The only difference I can see between them is that Babies costs a dollar and is described as: “Look at babies until you cannot look at babies no more! There is no end to the babies!”
Whereas Babies Free is merely “All the babies you will ever want to look at!”
I see, so there’s a clear functionality difference here. The free Babies app imposes restrictions on the amount of baby viewing. Users are limited to just the babies they will ever want to see; to see babies until you can no longer do so requires the pro-level upgrade. Figures.
Apple, long viewed as primarily consumer-oriented, now supplies more smartphones to corporations, taking the No. 2 spot from Palm’s Treo and breathing down the neck of RIM, according to a survey released Thursday.
Apple’s iPhone now has 14 percent of the corporate market. Palm’s Treo fell to 11 percent and third place while RIM’s BlackBerry held 76 percent of the market, according to a ChangeWave Research survey of IT spending plans.
Apple’s gains came mostly at the expense of Palm, which lost 4 percent of its marketshare to the iPhone. Meanwhile, RIM saw its lead trimmed by one point.
Although one analyst described the iPhone as often just corporate bling, the shifting numbers indicate an attempt to keep ahead of the curve in terms of the iPhone in a business.
“IT managers don’t want to be caught flat-footed,” Kevin Burden, ABI Research’s chief wireless analyst, told Cult of Mac.
As the holidays loom ever closer and the global economic get worse and worse, Apple’s doing its bit to encourage a little seasonal spending.
The new iPhone Your Life section on apple.com is full of tips and tricks for new iPhone users, encouraging them to dive into the App Store and look around.
There are recommendations and staff picks, and on the Top Apps page there’s limited web-based access to best selling apps in a range of categories – the first time I’ve seen Apple replicating some of the App Store functionality on the web.
The Tips and Tricks page is also a good starting point for Christmas Day iPhone newbies (of whom, I have no doubt, there will be many).
Travis Hammond is a graphic designer located near Baltimore, Maryland. He works for a private auction firm and a local magazine, and does freelance photography and design work. He’s also a bit of an Apple nut, if these among many other examples of his Mac, iPod and iPhone inspired creativity are any indication.
Now that iPhone Firmware 2.2 is out (all 245.7MB of it), what do we all think of it? Initial reactions around the web seem broadly positive, and my own experience so far matches that. In recent weeks I’ve been seeing quite frequent application crashes on my 2nd gen iPhone, so I’ll be interested to see if they happen less often now. On very first impressions, the phone feels faster and snappier in use post-update.
Most of the changes were published in advance, but there are some hidden extras that are new to me.
Inspired by our previous post on an iPhone stand from a standard binder clip, CoM reader Rich Sipe took matters into hand and fashioned another one, a bit more complex than the first one but it looks like it’ll give you a sturdy stand out of pinched office materials.
Think you’ve got the hands or, in the case of iPhone, the fingers of a surgeon? You’ll soon be able to find out with a new mobile game from developer ngmoco, inc.. Dr. Awesome, Microsurgeon MD is an iPhone game that lets you import friends from your address book and “perform surgery” on them in a Qix meets Trauma Center gamescape environment, according to blogger Brandon Boyer at Boing Boing.
Can see this iPhone power charger, a prototype by a Tokyo designer who goes by the name Mac Funamizu, in the hands of irate Hollywood agent Ari Gold from Entourage as he channels Gordon Gecko.
A diagram in Apple's iPhone status patent application.
Apple has filed a patent application to add always-on status indicators to the iPhone. The innovation would address a common task for cell phones but a headache for owners of the touch-screen handset.
In most flip-phones and even other touch-screen devices, users can instantly know when they’ve missed a call or received a voice-mail message. However, for iPhone users, it requires turning on the phone and going into settings to retrieve the information.
“Meninos is a creative team with experience from a wide range of clients, specialized in illustration, graphics and motion design,” according to the website copy. the iPhone icon coaster set pictured above is but one of many whimsical designs available on what appears to be a website based in Brazil.
“We start making this products for personal use, then for friends and now we sell for friends of friends,” they say. All products are designed and created (hand made) by the artists and designers at Meninos studio, where they like to make things simple and different.
The AppStore “is causing a sea change in both the mobile phone industry and the gaming industry that threatens the viability of all competitors,” according to technology stock analyst Jason Schwarz at Seeking Alpha.
Calling the AppStore bigger than the Mac, the iPod and the iPhone, Schwarz points to comments made by Steve Jobs during Apple’s recent earnings conference call with industry analysts, in which he pointed out that the company is now benefiting from being at the center of a cycle in which cool applications beget more sales, thereby creating an even larger market which will attract even more software development.
Schwarz writes that Apple and the AppStore have “brought the Internet to the level…everyone expected during the tech bubble…[with] efficiency of distribution [that] is impossible for the traditional model to compete with,” and goes on to identify Apple stock, trading in the $80 range, as “a unique wealth building opportunity.”
