iPhone - page 424

Over the weekend, Apple announced that they were ending their free iPhone 4 case program come September 30th, blithely quipping that “we now know that the iPhone 4 antenna attenuation issue is even smaller than we originally thought.”

Apparently, Consumer Reports remains unconvinced, though, because they are continuing to not recommend the iPhone 4 to customers, according to a recent update on their blog.

Our tests found the Bumper successfully mitigates the iPhone 4’s reception issue, which was a weak point in the phone’s otherwise-stellar performance in our tests. And we agree with Apple that not all iPhone 4 owners will experience reception difficulties with the device.

But putting the onus on any owners of a product to obtain a remedy to a design flaw is not acceptable to us. We therefore continue not to recommend the iPhone 4, and to call on Apple to provide a permanent fix for the phone’s reception issues.

It is arguably Consumer Reports’ scathing denunciation of the iPhone 4’s antenna problems that caused “Antennagate” to become as much of a public relations disaster for Apple as it was. Will Consumer Reports’ withheld blessing continue to plague Apple and re-open the issue once the bumper case program ends, or is the fire effectively put out? While I agree the iPhone 4’s external antenna makes it more susceptible to attenuation than other phones — no matter how much finger pointing and bar-fiddling Apple does — I think the fire’s largely been put out: even dropping one call more out of a hundred than the iPhone 3GS, the iPhone 4 is the best smartphone you can buy. At this point, Consumer Reports just looks petulant.

What’s more important to you? Your iPod… or your wedding ring? Your iPhone… or your dog? A new survey conducted by a company called Protect Your Bubble has found that, in the UK at least, most people would be less willing to give up their Apple products than any other possession.

By a significant margin, the iPod beat out other objects as Facebook respondents’ favorite things, with 12% of respondents reporting it as their most cherished possession. 11.5% valued their Blackberry over all other wares, while Apple’s iPhone crept in at 10%.

Comparatively, only 9% of respondents chose their laptop, another 9% dog, 5% their cat, 4% their car and a mere 1% their wedding ring. It appears that more people in the UK these days are married to Apple than they are to their spouse.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IY-uRRCARJw&feature=player_embedded

This video purports itself to be real footage of iOS 4.0 running on an HTC smartphone, but it’s almost certainly just a skinjob: not only would hacking iOS to run on another device be nearly impossible without access to the source code, but there’s some tell tale signs (like missing folder animation, wallpaper that moves along with pages and the ability to delete the iTunes and App Store icons from the homescreen) that this isn’t what it appears to be.

Nonetheless, we’re impressed, if just by the fact someone went to so much trouble to make Android look so much like iOS. Of course, if you’re going to put in those kind of man hours, one wonders why you would bother buying the inferior phone to begin with…

[via HardMac]

Stuck on an iPhone 3G or 3GS and jealous of the iPhone 4’s sexy ability to stitch three photos together for a beautifully optimized high-dynamic range snapshot of what it sees out of its tiny oculus? A Cydia tweak is on its way just as soon as the Dev Team releases their iOS 4.1 jailbreak, bringing HDR capability to legacy devices. Of course, the iOS 4.1 jailbreak is still an unknown amount of time away, so we could be waiting on this for sometime… but at least there’s some hope in sight.

All good things must come to an end, and now that Apple has largely put the fires out on the public relations nightmare of Antennagate, they’ll be ending their free iPhone 4 case program come September 30th… unless you complain loud enough.

Says Apple:

We now know that the iPhone 4 antenna attenuation issue is even smaller than we originally thought. A small percentage of iPhone 4 users need a case, and we want to continue providing them a Bumper case for free. For everyone else, we are discontinuing the free case program on all iPhone 4s sold after September 30, 2010. We are also returning to our normal returns policy for all iPhone 4s sold after September 30. Users experiencing antenna issues should call AppleCare to request a free Bumper case.

Of course, given how backed up Apple is sending out free cases, even if you order one now, you’re not likely to have a bumper around your iPhone before next year. Perhaps that’s the bigger takeaway from Apple’s decision to end the program: if you’re really having problems with your iPhone 4’s reception, you couldn’t afford to wait for Apple to finally get around to sending you one anyway.

