With the Apple’s release today of the iPhone 2.1 firmware update, that’s the exact question many people will be asking. Hey, we at TiPb asked it ourselves — for all of about 0.1 seconds before diving headlong into iTunes, for the good of our readers, of course.
So what’s new in iPhone 2.1, is it compelling enough for you to update, and who should avoid it at all costs?
Answers after the jump!
Welcome to iPhone Analysts vs. the Magic 8-Ball, where we take the often outlandish, sometime surreal predictions of iPhone analysts and pundits, blogeratti and the ‘net elite, and compare them to the potentially equally precise prognostications of a… magic 8-ball (running on an iPhone, of course!)
This edition rounds up some of the mountain of rumors piling up in advance of Tuesday’s “Let’s Rock” event. Let’s get it on!
And for those still keeping score on the last round, the current standings are after the jump!
Today on the forums there are a couple of threads definitely worth checking out:
The first thread for today was started by yours truly back on July 12th, Some of us have one… Happy? Not Happy? Feel free to rant away in there about all your new iPhone likes and dislikes. Next up is a thread where rats13 wants to know should he wait to get a iPhone or should he just go for it? My personal opinion Rats13… what are you waiting for?!
One of my favorites, the infamous Wallpaper thread. Help us out and post some of your favorite wallpapers! Last but not least is a great little modification tip you can do to your iPhone if you want to give it a more refined look. Check it out: brushed metal!
And don’t forget to register folks, it’s the only way to join in on the conversation — and it’s free!
See you on the forums!
Not evil twin to theiPhoneBlog.com Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, This Week in Smart Phone Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple’s current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place — best not to linger…). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!
This week: Zilch again. Nadda. We’re too busy getting ready to cover the no doubt universe denting news Apple will unleash at “Let’s Rock” on Tuesday. And, frankly, so is the competition. Face it, they’ve been quiet as little blue-OLED mice lately.
Blackberryboss Lazeridis is all dressed up like Leo Laporte and is already lining up in San Francisco to find out what Apple’s releasing this year… so he can release it next. Palm-Top Colligan’s not releasing anything new until Nova ships sometime in 2012, and Larry and Sergey have shifted the focus off Android and onto their new Chrome browser, which we just know they’ve been running on gLinux in-house for years but is somehow only released (in what will not doubt be perpetual Beta) for Windows.
And speaking of Windows, Steve Ballmer’s off preparing an extra-special CES-sized Monkey Boy dance (YouTube it) for his first adult Keynote since Bill Gates retired to make $10,000,000 mockumentaries with Jerry Seinfeld (Wikipedia him).
No doubt they’ll return to their usually scheduled schedules next week, and so will we!
Look, advertising is a mysterious thing, okay? It takes some crazy genius can figure out how to make you want things without you even realizing that’s what’s happening. Any Don Draper monologue can tell you that.
But, as Rene asked, who were the geniuses who came up with this one?
Alright: devil’s advocate time: We get it, time spent humanizing Bill Gates is time spent humanizing Microsoft; we even get the secret ‘anti-switcher’ message for hardcore Seinfeld fans who remember the Mac in his apartment. Heck: we get that Bill/Microsoft1 is a mensch and shops at regular stores for regular people, not some overpriced, all white and chrome, well-designed… you get where we’re going with this.
So, like the Apple ads, we get some cute humor with a heart of gold — it’s as though Microsoft went ahead and took PC, admitted straight up he’s Bill Gates himself, and then ran with it. Ok, we’re a little sold that this will help people warm up Microsoft. Feeling better about Vista (or, yes, Windows Mobile2) — not so much.
Finally, and we hesitate to even mention this, but was it really necessary to make us not only watch that little derriere-shake at the end, but anticipate and wait for it? Jerry Seinfeld: you imp you.
Last week the UK ruled that Apple was misrepresenting the iPhone’s provisioning of “just the internet” due to the lack of support for two ubiquitously popular 3rd party plugins: Flash and Java. We’ve previously covered the will they/won’t they drama surrounding development and deployment of Flash and Java pretty much ad nauseum infinitum, as well as some seldom discussed yet surprisingly frightening concerns about Flash and its downright sneaky use of 3rd party advertising cookies.
More recently, however, another issue has come to light. Primarily concerned with Windows Vista security and how it can be circumvented, this issue throws a renewed focus on the danger of 3rd party plugins like Flash and Java, on how they interpret and run code on our machines, and how they provide an increasingly popular attack vector for bad guys (hackers, malware authors, identity thieves, etc.)
