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So it’s November, have you seen the iPhone 3.2 beta? We’ve been over this before — iPhone 2.2 beta was released on September 25, 2008 and the final version was made available on November 21. So where’s 3.2?

Yes, Apple hasn’t announced iPhone 3.2, so we can’t really call it delayed, but then Apple never announces anything in advance — all we have are historical patterns and market realities.

Was Apple waiting to integrate iTunes LP and iTunes Extras? They’ve done that for Apple TV 3.0 already. Where’s the iPhone and iPod touch love?

We’ve already postulated what other features they could be exploring, including Google Maps updates with Latitude (and now, of course, Google Maps Navigation), but given the strained relations, rejection of the former, and brand-new beta status of the latter, 3.2 might be too early. Likewise, Zune HD competitive features like 720p video out.

With the onslaught of new Android software, like HTC Sense UI, MotoBlur, and Android 2.0, could Apple have decided to raise the level of this update? A few minor tweaks were certainly possible for a standard schedule iPhone 3.2, but would Apple delay their frequent update cycle in order to make a more impressive version?

We’re not going to get our hopes up, but if Apple is getting ambitious, if Scott Forstall and team are going to “blow us away”, we’re willing wait. If not, then where is it?

Verizon and Motorola’s upcoming Droid handset is getting a lot of press, here, there, everywhere, and one of the negative points that’s come up — in relation to the iPhone — is the Droid’s lack of multi-touch gestures like pinch-to-zoom. (TiPb mentioned it a couple days ago as well).

Some might complain about Verizon nickel-and-diming users by charging an extra $15/month for Exchange support, or that given Verizon’s CDMA technology the Droid can’t multitask a phone call and a data connection (so if, for example, you’re using the new Google Maps Navigator and a need to talk on the phone at the same time, you’re only as good as your last cache). Others are honing in on the Android app space limitations, or just the limited apps (NSFW). But what makes multi-touch so intriguing is that it’s a bit of a mystery as to why the Droid doesn’t support it. Of course, the G1 didn’t support it either, but Android 2.0 is supposed to contain the API’s to do it, and the non-Verizon (GSM, for sale outside the US) version — called the Motorola Milestone seems to do it, if not smoothly (yet?).

Apple’s massive multi-touch patent portfolio is cited as a reason, both now for the Droid and then for the T-Mobile G1. Either Google, while CEO Eric Schmidt was still on the board, agreed not to violate them, or fears litigating them. So, they build in the functionality and let 3rd parties take advantage — and the risk that goes with it — if they so choose.

But why then does the Palm Pre have multi-touch gesture support on Sprint in the US? Wouldn’t the same patents apply? Sure. However, patents are like nukes. They can be deadly unless the guy you’re pointing yours at is pointing equally deadly ones back at you. As both TiPb and PreCentral.net have posted for a while — and Palm has explicitly stated — Palm has a heckuva mobile patent arsenal.

Blustering about lawsuits aside, Apple suing Palm (or vice versa) brings mutually assured patent destruction down on the both of them. While Apple is arguably filthy rich and Palm pauper poor, they might not want the expense or the hassle given Palm’s current market position. Verizon and Google, however, is another matter, especially since Google has been in the mobile space nowhere near as long as Palm, and likely doesn’t have the same type of core mobile patent portfolio in their pocket to assure the same type of stalemate.

At the end of the day, only the top executives (and their lawyers) at Apple, Google, and Palm know for sure, but that’s our guess.

It’s a shame, of course, because the iPhone’s multi-touch gestures are natural to the point where they should arguably be considered default for all capacitive touch screen devices. Apple settled “look and feel” lawsuits with Microsoft over the windows/mouse/pointer interface over a decade ago. They likely consider multi-touch a similar competitive advantages, however, and Steve Jobs said as much at Macworld 2007 when he introduced Apple’s implementation of it:

“And boy, have we patented it.”

The internets are a rocking with posts about the iPhone’s App Store unofficially hitting 100,000 apps, but while we wait for official word from Steve Jobs, the blogsphere is also debating the important of the sheer quantity of those apps, and whether that’s more important that quality.

