The latest piece of hardware to come out of Cupertino, Apple’s iPhone 3GS, has claimed the honor of being ranked number 1 in Consumer Reports new smartphone ratings. Now does this come as a surprise to anyone? In all actuality, it was pretty close within the top 8 devices: (Device/Overall Score):

• iPhone 3GS (16 GB) 73
• iPhone 3G (8 GB) 70
• Samsung Omnia 69
• BlackBerry Storm 69
• HTC G1 69
• BlackBerry Bold 69
• Samsung Epix 69
• Palm Pre 67

While the race to top honors was anything but a blow-out, the iPhone shined when it came to it’s 3.5-inch widescreen display, top of the line multimedia, ease of navigation, web browsing, and battery life. Devices like the Palm Pre, among others, beat out Apple’s gem when it came to messaging along with superior multitasking capabilities.

So the iPhone ranked number 1 this year as it did almost two years ago, congratulations goes out to Apple for a continuing job well done!

Update – We love our friends over at PreCentral.net so to be fair we wanted to let it be known the Palm Pre did not come in last place, we simply just cut the list off after the Pre. For the full list please visit the Consumer Reports site.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in!]

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

iPhone 3GS #1 in Consumer Reports New Smartphone Ratings

Apple.com has posted up the winners of the WWDC 2009 Apple Design Awards (APA), and specifically for our interests, the iPhone winners. Like last year, a lot of our favorites got the nod. Here they are, with iTunes links where available:

iPhone Developer Showcase:

• MLB.com At Bat 2009 v1.0.1 / MLB.com
  
• Postage v1.0 / Rogue Sheep
• Topple 2 v1.1 / ngmoco:)
  
• Tweetie v1.3.1 / atebits LLC

Best iPhone Student App

• Wooden Labyrinth 3D v1.2.1 / Elias Pietil

Best iPhone OS 3.0 Beta App

• AccuTerra v1.0.0 Beta / AccuTerra

Congrats to everyone and thanks for the great apps!

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Apple Design Award Winning iPhone Apps: Tweetie, Topple, MLB at Bat, Wooden Labyrinth, Accuterra

Yep, the iPhone has won Engadget’s Gadget of the Year and Smartphone of the Year awards, not just from the editors, but from the readers as well. That’s quadrupal honors for those keeping score at home.

For the Engadget Awards in general, the editors also picked the unibody MacBook, and iPod touch (handheld and portable), and gave the BlackBerry Storm the worst gadget honors. Readers, meanwhile went far more Apple, with for iMac, unibody MacBook, 24″ LED Cinema Display, the iPod touch (for both handheld and portable), and Time Capsule for storage. Zune was worst gadget.

TiPb’s own Editor Awards and Reader’s Choice Awards were handed out on New Year and Oscar Sunday respectively.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

iPhone Wins Gadget of the Year, Smartphone of the Year at Engadget Awards

Forget the Oscars, we’ve got the Steves! Okay, so we’re not really calling them the Steves — they’re the TiPb Readers’ Choice Awards, and while they won’t let you watch Wolverine sing and dance, they won’t consume 4+ hours of your life either. And hey, who needs best picture when we have best fart app? (No, don’t worry, that’s not an actual category — this year!)

Right after New Year, and the TiPb Editors’ Choice Awards, we began something far more important — YOUR choices. We opened the forums up to nomination, and when we had our nominees, we let you have at the voting. And vote you did, rocketing your favorites to the very tops of the charts.

Well now the votes have been counted, the results are in, and TiPb is honored to present our Readers’ Choice Awards…

Favorite iPhone OS 2.x Feature

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, than even Palm, Nokia, Microsoft, and RIM are complimenting the heck out of TiPb’s Readers’ Choice Award for favorite iPhone OS 2.x feature. And was there ever really any doubt?

Before the App Store, installing mobile software meant hunting it down on the web, downloading install files, figuring out how to move the files over to to your device, then trying to get them to load and run. The iPhone App Store, introduced on July 11, 2008, changed that forever. Not only did Apple provide a robust SDK that allowed developers to get up to speed quickly, but the iTunes engine meant they could sell their Apps to people in every country Apple had already set up for music. And for users? One button, right there on their iPhone home screen, suddenly became a drop-dead easy way to browse, select, and install apps with almost no fuss and definitely no muss.

