iPhone - page 439

iHome’s pantheon of docks, clocks, and speakers for the iPhone and iPod are pretty hard to keep straight, but their flagship iP90 alarm clock docking station has always been one of their more visible products… and now they’ve updated it with a host of new features that make the iP90 a better buy than before.

Like its previous incarnation, the iP90 will charge and play music from the iPhone and iPod, and functions as a speaker dock, a dual alarm clock and an AM/FM radio. The new iP90’s most immediately obvious improvement, though, is a larger and more clear display, as well as improved sound quality thanks to Reson8 stereo speaker chambers as well as adjustable bass and treble.

In addition, the iP90 now has a Time Sync feature that automatically sets the time on your clock to the more trustworthy time on your iPhone or iPod. A switch for changing the clock to daylight savings time is also there, although if your phone is setting the time for you, I don’t really see the point.

Like the earlier model, the iP90 looks like a good addition to any iPhone owners bedside table. It will cost $99.

Taking their cue from start-ups like Square, Visa is planning to get in on the iPhone payment act, with a line of special iPhone cases that will allow you to make credit card purchases at retail just by waving your handset in front of a cash register.

Over at Daring Fireball, John Gruber pointed out this excellent alt-universe mock-up of what icons for non-universal iPhone apps should look like on the iPad home screen.

Apple’s always experimenting with new ways to interact with their devices, and their latest patent takes that experiment one step further into turning your iPhone into a programmable heart rate monitor.

The patent describes a design in which a series of electrodes are seamlessly embedded into the iPhone’s shell in such a way that they are not “visibly or haptically distinguishable on the device.”

You may not be able to see or feel these electrodes, but that doesn’t mean they don’t do anything: instead, they’ll constantly measure your heart rate, with the data used to do anything from measure burned calories to change your music depending on your mood to automatically discharge the battery as a “paddle shock” when your heart suddenly explodes. Win!

Over the past few days, the latest beta of the iPhone OS has afforded a treasure trove of revelations about upcoming software improvements, but few previously unknown details about the hardware of the upcoming 4G iPhone and iPod Touch.

This is news, though: two new presets in the underlying architecture of iPhone OS 4.0 tease the possibility that the next iPhone, and possibly the next iPod Touch, will gain the ability to shoot 720p video.

These are the video presets in question:

AVCaptureSessionPreset640×480
AVCaptureSessionPreset1280×720

That’s about what we expected: phones are more than capable of recording HD videos these days. Still, it’s nice to get further confirmation that the iPhone’s wimpy camera modules are about to get an industry-best upgrade.

An exciting new feature in the latest iPhone OS 4.0 beta might finally address a long standing complaint of both users and app developers: the inability to easily move non-media files between the iPhone and a computer. According to Boy Genius Report, iPhone OS 4.0’s new File Sharing feature will allow you to transfer and sync files directly between your iPhone and your computer.

All you do is plug your iPhone into iTunes, go to the Apps tab and scroll down. On the left side of the screen, you choose an app from a list of supported programs, while the right side of the screen allows you to copy files into that app’s sandbox or save them from your iPhone onto your computer.

The File Sharing feature doesn’t work yet, but it’s an exciting hint at things to come. It looks like a lot of the office and productivity suites on the iPhone OS are about to get a lot easier to use across multiple platforms.

Beta 3 of the iPhone OS 4.0 SDK has a couple of great new interface features, including the ability to close background apps through a hold-and-close method similar to the way deleting programs functions on the operating system, but I think I like the new media player widgets best.

In the latest beta, if you load the multitasking interface you see a new set of widgets that sit in the dock to control iPod playback. The widgets include three buttons for track navigation (Play/Pause, Track Back, Track Forward), a shortcut to launch the iPod application, and a software orientation lock which serves the same function as the iPad’s hardware switch. Accessing the widgets is as simple as swiping left on the dock.

Very slick, but what interests me most is the possibility of further widget sets. If third-party developers can program their own widgets to control background apps from the dock, multitasking on iPhone OS 4.0 is just going to rock. Skype widgets anyone? My guess is that’s just what Apple has in mind, and the screen orientation lock will be the one standard icon

In what might charitably be called the most toothless and limp parody this side of your dentureless grampa doing a timely Grover Cleveland impersonationation right before nap time, Ellen DeGeneres went on her talk show on Monday to poke fun at the iPhone 3Gs.

Ellen’s hilarious gag? When she wants to send a text message, she can’t do it through the “Maps” application. The punchline? The iPhone’s hard to use!

