iPhone - page 484

It’s a minor triumph of Apple’s that all AT&T plans for the iPhone include unlimited data services. After all, Blackberries and Treos alike have spendy access plans that dramatically increase their cost of use.

But as Justine Ezarik (a designer based in Pittsburgh known as iJustine who is also a “lifecaster” on Justin.tv) learned recently, AT&T still has a very old-world view of billing for data services. The company broke out as a line item every data transfer her iPhone made, including 30,000 texts, most of which come up as a huge series of $0.00 transactions. The total heft to the package? 300 pages. And it shipped in a box, which can’t have been cheap, even leaving aside the environmental impact of a few hundred thousand folks getting extra-big bills printed on paper.

In response, Justine has put up a marvelous iPhone ad parody that you can view above via YouTube. The message is clear: Get eBilling, and someone talk to AT&T about the way they manage billing for data!

Via Apple 2.0

Nintendo owns the portable gaming market. They have since they created it with Game & Watch in the mid-’80s and then revolutionized it with Game Boy in 1989. Many challengers have risen and fallen over the 18 years since.

But as I predicted the day the iPhone was released, a reckoning is due between Apple and Nintendo in the coming years. As GigaOM reported today, Nintendo has filed a patent for a tilt-sensitive handheld console (a perfect companion to the motion-based Wii). Meanwhile, the New York Times claims Apple is stealthily adding game functions to the iPhone. There’s nothing stealthy about it. You create a portable device capable of gorgeous graphics, pristine audio and driven by a multitouch interface, you’re already there in the first place.

Let’s go back to the prediction from Jan. 9, shall we?

And multi-touch in iPhone is significantly more flexible — it’s made to interpret complex gestures with more than one point of input. There are a number of DS games that could easily be adapted, and it’s just made to host a new rhythm or music game that would require drumming two spots at once. It’s not a threat to the DS, because its price-point is so much higher. It is a threat to crappy games for cell phones, which often cost $6 and suck.

More interestingly, this could begin to threaten Nintendo down the road. The iPhone and its interface are extremely high-end today. By the end of the year, Apple could replace its traditional high-end iPod with one driven by the new iPhone interface and screen and offer it for the same price those iPods sell for today — and even boost the hard drive size, too. Suddenly, you have the world’s premiere media player and rising games star in a $250 package. That beats the PSP any day and hounds the DS tomorrow.

Sounds good. Anything else?

That’s my prediction of the day: As the iPhone seizes the high-end of Apple’s consumer electronics products, the iPod becomes the ultimate PSP-killer, with an interface the DS can’t quite match without the need for a stylus. Tell me you wouldn’t buy that. I dare you.

I’m sorry. Sometimes the smug just gets everywhere.

And we’re off to the races. Despite Apple’s interest in restricting iPhone development to themselves and trusted third-parties like Google, clever programmers have delivered native software for the device — including an addictive-looking game called “Lights Off,” released today by Delicious Monster.

It’s a standard puzzle-game — tap the buttons to turn out all the lights in the 5×5 grid — but the presentation is very slick, and the iPhone interface alone makes it more compelling than it would be on OS X for Mac.

As with all unsupported iPhone software, it takes some warranty-voiding mojo to make “Lights Off” install, but the app’s creators, Lucas Newman and Adam Betts, helpfully include full instructions:

Installing third-party applications on your iPhone is not for the faint of heart. For more in depth instructions on iPhone modifications, look at the iPhone Dev Wiki.

1. Download iActivator and use it to “perform jailbreak” on your iPhone to allow access to the entire filesystem, which is necessary to upload applications.

2. Use iPHUC to upload Lights Off.app to the Applications folder on your iPhone.

3. Install SSH (or the alternate version) on your iPhone, and run the command: chmod +x “/Applications/Lights Off.app/LightsOff”

Not for the faint of heart, as you can see. But still: Blinking lights! Blinking lights and the satisfaction of walking on forbidden ground!

Via Daring Fireball.

Several hundred thousand people across the country are now happy iPhone users. They’re also all AT&T users, whether they wanted to be or not. Until Apple shipped their wonder-phone, I was never that interested in phones focused on e-mail and web browsing — then it all changed. However, as a T-Mobile user, my options are limited. Much as I would like to say I’m glad that my service agreement will force me to wait until at least the second-generation iPhone, I’m not. I want a great phone. And so I headed to the T-Mobile store yesterday, in search of hope. And I found none. To read the gory details, hit the jump.

Hot technologies often inspire imitators and detractors. The set of touchscreen iPhone-alikes coming from China are pretty clear evidence of the former, and anyone telling themselves they like their Treos just fine represent the latter.

