iPhone - page 439

It never takes long for the Dev Team to pry open the seams of the latest iPhone OS firmware, tickle its insides and come up with a fresh Jailbreak. Less than a week after Apple released their iPhone OS 3.1.3 update, the Dev Team followed it up with an update of their own: Pwnage Tool 3.1.5.

Here’s the caveat: the iPhone OS 3.1.3 update was pretty insignificant. The only real bug fix for non-Japanese users was improvement of the battery life indicator in rare cases. If you haven’t noticed a problem with your jailbroken phone, especially an iPhone 3G or 3Gs, you shouldn’t upgrade, since if you mess up your Pwnage, you risk losing your carrier unlock forever.

Apple’s refusal to spec their devices with memory card readers continues to irritate. My assumption has always been that the lack of an SD card reader on the iPhone has to do with two things: discouraging customers from buying the lowest priced iPhones and cheaply supplementing the storage with an SD card instead of shelling out a couple hundred more on the higher-capacity models, and making sure iTunes is the only real entry to shift to the device.

Still, when Apple updated the iPhone OS to firmware 3.0, adding functionality for iPhone peripherals into the mix, it was only a matter of time that we’d see an aftermarket SD card reader accessory… and here it is, ZoomIt.

Essentially, you plug the ZoomIt SD reader dongle into your iPhone or iPod Touch’s dongle connector, launch the free ZoomIt app and you’re free to shift any file supported by the OS to and from your device.

Of course, this isn’t really an expandable storage solution, but it wouldn’t be a bad way to backup photos from your camera while you’re on the road… and it should even work on the iPad. You can pre-order the ZoomIt now for $50, with a ship date in April.

Peter-Paul Koch is a man with opinions about the mobile web. And his latest opinion is a trifle controversial: Mobile Safari, he says, is this generation’s Internet Explorer 6. All the rage now, but destined to be hated by webdevs of the future.

Late last week, a word of warning to iPhone and iPod Touch app developers was posted on Apple’s official developer site: “If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user’s location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store.”

It’s a strange little note. The iPhone’s Core Location functionality is already opt-in, and it seems useful from both a developer and user’s standpoint if advertisements are tailored to a user’s individual experience… and location is a big part of that.

The wording is also worrying: what does “primarily” mean? That’s another one of those vague App Store Review Process wordings that just leads to headache down the line.

There are a few interpretations on this. When Apple tries to launch their own in-house iPhone ad network, they may want to position location-based advertisements as a major advantage of their service. On the other hand, this simply could be about limiting advertising-based apps from needlessly hogging the GPS radio and draining battery life.

If I were to guess, I’d say the latter is true. Hopefully Apple will clarify matters in due time.

[via Boy Genius Report]

It’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.

This time, we review Pastebot, 007: Top Agent, Jackson Pollock, Rhythm Racer, Judgement Day War, and TweakyBeat.

Welcome to the “iPhone photography toy of the week” slot. Today’s toy is: InfiniteScope.

Yesterday, we alerted you to blossoming galleries of attractive young women posing in various states of undress with their iPhones.

But, hey, iPhone fetish pics aren’t limited to the fair sex: there are a few galleries dedicated to iPhone Guys, too. Plus the NSFW user-generated Guys with iPhones website.

Can the right gadget make you hotter? This gallery of iPhone girls would seem to suggest yes. Otherwise adding a smartphone to a bikini and pout would be superfluous. Right?

This isn’t the only gallery pairing pulchritude with tech, there are also a few dedicated iPhone babe blogs,  too.

Since they all seem to be SFW, it’s a wonder no one has launched an iPhone app for iPhone babes. We’ll keep you posted on further developments…

With the iPad’s debut, we’re all looking forward to iPhone OS 3.2, but since we can’t expect that until the iPad starts shipping in March, we’ll have to make do with the latest software update to hit iTunes. So cram your 30-pin white connector umbilical into the omphalos of your iPhone, my friends, because iPhone OS 3.1.3 is here.

It’s a small update. Here’s what has been improved:

• Improves accuracy of reported battery level on iPhone 3GS

• Resolves issue where third-party apps would not launch in some instances

• Fixes bug that may cause an app to crash when using the Japanese Kana keyboard

Those first two changes may be tiny, but they are nice. Better battery life accuracy is always helpful, and that second fix looks like it might be focused on the issue where App Store apps sometimes wouldn’t launch until you downloaded a new app and installed it.

