iPhone - page 454

Everyone knows that the one thing holding the iPhone back in the U.S. is AT&T’s poor 3G coverage, right? With a dropped signal, it can transform from one of the world’s most capable mobile computers to a video iPod that plays a pretty mean version of Doom. Everyone knows the problem lies with the network’s inability to handle iPhone data traffic, as iPhones have no such problems in the European market, Japan, and other regions where it has a major foothold — places where the network load is so much not a problem that they enable data tethering from laptops.

Well, everyone knows but the New York Times and the mobile industry analysts — some of whom work for AT&T — they interviewed about the matter. In a dreadful column titled “AT&T Takes the Blame, Even for iPhone’s Faults“, one of the paper’s correspondents in Silicon Valley, Randall Stross, goes so far as to definitively declare that the iPhone’s design “is contributing to performance problems” and that with regard to Verizon, “AT&T has the superior network nationwide.” Oh, for crying out loud.

Despite the fact that the iPod Touch is increasingly being branded as a gamer’s device, Apple’s never had much truck with gaming… at least in-house. But new calls for a video game artist for the iPhone Gaming Group imply that Apple might be preparing to make a serious push into the gaming market, perhaps to better compete with other handhelds like the Nintendo DS.

A quality infographic is worth a thousand words; by that logic, since GigaOm’s latest infographic breaking down exactly who is getting rich off the iPhone (and by how much) contains roughly exactly that amount of words, it’s actually worth about a million.

Although there’s a lot of fantastic data in the GigaOm infographic, the thing that it makes most explicit is exactly how much money AT&T is making off the iPhone… and exactly how much it has to lose if their exclusivity deal lapses in 2010. According to GigaOm, AT&T actually makes $369 dollars off of the sale of every iPhone. That might not seem like a lot, but it will earn AT&T almost $2 billion dollars over the next two years in monthly data charges on the iPhones sold in the third quarter of 2009 alone.

That’s food for thought. AT&T hasn’t exactly been acting lately like a company about to lose the vaster part of its ill-begotten lucre over the next few years, which is exactly what will happen if its iPhone exclusivity lapses. With the iPhone worth, let’s say, $4 billion a year to AT&T, one wonders exactly how much they’d be willing to pay Apple just to keep control of their bread winner.

Check out out the full infographic at the link below. A lot of sites are just snapping up the entire image and regurgitating it back up locally; that’s not quite fair to the GigaOm guys, so we’re just including a snip of it: you should definitely click through to see the entire thing.

Who Is Getting Rich Off The iPhone [GigaOm]

Forehead arteries pulsing dangerously beneath purpling and apocalyptic skin stretched taut, a Microsoft manager recently told journalists not to use or even mention Apple products at a Windows Mobile event in Germany.

Eyeballs bulging out of his skull like the enraged ocular twins of his every spitted umlaut, the manager rebuked a journalist who had dared to opine over dinner that there has never been an easier-to-use smartphone than the iPhone.

“This is a Microsoft event,” the manager shouted. “Apple products have no business being here!”

Once again, AT&T shook their corporate fist menacingly at the bandwidth hogging iPhone kiddies scampering about their 3G lawn, threatening to charge users more if they keep on taking watching streaming video and availing themselves of other high-bandwidth services on their iPhones.

Speaking to attendees at a USB investor conference in New York, AT&T Wirelss CEO Ralph de la Vega said that AT&T was working on improving service in New York and San Francisco, possibly by introducing pricing tiers that would penalize high-bandwidth users.

Needless to say, if you’re under an existing contract, AT&T can’t just move you over to a tiered data contract… but once your existing contract is up, it’s open season.

UK supermarket giant Tesco has just announced tariffs for iPhone, which will go on sale from the company next Monday (December 14th).

The headline they’ll be using in adverts is that this iPhone is available for as little as £20 per month. Whether you go for a contract or decide to pay-as-you-go, this gets you £60 worth of calls and SMS messages (assuming PAYG customers top up at least £20 per month, which qualifies them for extras – and obviously encourages them to switch to a contract). Also consider that the free credit is applied once a month and only lasts for one month, then automatically expires.