But nothing’s weirder than the ancillary universes that show up to support the latest buzzworthy devices. And nothing for the iPhone is weirder than iRovr, a social network for iPhones only. It doesn’t seem to be much more than Friendster or Facebook optimized for the device, but it just expands the exclusive advantages extended to iPhone owners.

As you can see, however, there is a way to cheat your way in. Just use Safari 3. Which raises an interesting question: Is it lamer to join iRovr as an iPhone owner — or to cheat your way in as a non-iPhone-owning Safari user because you want the reflected glory?

My money’s on the second one.

Picture by Ed Dame

The iPhone’s non-user-replaceable battery has been a source of endless controversy since Apple first debuted the device. Some claimed that Apple wouldn’t even be able to sell any iPhones once people realized they couldn’t pop in a spare battery on the road (this idea totally ignoring, of course, the fact that many people, myself included, have never ever swapped cell batteries on the fly…). Others are under the impression that the iPhone’s battery will altogether stop working after either 300 or 400 charges — even though it’s pretty clear that figure states that iPhone battery capacity is more likely to fall to 80 percent after that time. Which is a bit different from 0 percent.

Now, of course, all of this confusion has yielded a class-action suit. Perhaps if everyone would just talk to Philip Elmer-Dewitt at Apple 2.0, this would all get cleared up. He’s put together a very detailed account of the entire battery saga. Check it out, and try not to lose your mind. That way lies madness.

Very few promising technologies have taken as long to catch on as the ebook. Everyone seems to be under the impression that electronics will one day replace printed books. But almost no one wants to actually read their books that way.

The sole users of ebooks tend to be people with PDAs — and now iPhones. A new site, TextOniPhone has sprung up to meet people’s needs to read works of literature on their revolutionary Internet Communicators. The site purports to have more than 20,000 books and novels optimized for reading on the iPhone. All the texts are public domain, and, as seems to be the norm these days, the site only works on iPhone (or a user-agent-spoofed browser). IPhone Dispatch has a nice review.
Gerry Manacsa, a senior designer at WOWIO, checked out a bunch of PDFs on an iPhone to test the platform’s viability as an ebook reader. His results were fairly good, particularly for comics, which is where I see the iPhone excelling, personally. This will be an interesting thread to watch.

Via Digg.

Despite the best efforts of folks like me, bonafide iPhones didn’t show up in the wild until a few week prior to release. As it turns out, that’s because Apple was smart enough to hide iPhones inside of other devices. This according to Richard Burns, AT&T’s President of Wireless Networks, in an interview with the Louisville Courier-Journal.

So secretive was the project that he didn’t even show the phone to his wife. And when AT&T’s team of testers hit the streets to try the phone in ballparks, subways and skyscrapers, Burns said they used a contraption to cloak the device so nobody would know what the testers were holding.

Burns declined to offer a description of the cloaking device, calling it “something that looked like something else.”

That’s how you know Apple is brilliant: They made it look like “something that looked like something else.” How visionary. Or not.

My best guess is that Apple made the iPhones look like Zunes. Any other guesses?

Via Digg.
Image from Hideapod.

Chart: MarketWatch.

Apple’s Q3 was the company’s best ever. It raked in $5.41 billion in sales, posting a $818 million in profit. Gross margins — the amount of revenue that is profit — is up to a whopping 36 percent. This surely is the highest in the industry. By contrast, Dell reported Q2 2007 margins of just 4.3 percent, earning $605 million profit on revenues of $14.1 billion.
Apple also reported 10 million iPods sold — up 21 percent on the year before; and 1.76 million Macs, up 33 percent year-on-year.

Apple’s stock is rebounding on the news: it’s up 6 percent after taking a hammering yesterday on AT&T’s iPhone numbers.

Picture by Ed Dame.

Apple sold 270,000 iPhones on the opening weekend, according to Apple’s Q3 results.

See the data PDF here.

AT&T’s quarterly results said only 146,000 were activated in the first two days — so it looks like 124,000 people either waited a few days to activate their phones, or had trouble activating them, as was widely reported.

We now have definitive proof that a business world built on the quarterly earnings report is destined for self-destruction: Apple’s stock fell almost $9 because its partner AT&T “only” managed to activate 146,000 iPhones in its first day and a half on sale. Not that the activation figure directly reflects the number of iPhones sold.

Yes, I’m serious, and I’m totally bewildered. Analysts and investors are pretending that the second quarter, which closed June 30, would be the one that reflects the impact of the iPhone. Which is nice, except that the iPhone went on sale at 6 p.m. on June 29, and AT&T had serious network issues that prevented people from activating their phones until well into the next week. Which means that anyone who couldn’t or chose not to activate their iPhone until after midnight on June 30 got left out of this report.