Needless to say, if you’ve jailbroken your phone, you go and see what the Dev-Team has to say about upgrading, although it looks like they’ve almost got it all sussed out.

We’ve covered a number of iPhone apps that field citizen complaints in a few different cities — Boston, Pittsburgh, San Jose — but always wondered if angry folks snapping potholes on the way to work would find their grievances fell on deaf ears.

The good news: if you live in Boston and can afford an iPhone, it’s like having a personal fix-it crew.

Some 2,500 downloaders of CitizensConnect have filed 750 complaints since October;  at least one reports swift action:

UPDATE: iMussolini Developer Luigi Marino told Cult of Mac that he discovered the lawsuit for copyright infringement by reading our story yesterday. Marino contacted the Italian state film archives, Istituto Luce, for clarifications about the video material he used from Mussolini’s speeches and they asked him to remove the app from the store to avoid a legal battle. Marino tells us he requested to pull the app and expects it to be gone from the iTunes store by 1 p.m. (CET).

UPDATE 2: iMussolini is gone. The competing Mussolini app — Mussolini’s historical speeches– — is, however, still available.

An iPhone app of Benito Mussolini’s speeches is the second-highest paid app in the Italian iTunes store a week after launching despite criticism for giving voice to Il Duce’s diehard fans and claims over copyright violations.

iMussolini, a mobile compendium of fascism, features 100 complete speeches,  plus 20 audio and video clips for €0.79 (it’s also available in the US iTunes store for $0.99, in Italian only) — without any kind of political commentary.

At about 1,000 downloads a day, iMussolini is more popular in Italy than Shazam and games like Ice Age and Dracula: the Path of the Dragon.

Comments by readers on iPhoneitalia, which broke the story, included enough pro-Mussolini sentiment  “Duce! Duce! Duce!”  and slogans (“Boia chi molla!”) to prompt complaints to the iTunes store that the app violates Italy’s 1952 Scelba law, which formally abolished fascism. The New York-based American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants  also slammed Apple over the app.

Today, the Italian state film archives, Istituto Luce, announced it will sue the developer for using archival clips and asked Apple to remove the application. At this writing, the app is still available.

iMussolini is the handiwork of 25-year-old Luigi Marino, who picked up an iPhone for the first time about six months ago and made the app in his spare time.

Cult of Mac spoke to Marino about why iMussolini is an excercise in free enterprise, getting the app approved and why his next app may feature Gandhi.

CoM: How did you start programming for iPhones?

Luigi Marino: I’ve been programming Java and C++ since high school, in July 2009 I bought my first iPhone and  in November 2009 in my first MacBook.  Programming for it is more of a passion than anything else. (NDR: Marino owns and runs an unrelated company).   In my free time, I also blog for an iPhone website called dev app.

Following up yesterday’s revelation that the iPad SDK contains photo capturing ability, despite the lack of onboard camera, comes this juicy little screenshot, showing the iPad displaying an iPhone-esque “Touch to return a call” bar across the top of the screen.

Since there’s no chance the iPad is going to operate as an enormous mobile phone (I wonder who the exclusive carrier of the iPad in Brobdingnag would even be?) I think this pretty much confirms what I guessed: the iPad SDK has some residual iPhone features still loitering shiftlessly about, and everything will probably be polished up before the iPad’s release. About your business then.

[via Engadget]

It’s mostly been assumed that the iPhone SDK’s omission of terms enabling VoIP over 3G was prompted by Apple bowing not just to AT&T’s bandwidth concerns, but by concerns that 3G VoIP would make calls and minute moot.

It now looks like that assumption may have been unfair: Apple has just updated the terms of the iPhone SDK to allow VoIP calls over 3G. iCall is the first company to be jubilantly crowing that their free VoIP app has implemented 3G VoIP, but others (hopefully Skype!) should be soon to follow.

That’s not to say that VoIP 3G will work universally — T-Mobile in Germany, to my irritation, doesn’t allow VoIP over 3G — but it’s nice to finally see this functionality hit the iPhone after a couple years wait.