Today, Apple launched a new RSS feed for iPhone Developers, promising updates, tips and how-to information on a range of relevant topics — from development to distribution.

The idea is to keep iPhone devs on top of the ever-shifting highways and byways of getting an app on iTunes, including:
— Tips for submitting apps to the App Store
— Current turnaround time for app reviews
— Program updates
— Development and testing techniques

With complaint sites over rejections and possible scams growing along with the astronomical app sales, something needed to be done to get better info in a timely fashion to devs.

The first few headlines look promising (see below)  it remains to be seen whether the RSS will be another reality distortion field emanator…

iTunes Connect Unavailable Dec 23 – Dec 28

Adding iPhone OS 3.x Features to Your iPhone OS 2.x-compatible Apps

You Can Now Choose the Currency For Your App Store Payments

Updated iTunes Connect Developer Guide Now Posted

Via Network World

First Boston launched its CitizensConnect app in June, giving its citizens the ability use the iPhone to tag locations and upload photos of potholes and other urban hazards; now San Francisco is using the iPhone to build a better city too — through tracking cyclists with its CycleTracks app.

Dragon Dictation is a cool, free little app that allows you to write emails or text messages just by talking into your iPhone, because it transmogrifies your speech into text. In fact, I’m using it to write this.

Well, sorta. As documented by the above-left screenshot, even with the most pristine elocution I could muster, the results provided by Dragon Dictation still left me with errors to clean up. The above-right shot is what happened when I spoke with my everyday, habitually clipped delivery.

So, perhaps not the best solution for popping out a quick text on the road, but a good option to quickly get text down in words that you can straighten out later. Because Dragon Dictation is service-based, connection via wifi or 3G (i wasn’t able to test it using EDGE) is required. And right now Dragon Dictation is free, making it easy to take out for a test spin.

PC users (yes, PC users read Cult of Mac) might correctly identify Dragon as the same engine that powers Dragon NaturallySpeaking, the impressive speech-to-text PC app (and MacSpeech Dictate, a similar app for the rest of us).

Meet the iVictrola, the weirdest and possibly the coolest iPhone dock you’re likely to see this Christmastime.

Or should I say not likely to see, as it appears that the limited stock at Design Within Reach has already sold out. Oh well.

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

Without dedicated analog controls, playing emulated console games on an iPhone or iPod Touch is always going to be a maddeningly imprecise experience, but even so, it’s can be nice to see the graphic capabilities of Apple’s touchscreen line explored.

The latest emulator to hit the iPhone is the 3G4, a Nintendo 64 emulator developed by fourteen year old programmer, “Doogie.” That’s a regrettable internet handle for a precocious teenager smack dab in the voice cracking throes of pubertal hormone imbalance, but it is apropos: the 3G4 is an impressive display, not only of the iPhone’s capabilities, but the programmer’s as well.

It’s not perfect by any means. The graphics have had to be heavily rendered down to work smoothly on the iPhone, and Doogie is still struggling with some elements of the interface: namely duplicate button registers, delayed button presses and a few mysterious crashes. He’s also yet to implement the L, R, and Z keys… and, in truth, it’s hard to see just where he’d cram them on 3G4’s already cramped display. But Doogie’s working on it, and anticipates a release sometime next year… although obviously not through the App Store.

AT&T have released a free tool to the App Store to allow iPhone users experiencing sub-standard service to help AT&T’s technicians improve the network.

By downloading the free Marks the Spot App to your iPhone, you can easily report any service failures you might experience. Dropped a call? No coverage? Data failure? Poor voice quality? Simply load up the app, allow it to pinpoint your position using GPS, select how often the problem happens to you in that area, then fire off your complaint to AT&T’s crackerjack network engineers, who will presumably slap up a new carrier tower in the blink of an eye. Or, at least, roll their eyes, theatrically yawn and go back to sleep.

