Today on the forums we have a few hot topics for you to check out:
First let’s start off by taking a look at the latest iClone… the Blackberry Thunder/Storm. Do you think it really is a iPhone killer? Make your voice heard and vote in the poll! Next up is a thread started by mikecc and he wants to know if you are using your iPhone for gaming more than anything else? Stay tuned to TiPb in the next few days for more coverage of the iPhone as a gaming platform.
If you are addicted to Spore: Origins, as some of us here at TiPb are, be sure to check out the “Show of Your Spores” thread! Rene’s spore is pretty creepy looking… And last but not least the last thread of the day discusses the upcoming 2.1 firmware… so head on into the forums and let us know what you are thinking!
Things have been heating up on the forums as of late. The community continues to grow! Join in now. It’s simple and it’s free!
In all of the about 10 seconds devoted to the iPhone in this year’s Apple pre-holiday event, Steve Jobs let rock with the iPhone 2.1 announcement. No demo, though we suspect it will be very similar to the iPod Touch 2.1 software that received so much loving. Jobs did run down the “feature” list, however:
Pretty much nails all the recent complaints. But that’s about all it does.
Don’t get us wrong. We said we wanted stability first, and this is stability first. We’re happy. Really. But the kid-on-Christmas inside us… That kid says no push notification service? And so much for those who hoped for cut/copy/paste, or turn-by-turn GPS. Unless Apple’s still hiding some “secret features“, guess we gotta wait until at last 2.2 for that, huh?
Better solid than just new bugs… Hopefully — at least — the Genius features and new interface tweaks will carry over from the iPod Touch as well. (Absent Nike +, of course!)
Continuing their all iPod Touch, almost no iPhone pre-holiday blitz, Apple has released a guided tour for the new, second generation device and its upgraded 2.1 firmware (available Friday for Touch and iPhone users alike).
The focus remains squarely on games. Sweating yet, Nintendo and Sony? But also shows off the new Genius feature. (Which we’ll be getting on the iPhone as well, right Steve?!)
It wasn’t MacWorld 2007, was it? Too much hype, too little delivery? Rumors of secret features and analysts wetting themselves over lower-margin product revelations set the bar too high? Or did Apple just decide to slip under it this time?
Either way, for iPhone lovers like we here at TiPb, Apple spared only about 10 seconds worth of attention. Highlights were limited to Firmware 2.1, which will be available Friday and include better battery life, less crashy apps, and… working 3G?!
Apple’s already made their money for the year on the iPhone, however, so it was time to pump the holiday purses: iPod Nano and iPod Touch. Read on for pics and the full roundup!
Could we not only be seeing iPhone 2.1 this Tuesday, but a 2.1 with secret features deliberately kept from the 4 developer beta’s just so Steve Jobs can see our stunned rapture when he pronounces BOOM!
We were told that, aside from what we already know about iPhone 2.1 from leaked info on the web, there are other parts to 2.1 that were specifically removed from developer seeds in order to keep them secret from the world.
Ars is both excited at the idea of new features, and scared of what feature untested outside Apple may do to an already buggy 2.x series. Us? We’re filled with anticipointment at the very thought.
Apple’s “Let’s Rock” Event, their traditional pre-holiday season iPod (and more?) refresh kicks off at 10am PDT/1pm EDT, and remember — TiPd will be rocking out, and live meta-blogging it!
Dieter’s already brought us up to speed on the nasty security bug Gizmodo found in the iPhone’s current 2.0.2 firmware (which John Gruber points out Apple already fixed once for firmware 1.1 way back last year — yikes!). Now Macworld (via MacRumors) reports that Apple has taken the unusual step (for Apple) of confirming the upcoming fix:
“The minor iPhone security issue which surfaced this week is fixed in a software update which will be released in September,” Apple representative, Jennifer Bowcock, said in an email to Macworld.
So add security to the list of what Apple’s now promising, along with 3G connectivity and App stability, for the next update.
Will that update be the already in beta 4 iPhone firmware 2.1? Kevin Rose has rumored it for September 6th, but we’ve already seen push notification fall off the feature list. With more bugs to fix, will Apple pull a Vista, or settle for a less ambitious, more urgent 2.0.3 in the interim?
I’m favoring the 2.0.3 at the moment. I’d rather stability over features at this point. Nail 2.0.x, then move on. What’s you preference?
Internet superstar Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, Pownce, and Revision3 has a… er… spottyrecord at best when it comes to iPhone speculation. Still, we give him full marks for getting back on that rumor horse once again. This time, Kevin’s saying he knows that sometime before the end of September we’ll see:
Firmware 2.1, debuting on the iPod Touch (which will get a minor facelift).
iTunes 8.0 with “new features and functionality” he can’t get into.
Price drops along the iPod line to keep them competitive with iPhone’s $199
Rounded wide-screen nano, back in candy-bar form factor
Mac OS X 10.5.6 to feature Blu-Ray support.
Rose, who’s locked in a battle with Barak Obama and Leo Laporte for the crown of top Twitter’er, asks that we follow him there, or on his own platform, Pownce, for more updates.
Our take? Last year’s big pre-holiday Apple event introduced the iPod Touch, which debuted the new 1.1 firmware, including the WiFi Music Store, so that’s quite possible. iTunes 8.0 is more opaque, however. If App Store integration wasn’t a big enough marketing excuse to make the full point jump to iTunes 8.0, what would it take? (7.0, for example, added CoverFlow and iPod Games).
iPod price drops before the biggest selling season of the year make sense, as Apple dropped the iPhone $200 at last years event. Likewise a new Nano.
Blu-Ray support — if it’s to include BD movie playback — is a bigger nut to crack, however, because the short sighted industry killers in Hollywood demands HDCP DRM compliance (i.e. hardware enforced, digital rights managed copy protection) over the full path, from player, through cables and graphic cards, into the monitor — and in the OS. This caused a bit of an internet brouhaha when Microsoft “caved” for Vista. Laptops and the iMac would be far easier to implement, but is there business advantage enough for Steve Jobs to feel like doing it?
Gotta love Steve Jobs and his blunt-force emails. This time, it’s a lucky AppleInsider reader who sent it on a complaint about crash-prone applications, a problem which has plagued the iPhone 2.0 pretty much since launch. And what did the drive-by-Steve’ing say?
This is a known iPhone bug that is being fixed in the next software update in September
Will that be the still-in-beta 2.1? Another hotfix like 2.0.2? Jobs, of course, didn’t elaborate. Smart money, however, would be on a 2.0.3 rev. so that Apple doesn’t have rush 2.1 out prematurely, with just more of the same issues.
I know my Apps experience the dreaded Home Screening of Death (HSOD) semi-regularly, especially the new/updated ones. What about you? Smooth sailing or lots of crashes? If the latter, how far away must September seem? (And is it just us, or is the unresolved bug list for 2.x pretty dang scary compared to the relatively stable 1.x?)
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…
The iPhone Blog merged with the Phone different site in May of 2008. Both sites were founded on a premise that comes one from one of Apple's old slogans: Think different. The iPhone Blog: for people who dare to phone different.
