Articles by Mike Overbo
A study has been performed about the error rates of mobile keyboards. The three keyboards picked were the iPhone virtual software keyboard, QWERTY keyboards (like those on BlackBerries and Treos), and T9 numeric keypads. iPhone users erred at a rate of 5.6 errors per message, T9 users erred at a rate of 2.6 errors per message, and QWERTY users erred at a rate of 2.1 errors per message. The test was done with 20 folks in each group, and the iPhone owners had to have used their device for at least a month to qualify as eligible.
There are some doozies in the press release:
While the iPhone’s corrective text feature helps, this data suggests that iPhone users who have owned the device for a month still make about the same number of errors as the day they got it,” said Gavin Lew, Managing Director.
Compared to hard-key QWERTY devices, the iPhone may fall short for consumers who use on their mobile device heavily for email and text messaging. The iPhone was clearly associated with higher text entry error rates than a hard-key QWERTY phone. The finding that iPhone owners made more texting errors on iPhones than their hard-key QWERTY counterparts (on their own QWERTY phones) suggests that the iPhone may have a higher fundamental error rate. Specifically, the high rate of false alarms for iPhone keys adjacent to high frequency letters is troubling. The iPhone’s predictive and corrective text features do alleviate some of the errors users make while texting, but it does not catch them all.I’m not sure I agree with him on that last bit. The rate difference from QWERTY to T9 vs. the error rate on the iPhone is basically insignificant. What’s another .5 errors per message amongst friends when you’re talking about an average of 5+ EPM anyway? But what’s most interesting to me is that software and hardware keyboards were just as fast. It’s just that software keyboards are prone to more errors.
“iPhone is a great switch from a numeric phone. But if you’re switching from a hard-key QWERTY phone, try the iPhone in the store first.”
There’s a new Nintendo emulator for the iPhone. Beyond the venerable NES.app Nintendo emulator, there’s now the GameBoy and GameBoy Advanced emulator named gpSPhone for the iPhone., made possible by some of the same folks that brought you NES.app. I’m guessing you can expect gpSPhone to mature fairly quickly.. There are limitations, you have to supply your own boot ROM, you have to hack your iPhone first, and sound support is iffy at best, and you definitely have to install it to /Applications, but those are meager gripes about a software emulator at version 0.0.5.
[via TUAW]
China Mobile revealed that they are having talks with Apple to bring the iPhone to China. The deal was revealed by China Mobile CEO Wang Jianzhou, but they have yet to really seal the deal. From an executive spokesperson at China Mobile:
“Of course, we hope to bring the iPhone to China. But for the time being we are only in preliminary contact with Apple, and we have not made any concrete progress yet.”
UPDATE: iLounge found some more Wang quotes. He’s apparently not excited to share any revenue with Apple, though he’s excited to carry the iPhone itself:
Our customers like this kind of fashionable product. We still think we can maintain the operator-centric model because we have the customers, the end users.
Apple continues to grant interviews to pocket-lint.co.uk, and there are some good quotes in there. These money quotes sum up the essential approach to their work on the iPhone and how it’s like a little zen garden. A walled zen garden, to be sure — there are some things that you just can’t do that don’t make any sense, but a zen garden nonetheless. More on that later. Anyway, to the quotes:
“All the complaints and feature requests we’ve had can be fixed and added by software upgrades.”
“We didn’t want to include something for something’s sake.”
“For the average mobile phone most people only use around 10%, Apple didn’t want that to happen with the iPhone.”
image credit koi-z-are-us.com
Here I had thought that Apple released it on Friday, in conjunction with their european iPhone launch. No, they officially launched it Monday night, to little fanfare. Again, there isn’t much to this update. It closes the TIFF vulnerability that allows people to easily hack their iPhones at jailbreakme.com, that’s about it.
My understanding of feature updates is this: Apple has to dangle the carrot to make official firmwares more compelling than unofficial, hacked firmwares. Are iTunes charging icons and international keyboards going to cut it?
