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Reading my news and RSS feeds on the go is important to me. Most people I know use Google Reader, and it is a fantastic desktop web application. However, I find the mobile version really lacking in features and functionality; this is where Bloglines (http://i.bloglines.com) comes in.

Bloglines really takes advantage of Apple’s HIG’s and gives a very integrated environment for your news. Keep in mind that this version of Bloglines is is still in beta…

(Ed Note – We’ve already welcomed Rene Ritchie to the fold, now we welcome Chad Garrett! Chad will be bringing us a software review each week — with any luck at all he’ll be able to move to reviews of real, honest-to-god, Apple-approved native applications very soon! Welcome Chad!)

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Psst! Hey, buddy. Yeah, you! Over here. You want hot merchandise? These here iPhones just ahem fell off the truck today. Oh these are real beauties too. Fresh from from the factory, as they say. Get’em while you can because my supplies are rather limited, if you catch my meaning, and the Chinese Police are very interested in my wares. Meet me tonight behind the workers dormitory and we can discuss this further.

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CNBC reporter Jim Goldman claims that a source close to Apple’s Asian contract manufacturer knows precisely when Apple will launch the long desired 3G iPhone. Clear your calendars for the month of June ‘08, the date of iPhone 3G’s arrival. This news, if you can call it that, comes as little surprise since the existence of a 3G iPhone was confirmed by none other than Apple itself. But this source, if accurate, dashes any hopes such a product will reveal itself at MacWorld in January. Was anyone really expecting Apple to obsolete the current model in under 6 months? Apple churns out new iPhone models like Mocha Lattes at Starbucks, but in a new iPhone release in such a short period isn’t realistic, especially given that iPhone hasn’t fully propagated among international carriers.

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Now see here, you Yanks. This whole iPhone concept…it’s just not cricket. You plebes may fall victim to the seductive powers of Sir Steven Jobs, with his shiny expensive bobs and brickabrack, but we Brits are made of tougher stuff. You won’t find it so easy fobbing off your gadgety thingies on us, by Jove. Just look at the pittance of iPhone activations made since launching here in the UK, something like 26,500? Mere truffles, I tell you. The queen has more diamond studs in her dinner gown. Knickers!

Now do go on and take your toys elsewhere, or Parliament will have to reassess the terms its peace treaty with you and reclaim lost territory. We wouldn’t want to start an “incident” now would we? There’s a good chaps.

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I post a story about iPhone coming to Commiland, and now Reuters steps in with news that iPhone’s arrival in China may be delayed by technical (read: Political) and fee (read: money under the table) issues. The gist of this delay centers around iPhone being locked, as apposed to Chinese phones which are unlocked and portable to any GMS carrier. Does anyone else besides me feel utterly ashamed and embarrased that communist mobile phones enjoy more freedom and liberty than our capitalist phones?

Maybe this Communism thing isn’t so bad after all… Capitalist pig!

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China Mobile Ltd., the country’s largest state run cell phone carrier, claims that it is in talks with Apple to bring iPhone to the land of cheap labor and censorship sometime next year. No agreement has yet been reached…so why bother making the announcement?

It’s only fitting. American jobs are being exported to China, so why not Steve Jobs? Get it…Steve Jobs, American Jobs? Heh? Oh never mind.

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Apple has selected a bunch of songs that make for popular ringtones and placed them in an easy-to-find section of the iTunes store. I’m getting tired of my old custom alarm ringtone (I only made one) and I think it’s time to wake up to something new.

Ringtones: the Playlists

Listen up. The iTunes Store has just made it easier to find the perfect ringtones to assign to your favorite callers. After scouring the more than 500,000 currently available ringtones, iTunes editors have assembled a wide assortment of ringtone playlists. The genre-based playlists include such eminently “ringtoneable” tracks as “Answer the Phone” (Sugar Ray), “Pyscho” (Bernard Hermann), “My Funny Valentine” (Chet Baker), “Hung Up” (Madonna), “On the Road Again” (Willie Nelson), “Soul Man” (The Blues Brothers), and many others. Want help creating your new ringtones? [Nov 06, 2007]

iTunes Store Link

Time Magazine has named iPhone “Invention of the Year”, a title shared with… well I don’t recall Time ever bestowing that award on any product, but this is after all the same publication that once named Adolf Hitler Man of the year, and me (or rather everyone) Person of the year.

