Get your gaming finger ready (no, not THAT one), iPhone fanboys. Word on the street says Apple is prepping the iPhone for gaming support. This coming from DownloadSquad in the UK, while perusing the latest update to iTunes looking for hidden gold, uncovered these two curious strings buried in the code…
/* ===== iPhone Game Item Strings ===== */
"4329.001" = "Are you sure you want to remove the selected game from your iPhone?";
"4329.002" = "Are you sure you want to remove the selected games from your iPhone?";
Interesting, no? Don’t go running outside in your boxers just yet, because we don’t know exactly what kind of games these might be. Are they native applications, fully hardware optimized, or lamo Flash-based games made possible by future Adobe Flash plugin support? We still won’t know that until Apple plays its hand.
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A Des Moines Iowa physician, Peter V. Boesen, has filed a patent suit against Apple, claiming copyright infringement over iPhone’s onscreen keyboard. Boesen holds a patent through a company called SP Technologies, who claims to have held a patent on iPhone’s technology since 2004.
The irony in this story is that Mr. Boesen is currently sentenced to 51 months in a federal penitentiary on healthcare fraud charges. I guess Dr. Boesen never heard the phrase “Physician, heal thyself”.
My prescription for the good Doctor is to take two cyanide pills and call me in the morning.
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It’s like a real breaking news story. There’s now an unofficial Terminal client for the iPhone. It’s important to note that this Mobile Terminal is not a web app; it’s a real GUI meat-on-the-bones fire-on-the-grill application. The project is hosted at Google code, which is interesting; it could mean an unofficial nod of approval from Apple, as the above gizmodo post details. The Terminal app will be an important development for further hacking at the iPhone, and it’s incredible that it was done without any kind of official SDK from Apple. My hat is off to you, good sirs and ma’ams.
In terms of getting to a place where they can unlock an iPhone and host applications, this is a big step; it means that hackers can interface directly with the iPhone instead of having to reload firmwares, reset the iPhone, test, etc: they can test changes on the fly now. A video is after the break, and you can visit the MobileTerminal.app page directly.
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This story is so disturbing it simply MUST be true. A reader sent me his personal story of what lengths (excuse the pun) he went through to get an 8GB iPhone. There are many things I would do for an insanely great Apple product…this is not among them.
Nuts and bolts (okay just nuts) of getting an iPhone…
I openly admit to being an Apple Fanboy to the extreme. In fact, my wife had me agree to an annual budget for all of my electronic purchases…then came the iPhone announcement in January. I was smitten. Problem: my budget is already spent, my Sprint contract was in force through December. My loving wife agreed to let me get the iPhone (and not have the cost deducted from my “toy” budget) if I would wait until the Sprint contract expired.
The iPhone goes on sale…..
On a road trip with my kids (wife was at home with baby) I arrived at 10:50 pm in Boise. Next door (okay I had to drive around a bit) to the hotel was an AT&T store. I went in to just take a peek at the Jesus Phone…needless to say, I left the store with a brand new 4GB iPhone. I callled my wife with good news and bad news. Good: We arrived in Boise safely. Bad: I bought an iPhone.
The very next morning I returned the iPhone. I was angry, depressed, insulted…you get the point. My wife joined me in Denver the next day…but I was reluctant to even speak with her (you know, pouting). Noticing my sadness (obsession) she inquired “How badly do you want the phone?”. I let her know that I wanted it very, very badly. She asked me if I’d be willing to finally make that appointment for a vasectomy?
I absolutely love my new 8GB iPhone.
File this under “Too good to be true”, but one commenter and two other people emailing me claim that AT&T salespeople unlocked their iPhones after canceling service. Sound credible to you? Me neither. But according to a user named RAJ…
2 OF MY FRIENDS HAD THE CONTRACT WITH AT&T. THEY TOOK IT ON 29 JUNE WHEN I-PHONE WAS LAUNCHED, TODAY ON 1ST AUG JUST AFTER ONE MONTH OF THEIR CONTRACT THEY SIMPLY CANCELED THE CONTRACT BY PAYING EARLY CONTRACT TERMINATION FEES OF 175 ( ALTHOUGH THE FEES WAS ALSO WAIVED OFF FOR THEM FOR SOME REASON). THEN THE AT&T HAD UNLOCKED THEIR I-PHONES BY PUTTING SOME CODES. NOW THEY SAID THAT THEY CAN USE THEIR I-PHONE WITH ANY OTHER CARRIER TOO….
Now, this has to be true because it was typed in All-caps. Anything typed completely in uppercase characters must be taken seriously.
So there you have it. Whether this is true or not I cannot verify, so don’t shoot me – I’m just the messenger.
David Adams from OSNews.com wrote a lengthy and very interesting seven page review of the iPhone and shares his experiences with the device after one month of use. He seems to have grown quite fond of it (haven’t we all?) and sees Apple capturing a sizable chunk of the cellular market.
The iPhone is a great device, that, despite the shortcomings I’ve cataloged here is a more elegant, usable, and arguably more useful tool than anything else on the market. Over the next year, Apple is likely to make many improvements via software updates, and the subsequent versions are sure to contain new features that make the early adopters quickly eBay their G1 iPhones. Apple has a huge opportunity here to totally dominate the largest and most important segment of the high tech industry, but they will fail to reach their full potential if they don’t pay close attention to their customers’ needs and put their users first.
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AppleInsider reports that Apple may be readying its first major software update for iPhone, set for release very soon now. According to the article, Apple VP Greg Joswiak told analysts that it expects to release an update soon. Exactly what may be contained within the update remains uncertain. It could simply be a package of bug fixes, or a mashup of new applications and features.
We’ll be watching.
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Posted on Tuesday, Jul 31, 2007 by admin
File Under:Uncategorized; Tags: iPhone, News
Officials within NASA’s Outsourcing Desktop Initiative For NASA (ODIN) program have rejected iPhone for use as a corporate communications device, opting instead for RIM’s Blackberry 8800 series. NASA deemed iPhone “not to be enterprise ready”, which is a reference to corporate deployment, not the starship Enterprise.
The space agency is in the process of selecting a Smartphone to employ with its fleet of workers, and is giving serious nods to the Blackberry 8800 and the Palm Treo 750. The news means, unfortunately, iPhone won’t be seen in launch control any time soon.
Ground control to Major Tom…..
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Organizers behind Office 2.0 Conference have come up with an ingenious, if costly, incentive to drive attendance to their upcoming developer/partner conference. Registered attendees and speakers will receive free 4GB iPhones. Where do I sign up? Well not so fast. A single attendee registration costs $995 through July 31 (that’s tomorrow), after which the registration price jumps to $1,495. If you’re a developer living in the Bay area, and had already planned to attend O2O, this is a no brainer. However, this conference price (even with iPhone) seems unusually high to me.
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Today iPhone is one step closer to gaining third party software support, unofficially of course. Hackers from the #iPhone IRC channel managed dissect embedded OSX’s source libraries and create a basic proof of concept application that does nothing more than display the words “Hello World”. The devs have now released these source binary files on public servers, available for anyone to download.
This is by no means the final solution in opening iPhone to software developers (that will come only through Apple), but I’ll take third party software any way I can get it. Even it is the result of a raped and violated hack ‘n slash effort.
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