Articles by Dieter Bohn
A lot of TiPb faithful have noticed that we look a bit different when you visit us from your iPhone. It’s true, we’ve iPhonified it up with the excellent IWPhone software bits. If you’re a believer in getting the “real internet”, just scroll on down to the bottom of the page and hit the link for “Normal View” and Mobile Safari will keep you on the full version until you clear your cookies.
The iPhonified version is very full-featured, with links to the forums, our about page, search, and gives you the ability to comment too. Actually, speaking of forums, you can grab our forums in an iPhone optimized version too, there’s a big ol’ link at the top when you visit them on your iPhone.
One note — during high-traffic times, your iPhone-optimized version might revert to the full version of TiPb. Ok, two notes: don’t forget that you can just type “tipb.com” into your address bar to find us.
After all the persistent questions about whether or not the BlackBerry Bold’s improved browser could compete with the iPhone, our friend CrackBerry Kevin decided to try to provide the definitive, final smackdown.
Go on and read the entire saga, but take heed, it’s not a pretty sight. Under ideal conditions, the Bold comes this close to competing with the iPhone on speed. Those idea conditions: 3G, Javascript off, strong signal, fresh reset, and WiFi off. Wait — WiFi off? That’s right, Kevin has two BlackBerry Bolds and both of them are five different kinds of screwed up — they fail with Javascript off, they fail with WiFi entirely. Now — not everybody is reporting the same hassles, but it’s starting to look like it’s a pretty serious problem.
The Javascript issue is very interesting, by the by. The iPhone defaults to leaving it on. One could argue that Javascript support helps make the iPhone able to browse the “Real Internet,” but one would be wrong about what makes up the “Real Internet”. The Bold, however, defaults to leaving Javascript off, and given Kevin’s results, it looks like a good thing they did.
What does this mean for iPhone users — besides bragging rights? Well, actually, bragging rights are enough for us. But there’s another tip you’re definitely going to be interested in, iPhone faithful. Can you guess it? Rene will let you know what it is very shortly.
While the holy grail for grabbing files on the iPhone would probably still be Apple-made iDisk support (as rumored), there are other options out there. Microsoft’s Live Mesh is supposedly going to be the very definition of cross-platform once they mange to get all of their clients done — but file access for the iPhone is pretty much limited to the browser right now.
Add one more “Securely sync your files to a 3rd party server and then get them on your iPhone” option to the mix: Sugarsync. They have clients for Mac, PC, Windows Mobile (though that one isn’t great), Symbian, and now: a Sugarsync client for the iPhone (App store link).
Although Sugarsync would like to say that their iPhone client supports pushing files to the iPhone, that’s not quite the case. Your files are pushed from sync’ed folders to Sugarsync’s cloud, waiting for you when you want to access them from your iPhone. Good enough, we say, since local file system access on the iPhone is still not really available.
Basically the only limitation here is the iPhone: it can view but not edit and it can only view a relatively small set of files, but that whole local file system bit. One nice bit: you can share any file on your Sugarsync cloud.
The service is $25 a year for 10 gigs, so it might be a viable option for those of you rocking a few computers and an iPhone yet hate MobileMe. For those of us who are shelling out for MobileMe already, it would be nice to think iPhone iDisk access won’t be too long in coming.
Gizmodo has uncovered what can only be described as a gigantic, huge, and completely embarrassing security flaw on the iPhone.
If you have your iPhone ‘locked,’ it can be circumvented very easily with very little trickery aside. On the ‘lock’ screen, you can still make an emergency call. When you tap that, you can then double-tap the home button to bring up your favorites (assuming you have that set).
The issue is that your favorites are basically the keys to the kingdom. You can tap the blue arrow next to a favorite to gain access to a contact’s information. From there, you can further tap email, a url, or sms to gain access to email, Safari and your bookmarks, or all of your SMSes, respectively.
Rene notes in an email that this is reminiscent of the old PalmOS bug wherein you could still search the device while it was locked. This, though, this is definitely worse.
Thankfully, Apple has the best ROM update system in the entire smartphone industry — able to push out updates to every iPhone via iTunes with minimal carrier delays. Let’s hope we see 2.0.3 very soon. Meanwhile Giz recommends you set that double-tap behavior to either ‘Home’ or ‘iPod’ to temporarily fix the issue.
Of course, this only applies to people who actually use the lock function on their iPhones, the rest of us just live dangerously.
