All Articles Tagged phonedifferent

Maybe you’ve heard, we now have an official section for the Phone different Native App Watch. We are keeping track of all the developers who are talking about creating software for the iPhone with the new SDK. We are going to keep it updated with the latest news as it arrives and adding (we hope never subtracting, but it’s possible) new companies as they pop up.

Know of a software company or piece of software that’s not on our handy-dandy table? Do tell!

This plus the App Wait-a-Thon means that if you want to slake your thirst for native app news in the run up to the June release, Phone different is the place to be. We’ll have another batch of Wait-a-Thon posts coming up this week, of course, giving you more chances to win a $100 iTunes Gift Card. In the meantime, congrats to last week’s winner, AnteL0pe!

Like our sister site, WMExperts, we’re looking for writers here at Phone different as well. You may have heard that Mike is now our “Editor Emeritus” during the Phone different Podcast and as a result things are getting awfully lonely around here. Come on, join us, give us some company.

Send an email to jobs@phonedifferent.com with the subject line “Writing for Phone different” and some info in the body:

• What sorts of writing you’re interested in. We need reviewers for accessories and software and also regular bloggers.
• A sample blog post or brief (less than 500 words) review (try to show that you can match our snarky-nerd-fanboy tone and/or can be objective in a review)
• Tell us how often you would be able to submit posts or articles

Please just send text email - no attachments or resumes or whatnot. Yes, we’re looking to pay you for your efforts and no, our great team of folks who have been posting reviews and blog posts aren’t going anywhere.

Thanks to this excellent how-to and a surprisingly little time with Photoshop, we now have our very own custom Home Screen Icon for the iPhone and the iPod Touch. If you’re here with your version 1.1.3 iPhone (or iPod Touch with the $20 upgrade), just click that “plus button” at the bottom and add us to your Home Screen. The iPhone’s bookmark tool is even smart enough to grab the first two words from our title - “iPhone News,” which seems like a pretty good indication of what you’ll find when you tappy tappy that little icon.

The only bummer that I can see is the iPhone is a little overly-aggressive in adding the “glass gradient” curve on the top of the icon, but we dealt with it as best we could.

Be a cool kid and add us to your Home Screen!

Update: Huzzah and hooray! Chat away!

All of our sister sites have put up the word so we may as well too — our forums have crashed just a tiny bit but we’re working hard to bring them back up. In the meantime, I’ll note that the amount of iPhone news to be had here at CES amounts to precisely bupkiss, and I’ve been looking. Like the Mac Pro announcement, I think this bodes well for iPhone news at Macworld next week!

Today’s podcast is a big one. We cover all of the new news with the upcoming O2 and T-Mobile launches, the Smartphone Round Robin sides of things, Google’s Android and whether it competes with Apple, plenty of iTunes news, and the final words from the community..



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The BlackBerry Curve (8310)

For the first week of Smartphone Experts’ Smartphone Round Robin, I was assigned the BlackBerry Curve 8310. As I’ve indicated in the Crackberry forums, I’ve said some nasty things about BB in the past. Some of that is going to have to be put behind me this week; this BlackBerry 8810 isn’t going to use itself.

And don’t forget - a comment on this post counts as an entry in the Round Robin Contest!

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We are now launching the cool project we were hinting at in the last podcast: the Smartphone Round Robin. For the next 2 or three weeks, all of the editors of the various Smartphone Experts sites will be using one of the “other” smartphones out there.

For me, this week, it means using a BlackBerry 8310. For Dieter of WMExperts, it means using a Treo 680. for Jennifer of TreoCentral, it means using her iPhone. And for Kevin of CrackBerry.com, it means using the AT&T Tilt. There are rules that we’ve all got to follow — we all have to give the device a full shakedown. I’ll be posting an article later today about my first few days with the Curve, and then a full article on Friday.

This week, I’ll be posting a few articles about the strengths and weaknesses of using a BlackBerry. I’ve already got a few posts in at CrackBerry.com.

