iPhone - page 423

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If you need to take the G Train in New York City or pay for a cab you’re jumping uptown, you now have a new way to pay for your ride: with your iPhone.

Visa has just announced that they have inked deals with the New York City subway to let you simply display your iPhone in front of a kiosk or turnstile in select locations as part of a trial of their payWave system.

What’s payWave?It’s essentially just Visa smart chip circuitry that allows you to wave a credit card or payWave-equipped device in front of a cash register, no signature or pin codes required.

Since the iPhone doesn’t have payWave circuity installed by default, if you want to use it with your iPhone, you need to use a specially designed payWave case to graft the functionality onto your handset.

If you’re willing to pick up one of those, though, you can start helping VIsa test out the service Think of the possibilities! While all those other suckers wait in line to recharge their Metro Cards, you’ll be able to breeze past the turnstiles with an Obi-Wan-style wave of your iPhone.

Pretty neat, but eventually, you can probably expect your iPhone to handle this sort of thing natively. Apple’s been doing some hiring and some research into Near Field Communications, and that, more likely than not, means that a few years down the line, you won’t need a special case: your iPhone will be your credit card.

The popular question-answering search engine Ask is due to submit their official iPhone application to Apple, which is designed to answer your questions on the go.

The app will let you ask questions either by typing them in, or by speaking them, and then offers up the most likely answer based on its index of more than 500 million question and answer ‘pairs,’ from hundreds of thousands of web sources.

On downloading the application, users will automatically be enrolled in Ask’s social Q&A private beta, which allows you to approach the Ask.com community for answers to more complex questions.

One of its most interesting features, however, won’t be introduced until version 2. It’s called ‘Nearby Answers,’ and uses your location to allow you to ask questions about places nearby. For example, you can ask a question about your local theater or restaurant, and your question will be routed to people nearby, or people have answered similar questions about those places in the past.

Also planned to feature before the end of the year is the ability to ask questions of your friends on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

It certainly sounds like a fantastic application, and I can’t wait to see how it works. We’ll be sure to let you know when it’s available for download.

[via TechCrunch]

[xrr rating=80%]

Google Earth has long been one of the most impressive apps on iOS, but the software just got an entirely new and subaqueous dimension: in Google Earth 3.1 for iOS, you can now explore underwater landscapes (or, as Google calls it, “ocean bathymetry and ocean layer content.”

Dive below the ocean’s surface to explore underwater canyons, or travel to the ocean’s deepest point, the Mariana Trench. Once underwater, simply swipe the screen with two fingers to “look around.” You can always reset your view by clicking on the north arrow on the iPad, or on the compass on the iPhone and iPod.

First person out there to spot R’lyeh, please let me know the coordinates: it seems like I’ve spent all morning searching the Pacific depths for the non-Euclidean city in which dead Cthulhu “wgah’nagl fhtagn.”

Google Earth is a free download on the App Store.

With AT&T’s exclusive hold on the iPhone due to end soon by many accounts, many are wondering if Verizon will get their own version of the iPhone early next year… and how much that will hurt AT&T. According to analysts, a Verizon iPhone wouldn’t hurt AT&T very much, and now AT&T is echoing the sentiment themselves: we’re not worried.

AT&T Chief Randall Stephenson recently spoke at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia Conference in New York City, Stephenson stated that while the iPhone was a major success for AT&T, two-thirds of iPhone purchases came from previous AT&T customers and were not likely to switch to another network just because the iPhone opened up over there as an option.

More to the point, Stephenson says that the iPhone 4 was such a huge success that they’ve locked in a huge chunk of their existing customers into new two year contracts. Added together, Stephenson thinks it’s unlikely that a Verizon iPhone would lead to a mass defection of users.

He’s probably right, at least immediately… but this isn’t about a cataclysmic migration of users that occurs the second AT&T’s iPhone exclusivity ends. This is about the long tail defection of individual users over a period of a couple of years who are so fed up with AT&T’s clumsy service and incompetence that the only thing keeping them there is the best phone on Earth. Unless AT&T takes the quality of their service more seriously without the iPhone exclusivity than they did with, there still may very well be trouble for Ma Bell down the road.

Are you wondering how a company like Nokia can, on the one hand, claim that it is selling more smartphones every day than the iPhone, and yet be kicking its CEOout the door like a mangy dog? These pie charts ought to make everything crystal clear.

