iPhone - page 480

After months of speculation, multiple jailbreaks and not a few bricked iPhones, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced today that a developer’s kit for the iPhone and iPod Touch will be sent out in February, creating a way to add function to the devices through official channels. But he’s still implying that developers will have to jump through hoops to actually get on the platform:

It will take until February to release an SDK because we’re trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once–provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc. This is no easy task. Some claim that viruses and malware are not a problem on mobile phones–this is simply not true. There have been serious viruses on other mobile phones already, including some that silently spread from phone to phone over the cell network. As our phones become more powerful, these malicious programs will become more dangerous. And since the iPhone is the most advanced phone ever, it will be a highly visible target.

Some companies are already taking action. Nokia, for example, is not allowing any applications to be loaded onto some of their newest phones unless they have a digital signature that can be traced back to a known developer. While this makes such a phone less than “totally open,” we believe it is a step in the right direction. We are working on an advanced system which will offer developers broad access to natively program the iPhone’s amazing software platform while at the same time protecting users from malicious programs.

So it sounds truly homebrew apps will get shut out unless starting developers can prove their good intentions. By endorsing Nokia’s new way of doing things, Steve is heavily implying that Apple will stand in between developers and iPhones for our own good. I see his point — virally infected iPhones would be bad for the Apple image. On the other hand, maybe he could just make the iPhone as secure as regular OS X and block access to things like the base band and root folders? Just a thought.

Via AP 

Image via TechCrunch France

Well over a month after announcing its German and British partners, Apple has finally reached a firm deal to sell the iPhone in France, pairing up with Orange from France Telecom. The device will sell for 399 Euro (almost $575), and the data plans have not yet been announced.

France has been a tough nut to crack for Apple, as the nation has rather robust unlocking laws for cell phones that would appear to run counter to the iPhone’s business model. Only time will tell.

Via Engadget Mobile

Last week, Apple introduced a new series of iPhone ads featuring real people talking about the benefits they get from using the device. And, wouldn’t you know it, the very first parody of the campaign has hit the market, featuring a guy named Ben whose iPhone got bricked from the 1.1.1 firmware update, only it’s still TOTALLY useful.

Fun stuff.

Via TUAW

You know how Apple thoughtfully included a cell signal, WiFi and Bluetooth-free Airplane Mode on the iPhone so that the wunder-device could be using as a media player in flight?

Well, apparently ATA didn’t get the memo. A passenger named Casey bound for Hawaii was repeatedly harassed by multiple flight attendants for “talking on his cell phone.” (He was actually trying to watch the terrible Jennifer Love Hewitt vehicle “I Know What You Did Last Summer.”) Consumerist has the sordid story:

So I ask what rule I am breaking. He tells me I am talking on my cell phone. I again explain I am not using the cell part and it is disabled. I go on to further explain that I have been on other airlines that have specific written rules that say cell phones in airplane mode are OK above 10,00 feet, so how could it be a FAA rule. And if it is, what rule ? He has no answer for that, but to now yells at me “You have to do anything I say, I am going to have you arrested”….

He ended up detained at the airport for awhile. It’s ridiculous. And, worse, it’s quite likely that the kind of people who would assume an iPhone in Airplane Mode is dangerous would confuse an iPod Touch with an iPhone. It’s a lesson to us all: Keep it out of sight, folks.

Image via Russell Shaw.

Here’s two more data points supporting the rumor that Apple will allow Dashboard Widgets to run on the iPhone. (See earlier post)

Apple Evangelist Matt Drance is due to speak at next week’s Widget Summit in San Francsico. Matt is “actively involved in helping 3rd parties develop for iPhone,” says his bio on the Summit website. (However, it’s doubtful Drance will announce anything about the iPhone on Tuesday. It looks like he’ll be talking about Widgets in Dashboard.)

And reader Andrew Mayne notes that Apple’s new webapps page uses widget-sized icons to show all the apps for the iPhone.

“Last I checked, the normal OS X (non-widget apps) didn’t have as many button shaped icons,” writes Andrew in email. “The convenient button shaping could be a coincidence… but a rather convenient one.”

