All Articles in News

Today’s TiPb Top 5 will be directed towards our iPhone and iPod touch wielding readers who love racing games, and It’s a follow up to last years TiPb Grand Prix. Just like our other TiPb’s top 5 must-have posts, all of these applications are available in the App Store. For the full overview, follow us after the break!

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not an iPhone-like slab, but it does ditch the Palm Pre slider (and Wi-Fi!) for a Centro-esque front-facing webOS form factor, and Dieter over at PreCentral.net has the full Palm Pixi Review up to prove it. His take?

The Palm Pixi is a tiny smartphone with enough features and elegance to woo even the most die-hard feature phone user, but current Pre owners will want to stick with what they have.

We’re figuring that will apply to iPhone owners as well, but for new buyers, could it be enough for Sprint and Palm to compete with a $99 iPhone 3G, and all its apps, on AT&T? Check out the rest of the Palm Pixi review and let us know what you think.

So if you’ve jailbroken your iPhone, installed SSH, and still haven’t changed your password from the default despite our previous warnings about Dutch Ransomers and Australian Rickrollers? Maybe you thought those were just funny (as seen in this video from iPhoneMVP) and not worth worrying about? Well now things have gotten more serious — there’s a new attack making the rounds that just plain steals your data.

Same method of attack, the bad guy scans the local network for insecure SSH on Jailbroken iPhones, and when it finds it, begins to copy your contacts, messages, email, events, photos, media, etc. This could, of course, include passwords, financial data, and those pics you never got around to deleting…

If you haven’t already, go change your SSH password now. If you need help, go to the TiPb iPhone Forums and get it. Just secure your iPhone.

[Intego, thanks to everyone who sent this in]

We’re huge security proponents here at TiPb, and that typically means recommending 1Password on the Mac and RoboForm on the PC. 1Password’s iPhone app has been available for long time already, providing on-device and Mac-synced bliss. Now, finally, RoboForm for iPhone [FREE - iTunes link] is here as well.

It’s a first release, and it’s not quite feature complete yet (on-device editing is a priority and coming soon), it requires an online account for syncing (a local Wi-Fi option to sync with the PC client would be nice as well), and there are some bugs (no 4 character master passwords — though you really should be using much, much longer master passwords!) security is so important we wanted to let you know about it right away, or if you already know about it, we wanted you to let us know how it was working for you.

Joe Hewitt, the developer who saw the Facebook App for iPhone and iPod touch to version 3.0, and the cusp of 3.1 (which promised/threatened push notifications), has thrown us the Twitter-equivalent of a curve-ball:

Time for me to try something new. I’ve handed the Facebook iPhone app off to another engineer, and I’m onto a new project.

Just to be clear, he’s staying with Facebook, just no longer working on their iPhone app. Does it have anything to do with his dissatisfaction with the iTunes App Store approval process?

According to the quote he gave TechCrunch, it did:

My decision to stop iPhone development has had everything to do with Apple’s policies. I respect their right to manage their platform however they want, however I am philosophically opposed to the existence of their review process. I am very concerned that they are setting a horrible precedent for other software platforms, and soon gatekeepers will start infesting the lives of every software developer.

(Hit the link above to read the rest of it). Some are no doubt happy to see such a high profile developer quit the App Store over the review process. Hey, we’ve complained about it quite a bit as well. Still, with the current process Hewitt was able to give us a pretty darn good app up to this point. Was it frustrating? No doubt it was, but many of us face frustrations on the job. The web is free, but it’s also often far from a premium user experience. Apple has thus far decided managing the App Store is, in their opinion, the best way to ensure their users’ experience (not just their noisy tech-blogging-and-commenting users’ experience, but the kids and moms and casual users as well). That the implementation remains capricious is another matter — one they need to be fixed and now. That the App Store should by all divine right and reason be as open as web development, however, is just another opinion, another option, and certainly not any more right or reasonable “just because”.

In any event, on behalf of TiPb, we thank you, Joe for all your hard work and the awesome app you’ve given us to date, and wish you well on your future endeavors.