[via 9to5Mac]

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOxbLU_32jI&feature=player_embedded

If the most often repeated scuttlebutt is to be believed. Apple’s Tablet, when released later today, will feature some sort of souped up flavor of the iPhone OS. That raises an interesting point: even as it is, the iPhone OS as an operating system brand name is pretty clunky, especially when you’re talking about non-iPhone hardware like the iPod Touch. If the Tablet does indeed run some flavor of the iPhone OS, maybe it needs a name change to reflect its expanded scope?

According to Mac Daily News, that’s just what Apple plans. The video they use as proof is pretty questionable, but nonetheless, MDN claims that Apple will rebrand the iPhone OS to iOS during today’s media event.

Short of a few bigwigs cloistered away in Cupertino’s panic rooms, no one really knows the exact details of what Steve Jobs plans to announce today, but even if this iOS rumor turns out to be false — and I suspect it might be — I think it’s still a pretty good bet that a name change for the iPhone OS might be in store.

Here’s a hilarious 5 minute talk by Eugene Lin, explaining how his career as an iPhone app developer started, shook unsteadily for a while, bumped into some rocks, lost altitude, gained altitude, and finally rocketed skywards when he had a certain ephiphany.

That epiphany: give people what they want. Which these days often involves scantily clad women. Better still, virtual ones. Better still, virtual ones in 3D. Well, sort of 3D, but you get the idea.

Now are you starting to see why the iSlabTabletSlateCanvasBookPadPod is going to sell so well?

Via Boing Boing.

Tablet? YES!

With its own App Store? MAYBE!

More hype than Avatar? CERTAINLY!

If you’ve spent the last week or so thinking about the new iTabletSlateBookCanvasPod and nothing else, you’ll probably want to grab David Weiss’s Prediction score card for tomorrow’s big announcement. Then you can check off the features as they come tumbling from the Jobsian lips.

Or, you could shell out a couple of bucks for Weiss’s freshly-approved iPhone app of the same name. This gives you the chance to drool slavishly over the whole gamut of upcoming tech events. (It’s true: other companies do sometimes hold events and announce things.)

The app connects you to an online community of predictions, predictors, and metadata thereof. You can add your own predictions to the mix, and feast on the glory of recognition by your peers when you are proved right. Alternatively, count how many blogs reported your predictions as damn-near-fact even though you ended up getting them all spectacularly wrong. Which is another kind of glory too.

Via John Gruber.

If astronaut Leroy Chiao has anything to say about it, Apple’s iPhone may be the first smartphone in space.

The former NASA astronaut, who has four missions in space under his belt, including a six and a half month stint on the international space station, has been a Mac nut since 1985. Today he is the Executive Vice President of Excalibur Almaz, a commercial venture that hopes to be putting space tourists into true space journeys by sometime in the next few years.

Chiao was disappointed to have to abandon his preference for Macs during his time as a NASA employee (because NASA was a PC-only shop) but says his first purchase after leaving the US government space program was a new Mac.

He’s an iPhone user, too — although he relies mostly on his 3 year-old twins for app selection so far — but he’s confident Mac and iPhone both have roles in his company’s plans — as long as they “play well with the systems on board.”

Lena Bryce spent four years trying to have a baby.

Then she and her husband downloaded the Free Menstrual Calendar app, timed their couplings strategically and voilà: now they now are the proud parents of a 6 pound-12 ounce bundle of joy named Lola.

“Doctors couldn’t find any reason why we hadn’t been able to get pregnant,” the 30-year-old woman from Glasgow told tabloid The Sun. “It began to weigh heavily on us. We were considering IVF and adoption when Dudley gave me the iPhone for my 30th. I typed in ‘get pregnant’ and downloaded five apps.”

Bryce found the Free Menstrual Calendar the easiest of the five apps to use — it tracks cycles and intercourse data —  and after two months she was in a family way.

The fascinating thing about these apps is that for every couple who wants to have a baby there are probably just as many relieved couples who use them to figuring out when avoid sex, too. We’re waiting for the “I avoided getting knocked up from a regrettable one-night stand thanks to an app” story to hit the tabs.

Via MacWorld

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObN9wSLSI_k

Mac aficionado Matt, who made a retro-awesome video of the Apple website over the years, also concocted this video of an iPhone running on Mac System 1.0.

This old school MacPhone does everything you’d expect from an iPhone.