Hackers Open iPod Touch and iPhone To 3rd-Party Apps [Engadget]

Guide to Unlocked, Open-Source Touchscreen Phones [Wired News]

Dev Team A Few Steps Away From Re-Unlocking iPhone [TouchDev]

Commercial iPhone Unlocking and Unbricking Works\ [Gizmodo]

Samsung Might be Sun’s Partner for jPhone [CNet]

Picture by hansdorsch

I heard a rumor today that Apple is shortly going to allow third-party applications on the iPhone. They won’t be full applications, however: they’ll be Desktop Widgets.
You will soon be able to drag any Dashboard Widget into iTunes, and they’ll sync with the iPhone, the source said.

To run on the iPhone and provide interactivity, they’ll require JavaScript, which means the iPhone will shortly get a Java update. When? The source didn’t say.

But the source did say that Apple hasn’t released iPhone widgets yet because Java has proven to be a major draw on battery power. Presumably, Apple has figured out how to tackle this problem. How? Again, the source didn’t say.

In OS X, Widgets are like mini web pages that run in Dashboard instead of a web browser. According to Apple’s Developer website, they’re a mix of HTML, JavaScript and CSS.

Unfortunately, this is all I know. I promised not to reveal the source of the rumor, but they’re well-placed. This is coming from just one source, via a third-person, so I’m only 70 percent confident it’s true. When I worked at MacWeek, we’d never publish rumors as news until it had been confirmed by at least three separate sources.

However, the redoubtable Glenn Fleischman reports for TidBits that Apple is getting near to making third-party applications available for the iPhone. Glenn has no details, but suggests the release is imminent.

UPDATE: As readers kindly point out, I’m confusing Java with JavaScriot: two separate technologies that share a name. The iPhone already has JavaScript, but not Java, so nothing would need to be added for Dashboard Widgets to work. Thanks for the feedback.

A guide to what’s new in the Mac OS X Leopard Finder (AppleInsider, pictured)
Man Files Class-Action Lawsuit Over iPhone Bricking (ArsTechnica)
Other Man Claims iPod nano Set His Pants on Fire (NetworkWorld)
Apple Stock Hits $167 a Share — For No Reason (Daring Fireball)
Why I Won’t Buy an iPhone (BusinessWeek)
Apple Classifies Windows a Virus (Flickr)
Leopard Could Add $240 Million in Revenue in Q4 (Fortune)
Anti-Caps Lock Feature in new Apple Keyboards is Hardware-Based (Rentzsch)

The iPhone 1.1.1 firmware Apple unleashed a bit more than a week ago has wreaked havoc on anyone interested in doing more with the iPhone than its manufacturer wants them to. Unlocked phones were closed down and rendered useless. Third-party applications were deleted and prevented from re-installing. It was back to Square 1.1.1 as soon as the update dropped.

But all is not lost. According to Engadget, the hackers who first broke into the iPhone have done it again — and this time they got into the iPod Touch, too. For the time-being, third-party apps are back on the table, so fire up your NES emulators! No one has installed the Mail application on an iPod Touch that has been reported, nor Weather or the other left-out apps. I’ll let you know if I hear anything. The exploit relies on a security hole using TIFF image files that cause Mobile Safari to freak out and open a back door. This TIFF issue has been fixed elsewhere, however, so this won’t last forever. Any new firmware would probably close the loop again. Cat, mouse. Mouse, cat.

It’s remarkable how rapidly Apple is upping the sophistication of its marketing for the iPhone. The initial ads stressed the coolness of multitouch and whipping the phone around, appealing to the slavering Early Adopters who ran out to pay $600 on the first pressing. Now that the iPhone has dropped to $400, though, Apple has created a new ad campaign that focuses on the way people use it in the real world — the crazy interface barely even shows up.

