January 2009: Monthly Archive

MacRumors is reporting that both the recent iPhone OS 2.2.1 release, and ad serving reports from Pinch Media show an iPhone model 2,1. The original iPhone was 1,1, the iPhone 3G was 1,2, so if accurate this numbering would not indicate the small bump of the iPhone 3G, but a real next generation device update (similar to the recent, revised iPod touch, which earned it’s own 2,1 model last fall).

So, TiPb’s just gonna keep on saying it: we want us some iPhone HD this June! With faster 802.11n mobile WiFi chips, quad-core cpu’s for iPhone 3.0 that support OpenCL and a PowerVR graphics core to the extreme.

Anyone else starting to get impatient for WWDC 2009?

We kick off the next iPhone Live! tonight (Wednesday, Jan. 28) at 8pm EST/5pm PST. (Pre show will start about 10 min. before if you want to drop by early!)

This week we’ll FINALLY get into some iPhone vs. Palm Pre (technical and legal!) action with Smartphone Expert’s editor-in-chief — and resident Palm expert — Dieter Bohn who was live at the keynote and got quite a bit of hands-on time with the Pre at CES. Is it better? Can it compete? How will Apple answer? Or will those multi-touch patents stop Palm dead in their tracks?

(We’ll also cover iPhone OS 2.2.1, what it might mean for Jailbreak/Unlock, and catch up on Apple’s iPhone numbers from last week’s conference call).

Join in via http://www.tipb.com/live

Chat with you soon!

AT&T reported on their own quarterly earnings today, the highlights according to Fortune (via MacRumors):

• AT&T has activated 4.3 million iPhone 3Gs since its launch, 1.9 million in Q4 alone — more than double its iPhone activations one year earlier.
• The average revenue from Phone users is 60% higher than the typical AT&T customer — thanks to that $30 per month data fee. Their heavy use of Web services helped drive AT&T wireless data use up 51.2% year to year, which as reader Jon in Brentwood, Calif., points out is not necessarily a good thing.
• About 40% of the iPhone activations this quarter were new AT&T customers, either buying their first cellphone or switching from another carrier.
• The churn rate — the percentage of customers who drop AT&T’s service — among iPhone owners is significantly lower than the rest of the network, sharply reducing marketing costs.

They also note that 1.9 million iPhone 3G’s activated in its second quarter on the market is nearly double the 1 million BlackBerry Storm’s activated by Verizon in it’s debut quarter…

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Here’s what you need to do:

• Download and install the free Slacker App for iPhone
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Get to it!

We’ll be talking about the iPhone vs. the Palm Pre tonight on iPhone Live! (Hopefully with some special guests!). In the meantime our editor-in-chief, Dieter Bohn, writing on behalf of our sibling site, PreCentral.net, points to Engadget’s in-depth coverage. Dieter’s conclusion on calls the “Potential Palm Pre Patent Portfolio Pugilism Puzzle”?

Do Apple and Palm (which is increasingly Apple-esque after their recent hires) have the kind of corporate attitude necessary to just swallow their pride and accept that there’s space at the top of the hill for two smartphones, each licensing their patents to each other? If you take a look at the sorts of statements that Roger McNamee made in this Kara Swisher interview, you’ll see that the answer for Palm is clearly yes. They’ve said for a long time that they expect that there will be plenty of space for everybody in the smartphone market, nobody needs to fail for them to succeed. Will Apple be able to play nice too?

Reads like the haughty days of cold war mutually assured destruction to us, so we have to ask: Will Chairman Jobs push the button?

(Any answer beginning with “you’re goram right he will!” gets double comment points!)

TiPb has theorized before that Apple’s promised-by-September-yet-still-undelivered Push Notification Service (their alternative to actually allowing 3rd party multi-tasking) hasn’t shipped yet because MobileMe taught Apple — very painfully and publicly — that it’s better to take their time and get push services right than rush them out broken and buggy.

