This new gadget is called a “Bringrr,” but we think that’s only because “Hey, Don’t Leave The Prototype in a Bar Next Time, Dumbass Device” wouldn’t fit on the box:
Pair the little Bluetooth-equipped plug with a phone, pop it into a car’s cigarette-lighter port, and it’ll have a conniption (alarm, flashing lights) if the car is started without the phone in close proximity.
Bringrr is $35.
Being the star of the best comedy series of all time has its perks: recognized waiting in line like some sort of pleb by an Apple Store employee, actor Jason Bateman was pulled from the line and ushered into the Apple Store to get his iPhone 4 ahead of the less famous people waiting in line in front of him.
Usually, we’d be incensed at the privileged treatment celebrities get, but in Michael Bluth’s case, I think we can make an exception.
Edit: This post was originally accompanied by a photo of Jason Bateman being spoken to by an Apple store employee while waiting in line for his iPhone 4, which we picked up from the celebrity gossip blog WWTDD. If you want to see Jason Bateman looking bored and sitting on the ground in a long line while an Apple Store Genius with his underpants exposed talks to him, you should go over and see the pictures there.
Having problems with your iPhone 4 reception when you touch the bottom of your device? According to antenna expert Spencer Webb, don’t blame Apple… blame the FCC.
Just about every cell phone in current production has the antenna located at the bottom. This insures that the radiating portion of the antenna is furthest from the head. Apple was not the first to locate the antenna on the bottom, and certainly won’t be the last. The problem is that humans have their hands below their ears, so the most natural position for the hand is covering the antenna. This can’t be a good design decision, can it? How can we be stuck with this conundrum? It’s the FCC’s fault.
You see, when the FCC tests are run, the head is required to be in the vicinity of the phone. But the hand is not!
Basically, because phones have gravitated away from clamshell or extendable antenna designs, and because the FCC has rigid guidelines on how much radiation a cellphone is allowed to pump directly into your skull, Apple had to put the antenna at the bottom of the phone… right where most people will grab onto it.
When Apple rejected WiFi Sync from the App Store, speculation was that their reasons had a lot to do with future Cupertino’s own plans to allow iDevices to sync with Macs wirelessly.
The latest Jobs’ email lends some credence to that theory. Rick Proctor wrote Jobs and asked, “Do you think you will ever allow syncing iPhone to Mac over wifi?”
Jobs’ terse but cheery response: “Yep, someday.”
Excellent news. I’m sick of syncing my iPhone through wires like some sort of caveman. If we get wireless syncing, though, is it too much to ask for inductive charging as well?
You’re probably sick of reading about the iPhone 4, so here it is in a nutshell: It’s slick as sh*t and I recommend without hesitation that you buy it.
This is awesome: A Tublr blog with a boatload of screencaps from Apple’s TV ads showing people holding their iPhones the wrong way.
Earlier today, Steve Jobs said the iPhone 4 ‘Death Grip’ was a “non-issue” and people should “Just avoid holding it in that way.”
Which of course is total bullshit, as Apple’s own ads show.
Here’s some more, including shots of Jobs himself clutching his iPhone in his left hand:
We’ve been able to replicate the iPhone 4 radio reception ‘Death Grip’ with older iPhones, and speed tests show that network performance is perhaps more complex than the number of bars in the upper left corner.
Buzz in the blogosphere as hordes of consumers began using their shiny new iPhone 4s on Thursday was all about whether Apple might have a problem on its hands with the device’s antenna. With some uncertainty as to how widespread the problem might be and as to whether it could be something hardware or software related, it does appear possible to hold the iPhone 4 in such a way as to cause it to lose reception and drop calls in progress.
A Macrumors reader reportedly emailed Steve Jobs about the issue, asking “What’s going to be done about the signal dropping issue. Is it software or hardware?” — to which Jobs initially replied in his classic, koan-like manner, “Non issue. Just avoid holding it in that way.”
In a more considered followup response that some are considering an “official statement” from Apple on the matter, Jobs called the problem “a fact of life for every wireless phone,” and advised users to “avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band, or simply use one of many available cases. ”
No matter how this plays out in the coming days and weeks one thing certain is that, be it truly a hardware problem or merely a software issue — it’s not going to make AT&T any new friends in the U.S.
I just confirmed that the iPhone 4 loses reception when the antenna band is touched. Plus, it’s enough to make the iPhone drop calls. This is a serious problem, and I can’t believe Apple let this slip through.
My new iPhone 4 drops from full reception (four-to-five bars) to just one bar in a matter of a few seconds when my fingers and thumb are touching the antenna band. See the video above. But when I take my fingers off the sides and hold the iPhone by its glass back, the number of bars quickly climbs to five again. The problem was first reported by Gizmodo, and seems to widespread, if not universal.