The three new ads were shot against black back-drops in New York. Some enterprising blogs have already tracked down the locations of the shoots, but I’m more fascinated by the overall messages Apple is sending by letting people tell their stories. Take “Mankind,” told by Doug and shown above. In the spot, he talks about Visual Voicemail and nothing else, how it lets you see the length and sender of all messages and ignore the ones you hate. The picture he paints is rich, complaining about the guy who owes you money and leaves a four-minute message — it’s obviously a bunch of excuses, and he’s not going to pay you. Skip it!

Perhaps the most effective piece for me stars Stephano. It’s called “One Thing.” In it, he mentions that he used to carry an iPod, a camera, a regular cell phone and a cell phone for texting and e-mail. Now he has just one thing. Exactly. Apple is showing how this thing fits into people’s lives. It’s really pretty compelling.

What iPhone story would you tell the world?

(Screencap from TUAW)

Members of the Hackin0sh development community report that an old exploit that was used to crack the PlayStation Portable’s firmware almost two years ago could hold the key to re-opening up iPhones loaded with the 1.1.1 firmware that closed them back up.

Notes Hackint0sh reader Locked:

It looks like the dev team is up to something. I have been following them over at IRC and it looks like Mobile Safari on both the touch and the iPhone are suffering from a one year old TIFF exploit.

Basically, opening a carefully crafted TIFF image will crash mobile safari, causing a buffer overflow and allow for arbitrary code execution. This same exploit was used more than 1.5 years ago to crack the PSP firmware.

So, nothing to report, yet, but there might yet be life for third-party applications on the iPhone. As Steve Jobs himself has said, this is a game of cat and mouse, and with application development, at least, I want the mice to win…

Via Winonmac via Digg

Ladies and gentlemen, we officially have the most ridiculous response to the iPhone price cut that Steve Jobs announced last month: A woman in Queens, New York, Dongmei Li, is suing Apple for $1 million because she can’t make as much money on eBay by selling the two iPhones she owns. No, seriously.

Li’s lawyer, Jean Wang, said her client bought two 4-gigabite (sic*) models for $499 each with the idea of selling them later on eBay.

“Since they’re selling the 8-gigabite phone for $399, there’s really no market for her,” Wang said.

That makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? She should totally get $1 million! Ms. Li bought two 4-gig iPhones for $1,000, hoping to sell them on eBay for, let’s say, given market rate, at most $1,500. Now, 4-gig iPhones are worth $300 or less each, or $600 combined. And as we all know, $1,500 – $600 = $1 million in lost revenue.  For shame, Apple! For shame!

I will now launch my own lawsuit. I almost bought an iPhone, but I decided not to, because they’re expensive. Now the price has changed, and I haven’t been able to work ever since because of the trauma. I would like Apple to pay me $8 million for my lost salary owing to disability for the last three weeks.

*Yes, the New York Post spelled gigabyte as “gigabite.” That makes the article even more entertaining.

Image via Massachusetts government

Thanks, Raymond!

There seems to be a memory leak with some iPhones that quickly gobbles up the device’s storage space.
A <a href=”https://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5025646&#5025646″>discussion thread</a> on Apple’s support forums details the iPhone’s “Other” memory category growing to several gigabyte in some cases. (The “Other” category is shown in the iTunes screenshot above)

The source of the memory blob is mysterious, but one sufferer suggests that Google Maps may be causing the problem. The Google widget may be caching every map that’s loaded.

The only way to clear the growing memory blog is to wipe the device and start from scratch. One reader reports that upgrading to 1.1.1 did not free a memory blog that had grown to 1.6GB, but wiping and restoring the phone dropped it to a reasonable 14MB.

Thanks Adrian!

The Cooper-Hewitt National People’s Design Award will soon be d0led out to what the Internet-using public determines to be the best-designed new product or service. Interestingly, two of the top competitors at the moment are Apple’s incredibly high-tech iPhone and on the other side of it…TOMS Shoes, a company that created a philanthropic business model. They took a traditional South American shoe design, marketed it in the U.S. for a low price and gives a free pair of shoes to a needy child in South America for each pair sold.

Two radically different models of innovation through design. What’s your vote? Head here to be heard!

