All Articles in Editorial

MobileMe was announced by Steve Jobs and demonstrated by Phil Schiller at WWDC 2008. Tagged originally as “Exchange for the rest of us”, a disastrous launch — where Apple tried to do too much at once, including the iPhone 3G, iPhone OS 2.0, and the App Store — and a problem with early computer-side syncing forced them to downgrade the promise of “push” to more of a gentle “nudge”.

Fast forward 6 months and MobileMe has grown through its pain becoming almost, though not quite, everything Apple promised it would be at WWDC. Web-based email, contacts, and calendar are synced in near-real time to and from the iPhone and the Mac (Windows mileage may vary). Photos function, and iDisk is beefier, but still functionally on par with its .Mac roots.

But what do the next 6 months hold? If we get new iPhone hardware in June, and iPhone OS 3.0 along with it, could Apple be ballsy enough to try and give us MobileMe Take 2 at the same time? And if they are, what do we want to see in it?

Read the rest of this entry »

Sure, there are still plenty around — plenty of good ones even — but back before the App Store, before Apple released the iPhone SDK, WebApps were the development platform for the miraculous new mobile wireless platform.

HTML (HyperText Markup Language), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), and AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) were the only tools needed, Steve Jobs told us, to make delightful, dynamic applications for the iPhone. And — by the way — every web developer already new how to use them! As a bonus of sorts, Apple provided some simple URL handles for things like telephone numbers, and some attributes and sample behaviors that helped optimize the iPhone experience.

For a while there was a torrent of WebApps, from re-purposed websites like FaceBook and Amazon, to original content and even games. Some were great, some were okay; it depended how well the idea suited the WebApp platform.

Now, 9 months post-iPhone SDK, 6 months post-App Store launch, post 15,000 apps, and we don’t hear much about WebApps anymore. Almost three months ago TiPb asked if WebApps had a future. Three months later, is the silence we’re hearing our best response?

Palm has now announced their new webOS platform, which is similar to WebApps but runs locally as well and should — though we don’t know the details yet — provide far greater hooks into the smartphone system (perhaps somewhere between WebApps and Native Apps, like Widgets). Could this kickstart the iPhone WebApp developers back into gear?

Anyone out there make, use, or find a killer iPhone WebApp lately? Know of any in the pipeline? And where do you think WebApps will be another 3 months? In another 6?

As I’ve said many times before on TiPb, I’m a Palm guy going back to the Palm V, and Treo guy going back to the Treo 600. When Palm essentially abandoned that user-base (see my Palm Treo Pro Round Robin video and review) a few years back, I abandoned them and dove headlong into the iPhone (and now the iPhone 3G).

I still have a very warm spot in my heart for Palm, however, their innovation in the smartphone space, and their focus on zen-like user experience. So, when Palm announced their new WebOS platform and premiered their new Pre handset at CES (see our new baby sibling site PreCentral.net for all the details and a massive hands-on video), I was more than just a little ecstatic. I won’t lie, it’s the first post-iPhone device that’s caught my attention.

Don’t get me wrong, I still fear for Palm — the market is much more crowded than it was when they helped create it, and for all the problems WebOS and the Pre solve, they bring their own set to the table. However, watching the Palm Keynote fro CES I, presented by former Apple iPod father Jon Rubinstein and Palm founder Ed Colligan, two things stood really stood out for me:

• What Palm outright stole from the iPhone and put in the Pre
• And what Apple should immediate steal from Palm and put into the next iPhone OS.

We’ll get into both, after the break.

Read the rest of this entry »

Two years since Steve Jobs pulled the original iPhone from his pocket at Macworld 2007, and still no cut/copy and paste functionality, and none in sight. Head of iPhone Marketing, Greg “Joz” Joswiack famously said it wasn’t a priority. Still, we’ve seen both the similarly capacitive touchscreens, Google Android G1 and BlackBerry Storm, show off versions of (multi-)touch based cut/copy and paste. We’ve also seen some magnifying-loop-based proof-of-concepts and independent end-runs around the omission both via shared frameworks and JavaScript bookmarklets, but still nothing official, nothing from Apple.

One sometimes bandied-about suggestion as to why the iPhone still lacks cut/copy and paste is because Apple hasn’t figured out an elegant solution. They want a simple gesture that can be used quickly, easily, and consistently in any app, and is as intuitive to the user as pinch to zoom.

