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Welcome to the first in a new series from TiPb, 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 kicks off with Gene Munster, who boldly states Apple will sell 13 million iPhone 3Gs this year, and 45 million next.

Magic 8-ball? “Most likely”

Next up we have Diggster Kevin Rose, with a multitude of maybes:

• Apple Event on September 9th? “Very doubtful”
• Firmware 2.1 debuting on sleeker iPod Touch? “Most likely”
• iTunes 8 with music recommendations? “Cannot predict now”
• New, candy-bar Nano with rounded widescreen? “It is certain”
• Massive iPod price drops across the line? “Don’t count on it”
• Mac OS X with Blu-Ray? “Ask again later”

Lastly, iDealsChina is rumormongering GPS for the iPod Touch? “Cannot predict now”

Who’s right? What’s left?

When a story breaks — if it breaks — we’ll come back and compare results. And we’re betting on a pretty even race, you?

(Special thanks to K. Michaels for the inspiration).

Mild Mannered Industries, which claims some experience with Sync Services, has an interesting and insightful blog post about how MobileMe syncing probably works, why syncing in general is so hard, and if we can ever look forward to a day where MobileMe actually, really, truly “just works”:

Is this really Apple’s fault? In the case of Mobile Me, and .Mac before it, all of the code is essentially Apple’s, but I think this just goes to show how hard it is to get a sync client and the core sync services code right. When you add in all of the third-party Sync client code, and mail synchronization, it just seems inevitable that many users will hit a problem at some point, and become very very unhappy.

Their glass-not-only-half-empty-but-broken-and-spilled-out-on-the-table outlook?

Personally, if it was me, I would have let .Mac die a quiet death. The problem set for ubiquitous syncing is just very very hard, and the consequences of failure, in terms of user dissatisfaction are too high. I suspect that, in time, MobileMe will go the same way as the Newton …

Our take? Pretty much the opposite. Not to get all Tennyson about it, but Apple is strong of will as they come, and striving, seeking, and finding the most reliable sync solution possible is only going to increase in importance when it comes to the mobile world they’re embracing with the iPhone and related technologies. Perhaps they won’t crack the nut, but they’ll mess it up something fierce in the attempt. And come on, would any of us really rather have no sync at all?

(via Daring Fireball)

UDPATE: D’oh! It’s a proof of concept rendering, not an actual coded App! My bad. (Thanks to Kevind for pointing that out in the comments)

What is iHologram? A simple application that fools your eye into seeing a 3D walking cartoon cat.

What does it do? Nothing but bring a smile to your face and a little magic to your iPhone.

Says Gizmodo:

David [OReilly]’s application assumes a constant viewing angle of 35 to 45 degrees, which is the usual when anyone watches the iPhone screen. Knowing that angle, the application calculates the orientation of the screen relative to the viewer using the iPhone motion sensors, so when you turn it around, the 3D world perspective gets skewed accordingly.

We recently covered the new OpenClip project, and expansion of what was first demonstrated with MagicPad, and we liked both their implementation and their moxy in trying to pip Apple to the cut and paste post. Not everyone was as entirely impressed as us, however. John Gruber of Daring Fireball questioned whether or not the developers were really respecting the App Store SDK agreement. Since OpenClip aware applications write to their own sandbox’d Documents directory, but read the last-modified chunk from other applications Documents directory, Gruber considers it more of a loophole, and cites Apple’s iPhone OS Programming Guide:

Not simply that no other application can write to, but which no other application can access. That this restriction is not yet enforced at a technical level (such as is the case with an app attempting to write outside its own sandbox) does not mean it’s permitted.

Worse yet, Gruber points out that the current Beta 4 of the upcoming 2.1 firmware DOES enforce complete denial-of-access to other application’s Documents directory:

The OpenClip demo apps, which work as advertised on iPhone OS 2.0.2, do not work in the current 2.1 beta, because apps are no longer able to read or even see other apps’ sandboxes.3 To be clear, this change is clearly not in response to OpenClip; Apple began seeding the 2.1 betas with these tightened sandbox restrictions before OpenClip debuted, and the iPhone OS Programming Guide has stated all along that apps can’t “access” the contents of other sandboxes.