Some Cult of Mac readers have lately complained about the preponderance of iPhone and iPhone app-related coverage we have been publishing, but the fact of the matter is that AppStore development is exploding. It represents where much of Apple and Mac oriented creativity exists right now. And if Schwarz is right when he says “Modern day society values its computers and phones above all else,” then AppStore news and product development are likely to increase and not fade away.
New reports suggest discount retail giant Wal-Mart will begin selling the iPhone Dec. 28, a move raising some eyebrows while also expanding Apple’s retail strategy, according to other experts.
An AT&T memo obtained by the Boy Genius Report outlined plans to offer the iPhone first in select Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club locations, followed by nationwide availability to more than 3,000 Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club stores.
“We are pleased to announce that Wal-Mart has reached agreement with Apple to offer iPhone 3G in Wal-Mart and Wal-Mart managed Sam’s Club Connection Centers nationwide beginning December 28, 2008,” according to the memo.
A free app from magazine Consumer Reports available on iTunes may help harried shoppers decide in a hurry which model is worth it in the coming holiday season.
Categories include: cars, electronics, home and garden, babies and kids. Early adopters have a few complaints (centered around the search function, or lack thereof), it could still come in handy.
When you switch on Voice Search in Google’s Mobile App for iPhone, you see a little bit of warning text underneath which reads:
“Voice Search only works in English, and works best for North American English accents.”
Tish and piffle, I thought to myself when I read that. I’m sure it’ll understand my humdrum Estuary English accent perfectly well.
But you know what? The warning was put there for a reason. Because so far, every search I’ve done has failed when I use my normal voice, and worked when I put on my appalling attempt at an American accent.
So thank you Google for giving us voice search, which is officially the New Best Thing Ever (better than the last Best Thing Ever, at any rate). But curse you, Google, for making me sound like a complete idiot every time I want to do a voice search for something in public.
Google’s voice search application for the iPhone is nothing short of spectacular. After tantalizing would-be users with either a PR goof or a brilliant marketing ploy that resulted in a delayed release on the AppStore, the updated version of Google Mobile finally hit on Monday and I got it on to my phone last night.
It’s like the home screen says, “For voice search, just bring the phone to your ear and speak. Really, no buttons required!” The program offers to let you watch a video to learn more, but it’s about as easy as it gets to call up a search results page that gives you just what you’re looking for simply by speaking into the phone.
When I searched for “70 Harper” the program returned results for “cindy harper,” but when I amended the search to “70 harper street, san francisco” I got a Google map pinned exactly to the address I spoke into the phone. Speaking about the incredible performance of this free app with my colleague Leander Kahney this morning, he agreed Google has served up something pretty amazing, saying, “it even understands my weird English accent.”
Say what you will about Google having worn out its welcome, or being on the downside of its rise to Internet glory, this advance in mobile search technology is a huge leap forward in this reviewer’s opinion. The iPhone may not yet be a fully functioning Star Trek communicator, but Google’s voice search brings it closer than many thought we might get.
China and Apple still in iPhone talks (photo: The Tenth Dragon)
China Mobile’s CEO Tuesday gave the latest hint Apple may still get its iPhone into the world’s largest marketplace by the end of 2008.
“China Mobile is still interested in [bringing the ] iPhone into China Mobile markets,” Marketwatch quoted Wang Jianzhou when addressing the GSMA Mobile Asia Conference. The carrier’s head didn’t provide details, citing a non-disclosure agreement with Apple.
China, with over 600 million mobile users, remains a highly-prized target for Apple. CEO Steve Jobs has said he expects to sell the iPhone in the Asian country by the end of the year.
Tech makes cheating more, not less complicated. Case in point: a desperate wife, going by the name of Susan042764, asked on the Apple forum whether raunchy photos of her husband could have automatically attached themselves to an email (send to a woman’s address) due to an iPhone “glitch.”
Honey, for your sake, we hope that’s the only “virus” he catches.
The Fail Whale enjoying a well-earned break, yesterday.
Today’s big question: what is the best Twitter client for iPhone? I asked everyone in my house, but neither of them had an opinion. So I asked Twitter instead.
At the time of writing, there’s a lot of praise for Tweetsville and Tweetie (not actually publicly available yet, it seems) and Twittelator.
My favorite right now is Twitterfon. I only discovered it a few days ago, while discussing iPhone software over a pint in the pub, but it as soon as I’d got it installed, it replaced Twitterific as my daily quick-must-check-my-Tweets-else-I’ll-probably-die app. (Did someone say something about time and attention? No? Good.)
Why do I like Twitterfon? Mainly because it’s fast, also because it looks like an iPhone app. Twitterific was too pokey, too cramped, too dark, for my liking.
For the second time this month, Barclays Capital’s Ben Reitzes reduced his target price for Apple shares. Citing lower handset expectation and increased pressure on higher priced products, Reitzes Photo: Cishore/Flickrcut his target price for Apple to $113, down from $121.
On Nov. 7, Reitzes trimmed his target price for Cupertino shares to $121 from $125.