Update: Macrumors reports that Apple is aware of the issue and has a fix on the way:
[...]this security flaw was already reported to Apple earlier this month and has been acknowledged as an issue. A fix will presumably be included in a future firmware update
The developer lets us know [via Giz] that famously lawsuit-happy Tetris©-IP-owners “The Tetris© Company” has contacted him and told him he has to take down Tris. Noah writes:
That, I’m afraid, is essentially game over. Do they have a case? No. Not really. I am convinced that if it went to court, the “copyright” claim would get thrown out completely. The trademark, perhaps not — but if I changed the name, to e.g. “Trys”, that would be much harder for them to argue.
But, like most of us, he’s not keen on the idea of taking on a big company like “The Tetris© Company” so that he can offer his Tetris©-alike game. You can still find Tris (not to be confused with Tetris©) for free in the App Store as of this writing, so go grab it.
For what it’s worth, “The Tetris© Company” has gone after pretty much every other Tetris©-alike game on every other mobile platform out there, so this is a long piece© fitting into just that one four-by-one slot© for “The Tetris© Company:” something they work very hard at achieving and when they get it, their eyes light up with joy at having cleared their board.
Oh, and for good measure: Tetris© is a trademark of “The Tetris© Company.” ©©
Here’s the backstory to what you’re looking at, above: Mobile Computing posted up a video showing that the iPhone 3G obliterated the BlackBerry Bold in a download & render test of web browsers (We just covered this, oh, hours ago). Fun stuff, except as our friends at CrackBerry noted (and MC added too) - it wasn’t a fair fight. The Bold probably wasn’t actually using WiFi and also most of the Bolds out there have pre-release ROMS on them, so the finals might be a stitch faster.
So a loyal CB reader pitched in and posted a video of the Bold loading the same page again, but this time actually using WiFi, it came in a little bit faster.
At TiPb, though, we figured it still looked slow. But since the Bold probably had a pre-release OS on it, we figured we’d hobble the iPhone 3G as well. So above, Loyal Moderator Bad Ash pits the BlackBerry Bold on WiFi against the iPhone 3G on EDGE.
Yeah, it’s closer, but we’re still ahead by 4 seconds or so. Tie the iPhone 3G’s WiFi hand behind its back, fine. Tie it’s 3G hand back there too, fine. The iPhone 3G still seems to win out — and we look forward to being able to say that about the final Bold ROM too. Hey — you guys still have (slightly) more reliable push email, so there’s that.
When Rene gave us a As the Turn-By-Turn Turns update yesterday, we got a very smart comment from somebody calling him/herself GoogleLicense:
TiPB ought to do some research on the why’s behind this and break the story since the iphone press seems to love reporting this topic.
It might be something like this: Apple licenses significant parts of their map stuff from Google. Google licenses significant parts of their map stuff from several other vendors. Each license has certain restrictions.
If you dig around in the bowels of Google’s developer site looking for info on required copyrights and license restrictions when using embeddable maps, you can get a lot of details of what is and isn’t allowed for what sets of data and who the original source is that is putting those restrictions…
Indeed, we know a good idea when we see it. After the break, a short history of map providers, their licenses, and why it seems like waiting for Turn-by-Turn directions within Google Maps on the iPhone isn’t a great idea.
Read on!
Fail Me, iPhone firmware 2.0.2, apps, and your forum threads!
Good news on the Facebook front: their native application is due to get an upgrade in September. The upgrade should actually make the app reach some sort of feature parity with the web-app version of Facebook, which right now is far superior to the native app.
New features include a revamped profiles view, viewing all notifications in the home tab, friend search and approval, the ability to view your full inbox, and more.
Joy!
We always see (almost entirely incorrect) ‘outlines’ of keynotes in the runup to any Apple event, now we’re getting them before the runup starts. It’s a pretty safe be that Apple will be doing something in late September or October, they always try to have new iPod announcements before the holiday season. So go grab your salt shaker, pour out a few grains (actually, you might want to use them all), and take a gander at what Anonymous has told to expect in a “late September event,” after the break.
Our take on the list you’re about to read: real iPhone file access would be a godsend and it’s a natural next step for the platform. iTunes Unlimited Music Subscriptions have been oft-rumored but given how strident Jobs has been about people wanting to own music instead of subscribe to it, we’re still doubters. Then again, he did say the same thing about mobile video right before the iPod got video support. Basically, there’s nothing there that we really think is a lock.
Here’s a better question: what do you think Apple has in store for us this coming holiday season? Read the rest of this entry »