As has been reported widely, Apple’s iPhone Update 1.1.1 makes it again impossible to use an iPhone on any network other than AT&T and eliminates third-party applications installed through the so-called Jailbreak hack. The update, which introduces the WiFi iTunes Store to the iPhone, enables TV-out and some basic usability features, like double-tapping the home button to get to phone-call favorites.

On one level, I’m not that bugged by this behavior. After all, Apple issued a huge warning that installing the update could render unlocked phones inoperable and “might” stop third-party applications from functioning. I’m sure AT&T has been screaming at Apple to close down the unlock loophole since it hit a month ago, and Apple earns part of the revenue from iPhone service plans.

On the other hand, this is incredibly anti-consumer behavior. Most formerly unlocked iPhones now won’t even work on AT&T. They’re useless bricks (only unlocks from iPhoneSimFree can work again with AT&T). Why shouldn’t an iPhone be able to operate like an iPod Touch if, for some reason, the SIM card isn’t functioning? Why should it be a brick. People have paid good money for it. This is Apple bending over backward to please a partner notorious for ignoring consumer interests.

Worse still is the removal (they were scrubbed off of phones) of all third-party software. What possible reason does Apple have for this other than an insistence on total control? That’s as bad or worse than the mobile service carriers themselves.

Obviously, wait to upgrade if you’re unlocked to see if the hackers can stay ahead of Apple in the “cat and mouse” game that Steve Jobs described the other week. Does this bug everyone else as much as me?

Via Compiler 

Photo from John Griffiths

As expected, Steve Jobs at a press conference in London this morning announced the UK iPhone will launch November 9th, use the O2 network, cost £269 and £35 a month for an unlimited data plan. The phone will be available at the Carphone Warehouse, at about 1,300 outlets.

The iPhone will be more expensive, £269= $537, and there’s no 3G — which is common in Europe. Jobs said it’s to save battery power. 3G chips would reduce battery life to just a couple of hours:

According to the Guardian’s liveblog:

“It’s pretty simple, says Jobs. “The chipsets work well apart from power. They’re real power hogs. Most phones now have battery lives of 2-3 hours and that’s due to these very power-hungry 3G chipsets. Our phone has 8 hours of talktime life. That’s really important when you start to use the internet and want to use the phone to listen to music. We’ve got to see the battery lives for 3G get back up into the 5+ hour range. Hopefully we’ll see that late next year. Rather than cut the battery life, we’ve included Wi-Fi and sandwiched 3G between Edge and a more efficient Wi-Fi.”

No announcement about other European countries, though it’s widely rumored it’ll be Orange in France and T-Mobile in Germany. Said Jobs: “We’ll be in a few countries in Europe in the next quarter.”

The European version of the iPhone looks like it’ll be available only in the UK and Germany at first, leaving iPhonophiles in other EU countries looking at unlocked iPhones as their best bet of getting their hands on a multitouch phone.

My friend Roger Aberg, who runs the MacFeber site, already has an unlocked iPhone he uses in Sweden. He has no problems with the device, he says, but he’s hoping the European iPhone will be upgraded to HSPDA — a super fast 3G standard that’s common in Europe.

Writes Roger in email: “People are a bit skeptic about the non-3G-part. I hope for a HSDPA-version (or turbo 3G) that is plenty faster and is pretty common here. Its 3.6 mbit (regular 3G is 0.3 mbit) and would be sweet on the iPhone! That would make me upgrade.”

However, some analysts don’t expect a 3G version of the iPhone until 2008 at the earliest, when Apple will introduce the iPhone to Asia.

If Apple delays the 3G iPhone, Europeans outside the UK or Germany looking for an unlocked iPhone might be best off shopping for one in the U.S. Thanks to the weakness of the dollar, and local European sales tax (or VAT, which can run to 25 percent in some European countries), Yankee iPhones will likely be cheaper — about $35 according to Roger.

True to its word, Apple has now opened the door for people who bought iPhones at full price prior to August 22 to received a $100 store credit for use at the online Apple Store or in the company’s physical retail facilities.