The Barclays analyst told investors he expects a two percent drop in first quarter 2009 earnings to $9.4 billion, down from $9.6 billion. Apple may earn $34.4 billion for 2009, a drop from $35.7 billion previously expected. In fiscal 2010, Apple earnings could rise 18 percent to $40.55 billion, a drop from $42.8 billion early estimated.
The battle to bring the iPhone to Taiwan became a bit more crowded as that Asian nation’s top carrier announced it will start selling iPhone service “before the end of the year.”
December is the tentative launch date for exclusive sales deal, Digitimes reported Monday.
In a brief statement released over the weekend, Chunghwa Telecom said it “has signed a contract with Apple, and it will provide third-generation iPhone services in Taiwan before the end of the year,” according to the Dow Jones News service.
The Google Mobile team is expected to enhance its iPhone search product with a voice recognition add-on as soon as today, according to a report in the New York Times.
Having already reorganized the way it delivers the results of an iPhone search request earlier this week, the Mountain View, CA search engine company is taking another step toward perfecting the way it handles the challenges of entering and retrieving information with hand-held wireless devices.
“Solving those two problems in a world-class way is our goal,” says Vic Gundotra, a former Microsoft executive who now heads Google’s mobile businesses.
With teams of voice recognition engineers working in New York, London and Mountain View utilizing trillions of search queries Google users have made over the years, one aspect of the service relies on a statistical model of the way words are frequently strung together, according to Mike Cohen, a speech research who was co-founder of Nuance Communications before coming to Google.
The service also takes advantage of the iPhone’s accelerometer to put itself into “listen” mode when the phone is raised to a user’s ear, a design development contributed by a Google researcher in London.
Both Yahoo and Microsoft already offer voice services for cellphones. The Microsoft Tellme service returns information in specific categories like directions, maps and movies. Yahoo’s oneSearch with Voice is more flexible but does not appear to be as accurate as Google’s offering, according to the Times report.
The Google system is far from perfect, and it can return queries that appear as gibberish. Google executives declined to estimate how often the service gets it right, but they said they believed it was accurate enough to be useful to people who wanted to avoid tapping out their queries on the iPhone’s touch-screen keyboard.
As of this writing the add on was not yet available on the AppStore, but as Raj Reddy, an artificial intelligence researcher at Carnegie Mellon University says, “whatever they introduce now, it will greatly increase in accuracy in three or six months.”
Photographer Russ Croop has been creating art on his iPhone using an app called NetSketch that allows you to draw using your fingers, like the above “Point Lobos.”
Croop’s colorful creations look more like art (check out his online gallery, where you can also watch them being made in video form) and less like displacement practice than most, but local galleries have not yet signed him on to show them, according to iArt Mobile.
Maybe art on such a small screen underwhelms them, assuming the idea is to show works on the iPhone, but it’s probably just a matter of time. iPod art has already found its way into galleries.
Fans of comics’ “Golden Age” now have a great way to feed that jones on the iPhone and iPod Touch with Comic Zeal from Bitolithic.
The $1.99 app lets you download an unlimited number of classic comics from the 1930s and 1940s, a period that saw the arrival of the comic book as a mainstream art form, when the medium’s artistic vocabulary and creative conventions were defined by its first generation of writers, artists, and editors.
The app downloads full comics to store locally on your device for easy access offline, and takes full advantage of the iPhone platform’s pinch-zoom and fingertip scrolling so you can move around pages quickly and zoom in to detail as you wish. A recent update makes turning pages with the swipe gesture a breeze and counts as an excellent improvement to the original released version.
“I had been itching to do some development for the Mac but when we learned the iPhone and iPod contained most of OS X I knew I had to do SOMETHING on the device,” Melbourne-based developer Emiliano Molina told Cult of Mac. “During that time, a colleague let me borrow some of his most precious comic books. The most leisure time I had was on the train but I couldn’t risk damaging them,” he says, “eventually I realized that what I needed was a digital version of those comics on the iPod.”
The Comic Zeal library contains an eclectic mix of titles that have fallen out of copyright, such as Romantic Adventures, Strange Worlds, Racket Squad and a personal favorite of this reviewer, Eerie.
Molina is also developing what he calls the Comic Zeal Creator, which allows you to convert the CBR/CBZ files of comics you find on the internet into Comic Zeal’s CBI format, so you can upload your own favorites to the iPhone for storage and later access. The Creator remains in Beta and can be downloaded from the Bitolithic website.
What with all the talk about how hard it is to manage large numbers of apps with the iPhones swipey-sidey interface, I wondered what people are doing when it comes to visualizing the things. A computer’s screenshot is one large image (maybe two or three with multiple monitors). You could argue that an iPhone’s screenshot isn’t complete without all its screens – up to 10 of them – lined up side-by-side.
And that’s what some people are doing, in the process creating gorgeous little personalized maps of portable computing. This one by thepatrick on Flickr (used under Creative Commons license – thanks thepatrick), is labeled with descriptive notes that explain each geopolitical region.