Which is obviously a clear sign that it’s time to sell all of your shares in AAPL. Obviously. You know how, in movies, we’ve gotten to the point where people talk about the highest opening 5.5-day gross ever by a film released on a Tuesday in a month with a full moon that falls on a Saturday? This is the opposite. This is the smallest 1.5-day activation ever for an incredibly successful product. They chopped off Sunday, for heaven’s sake!

But this is the world that exists. It’s all about the quarterlies. And maybe that means that Apple did AT&T a disservice by not launching a week sooner. It shouldn’t have any impact on the long-term health of either firm. But it’s idiotic. Especially since AT&T experienced — wait for it — 61 percent total revenue growth!

Grrrr. Anyway, don’t read too much into these numbers. Apple will release its sales numbers soon, which are a clearer indication of how well the iPhone did in its first day and a half. Not that a day and a half of sales matters. It’s stupid. Can we talk about this in October?

Image via TechDigest

Watch the video up top. It’s a pretty terrifying video of a totally compromised iPhone through a new exploit of Safari, both on iPhone and likely PCs and Macs. A fix is already in the works, but I have to say I’m not that bothered. Why? Because it, like every other really dangerous exploit of a Mac or Apple product I’ve seen is heavily reliant on social engineering. For your iPhone to freak out and possibly shoot your cats with an iLaserbeam, you first need to go to a website specifically designed to make your iPhone freak out and kill your kittens. And I’m sorry, there’s no amount of protection that can protect people who are dupes for fraud. You can only go so far. This hole needs to close, no doubt, but if people vulnerable to harm on the web don’t know to only go to links they can trust, they probably shouldn’t be using the web at large.

Now, when people can make this happen over WiFi without the use of an exploit-focused website, then I’ll panic. And probably go back to landlines.

Via NY Times.

Color customizers extraordinaire Colorware are now offering iPhone paint work. For $150, they’ll take your iPhone and remake its look in your image. They’re also selling pre-colored iPhones for the same premium over stock models. I’m always surprised that Colorware’s work looks so good — color’s such a tricky design element, especially when it’s literally an after-thought — but their work is hot.

That said, it’s not for me. I’m still scraping together the money for an iPhone, so…

Via Infinite Loop

We’ve all seen Apple use the New York Times website to demonstrate the iPhone’s tremendous facility on the Internet. But the Times site works so well in part because the newspaper’s web page somewhat mimics the look of a real newspaper front page. What about the hundreds of terrible newspaper web pages that we read for local content?

Enter PressDisplay. The company takes the original layouts of newspapers and turns them into browseable web objects. And it’s now compatible with iPhone.

As you might expect, it’s optimized for crazy zooms, rotations and all of the other interactions that just make iPhone special. It is a commercial service, but it’s free through the end of August, so there’s really no better way to read the Washington Post or the San Francisco Chronicle on the train to work until then!

I think we have a new usability standard. The above YouTube clip shows a 2-year-old girl named Anna very fluently flipping through modes on the iPhone before heading to the YouTube tab to watch a favored Coldplay video. Apple’s current ad campaign is working just fine for the time-being, but when they want to go for the jugular, they should call this family up.

Anyone else still have goosebumps?

Via Digg.

It’s just a mock-up, but I’d totally wear it, wouldn’t you? For me, I would want a single pendant with the iPhone Safari logo, nestled against my heart…

Via Geeksugar.

We’ve officially moved beyond skepticism that Apple would be able to get a foothold into the mobile market to full-on speculation for how the company will follow up the breakout success of the iPhone. According to MSNBC, it will be with the iPhone Nano. Which they make sound like…the iPod Nano. With a phone on it.

Kevin Chang, a JP Morgan analyst based in Taiwan, cited people in the supply channel that he did not name and an application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark office for his report.

Apple filed a patent application document that refers to a multifunctional handheld device with a circular touch pad control, similar to the Nano’s scroll wheel.

Yeah, I’m sure that will be exactly what Apple does. I’m sorry, there’s no way Apple ever releases a product with a click-wheel. The company has sent clear messages that it considers that to be the iPod interface and the iPod interface alone. The iPhone is about multitouch. You don’t get the name otherwise.

The iPhone will quite obviously eat into iPod sales. That’s kind of the point long-term. It doesn’t mean Apple’s ready to roll out a bad product to replace good ones.