Let’s dispel here and now any notion that the next great guitar solo or hit record will be produced or recorded using Apple’s mobile devices or the myriad amplifier emulating and recording applications available for them today.

Will. Not. Happen.

That said, for the casual music enthusiast and app dabbler, a few interesting peripheral/app combinations continue to highlight the versatility of Apple’s mobile development platform — and point the way to a future in which talented individuals won’t have to invest thousands of dollars in equipment and studio time in order to produce professional sounding music recordings.

We’ve spent the past several weeks playing with three of these, from Agile Partners, Frontier Design Group, and IK Multimedia. Our report contains a decidedly mixed bag.

This week’s must-have iOS games features one of the best 2D platformers yet for the iPhone, GTA goodness in high-definition and golfing that claims to be as real as it gets. There’s also some pooping pigeons thrown in for good measure!

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

This weeks must-have iOS apps include Nike’s latest to help you track your run stats, professional HTML emails on your iPhone with MarkdownMail, quick and easy invoice creation for your business, and AppShopper’s new app that helps you keep track of the App Store.

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

Celebrating the release to manufacture of Windows Phone 7, Microsoft employees held a mock funeral Friday for the iPhone and Blackberry on their Redmond campus:

Employees dressed up in fancy dress and also modified cars to include Windows Phone branding. Aside from the crazy outfits the workers made fake hearses for giant BlackBerry and iPhone devices. Employees cheekily claimed they had buried the competition with Windows Phone 7. [Neowin]

Mourners and pallbearers were seen holding signs such as “Windows Phone 7 OS Platform buries the competition” and performed a funereal dance to Michael Jackson’s Thriller as part of the remembrances.

The latest iPhone Killer launches on October 11.  Is it too early to call this another premature obituary?

[via AppleInsider]

Heartened by Apple’s recent decision to loosen their restriction on outside frameworks for the development of iOS apps, Adobe has announced that it will be resuming work on its Flash-to-iPhone compiler.

Apple’s announcement today that it has lifted restrictions on its third-party developer guidelines has direct implications for Adobe’s Packager for iPhone, a feature in the Flash Professional CS5 authoring tool. This feature was created to enable Flash developers to quickly and easily deliver applications for iOS devices. The feature is available for developers to use today in Flash Professional CS5, and we will now resume development work on this feature for future releases.

Meant to be a headlining technology in their Flash CS5 software, Adobe was forced to abandon development of the compiler after a change to Apple’s iPhone Developer Program License Agreement prohibited the use of translation tools in app development.

Apple’s change of heart again makes development in Flash — if not Flash on iOS proper — a viable option again, and is a rare victory for Adobe in their conflict with Apple.

Last year, Apple pulled Google Voice’s official application from the App Store without either ceremony or explanation. The move always seemed pretty suspect, and intended more to protect the interests of AT&T than iOS users, but it seems that there is good news on the horizon: Google Voice is likely heading back to the App Store.

According to the developer of the third-party Google Voice application GV Mobile, he emailed Apple’s approval board after the release of yesterday’s App Store guidelines, pointing out there seemed to be no provision at all explaining a Google Voice ban, and asking what the chances were of getting his app reinstated. Apparently, the response was encouraging, and Kovacs was led to believe that if he resubmitted his app, it would likely be improved.

On Google’s part, they say they have nothing to announce at this time, but if third–party Google Voice applications start getting approved again, it’s very likely the official app will soon possible. Let’s hope that Kovac’s exchange wasn’t a fluke and Apple has come around on its senseless ban against Voice once and for all.

At long last Apple has released iOS 4.1, which includes bug fixes for iOS 4 performance issues on the iPhone 3G.  Having suffered for months with 4.0 on my 3G,  I rushed home yesterday to upgrade when hearing that 4.1 had gone live.  After a day of use my impressions are definitely more positive than with the change from v3 to v4, but I wouldn’t describe the improvements as overwhelming.

