Articles by Rene Ritchie

Apple has just released desktop Safari for Mac and Windows to 4.0.4, which improves full history search performance, has the mandatory stability improvements, and security fixes, but the big news as far as we’re concerned is the number one item on the list — Improved JavaScript performance

Desktop Safari is the big brother of the iPhone’s Mobile OS X Safari, and they share a rendering engine (WebKit), and a JavaScript engine (Nitro), and improvements in desktop Safari and Nitro have traditionally filtered down to Mobile Safari with the subsequent iPhone OS update. That’s right, we’re looking at you iPhone 3.2 (where ever you are!)

Since the current iPhone 3.1 Safari is still outperforming even brand-new devices like the Droid, that may seem a little greedy, but we know Google’s Android and Palm’s webOS aren’t sitting still in the rendering race, and have updates of their own in the pipeline, so once again, competition benefits the end users. Bring. It..

Join Dieter, Chad, Rene and special guest, the Cellphone Junkie Mickey Papillion tonight for all the week’s news, views, and rants. If you have any questions, leave a comment below, hit us up on Twitter @theiphoneblog, or better still — join us live in the chat room via http://www.tipb.com/live

Chat with you soon!

Last month at CTIA, AT&T proudly announced that they would now permit VOIP over 3G on the iPhone, and Apple promptly told TiPb (and others) that they were updating their SDK agreement and wanted VOIP over 3G apps in the App Store as quickly as possible, and Skype was all up in the happy as well. And now…

[cricket chirps]

Yeah, we’re still waiting. We asked Apple for an update but haven’t heard back yet. Hopefully, very soon, we’ll be awash in them. In the meantime, let’s keep the spotlight shining, and feel free to let Apple, AT&T, Skype, and all the other providers know you want your VoIP over 3G!

Nintendo president, Satoru Iwata loves his MacBook and his iPhone, and firmly believes Nintendo and Apple aren’t competitors (they appeal to different customers), and any talk of it makes him uncomfortable.

Yet Apple is most assuredly aiming at gaming (even if John Carmack thinks it’s between clenched teeth), especially with the funner iPod touch ever, and its game-heavy marketing.

With Nintendo profits down 52% for the first half of the year, and Apple selling record numbers of iPhones and reporting 100,000 apps and 2,000,000,000 downloads (with games weighed heavily among them).

Even with a dedicated gaming device like the DS (and perhaps a new platform on the way next year?), and a high-profile set of first-party properties like Mario, Metroid, Zelda, Pokémon, etc. those are tough numbers to look at. And Nintendo isn’t kidding themselves about that:

“If we can’t make clear why customers pay a lot of money to play games on Nintendo hardware and Nintendo software and differentiate ourselves from games on the mobile phone or iPhone, then our future is dark.”

Still, there are no plans for a WiiPhone (no matter how cool that might sound to us!), though an Amazon Kindle-like model, where the end-user doesn’t see any of the cell network bills, does appeal to Iwata.

Likewise, we can’t hold our breath for even older 1st party GameBoy titles to show up on the iPhone either. At least not anytime soon.

[Wall Street Journal -- thanks to everyone who sent this in!]

Sky Mobile TV News and Sports [Free + £6 a month subscription - iTunes link] for iPhone and iPod touch is now available in the UK App Store, and is Wi-Fi only at the moment (so AT&T isn’t the only one unhappy with TV over 3G, eh?)

The app itself is free, though the programming will set you back £6 a month — unless you’re an O2 customer, in which case they’ll foot the bill for your first three months. Nothing like a competitive market, is there?

If you live in the UK and want all the news, football (soccer to you North Americans), golf, and cricket you can shake an iPhone at, and you check out the app, let us know what you think.

If you live in the US, how would the idea of CNN/ESPN or FoxNews/Sports apps grab you?

[Telegraph via Engadget Mobile]

When Google opens their wallet, big buyouts follow, and this time it’s iPhone/mobile advertising company AdMob for $750 million, and VoIP startup Gizmo5 for about $30 million.

AdMob is an obvious choice for Google, as it’s built mobile and in-app advertising (especially on the iPhone) into a $100 million a year business, enough to get Brin and Page personally involved in the courtship. Says TechCrunch:

Google is gunning hard to dominate mobile Web advertising and AdMob has an early foothold in the display side. [...] Google’s purchase price tells us it thinks the opportunity for mobile display ads is in the billions of dollars, at the very least.

Gizmo5, rather than advertising, could help round out Google’s services portfolio. Again, TechCrunch has the details:

Google Talk allows voice calls between users but has no PSTN link to allow incoming or outbound calls to real phones. Gizmo5 does this well already. [...] And Google Voice is a great VoIP and phone identity service, but they have no endpoint for calls. Gizmo5, which by the way already integrates with Google Voice, is a soft phone end point for Google phone users.

