This week’s Around SPE is sponsored by the the TiPb iPhone Accessory Store, which has long been your best source for iPhone accessories. A lot of iPhone 3G upgraders were left out in the cold when their car chargers turned out to not be compatible, but they’ve got plenty that are, not to mention plenty of headphones that are a step up compared to the standard white buds
Last week both CrackBerry.com and WMExperts found themselves on the cusp of major releases — the BlackBerry Storm, BlackBerry Bold on AT&T, the HTC Fuze on AT&T, not to mention a few others on the Windows Mobile side. So while everybody has been anticipating new devices, all of the editors at SPE are anticipating something else that will be starting on November 17th. The hint is right up there in the picture!
Read on for the full skinny on what’s been happening around SPE!
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Reader Karl writes in to let us know his twelve year old son discovered a glitch in SMS security:
Being security conscious he turned on the passcode lock and disabled SMS Preview. [...] If a message is received during the passcode entry or while the screen is locked, a generic message of “New Text Message” appears, to prevent viewing of messages without unlocking the phone. [...] If however the phone is placed in emergency call mode, any incoming SMS messages are previewed instead of presented as the generic messages.
Next comes two issues concerning the implementation choices Apple made in the iPhone Mobile Mail client. According to Ars Technica, as disclosed by Aviv Raff, the first involves the way Mail truncates URLs for display on the iPhone. If a malicious URL is properly crafted by an attacker, the truncation can cause a fake URL to be non-obvious to the users, and thus more likely to result in phishing.
The second results from the lack of an option to display images in the full HTML Mobile Mail client. Since images are automatically displayed, spammers can gain confirmation that the email account that received it is active and ripe for spam attack.
As always, malicious attacks evolve and propagate at an alarming rate, and while we hope Apple fixes these immediately if not sooner, the onus is ultimately and always on we end users to pay attention and do everything we can to avoid them.
Since upgrading to iPhone firmware 2.1, from time to time my camera preview — and the pictures themselves — have taken to breaking apart and re-arranging themselves into something pretty much unusable (though likely to fetch a pretty penny at the snootier, more vacuous galleries, no doubt).
The above picture was of a plain surface, now broken into a patchwork of planes. Happens with faces, people, and just about everything. It’s not happening regularly enough, however, that I’m close to considering the nu-cu-lar option — full on restore.
Anyone else having this problem?
As opposed to “push” style ActiveSynch, MobileMe, or Yahoo! iPhone mail, traditional POP or IMAP accounts, like Gmail or ISP mail, needs to “fetch”, or check the server on a certain schedule to see if there are new messages.
Reader Mike wrote in pointing us to a thread on the Apple Discussion Forums about “fetch” email being broken with iPhone 2.1. I only fetch mail from Gmail, and Gmail IMAP is a strange and buggy implementation which gives me considerable problems beyond the iPhone, so I can’t say whether anything is really broken or not in 2.1.
Reader Steffen, however, after thinking the problem could just be undocumented IMAP IDLE behavior, decided to run some tests:
Finally, I had some time to look into this thorougly. I dumped IP traffic all night to see what iPhone does. My iPhone is set to retrieve data every hour. Here’s when the iPhone actually connected to my IMAP server:
09:36 PM, 10:44 PM, 11:02 PM, 12:36 AM, 06:36 AM, 09:38 AM, 09:45 AM, 09:57 AM
Looks like everything but an hour to me… Oh yeah, forgot to mention… I’ve turned off everything except for GSM radio do be sure to get all traffic. The last three connections occurred when I started to play around with the iPhone this morning. So, the effect that lead me to the assumption of IMAP-IDLE on the iPhone seems to be something else. It appears that the iPhone will contact IMAP more often while using it and somehow random while idling… So, no IMAP at this time, but maybe interesting as well…
Definitely interesting! Thanks Steffen!
Any other readers out there got “fetch” problems? Wacky behavior? Please let us know!