All you have to do is go to this web site, enter your phone number and serial number (on the back of the iPhone), and submit. A text message from Apple with an access code pops back, and you’re good to go — $100 for anything carried by Apple, including third-party products.

Steve Jobs shocked many by dropping the 8 gigabyte iPhone’s price from $600 to $400 at a media event last week, just 66 days after the product was first introduced. He shocked still more by offering the $100 credit for those who would be ineligible for fair price-matching, which Apple only offers within two weeks of purchase.

It’s still arcane and command-line driven, but the hackers at iPhone Dev Team have created an unlock application that’s free to the world. The iPhone can head to T-Mobile, Europe and the rest of the world…now.

All the details are here, but the rest of us might still want to wait for the GUI version. This is not simple stuff, and many report that YouTube gets broken. Still, I’d love to see this become so prevalent that Apple starts selling the iPhone unlocked out of the box. And while I’m at it, I would like American cell carriers not to suck, so I guess I can dream on…

Via Engadget.

As you’ve no doubt seen by now, Apple announced the sale of its 1 millionth iPhone Monday morning, just five days after Steve Jobs cut the multimedia communicator’s price by $200. No one can seem to agree whether this is a successful launch or not. Some folks even predicted that Apple would sell 1 million iPhones would sell in the first weekend.

So it might make sense to look back at the historical data. How long did it take to sell 1 million iPods? According to official sales data, Apple didn’t pass the psychological barrier until July 2003, almost 21 months after the company first put 1,000 songs in our pockets. It took eight times as long, and for a device that was cheaper, didn’t require a subscription and was going after a completely unclaimed market, whereas the iPhone is aiming for the strengths of the mobile handset market.

Now, the first iPod was only available for Macs, but even the first quarter of the 3G iPod that finally got Apple over the one million hump only included 304,000 iPods sold, despite being designed for Windows. No matter how you slice it, the iPhone has been a break-out hit from day one. And with the price finally in line with the competition, the future’s only looking better.

Way back in January, when the iPhone was young, readers uniformly predicted that unlocked iPhones would hit the streets moments after Apple released the device. I was rather conservative in saying it would take 24 hours — some readers said unlocked iPhones would be common on eBay a week before the street date.

And yet, it’s really taken until…uh, NOW, for widely available iPhone unlocking to arrive. iPhoneSIMFree is a $99 application that makes the iPhone work on any GSM carrier worldwide, including T-Mobile, where I’m stuck for the time-being. Visual Voicemail is broken off of AT&T, but everything else is just fine and dandy. Anyone ready to take the plunge now that the price is down and AT&T isn’t an absolute requirement?

Most of the furor over the big iPhone price cut is over-blown. I’m still frankly amazed that Apple has offered $100 store credit to every iPhone owner who isn’t benefiting from the $200 price drop. It’s unprecedented and creates a dangerous expectation that the same will happen the next time Apple cuts a product’s price.

But at least the people who have complained most loudly about Apple’s decision to me OWN iPhones. I can’t say the same for Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post, who claims he would be “iRate” about the price cut. If only he owned one.

This time, though, he has failed to live up to one clause in his implied contract with iPhone buyers. The sky-high price was supposed to guarantee a decent period of exclusivity. For a time, if you bought an iPhone, you were supposed to be the envy of your friends. The ability to show off all the neat things it could do was your compensation for the fact that the iPhone didn’t really change your life.

Hmm. Yes. Other than that, it’s a pretty standard “What’s wrong with the world today?”-type column (Did you know that technology doesn’t actually solve all of life’s problems? Or that people are getting stabbed with knives and forks? And calling each other names like dork?). But he had to change direction at some point — it’s hard to lead the charge of a cause when you’re not actually part of it.

Via Daring Fireball.

The legions of iPhone owners who were enraged by yesterday’s $200 price cut on the device they paid $599 for have been heard in Cupertino, as Apple CEO Steve Jobs has announced a $100 store credit good for any purchase at physical Apple Stores or the online Apple Store. The offer applies to anyone whose purchase fell out of the 10 business day window where Apple gives out price break credits.

