Articles by Brian Hart
Road warriors and those who spend an ungodly amount of time talking on their iPhone (or most any other cell phone), take notice! The Sony Ericsson HBH-PV705 Bluetooth Headset ($44.95), available now for your convenient purchase at the Phonedifferent store, may just take your breath away with it’s long-lasting battery life! You may possibly run out of things to say before the HBH-PV705 runs out of juice! Boasting an impressive talk time and standby time, you may be able to get by without a car charger (which may explain why one is not included in the package).
Keep on reading for the rest of the review!
Every week, we’ll be bringing you a tip, trick, or quick how-to on how to keep your iPhone ship-shape. You’ll be able to see them all in our tip archive.
The young lady that cuts my hair told me a horror story today. I just about broke into a sweat listening to her tale of terror. A recent iPhone convert, she was at home in her bathroom (hostile environment for all things electronic), putting her make-up on, and with a careless sweep of her arm, her iPhone scored a perfect “10″ from the high dive straight into the commode.
Panicked (as you can imagine), she fished out her iPhone, immediately turned it off, and dried it as best she could. Waiting a day, she tried turning it on, but no dice — it seemed to have given up the ghost in the machine. Still filled with hope, she carried her iPhone in her pocket the rest of the day and, amazingly, it came to life.
All was not well, though. Having made it through a drowning and near-death experience, her iPhone’s “Home” button no longer worked — her iPhone was useless; a mere night-light.
If your iPhone encounters water (or falls in your mug of ale), retrieve it immediately, power it off, dry it as best you can with a cloth, and click the bookmark you just made for this article. You did that, right?
Read on for the deets on how to save your precious iPhone!
It is with sadness we report the passing of Stan Flack, the founder of both MacCentral and MacMinute. He passed away quietly today (Monday) at his home in Prince Edward Island, Canada.
Stan has been in the Mac industry since 1994 when MacCentral first went online as a weekly publication. Things were a lot different back then – the Internet as we know it was in its infancy – but Stan saw a way to make a successful business.
Mr. Flack certainly contributed to the Apple community and will certainly be missed. He is considered by many to be a pioneer in Mac journalism. For the complete story, head over to Macworld.
The Speck Products Techstyle Classic Leather form-fitting case and holster ($24.95) for your iPhone, available now at the Phone different store, is an elegant, “classic” look (as the product suggests) that provides good protection for your iPhone with traditional leather styling. Keep reading for the full review!
I’ve always been a leather guy. I ride a Victory motorcycle (weather permitting) and there’s nothing like pulling on the leather jacket, Google Mapping a scenic route on my iPhone, and roll some thunder down the open road.
As much as I like the tough-guy image (ha ha), I’m still an uber-geek at heart, so I love trying out new things for my iPhone. When my Speck Products Techstyle Classic Leather case and holster arrived in the mail from the Phone different store, I eagerly opened the plastic packaging and studied the design of this case-and-holster combo.
It doesn’t have 3G. It doesn’t have true GPS. It doesn’t have instant messaging or 3rd party apps or even cut and paste. With all it’s current shortcomings, the iPhone is still a worthy “Swiss Army Knife” of smartphones that you can confidently take with you through airport security, on a plane, and throughout your trip as an excellent traveling companion. In fact, I’ll boldly exclaim that the iPhone is all that I could ask for in my travels and I really put it through it’s paces on a recent trip.
Read on about my trippin’ with my iPhone!
I can hardly remember my life before having a PDA. I held a Palm Pilot for the first time in 1996, a Pilot 1000 my father received at work. He was somewhat non-plussed; technology was not his gig and he deferred to me for most things with a power button. For me, the Palm Pilot was something revolutionary and Graffiti input was mind-blowing.
The addiction and PDA-dependence grew from there for me. I was “plugged in” and my vocabulary would now include words and acronyms like “stylus”, “PIM” and “SD Card”. As other platforms emerged, like Pocket PC and Symbian, I remained doggedly loyal to the Palm OS through it’s progression of versions. I watched Palm OS become Garnet and then “FrankenGarnet.” I even got used to seeing “Powered by Access” when I fired up my trusty Palm. I made the leap from PDA to a converged device with the Treo 650, then the 680. Throughout the years I endured the criticisms of Palm’s lack of multitasking, multithreading, no wifi (!?!) and antiquated PIM. I remained a Palm loyalist and apologist, looking toward the horizon for a Cobalt or Palm OS 2 that would never come.
More on my migration to the iPhone after the break!
What does all this SDK talk mean with respect to the popular DataViz products like Documents To Go? Read on, my friends!
Although it’s easy to be swallowed up in the sea of information spilling forth from the SDK Roadmap earlier today, and even though I’m still hoping for Stevie J to throw us a bone (like copy/paste ready for download from iTunes? ahem), I’m trying to stay calm. Deep breath. Maybe another piece of good news will help.
One of my favorite apps from my Treo days is DataViz’s DocsToGo. I tried to reach DataViz for comment with regard to the SDK release and their plans for bringing their products to the iPhone, but alas, the time-zone gods are against me and all I could come up with was a blurb from their website. Read their statement and glean what you can:
We are currently investigating the opportunity to develop Documents To Go, RoadSync, Passwords Plus and any of our other software titles for the iPhone and would appreciate your feedback.
Here’s our feedback: Yes, Please.
After the break, DataViz CEO Dick Fontana talks up the SDK for Fox News. [via] — “DataViz has a long relationship with Apple which gives Dick reason to be optimistic about the opportunities for DataViz with the iPhone.” — indeed.
SDK news, Wait-a-Thon $100 iTunes Gift Cards, sparkling personalities… can life here at Phonedifferent get any better?? YES!!!
How ’bout some FREE music, compliments of NIN (Nine Inch Nails)?
Following up on Radiohead’s release last year, NIN is offering FREE music for download. Titled “Ghosts I – IV”, Ghosts I are the first 9 tracks available for free download as high-quality, DRM-free MP3s, including the complete PDF. All you need is a valid email address and presto, you got some free music to carry around with you on your iPhone.
That’s not the best part, though, read on…
The Shieldzone Full Body invisibleSHIELD ($24.95) for your iPhone is an invisible, thin plastic coating that serves well to protect your pretty shiny iPhone from scratches, scrapes, and scuffs without adding additional bulk.
Read on for the full review!
Do you remember when you had a choice between VHS and Betamax (Beta)? If you do, you’re at least a Generation X’er (and maybe older, sorry). VHS won the war; a bigger, more cumbersome tape format beat out the (arguably) superior, more svelte Beta tape. The defeat of Sony’s Beta format is legendary and has become a marketing study, but we could be seeing the same kind of thing (but different) with web apps vs. native apps on handheld devices.
Michael Mace has published an article on his blog, Mobile Opportunity, which reads like an obituary for native mobile apps — all very interesting in light of the much-anticipated and heralded release of an iPhone SDK and 3rd party apps.
At issue is that due to rising costs and diminishing returns, software developers are fleeing the good ship “Native Apps” like it was the Titanic. The relatively “worse” technology is using the Web to deliver apps (VHS) has a better business model, the relatively “better” tech is writing Native apps (Beta), but Mace argues that the business model is basically dead.
If Mace is right, what does the future hold for native apps on the iPhone?