How does this all relate to the iPhone, and what about ZOMG! Can has my Flash vidz? Read on to find out!
Have you checked out our forums lately? The community is growing and the commentary is getting better and better each day. Unconvinced? I’ll bring out a thread, a post, a topic, or a comment directly from the forums and post it on TiPb’s front page every week to prove it to you. We here at TiPb love the interplay, quid pro quo, repartee with our readers, so step up your creativity and tighten up your diction, you could be next!
This week we have a great and interesting thread going on in our forums. CharlieBall asks when did your iPhone make your life easier? Obviously, we all know that the iPhone is a multipurpose tool that’s the best iPod, best internet device, etc. but what about those little, less important times where the iPhone just made your life easier? The current answers range from trivia questions to phone saber battles, directions to movie times. So, when has the iPhone helped you out?
For me, I always Shazam songs that play on the radio and play games to kill the dead time. How about you?
Go Read CharlieBall’s post on when the iPhone made your life easier!
A lot of folks (yours-truly included) have been loving Pandora lately because they’ve been using the excellent native iPhone app (Read a Lightning Review of Pandora). With any luck, these folks could be mobilized to help Pandora out — they’re facing crippling and unfair royalty fees from SoundExchange. It’s an issue that we reported on a bit last year over at our sister site, WMExperts. The gist is this: the RIAA and SoundExchange are looking to enforce new royalty rates for Internet Radio that are so high that it’s fair to say they’re meant not to pay artists, but to destroy a medium. This article on Pandora’s plight over at the Washington Post [via] is a pretty good summary of the state of the Internet Radio fight, and here’s a pretty good summary of the article:
“We’re approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision,” said Tim Westergren, who founded Pandora. “This is like a last stand for webcasting.” [...] Westergren, seemingly wearied by the constant haggling over the issue, signaled that Pandora’s investors may also be impatient for an end. “We’re funded by venture capital,” he said. “They’re not going to chase a company whose business model has been broken. So if it doesn’t feel like its headed towards a solution, we’re done.”
Our take: the actions taken last year by SaveNetRadio.org and the huge masses they were able to mobilize managed to shine enough light on this issue to delay what looked like the impending death of Internet Radio. Now we’re back for Internet Radio 2: The Revenge, and since Pandora’s now on our iPhones, this time, it’s personal.
Or better: We might be approaching Pandora’s Last Stand, but let’s make sure they don’t stand alone.
Have you checked out our forums lately? The community is growing and the commentary is getting better and better each day. Unconvinced? I’ll bring out a thread, a post, a topic, or a comment directly from the forums and post it on TiPb’s front page every week to prove it to you. We here at TiPb love the interplay, quid pro quo, repartee with our readers, so step up your creativity and tighten up your diction, you could be next!
This week we have a great tip from our moderator extraordinaire Bad Ash! We all obviously know that MMS is missing in the iPhone and even though we may have differences in opinion about MMS (it being a limited technology, for one) but the fact of the matter is that MMS has become the pseudo-standard for sending pictures on cell phones.
So, how can we send MMS pictures if we’re using the iPhone? Well you’ll have to check out Bad Ash’s post won’t ya! Hint: It involves attaching the phone number to a carrier specific e-mail address. E-mailing that address will send the picture via MMS. It’s easy as pie!
Go check out Bad Ash’s tip on how to send MMS to other cell phones!
Have you checked out our forums lately? The community is growing and the commentary is getting better and better each day. Unconvinced? I’ll bring out a thread, a post, a topic, or a comment directly from the forums and post it on TiPb’s front page every week to prove it to you. We here at TiPb love the interplay, quid pro quo, repartee with our readers, so step up your creativity and tighten up your diction, you could be next!
This week we have a question raised by Wegmans wondering if we love our iPhone’s soft keyboard. Answers range from resounding yes’s to an almost as good as my old phone. Surprisingly, many of the folks who came from Blackberry and Treo have little complaints about the iPhone’s keyboard and have actually gotten quite attached to it.
AutoCorrect? Best thing ever. No physical buttons? Saves ourselves from the Blackberry thumbs! However, the forums are still looking for a universal landscape keyboard.
Either way, the iPhone’s keyboard is a great implementation of a soft keyboard. For those who haven’t tried it, try it out! And for those who have, do you like the iPhone’s keyboard?
Go check out Wegmans’ thread on if you like the iPhone’s keyboard!
  
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The iPhone Blog merged with the Phone different site in May of 2008. Both sites were founded on a premise that comes one from one of Apple's old slogans: Think different. The iPhone Blog: for people who dare to phone different.
