Articles by Dieter Bohn
The rumors had said that the iPhone would pick up some features that had been touted for the Pre. One feature of the Pre: Universal Search. The iPhone does the Pre one better with their Spotlight search — it not only searches contacts and apps, but will also search within other key applications like Mail and SMS.
Spotlight on the iPhone works thusly: it becomes your new left-most home screen. When you get there, you can just start typing to bring up a list of everything that matches your search. The list will include data from:
- Contacts
- Calendar
- Email (To, From, Subject)
- iPod
- Notes
- Messaging (SMS / MMS)
- Apps (name of App)
The search results get listed in a big, touchable list and each result will have the icon for the app it’s from set to the left of the result.
Ladies and Gentlemen: this is the single most important new feature of iPhone 3.0 for me and how I use phones. The ability to ‘just start typing’ in order to find what I want to get done is my killer app. How about you?
Whew! The feature announcements in the iPhone 3.0 event came fast and furious. One of the most-wanted features, MMS, will be supported when 3.0 is released to consumer this summer. That’s the good news. The bad news: Apple claims that the radio on the original iPhone 2G can’t support MMS, so that feature will not make it to 1st gen iPhones.
MMS on the iPhone 3G looks to be almost full-featured. You will be able to send and receive photos, audio, vCard (contact cards), and ‘location.’ One thing that won’t be supported on MMS: Video. The iPhone 3G still can’t record video and therefore, one assumes, receiving video MMS will be difficult.
Still – it’s lovely to see the iPhone finally support a feature that’s common not only on other smartphones, but on nearly every feature phone made. iPhone 3.0 can’t come soon enough!
iTunes 8.1 brought us some snazzy improvements to Party Shuffle iTunes DJ and the iPhone’s Remote app. That wasn’t the only iPhone-related improvement, however, as Ars Techica notes, there’s a new feature that used to be reserved for the iPod Shuffle that you can now use for the iPhone: Autofill.
Autofill essentially lets you just fill up the empty space on your iPhone with some randomly chosen music (you can choose to leave some space open for installing apps and the like later on). As somebody who’s not really into constantly creating playlists and managing albums, it’s a nice option. A nice option that’s squirreled away in a pretty difficult to find place.
After the break, we walk you through the steps (courtesy of the Ars Article) screenshot-by-screenshot. Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome to Around SPE, where we highlight the big news of the week from around the network in a format that’s more than just a list-o-bullets. This week we’re putting the spotlight on Android Central, which saw a fairly hefty redesign on Wednesday night. Search, registration, commenting, navigation, the whole shootin’ match is all much improved.
We’re also proud to announce that Android Central made a donation to Olin College to help students there develop mobile applications (with a special focus on Android, naturally). You can find out more information about the class here, or better yet — go check out the applications already in development this early in the semester!
In Android news, we caught word that Amazon was selling the Black G1 for a measly $97.99. Then it got even better with Costco offering the G1 for $79.99, a whole $100 off! Why the discounts? Recession? Pressure from the HTC Magic? Finally, the long awaited Cupcake update is supposed to come to Android by April. Paid apps came to the UK Android Market. And we wondered whether the T-Mobile G2 (aka HTC Magic) was going to show up at CTIA.
Now for the roundup of the week’s news from our other SPE sites!
Apple Store goes down, Apple Store comes up with just what we expected: a new revision of the iPod Shuffle. It’s got 4 gigs of storage, comes in silver and black, and an all new feature: VoiceOver.
The new Shuffle is half the size of the previous — a feat achieved by removing nearly all of the controls off the device itself and onto the headphone cable. Only the Off/Repeat/Shuffle switch stays on device. In other words — don’t plan on using your own headphones with the Shuffle. While that’s a bit of a downer, the upside is that the headphone controls are very thoughtfully laid-out and easy to hit without looking.
VoiceOver and how the controls work — after the break!
This week CrackBerry.com broke the first real photos of the BlackBerry “Niagara” 9630, WMExperts brought you hands on details of Internet Explorer Mobile 6, Android Central brought you a walkthough of buying apps in the Android App Market, and PreCentral.net wondered whether Palm would survive long enough to release the Pre. Plenty more happened this week in the smartphone world, naturally, so the thing to do is continue reading to find out what you may have missed this week around the Smartphone Experts network.
Last night’s iPhone Live! was pretty darn good — so good, in fact, that it created a cross-border, pan-dimensional bug that kept us from recording the first 20 minutes properly. We recapped it a bit, but those who it hit it up live got a special treat. Rest assured, though, we have more than enough to talk about with the new Kindle iPhone App, what it means for Apple, Amazon, and when it might go international – so if you missed iPhone Live!, go ahead and check out this here podcast.
Yes, folks, I was one of the suckers eager buyers of the 2nd edition of the Kindle. My pain is your pleasure, though, as you can get some early screenshots of the app already loaded up with books via Whispersync.
As you may have just read in our previous post, Amazon has just released Kindle for iPhone for free in the App Store (iTunes link), you cannot buy Kindle books directly from the app. Instead you can purchase inside Mobile Safari, from your desktop, or from a Kindle
The text is nice and readable (and you can resize as well). The app keeps a “page metaphor,” meaning that instead of being able to scroll up and down, you swipe left and right to switch pages. A single tap on the screen bring up a menu to give you back, bookmark, text-size, and a sync button to sync your last page read with a Kindle.
The Whispersync tech works exactly as advertised — books purchased show up as “Archived” and you can then download them directly to your iPhone.
Head on in after the break for your screenshots! Read the rest of this entry »
In a sense, it was a calm after the Mobile World Congress storm this week, but we got together and recorded a massive hour-and-a-half-long Smartphone Experts Roundtable Podcast to discuss all the news from Windows Mobile 6.5 to the Ovi app Store to Apple’s “absent presence” at the show.
If you didn’t realize, SPE has four podcasts for your listening pleasure: the CrackBerry.com Podcast, the Phone Different Podcast (with the occasional iPhone LIVE! show), the PalmCast on both TreoCentral and PreCentral.net, and finally the WMExperts Podcast. The bold and daring may even want to try the (still in Beta, since it’s based on the somewhat unreliable Yahoo Pipes feature) Smartphone Experts Combined Podcast Feed, which puts all four podcasts into a single feed — also available in iTunes, if that’s how you roll.
Now for the roundup of the week’s news!
Lots (and lots) of you have become smitten with Emoji, the cute, extra smiley-faces that come to us from Japan and work quite well on the iPhone. That is to say, they work quite well if you’ve hacked them on or downloaded one of the several apps that turns them on on-the-sly.
Sadly, that latter option is no longer going to be available. Ars Technica is reporting that Apple has issued a global take-down notice on any app that enables Emoji on non-Japanese iPhones. More specifically, they’ve told developers with apps that enable it to immediately remove that functionality:
Existing applications that offer Emoji enabling beyond their base functionality have been ordered to remove Emoji support. Fung told us that Apple has required an immediate update to his Typing Genius program with the Emoji support removed. This same order appears to have gone out to all developers whose App Store marketing text mentions an Emoji feature.
The good news is that if you’ve already installed one of these apps or otherwise enabled Emoji, the little guys should still work just fine for you — that is, until Apple decided to use their best-of-class software updating system for the iPhone to push out a new ROM that, one assumes, will break it.