The worst delays appear to be gone.  Under iOS 4.0 my 3G was experiencing delays of up to 10 seconds when opening  apps like Messages and Settings, these now launch in a few seconds.  Email messages load quicker, the on-screen keyboard is responsive with a shorter initial delay, and searching my contact list is relatively efficient again.  I was also able to start a song playing in iPod mode then jump around to several other apps without any skipping in playback.

I’m still experiencing notable delays when loading the Calendar app.  The iPhone appears to update my calendar via MobileMe each time I load the app, blanking out the screen before returning a few seconds later with my data.  I thought this was a bug in 4.0 but perhaps this is a change in the app’s behavior?

My overall (subjective) impression is that iOS 4.1 on the iPhone 3G is a tune-up of iOS 4.0, but isn’t a performance improvement over iOS 3.  The most egregious problems do appear to be fixed and the device is useable again.  That’s most important.

iPhone 3G owners, what’s your experience been so far?  Let us know in the comments.

iPods are great nifty little devices that allow you to take music off of your computer and carry  it around town with you inside a magical Apple electronic device. But what happens when you want to transfer the music that’s on your iPod and put it back on your Mac? Despite all of its friendliness, iTunes is unwilling to pry the music of your iPod or iPhone. In this walk-through we’ll show you how to reclaim your music from your iPod and get it back on your Mac.

AT&T’s beleaguered and spotty 3G network has been the butt of both joke and collective outrage since the iPhone 3G, but Ma Bell is now promising customers that they’re serious about improving things, having dedicated a minimum of $18 billion to improve both wireless and landline network capacity across the country next year.

Not only will this entail infrastructure support, but according to AT&T, they will also install thousands of new cell sites which will expand mobile broadband coverage to millions of customers whose iPhones might currently cling tenuously to the bottom bar of reception. Additionally, AT&T is making noises that they will be increasing the capacity of their data network, hopefully leading to better download speeds at all… or at least not letting them degrade any further.

The money’s also earmarked for moving AT&T along to the next generation of mobile broadband: the blistering LTE 4G standard. AT&T is promising these network enhancements will allow seamless migration to next-gen LTE… good news indeed, if you are just counting down the days to an iPhone LTE announcement.

Apple hardware hacker Charles Mangin has a respectable history smashing modern functionality into nostaglically held but utterly obsolete hardware. For example, Maguin’s amazing success inserting a Mac Mni into an old Disk ][ drive, or his even more breathtaking success cramming an old G4 cube into an even older Macintosh Plus.

Mangin’s latest project might be his greatest triumph yet though: an iPhone ensconced in the hollowed out shell of its evolutionary predecessor, the venerable Apple Newton. Charles has yet to complete the project, but given his past successes, we’re confident he’ll succeed… but will he update the Newton’s stylus with a touch-capacitive tip for extra points?

Wired Mag Editor Chris Anderson has posted a tasty rumor on Twitter: he claims that a T-Mobile manager revealed to him that they would be getting the iPhone 3GS by the end of the year. Granted, we shouldn’t put too much stock on the word-of-mouth hearsay of an anonymous store manager… but in actuality, other networks getting the iPhone 3GS, but not the iPhone 4, would make a lot of sense.

Here in Germany, for example, the rumored end of T-Mobile’s iPhone exclusivity was heralded with other networks suddenly being allowed to stock the 3GS. In other words, T-Mobile’s “iPhone exclusivity” was shifted to the exclusive sale of the iPhone 4… and even that exclusivity seems likely to end soon.

If Anderson’s nameless manager is right, then, we might see something similar happen in the States: AT&T becomes the exclusive carrier of the iPhone 4 for a time, while other carriers are allowed to sell the 3GS. If this coincides with a rumor of a January CDMA iPhone 4 for Verizon, we might conceivably start next year with an iPhone on every network.

[via 9to5Mac]

Apple has updated its Game Centre overview page today to provide details on which devices will be supported when the social gaming network goes live on Wednesday with the release of the new iOS 4.1 update.

The list of supported devices includes the second-, third- and forth-generation iPod Touch models, along with the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 3GS. Unfortunately for those still clinging on to their trusty iPhone 3G, Game Centre is another feature you’ll miss out on in iOS 4.1.

