Articles by Dieter Bohn
This week three of our intrepid editors headed out to CTIA 2009 in Las Vegas to catch as much coverage as we could — and catch it we did. From the Palm Pre emulating the PalmOS to BlackBerry App World to Hands-on time with the Nokia E71x to hands-on time with half a dozen Windows Mobile devices, it’s been a pretty crazy week.
It wasn’t all Vegas Baby, however. TiPb has been all over the rumors of next-gen iPhone hardware and both the iPhone and Android picked up new document editing capabilities.
You’ll find the details on all of that and much more inside as we round up the best of Smartphone Experts!
Each week we round up the best of the Smartphone Experts Network in a few pithy paragraphs designed for your reading pleasure. Everything from a new leaked Storm ROM to waiting on any number of new smartphones to finally arrive to a comprehensive look at iPhone 3.0 can be found here.
You’ll want to stay tuned to the Smartphone Experts family of sites next week – we’ll be live at the CTIA Wireless convention, bringing you all the latest from every manufacturer on all of our sites. Will Android finally have its coming out party? Will Palm finally tell us when the Pre is being released? Will the AT&T Nokia E71 ever get official? Whatever happens, we’ll give you the scoop.
Read on for the Best of SPE!
Speculation on the 3rd Generation iPhone, plus: Just can’t get enough of that tasty iPhone 3.0 Beta! Listen in!
BGR is claiming some inside info from AT&T on the next hardware revision of the iPhone. The announcement is apparently slated for June (actual release unknown) and the new features line up with some of what we’ve been hearing. Top of the list is speed, with likely support for the higher-speed abilities of HSDPA on AT&T — up to 7.2MBps — which may also play into those multi-core rumors too. There’s also apparently going to be some sort of “U-Verse” app that will work with your home entertainment system (If there’s an IR port on this thing, I’ll eat my hat). The word “unified” gets tossed around a bit, but beyond it having something to do with Apple playing nice with AT&T’s services, it’s a little unclear.
Oh, and since it’s the hip thing to do, there’s a bit of netbook chatter tossed in at the end, but we’re not getting an Apple vibe off that. We’ll leave the netbook bits aside and ask: what feature do you most want? Video and Megapixels with a side of video publishing? OLED Display? iPhone HD? Free puppy with every purchase?
Thanks to Jeff for the tip!
We hear via Crave and confirmed via a quick check at the Apple Store that Apple is discontinuing their Apple-branded Bluetooth headset. It had a nice run, we suppose, but aside from a clever dual-charging iPhone accessory, the headset was actually pretty bare-bones compared with other options (My own personal favorite is the BlueAnt Z9i headset).
It’s probably a safe bet that Apple is going to replace it with a set of Stereo Bluetooth headphones in the fairly near future, given that their A2DP implementation on iPhone 3.0 is pretty nice (check out the images in our walkthrough — much easier to toggle it on the iPhone than it is on most other devices). Another safe bet may be that Apple’s ‘phones, as with their current headphones and also this now-discontinued Bluetooth headset, will be decent enough but not as good as what you can find from other manufacturers. I’m fond of the Motorola S9-HD, if you’re curious, but the Voyager 855 is my day-to-day, as it’s sorta-kinda safer while riding my bike as I can leave my left ear open to listen for cars.
[Thanks to all of you who sent this in!]
Tuesday was a big big day at Smartphone Experts. Not only did we have comprehensive coverage of the new iPhone 3.0 software announcement (and more keeps coming here) at The iPhone Blog, over at CrackBerry.com we had one of the very first hands-on with the BlackBerry “Niagara” 9630. If you add in late developments like some additional Windows Mobile 6.5 features sneaking out at WMExperts and anticipation that the Nokia E71 will finally hit AT&T at Nokia Experts, you make for a fairly exciting week in the smartphone world.
Read on for the Best of SPE!
The word has gone out: Apple is now allowing you to do more than just rent movies in HD, they’re letting you buy them. You’re looking at spending a bit extra for the HD version – $19.99 to be precise. They’re pushing preorders for a few movies (Quantum of Solace and Twilight) but there are also a few you can buy right now (Saw V, for example. Sadists rejoice!).
