iPhone - page 447

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

The official iPhone launch in China was greeted with shorter lines than expected  due to lousy weather and because about a million early adopters have already bought them on the gray market.

People did stand in line, just not super long ones — check out the empty red ropes — and a persistent drizzle certainly didn’t entice buyers to be the first to get their hands on an official iPhone.

Also contributing to a less than hysterical welcome were the fact that the official market 8G iPhone has no wi-fi (a bow to the country’s regulatory demands) and costs about $730 dollars without a service contract.
From there, prices levitate to a heady $1,024 for the iPhone 3GS.
Gray market versions, found in many electronic marts, cost about 20% less, with wi-fi.

China Unicom has said any handset that supports its 3G mobile standard will be able to use its network, so gray-market iPhone users can buy service contracts just like users of the official handset. The carrier refused to provide info on how many customers had reserved iPhones.

Via MacWorld

I recently came across orbit, which is one of the best navigation options available for the iPhone and iPod Touch. I have an iPhone that has over 100 applications and it’s definitely a pain to get to the applications on the last page. I can always put the useful applications on the first page but at this point, I have just stopped arranging them. This is when Orbit enters the scene. Instead of swiping across all these pages, it lets me jump to a particular page quickly using simple tile view, saving me a lot of time. That’s the reason it’s one of my favorites.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs04IBr-8L4

Here’s what might happen if Apple invented an  iPhone called the 4G Talk.  Except, unlike what you would expect from Apple, it talks and doesn’t have anything nice to say.

Put your headphones on — as it taunts the poor guy trying to use it, the phone also doesn’t say stuff you’d want your co-workers to overhear.

Props to spoofsters Back of the Class for giving it an Apple-like voice.

Hat-tip to CoM reader Robot Emperor for sending it our way.

‘Tis the season for folks to bust out their best Home Ec skills (or their credit cards) in search of costumery to frighten and delight the young and old alike out trick or treating, or just looking for a few good laughs on Halloween.

Back in 2007, when the iPhone had been out just a few months, we saw a raft of costumes related to Apple’s newest technological wonderment. But so far in the succeeding years, we’ve not seen a whole lot of new takes on the idea and frankly, what we have seen has been pretty lame.

Look at the guy in the picture above. He had to be purposely dressing it down at a party full of Windows aficionados, right? But in the gallery that follows, we’ve had to reach back in time for things better than this. Apple fans seem to have fallen creatively short in recent years.

Is it possible nowadays to dress like a piece of technology known for its elegant design and not look like a complete (and uncomfortable) buffoon?

Let us know what you’ve found out there in comments below, or submit pics of your own awesome Apple-related costume designs and we’ll feature another gallery of the best down the road.

My beloved truck used to be behind the times. The factory-installed stereo had a cassette deck. Remember them? No iPod/iPhone connection and worse, no hands-free cellphone.

But now its got a shiny Sony Xplod aftermarket stereo, which features both iPod and Bluetooth connectivity.

There’s a lot of replacement stereos, but the Xplod has the easiest Bluetooth setup ever, and it always makes a seamless connection with my iPhone. It just works, every time, period. Now I’m always chatting it up in while I’m driving, and I love streaming music via Bluetooth. I should have got one years ago.

Full review after the jump.

Condé Nast announced that it will launch a digital version of men’s mag GQ on November 18 in tandem with the print issue.

The digital version available on iTunes will cost $2.99, half of the newsstand price, and there’s no word on whether snail mail subscribers get a discount. Condé says digital GQ be a perfect clone of the dead tree GQ, right down to the ads.

Jabra’s new Stone headset is the first non-dorky Bluetooth headset I’ve ever seen.

Actually, it’s the second. The first was a Secret Service-style single earbud from Hong Kong that clipped to your shirt. Trouble is, it sounded awful.