Right now, of course, it’s impossible to know if the Mark the Spot app is just a placebo public relations tool to mollify their customers, or if AT&T will actually prioritize improving their network by identifying the holes in their cell tower web and patching them up.

Either way, though, it’s a fantastic idea: so fantastic, I wonder how long it is before tools like the Mark the Spot app ship on all smartphones across all networks. In fact, given the fact that the iPhone can already detect when a phone experiences network service problems like dropped calls, I wonder why the iPhone OS doesn’t automatically cough up a tool just like Mark the Spot when it detects an outage.

[via 9to5Mac]

Now, if you’re in the middle of a pub crawl, your reality is already pretty augmented. But if you’re just starting out, or aren’t yet wasted to the point where dropping the iPhone down a street grating is a real possibility, then finding the closest watering hole has never been easier — thanks to Belgian beer-maker Stella Artois’ just-released, free, augmented-reality bar-finder app.

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

If you’re inclined to use your iPhone or iPod Touch for hauling around non-natively supported files like Word documents and Powerpoint presentations, there are apps that will allow you to copy over your files… but those only work once you are out of your house. The awkwardly named Here, File File! aims to change that, offering easy access to the contents of any of your Macs, from anywhere.

Although Here, File File! hasn’t hit the App Store quite yet, the teaser video compelling demonstrates how the app works. After installing the contents of a small DMG on your Macs, Here, File File! allows you to browse, search, slurp and stream any file on your machine or its connected folders to your iPhone or iPod Touch, keeping things secure through user authentication and SSL encryption.

The stand-out functionalities of Here, File File! seem to be its effortless Spotlight integration, the ability to send emails with files attached from your host machine, and functionality for streaming movies or music from your Mac to your iPhone from anywhere, and over any connection (although, presumably, the streaming media feature only works with natively supported formats like MP4 and MP3.)

The developers claim that Here, File File! should be available on the App Store in January, although the price has yet to be announced. In the meantime, you can sign up to be notified when the app is released.

[via TUAW]

In America, filing for a patent is simple, and a patent is often approved by clerks with no actual knowledge of the technology in question. That makes it all too easy to file for frivolous, overly broad patents… then sue other companies for massive pay outs when they unknowingly infringe.

You don’t need any more information to recognize that the entire patent system is completely broken than to just mull over the fact that Apple is being sued over the iPhone’s camera by a small company made up of exactly two lawyers and six staff members whose entire business is patent infringement. And Apple is likely to pay.

In yesterday’s Sunday Business section of the New York Times, tech reporter Jenna Wortham essentially declared the war for smartphone dominance over — with Apple as the champion thanks to the out-sized success of the App Store strategy. Interviewing developers, competitors, Apple execs, and analysts, Wortham looks everywhere for cracks in the iFacade, but ultimately comes up empty. If someone is going to unseat the iPhone as the most profitable and desirable mobile platform, they haven’t emerged yet, all apologies to Android, Palm, Microsoft and RIM intended.

What struck me as I read the article was just how much of a shock to the entire mobile industry the iPhone has been. I see that less in the outsized numbers the magical handheld has posted than I do in the day-late, dollar-short responses of pretty much everyone else (Google possible excepted). Palm still claims that its use of widely embraced web-coding techniques in WebOS app development will help it counter the iPhone, but the 500 apps in its woeful App Catalog counter this notion. RIM and Microsoft note, correctly, that the correlation between quantity and quality isn’t always clear (what else can you say when you’re out-numbered by more than 30-to-1), but offer only vague promises of innovation:

RIM Co-CEO Jim Balsillie: “We’re much more interested in changing the applications and changing the user experience and really unlocking the promise and the money and revenue opportunity for the ecosystem.”

“Our strategy is to look holistically at how we can provide the best all-around user experience,” says Victoria Grady, director of mobile strategy at Microsoft. The Marketplace now has more than 800 apps.

Harry McCracken at Technologizer is worried that Apple’s rumored purchase of Lala could be the best thing for iTunes – or the worst.

Harry has been testing LaLa’s as-yet-unreleased iPhone app, and it’s just like iTunes in the cloud. The app streams your iTunes music collection to wherever you are, plus you can buy new songs for a dime (well, streams of new songs).