Invention of the year is an overstated understatement. Any product that has educated adults behaving like pre-teens camped outside retails stores for days on end, and turns slobs into celebrities, is an achievement unrivaled by any other medium. Invention of the Century would be more fitting.

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The arrival of iPhone in the UK next week may cause more than just nerdgasm among Guinness-drinking geeks. According to one industry expert, the iconic gadget may set off a “crime wave” of mobile phone thefts, as criminals go searching for the elusive new smartphone in the pockets and purses of unsuspecting toffs. Each year more than 800,000 mobile phones end up in the hands of crooks, accounting for 52% of all thefts in the UK. Nickers!

Best guard your purse strings, gov.

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While I was gone at CTIA, there’s been a bunch of things that have happened that I didn’t get time to properly write about. So today, we’ll have a bit of an iPhone news smörgåsbord. There’s been a fair amount of news, a fair amount of not-news, and some of the things that I’ve been reading are just plain wrong.

Apple Dealing with Film-Makers Directly for iTunes
Apple has sidestepped some of the major studios for some films, opting instead to deal directly with film-makers. This could be a sign of things to come — it would be great to not have to report every major film-studio or TV channel contract tiff.

Apple iPhone Dev Center
Apple has created a web site devoted to developers that are interested in putting their programs on the iPhone. Apple is calling it the iPhone Dev Center, and it’s a repository of tips, tricks, and guidelines to follow should anyone want to make an iPhone web app. It’s also probably a list of instructions that one would have to follow to get listed as a featured application on Apple’s web app listing.

Molson Reveals iPhone on Rogers in January?
For any Canadian readers, Molson ran a contest that had an iPhone as the prize. They had a disclaimer on the iPhone prize, stating that it couldn’t be activated on the Rogers network until January. So, odds are pretty good that the iPhone will be out in Canada in January. Molson has since pulled the language for the contest, saying they have no idea when anything is coming out ever. And they never had any idea. (images below via Electronista)

Is the iPhone Running Leopard?
There’s an article at Wired that delves deeper into Jobs’ open letter about 3rd party applications on the iPhone and the connection to Leopard. One of the tidbits that Jobs talks about briefly is signing applications, and Wired has a good look into what that would mean for 3rd party iPhone apps. And, there’s some discussion whether the iPhone is based off of Leopard or not: “It’s not known for sure at this point, but all indications are that the iPhone is a Leopard-based device,” as stated by Carl Howe, analyst at Blackfriars. It clearly is. Witness the uname -a of my laptop on 10.4 vs. the uname -a of my iphone:

The important bit there is the kernel version. Apple releases the OSX frameworks to correspond with kernel versions of darwin for every version of OSX. The iPhone has been running Leopard (9.0) since it came out in June. My 10.4 laptop is running darwin 8.10.0, which corresponds to 10.4.10.

iPhone Security Faults
Meanwhile, there’s been a rash of complaints about the iPhone’s security. You may have seen headlines that compare the iPhone to Windows 95, for example. It’s of course, a loaded comparison, made for sensationalism. You could just as well compare the iPhone’s security to Windows 98, Windows ME, or Windows XP if you’re logged in as an administrator (which is everybody — you can barely run Office as a limited user). But, Windows 95 gets the headline. Since the iPhone is made of UNIX, user separation is built-in, expect apps to run as something other than administrator/root/super-user when the SDK update comes out. Perhaps earlier; we can’t know as Apple isn’t commenting. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that ‘run as root’ is a good security model. It’s so bad, it’s not even a security model.

iPhone de-bricking: re-virginizer tool available
The Elite team posted a re-virginizer tool that people can use to restore the ability to upgrade. This tool locks the iPhone with the proper bits in place on the iPhone radio; some of the free iPhone unlock tools wrote stuff to the iPhone baseband radio that was invalid; this led to bricked phones when it came time to update the firmware to 1.1.1.

AT&T Upgrading Core Network
Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T, was interviewed recently and he talked about many things concerning the iPhone and AT&T’s network. Their core should make for faster downloads for anything that uses AT&T’s networks, wired or wireless. That means us: anyone using an iPhone should see a smidgen of a benefit, but the real help comes when we’re using 3G fast internet iPhones.