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Unlike the snow, TiPb’s 2008 Holiday Gift Guide has come and gone, but while festivities pass, the gift of giving lasts all year long — especially when loved ones are expecting them some Valentine’s gift love! So, TiPb once again comes to the rescue with our 2009 Valentine’s Day iPhone Gift Guide!

Need something special for that someone special? We got’cha covered after the break!

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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?

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With my original iPhone 2G, I used a Monster solution to output the audio to my no-dock, no-RCA equipped car. Along came the iPhone 3G and while the Monster still worked, it no longer provided power. See, Apple in their Infinitely Looped wisdom decided to remove the FireWire pin from the iPhone 3G dock connector, and that was precisely the pin many peripherals used to transmit charge.

That was a problem for me, since my daily commute to work is an hour to an hour-and-a-half, and I typically listen to podcasts and audio books there and back again. Without power, my iPhone’s charge was taking a hit!

Enter the Griffin RoadTrip with Smartscan. It transmits iPhone (or iPod touch) audio to your car’s FM radio, and most importantly for our perpetually draining devices — it charges as well.

I’ve spent a month with it now, putting it through it’s paces on the Hoth-like roads of a Montreal winter. How did it hold up? Read on to find out!

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Is the Pre better? Can it compete? How will Apple answer? Or will those multi-touch patents stop Palm dead in their tracks? Listen in the find out!

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The Griffin California Roll for iPhone 2G and 3G is in stock and ready to ship from the iPhone Blog Store for $19.95. Personally, I’m not much for sushi, but this is a California Roll I can sink my teeth into. If you want something to carry your iPhone, iPod, iPod Touch and other small accessories and to organize them into one case, Griffin’s California Roll could be what you are looking for. Follow me after the break to get to know this case a little better!

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The v-moda vibe duo In-Ear Headphones w/ Mic, available in the TiPb Store for $99.95, are compatible with the iPhone 3G, iPhone 2G, iPod Touch, and iPod Touch 2G. In a sea of headphones ranging from the very inexpensive to the absurdly expensive, v-moda has found a nice middle ground in price without compromising quality. The design is stylish and the performance is above-average. Keep reading for the full, detailed review!

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Craig Hockenberry and the Icon Factory are among the earliest and most well respected iPhone developers in the community. In addition to their amazing design work and Mac and Windows software, they created the highly popular Twitterrific and Frenzic for the iPhone.

TiPb: We’ve been spending a lot of time lately discussing the App Store and what business model(s) it will evolve From launch, you took the route of having both a premium paid version of Twitterrific and a free, add-supported version. What made you settle on that idea, and how effective has it been for you?

Craig Hockenberry: The desire to have both a free and paid version of Twitterrific came from our experience on the Mac. It’s the best of both worlds for everyone: we get some funds to pay for the development of the product, and users get to choose how they want to support us.

We decided on having ads before the final details of the App Store were revealed. Since there are no demos in iTunes, the ability to have a free version for people to evaluate has been a big benefit. A lot of my fellow developers are now looking at this model.

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The iPhone and Twitter go together like peanut butter and chocolate. Okay, maybe not, but they’re both darlings of the weberatti and enjoy popularity, prestige and — when it comes to the App Store — a growing plethora of choice combinations.

One such iPhone Twitter app enjoying attention lately is atebit’s Tweetie, now on release 1.2. The nice thing for iPhone tweeters is that each Twitter client seems to focus on something different, giving us a good amount of diversity and choice. Tweetie, for example, excels at functionality. You can do a lot with it, perhaps more than any other Twitter client currently shipping. What kind of functionality? Where do I start!

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Marc Edwards is one of the well known team behind Mac Dashboard Widget aces iSlayer and iPhone development house bjango, whose apps include Jobs, Cities, Darkness, and Phases, and he was kind enough to sit down and talk App development and ecosystem with TiPb.

TiPb: Your team is famous for their Mac OS X Dashboard widgets, was developing for the iPhone really the easy transition some have suggested?

Marc: For us, yes. Our widgets have used Cocoa plugins for quite some time. A lot of widgets are straight HTML, Javascript and CSS though, which is very different to what’s needed for iPhone apps.

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Apple has made upgrading your iTunes library to iTunes plus easier than ever! So to share the good news, we have created this post to show you the steps involved. Ready? More after the break!

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