It isn’t.

Scoble (and others, I think MacBreak Weekly covered this earlier) suggests that the huge number of apps makes for a greater chance each individual user will find that unique assortment that best fills their needs. In other words, while everyone has the same iPhone, they don’t all have the same apps, and those apps essentially create a personalize experience — a different iPhone — for each user.

What’s more, those must-have apps, and the money, effort, and time spent in acquiring, setting up, and becoming proficient in them, creates a cost that prohibits users switching to another platform. To go from iPhone to Android, in Scoble’s example, means you lose Tweetie, Tap Tap Revenge, Photoshop.com, NASDAQ, etc. (Never mind if you’ve bought Navigon or other, high-priced content).

John Gruber, for his part, asks if the App Store is popular because the iPhone is great, or is the iPhone great because the App Store is popular.

The number of apps already in the store — and, even more so, the momentum with which new ones are being added — almost certainly guarantees the continuing popularity of the iPhone and iPod Touch for the next few years. But Windows is proof that popularity doesn’t guarantee market-leading quality.

But the iPhone isn’t Windows. Neither popularity levels not quantity of software can be used to balance that particular equation.

Unlike the iPhone, Windows has never been a poster-child for great user experience (Windows 7 may alter that, but it’s just going to market now). Fact of the matter is, the iPhone debuted in 2007 without an App Store at all, and sold for the entire first year (until the launch of the iPhone 3G and iPhone OS 2.0) without an App Store. It sold on the strength of its user experience.

It’s that focus on usability that makes the iPhone great, and that in turn makes many of the apps great. Just like with the Mac, Apple has built in core technologies and development tools to handle a lot of the heavy lifting. So, while it still takes the very best developers to make the very best apps, even fair-to-middling developers can make apps that are surprisingly usable.

Those great apps, combined with a large quantity of usable if not inspired apps, is what makes the iPhone so compelling. The App Store itself is proof. Where Palm, Windows Mobile, Nokia, and RIM have had apps — many thousands of them — as well, it took Apple to create a single place, with a single home screen icon, to find and acquire them all. If it was just quantity, Apple would have had a hard time catching up to them.

Gizmodo has an interesting post up on Apple’s iPhone App Store, and how it might be headed straight down the road to oblivion. Their basic take is that downward price pressure, users conditioned by iTunes to expect $1 songs and $2 TV shows, Apple recommending (and wanting) cheaper prices, high development costs with low chances for visibility, all combine to put iPhone (and iPod touch) development on the endangered species list. Further, yesterday’s announcement of in-app purchase for free apps, they argue, makes things like the Top Lists nebulous going forward.

And it doesn’t just apply to the iPhone:

don’t forget, Palm and Android fans, this App Store Effect sends ripples well beyond the App Store. Customers expect to see functionally identical apps priced the same way across platforms, because to us, that’s what makes sense. Can devs really afford to port an app to the webOS to sell to the tens of thousands of Pre owners, when they’re expected to tag it with iPhone prices, calculated for a base of millions? Whether by Apple’s design or totally by accident, everyone who doesn’t own an iPhone will suffer for it.

See their chart, above, showing the pricing differences between platforms. Some would argue the market can correct for anything. If premium developers leave in frustration, users will tire of CrApps, a premium developer will sense the voice, fill it, make a killing, and other premium developers will flock back. Others believe Apple controls the market and so it’s their job to make it as good a market for developers — and ultimately users — as possible through proper policies and procedures (BlackBerry, for example, won’t allow paid apps under $2.99 into the App World).

We’ve all discussed this a lot in the past, and no doubt will continue to discuss it moving forward, but give Giz’s article a read and let us know what you think.

Dear Apple, if you’re releasing a new wireless keyboard, why not take this opportunity to make it work with iPhone? If the rumor-mill is to be believed, you’re set to release new iMacs and Mac Minis (and hopefully a 27″ or 30″ LED display!) perhaps as soon as next week (hey, there was a Spotlight Turns to Notebooks event last October!). And if the FCC filings are accurate, you’ll have a new multitouch mouse and wireless keyboard to go with them. Apple, in the name of everyone whining on the internet for it — let that wireless keyboard work with the iPhone.