Now it’s almost February, iPhone OS 2.1 has become 2.2.1 with still no PNS in sight, and rumors around Macworld this year whispered that, if PNS wasn’t dead, it was at least playing that way.

Macworld’s Dan Moran is sharing his own thoughts and theories on the issue, that Apple might have tried for more than it could accomplish, that PNS doesn’t really go far enough anyway, that too much notification can be a Bad Thing, that Apple will kill poor solutions, and most interestingly, that maybe regular users just don’t care:

Maybe that’s the simple answer: that people—to wit, users—just don’t care. They’ve learned to adapt to the iPhone’s way of doing things, and that way doesn’t include notifications or multitasking…at the moment, anyway. At some point in the future it seems likely that Apple will introduce a new feature that takes care of the issues that notifications would have addressed, and it appears that most users are content to wait until then.

How about it, regular users? Would you rather have bad PNS than none at all? Or are you really content to wait, figuring Apple will figure it out eventually? Or do you really just not care about PNS at all?

Sure, there are still plenty around — plenty of good ones even — but back before the App Store, before Apple released the iPhone SDK, WebApps were the development platform for the miraculous new mobile wireless platform.

HTML (HyperText Markup Language), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), and AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) were the only tools needed, Steve Jobs told us, to make delightful, dynamic applications for the iPhone. And — by the way — every web developer already new how to use them! As a bonus of sorts, Apple provided some simple URL handles for things like telephone numbers, and some attributes and sample behaviors that helped optimize the iPhone experience.

For a while there was a torrent of WebApps, from re-purposed websites like FaceBook and Amazon, to original content and even games. Some were great, some were okay; it depended how well the idea suited the WebApp platform.

Now, 9 months post-iPhone SDK, 6 months post-App Store launch, post 15,000 apps, and we don’t hear much about WebApps anymore. Almost three months ago TiPb asked if WebApps had a future. Three months later, is the silence we’re hearing our best response?

Palm has now announced their new webOS platform, which is similar to WebApps but runs locally as well and should — though we don’t know the details yet — provide far greater hooks into the smartphone system (perhaps somewhere between WebApps and Native Apps, like Widgets). Could this kickstart the iPhone WebApp developers back into gear?

Anyone out there make, use, or find a killer iPhone WebApp lately? Know of any in the pipeline? And where do you think WebApps will be another 3 months? In another 6?

As revealed by Craig Hockenberry on Twitter shortly after today’s iPhone OS 2.2.1 update: developers hadn’t heard a whisper of this release, no beta, not even a warning, and it wasn’t compatible with the previous SDK. Nice, Apple!

It should come as some relief, then, that the iPhone SDK has now also been bumped to 2.2.1. Says Ars Technica’s Erica Sadun:

In all likelihood, the 2.2.1 SDK is, as suggested, a simple bug update without any significant API changes.

So not much different from the iPhone OS 2.2.1 then?

Of course, with such a minor point release we can’t really expect anything revolutionary (we’ll likely need 3.0 for that). But Apple has been known to sneak some early clues into frameworks, so hopefully we’ll find something to look forward to once the deep code divers get through tearing this one apart.

The long-running dispute between Apple and IBM over Apple’s hire of Mark Papermaster has come to a close, according to Apple PR:

Apple® today announced that Mark Papermaster will be coming to Apple as senior vice president of Devices Hardware Engineering, reporting to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, on April 24. Papermaster, who comes to Apple from IBM, will lead Apple’s iPod® and iPhone™ hardware engineering teams. The litigation between IBM and Mark Papermaster has been resolved

Papermaster will take the helm of iPhone and iPod hardware, replacing Tony Fadell (who was rumored to have pushed for Linux to be the basis for the iPhone).  Odd that he’s going to have to wait until April 24th to take charge, but we suspect that won’t slow things down too much on hardware development.  Got any advice for Papermaster?  Would you like to seem him shephard in that iPhone HD? Think he’ll push for Quad-Core goodness?