And to the new developer, here’s wishing you the best, and the best for future versions of the Facebook app as well!

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in!]

Apple has just released desktop Safari for Mac and Windows to 4.0.4, which improves full history search performance, has the mandatory stability improvements, and security fixes, but the big news as far as we’re concerned is the number one item on the list — Improved JavaScript performance

Desktop Safari is the big brother of the iPhone’s Mobile OS X Safari, and they share a rendering engine (WebKit), and a JavaScript engine (Nitro), and improvements in desktop Safari and Nitro have traditionally filtered down to Mobile Safari with the subsequent iPhone OS update. That’s right, we’re looking at you iPhone 3.2 (where ever you are!)

Since the current iPhone 3.1 Safari is still outperforming even brand-new devices like the Droid, that may seem a little greedy, but we know Google’s Android and Palm’s webOS aren’t sitting still in the rendering race, and have updates of their own in the pipeline, so once again, competition benefits the end users. Bring. It..

Join Dieter, Chad, Rene and special guest, the Cellphone Junkie Mickey Papillion tonight for all the week’s news, views, and rants. If you have any questions, leave a comment below, hit us up on Twitter @theiphoneblog, or better still — join us live in the chat room via http://www.tipb.com/live

Chat with you soon!

Last month at CTIA, AT&T proudly announced that they would now permit VOIP over 3G on the iPhone, and Apple promptly told TiPb (and others) that they were updating their SDK agreement and wanted VOIP over 3G apps in the App Store as quickly as possible, and Skype was all up in the happy as well. And now…

[cricket chirps]

Yeah, we’re still waiting. We asked Apple for an update but haven’t heard back yet. Hopefully, very soon, we’ll be awash in them. In the meantime, let’s keep the spotlight shining, and feel free to let Apple, AT&T, Skype, and all the other providers know you want your VoIP over 3G!

Nintendo president, Satoru Iwata loves his MacBook and his iPhone, and firmly believes Nintendo and Apple aren’t competitors (they appeal to different customers), and any talk of it makes him uncomfortable.

Yet Apple is most assuredly aiming at gaming (even if John Carmack thinks it’s between clenched teeth), especially with the funner iPod touch ever, and its game-heavy marketing.

With Nintendo profits down 52% for the first half of the year, and Apple selling record numbers of iPhones and reporting 100,000 apps and 2,000,000,000 downloads (with games weighed heavily among them).

Even with a dedicated gaming device like the DS (and perhaps a new platform on the way next year?), and a high-profile set of first-party properties like Mario, Metroid, Zelda, Pokémon, etc. those are tough numbers to look at. And Nintendo isn’t kidding themselves about that:

“If we can’t make clear why customers pay a lot of money to play games on Nintendo hardware and Nintendo software and differentiate ourselves from games on the mobile phone or iPhone, then our future is dark.”

Still, there are no plans for a WiiPhone (no matter how cool that might sound to us!), though an Amazon Kindle-like model, where the end-user doesn’t see any of the cell network bills, does appeal to Iwata.

Likewise, we can’t hold our breath for even older 1st party GameBoy titles to show up on the iPhone either. At least not anytime soon.

[Wall Street Journal -- thanks to everyone who sent this in!]

Sky Mobile TV News and Sports [Free + £6 a month subscription - iTunes link] for iPhone and iPod touch is now available in the UK App Store, and is Wi-Fi only at the moment (so AT&T isn’t the only one unhappy with TV over 3G, eh?)

The app itself is free, though the programming will set you back £6 a month — unless you’re an O2 customer, in which case they’ll foot the bill for your first three months. Nothing like a competitive market, is there?

If you live in the UK and want all the news, football (soccer to you North Americans), golf, and cricket you can shake an iPhone at, and you check out the app, let us know what you think.

If you live in the US, how would the idea of CNN/ESPN or FoxNews/Sports apps grab you?

[Telegraph via Engadget Mobile]