You introduced enhanced peripheral functionality last March during the iPhone 3.0 SDK event, including dock and Bluetooth access, but you didn’t add the Bluetooth profile or any drivers for keyboards. That led to many sad, irritated messages sent our way via comments, email, and tweets. Now, with MMS in the US finally off your miss-list, wouldn’t it be nice to scratch external keyboard off that list as well? Since we haven’t even seen a beta for iPhone 3.2 yet, mightn’t you not introduce said drivers there?

No need to answer now. We’ll just wait for your next event (which we’ll be liveblogging right here at TiPb, ‘natch) and hope for the best.

Is Apple charging the big record labels $10,000 to create iTunes LP packages for them, and outright refusing to make the service available to the indies? That’s the allegation Gizmodo brought forward, based on a conversation with one such indie, who heard it from their labels digital distribution manager, who claims to have heard it from their iTunes rep.

Enter internet brouhaha. Some sites are calling the $10,000 fee exorbitant, and the lockout of indies untenable. Other sites are pointing out how much good quality interactive web development costs, and highlighting that Apple has only rolled out 12 iTunes LP’s so far.

Here’s the thing: when Apple announced iTunes LP, despite the fact that they’re using the fairly open WebKit framework to make it, they didn’t announce the specific TuneKit implementation as an open format, they didn’t announce an SDK, and they didn’t say they were offering it to every artist immediately.

It looks to us like this is just a case of Apple being Apple. iTunes LP is an experiment, clearly near-and-dear to them from Steve Jobs on down, and they’re starting with a few, select albums and trying to provide as premium and experience as possible. That kind of development work isn’t cheap, especially when you want to keep the numbers low at first, and it also means it isn’t open to everyone. Heck, it only even works on iTunes on your Windows or Mac PC at this point!

If they’re still nailing down the format specs, creating the development tools, and getting to set to roll out versions that will work with iPods, iPhones, and mythical, still unreleased Apple TV and iTablet devices, then this makes the kind of sense that does. And we’re guessing, when the dust settles and all the above is in place, Apple will open up iTunes LP and roll the format out wide, even to indies, because it will do what Apple really intends iTunes to do — help sell Apple hardware.

We were going to post some long preachy editorial about Tweetie 2.0 being a paid upgrade but it looks like everyblog and their siblingsite has already done that. So here’s our quick take:

We’re buying it, and happily. We asked developer Atebits why they went the route of a new app vs. an in-app purchase, and the response is worth quoting:

If all I were adding were features, then the in-app purchase route would have been an option (but then again, if all I were offering were features, I’d probably release it as a free update). Tweetie 2 is a fresh start, 100% rewritten, shares no code with the original . The only thing they have in common is the name.

So bottom line, Apple doesn’t (yet?) provide a mechanism for paid upgrades, and in-app purchase allows for more content, not for replacing an old app with a whole new one. So, yeah. This is the option Atebits took, and it works for us. New great app, same great price. And it is a great app, one which took considerable time and effort to make, and we want to support that because we want the developer to be successful enough to make Tweetie 3.0 just as big an update next time.

Sure, scale factors into that — $3 is a no brainer, so if you ask us what we’ll do if a GPS app wants $100 again next year, well… We’ll light those torches when and if we come to them.

I spent the wee hours of my Saturday morning in line for the grand opening of a new Apple Store. If you’ve never been to one, it’s an event.

The line starts early and by the time the store is almost ready to open, it snakes its way around the mall or down the street. Suddenly, the noise starts to build and build, and then Apple Store employees come racing around the corner or down the stairs, clapping and cheering and screaming. They run down the line, pumping fists and slapping hands, and it gets louder and louder. They form up in front of the store, bright colored shirts against wood, glass, and steel. Managers and specialists and concierges and geniuses all, they cheer for the crowd, and they scream for the crowd to bring that noise right back at them. Then they race away, the lights go out, the employees re-appear inside the store, and the doors open.

When line is released and it’s the crowd’s turn to run, into the store, grabbing one of the thousand free, location branded t-shirts they give away, and through the gauntlet of Apple Store employees who cheer and slap hands again, greeting every new customer.