However, I’m not entirely certain any of that matters. OpenClip, based on my understanding, was never intended to be a long-term solution, merely a proof-of-concept to show that cut, copy, and paste could be done in an elegant manner on the iPhone, to keep a spotlight on the continued lack of cut, copy, and paste support from Apple, and to encourage the discussion of the issue and implementation.

In that regard, I think they’ve already succeeded.

Here’s the backstory to what you’re looking at, above: Mobile Computing posted up a video showing that the iPhone 3G obliterated the BlackBerry Bold in a download & render test of web browsers (We just covered this, oh, hours ago). Fun stuff, except as our friends at CrackBerry noted (and MC added too) - it wasn’t a fair fight. The Bold probably wasn’t actually using WiFi and also most of the Bolds out there have pre-release ROMS on them, so the finals might be a stitch faster.

So a loyal CB reader pitched in and posted a video of the Bold loading the same page again, but this time actually using WiFi, it came in a little bit faster.

At TiPb, though, we figured it still looked slow. But since the Bold probably had a pre-release OS on it, we figured we’d hobble the iPhone 3G as well. So above, Loyal Moderator Bad Ash pits the BlackBerry Bold on WiFi against the iPhone 3G on EDGE.

Yeah, it’s closer, but we’re still ahead by 4 seconds or so. Tie the iPhone 3G’s WiFi hand behind its back, fine. Tie it’s 3G hand back there too, fine. The iPhone 3G still seems to win out — and we look forward to being able to say that about the final Bold ROM too. Hey — you guys still have (slightly) more reliable push email, so there’s that.

When Rene gave us a As the Turn-By-Turn Turns update yesterday, we got a very smart comment from somebody calling him/herself GoogleLicense:

TiPB ought to do some research on the why’s behind this and break the story since the iphone press seems to love reporting this topic.
It might be something like this: Apple licenses significant parts of their map stuff from Google. Google licenses significant parts of their map stuff from several other vendors. Each license has certain restrictions.
If you dig around in the bowels of Google’s developer site looking for info on required copyrights and license restrictions when using embeddable maps, you can get a lot of details of what is and isn’t allowed for what sets of data and who the original source is that is putting those restrictions…

Indeed, we know a good idea when we see it. After the break, a short history of map providers, their licenses, and why it seems like waiting for Turn-by-Turn directions within Google Maps on the iPhone isn’t a great idea.

Read on!

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“Marimba” shatters the early morning silence. Groggy, you fumble for your iPhone and “slide to unlock”, ending the alarm. A cloudy, gloomy day greets you as you skip the weather and start on your email. In the background, your iPhone begins to stream the morning news. Not all of it and not all from one source, just your favorites. Just what you’d previously setup in iTunes Podcast Creator.

Sports and local highlights — minus the crime news that’s too harsh for your morning mellow — flow one from the next, scraped while you slept from CNN, ABC, BBC, CBC, Comedy, and all the independent, niche podcasts you’d favorite’d. The fuzzy-logic of Apple’s servers matched your criteria as closely as possible while still filling the 60 min. time slot you’d set up. And once collected, assembled it and pushed it out to your iMac, where iTunes made it available immediately for streaming over WiFi right to your iPhone.

Today, however, you’re running late and don’t even have time to sync before heading out the door. But since your iPhone can access your iMac’s streaming, custom-podcasts over the blazingly fast 4G LTE network, you don’t even notice the transition from local to wide area network as your door closes and you hit the street. You just keep on listening as Jon Stewart makes fun of whos-that-president for the umpteenth time. And as you jump on the train, with a couple quick taps, your iMac is updated, your iTunes Podcast Creator is adjusted, Stewart is out of tomorrow’s mix, and iPhone lover Stephen Colbert is back in.

