Articles by Mike Overbo
AT&T begins rebranding Dobson’s CellularOne-branded stores on Sunday, converting them to AT&T stores. That probably means the iPhone finally makes its official way to Alaska soon. So if you’re up in Alaska and close to Fairbanks, Anchorage, or Juneau, it may be worth a stop by once it becomes available. AT&T gains a bunch of other regions besides Alaska, of course — if you want to take a peer at the local coverage, there’s a coverage list available here. Or there’s this picture from an earlier article about the Dobson purchase…
If you make a lot of international calls, the service promoted by Jajah may be of interest to you. You sign up with their service, and when you want to make an international call, you punch the number in on their made-for-iPhone website, and wait for them to call you.
- it’s a web app, so you don’t need to jailbreak or anything
- for folks based in the U.S. and Europe, but you can call to 122 countries
- it makes no sense to use for domestic calls, since it uses your minutes anyway
- they charge you starting at 2 or 3 cents per minute for international calls, rates are available
- you should verify that it is a lot cheaper than what AT&T would charge you
- they use VOIP, aka voice-over-IP, which is basically telephone calls that use the internet.
Ars Technica notes on some details about a patent, filed last year, about gaming on the iPhone. The patent details using a part of the screen to show the game. Another section of the screen functions as an input that can control both the game and other multitasking apps outside of the game, such as the iPod music app. The patent also details using the gaming control app alongside a game scene. The control area controls multiple apps at the same time depending on where you tap and flick? I think that’s the gist of it.
I wouldn’t get my hopes up for Apple releasing a game based on this anytime terribly soon; patents aren’t reliable indicators of when a feature is forthcoming. Indeed, we might never see this, at least, not from Apple. It could also be the basis for multi-tasking on the iPhone when apps become available, you never know.
W00t! With your help this podcast reached #41 in iTunes gadget podcasts. Thanks to you! We chat a bit about the Smartphone Round Robin, iPhone launches in Europe, unlocked iPhones, supposed spat between AT&T and Apple, rumors of the SDK being seeded, Universal CEO mockery, and the usual looks from our community.
I’d also like to apologize for the lateness of this podcast — we’ve been t roubled with some audio problems since we upgraded to Leopard. Okay, I’ve had some audio problems since we upgraded to Leopard. Dieter has been fine.
ModMyiFone member suavphisticated figured out how to put together an picture messaging (aka MMS) app for hacked iPhones. It’s probably a bit early for general consumption, but if you’re feeling technically apt and are jonesing to prove it, here’s your big chance. It can only send mms messages, as in it is not yet able to receive them, but receiving is apparently part of the long-term plan. Can I get a w00t?
The last iPhone review is up from Kevin of CrackBerry.com. It’s a well-written review of the iPhone and he sides with me against Dieter that the iPhone is a smartphone, big ups there. It has some catching up to do, to be sure, but that’s to be expected for a device that hasn’t even been out 6 months yet. It sounds to me like he’s been thinking about purchasing one. Kevin names the iPhone the champ of entertainment, and wonders why they didn’t call it the iGadget — the phone is treated as just another application of the phone. It’s an interesting point, one I’ll be addressing later with my triumphant “return to the iPhone” article.
CNet France reports that a new version of the firmware, version 1.1.3 is due for release at the end of this week. They claim that the update will bring a voice-recording app, as well as the use of disk mode so you can use your iPhone as a portable storage drive. Electronista notes that it’s been about a month since the last update, and the last update happened at the end of the week. I hope that a considerable update is in the works; I’m still waiting for the Leopard-obvious features like notes syncing. Still, this is just a rumor; nothing real to get excited about.
Verizon recently announced a bunch of things — that users would be able to use unlocked cell phones on their service, that they were doing a 180 and would be supporting Google’s Android, and that they were going to start thinking of their network as an open network. Of course, the cynical (meaning John Paczkowski of AllThingsD) figure that Verizon will charge per-byte data charges to prevent their network from turning into “dumb pipe” (video link) just like how Verizon’s parent company Vodafone does it in Europe.
Of course, that creates a new PR blurb for AT&T: their network has always been open and they don’t monitor, notice, or care what phone you use. The cynical make a joke in the headline about being “most open to the U.S. government,” zing, but that it wasn’t a PR point until Verizon did their new open bit. It was just assumed as part of the open nature of GSM.
While those two wireless giants fight it out with themselves, the irony that remains is that the iPhone is actually a pretty closed device as it stands currently.
The BBC reports that of the 30,000 iPhones sold in France over the first 5 days, 20% of them were sold as the more expensive unlocked version. That’s right, upwards of 7000 folks spent €750, or about $1000 US, to get an unlocked iPhone. How many of them were from other EU nations not willing to wait for the iPhone to arrive? It just goes to show that there’s a demand for it; if I could spend the money to officially unlock my main iPhone, I definitely would. While I love visual voicemail, I do wish that Apple would’ve opted for multiple carriers instead of exclusivity.
Google has made their main page and many of their other pages iPhone compatible. The main page gives web, image, local, and news searches, there are easy buttons for GMail, Calendar, Reader, and More — More being Docs, GOOG-411, SMS, News, Photos, Blogger, and Notebook.
In other news, iPhone is the fastest-growing search term of 2007, which isn’t too surprising. If you’re a user of AOL’s Instant Messenger and Google’s GMail, Google has integrated AIM into GMail. W00t!