Of course, Apple will have to stop considering/reverse the rejection of Google Voice, or Google will have to deliver that killer web app version, before iPhone users benefit from that…

Apple’s iTunes has just made a ton more movies available for purchase in 720p HD for both Mac and Windows, bringing the total to just over 285. We assume they’ll play on the 720p capable Apple TV as well, since HD rentals have been available for a while, but it’s not expressly listed — and it’s still US-only so I can’t test it up here in Canadaland…

No mention of the iPhone yet either. So what, some of you may flame, the iPhone’s screen is only 320p, who needs 720?! Well, one day hopefully a mythic iPhone HD or iTablet will, but in the meantime we’d still settle for a 720p HDMI cable output option that we could plug into a TV, since the 3GS is already capable of it and the Zune HD has had that feature since launch.

Boy, country and platform bitterness, all in one post. Sigh.

If you try out the new HD purchases, let us know what you think of the sound and image quality.

[via TechCrunch]

Why is it easier to make a great Twitter client for Apple’s iPhone than for Google Android phones like the new Verizon DROID? After Robert Scoble wrote a typically impassioned post entitled The Droid fails AS A PRODUCT when compared to Palm Pre and iPhone, and used Twitter clients as an example, Thomas Marban of Android’s premiere Twitter client, Twidroid, responded:

one of the main reasons why UIs are unequally inferior are not only the way you build apps (open vs. closed hw/sw system) and the SDK itself but also marginal to non-existing UI standards, no ready-made drag & drop UI items, variations in carrier- & device firmware, hard- & software input, screen sizes, international customizations, modded phones, rooted phones and last but not least completely different expectations among users and the linux’ish target group itself. in a nutshell: beautiful mess. obviously, all these reasons eat up a huge pile of time that one could better spend with improving UX and polishing the interface. those who started early with android development have learned and are still learning it the hard way, just like they did with win 3.1 back in the days.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball, in Lots of Excuses comments:

That doesn’t sound like someone who plans to ever ship something of the caliber of Tweetie, Birdfeed, or Twitterrific. From what I’ve seen of Twidroid, it’s not even as good as Craig Hockenberry’s original version of Twitterrific for iPhone, which was written as a jailbreak app before the iPhone officially supported third-party software. If Android hardware diversity is already a problem for third-party developers, it’s only going to get worse.

This also highlights the advantages Apple has given iPhone developers. Not only is the iPhone based on OS X, but the development tools are based on Xcode and Interface Builder, and while not as many developers are likely already familiar with Cocoa touch as, say, developers might be with Android’s language(s) (or web developers may be for the Palm Pre), existing Mac developers can make those tools sing. And, given the SDK Apple provided, even new developers get a huge head start in terms of functions and user interface elements.

Sure, that means there’s a lower barrier of entry to creating poor iPhone apps, but it also means great developers aren’t wasting their time re-inventing UI wheels, or fighting the OS to do right by their apps. They investing that time in making great apps.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, market share and profit share aren’t the same thing, and just to prove that point, it looks like Apple’s iPhone has shot passed Nokia to become the most profitable handset on the market. Says Telephony Online:

The firm estimates that Apple’s iPhone operating profit came in at $1.6 billion in Q3, while Nokia recorded only $1.1 billion in operating profit. “With strong volumes, high wholesale prices and tight cost controls, the PC vendor has successfully broken into the mobile phone market in just two years,” said analyst Alex Spektor in the research note.

That’s based on 1.6 billion in Q3 iPhone profits for Apple vs. 1.1 billion for Nokia and their handsets.

Why does this matter to us? High profit margins for Apple means more cash they can re-invest into the iPhone and its technology, and like the MacBook and iMac line (and the boilerplate they keep feeding us on their conference calls) it means they can decide to amp up the innovation, even if costs them a little in the short term. No margin, no room for that kind of competition.

So, Apple, we hope you take a lot of that 1.6 billion, check out your competition, and invest heavily in wowing us again in 2010, b’okay?

[Strategy Analyst via Telephony Online via MacRumors]

Orange UK sold 30,000 iPhones on release day, despite their dodgy unlimited data = 750MB, and despite the iPhone already being available on rival O2 UK since 2007. By contrast, Verizon launched the much-hyped, geek-liked Droid for the first time on any network, anywhere, ever, and sold — according to Bloomberg — 100,000 over the weeked. Three and a bit times as much sounds almost as good as their “5x the 3G coverage of AT&T” commercials. But then the US is a much bigger market and Verizon a much bigger carrier, and Orange has only a day, not a weekend, but whatev…

The iPhone 3GS, as a third data point, sold over 1,000,000 it’s first weekend out the gate (300,000+ of those estimated to have been on AT&T). Sure, that was international, but then the iPhone 3GS was available internationally, all under the same brand, in several countries at the same time. Verizon licensed the Droid trademark, so even when the same device rolls out in Canada and Europe, it won’t be the Droid but the Milestone, which is 5x less the geek name sex-appeal.

What does this all mean? iPhone mindshare is still huge and demand in countries that were exclusive to one carrier is still high. In part, this may be because there’s a single, global iPhone brand (and feature set) for consumers to identify with, and rather than controlled by a carrier (like Droid), it’s controlled only to Apple — so it might just appear on your favorite carrier one day as well, be it Bell/Telus, Orange/Vodafone, or Verizon…

[via AppleInsider and BGR]