Let’s Rock, iTunes 8, iPhone 2.1 update, and of course, an extended rant [ED: with some cussin', beware!] on the App Store debacle. Tune in!
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UPDATED: Reseting everything, including the router, solved the problem.
After Apple unleashed 2.1 today, and I downloaded and installed it with nary a snag or bump, I thought everything was pretty much apps with my Apps. Needless to say, tonight I whipped out my iPhone’s handy Apple Remote App to help out with a little YouTube searching, only to discover that while my libraries (desktop, laptop, Apple TV) were all still set up, none of them would connect. (They’d all worked flawlessly, immediately prior to iTunes 8 and iPhone 2.1).
I removed the libraries and tried to set them up again, but can’t get the iPhone to show up in iTunes in order to type in the verification PIN. I’ll continue to trouble shoot and report back if I come across any fixes.
Anyone else having this problem?
With the Apple’s release today of the iPhone 2.1 firmware update, that’s the exact question many people will be asking. Hey, we at TiPb asked it ourselves — for all of about 0.1 seconds before diving headlong into iTunes, for the good of our readers, of course.
So what’s new in iPhone 2.1, is it compelling enough for you to update, and who should avoid it at all costs?
Answers after the jump!
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Running 2.1 (5F136) now, and here’s what we’re noticing: WiFi works fine (tried on Apple and Linksys routers). New icons for connection type (3G/Edge) in the top bar. New blue filled and half-filled dots to describe state of video and podcasts (watched/listened to). Genius Playlists don’t seem to work as well as iTunes 8, at least for me, with lots of songs coming back as “not related”.
We’ll update this post as we discover more (sadly, doesn’t look like cut/copy/paste to turn-by-turn this go around!). What have you found so far? Any surprises?
Screen cap gallery after the break!
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Another week, another iPhone 2.1 beta. Yup, Apple is maintaining a breakneck pace on the next firmware point release, updating it more regularly that blogger David G. from MobileMe! (Still waiting on “laster [last?] week” there Dave!) More typically Apple, of course, is the lack of details to the release, with TUAW reporting:
“iPhone OS 2.1 beta 3 is now available and is to be used for testing only. View the Pre-Installation Advisory for iPhone OS 2.1 beta 3, Readme, and Release Notes before installing the new versions of the iPhone OS and SDK. As a reminder, pre-release software is Confidential Information and is subject to the terms outlined in your Registered iPhone Developer Terms and Conditions with Apple.”
Again, there were 8 betas released for 2.0 between March and July. If Apple keeps this up, could we be looking at a September release for 2.1? Something times with the anticipated September special event for new iPod Touches and general holiday announcements? (Which last year included the Wi-Fi Music Store and the infamous $200 iphone price drop…)
iPhone SDK and Firmware 2.1 Beta 1, released to a very small group of developers just last week brought us rumors of direction and speed based GPS (turn-by-turn?), Notification Server API’s, and the holiest of holy grails, cut, copy, and paste. Now Ars Technica reports Apple has dropped Beta 2, and while the hints hold true on the Notification “Push” technology, what else will our deep diving developers discover in the coming days? (I’m hoping for video recording!)
While Apple went through 8 betas for version 2.0 between March and the July 11 release, two updates for 2.1 in two weeks is a brisk pace, probably necessitated by Apple’s pledge to have the Notification Service — which allows developers to “push” alert badges, sounds, and popups — out to users as a way to prompt applications that aren’t running, simulating multi-tasking but without the negative impact of task management or resource obliteration that have plagued WinMob and Palm (though BlackBerry’s NOC outages and Apple’s own MobileMeltdown are harbinger that no scheme goes unpunished).
Also over night, Apple seeded the first beta for Mac OS X 10.5.5 to developers, which may portent further 2.1 related news, and for security conscious Mac users (and that should be all Mac users), Apple released Security Update 2008-005, which among other things patches the nasty DNS vulnerability that’s been all over the news recently, and the more Mac-specific ARDAgent issue. Rev up Software Update now.