“…all of a sudden, the iPhone’s relatively skimpy memory isn’t nearly as much of an issue, since you can stream all the music you’ve got in iTunes on a PC or Mac to your phone. You can also listen to and buy songs from Lala’s 8-million song store. It’s all surprisingly fast for a streaming service, and it even caches recent music you’ve listened to so you’re not completely out of luck if you don’t have an Internet connection.”

Harry is in love, and hopes that Apple will roll Lala’s functionality into iTunes if Apple buys the company. But he’s also worried that Apple may be buying Lala to kill it — it’s a competitive threat to iTunes.

Over at Silicon Alley Insider, the same notion is implicit in a quote from an industry insider who says LaLa’s licenses are non-transferable:

One industry source with years of experience in the digital music business is very surprised by the apparent deal. “I would be completely shocked,” he says. “None of the licenses are transferrable (not that Apple has a hard time getting licenses). Why would they buy it? Again, I’d be shocked.”

Thing is, as far as I know, Apple has no history of buying companies to shut them down. Anyone know any examples? And as Elliot Van Buskirk at Wired points out, Apple does have a history of buying companies to kickstart new products. Apple’s iTunes was based on SoundJam.

In addition, as we reported in August, Apple is building a one of the world’s largest data centers in North Carolina. Given it’s enormous size, the new data center is likely to focus on cloud computing, perhaps hosting services like Lala’s for Apple’s giant iTunes customer base.

A new study looking at decades of cancer data has concluded that cell phones do not cause brain tumors.

Scientists looked at cancer rates in Europe after cell phones were introduced and found no rise in brain cancers. If there was a link between cell phone radiation and  brain tumors, there would have been a rise in cases after the mid-1990s, when cell phones became mainstream, the researchers figured.

Luckily for us, there wasn’t.

Reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (JNCI), the Time Trends in Brain Tumor Incidence Rates study analyzed national cancer registeries in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden between 1974 to 2003 — a mountain of data that covers the entire adult populations of those countries, a total of 16 million people.

Via V3.co.uk.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmLU4GS7zAI

As a smartphone, the iPhone is hard to beat, but as a tool capable of inflicting extraordinary acts of physical violence, the handset is less impressive… even when compared to Apple’s other products.

A MacBook Air, of course, can be stealthily drawn across a carotid artery, but the iPhone’s rounded, lozenge-like design makes it a poor weapon for either stabbing or slashing. Neither can it be dropped like an anvil upon an unsuspecting brain pan, like the iMac, or used as a blunt, aluminum club, like the MacBook Pro. In battle, an iPhone — at best — can be hurled at an opponent as a distraction while you sprint, comically hooting, in the other direction. It’s a bizarre misstep in Jonathan Ives’ oeuvre of gladiatorial product designs.

Still, where Apple may have failed to deliver, enter the makers to transform the iPhone into the weapon of mass destruction it should be. Christopher Rojas took the TouchOSC application and used his iPhone to remote control a fantastic, solar-powered Arduino Tank, built out of parts from Sparkfun.

In theory, officially introducing China up to the charms of the iPhone should have been a coup for Apple, potentially generating the sale of millions of handsets in the largest market on Earth. But the reality looks far bleaker: according to data from the official Chinese online iPhone store, Taobao.com, only five iPhones were sold in the first two weeks of its online availability.

Taobao.com is not the only place selling iPhones: Apple’s carrier partner in China, China Unicom, is also selling iPhones, but has not released official numbers. That said, Taobao.com’s numbers should be viewed grimly: it’s the largest and most frequented electronics site in China… the Chinese equivalent of Amazon.com.

Square-Enix’s cute little RPG, Song Summoner was an adorable little time waster back when it was released back in July of 2008 for the Apple iPod. It’s gameplay was a fusion between the tactical, turn-based stategy battles of Final Fantasy Tactics and the creature creation of Monster Rancher, an old PlayStation game in which you created unique Pokemon-like monsters to fight for you by plugging CDs into your console. Song Summoner worked similarly, allowing you to pick any MP3 on your iPod and create a unique soldier to fight for you, with stats and appearance plucked by algorithm from the data of the track.