Apple still needs to clarify their rejection policies, figure out how to offer demos, and immensely improve discoverability, but niggles aside, our TiPb Editors’ Choice for most innovative is also our TiPb Readers’ choice for favorite new iPhone feature.

Runner up: 3G radio support

Biggest iPhone FAIL

What’s success if it can’t be measured against failure? Everyone, even Apple, has finite resources, and every man/hour they devote to greatness like the App Store is another man/hour they can’t devote to other features. Even features so commonplace it boggles the brain that Apple hasn’t figured out their usual elegant, simple, solution already. And for certain features, their absence is so commonplace now, so brain-boggling still, they have passed beyond grievance and attained the level of running joke. Stale running joke. That brings us to the TiPb Readers’ Choice for biggest iPhone FAIL:

Cut/copy and paste is primary editing. Moving text, be it a name, number, note, or URL, is not something everyone will need every day, but something everyone will really need at some point, and the iPhone still doesn’t have it. Whether Steve Jobs doesn’t think his engineers have nailed it yet, or if they aren’t even trying, we don’t know — but we do care. We hear about it, read about it, and talk about it nearly all the time. We just can cut it out and paste it anywhere. That’s why cut/copy and paste is TiPb Readers’ Choice for biggest iPhone FAIL!

Runner up: Push Notification Services MIA

Biggest iPhone FIGHT

You don’t make an omelette without scrambling a few omes. Or something like that. And you certainly don’t introduce a widescreen ipod, breakthrough internet device, and revolutionary phone without making some big time enemies, especially if those enemies are established smartphone makers who sat on their profits for years with nothing even remotely innovative in the works. Maybe that’s why the iPhone gets into so many fights (or maybe it’s just Steve?). And maybe that’s what helped TiPb’s readers choose their iPhone fight of the year.

Was it RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis saying all he heard from the iPhone was talk? That it sacrificed features for aesthetics? That the iPhone’s 3G connectivity problems, and not shoddy firmware from RIM, might have caused a delay in the Bold’s release? That he couldn’t type on glass and none of his friends could either? (Maybe that explains the Storm?) Was it iCloning not only the phone, not only the App Store, but the entire SDK event? Was it CrackBerry Kevin calling it the “Ah frak” phone during his round robin review?

Yes. For all those reasons, and more, the iPhone vs. BlackBerry is TiPb Readers’ Choice for biggest iPhone FIGHT.

Runner up: iPhone vs. Palm Pre patent lawsuit

Favorite iPhone Game App

If the iPod touch is the funnest iPod ever, the iPhone must certainly be the… funnerest? Either way, Apple has poured an uncharacteristic amount of time (and money) into advertising both devices as mobile gaming godsends. From casual puzzlers to first-person shooters to arcade-style action’eers, a huge swathe of the 20,000 apps (and growing!) in the iTunes App Store — and on the top 25 lists — are games, and TiPb readers have a favorite even if only by a narrow margin…

Asphalt 4: Elite Racing (iTunes Link) is no stranger to TiPb readers. It out drove and out lasted 5 other racing games to win our inaugural GRAND PRIX review series, becoming our first champion. Combining great multitouch gameplay, accelerometer control, and awesome OpenGL graphics, it was one of the earliest racers available on the iPhone, and is clearly still TiPb Readers’ Choice for favorite game!

Runners up: Enigmo and Fieldrunners (tie) (iTunes links)

Favorite iPhone Productivity App

Apple, in their infinitely looped wisdom, chose not to build a to-do or task manager into the iPhone, and while Steve Jobs showed off note-syncing during the iPhone’s debut, it has still failed to materialize. Luckily for getting things done’rs, Apple did provide the App Store, which has since given us all manner of 3rd party productivity apps, from the famous and established to the new and novel. Absent a full blown Office-compatible document editor, it was these two titanic categories which battled it out among TiPb readers’ for favorite productivity app.