I am all for the Federal government funding and deploying a robust and relentless antitrust division. I don’t wish to go into detail or name examples here and now, but I believe the emasculation of antitrust and restraint of trade investigation and prosecution over the past 30 years has meant a great disservice to the public and to the economy. If that arm of the Justice Department gets revived under Obama it will be a good thing for the country and for the world.

With respect to antitrust claims against Apple related to either the iPhone Developer’s Agreement or the iAds program I don’t think Apple has a thing to worry about.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCU0RcoxKxE&feature=player_embedded#!

Italy’s Justice Minister used an iPhone to cite a wiretapping law during a prime-time talk show.

Minister Angelino Alfano, best known outside Italy for a controversial immunity law meant to save the bacon of beleaguered Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, pulled out a patriotic iPhone to consult an app called Laws and Codices (Codici and Leggi).

The €19.99 euro app promises to guide users through Italy’s notoriously complicated legal system, which often makes the old quip true that “in Italy, under the law, everything is permitted, especially that which is prohibited.”

Alfano used it on the show to quote verbatim a  much-debated law on wiretapping, the talk show was about the “war over wiretaps,” which has again exploded recently.

While there’s no shortage of politicians who use Apple products — of late iPad aficionados Norway’s Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and Russian premier Dimitri Medvedev — this may be the first time one relies on an app to get it right in public.

Via iPhoner, hat tip to  Andrea Nepori

If you took the plunge on the Spirit jailbreak over the weekend, no need to wait for AT&T to fulfill their long ignored promise to bring data tethering to the iPhone in the United States: the MyWi App will turn your iPhone into a wireless 3G modem right now.

The app costs $10 on jailbroken iPhones and it looks pretty simple: you just launch the MyWi app, flip the “WiFi Tethering” switch to “On” and then you can connect any WiFi-capable device to your iPhone.

This would be a great way to make your iPad WiFi 3G capable while saving yourself $130 bucks. If you want to try MyWi, you can grab it now through Cydia.

[via Gadget Lab]

According to the Wall Street Journal, industry insiders are predicting that Apple will cave on the terms of the iPhone 4.0 SDK rather than be dragged into an antitrust battle over them.

As a contributor to Cult of Mac, you can probably guess that I’m an Apple fanboy. I showed up to the Apple Store at 5:45 AM on April 3rd (iPad Day for you civilians) ready to have my mind blown. Little did I know that I would soon be returning my iPad to that same Apple store.

I blame iPhone OS 4.0 and here’s why:

Picture copyright CNN

This weekend market the White House Correspondents Association, an annual black tie dinner when a large number of political insiders gather to smile politely while a washed-up comic offers up lame impressions of Jimmy Carter. (With the lone exception being that time that Stephen Colbert shot everybody in the face)

During the dreaded run-up to Jay Leno’s observations about the foibles of modern life, CNN’s Ed Henry convinced First Lady Michelle Obama to send her first-ever Tweet from his iPhone. Except she couldn’t — because she had no idea how to type on it.

“How do you type on this?” she asked, before handing the phone back to Henry and dictating the highly inoffensive “from flotus: ‘here at dinner this is officially my first Tweet. i am looking forward to some good laughs from the potus and jay'”.

There you have it. No word on whether Steve Jobs is sending the White House the entire collection of “This is how you…” ads from when the iPhone was first introduced.

CNN via The Awl

Cult of Mac reader Ian Chan was inspired by our recent story of a football player getting grounded after listening to his iPod during landing to pen the above comic on airplane safety.

Chan — along with everyone else who has forgotten to turn off a device on board — says:

“I might be overreacting, but perhaps you (the FAA) should worry more about your pilots making $17,000 a year and being on food stamps [warning, link to Michael Moore] than me listening to Miley Cyrus on my flight home.”

Word.

Via Ian Chan

Spirit by comex allows you to jailbreak your device, to get complete control over it (see why you should jailbreak here). Currently, spirit allows you to jailbreak any device that has already been upgraded to firmware 3.1.2, 3.1.3 or even an iPad on version 3.2. However, it will NOT unlock the device, enabling it to be used with different GSM carriers worldwide.

The “Spirit” iPad/iPhone jailbreak is available for download from the Dev Team. You can download Spirit here.

The free, untethered jailbreak is available for Mac and Windows, and works with any iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch on firmware 3.1.2, 3.1.3, or 3.2. It’s a quick, easy, one-click process, according to QuickPwn, although the Cydia app is buggy. Just download the jailbreak software, plug in your device, and your iPad or iPhone is instantly recognized. Hit the “Jailbreak” button and you’re done.

Note: Before performing a jailbreaking make absolutely sure you’ve got a backup of your SHSH blobs so that if anything goes wrong you can restore to 3.1.2. You can find a step-by-step guide from Redmond Pie here.

