iPhone - page 472

The App Store just gets weirder with every passing day. To celebrate, consider this the first in an occasional series of posts looking at the weirder stuff that’s popping up there.

10 seconds ago is a strange audio widget that records the ambient sounds coming in through the mic, delays them by, um, ten seconds, and plays them out through the speaker. Or, as the app’s maker puts it:

“When you try, don’t you think your vision sometimes hinders your concentration on the sound? If so, then try this tiny app.”

Couldn’t have explained it better myself. (There’s a pro version too, sonic delay fans.)

Giant discount chain Wal-Mart in November may become the second retailer to sell Apple’s iPhone, a report said Monday.

Wal-Mart, which already sells a huge number of iPods, could announce a deal Nov. 15, just two weeks before the retail sector’s “Black Monday,” according to the Boy Genius Report website.

In September, electronics retailer Best Buy began selling iPhones, making it the first third-party retailer to offer the Apple handset.

Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney told Cult of Mac if the report is true, the addition of Wal-Mart with its 3,500 stores, would be a good move.

“Problem is that Wal-Mart shoppers are on budgets and the iPhone is expensive for them both in device cost and service,” Dulaney wrote in an e-mail.

Experience the sensations and mind twisting perceptions you get by ingesting psychotropic drugs – without the harmful side-effects – using a cool new app from Reality Jockey, Ltd.

Available today on the AppStore, the free single release and the $2.99 album release of RjDj will amaze and amuse you with its combination of built-in soundscapes and the unique contribution your personal reality brings to the party.

Using the microphone of your iPhone, RjDj takes the sounds of whatever ambient environment you find yourself in and morphs them into the single built-in track on the free version, or into one of six tracks on the album version, to both create and influence the music you hear.

The program also allows you to record the unique sensations you have while walking through the city, sitting with friends at a cafe, or playing with children in the garden, which you can save and listen to like a normal music track. Well, maybe not normal, but the effects are stunning, sometimes jarring, nonetheless.

In a world of one-off apps available for the iPhone, RjDj is one I could see going back to again and again.

Over at Howard Forums, user Windsor43 relates the hilarious tale of how an SMS message from him to his wife autocorrected the word “nah” to “nag”.

“Thanks, Steve,” Windsor43 says, “for making my wife almost Think Different.”

I suspect most of us can relate to that one. I tend to sign off messages to loved ones with “gx”, but the iPhone likes to correct that to “Gf”. Is that supposed to be short for “girlfriend” or something? No matter; my wife is used to it already.

(Yes, we’ve heard the rumor about an autocorrect toggle switch in the next iPhone update. Let’s hope it’s true for Windsor43’s sake.)

Have you got any amusing tales of autocorrect woe? Confess all in the comments.

Apple has once again won the “cool factor” with teen iPhone owners now nearly triple ( 8 percent versus 3 percent) compared to a year ago. The Piper Jaffray survey also revealed 22 percent of teens say they plan to buy the Apple handset – up from just 9 percent in 2007.

Other good news for Apple: 84 percent of MP3 players purchased by teens were iPods. Microsoft’s Zune came in a distant second, capturing just 3 percent of the teen marketshare.

Apple’s iTunes music download service now has 93 percent of the market. That’s up from 79 percent uncovered a year ago.

For those of you who thought the Diamond Shuffle was a bit much, Swiss luxury accessories brand DEOS launched these diamond-encrusted covers designed for iPod and iPhone earbuds.

Prices for these handcrafted covers, which slip on earbuds, start at $4,500, for black and white diamond versions, climbing to $60,000 for earbuds dripping with pink, yellow or black diamonds.

Sure, they cost more than the actual device. Which is why some of the models, like the DEOS 32W, which has a full carat of diamonds and costs $5,000, comes with a complimentary Shuffle.

If you’d like to add a little splash to your morning run but don’t have the cash, Swarovski crystal versions run from $110 (demi-dipped) to $200 for the Full Monty.

Steve Goldstein, founder of the Geveva-based DEOS (Defining Expressions of Sound), said the idea is one whose time has come:

“Today there are more than 152 million earphones in the world. [It’s] a marvellous way of making a fashion statement. When you meet someone the person sees first your face and then looks at your ears…”

Don’t mean a thing, if it ain’t got that bling.

Via The Moodie Report

Google’s 2001 retro-search tool has provided endless amusement over the past few weeks. None so much as the image at right, which is the “iPhone 2,” released by InfoTech in mid-1999 and reviewed on StreetTech by Gareth Branwyn.

And yes, it was a comical Internet landline phone, featuring full QWERTY keyboard. Like today’s iPhone 3G, it featured a touchscreen, Internet access, e-mail, and location-based services. Also like today’s iPhone 3G, it improved on significant shortcomings in its predecessor, by adding a better keyboard, higher data speed, and better speaker-phone sound quality.