It’s enough to make the iPhone drop calls. I just tested it by calling my office phone. Holding the iPhone in my left hand, reception plummeted and the call dropped.
iPhone fail!
Today is iPhone 4 day and like the rest of you I got up early today. I’d say way to early since it was 4:00 am and I was surprised to find out that my alarm clock on my iPhone could be set to such an early hour. The engineers at Apple HQ in Cupertino could not have done a better job on that alarm, but for once I was wishing they’d screwed it up since I think it should be a crime for an alarm clock to ring before 5:00 am.
Just a quick note from my commute: the line at the flagship Apple Store in San Francisco’s Union Square is stunningly huge, spanning the enter length and width of the block, and then wrapping around the corner for who knows how far long.
This is subjective, but this line is dwarfing what I saw for the iPhone 3G launch, which was by far the biggest previously. If Apple has supply, they’re going to sell two million phones this weekend alone…
– Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
Now here’s a classic set of unboxing photos! Over at Clone77’s 365 days project the newest iWonder gets the Imperial delivery and setup treatment from an industrious bunch of mini Stormtroopers. Love the coordinated effort, and use of the lightsaber for cutting the plastic!
Clone77 appears to be on a yearlong project to expose his troopers to the wider world, very entertaining. The iPhone 4 arrived on Day 133.
Thanks to the always-enjoyable iPhoneSavior for the tip.
If you’re about to buy a new iPhone 4, you should consider selling or trading in your old one.
If you want to sell your old iPhone on eBay or Craigslist, take a look at our guide — How to Sell your iPhone Online — which tells you how to wipe the data and good strategies for getting the best price.
Selling your iPhone online will get you the best price, but will likely involve a degree of hassle, of course. Probably the easiest, hassle-free way to get rid of your iPhone is trading it in with Gazelle, an electronics recycling service.
You can even trade in your iPhone from your iPhone. Here’s how:
Cupertino’s been having some problems lately when it comes to yellowing on their more ambitious displays, and it looks like the iPhone 4 is no exception: numerous owners are reporting that their iPhone 4 Retina Display have come with visible yellow bands and spots.
Gizmodo’s up to 27 cases of yellowing and counting, which certainly seems like a huge number given the fact that the iPhone 4 isn’t even officially on sale yet. And a reader poll on Engadget has the number of yellow iPhone 4 retina displays at over eight thousand, or a little over 38% of those with iPhone 4s polled.
Anyone out there with an iPhone 4 noticed the same issue? If this is true, between the antenna issues and the screen yellowing, this might be the most problem prone hardware Apple has released in a long time.
Just a few hours before the iPhone 4 officially goes on sale, Apple has dropped iMovie for iPhone onto the App Store.
The $4.99 app will allow users who own an iPhone 4 (and presumably future video-capable iPads and iPod Touches) to edit and share videos directly from their handset, adding everything from transitions, background music and titles to your clips before shooting them off to YouTube, MobileMe or to a friend via e-mail.
There’s nothing out there when it comes to mobile video editing like iMovie for iPhone, so if you plan on stitching together some movies on the go, this is your best and only real choice. Just one caveat: while you can export your videos to your computer at 720p, any emails you upload to YouTube, MobileMe or send out by e-mail will be downgraded to 568×320… almost definitely to help accommodate 3G network providers.
A couple of weeks ago, we posted a link to a stress test the guys over at iFixYourI performed on the iPhone 4, showing that while it was fairly bend proof, it easily shattered when dropped.
The problem with their test was that since the iPhone 4 hadn’t been released yet, they had simply conducted their test with an empty iPhone 4 case and display, which prompted our commenters to raise some excellent points that a hollow iPhone 4 was more likely to be easily broken than one with all the electronics innards tightly packed inside.
Here’s the follow through. iFixYouri have done another drop test on a real iPhone 4. Frankly, I’m surprised how well the real iPhone 4 holds up to dropping it from waist height onto concrete: three successive drops breaks the phone, while the fourth shatters it, but I’d actually consider that pretty good for an unprotected handset made largely out of glass, wouldn’t you?
Those in the know of how cellular antennas work have been expressing misgivings about the design of the iPhone 4’s antenna for a while now.
As a simplistic summary of the problem, with the iPhone 4, Apple chose to essentially make the stainless steel band wrapping around the phone act as the phone’s antenna by separating it into three distinct chunks delineated by the gaps in the handset’s frame. Superficially, that should give the iPhone 4 more reception bars, but as MAKE’s Dave Matthews said two weeks ago: “Having been in the cellular business most of my career, I think it’s really odd that you’d want an antenna grounded by a moist hand.”
It looks like this fear may have been grounded in reality. Numerous users are reporting — with video proof — that the iPhone 4 loses up to four bars of reception when it’s actually picked up. If you don’t touch the bottom of the phone, you’re fine, but as soon as you connect the left side with the bottom of the phone… reception goes in the toilet.