So what’s in it for you? Well, there’s a chance to win a prize: a smartphone of your choice and plenty of coupons to spend at the store associated with it. Just leave a comment in any Round Robin thread in the forums. Four sites, four chances to win per day. Just head on over to the Smartphone Round Robin update page for the deets.

Shocking you with a day early this time instead of a day late. For podcast 7 we talk about CTIAthe iPhone on Orange, possible unlock rumors, a product red version possibly coming, an SDK in february plus some widget speculation, some leopard speculation, webapps, and a brief hacking segment. And then, a bit on the iTunes plus price cut, Greenpeace, new Apple ads, and att.com making changes. And of course the usual chat about the community.

No less chock full of stuff than last week, but I managed to shave off a few minutes and keep us under 50 minutes. How did I do it? By shaving off the talks about Apple vs. gateway / acer / packard bell. Sharp listeners, look for the “I’m going to cut this” and Dieter being sad. I’ll post it up later today.

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It’s an even bigger podcast than last week, coming in at almost an hour. We talk about some of the ins and outs of the new firmware, the danger to unlockers, rumors of iPhones abroad in Canada and France, the recent rumors of 2nd party apps, widgets and human interface guidelines, and of course the hacked apps. Then, we talk about Jobs and his reality distortion field, and some of the Apple lawsuits out there. And of course, the community gets the final words.

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In podcast number five, we discuss the crazy amount of news from the previous two weeks. The main topics are sales volume, iPhone in Europe, ringtones, iTunes and firmware updates, GUI unlocking and the risk it brings, and 3G iPhone rumors. And, as always, we discuss some of the best bits from the community.

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In podcast number four, we talk at length about the implications of Apple’s price cut, the $100 apple store coupon, ringtones, other news from “the Beat Goes On,” unlocking news or lack thereof, and much, much more. Plus, our usual looks to the community.

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Our third podcast. Plenty of stuff to talk about, even without the last 5 minutes of the track at the end. We cover the new hardware unlock, the inevitable software unlock, the new ease of hacking the iphone, AT&T, and as we are wont to do, cover the forums a wee spot.

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As usual, our show notes are after the break.

Our second podcast. Plenty of stuff to talk about, even without the last 5 minutes of the track at the end. We cover some iPhone game news, hacking news, Fake Steve Jobs, and as we are wont to do, cover the forums a wee spot.

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Review: Smartphone Experts Top Pouch

Posted on Friday, Aug 3, 2007 by Mike Overbo

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Tags: phonedifferent File Under:Accessories, Featured, Reviews

So, I’ve talked before at length about my pile of accessories to review. Well, it’s nigh time to turn my burning gaze to the stack of accessories that need reviewing. Again, if there’s a product you want reviewed first, let me know and I’ll move that to the top of my queue. First up on that queue is the Smartphone Experts Top Pouch.

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Bookmarklet / Favelet Smorgasbord

Posted on Tuesday, Jul 31, 2007 by Mike Overbo

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Tags: bookmarklet, favelet, hack, omgnoappz, phonedifferent, roundup File Under:Featured, Reviews

So, yeah. Favelets and bookmarklets. In the podcast, I promised a review article about useful bookmarklets and favelets, for the iPhone. And here it is.

I’ve written a few simple bookmarklets as well; it seems a lot of the bookmarklets are designed for web editors, and not always so much for the average web user. I’m guessing that not many regular folks need to edit CSS from the iPhone, and those that do already have those bookmarklets synched over. But still, there’s a void for popular sites. It seemed that all I found were eBay, Amazon, and Google sites. So I set out to make a few of my own, and edit a few others so that they’d work on iPhone Safari (henceforth, iSafari).

If you have any requests for a custom bookmarklet, put them in the comments. It has to be said that I make no guarantees that I can make the resulting request as I’m not an expert with javascript by any means, but the worst that can happen is that I say no. Okay, that’s not the worst that can happen. The worst is that I say no VERY IMPOLITELY.

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