Look, we’re four generations in. If you still crave a physical hardware keyboard on your iPhone, you’re basically barking up the wrong tree: hey, look over there, there’s RIM, a succulent hydrant for you to whiz upon. Apple’s just never going to be there for you.

That said, there’s scarcely an itch the constabulary of third-party accessory makers won’t scratch for you, given enough dosh. So here, have this Mini Key case for the iPhone 4, complete with sliding, backlit QWERTY. It adds significant bulk, no batter life, and will cost you $60 when it’s released at the end of the year. You’re welcome.

Nike has released its Nike+ GPS app in to the App Store this morning, and it allows users with a GPS enabled device to track their runs without the $19 Nike+ shoe sensor accessory. Record your pace, distance and the route you ran using just your device’s built-in GPS and accelerometer.

It’s a $1.99 app and it does a whole lot of impressive stuff: motivational messages from Nike’s top athletes aim to push you further to improve your workout and reach your goals, while your personalized ‘PowerSong’ is designed to give you that extra boost.

Voice feedback as you run to tells you how you’re doing and when you’ve finished, you can upload your stats to your Nikeplus.com account (free) to compete with friends, join challenges, set goals and connect with the rest of the Nike+ community.

At just $1.99, the athletes among you will save themselves a small fortune by not having to fork out for the shoe sensor running accessory.

Nike+ GPS is compatible with the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and the iPod Touch (2nd generation and above), running iOS 4.0. Get it in the App Store here.

This week’s must-have iOS games include the graphically stunning Epic Citadel that was recently introduced at Apple’s music event, adrenaline-fuelled sprinting across rooftops in Mirror’s Edge for iPhone, using your powers as Spider-Man to save the city of New York, and a whole lot more to keep you entertained this weekend.

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

This week’s must-have iOS apps include the universal release of the official Twitter client, a fun and unique way to make music, and an app that turns your device in to a USB memory stick.

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

As an iPhone user I have always shied away from cases as I have never found one that enhances the design of the iPhone rather than devaluing it. But the latest version of Grove’s Bamboo case for iPhone 4 is a game changer. It is hands down the best case I have ever used or reviewed.

That is a bold statement I know, but here’s why:

It’s official: the iPhone has joined the ranks of iFurniture.  Yesterday brought news of another iPhone coffee table, which joins a proud history of Apple-inspired furniture throughout the years.  In another Geek Trend, some members of the Cult of Apple can now kick their feet up both with and on their iDevices while lounging at home.

The findings of a recent survey by Coupons.com has all the trappings of some sort of offensive, stereotypical joke… but without the punchline.

Analyzing the findings of how both users on both the Android and iOS operating systems use their website, Coupons.com came to some interesting findings as to what separates the two.

iPhone users? According to Coupons.com, they can best be described as “feminine-smelling, chicken-eating, entertainment-reading fish owners.”

Android users, though, are “manly-scented, pork-eating, news-reading bird lovers.”

These results certainly don’t seem to apply to me. On one hand, I fall into the Android category as far as my pheremonal stink and budgerigar ownership are concerned, but I certainly prefer chicken to pork, and I use iOS exclusively… which according to Coupons’ research, makes me some sort of weird, fish-stroking girl. And what about pork-abstaining Android users, Hassidic and halal alike? There is more research to be done here methinks, Coupons.com.

[via Gizmodo]

Steve Jobs confirmed in his press conference today that iOS 4.1 contains several bug fixes, including a fix addressing the poor performance of iOS4 on the iPhone 3G.  Alas we have to wait another week for the update to be released.  It will be hitting my iPhone as soon as iTunes says it is available.

I think it was notable that Jobs addressed this point very early in his presentation; the bugs mentioned are all major issues and need to be resolved.  The new Gaming Center and real-time graphics rendering of the A4 chip are impressive, but we 3G laggards are just looking to be able to send email and make calls again!

No comments about whether iOS 4.2 will support the 3G and older iPod touch models, the presentation merely included an asterisk that noted *not all models.   I think a cutoff at iOS 4.1 is appropriate for these devices if the performance problems are finally fixed.