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UPDATE: Former Apple employee Chuq Von Rospach has just blogged about a meeting with an unnamed current Apple insider who let slip that:

90% of the disconnects are initiated inside the phone, which would exonerate AT&T. Most of the disconnects are being generated by crashes in the driver code for the 3G chip, which comes from the chip vendor, not something Apple written and outside of Apple’s direct control. Complicating this — even though Apple is handing over “here is the bug, here is the fix, update the driver”, the turnaround from the vendor on driver updates is on the order of 2-3 months. Said, um, lack of urgency not exactly making people inside the projects happy.

Understated much? If he’s not, as he says, being lied to, Chuq thinks this lack of responsiveness may be why Apple went ahead and bought PA Semi a few months back: to bring the chipset in house and more fully under their own control.

Remember that 3G network connection glitch we mentioned a few days back? The one that might be a hardware problem with a software fix? (Apple Insider weighs in today that this could, in fact, be likely). MacRumors is reporting that Steve Jobs, as he or someone acting on his behalf is sometimes want to do, has responded to an email inquiry about it, and provided the following:

We are working on some bugs which affect around 2% of the iPhones shipped, and hope to have a software update soon.

If this is authentic, and 2% is a solid number, given that the iPhone 3G sold 1 million units its first weekend, and may be over 3 million units now, that’s a staggering 60,000+ users potentially affected, — never mind 20 more countries set to launch later this week.

Unless Apple pushes out a 2.0.2 hotfix, firmware 2.1 has been in beta for a while already, and in general rumored to be heading towards a September-ish release (probably to coincide or follow up Apple’s tradition fall iPod and Mac product Special Event, which last year introduced both the iPod Touch and the WiFi Music Store).

Casey recently posted that the current 2.1 beta removed support for the Push Notification services (Apple’s conceptual replacement for multitasking functionality) to allow for more internal development, but perhaps also to fast-track the 3G fix?

That could leave the 2% in the slow lane for a while still…

Panic makes killer Mac apps. I use Coda daily, and Cabal Sasser designs UI the way they’re meant to be designed. Likewise, Steven Frank’s recent blog post on the double-edged sword that is Apple’s App Store is one of the best descriptions I’ve seen on the subject from a developers point of view:

I’ve been trying to reconcile the App Store with my beliefs on “how things should be” ever since the SDK was announced. After all this time, I still can’t make it all line up. I can’t question that it’s probably the best mobile application distribution method yet created, but every time I use it, a little piece of my soul dies. And we don’t even have anything for sale on there yet.

The App Store is definitely a Hobson’s choice when it comes to virtue and compromise. Sorta like being let loose in the fields of plenty after being bound and gagged and given a swift kick in the tenders.

If you’re a developer, how’s your soul holding up?

We have an update from iphone-dev that falls in the good news / not-so-good news category. The not-so-good is that they’re still hard at work on figuring out how to unlock the baseband radio, but there’s no ETA on when or (here’s the bad part) whether it’s going to happen.

On the good news front, the Jailbreak for 2.0.1 is still humming along nicely and the team has put together a little tool called QuickPwn which allows you to jailbreak without having to sit through a full restore afterwards. I was forced to restore my iPhone over the weekend (so much for trusting ‘Update All’ on the on-device App Store), so I can tell you that avoiding this lengthy process is a Good Thing. QuickPwn is still very early in development and currently only available for Windows. You’ll also be forgoing a “funky UI,” but that’s a small price to pay for getting that hour or so of your life back.

via Bad Ash at the iPhone Blog Forums and Gizmodo

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.

What’s better than a couple of well versed, well argued technologists presenting deeply reasoned and sharply insightful, fundamentally different but equally challenging, views on a critical topic? Well… nothing. They’re just hard to find given the intertube collective’s penchant for rewarding punditry and link baiting. Sometimes, however, we’re lucky enough to find a mix of both knowledge and provocation.

Cases in point: here were have noted Windows Super-Siter, Paul Thurrott, and accomplished Roughly-Drafted Apple Insider Prince McLean each presenting their own unique, multi-part perspectives on MobileMe.

Ready for the blow-by-blow? Continued after the break!

Read the rest of this entry »

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!

So the news isn’t that iPhone 2.1 Beta 4 has been seeded to developers, no that’s expected. With a (hopeful) September release, iPhone 2.1 should be receiving its finishing touches. What the news is, is that the much ballyhooed feature of push notification is missing. As in gone. Not there. Removed. iPhone 2.1 Beta 4 removes the push notification feature from the test version.

Should we begin to worry? Push notification has been present in iPhone 2.1 since the very first beta. Apple says its been removed for further internal development. Obviously, the removal of the push notification feature would prevent developers from understanding the animal that is push.  But then again, we at TiPb would rather prefer a delayed polished product than a rushed buggy one (ahem..MobileMe).

Read

The day I thought would never come, arrived much sooner than expected! NotifyLink, a provider of server-side synchronization software for mobile devices, has just announced the availability of NotifyLink for the iPhone/iPod Touch. Of course, to make use of this technology, your organization has to have the NotifyLink Server.

There is a great support page which lays out how you setup your account (done though the Exchange option when adding an email account). There are pictures walking you though setting your email to configuring and accepting meeting invitations to using the Global Address Book for looking up your organizations contacts!

A quick summary, after the break! Read the rest of this entry »

(US IP’s only, Canadians can check it out here at 10:00 in. If any international readers can provide additional localized links in the comments, it would be appreciated!)

Attention iPhone users! When Steve Jobs admitted the iPhone had a “kill switch”, everyone thought it was just industry jargon for disabling potentially malicious applications. Everyone but noted fake-news anchor and iPhone luster, Stephen Colbert, who says this makes the iPhone the #1 threat: “Your iPhone Can Kill You.” His solution? “A Zune can’t kill you… or do anything else.”

Colbert’s stare down with a Facebook and AIM sporting 3G is classic, complete with a subtle nod to one of this year’s… er… least comprehensible iPhone appearances in film….

(via Engadget)

Remember that warning we posted on Tuesday about a MobileMe phishing attack in the wild? Turns out it’s been terrifyingly effective so far. Ars Technica quotes CardCops president Dan Celements:

“We found 20 different files parked on the server, each file with two or three or four, up to 20, profiles. Cumulatively, there were about 300 profiles collected in that one day. And 100 to 200 were mac.com addresses.”

NOT GOOD. Ars goes on to rightly point out that Apple customers are typically higher-income, and thus more desirable targets. We’d also add that Apple users are not as accustomed to malware and phishing as our Windows-using friends, but as email and web browsing doesn’t care about platform, we REALLY need to be. Just like you wouldn’t open a package left at your door that smelled like gasoline and was ticking, even if it came in a Tiffany’s box, don’t open links or give out credit card information just because it fakes coming from Apple.

REMEMBER: Don’t EVER believe email requests for secure data. Go to the site yourself (not through their link — type it in) and log in and see if there really is a problem. Check domain names carefully. App1e.com isn’t the same as Apple.com, they’re just hoping you don’t notice. Worried about the recent DNS poisoning attacks? Use HTTPS/SSL or use a direct IP address. If in any doubt, pick up a phone and call Apple (or your credit card company) directly.