Though making a considerable offer toward appeasement, Jobs did take the opportunity to chastise iPhone owners in his letter:

Second, being in technology for 30+ years I can attest to the fact that the technology road is bumpy. There is always change and improvement, and there is always someone who bought a product before a particular cutoff date and misses the new price or the new operating system or the new whatever. This is life in the technology lane. If you always wait for the next price cut or to buy the new improved model, you’ll never buy any technology product because there is always something better and less expensive on the horizon. The good news is that if you buy products from companies that support them well, like Apple tries to do, you will receive years of useful and satisfying service from them even as newer models are introduced.

Ouch! What say you, iPhone owners? Is this good enough? Or will nothing less than $200 do it for you?

Thanks for the heads-up, d0b3rmann!c

Nothing Steve Jobs announced this morning was as surprising as the $200 price cut to the 8 GB iPhone and the discontinuation of the 4 gig model (currently blowing out at $299 while supplies last — deal of the century). Less than three months on the market, Apple chopped the price by more than a third.

Readers of the blog (and lots of other sites) are screaming bloody murder, throwing about accusations that defenders of the price cut are Apple employees, demanding refunds and more. I would love to join in on the outrage, but this is entirely typical of the way Apple handles truly new technologies.

The very first Mac debuted in February 1984 for $2,499 with 128k. Just eight months later, the company rolled out the Mac 512k for $3300 in September. That would have been fine, but the Macintosh Plus, with 1 meg of RAM, came out in January 1985 for just $2,600. Anyone who bought a Mac 512k got hosed even worse than the earliest adopters.

When the first iMac came out, it shipped in August with a 233Mhz processor and a stunningly under-powered graphics chip for $1,299. Two months later, a revision tripling the video ram came out for the same price. It was the difference between playing Myth at all and not, on a non-upgradable machine.

The multicolor edition shipped in January for the same price, a 266Mhz chip and a significant better graphics chip. By may, 333Mhz chips rolled for the machines. And then it all got replaced by the iMac DV, which included FireWire, completely obsoleting the previous line.

Perhaps the most egregious recent Apple screwing consumers moment came with the iMac line in 2005 and 2006. The iMac G5 with ambient light sensor shipped in May 2005. Then it was replaced by the iMac G5 with a built-in iSight in October, just three months before the transition to Intel chips, when an identical but much-faster machine came out for the same price.

And, of course, the AppleTV was on the market for just two months before Apple brought out the 160-gig model, with four times the storage of the non-upgradable original.

I’m still paying the price for getting a first-gen Powerbook G4 12″. I got no SuperDrive, no DVI port and no USB 2.0, even though I bought just two months before the upgrade.

At this point, if you buy a first-generation Apple product, you’ll probably see either a huge price drop or feature boost within a couple months of your purchase. It’s nasty, it’s mean and it’s capricious, but it’s the way Apple works. If you want to get the most from Apple, wait for their products to mature and drop in price.

It’s entirely likely that a 3G iPhone with a 16gig drive will be announced in Europe in September. That’s just the way Apple operates. I think the reason it’s so upsetting in this case is that the company always introduces its products with flair and says to the world, “This is the one! This is how it should be done!” And we believe it, we overpay, and watch in dismay as Apple introduces One More Thing after One More Thing…

In the most unanticipated news of the Apple “Beat Goes On” event, CEO Steve Jobs announced that the high-end 8 GB iPhone will now retail for $399 with a two-year AT&T wireless plan, a price cut of $200 less than three months after the device first shipped.

Jobs said that the company would ship its 1 millionth phone this month and wanted to make the device more accessible, hence the cut. I have to also see the move as strategic related to the new iPod Touch, which delivers every feature of the iPhone except for e-mail, text messaging and phone calls, and will retail for $299 for an 8GB model. Making the iPhone cost $100 more for the same size and costing the same as a 16GB model is a lot more palatable than a $300 premium.

Still, I wonder what this says about the success of the iPhone. We’re talking about a 33 percent price cut. Is Apple disappointed by iPhone sales or merely competing with itself

Via Gadget Lab