And, eeriest of all, it had notable areas that needed improving. There was no “Forward” browser button, no “Find” function, and, hilariously, no Cut, Copy, or Paste features. In many ways, it’s exactly like today’s iPhone. Just, you know, totally janky.

Some things never change, apparently.

Thanks, Jwester!

From Juicy Couture, the people who made terrycloth sweat suits hot, come three iPhone jelly cases in bright pink, blue and yellow with logo tags.

Hopefully some of the butter-fingered celebs who made Juicy famous will protect their iPhones with these, declaring “iChoose Juicy,” instead of “assistant go get me another phone” to the world.

$55 for a set of three. Available for pre-order.

Nearly a third of iPhone users switched carriers in order to buy the Apple touch-screen phone, researchers said Monday. The news comes as the iPhone leads smartphone sales between July and August.

Some thirty percent of U.S. smartphone buyers switched carriers to AT&T in order to purchase an iPhone in that period, market research firm NPD Group announced.

That compares to the 24 percent industry average for smartphone buyers.

When Apple CEO Steve Jobs announces fiscal fourth quarter iPhone sales later this month, a few industry analysts could be red-faced. An effort by iPhone owners points to Apple selling more than the 5 million a consensus of experts had predicted for the three-month period that ended Sept. 30.

In addition, the data could lend support to Jobs’ claim 10 million iPhones would be sold in 2008.

The iPhone 3g arrived in Russian stores Friday. They cost a pretty ruble — 23,000 and 27,000 or about $900 and $1,000 for the eight and 16 gigabyte versions — causing some early adopters to spend as much as they make in a month on the gotta-have-it handset.

Retailers weren’t expecting long lines, though. Apple resellers are using a don’t call us, we’ll call you approach, asking potential buyers to leave contact details.

“We already have more than fifty people on our list, so it is better to leave your number and we will call you when your phone is ready for pick up,” he said. Most dealers, such as Evroset and Svyaznoy are also accepting advance orders.

This is a good thing, since temperatures in Russia are already brisk and wet.

Videos show a few very subdued customers waiting in bank-like settings for their new phones.

Although the arrival of the 3G version was sufficiently hyped (as per the “iSoon” billboard above) retailers don’t expect a stampede because uber-early adopters have already bought them on the gray market…

Sales expectations for the former U.S.S.R. are 3.5 million handsets by the end of 2009.

Via Moscow News

This is more like it. Visual IT has done a deal with the Geographers A-Z Map Company to produce a licensed copy of the Mini London A-Z for iPhone.

Yes, iPhones come with the Google Maps app, but this is a very different thing, for two reasons.

Thanks to an iPhone app called Stereoscope, iPhone users will be able watch a giant interactive art show played across the façade of Toronto’s City Hall buildings this week.

A free download, Stereoscope is an amazingly fluid 3D rendering of the Toronto City Hall’s two curved, opposing façades. With your fingers, you can zoom in and out and move around the giant buildings, Matrix-style, on your iPhone’s screen.

And starting October 4th, the Stereoscope app will replay a live light show playing across the surfaces of each building, generated using lights in the buildins’ 960 windows. The Stereoscope app will stream the light show live, replaying it on the rendering of the buildings.

“Reaction to the iPhone application has been overwhelmingly good as many people were surprised what 3D on the iPhone could be like,” said project director Tim Pritlove.

The light show is part of an all-night art event called Nuit Blanche that will turn the landmark buildings into a giant computer screen.

Created by Project Blinkenlights, the unique art show will feature animations and interactive games.

The full story after the jump.

The Android-based G1 handset now shares with the iPhone the status of a goal-setter for mobile phones, researcher Gartner said Thursday.

“You won’t beat Apple in the short term, but being worse than both Apple and Android is likely to end in disaster,” Gartner analysts Roberta Cozza and Carolina Milanesi write.

The two said the Android-based G1 will probably ship between 600,000 to 700,000 devices this year and comprise 10 percent of smartphone sales by 2011.

The iPhone’s entrance onto the handset scene was a “big favor” to the handset industry, pushing companies to change in the face of Cupertino, Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said Thursday.

The comments came as the handset giant launches its 5800 XpressMusic, a touch-screen handset with the Comes With Music service. Like the iPhone, the 5800 offers a 3G network interface, GPS and Wi-Fi.

Nokia’s comments appear to reflect the view of others. “I don’t think a handset maker out there doesn’t believe that,” Kevin Burden, ABI Research’s director of mobile devices, told Cult of Mac.

The next time you’re stuck in traffic, start stumping for Obama.
That’s the idea behind the Obama for America iPhone app, free for download on iTunes.
It organizes your contacts “by key battleground states” and keeps an anonymous record of your virtual campaign trail. And if you haven’t got a move on yet, it’ll tell you where the nearest Democratic headquarters are and keep you updated on local events.

While it seems a little full-on for the armchair activist, kudos to iPhone dev’er Raven Zachary for the idea.

Via Cnet

Apple has decided to drop the iPhone dev NDA for released software.