It was a game I eagerly bought and desperately wanted to love. There was only one problem: even though it was released in 2008, and the iPhone and iPod Touch had been available for over a year, Song Summoner was a click-wheel game, only available on Apple’s non-touchscreen iPod line. Fast forward a year and a half, though, and Square-Enix is finally correcting that misstep: for $10, you can now pick up an updated version of Song Summoner subtitled “The Unsung Hereos” on the App Store. It contains the first Song Summoner came, as well as a sequel that is speculated to have gone unreleased thanks to Apple ending support for click-wheel games. There’s also a free lite version available for you to try.

If you’re looking to do some gaming this weekend, give Song Summoner a shot. The original was a blast despite the control scheme; for $10, I think the touchscreen version should probably be one of the better and more content rich games to hit the App Store this month.

I imagine that in a lot of totally fundamental ways, pitching a university to let you teach a new course must be a lot like pitching a tech article to a mainstream magazine. It all starts with throwing random words at a sheet of brainstorming paper, then cynically deciding that while “iPhone: the future of music composition” is clearly ridiculous, it would look good as a headline [in the course catalog], so let’s see where it gets us anyway. Quickly inducing hyperventilation in order to simulate breathless excitement, you pick up the phone, call your editor [department head] and shout: “The iPhone is the future of music! No one else has done it before, so we’ll be at the forefront, reporting [teaching] about a fantastic new era meshing technology and art!”

Yes, go forth, my son. Fortune favors the bold! Do your job right and if you’re a tech journalist, you’ll make about $800. But if you’re a university professor, like Georg Essl of the University of Michigan? You may just have taken your first step towards tenure!

Two weeks ago, we mentioned that the ALK’s CoPilot Live app, an already inexpensive iPhone GPS option, went on sale for $20 (from $35) during Thanksgiving.

Today, ALK announced they’re introducing a similar deal — now $25 — through the end of December.

To make the deal even more enticing, they’re making available a “Premium Live” package that includes live traffic info and routing (from the same source as the $80 Navigon app), a live Internet local search feature and something I haven’t seen before on a GPS app: A live gas-price feature that can route you to the cheapest gas near your location.

The Premium Live option runs an extra $20/year, but the savings from hassle-free routing to cheap gas might just make the package valuable enough to pay for itself.

First Verizon snubbed AT&T’s 3G coverage in a snarky “There’s A Map for That” advertisement. Then they called the iPhone a Misfit Toy thanks to AT&T’s spotty 3G network. AT&T got hysterical about it, going to court to get the “false and misleading” ads removed from the air. Verizon’s breezy response: “The Truth Hurts.”

Now it looks like the little purse fight between the nation’s two largest cell providers is at an end: both Verizon and AT&T filed for an official dismissal of the case in an Atlanta federal court yesterday. Verizon also asked for their counter-suit against AT&T to be dismissed.

It’s hard to think of a more forward thinking bunch of visionaries than the true pioneers of the fastly changing frontiers of technology: hard core pornographers.

Time after time — Betamax, VHS, Laser Discs, DVD, Blu-Ray and the Internet — pornographers are the first to embrace new technology, hoping to add yet another sales channel to their already rich smut peddling arrays. Compare pornographers to industries like the RIAA or MPAA, who are hopeless to embrace new technology that might threaten their old, stagnating business models, and it’s really hard not to think pornographers are one of the few media entities out there who really get tech.

Needless to say, porn would like a piece of the App Store, but Apple’s prudish policies aren’t having any of that. But pornographers are nothing if not ingenious, and a group of them have now launched the Sex App Shop, which the press release heralds as “the world’s first legal alternative to [the App Store],” featuring a wide range of adult content from major labels like Playboy, Vivid, VCA, Wicked Pictures and New Sensation. Apps costs $0.99, and yearly memberships with unlimited downloads is available for $99.