It simultaneously runs apps, widgets, has an accelerometer and makes calls — the phone dial pad graphic is an excellent touch —  though you won’t be able to play Desert Trek on an iPhone any time soon since he recreated that 1984 look with video effects.

The MacPhone mock-up took him about a day to make it using Keynote and iMovie plus some photoshopped screenshots from his 128kMac.  

According to mobile analytics company Flurry, the Apple Tablet isn’t just a very real product, but they’ve detected up to fifty of them floating through Cupertino, running a new version of the iPhone OS numbered 3.2.

Although it’s amusing to think of a scenario in which the Internet threw a hype party for the a device that never came, it would be a sucker bet indeed to gamble that Apple won’tl announce a tablet-like device on January 27th. That said, the Tablet can’t be the only thing Apple has up its sleeves for Wednesday, and Hot Hardware is claiming that the media event will herald another much anticipated announcement from Apple: the end of AT&T iPhone exclusivity in the United States.

The rumor comes by way of an anonymous source within AT&T. They don’t have any details about what carriers we can expect to see the iPhone on if carrier exclusivity does indeed end, but according to Hot Hardware’s source, this might actually be a welcome development for AT&T, since having iPhone exclusivity has essentially crippled AT&T’s underdeveloped 3G network, with no end in sight. Although the iPhone has made AT&T incredibly profitable, it’s also generated such extreme bad press that their recent advertising efforts have been almost solely dedicated to fighting off network attacks.

Way back when the iPhone was the much-speculated upon Apple product of the future, I took the liberty to imagine a time when the iPhone would be a legitimate mobile gaming competitor, tackling Nintendo and Sony head-on. It was a fun bit of predictification back then, but it’s science fact today. The clearest evidence yet that Nintendo’s dominance of portable gaming might be threatened is Rockstar Games’ much-anticipated Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, an epic, multi-hour crime game that is deeper than anything I’ve seen on the iPhone to date.

John Gruber’s favorite iPhone notepad app, Simplenote, got an updated earlier this week. From now on, it’s free and supported by advertising.

The latest iPhone photo app to grab my attention and that of a handful of Flickr users is Phototropedelic.

Leander posted yesterday about rumoured features for iPhone OS 4.0, including multi-touch gestures OS-wide, background apps, UI changes, and more.

Today, on TechRadar, Gary Marshall outlined his thoughts on 10 ways to make iPhone OS 4.0 damn near perfect, offering ideas such as disabling orientation, deleting default apps, home-screen widgets, document sync from a Mac (or PC), Mail filters, and one I’d love to see—touchable wireless icons (so you can disable Wi-Fi without accessing Settings).

I commented on that article with ideas of my own about what I want to see in iPhone OS 4.0:

Mail needs an optional unified inbox that can be set as the default view. Forcing me to go in and out of each inbox is dumb.

All default apps should be removable, with a suitably chunky warning if you decide to do so. If Apple only hides them, I don’t care. Perhaps there should be a show/hide list in Settings.

The Springboard needs serious work, because while it was great pre-App Store, it’s now a nightmare to arrange/organise apps. One might argue you should do this in iTunes, but plenty of people only use their device, ignoring iTunes in the main.

I’d like to see an app list, available by swiping left of Spotlight to access an app launcher that lists every app on the device, but that can be filtered as per Spotlight. I did a mock-up of this for Cult of Mac back in October.

On deleting an app, you should be able to optionally store its settings, which should (again, optionally) be available when reinstalling the App via iTunes at a later date. In other words, if I’ve spent 20 hours getting 90% of the way through Myst or Peggle, but delete the app, I shouldn’t have to start from scratch on reinstalling it. As it stands, Apple’s decided iPhone and iPod touch gaming should be akin to cheapo Nintendo DS carts, as opposed to something with a battery back-up. Such a system would benefit apps, too.

Also, Apple should fire/beat to within an inch of their life whoever came up with the sync UI in iTunes and get someone with some actual talent to redesign it. I don’t appreciate ‘film’ titles being truncated after about 25 characters, forcing me to check a tiny thumbnail to see if I’m syncing the right one. And the Applications tab is a disgrace, coming across like an interactive Flash website from 1999, not a robust system for organising your apps.

So, what are your wishes for iPhone 4.0? Tell us in the comments!