The Stone should have no such trouble: it supports A2DP (good for music, even though it’s a single earpiece) and has nice, clear noise-canceling microphone. Volume controls are handled by the surface of the Stone, which is touch-sensitive – how cool is that?

It’s called the Stone because when docked into its portable charging dock, the pair look like a polished stone.

But boy, does it need that charging dock. Battery life is a skimpy two hours talk time, according to Jabra (and less than an hour according to one early review). The charging dock is good for three charges of the headset before it too has to be recharged. Standby is 12 hours.

Jabra’s Stone costs $130 and will be available exclusively from AT&T in early November. Might be worth the price  for the cool touchscreen volume controls — and for not making you look like Lieutenant Uhura.

Back in July this year, I wrote a short scribble on my personal site listing a handful of ideas for iPhone apps.

The first was something I called “Supermarket Spotlight”, and it was described thus:

“Like Spotlight on your Mac, but for supermarkets in meatspace. You tell it that you’re in Tesco in Trowbridge, then start typing in the product you’re after. It tells you: ‘Aisle 12, section 2, top shelf, on the right if you’ve got your back to the cash tills.’ Either that, or it simply does the augmented reality thing and takes you there, beeping louder as you get closer, like a geiger counter.”

I never expected anyone to actually make it.

This iPhone clone found by a reporter at a trade show in Asia comes with about as ugly an add-on as possible: a squashed qwerty keyboard with keys that look like veneers gone wrong.

It’s pretty ingenious, as much as lacking in aesthetics, since the keyboard is integrated into a protector case (which also looks fittingly hideous) with a custom connector for the phone.

For those of you who want an external keyboard for your iPhone, would  you want it badly enough to use this one?

Via Pocket Lint

When iTunes 9 came out, a lot of people (myself included) were delighted to see a new feature that allowed you to re-arrange the apps on your iPhone’s screens using your desktop computer.

Hooray, we cheered. No more tedious dragging of little wriggling icons from one screen to another. Now we can put our apps where we want them to be, and never have to worry about them again.

Wrong.

It turns out that using this feature in iTunes 9 is a complete waste of time, thanks to the way the iPhone OS works. Here’s why.

Last week, we published The Complete Guide to Unlocking and Jailbreaking your iPhone and iPod Touch. Here’s a list of must have apps and tweaks that you’ve enabled by following our guide. Through Cydia, you can download and install each item below and add new functionality and usefulness to your iPhone. I give you the Top Ten Must Have iPhone Jailbreak Apps:

Warning: This method no longer works. To jailbreak the latest firmware, check out greenpois0n/limera1n/Pwnage Tool

George Hotz a.k.a GeoHot has released the Mac version of blackra1n, his 1-click jailbreak solution. Just like the Windows version, it is pretty easy to use and worked perfectly with my iPod Touch 2G and iPhone 3G. Besides the tool, there’s a blackra1n application that gets automatically installed on the iPhone after jailbreak, which gives you option to install Cydia and some other alternatives like RockYourPhone and Icy.

Here’s see how it works.

HAVA just launched a mobile player for iPhone, putting it further into competition with rival service Slingbox.

They call it place-shifting, but lingo aside it allows you to control your live home TV from broadband Internet or computer or mobile phone — and watch it in another room, across town or while stuck in an airport abroad.

HAVA also has DVR capability to allow users to start a recording to their PC or attached storage, pause, rewind or fast forward live TV.

The Hava iPhone app costs $9.99 and you’ll need one of their devices, which start at $149.00 for the platinum HD model, plus broadband connections on both ends and a WIFI connection for your iPhone. (The Slingbox Solo starts at $179 and its companion iPhone app costs $29.99)

Ever since the two companies launched within a year of each other about five years ago, debate has sprung up — in both the Hava community and the Slingbox camp — about which one is better.

Let us know which one you’re using and whether you’d recommend it.

The art of automata is all about making beautiful mechanical objects out of wood and other materials.

When Murtaza Lakdawala discovered automata, he also got inspiration for a neat project: a hand-cranked rotating stand for his iPhone. And this is the result.