Advisory firm Canaccord Genuity told investors to buy, buy, buy Apple stock on Tuesday, targeting Apple’s price at $356 per share… and to give investors an idea on why they were so excited about Apple’s prospects, they accompanied their note with the following observation: even though Apple only sold 17 million handsets in the first half of 2010, Apple has pulled in 39% of the mobile sector’s profit.

Meanwhile, Nokia, Samsung and LG sold 400 million phones last year — over twenty times as many handsets as Apple sold iPhones — and yet their profit was dwarfed by Apple’s in the same period.

As Canaccord Genuity analyst T. Michael Walkley notes, “[W]where most handset OEMs struggle to post a profit or even 10% operating margins… we estimate Apple boasts roughly 50% gross margin and 30%+ operating margin for its iPhone products.”

No wonder the boards of companies like Nokia are lopping off their key executives’ heads and bowling them out the door.

Cervantes Mobile’s latest iPhone accessory, the Jorno, is basically technology that’s been floating around for nearly a decade: a folding keyboard for serious writing on a handheld device. I had something just like this for my old Dell Axim PDA back in 2002, and while the Jorno docks with the iPhone through Bluetooth instead of a physical connection, otherwise it’s pretty much identical.

I can’t make any bones about the Jorno’s price: at $79, I’d say it’s too expensive by half for such old tech. That said, I will say that the Transformers-like process of folding one of these keyboards was such a clickety-clacketing delight that I still count my old fold-up Axim keyboard as one of the best gadgets I ever owned, and this is pretty much the same thing. If you want to have an easily pocketable yet full-sized physical keyboard to do serious writing on your iPhone or iPad, then, you could do worse than giving this cute like keyboard a shot.

If you’ve ever wondered what killed off AT&T’s unlimited bandwidth plans, look no further than the App Store.

The study was performed by Finnish analytics company Zokem, which analyzed the mobile web usage of over 10,000 smartphone users across 6.5 million sessions in sixteen countries over the past year.

What Zokem found was that while a smartphone’s mobile browser — Safari, in the case of the iPhone — is still the biggest bandwidth hog on most smartphones, apps are now taking up 50% of mobile data volume. Predictably, the most popular apps across all smartphones are Facebook and Twitter.

Keep in mind that this study was not aimed at any particular platform, so iPhone users were lumped in with Android, Palm and Windows Mobile customers as well. Given how well-developed the iPhone’s App Store is compared to its competitors equivalent marketplaces, though, I wouldn’t be surprised if iOS device users use up an even larger percentage of mobile data through apps. At the end of the day, though, the disparity between app and browser usage is only going to get more profound as more media — and perhaps iTunes itself — enters the cloud.

iPhontography is a revolutionary new art form of images inspired by, shot with, and edited on the iPhone. A series of exhibits, the result of a presentation made in August at the Artistic Photographers of America meeting in San Francisco, will bring together artists and their work at some of Apple’s larger retail stores around the country and the world starting later this month.

The work is curated from art submitted to Pixels at an Exhibition, a website created to showcase images submitted by iPhone users from across the globe. Show curator Knox Bronson and other iPhone artists will attend each exhibit and present information about the Pixels project and talk about techniques and apps used to create the images on display.

The exhibits begin September 27 at the flagship Apple retail store in downtown San Francisco at One Stockton Street, with a reception from 6:00 – 8:00pm.

Additional exhibits are thus far scheduled for Chicago on October 21, and at the New York City Soho Apple store on October 29 – in conjunction with the PhotoPlus International Photography Expo and Conference. Plans for shows in Los Angeles and London are also said to be in the works.

Over the years, Napster has pupated from an illegal peer-to-peer music sharing network to a streaming audio subscription service, and today marks another surprising evolution in a brand that has, over the past decade, meant all things to all men: it’s now an iPhone app.

10-4, you heard that correctly: Apple has finally approved Napster on iTunes as a free application. Weighing in at just 1.8MB, Napster will stream over 10 million songs to you on your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, provided you’re willing to give a Hamilton a month to Napster LLC (which the App Store listing proudly reminds us is “a Best Buy company”) for their Napster plus Mobile Access subscription.

Okay, it’s not the long delayed U.S. launch of our favorite streaming music service, Spotify. None the less, it’s great to see so many options for streaming your music start hitting the App Store, and I think it heralds great things for Apple’s own entry into the Cloud: clearly, whatever Apple’s got planned, they don’t think existing services like Napster or Spotify are a threat. iTunes Live, when it comes, is going to do things we didn’t even know we wanted.