Well maybe we can help them out. If we want to see iPhone OS 2.3 at Macworld, or even iPhone OS 3.0 at WWDC in June 2009, how should they do it? What gestures should they use? What procedure should they implement?

If you were Steve Jobs, striding down the deep, dark sub-basement hall to the secret iPhone development lab, how would you tell the terrified techies to “just make it work”?

Form-factor-palooza continues! During the iPhone Round Robin, our best frenemy CrackBerry Kevin spoke extensively about his desire for an iPhone Pro:

know a big part of the iPhone philosophy is to keep it simple, but sometimes it doesn’t hurt to be a little more complicated, and luckily, tagging a product with “Pro” at the end covers the reduced intuitiveness of a professional device. At the bottom of the iPhone is a single home button. How about we toss a little Apple key to the left of it? Maybe when you hit that button you could get a few basic functions to pop up on the display… maybe like copy and paste? While we’re at it, let’s add a little back button to the right of that home key. The lack of a back key on the iPhone is one of my BIGGEST irks of all – you have to learn within each app the correct way to tap “back” to a previous menu (time waster). The most unified/simplistic means of getting back is via a back button. I know this is something that even iPhone fans (Rene, I’m looking at you) would like to see. Maybe add the ability to edit office docs natively – it’s not something one typically does on a smartphone all that often (more likely to view than to edit), but sometimes “Pro” users do have to make changes on the go. And last but not least, give it a flashing red light. In other words, make it more like a BlackBerry!

Seems he’s not alone, though Gizmodo certainly takes it to another level entirely: enter the slider! (Or re-enter, as we heard rumors of the iSlider back in July…) It’s not TiPb’s cup of tea. We’re still predicting an iPhone HD, but sans-slider. We highly doubt it’s something Apple would ever consider either, but we’re sure it would appeal to at least some of the HTC Pro/G1 crowd.

What do you think? Does the iPhone need it a big @$$ keyboard for 2009?

In case you haven’t read it already, our editor-in-chief, Dieter Bohn, has an outstanding article up at sibling-site WMExperts highlighting his top 5 reasons Twitter is better than SMS (and vice versa).

There’s a lot of intertube fuss about SMS lately, as a recent New York Times article once again shone the spotlight on the disgustingly dirty price gouging (and potential fixing) that goes on when it comes to SMS rates in North America. Basically, SMS (at 160 bytes/characters) is ridiculously cheap for the carriers to transmit, no matter what the scale, and yet the prices have doubled from $0.10 to $0.20 on many networks over the last few years. Voice, by contrast, involves much more data and is much more “expensive” in terms of infrastructure costs. North Americans will pay ludicrous sums of money for “cheap” SMS but not for “expensive” voice, so the carriers take advantage.

Dieter points out that the cost, community, compatibility, control, and context of Twitter give it a clear advantage of SMS, even as the discoverability, dilution of quality, dropping 20 characters, downtime, and potential delays in notification (outside the US) make it still far from perfect.

Flaws and all, Dieter is moving towards Twitter (@backlon) and away from SMS. Am I going to do the same? I already have (@reneritchie) and without really considering it. But here’s the thing — I have considered that not only should I not have to consider it, I don’t think any iPhone user should. (Or any @theiphoneblog follower either!)

Read the rest of this entry »

[This is an official Smartphone Experts Round Robin post! Every day you reply here, you're automatically entered for a chance to win an iPhone 3G, Case-Mate Naked Case, and Motorola H9 Bluetooth Headset! Full contest rules here!]

After 4 weeks sampling Google’s Android G1, Palm’s (HTC’s) Treo (Windows Mobile) Pro, HTC’s Windows Mobile FUZE, and RIM’s BlackBerry Bold, it’s back, and I’m back.

Boom.

A lot has happened since Dieter ripped the still beeping iPhone 3G from my cold, not-even-dead hand. Promo codes hit the App Store. iFart apps did to (and made a killing — sigh). And, of course, Apple released a little something called firmware 2.2.

Admittedly, I cheated a bit. I checkout out the new firmware and the new Google Maps, but I really haven’t had the chance to use iPhone OS 2.2 as my “daily driver”, not until now.