PwnageTool for Mac has been updated to version 3.1.4 by the DevTeam. This new update basically adds firmware 3.1.2 jailbreak support. It currently supports jailbreaking all the devices except iPod Touch 3G.

PwnageTool is currently compatible with Intel Mac only. The reason some would prefer it to blackra1n is that it allows you to ‘hacktivate’ the phone (use it without AT&T’s iPhone data plan) and the unlock is preserved even through firmware updates. However, to unlock an iPhone 3G or iPhone 3GS, make sure that you have a firmware 3.0 (or 3.0.1) baseband on the phone.

iPhone users can now go keyless, if they want to spend $500 for the Viper SmartStart system.

The app is available, gratis, on iTunes. But you need a Viper receiver that costs half a grand to be able to say goodbye to your keys. (If you’ve already got a Viper system, you can add on the iPhone SmartStart module for $299.)

SmartStart lets you lock or unlock  your car, set the alarm, start it from remote, unlock the trunk and there’s a “panic or car finder” for those parking lot nightmares. You can also manage more than one car on it and assign more than one user per car — which the company says is great for families but somehow I imagine more “War of the Roses” shenanigans.

Cool idea, but I can’t imagine paying that for it. How much would you spend to control your car from your iPhone?

Blackra1n, iPhone hacker George Hotz’s software for 1-click jailbreaking, has been released for all existing iPhone and iPod Touch devices. However, it will NOT unlock the device, enabling it to be used with different GSM carriers worldwide.

Blackra1n is currently compatible with Windows only — or “all Windows that matter,” in GeoHot’s words. I am supposing that means Windows XP, Windows Vista and hopefully Windows 7 RC. Currently, there is no word on a Mac version — but it should be released soon as well.

What blackra1n does is…

As more and more U.S. iPhone users become fed up with AT&T, some are seriously starting to consider using Apple’s iPod Touch as a full-time phone.

Trouble is, the Touch doesn’t have cell phone radio. But pair it with a personal WiFi router, like Verizon’s MiFi, and a service like Skype, and the Touch might be a viable full-time VOIP phone.

CoM reader Alex Bowles’ contract with AT&T expires in January, so he seriously looked into replacing his iPhone with an iPod Touch and Verizon’s MiFi. Here’s what he found.

Famous iPhone hacker George Hotz (better known as GeoHot) claims to be working on a tool that might revolutionize the current jailbreak scenario! Called blackra1n, the tool promises to jailbreak all  existing iPhone and iPod Touch devices with 3.1.2 installed in just a matter of seconds, according to GeoHot. However, it will NOT unlock the device, enabling it to be used with different GSM carriers worldwide.

Currently, jailbreaking an iPhone or iPod Touch is a complex and time-consuming process, requiring the creation of custom firmware, entering several different modes, etc. There are separate tools for different devices and different firmware versions. Not only this, each generally requries you to follow a different procedure. It’s a pain.

But with blackra1n, jailbreaking promises to be a few simple clicks for any iPhone or iPod Touch.

The last tool released by GeoHot was purplera1n, a simple solution, which allowed iPhone 3GS users to jailbreak any OOTB (out-of-the-box) phone with firmware version 3.0 with a single click. The procedure was simpler and less painful, compared to DevTeam‘s offerings, which required you to choose between several different options. But purplera1n contained a few bugs that forced him to kill the project after the release of firmware update 3.0.1.

However, blackra1n will be quite different from purplera1n because it is based off a completely different exploit, GeoHot says. GeoHot expects to release the tool really soon although, after dealing with some technical obstacles. Hopefully, it will be out this weekend.

Hotz is a 21-year-old hacker who is famous for unlocking the first iPhone ever soon after its debut in 2007. After a break, he recently made a comeback to the iPhone scene with the release of his jailbreak and unlock solutions for iPhone OS 3.0 that offered tough competition to the DevTeam.