Always faddish in their production of knock-offs and crap gadgets, the black market electronic shops of the Far East have lately been disgorging a surplus of cases that sandwich in a SIM slot and a cellular radio, thus allowing you to make phone calls on your jailbroken iPod Touch. They’re clever hacks, to be sure, but it appears that Cupertino itself has already thought of just that approach to transforming an iPod Touch into an iPhone… and if Apple can think of it, you can bet that they’ve patented it.

In fact, earlier this year, Apple filed a patent application for an “accessory transceiver” that would bring mobile calling and data to the iPod Touch. You know, just like the Peel 520. Or the tPhone. Or any of the other iTouch-to-iPhone cases we’ve written about since August.

Like a time travel scenario where you meet your own grandfather as a child, enthusiasts working with the Einstein Newton Emulator project have ported the Prodigal PDA to the iPhone.  The current implementation is only available as source code and runs a bit slow, but is an actual working version of NewtonOS complete with handwriting recognition and familiar input gestures.

Your choice of smartphone may tell more about you than you realize. Various sources are reporting on a Nielsen Mobile Insights survey about mobile phone usage; among other findings: iPhone users prefer chicken, while Android owners love ribs.

[coupons.com] examined its mobile coupon usage from the different platforms and came up with some staggering results. Did you know that women’s body wash coupons were routinely used by iPhone owners while men’s body wash was often purchased by Android owners?

If that doesn’t floor you, you should know that iPhone owners buy baby products 42 times more than Android users. Google OS users are more apt to use pain-relief coupons though, probably because of the headaches of using Android’s multimedia player. [intomobile]

According to the Wall Street Journal additional details from the survey reveal that a higher proportion of 18- to 24-year-olds use Androids than iPhones, BlackBerry users tend to use their phones more for business purposes than entertainment, and iPhone users tend to be more affluent and better educated.

I’m not sure whether this is more useful as flame-bait or marketing demographics, but it’s fun!

[via Digg]

This week’s must-have iOS games include the newest addition to the The Sims series with some fantastic new features, guns galore in the latest Time Crisis arcade shooter, and Gameloft’s impressive Prince of Persia game in HD on the iPad.

Check out a few of our favorite games from the past week after the break!

Turn your videos in to cartoons, share you favorite books, movies & TV shows with friends, and make notes with the best interactive notepad in the world; all with apps featured in this week’s must-have iOS apps.

Check out a few of our favorites from the past week after the break!

Now that Apple has made iBooks available on all iOS devices users can read their purchased eBooks on a number of different devices. But what if you have a couple large RTF, DOC, TXT, or LIT files of your own that you want to view in iBooks you’re out of luck. In this tutorial we’re going to show you how to get digital and convert your documents into eBooks so that you can enjoy reading them on your iPad, iPhone or new iPod Touch.

Today’s Best Thing Ever is also my favorite new appquisition of the week, and it’s called the Accidental News Explorer, and it was built by Brendan Dawes

It’s news, but not as we know it. For a start, there’s no list of headlines. Just a search box.

Apple’s new social network for music fans, Ping, has had a rough start.  People didn’t expect it to be a Facebook for music right away but they did expect more from Apple.  After years of social media hype many people thought Apple would have learned from the mistakes others have made.  While Ping might not be the best idea Apple has ever had, I think when will look back years from now we will wonder what took them so long! For those of you who have turned on Ping, here are some things Ping should have and a few tips to make your Ping experience a little better. Read more after the break.

Case and battery manufacturer Mophie has just launched the Juice Pack Powerstation — a one stop iOS charging station.

It’s 3,600mAh capacity  means it is more than capable of fully recharging either iPad or iPhone (including iPhone 4), which will bring the possibility of going days without touching a power point.

The Powerstation has a pair of USB ports, one used to charge your device and the other for charging the battery itself. At 2.86 x 4.31 x 0.65 inches, and weighing somewhere around a pound, it is not the most portable of devices. You would be hard pressed to find a pocket big enough to lug this around in, but that said it will comfortably fit in most bags.

The Mophie Juice Pack Powerstation for iOS devices is available now direct from the Mophie site for $99.95. Full review as soon as we get our hands on one.