And again, we see a familiar name: our Back to Business task runner-up, and our Forum Review Todo App showdown winner Appigo Todo (iTunes link) pulls the three-peat. With its pro feature set and fair price, it just works for us, helping us keep track of what needs to be done, and letting us customize the way we want to do it. For those reasons above all, it’s TiPb’s Readers’ Choice for favorite productivity app.

Runner up: Evernote (iTunes link)

Favorite iPhone Social Networking App & Favorite WebApp

What are you doing? Sounds like a simple question, doesn’t it? And that’s the genius of it. Whether it’s status in a full blown network, a 140-character micro-blog, or an message sent instantly to someone… anywhere, the beloved series of tubes we’ve come to call the internet has woven us closer and more connected than ever before. And with the iPhone being the first real breakthrough internet device, it’s no surprise TiPb Readers have chosen a favorite social networking app… and chosen the web version as favorite WebApp as well!

If social networking is the latest big thing, the latest big thing in social networking is Facebook (iTunes link). Friendster who? MySpace what? Exactly. What began as a small university network now has more users than their own terms of service has egregious content-swiping clauses. (Sorry, couldn’t resist). While some might argue that even version 2.0 of the iPhone Facebook App doesn’t quite compare to the Facebook WebApp, no one can argue with how many people are writing on walls, commenting on photos, joining fringe protest groups, and adding enough widgets to crash MobileSafari day in, day out, right from the comfort of their iPhones. That’s why Facebook is TiPb Readers’ Choice for favorite social networking app AND favorite WebApp.

Runner up: Tweetie (Social network app) (iTunes link).

Favorite Jailbreak App

The iPhone wasn’t meant for the crazy ones, the rebels, the pirates. Apple locked it down tighter than Steve Jobs’ press department. Fortunately, along came the hackers who broke the root out of Apple’s jail, and set loose not only the first application development for the platform, but still the only one that really lets you do almost anything you want with your iPhone — you know, like cut/copy and paste and run background IM…

Perhaps counter-intuitively, however, it’s not either of those, not a carrier-unlock, not even a video recorder that’s TiPb’s favorite iPhone Jailbreak app. It’s something far more simple, and perhaps that’s what makes it so important. Choice. Toggle things on and off. Set them higher or lower. Control what’s going on, on your phone, with far greater granularity than Apple currently allows. That’s all it took to make SBSettings TiPb Readers’ Choice for favorite iPhone Jailbreak app.

Runner up: WinterBoard

Favorite iPhone Case

Confession: I rock my iPhone commando style. Nothing gets between me and it — at the risk of nothing getting between the concrete and it either, if I’m ever extra clumsy. Smarter people than I, therefore, prefer to protect their investments with anything and everything ranging from ultra-thin shrink wrap to silicone bodysuits to leather pouches to pretty much full blown armor. Out of so many choices, how could TiPb Readers choose a favorite iPhone case? Silly questions — how couldn’t they?

Perhaps not surprisingly, TiPb’s Editors’ choice, was also our Readers’ Choice as well. Protection of a hard case with a pull off bottom for easy docking, the Seidio Innocase II (store link) takes honors all around.

Runner up: Griffin Elan Form

Favorite iPhone Bluetooth Headset

More and more cities are passing hands-free phone laws for driver. Touch that dial, and you’ll be getting a ticket for your trouble. Any wonder interest in Bluetooth is soaring? In the ear, around the ear, and on-the-dash speakers, there’s a type to match any need (well, except for stereo… but this isn’t the fail section, is it?) Which one was our TiPb Readers’ choice for favorite Bluetooth headset?

Again, our readers’ choice matched our editors’, and the Jawbone 2 (store link), while not the smallest, is still one of the most distinctive and remains tops for noise reduction. Part function, part fashion, the Jawbone 2 was TiPb Readers’ choice for favorite Bluetooth headset.

Runner up: Blueant Z9i

See You Next Year!

That’s it for the inaugural TiPb Readers’ Choice Award. Thanks to all our readers for voting and making your voices heard. Congratulations to all our favorites, we look forward to seeing what you — and your competition — has in store for us next year!

And if your favorite didn’t get the most votes, fret not. That’s what the comments are for. Light ‘em up!

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb Readers’ Choice Awards: Announcing YOUR Best (and Worst!) of Everything iPhone!