Of all the smartphones we test during the Smartphone Round Robin, the constraints of our phone exchange is felt most with the Windows Mobile 6 AT&T Tilt. One week is just not enough to get a full grasp on what Windows Mobile can do. If you’ve read some of my other reviews, you’ll hopefully recognize that as a compliment-dig.
I saw this Neonode N2 phone cross by in my RSS reader, and it looks like it could practically be the iPhone Nano. After reading the review at pencomputing.com it’s clearly not, but the N2 is absolutely tiny. It’s also built off a touchscreen interface, though the N2’s is built off infrared instead of multitouch. The weirdest thing is that the Neonode N2 and N1 have been using iphone touch, tap, and swipe interfaces since 2002 — they’ve been around a while.
The other weirdest thing about the N2 is that it’s built off Windows CE, just like Windows Mobile, except the N2 doesn’t add all of the Windows Mobile interface, they just use the bare guts of CE and add their own pretty. I have to say, it looks pretty decent from the few screenshots.
I’m not going to say that it’s going to sell like hotcakes, because it probably won’t. It costs about $645 US, doesn’t do 3rd party apps, doesn’t even do EDGE, and does only 1 GB of storage. They use a mobile processor I’ve never heard of on its own boffo architecture, so converting apps over isn’t necessarily going to be a slice of pie or a walk in the park. I just figured it’s kind of interesting. I wonder how well they patented their stuff and if we’ll see yet another iPhone lawsuit.
After a full weekend of the iPhone in Europe, how well has the iPhone been doing? Well, T-Mobile reported that they sold 10,000 iPhones on the first day. That’s not too shabby; it’s not an incredibly high number either, but it’s not bad either.
O2 hasn’t published any numbers yet, so there’s a bunch of hemming and hawing about whether the UK launch was a success or failure — and same with the German launch, actually. My guess is that since possibly 250,000 iPhones have been unlocked and sent overseas and Apple has had to limit purchases to 2 and require a credit card for purchase, that the iPhone launch must have been pretty good over there when it started a few months ago.
Well, in iTunes 7.5, free ringtones are back. It turns out that you can do the old trick of renaming an AAC music file to turn it into a ringtone. To get it to work, take any 30 second m4a file in finder, rename the extension to be m4r, and drag it in to iTunes. Voila!
For the iPhone, folks figured out how to downgrade the iPhone firmware to the older 1.1.1 firmware to get all the fun goodies if you decide that 1.1.2 isn’t all that great, or you miss the ease of the jailbreakme.com installer.
It seems that the iPhone modem firmware has been unlocked as well, meaning that they’ve figured out how to unlock 1.1.2 iPhones once the jailbreak is easy enough. A simpler GUI app will probably show up in the next few days.
Hackers have figured out how to re-flash the radio in 1.1.2 so it is now safe to unlock the iPhone, as you can “revirginize” the iPhone after unlocking it to avoid any bricking with the next update.
The 1.1.2 iPhone software has already been jailbroken. The software isn’t quite out of beta yet, it works only with Intel machines, and you’ll have to read a readme.txt file to figure it out, but it’s available for download if you need it. If you want to jailbreak 1.1.2, you’ll have to do most of the work from 1.1.1, so keep that downgrade link handy.
And for the last little tidbits, if you have an iPhone with 1.1.2 firmware connected to iTunes 7.5, it gives you the battery status in a little icon next to the eject button in iTunes. And, if you put your computer with iTunes 7.5 to sleep, it will still charge the iPhone. Oh, and you can sync entire events from iPhoto ‘07 to the iPhone instead of just photo albums.
This guy Core of wickedpsyched.net coded a version of AFP, the Apple Filesharing Protocol, for the iPhone and iPod Touch. This means that you could enable filesharing on your iPhone and copy some files over directly from your desktop over wi-fi. If you ask me, this is better than disk mode, where you can plug in your iPhone and it shows up as a removable disk. It apparently doesn’t show up in Installer.app yet, but give it a few days and I’m sure it will be there.
There’s also great news if you’re more of a windows person. Say you just prefer the Samba/SMB/Windows Filesharing so you can share with windows and mac, well he’s got you covered there too.