Adobe has announced the release of Photoshop for your iPhone or iPod touch – although the software is closely tied to Adobe’s Photoshop.com photo hosting and sharing service.

Microsoft’s “Pink” phones, a Zune-like response to Apple’s iPhone, is on the verge of collapse, as the company ignores advice coming from the increasingly disgruntled team of Danger employees. The key mistake, according to leaks is the software giant’s demanding a firewall between the Pink program (also known as the Zune Phone) and Windows Mobile and Zune projects.

According to AppleInsider, Microsoft’s isolation of the Danger team prevented the engineers and others to pass along lessons learned while developing Danger’s Sidekick. Since acquiring the smartphone maker in 2008, Microsoft has seen most of the Danger team either be fired or walk.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ircH4hwjx60

If you’ve ever wondered what the point of those flashlight apps are, wonder no more: they are kick-butt investigation tools.

The next time you need to crawl down a 150-foot electrical conduit and don’t have a flashlight —  your iPhone can light the way, a recent episode of CSI reminds us.

In a cheesy bit of iProduct placement, the actor hands his iPhone-cum-flashlight over to the guy who will have to brave the crawl space saying “There’s an app for that.”

There are a bunch of these apps on iTunes, most are free, ranging from Funny Flashlight to myLite (also has strobe effects), with jokey descriptions like “Are you scared of the dark?”

Has anyone found the flashlight app handy — aside from helping solve heinous crimes?

Via Art of the iPhone

Apple has just released a new firmware update, version 3.1.2 for the existing iPhone and iPod Touch range, which contains no new features but fixes an important issue with cellular network reception. The new software fixes dropped cell connections until the iPhone is restarted, according to Apple.

However, it looks like the update does contain a new baseband version in order to fix the issue, therefore if you have an unlocked iPhone 3G or iPhone 3GS, do not update until there is confirmation from a trusted source, like the iPhone DevTeam. If you’re planning to jailbreak, you should wait as this firmware version is currently incompatible with the latest jailbreak tools. But updates will soon be released to resolve the compatibility problem, according to the iPhone DevTeam.

The complete-ish list of changes, according to Apple’s cryptic update notes, is as documented below:

• Resolves sporadic issue that may cause iPhone to not wake from sleep.
• Resolves intermittent issue that may interrupt cellular network services until restart.
• Fixes bug that could cause occasional crash during video streaming.

Clearly, it indicates no new features, unless there are some hidden ones. ;)

To download the new firmware for your iPhone, select the model below to download it directly from Apple’s server or open iTunes and click iTunes –> Check for Updates in the menu bar.

• iPhone
• iPhone 3G
• iPhone 3GS

The New York Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) gave the green light to Station Stops, an app with handy time tables, after having it yanked from iTunes for intellectual property claims against the developer.

Station Stops, which costs $2.99, is back in the Apple store this week.
It’s a major victory for the developer/blogger/commuter Chris Schoenfeld, who saw his work pulled from iTunes in August and on the receiving end of a nastygram from MTA lawyers.

The app provides a timetable for the Metro-North Railroad for regularly-scheduled trains departing and arriving from Grand Central Station.
Schoenfeld ran into trouble with the MTA because although they provide schedules to Google Transit, they do not release the data publicly. To build his app, Schoenfeld did it the old way — by entering data manually from the published public schedule.

More on how the MTA saw the light after the jump.

If you were around when Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda made American cultural history in 1969 with “Easy Rider,” you may have noticed the announcement about the iBike Rider, an iPhone case and more for motorcycle riders. While quite a stir was made about helmet-mounted GPS, or the handlebar iPhone case and even the iPod bike charger, the iBike Rider is for hog-owners.

The iBike is a weather-proof case for $42 but also offers the option of piping iPhone conversations directly into your helmet for an added $85. The one drawback: the iBike currently ships from France.

[Via Gizmodo and iBike Rider]