Happy New Year and welcome to the iPhone blog’s 2008 “TiPby Awards”! This year we’re breaking them into two parts: Editors’ Awards (below), and Reader’s Choice (which is already underway in our forums and will wrap up later in the month). If you haven’t voted yet, get on over to the forums and vote now. If you haven’t guessed our Editors’ Awards… Read on after the break!

Smartphone of the Year

Apple only has one current-generation handset, so unlike our sister-sites CrackBerry.com, Treo Central, and especially WMExperts, we’re not technically doing this category. If we were, however, and even if this wasn’t the iPhone blog, and even with new entrants like the Android G1, the Treo Pro, the BlackBerry’s Bold and Storm, and more HTC Touches than you can shake brand dilution at (including the admittedly awesome HD), the iPhone 3G continues to be the disruptive influence in the industry. What Apple did with User Interface with the original iPhone in 2007 and iPhone OS 1.x, they actually managed to eclipse in 2008 with the SDK and iPhone OS 2.x. They sold 10 million units faster than even their own predictions, outsold everyone in the smartphone and feature phone spaces last quarter, and finally — and most importantly — brought mobile computing to the consumer masses.

Innovation of the Year

We were tempted to say capacitive touch screens, but the iPhone had that way back in 2007. No, this year was all about Apple provisioning over 10,000 pieces of software, developers making millions in sales, and most importantly — users downloading hundreds of thousands of apps quickly, easily, and directly on their iPhones. Steve Jobs said Apple, in their 30+ year history, hadn’t ever seen anything like the attachment rate of the App Store. No one else has either, including Google, Microsoft, Palm, and RIM who have all since struggled to catch up. That right there is the very essence of innovation.

Game of the Year

There are so many games, and increasingly so many great games, that it makes this category especially hard to decide. Super Monkey Ball’s demo, for example, helped make the original iPhone SDK event spectacular, showcased 3D OpenGL graphics and just what the SDK could do (in two weeks!), and made a mint for a major gaming house like Sega, establishing the $9.99 price point (which both EA’s Spore and THQ’s Star Wars: The Force Unleashed built on in spades). Ultimately, however, we’re going with Rolando, one of the newest games, and one that has benefited enormously from both the continued maturity of the platform and experience of the developers, Ngmoco:) It’s become an overnight smash hit and with good reason: it’s not a port but a real iPhone game, made by iPhone developers, to leverage the specific strengths of the iPhone. And most importantly, it’s fun.

Productivity App of the Year

Some joke that the iPhone is a “toy” or not ready for business. Unfortunately for those of us having to make a pick in this category, the opposite is true. Due to it having a real, desktop OS heritage and tons of screen real-estate, it’s not only possible to do some really productive things. We flirted with a few heavyweights like 1Password, task list champion Things, and “native” Excel 2003 editing and iDisk accessing MobileFiles Pro, but we wanted something that provided cross-platform power, and that brought us back to VNC powerhouse Jaadu. Remote access to your Windows PC, Linux box, or Mac in the palm of your hand? That’s productivity. (The fact that it’s saved us many a long, sometimes frozen drive into the office only slightly affected our decision on this one…)

Social Networking or IM App of the Year

Facebook stayed near the top of the free app chart, off and on, since launch, but even in its much improved 2.0 version still couldn’t quite compete with their WebApp. Twitter loomed large as well, with a myriad of contenders starting with the pre-App Store Twitterrific. Pinger even made an impressive go at aggregating presence. But for us, the 800lbs gorilla is BeeJive IM, which just fills the missing iChat space as well as any non-multitasking app possibly could (especially with Apple’s Push-Notification Service still in limbo… ahem)

Innovative App of the Year

Again there’s an embarrassment of riches here. Ocarina turned CrackBerry Kevin from frenemy to fan, getting him to literally play Marimba on his iPhone’s speaker and then quickly try to see what Dieter was playing on the other side of the world (ish). WeightBot showed that interface could still be innovative, and Sea Dragon brought Microsoft Labs and their deep zoom technology to the iPhone table. Yet, and even with the dark-ish cloud that covers the use of private API’s, we’re giving this one to the impressive Voice Search in Google’s Mobile App. Why? You lift the iPhone to your ear and start talking. It brings us one step closer to Star Trek.