I’ve reviewed the iPhone software several times now, for 2.0, 2.1, and 2.2, so I’ll spare you the regurgitation, because something else has happened to: I’ve spent time with all those other smartphones. I’ve experienced some things still unavailable on the iPhone, some I’ve really liked, others… well, check the videos for the Android G1, Treo Pro, HTC FUZE, and BlackBerry Bold if you haven’t already.

Instead, I’m going to focus on that: returning to the iPhone and looking at it again through eyes now widened by our sibling sites’ signature devices. And I’m going to start after the jump!

Read the rest of this entry »

Back in October of ‘07, Mike discovered a warning message in Apple’s new Leopard Mail that mentioned Notes Sync with the iPhone — something that the iPhone didn’t offer. Rumors flared, and the intertubes began to hope against hope that Apple would offer Notes Sync. Thing is, though, Apple themselves said they’d be offering Notes Sync fully 10 months earlier during Steve Jobs’ original Mac World 2007 keynote where he introduced the iPhone. It’s right there on the big screen, plain as day. “Notes”.

But we didn’t get it with the iPhone 2G’s launch, we didn’t get it with Leopard’s launch, and now coming up on 2 years after that momentous keynote, we’re on to the iPhone 3G and OS 2.2, and we still don’t have it.

Kind of makes “push notification” have to stand in Apple’s “promises, promises” line, now doesn’t it?

So what happened?

Notes Sync was obviously intended for release with the original iPhone (it’s on the slide and in the Mail.app code!). Was OS X 10.5 Leopard’s delay enough to push it out, and drop it into functionality purgatory? Did Apple run out of engineers, or decide later that engineering efforts were better spent elsewhere? Did it work fine on Mac with Apple Mail, but get complicated enough on Outlook to scuttle partial-support plans?

Or is Apple thinking it’s peripheral enough functionality that they’ll just roll it into Snow Leopard’s release, which should also have integrated ActiveSync support (for “push” notes)?

What’s your conspiracy theory?

So with my cable modem dead all of yesterday, what’s any self respecting TiPb editor to do? Document iPhone features, of course! Now, while Google supplies the APIs and data, Apple creates the front end client (which “blows Google away” according to what Steve Jobs said while on stage with Bill Gates back in 2007). What’s new in the iPhone OS 2.2 version of that front end? Click the graphic above for a large size look at how Google Maps flows together. Couldn’t squeeze everything in, of course (looking at you, position identifying pin drag!), but most of the important stuff should be in there, including:

• Get info on searched location and share that location via email
• Get directions to or from a location
• Cycle between driving, transit, and walking directions
• Get different transit times
• Get street-view environment of a location and maneuver around (the Apple Store was initially blocked by a truck, so I had to tap the arrow to “walk” a bit, and then swing around to look behind it).
• Tap the radar to back out of street view
• Double tap for on-screen controls
• Report inappropriate content to Google, which sends you a page on Safari

Anything big missing from the graphic? Let us know and we’ll (try to!) add it in.

Anything big missing from the Google Maps app? Tell us in the comments and who knows, maybe we’ll see it in iPhone OS 2.3!

Sibling site WMExperts, which — while Dieter doffs his WinMo cap and rounds his robin reviewing the iPhone — brings us Phil Nickinson’s exception to iPhone OS 2.2’s Podcast Download feature.

Okay, it’s not cut and paste, lack of MMS, no unified inbox, no Flash, etc. etc. In all fairness, it’s an interesting look at some of the things we here at TiPb complain about as well, pointedly the 10MB cap for podcast downloads over the 3G network (you have to switch to WiFi for anything larger, same as the App Store has enforced since iPhone OS 2.0):

It’s this kind of manipulation from Apple that keeps a good many of us from wanting to deal with the company (and frustrates many who do). It’s not that the hardware’s not sexy. It’s not that the software is lacking. It’s that lines are being blurred, or destroyed. Apple makes the hardware, and AT&T provides the service. There’s too much collusion going on. If AT&T wants to set a 5-gigabyte cap on my data, fine. But don’t tell me how to use those gigs. And don’t use Apple as a proxy to do so.

The only problem with the argument? The inclusion of Apple.

Read the rest of this entry »