2009: Yearly Archive

Ho-ho-hold on a minute, Verizon — AT&T’s not finding much to laugh about in those new anti-AT&T iPhone “map for that” commercials that show a teensy, tiny blue GSM/HSPA 3G footprint compared the ginormous country painted CDMA/EVDO red. In fact, AT&T is amending their original lawsuit to include those new misfit toys, Santa’s workshop, and blue Christmas ads.

“Contrary to the image presented in the Verizon ads, our wireless network is pervasive,” said an AT&T spokesman. “It covers over 300 million people, or 97 percent of the U.S. population. Our fastest, or 3G, network covers approximately 233 million people, or 75 percent of the U.S. population….[Verizon's] use of white space is misleading.”

In other words, AT&T is saying Verizon’s 3G coverage of mountains and lakes is impressive for the fish and eagles, but they think they have the humans and their “cities” covered just fine, thanks. (Though, again, NYC and SF might disagree…)

Digital Daily has the whole, amended, complaint for your reading pleasure. Let us know your take.

Much has been said about Verizon’s latest addition to their smarthphone arsenal, the Motorola Droid, some good and some bad. I decided to pick one up and decide for myself. It’s been a little less than a week that I’ve spent with my Droid and I must say, I’ve actually come away quite impressed. Now by no means am I saying the Droid is the best looking device on the market, nor is it the perfect smartphone — that simply does not exist. But what we have here is a very solid effort by Motorola. Sure Apple is at the top of the game in regards to UI, ease of use, speed, etc… but they have to play some major catch up with the release of their next iPhone — namely on display, notifications, and multitasking.

For the full run down follow me after the break! Read the rest of this entry »

Today’s TiPb Top 5 will be directed towards our iPhone and iPod touch wielding readers who love racing games, and It’s a follow up to last years TiPb Grand Prix. Just like our other TiPb’s top 5 must-have posts, all of these applications are available in the App Store. For the full overview, follow us after the break!

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not an iPhone-like slab, but it does ditch the Palm Pre slider (and Wi-Fi!) for a Centro-esque front-facing webOS form factor, and Dieter over at PreCentral.net has the full Palm Pixi Review up to prove it. His take?

The Palm Pixi is a tiny smartphone with enough features and elegance to woo even the most die-hard feature phone user, but current Pre owners will want to stick with what they have.

We’re figuring that will apply to iPhone owners as well, but for new buyers, could it be enough for Sprint and Palm to compete with a $99 iPhone 3G, and all its apps, on AT&T? Check out the rest of the Palm Pixi review and let us know what you think.

So if you’ve jailbroken your iPhone, installed SSH, and still haven’t changed your password from the default despite our previous warnings about Dutch Ransomers and Australian Rickrollers? Maybe you thought those were just funny (as seen in this video from iPhoneMVP) and not worth worrying about? Well now things have gotten more serious — there’s a new attack making the rounds that just plain steals your data.

Same method of attack, the bad guy scans the local network for insecure SSH on Jailbroken iPhones, and when it finds it, begins to copy your contacts, messages, email, events, photos, media, etc. This could, of course, include passwords, financial data, and those pics you never got around to deleting…

If you haven’t already, go change your SSH password now. If you need help, go to the TiPb iPhone Forums and get it. Just secure your iPhone.

[Intego, thanks to everyone who sent this in]

We’re huge security proponents here at TiPb, and that typically means recommending 1Password on the Mac and RoboForm on the PC. 1Password’s iPhone app has been available for long time already, providing on-device and Mac-synced bliss. Now, finally, RoboForm for iPhone [FREE - iTunes link] is here as well.

It’s a first release, and it’s not quite feature complete yet (on-device editing is a priority and coming soon), it requires an online account for syncing (a local Wi-Fi option to sync with the PC client would be nice as well), and there are some bugs (no 4 character master passwords — though you really should be using much, much longer master passwords!) security is so important we wanted to let you know about it right away, or if you already know about it, we wanted you to let us know how it was working for you.

Joe Hewitt, the developer who saw the Facebook App for iPhone and iPod touch to version 3.0, and the cusp of 3.1 (which promised/threatened push notifications), has thrown us the Twitter-equivalent of a curve-ball:

Time for me to try something new. I’ve handed the Facebook iPhone app off to another engineer, and I’m onto a new project.

Just to be clear, he’s staying with Facebook, just no longer working on their iPhone app. Does it have anything to do with his dissatisfaction with the iTunes App Store approval process?

According to the quote he gave TechCrunch, it did:

My decision to stop iPhone development has had everything to do with Apple’s policies. I respect their right to manage their platform however they want, however I am philosophically opposed to the existence of their review process. I am very concerned that they are setting a horrible precedent for other software platforms, and soon gatekeepers will start infesting the lives of every software developer.

(Hit the link above to read the rest of it). Some are no doubt happy to see such a high profile developer quit the App Store over the review process. Hey, we’ve complained about it quite a bit as well. Still, with the current process Hewitt was able to give us a pretty darn good app up to this point. Was it frustrating? No doubt it was, but many of us face frustrations on the job. The web is free, but it’s also often far from a premium user experience. Apple has thus far decided managing the App Store is, in their opinion, the best way to ensure their users’ experience (not just their noisy tech-blogging-and-commenting users’ experience, but the kids and moms and casual users as well). That the implementation remains capricious is another matter — one they need to be fixed and now. That the App Store should by all divine right and reason be as open as web development, however, is just another opinion, another option, and certainly not any more right or reasonable “just because”.

In any event, on behalf of TiPb, we thank you, Joe for all your hard work and the awesome app you’ve given us to date, and wish you well on your future endeavors.

And to the new developer, here’s wishing you the best, and the best for future versions of the Facebook app as well!

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in!]

Apple has just released desktop Safari for Mac and Windows to 4.0.4, which improves full history search performance, has the mandatory stability improvements, and security fixes, but the big news as far as we’re concerned is the number one item on the list — Improved JavaScript performance

Desktop Safari is the big brother of the iPhone’s Mobile OS X Safari, and they share a rendering engine (WebKit), and a JavaScript engine (Nitro), and improvements in desktop Safari and Nitro have traditionally filtered down to Mobile Safari with the subsequent iPhone OS update. That’s right, we’re looking at you iPhone 3.2 (where ever you are!)

Since the current iPhone 3.1 Safari is still outperforming even brand-new devices like the Droid, that may seem a little greedy, but we know Google’s Android and Palm’s webOS aren’t sitting still in the rendering race, and have updates of their own in the pipeline, so once again, competition benefits the end users. Bring. It..

Join Dieter, Chad, Rene and special guest, the Cellphone Junkie Mickey Papillion tonight for all the week’s news, views, and rants. If you have any questions, leave a comment below, hit us up on Twitter @theiphoneblog, or better still — join us live in the chat room via http://www.tipb.com/live

Chat with you soon!

Last month at CTIA, AT&T proudly announced that they would now permit VOIP over 3G on the iPhone, and Apple promptly told TiPb (and others) that they were updating their SDK agreement and wanted VOIP over 3G apps in the App Store as quickly as possible, and Skype was all up in the happy as well. And now…

[cricket chirps]

Yeah, we’re still waiting. We asked Apple for an update but haven’t heard back yet. Hopefully, very soon, we’ll be awash in them. In the meantime, let’s keep the spotlight shining, and feel free to let Apple, AT&T, Skype, and all the other providers know you want your VoIP over 3G!