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Apple is no doubt already hard at work on iPhone OS 3.2, the second minor update to the third major release of their mobile platform. Sure, we got iPhone 3.1 just over two weeks ago on Sept. 9, but looking back, we should expect to see the first beta versions of 3.2 sooner rather than later.

By way of comparison, iPhone 2.1 was released on Sept. 12, 2008. iPhone 2.2 Beta 1 was released on Sept. 25, with some tweaks to App Store and Safari’s UI. iPhone 2.1 Beta 2 dropped on Oct. 24, with Google Street View, SDK support for line-in audio, and direct podcast downloads and streaming. The final iPhone 2.2 firmware was released on Nov. 21, and both Google Street View and the ability to get podcasts on-device were great enhancements.

So, it’s not unreasonable to imagine 3.2 Beta 1 could show up before the end of the month, with a final release before the holidays.

Since we’ve already gotten direct TV and Movie downloads (over Wi-Fi), there may not be an analogous improvement to iPod and iTunes this time around. Subscribing to podcasts on device, however, where a push notification alerts you when a new episode is available and you’re on Wi-Fi to download it, is something we’d adore. iTunes LP and iTunes Extras support would also be dandy give their introduction in iTunes 9.

Likewise, Google Voice and Google Latitude having been rejected/held-for-study by the App Store, we may not get a Maps app update either (though Apple baking Latitude into the existing Maps app, Google-willing, could be a great compromise solution). We won’t hold our breath for push Gmail either (not GoogleSync, we mean built-in, doesn’t use up your only ActiveSync slot, genuine push email like MobileMe and Yahoo!)…

Enabling 720p TV-out from the iPhone 3GS and iPod touch G3 would be a great, and competitive addition, especially with a souped up dock-to-HDMI video cable to go with it.

We have our ongoing (though admittedly greatly reduced since 3.0) wish-list: better support for Bluetooth controls (AVRCP), APIs to allow apps to interact with the calendar, some form of background support for streaming audio, turn-by-turn, and other apps that cry out for it, Mobile iChat, remote backup and restore, iTunes music and video streaming, file system access for document handling, etc.

(Yes, we left out bug fixes, as we hope Apple sees those as urgent enough to address in an iPhone 3.1.1 release much, much sooner).

But what do you want to see Apple prioritize for iPhone 3.2?

Composers, writers, and publishers of the music Apple sells in the iTunes stores are petitioning the government to mandate that Apple should not only pay them their cut of the sale price (which they already get) but should also fork over a performance fee for the 30 second samples iTunes provides to help sell that music.

Now, we’re all for content creators getting a fair cut of the profits — indeed we are content creators here at TiPb editorial — but, a) asking that marketing done to help sell your music be deemed performance that requires payment, and then b) when failing to negotiate that with Apple, asking the government to mandate it?

Imagine Nike demanding a shoe store pay them to display Nike shoes on the wall. Strangely, in the reality we live, typically you pay for advertising, you don’t get paid for having your product advertised (if so, we’re going to get some TiPb signs up in Times Square and have NYC pay us a bundle).

Getting back to the fair cut of profits — creators have historically gotten shafted and we get that. But they’ve historically gotten shafted not by Apple or other online, or even brick and mortar retailers, but by Big Media (in this case the record labels). If the creators want to go after them, want to rectify the bad deals and swindles of the past, we’ll get the popcorn and spicy drink and cheer them on.

They also want performance fees for downloads, which is equally stupefying, since buying a song electronically is not analogous to Apple performing it, but to buying the CD. If Apple were to hold a live streaming concert on Apple.com, then, yes, performance fee.

Okay, maybe we’re being too one side. Maybe Apple is an easier, trendier target, and if Big Music won’t pay artists what’s fair, maybe Apple should be forced to pay unfairly. And if they are, maybe Apple should turn around and charge the artists 110% marketing/brokerage fee for putting the samples up to encourage sales…

Now excuse us, we’re off to bill Amazon for the cover art and sample pages they’re using to sell our pulp novels…

[via CNET]