February 2009: Monthly Archive

Join Dieter, Matthew, Kevin, Rene, and Casey as they discuss Mobile World Congress 2009 — there’s a little bit for everybody in this gigantic cross-platfrom smartphone podcast!

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Show notes after the break.

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The forums are seeing a lot of action as of late and today is more of the same!

The rumor mills are just getting started about the next generation iPhone and you can expect that to increase by the day. Knowing that a new Apple phone is only 5-6 months away, will you be purchasing the next iPhone? Be sure to get your vote in and let us know why or why not!

The next thread comes to us from TiPb’s very own Rene Ritchie. He wants to know what podcasts are currently on your iPhone? I’m sure every single one of our readers already subscribed to iPhone Different and iPhone Live… right?

Usually the main question from someone who is looking into buying an iPhone is battery life. No different here, jstac wants to know about the iPhone 3G’s battery life. My answer is simple — all depends on how you use the device. It can be good and it can be bad.

Another question that gets asked a lot about the iPhone 3G is it’s build quality. While I personally have had no issues with mine since July 11th, other people have not been so lucky. How about you? Be sure to check out this ongoing thread on the build quality of the iPhone 3G.

To join in on the forum fun be sure to register! It’s a simple process that will only take a moment of your time.

See you on the forums!

Updated: Apple’s MobileMe News talks updates:

We’ve recently made improvements to the MobileMe web applications, including performance enhancements for MobileMe Calendar. In addition the MobileMe login page now also includes news information. See this support article for additional details.

Fiendmish in the comments also points us to Apple’s Knowledge Base article on the subject. Thanks!

Original: Login to MobileMe’s WebApp yet today? Well if you have, you’ve seen what we’ve seen — Apple put a fresh coat of paint to the front login page, shuffling the big icons off to the side and clearing some space for a little marketing front and center.

I like the new look, but I can’t tell yet if there’s anything changed under the covers? File sharing was the last update, anyone see anything else?

Apple will be holding their annual general shareholder meeting today. The Board of Directors (including Google CEO, iPhone partner, and Android rival Eric Schmidt) is up for re-election, and management will supposedly be held to answer by shareholders, but Steve Jobs will not be in attendance (he’s still out on leave), and we don’t really expect much in the way of specific iPhone news.

Of course, if anything interesting does come out, you know we’ll keep you covered.

(via TUAW and Bloomberg)

Microsoft PR must hate it every single time CEO Steve Ballmer gets on a mic. Bloggers on the other hand…? From the latest analyst briefing:

“The truth of the matter is all the consumer market mojo is with Apple and to a lesser extent BlackBerry. And yet, the real market momentum with operators and the real market momentum with device manufacturers seems to primarily be with Windows Mobile and Android.”

Um.. Apple and BlackBerry manufacture their own devices there Steve, so while their internal momentum is enough to steamroll an industry, ODM’s can’t get their hands on iPhone OS X or RIM’s OS no matter how badly they probably want to.

Apple Insider rightly points out, of course, that this is the same line Microsoft used about the iPod when promoting their own PlaysForSure DRM platform (which later became closer akin to PlaysNoMore).

Check out Apple Insider’s full coverage to get Ballmer’s views on Apple’s Mac, Google, Android on Netbooks vs. Windows 7, and how Microsoft could be like RCA! (?!)

I’m a big fan of not using a hard case as doing so hides the beauty of the iPhone. So I tend to look for pouches, sleeves, and sometimes leather cases. Enter the Krusell Hector Leather Case for the iPhone and iPhone 3G which happens to be available in TiPb Store for $29.95. I’ve spent a good amount of time using this case, so read on for the full review! Read the rest of this entry »

Could this be a sign of things to come with tethering and the iPhone? Will all of us who own iPhones be vulnerable to these overages if we choose to start using software like the upcoming SlingPlayer Mobile?

A Chicago man (Jamesus — hoping it was not you, buddy!) decided to watch a Bears game via Slingbox on his laptop before leaving for a cruise… Harmless enough one would think, but his AT&T wireless data card decided to pick up a international signal while he was still in Miami… end result: A $28,067.31 bill for international data charges. It’s safe to say the data card was picking up the wrong signal and with a few customer service calls he eventually did get the charges dropped down to $290.65.

So all of you travelers out there, take heed if you are traveling on a fringe area and take all precautions to avoid something like this happening to you…

*It seems that this story comes to us via the Chicago Sun-Times and their feature: The Fixer. The man who was charged could not get AT&T to remove the charges from customer service calls until the Sun-Times got involved and the story ended up in the paper. Knowing that, it makes AT&T look a lot worse then they already did… Ouch.

[Via EngadgetMobile]

What do you do if you helped commercialize the home computer with the Apple II, made the GUI mainstream with the Mac, laid the foundation for many aspects of modern computing at NeXT, revolutionized the music industry with iPod and iTunes, changed the consumer electronic retail experience forever with Apple Stores, and restore innovation to the smartphone space with the iPhone? And… oh, yeah, sidelined in a little 3D paradigm shift in entertainment via Pixar?

Well, if you’re one Steven P. Jobs, and it’s today… Boom! You celebrate your 54th birthday.

On behalf of everyone here at TiPb, we wish you peace, prosperity, health, and happiness. Have a great birthday — you’re not quite done denting our universes yet!

Apple has just released the first public beta of their new Safari 4 web browser for both the Mac and Windows (the Windows version now looking like an actual XP or Vista app). New features include an iTunes/Finder-like CoverFlow visualization for exploring browser history, and Apple TV commercial-esque visual wall of Top Sites (which should cause the same potential pr0nbarassment for some as Chrome and Opera’s “favorite” visualizers in the past), the ability to search, spotlight-like through past sites, Chrome-style top-mounted tabs, robust developer tools… and most important for the iPhone and iPod touch’s future — the new Nitro Engine for screaming fast JavaScript rendering.

Yes, JavaScript engines are the new speeds and feeds. Bottom line, the more script, the slower and heavier the site. Hey, BlackBerry still turns JavaScript off by default on the Bold and Storm to get anything approaching decent rendering speeds. But with Google’s V8 and Firefox’s TraceMonkey helping push the technology — not to mention every Web 2.0 site ladling on the AJAX — we’re going to need all the power we can get, especially on the iPhone.

As for the rest: CoverFlow already works well on the iPhone, though I’m not sure we need it in Mobile Safari, and the smaller screen might make Top Sites a little too tiny to be useful. And the search? Heh. We still need Spotlight on the entire iPhone, so how about we get that rolled up together?

Anything else you want to see in Mobile Safari 3.0?

Apple’s new iPhoto 09 will use the geo-tag data recorded by the iPhone 3G’s camera to map out the locations of your pictures. But what if you’re no using the iPhone for all your pictures? What if you have a regular old point-and-shoot or even a DSLR without GPS? One approach would be to use a stand-alone GPS to record your position and then cross-reference the time-stamp on your photos to add in the location data later. And, hey, the iPhone just happens to have that GPS, and it looks like a control panel found by TidBITS (via Ars Technica) in iPhoto 09 hints that Apple might be adding that functionality in the future.

Since recording Geo-Tag information would require some form of GPS running in the background, we may not see this until a future iPhone firmware update, perhaps 3.0 in June?

Still, it’s nice to see more clues as to just what Apple might be considering…