The movies also come with an SD version bundled in for your iPhone and iPod. Which is great and all, but how’s-about Apple provide us with an iPhone that doesn’t need such primitive down-scaled resolutions. iPhone HD looking more likely to anyone? If it comes, we’re still doubting it would be the 720p that these videos come in (our money’s on iPhone HD with 480p), but it would be a sight better. We’re still hoping against hope here, but maybe 2009 could be the true “Year of HD,” …4 years late, but still very welcome.
So much iPhone news came today that it’s tough to keep track of it all. One thing we wanted to make sure didn’t get lost in the shuffle was the iPod Touch news that came out today. Specifically, the iPhone 3.0 software will come to the iPod Touch for a $10 upgrade fee and will include an “unlock” to give the iPod Touch the Bluetooth functionality that’s being added in iPhone 3.0.
Wait, what? Yes, the iPod Touch (at least the 2nd gen version) does indeed have a Bluetooth chip in it. We don’t know exactly where or how the thing is hidden away inside, but Apple came clean today and said they could ‘unlock’ it. Longtime readers may remember that back in September this very issue raised its head and the verdict was that, well, we didn’t think it was there. The deal is that modern devices like Smartphone and the iPod Touch often cram multiple radios and other functionality into a single chip. Back in September it looked as though the chip on the iPod Touch could support Bluetooth but that, well, it was more likely that it was there for Nike+’s “proprietary 802.11 protocol.” So rumor smashed — incorrectly.
As we reported earlier today (before the Apple event, even), the iPhone 3.0 update will allow real, turn-by-turn directions on the iPhone. It looks like Apple isn’t bothering with enmeshing themselves in the confusing licensing issues surrounding turn-by-turn and is instead simply lifting the SDK Ban on turn-by-turn directions. The first app may very well come from Sygic (that’s what they’re claiming, anyway), which we had the chance get some eyes-on time with during Mobile World Congress.
Apple is simply allowing 3rd party apps to extend their access to CoreLocation (the iPhone’s built-in location service that includes GPS, cell tower-based, and WiFi-based location) to include turn-by-turn. Of note: Apple says that developers need to “BYOM” (Bring Your Own Maps). What that implies is that the licensing issues referenced above prevents Apple from allowing developers to use another new iPhone 3.0 feature: embeddable maps. iPhone 3.0 allows (almost) any app to include embedded Google maps, complete with pinch, zoom, and the like, within the app itself. Using that embedded map for turn by turn directions, however, is verboten. Instead developers will either have to require a large download of maps and/or provide them over-the-air as TeleNav does.
It’s also possible that developers will be able to use the new in-app purchasing feature of iPhone 3.0 to allows users to purchase maps as well. It’s unclear who else besides Sygic is getting a turn-by-turn directions app ready, but you can probably rest assured we’ll see such apps from the big players in short order once 3.0 is released this summer.
There were plenty of things we were hoping for with iPhone 3.0, but that list definitely included improved support for the many things we can do with Bluetooth. The list was as long as the feature list for Bluetooth itself and though Apple didn’t get everything, they certainly got a lot. Here’s the list of what you can (and can’t) do with Bluetooth on iPhone 3.0:
- A2DP Stereo Bluetooth. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. And come this summer, your bluetooth stereo headphones and speakers will work with the iPhone 3G. Note, it will not work on the original iPhone 2G.
- Peer to Peer. This is a big one, folks, but it’s a little strange. You can share files and talk to other apps over Bluetooth. This means you’ll be able to do multiplayer games, for example, or ‘beam’ your contact card from one iPhone to another. Or heck, play a trombone duet. No pairing is required, either. Discovery of other iPhones happens with Apple’s Bonjour ZeroConf autodiscovery protocols
- Control Accessories. In addition to the dock accessory control, you can now control Bluetooth accessories from within an app. The example from the event was a glucose meter, but the possibilities are honestly endless.
- Tops on my Bluetooth list: Bluetooth keyboard support. Technically, you will be able to do with with iPhone 3.0. The weird issue there, however, is that this keyboard support would have to happen on an app-by-app basis instead of happening device-wide. That, friends, is a bit of a bummer.
Biggest Bluetooth surprise of the event: confirmation that the 2nd Generation iPod Touch DOES have Bluetooth and they can ‘unlock’ it to reveal Bluetooth features.