Spirit is not a carrier unlock (which allows you to use unauthorized wireless carriers like T-Mobile).

The Dev Team highly recommend syncing with iTunes before trying this jailbreak. If anything goes wrong, you will have to restore the device. It’s especially iffy on the iPad.

Note: On iPad, all this is still sort of beta. Some packages in Cydia, not designed for iPad, might screw up your system and require you to restore. Be careful. (And no, Cydia’s appearance is not final.)

Dev Team: Spirit Freed.

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 Asteroid Panic (iPad), Dizzypad, Doppelgänger, PapiJump for iPad, and Super Turbo Action Pig.

I’m surprised that they were still a contender, but according to Forbes, Apple has just reached a milestone: they’ve just passed Motorola as the largest phone maker in the United States.

Cupertino’s already got a history of stepping down on app developers who use Apple’s own app icons in their software, so clearly they are protective of their assets, but now words comes that Apple has filed trademark motions on a number of its official app icons.

None of them are new, so there’s no forthcoming features of future devices to spy here. Each icon is marked by a description as well as a list of colors, and an image of each app icon has been submitted in the huge size of 1000×1000 pixels, which means that Apple shouldn’t have to re-render any of them for the next decade to come.

Although individuals have already demonstrated working hacks of Apple’s iPad, it seems like it’s taking them forever to actually release a working jailbreak… and if you’re an iPod Touch owner, it seems like it’s been even longer since the first working, untethered 3.1.3 jailbreak was demonstrated, only to never be released.

It looks now like everyone has something to look forward. According to the iPhone Dev Team’s blog, they intend on releasing an iPadjailbreak sometime soon after the iPad 3G goes on sale.

It was a Brian J. Hogan, a 21-year-old resident of Redwood City, California, who found Apple’s iPhone in a bar, according to Wired.com.

He now regrets not trying harder to contact Apple, and sold the phone to Gizmodo because they told him “there was nothing wrong in sharing the phone with the tech press,” according to a statetment provided by his attorney to Wired.com.

Hogan has been interviewed by law enforcement investigators but has not been charged with a crime. His attorney says he is willing to cooperate with authorities…

… The person who found the phone “is very definitely one of the people who is being looked at as a suspect in theft,” San Mateo County Chief Deputy District Attorney Stephen Wagstaffe told Wired.com Wednesday. “Assuming there’s ultimately a crime here. That’s what we’re still gauging, is this a crime, is it a theft?”

… A friend of Hogan’s then offered to call Apple Care on Hogan’s behalf, according to Hogan’s lawyer. That apparently was the extent of Hogan’s efforts to return the phone.

Gay hook-up app Grindr, in the hot seat after a 15-year-old Canadian teen says he was assaulted by a 54-year old met via the free app, has issued a statement about the case.

App makers Nearby Buddy Finder are standing by their terms of use and parental control in the hopes of avoiding legal problems:

“Grindr has a very strict 18 years-and-over terms of use policy that all users of our service must agree to, additionally we actively monitor for potential violations of this policy and bar anyone who violates its terms.

We voluntarily have this policy in place to help protect the safety of minors. Unfortunately, as with any Web technology, people can find ways to bypass even the most robust control mechanisms.”

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The iPhone perhaps does not have the native tele-dildonic abilities of more prolifically vibrating devices like the Nintendo Wiimote, but if you’ve ever looked at your beloved handset and wished that love could be exhibited in a deep muscular rubdown, there’s an app for that… along with a $5,999 chair.

The Human Touch Connect is your typical Brookstone-esque massage chair, with the added ability to be controlled through the Internet, Bluetooth or any iPhone OS device. Use the app and you have access to a full library of massaging programs like the Coccyx Blaster or the O-Ring Loosener, although be wary of using the triggering the latter setting without a waterproof iPhone case.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fyx7U7TH2bQ

This fantastic proof of concept video by the guys over at Magic Jungle Software demonstrates their forthcoming game, Chopper 2, being output from an iPad to a 42-inch HDTV, with an iPhone or iPod Touch used as the game’s controller.

It looks incredible, but perhaps more interesting is Distorted Loop’s take on the video, which is that this would be a fantastic direction for a relaunched Apple TV to take: an audio-visual, app-running console hooked up to your television that can be controlled by an iPhone, iPod Touch or even a “future low-cost touch sensitive remote control” that would ship in the box.

A product like that would not only finally realize the wasted potential of the Apple TV product line, but put Apple on track to compete with the likes of the Wii, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 as furiously as the iPhone currently competes with the Nintendo DS.