Via Digg.
Image via Information Architects

A bit more than a week into the iPhone launch, we’ve established some certainties:

1. All the iPod functions are awesome
2. Browsing in Safari is surprisingly good
3. No. 2 is only true when connected to WiFi, because EDGE is SLOW

For all of the nit-picking and armchair quarterbacking, the only feature that people are consistently upset about is the lack of high-speed wireless data. Unfortunately, some early adopters are trying to justify their purchases. From the sounds of it, the always-entertaining Robert Cringely is among their ranks:

The question here is whether 3G is already built into the iPhones shipping now or whether it will require a new model? Given that it is coming so soon after the iPhone introduction, I can’t believe that even Steve would make us buy new phones. It is very likely that a firmware upgrade will awaken the 3G within all you iPhone owners.

That’s a different definition of “very likely” than I’ve ever heard. I wish it were true, Bob, but it just ain’t. Many people have gone through the iPhone with a fine-toothed comb, and there is no secret 3G hardware. If there were, Steve Jobs wouldn’t have explicitly complained about the poor battery life of current 3G chipsets, and the many geeks who’ve ripped open their iPhones would have found the chip. The first-gen iPhone is the first-gen iPhone is the first-gen iPhone. Flash and java support can be added. New hardware can’t.

I won’t be surprised at all if Steve gooses iPhone sales with a 3G model in time for Christmas, maybe with 16GB of on-board storage. I will, however, eat a haberdashery worth of hats, if current iPhones get on that high-speed highway.

Via Apple 2.0

Jon Lech Johansen, the 23-year-old who first cracked the CSS encryption screen for DVDs when he was 15, has now discovered a method for activating the iPhone without registering with AT&T at all. With the help of a little Windows application called Phone Activation Server and a few “magic numbers” Jon posted, Apple’s amazing new device wakes up as a touchscreen iPod and WiFi-enabled Internet device — that, of course, can’t make phone calls. With this, I think it’s safe to assume we’ll see an unlocked iPhone running on T-Mobile or one of the European carriers very shortly. I know there’s a lot more to it, but people are really honing in on the secured side of the iPhone now. Still, it would be nice if the cracks were written for Linux and Mac OS X instead of .NET…

Via Apple 2.0

David Pogue of the New York Times, ladies and gentlemen. Would that we could all be so un-self-conscious.

At the end of its first full week on sale, a distinct pattern has emerged for iPhone availability: We West Coasters are out of luck. Though Apple has obviously begun to restock its stores with iPhones, they appear to be working from East to West.

According to Apple’s availability checker, virtually every Apple Store in New York, all of them in New Jersey, and most shops up and down the eastern seaboard are chock full of iPhones, while no state west of Utah has even one iPhone available in Apple Stores. Hopefully, new shipments could arrive out here tomorrow for a weekend pick-up. As a reminder, Apple announces the next day’s iPhone availability at 9 p.m. each day – which is a nice way to avoid going to a store and coming back empty-handed.

It must be a constant frustration to Steve Jobs that journalists and message board commenters alike routinely “misspell” iLife, iTunes, iPod, etc. as Ilife, Itunes, Ipod. Well, in the universe of the iPhone, that vicious cycle will end. Reader Scott notes:

I don’t know if anybody else has noticed this yet, but the spellcheck on iPhone auto corrects the “mis-punctuation” of Apple’s i-products.
For example:

Ilife becomes iLife
Itunes becomes iTunes
etc.

It gave me a little chuckle to realize Apple edited the dictionary in it’s own favor.

Update: Scott came through with the evidence.

Picture: CommonGate

The paparazzi caught Ms. Lohan leaving Planet Blue at the Country Mart in Malibu on Saturday clutching an iPhone in her hand, according to crazyGossip. More crazy Lohan shopping pics at the site.

I bet the iPhone’s glass top is great for chopping and snorting.

Todd Ficharker, who describes himself as the “clumsiest person in the world” smashed the screen of his iPhone less than 24 hours after he bought it. He explains:

“I tried answering a call while it was plugged in and the short cord pulled it out of my hand and hit the corner of a table on the way down. 100% my fault.”

But there’s a silver lining! Unbelievably, Apple replaced it for free.

“They gave me a brand new phone for free. Talk about fantastic customer care. I am in love 4-eva with Apple.”

Via MacFeber

Pic by Leander Kahney: Apple’s San Francisco store on iPhone opening night.

Goldman Sachs analyst David Bailey thinks Apple sold 700,000 iPhones on its opening weekend, more than half again than the 500,000 estimated by his esteemed colleague Gene Munster.

Bloomberg reports that Bailey initially pegged 350,000 iPhone sales, and Munster estimated 200,000.

Said Munster: “In 2009, we estimate a third of Apple’s sales will be from iPhone. This is a huge product.”