Articles by Mike Overbo
The iPhone + TomTom GPS rumor from yesterday has been quashed. Eagle-eyed MacRumors reader thecreativ1 noted the resemblance to an earlier iPod Video fake that was hoaxed; the extra blurriness, and all.
“Don’t you guys remember the big hoax about the “real” video iPod??? About how weeks later the guys showed a screencast about how he made the fake….
“Well I do, and the barcode sticker on the tomtom dongle looks an awful lot like the barcode sticker on this notorious fake…”
So it’s not true. I wanted it to be real, but it’s not. (via engadget).
I’ve got some store news real quick — First off, we’ve mentioned it in the podcast before, but it bears mention again. All of the Smartphone Experts stores support gift certificates. In case you’re wondering, that does include the Phone Different Store. Also, we’ve got a coupon for 10% off accessories in effect until midnight on Saturday. To utilize it, just use “iHOLIDAY” as your coupon code.
The Smartphone Round Robin contest is over. Here are our last thoughts and responses about the the iPhone. After the break are the winners of the contest and the bulk of the article.
I’d like to say that the Smartphone Round Robin was an excellent idea. It was a lot of work, too, but hopefully it ends up being something useful for those of you that followed it while it was going on, or to anyone that ends up here long after this moment has passed.
And if you’re not ready to say goodbye to the round robin just yet, we’ll all be chatting about the round robin for the Mobile Computing Authority podcast tomorrow, that podcast should be available next week.
Engadget has a story that shows the iPhone with a TomTom GPS module connected at the bottom, on the route to Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Is it real or fake? No one can know for sure, but there’s at least a possibility that it’s real. The picture quality of the “proof” is horrid beyond measure; the JPEG compression artifacts are pretty much out of this world.
If the iPhone does work with TomTom and a GPS dongle, I’ll be a happy, happy camper. TomTom’s map setup is actually pretty excellent; I’ve used it for driving and stuff on the Treo. Their device activation was horrible with all the software keys you have to input, but once you got it working, it was excellent.
If you’ve hacked your iPhone, you may be aware of a positioning app called Navizon which maps your location via tower triangulation and the presence of known wi-fi hotspots. That version costs $25, but there’s a new version of Navizon now available. It’s called Navizon Lite, and it provides location awareness based only on tower triangulation. In short, it can tell where you are (roughly) based on what kind of signal your phone gets, and skips the database of wi-fi hotspots. It’s tough to beat free, but you do have to hack your iPhone to get it to work in the first place.
I’m not sure how I missed this one as I do follow TUAW, but eagle-eyed Chris Davies of MYiTablet spotted this neat little bookmarklet called “Tabulate” to queue pages you want to read. It’s like browsing with faux tabs, and you can select whether you want to open a link in the current window, a new window, or save it for later. It’s a nice little bookmarklet hack. I’ve written some very simple bookmarklet hacks myself and researched some of the better ones (see here), but this one might be one of the best I’ve seen.
This is a neat-looking felt case. I think I’ll send it along to the store.
It seems like a long time since I affixed my burning gaze towards iTunes, and as luck would have it, there’s a bunch of iTunes news floating around just aching to find their way into a roundup smörgåsbord type of article.
It sounds like the new Pepsi zillion song giveaway is going to be with Amazon MP3 instead of iTunes. You’ll probably hear marketing speak say they’re giving away $1 billion worth of songs, but the reality is a different situation:
“PepsiCo is planning to place tokens on five billion drink containers. Consumers will have to collect five tokens to qualify for free tracks. In theory, the campaign could flood the market with $1 billion of free music (Apple charges 99 cents per DRM-free track), but redemption rates on these types of offers are usually low, at about 2 per cent.
iPodObserver has a quick story about independent superstar band Radiohead, who made headlines by letting anyone choose the price they wanted to pay for the album. Rumor has it that Radiohead are working through a deal directly with iTunes, the first of its nature. If this happens, it upends the content distribution methods currently in place by bypassing the middleman. In other words, it screws the record companies.
Ars Technica has an interesting article about kids using podcasts to replace lectures and iPod-ready versions of Cliffs Notes for late-night cramming.
Om Malik has a little introductory article about Songbird, an open-source version of iTunes that’s built on the Mozilla platform. The Mozilla platform is the basis of widely beloved internet browser FireFox, so if Songbird ends up like FireFox, it will be bloated and slow we’ll have a nice alternative to iTunes. Songbird isn’t anywhere near ready for release yet, as indicated by the current version available: Songbird 0.3 Developer Pre-release. Amazingly, device syncing is not one of the core functions yet, though they do have add-ons that allow syncing for iPods and other devices. There’s a video interview there that’s worth a look, and there’s an interesting tirade against iTunes starting at about 9:45, calling iTunes a bottleneck in the value chain. Yup, he calls it that even as he compliments it for being the best out there as it stands. See below:
Eric Zeman of InformationWeek fame posted a quick list of the 6 lamest Apple lawsuits in recent memory, if you’re having trouble keeping track of them. As to why you’d have to keep track fo the various dumb lawsuits that Apple has endured, I don’t know. But I read the list and I’d have to say that it’s accurate.
After a month without the iPhone, it’s good to be back. I got used to a lot of things in the 6 months of use with the iPhone that just aren’t possible with the other devices. In using the iPhone, I got used to having 7GB of music handy. I got used to carrying around headphones so I could slip into the world of music at a moment’s notice. I got used to looking whatever I needed on the real web. I got used to checking voicemails individually whenever I needed. I got used to how I checked email. I got used to threaded SMS. I got used to viewing videos. I got used to not charging my phone religiously every night. I got used to the seamless syncing with iTunes. On my return to the iPhone, I was astounded how quickly I was spoiled with syncing information. It was downright nasty to get all of my information onto a lot of these other devices. After 6 months of using the iPhone, what would have pleased me now frankly shocked me.
That’s not to say that the iPhone is perfect. No, there are a bunch of things that I realized I’d miss once I got back to the iPhone. I’d miss to-do lists, I’d miss installing programs, I’d miss the culture of openness that most of the other smartphones possess. I know that I’ll have some, if not all, of the features I’ve been wanting in a few months once 3rd party applications arrive; I’m sure that others will arrive as carrots in the future whether they come from Apple or whether they come from the hacking community.
The future is really why I went for the iPhone in the first place. I wanted to use a device that has a future, not one that has a past. All of the other smartphones, they come with what is best described as baggage. There’s a history to how they do things, and when they do something that’s probably wrong in terms of how a smartphone ought to work, there’s an excuse for it, or some obscure technical reason that was relevant years ago but isn’t relevant now. They were designed to work around older technology, and all of that cruft builds up, and that cruft takes battery power. Why else would those thicker devices have worse battery life? In a lot of ways, the other smartphones pioneered the way, but it doesn’t seem like they kept up. The iPhone, even with its shortcomings, is a fresher look on what it means to be a smartphone than any of the other devices out there, and I’m pretty sure that it will continue to be that way. Who is going to be able to keep up with what Apple has started?