It said that “the NDA has created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone’s success”. That’s putting it mildly.

Unreleased software – or even unreleased features inside released software – is still covered by it, however.

This means the lives of software developers (and quite a few book publishers) will now be a lot easier.

That sound you can hear is iPhone devs everywhere breathing a sigh of relief.

Net Applications added another metric to the increasing evidence that Apple is closing the gap with Windows – this time online.

Macs online grew by more than 5 percent to 8.28 percent in September, compared to August, a survey of operating systems used to connect to Web sites found.

Windows, although comprising more than 90 percent of online connections, actually fell by 0.47 percent to 90.23 percent of online operating systems last month, according to Net Applications.

IPhones leapt from 0.30 in August to 0.32 percent in September, a 6.67 percent jump.

In related news, an iPhone Satisfaction Survey by the Technologizer Web site found 91 percent of participants adore their Apple device with the majority having owned the handset for 2-3 months. E-mail, the Web and SMS topped the list of most-used iPhone applications.

Graph from Technologizer

Calling it the world’s first monthly comic series for children on the iPhone and iPod touch, EyeCandy is available on iTunes.

The $.99 comic, described as “goofy” by creator PJ Holden as he walks through features, can be stripped down to the ink or pencil layers for digital finger painting. It exploits the iPhone platform for sound, vibration and an accelerometer. Each issue comes with extras, like a pony toy (shake the iPhone and it whinnies) in the cowboy-themed first issue, so a lot of busy time for your buck.

EyeCandy is a heroic come back by Infurious Comics, whose MURDEDROME was rejected by Apple for sale on iTunes out of concern over adult content.

The boys in Belfast are valiantly trying to put a positive spin on the situation, describing safe for children release as “hot on the heels of the rejection” of the adult comic.

While we’re not against kiddy apps, it’s a shame there isn’t more for grown-ups who need a little displacement activity during meetings.

Yes, we know the iPhone camera is rubbish compared to most of its cameraphone rivals. But that needn’t stop people being creative with it. People like…

P0psharlow, who has created some stunning panoramic images with an iPhone and some very deft image manipulation:

Fulton Street workers study

It’s soft. It’s cute. It’s an iPhone, in felt.

It has no practical purpose we can ascertain, unless you count baby geek toy or dog bauble. Oh wait, the guy who made it says it’s not suitable for either of those things.

Still, it’s one-of-a-kind and uber cute. (Did I already mention that?) And, unlike the apple-shaped iPod shuffle cover in felt, which is adorable but we can’t get behind because the colors are wrong, this seems about as faithful as you can get. Using felt.

If you have to have it, bidding starts at $25 plus $5 shipping on eBay.

Via Geekologie

If there’s one thing the British like complaining about more than the weather, it’s the transport system.

So it shouldn’t be a surprise to find the App Store bulging with apps for people on the move. Here are just a handful of my favourites…

There’s Alistair Stuart’s Trains, giving near-as-dammit live information from UK station departure boards: essential for people five minutes walk away from the station door, and whose train ought to be leaving in four minutes.

And there’s Ian Smith’s LondonCam, a highly rated app that displays the latest image from any of more than 80 traffic cams that monitor London’s busiest roads and interchanges.

Traffic UK provides real-time traffic updates for the area around your current location, or for any place you care to name.

And TubeStatus is one of several London Underground monitoring apps, providing timely warnings of line closures and service disruptions. Which, as any Londoner will tell you, are many and varied and frustratingly frequent.

Sonic Lighter is slightly different to all the other iPhone virtual lighters; it checks in with the GPS and pings a remote server with the device’s location at the moment the app was started.

The result: a Google Map covered with little red flames, every one of them an instance of Sonic Lighter getting all lit up.

And the map has few surprises: big swathes of red flames across North America, Europe and Japan. But hold on, what’s that, up there? In the Arctic Ocean, hundreds of miles north of the Chukchi Sea, itself north of where Alaska and Russia kiss? It’s a single, solitary Sonic Lighter ignition. Maybe it’s a member of Sarah Palin’s crack squad of Russia-monitoring sniffer dogs. Or maybe it was just some guy on a plane. Either way, we salute you, most-northerly Sonic Lighter user. You should get a prize, or something.

(If anyone’s taken their iPhone to the north or south poles, and has some interesting iPhone pics to prove it, please contact the Cult.)

(Via Gruber)

An apparent shift by iPhone 3G buyers to lower-priced 8GB models reportedly prompted Apple to trim by 4 million the number of handsets it will build for the rest of 2008. Cupertino will order 14 million to 15 million phones instead of 18 million analysts first projected.

Pacific Crest’s Apple analyst said Friday “supply-chain checks” found since mid-September Apple is not meaningfully resupplying AT&T stores that have sold down their inventory of 8GB iPhone 3Gs.

It’s… it’s like looking into the Eye of Sauron. If each application were a different Eye.

More at Gizmodo.