Having for many years a George Costanza wallet wreaking all sorts of lumbar havok upon my coccyx and spine, I now favor svelteness of pocket: anything that isn’t my iPhone, a small wad of bills, a couple cards and my keys is simply too much.

I think I’m in love with this ingenious, minimalist iPhone 4 case by TRTL BOT: it seems like it was made just for me, fusing a standard attenuation-reducing iPhone 4 case with a slim pocket for up to three cards and a small fold of cash.

Speaking of small folds of cash, it only costs $30, and if you’re still on an iPhone 3G or 3GS, TRTL BOT sells a similar case for $5 less. Go get one: Jerry Seinfeld would approve.

Dan Bishop of Kara Kustoms has finished work on his incredible series of machined iPhone 4 cases. Made with an anodized finish and available in a panoply of colors, not only will these cases ruggedly reinforce your glass-backed iPhone 4 and help it survive a shattering fall, but the unique design helps you keep your hands from coming in direct contact with the antenna without actually covering up the sides. Each case costs $39, and they are now available to order with free shipping anywhere in the states.

Apple has today released the first beta of iOS 4.2 for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch, which is now available to download for developers.

4.2 comes just a week after the public release of 4.1, and was first previewed by Steve Jobs at Apple’s media event on September 1st. The update introduces some much-anticipated new features to the iPad in particular, including; folder organization, Game Centre, and long-awaited multi-tasking. AirPlay, a new feature for streaming music to your device, is also introduced to iOS in this update, along with the wireless printing feature, AirPrint.

Devices supported in beta 1 include the iPad, the iPhone (3G and above), and the iPod Touch (2nd-gen and above).

The iOS 4.2 download weighs in at 514MB and is currently only available to registered developers through Apple’s Dev Centre. The update is scheduled for public release in November.

[via TUAW]

Yesterday at their annual Nokia World Conference, the beleaguered Finnish cell phone giant, introduced their latest answer to the iPhone, the Nokia E7, prominently boasting a high-quality new ClearBlack Display which they hope will impress users as much as the iPhone 4’s Retina Display. How does it measure up?

Quite well, actually. While the 4-inch, 640×360 ClearBlack Display doesn’t boast the iPhone 4’s pixel density, it does seem more vibrant in color and less cool in tone than the Retina, and a polarizing layer promises to give superior visibility outdoors. Since it is AMOLED, it would also consume significantly less power than the iPhone 4’s display, and theoretically faster response times and wider viewing angles as well. We’d still prefer the clarity of a Retina Display, but we’ve got to admit, we’re impressed.

Of course, Nokia’s ability to put together some decent hardware isn’t in doubt. Where they’ve been falling all over themselves in the last few years is in software, having yet to put together a credible challenger to Apple’s amazing success with iOS. Until they manage that, Nokia will continue to founder no matter how innovative the hardware of their phones.

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Letemsvetemapplem.eu managed to get their hands on the new fourth generation iPod Touch, and put Apple’s latest touchscreen PMP in a showdown against the iPhone 4 in a battery of tests.

In the video above, you can see the difference between the quality of the Retina Display on the iPhone 4 compared to the new iPod Touch. While the Touch is packing the same amount of pixels as the iPhone 4, it’s slightly less vibrant and has significantly worse viewing angles than the former’s IPS touchscreen.

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It seems to me that the iPod Touch acquitted itself a lot better when it came to taking video, though. To my eye, the iPod Touch seems to produce the better footage in the side-by-side clip embedded above, despite a significantly wimpier camera module. That said, it seems pretty clear that the subtle discrepancy in quality we’re seeing here has everything to do with the iPhone 4 being held in the tester’s unsteady left hand while filming, which presumably kept things slightly out of focus throughout the test.

[via Mac Rumors]

For this week’s iPhone 4 case review, we have chosen Marware’s Glide: a stylish leather sleeve that offers maximum protection whilst carrying your phone, but the pleasure of your device unprotected while you’re using it.

What Is It?: The Glide is a genuine leather sleeve that’s designed to offer maximum coverage and protection to your iPhone 4 while you’re carrying it, and protection from dust and scratches while it’s in your pocket or bag. A dual-purpose pull-tab allows you to pull your device from the sleeve quickly and easy, while its velcro fastener will keep it from slipping out while it’s in there. There’s also a handy credit card holder on the back! It’s available in either black or brown and for as little as $10.88 on Amazon!