TomTom is a popular turn-by-turn navigational app for the iPhone that has recently been updated to support multitasking and iOS 4. The new app released on Tuesday is version 1.4 and TomTom has advised all users to upgrade to this version immediately if they are running iOS 4.
Waiting in line outside an Apple store is no longer just for fans: it’s business. Two enterprising guys have put up tent space and chair space on website airbnb for spots in line for the iPhone 4 launch
A spot in the San Francisco tent — for the full-on can’t-wait-for-it fanboy experience — will run you $400 a night, more than the price of the new iPhone 4.
And you have to share the tent, too:
“Rent the tent I pitched outside of the Apple store in San Francisco and be the first person to get an iPhone. I have a 2 person tent and figured that if I couldn’t get my friends to join me, I would rent out the extra spot. I’m hoping to earn enough to cover the cost of my phone!”
Another airbnb listing offered a chair outside an Apple store for $200. It’s no longer being offered.
Perhaps the chair has already been occupied?
Via airbnb
A study by warranty provider SquareTrade found that 26% of all iPhones fail — break or suffer hardware malfunctions — in the first two years of use.
Of course, SquareTrade sells warranties to cover all your iPhone health issues so the info requires a grain of salt. But their study of 25,000 customer claims did find that iPhone reliability is on the upswing. You can read the full report here [PDF].
Last year’s report covering the iPhone and iPhone 3G put the failure rate at 33%. For the iPhone 3Gs, they found most snafus came from power, followed by touchscreen, battery and button issues.
Like the Apple gear they love to dissect, iFixIt’s teardowns seem to just get better and better. Benefitting from the kindness of a customer whose iPhone 4 was delivered early yesterday by FedEx, the premier DIY evangelists took apart and photographed in beautiful detail a brand new iPhone 4, describing the many amazements Cupertino designers and engineers have rolled out with Apple’s newest portable communication device.
Among the discoveries this time out are:
A look at the photographs — and there are many more at much higher resolution available at the iFixIt teardown pages — really gives one a sense of the delicate beauty beneath the already gorgeous surface enclosure of the iPhone.
Kudos to Apple and its manufacturing partners for delivering such a well-made device, and to iFixIt for tearing the thing apart with such meticulous care and attention.
While the white iPhone 4 wasn’t available from Apple or AT&T for pre-order last week, it’s started to look like those who want a more opalescent handset might have more luck local big box retailer: just two days after info leaked that Best Buy might have white iPhone 4s on Thursday comes indication that Walmart might have them as well.
Bluntly, I doubt you’re going to be able to get a white iPhone 4 anywhere on June 24th: if anyone was going to have them, it would be Apple and AT&T, and their refusal to take pre-orders for the white model strongly hints at some sort of supply chain problem. My guess is that while Best Buy and Walmart may have placed orders for the white iPhone 4 before this problem exhibited itself, they aren’t going to be getting any… this week, that is. If you’re optimistic or desperate for a white iPhone 4, though, it can’t hurt dropping by.
Line-sitting obssessive Greg Packer is at it again, camping outside of the Fifth Avenue Apple Store in New York City for the iPhone 4. And this time he’s got a sponsor!
The sponsor is Gazelle.com, a site which buys up your used gadgets based upon a cash offer from their dynamic pricing engine. They then either resell your used gadget or recycle it.
Packer himself — more enthusiastic about line-sitting than he is functionally knowledgeable about tech — doesn’t really seem to have a very nuanced understanding of what his sponsor does, describing Gazelle as an “eBay for electronics.” It’s not, really, but either way, it looks like a pretty cool site for individuals who don’t want to go the eBay or Craigslist route for selling their old gadgets… or at the very least, recycle their own tech easily and responsibly. Their sponsorship of Packer has certainly raised my awareness of what they do, so in that, their money seems well spent.
As for Packer and his motivation for sitting in line, “I was the first in the US to have iPhone 1, so why not do it again?”
Shhh! No one tell him that FedEx is already delivering iPhone 4s to customers, no line-sitting required.
While the ability to set a user background wallpaper under iOS 4 is a welcome addition to the operating system, the default wallpaper choices can be pretty, well, garish. Some of them are just too busy, too high contrast, too gross.
The wallpaper above, called Tranquil, is Jason Kottke’s brilliant send-up of the questionable taste Apple employed when picking some the default iOS 4 wallpaper choices.
Just tap and hold on the image until the “Save Image” dialog appears to apply it as the wallpaper of your iPhone.
Point well made, Mr. Kottke.
It should come as no surprise that with the iPhone’s early delivery the boys at iFixIt have already got their hands on one and are opening it up and exposing its innards for all the world to see.
Kind of like getting advance notice of a trainwreck, isn’t it?