The good-looking passenger beside you comments on the awesome sounding custom podcast you’re rocking. Smiling, you tap another button and peer-to-peer it right on over, just as the train pulls out and the day starts to look ever so much brighter…

Sound more like a multi-media dream than current reality? Well, some of Apple’s newest patents look like they might be trying to make this particular dream come true. Read on for what just might be the future of iTunes and truly mobile media…

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So, this weekend I had a lot of problems connecting to the 3G network. Bars showed full. 3G icon was lit up. But email and web browsing — any type of network activity really — either took forever to resolve or timed out completely. Today was even worse. Couldn’t get on for most of the day. Zip. Zero. Zilch. And this was AFTER installing yesterday’s hot new 2.0.2 firmware (once I got it to download...). So what’s going on?

Are there carrier issues resulting from less mature 3G networks? Is there an Infineon 3G chipset hardware problem? Is Infineon dragging their heels about writing better drivers? Is something in Apple’s iPhone 3G software stack that’s just not connecting well, or timing out too quickly? Or is it a horrible confluence of all of the above, making it an especially tough — and frustrating — bug to squash?

Given the lack of any apparent, or at least successful, fix in 2.0.2, Engadget says Apple is “shooting in the dark” trying to resolve the 3G issues. I don’t think so. I think, as one of our commenters mentioned, 2.0.2 was scheduled to add support for the addition 20+ countries and carriers coming on line this week, and crammed in whatever minor improvements Apple had ready. Rewriting the 3G drivers, especially if Infineon isn’t moving at Apple-required speed, isn’t likely to happen before the rumored September 2.1 release (which, as mentioned in the post on turn-by-turn GPS, has already jettisoned Push Notification Server support, hopefully because Apple is laser-focused on delivering an actual, gosh-darn real stable release in 2.1).

I don’t know about you, but at this point, that’s the priority I want them to have moving forward. Do one thing at a time, do it very, very well, and then move on…

Cali Lewis over at Geekbrief.tv recounts how iPhone App Store developer Juviwhale (who previously spoke to TiPb about his work on MagicPad) met up with a college student named Zac White at Dev Camp, who turned MagicPad’s localized cut/copy/paste functionality into cross-application gold with the open-source OpenClip framework:

Apple forbids applications from running in the background because it would take up too much of the iPhone’s resources. Also, developers are not allowed to create plug-ins that make their apps work with other apps on the iPhone. Zac White’s Open Clip framework uses a shared space on the iPhone. Any application that includes Open Clip can then access the common area and write to it, and read from it, thereby enabling copy and paste between participating apps.

Bottom line, it looks like any developer can add OpenClip, and instantly gain access to the shared cut/copy/paste pool. (Two of the apps demonstrated, sing a similar slide-up set of buttons to the proof-of-concept David Friedman showed off a few weeks back)

If this doesn’t get Joz to bump official support up the list… it may not even matter soon.

(So long as auto-correction plays nicely with this implementation?)

Word from a merry tipster, whom we would trust with our lives (well, maybe the lives of our pets, we’re not madmen), is that AT&T is informing the faithful:

As with most major software releases (like the iPhone 2.0 software), vendors typically release enhanced software updates shortly after the major release. Vendors tweak their code to optimize the performance of the device and the customer experience. That’s the case with the release of iPhone 2.0.2 (5C1) code that will be available on iTunes at 5:00 PM eastern time today.
Customers should plug their iPhone into an iTunes equipped computer, that’s connected to the internet, and follow the prompts to upgrade their device. The results of this software release will improve the customer’s experience while operating on our network.

Note the bolded text above. Could it be? A 3G fix already? Or are we looking at more mysterious “bug fixes”?

Thanks for the tip Bla1ze!

Update: Looks like it’s up. And Rene fills us in on all the nitty gritty details in the update notes:

“Bug Fixes”

Gee, thanks for the information, Apple! Well, folks, when your download finishes, let us know what you think!