Bluetooth Headset of the Year

Even though it came out early in the year, the Jawbone 2 managed to hold on to its position both on top of the charts, and in our hearts throughout 2008. Chad summed it up: “Not the smallest out there, but not the biggest either, it sure looks good though. But it also does what few other headsets can do; eliminate background noise. I think your next headset purchase might have just been made.” Indeed, Aliph has managed to pack the technology of the original Jawbone into a smaller size that manages to pretty much match the performance of the original. Plus, the earhook is leather-wrapped, long-time listeners to the podcast know we can’t resist the combination of leather and microphones.

Case of the Year

Protection of a hard case + thinness of a skin = a big win for the Seidio Innocase II. “Soft-touch” helps keep the otherwise iconic glossy plastic and sleek metal and glass slab scratch-free and firmly in hand. We are big fans of the iPhone form factor, obviously, so we wanted to pick a case that didn’t mess with that. Skins are nice, don’t get us wrong, but sometimes you just want the protection of a hard-case. Add in the fact that this hard case allows you to pull off the bottom for easy docking and you have this year’s winner.

Accessory of the Year

Chad reviewed and recommended it. Dieter recommended it. Jeremy recommended it. And the iPhone, lacking a user-replaceable battery, practically demands it. What more can we say? Nothing that Chad hasn’t said already about the Griffin PowerDuo: “can’t be recommended enough. I am very pleased with the quality and versatility of this accessory, and I can proudly say I use it every day.”

EPIC FAIL of the Year

MobileMe was a fiasco, but one that Apple ultimately fixed. The lack of cut/copy and paste, video recording, MMS, unified inbox, pervasive landscape keyboard, and many other individual omissions, while still vexing to many, remain vexing from 2007, which makes them all the more shameful, yet all the less timely for our purposes. Likewise, the continued presence of iClones, which nearly 2 years post-iPhone introduction, remains merely a depressing reminder that 2008 passed by entirely without significant innovation from the so-called competition. Even the bewilderingly announced-at-WWDC-and-promised-for-autumn Push Notification Service which has still failed to even re-materialize in beta form is somewhat excused by the aforementioned MobileMe launch fiasco: the only thing that would upset us more than no PNS is one that Apple rushes out only to have it crash and burn the first time people try to use it. We’ll even take a pass on App Store’s lack of demos, discoverability, and developer shenanigans and fart-fueled races to the bottom. Our EPIC FAIL of the Year is Steve Jobs abandoning the Macworld Keynote. Even if it’s Apple’s last appearance, even if there’s nothing Steve-note worthy to announce, when you go out, you don’t just go out with a bang — if you’re Apple, you go out with a Steve Jobs “Boom!”

Story of the Year

Stories is more appropriate. Nothing sparked more interest, not the iPhone 3G release or iPhone Nano speculation, not the stock manipulation rumors about the health of Apple’s CEO, not the holy geek trifecta of Transformers star Megan Fox in a Star Wars shirt brandishing an iPhone or even AT&T’s end-of-year Midwest service outage. Jeremy was all over this for TiPb, both on the blog and in the forum: the stories of the year were and are the endless cat and mouse game between Apple and the iPhone Dev Team, jailbreaking each and every new firmware release, and the New Year’s advent of the long, long anticipated iPhone 3G unlock. Could the continued popularity and power of the Jailbreak and Unlock encourage Apple to relax their SDK restrictions and carrier tie-ins for 2009? Doubtful. Which means we may already have a hint what the story of the next year will be: Jailbreaking and Unlocking the TiPb predicted iPhone HD…

Bring on 2009!

Well, that’s it — TiPb Editors’ Awards for 2008 gone and done! What will we see in 2009? Who knows, but we’re excited to find out!

Did you agree with any of our picks? Disagree? What would YOU have given the nod to? Feel strongly about it? Get over to the TiPb iPhone forums and let your voices be heard for our Readers’ Choice awards!

Happy New Year

–The iPhone blog team

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

2008 TiPby iPhone Editors’ Awards