Tag Archives | Apple. iPhone

Sprint’s EVO 4G Superphone vs. the Next iPhone

Posted by Harry McCracken on March 25, 2010 at 10:15 am

One product has dominated the buzz at this year’s CTIA Wireless show in Las Vegas: Sprint’s EVO 4G, the first 4G phone headed for the U.S. The fact that it’s Sprint’s first WiMAX handset is the big news, but with its 4.3″ screen at 800-by-480 resolution, twin cameras (8MP on the back, 1.3MB on the front), 1GHz Snapdragon CPU, 512MB of RAM, and 1GB of built-in storage plus MicroSD slot, this Android 2.1 phone has the best specs I’ve ever heard of in a phone.

Great specs, of course, don’t guarantee much of anything. Still, when I saw the EVO in person, my socks were indeed knocked off. It could be the kind of phone you consider switching carriers to get. (Sprint’s lead in 4G wireless ensures that no other U.S. carrier will get an EVO doppelganger just yet.)

The phone’s over-the-top specs also led me to wonder: How well-equipped will Apple’s next iPhone be? When the iPhone 3GS shipped last June, it seemed pretty beefy. But advances in screen sizes and resolutions, CPU speeds, cameras, and other areas have left the 3GS feeling fairly basic. Thanks to the quality of the iPhone OS, it still delivers an experience that fancier phones are scrambling to catch up with. And Apple, more than most companies, rarely ups the specs of its products for the sake of pure specsmanship. But chances are high that we’ll see a new iPhone (call it the “Next iPhone”) within the next few months…and it’s possible that its hardware will represent the iPhone’s greatest leap forward to date.

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Life With Droid: The Good, the Bad, and the Bizarre

Posted by Harry McCracken on March 22, 2010 at 8:38 am

From July 11th, 2008–the day the iPhone 3G went on sale–until February 15th, 2010, I was an iPhone user.  But for all the things that are wonderful about the iPhone, I was increasingly fed up with one, um, minor weakness: I had trouble making and receiving phone calls on it. That’s in part because I spend a lot of time in the South of Market neighborhood of San Francisco, much of which seems to be Bermuda Triangle of AT&T coverage.

So after thinking it over for a couple of weeks, I took dramatic action: I bought myself a Motrola Droid from Verizon Wireless. Why the Droid? Well, with the profusion of new apps for Android phones, I figured I needed an Android phone on hand to review them . And the Droid is on the famously dependable Verizon network, is available now (unlike the Verizon Nexus One), and has a keyboard (also unlike the Nexus one).

Oh, and Amazon had the Droid for $109 with a two-year contract, no rebate paperwork involved. Which sounded like a great deal until it knocked the price down to $49.99 shortly after I placed my order…

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First Impressions: Opera Mini on the iPhone

Posted by Harry McCracken on March 15, 2010 at 6:26 am

Here at South by Southwest Interactive, I finally got a little hands-on time with Opera Mini for the iPhone, which Opera started showing off last month at the Mobile World Congress Show in Barcelona.  The Norwegian browser company told me that it’s still putting the finishing touches on it and plans to submit it to the iPhone App Store real soon now.

On every platform it runs on, Opera Mini’s signature feature is that it’s speedy, thanks to server-side compression that crunches Web pages down before they get sent to the browser. In my extremely informal experiments here at SXSW, Mini didn’t feel particularly zippy. (Actually, it loaded the New York Times’ home page more slowly than Mobile Safari did.) But it may not have been a real-world test of how it’ll perform when Apple approves it (please!) and it shows up on the App Store: An Opera representative told me that the compression is still going on via servers in far-away Norway, which would tend to bog things down.

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Rhapsody Readies Offline Music for iPhone

Posted by Harry McCracken on March 14, 2010 at 12:02 pm

I’m at the amazing South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, where I ran into a couple of folks from the Rhapsody music service who gave me a quick peek of something I’ve been waiting for since Rhapsody hit the iPhone in September: an update to the iPhone app that lets you download music over 3G or Wi-Fi to the phone so plays directly from the handset rather than streaming over the Internet. The company says it’s finishing it up and planning to submit it to the App Store shortly.

Caching music locally guarantees that a song won’t die in midplay if your Internet connection flakes out. It lets you listen in places where the Internet doesn’t go, like most airplanes. And it uses way less battery power. Basically, it should make a $15-per-month Rhapsody to Go subscription look a lot more attractive. (The usual rules of subscription music apply: You can listen all you want as long as you pay the monthly fee, but if  you cancel service all the albums you’ve added to your collection go away.)

Once Rhapsody for iPhone does offline music–I’m assuming Apple will approve it without delay–the one feature it’ll lack that you’d want is the ability to play in the background while you use another app. That’ll only happen if Apple enables third-party multitasking. But Rhapsody says that it plans to add music downloading soon to its Android app, which already runs fine in the background.

Here’s a video preview of the iPhone app from Rhapsody:

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ReMail Lives! Maybe!

Posted by Harry McCracken on March 5, 2010 at 11:01 am

Last month, Google bought ReMail, a company that made a nifty e-mail program for the iPhone–then promptly yanked the app out of the App Store and announced plans to discontinue support for it. Today brings some news that sounds modestly hopeful: Google has decided to open-source the ReMail code. If there are any developers out there with the interest and technical chops, they’ll be able to adopt ReMail, get it back in the App Store, and release upgrades.

Of course, there are no guarantees that such developers will emerge and save ReMail. Last year, when Google decided to cease work on the Twitterlike Jaiku service it had bought, it released Jaiku as open-source code–and that’s pretty much the last time Jaiku attracted attention at all. But ReMail is a unique, useful product with a clear audience. Maybe someone out there will see an opportunity to make money by rescuing it–I hope so.

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OLEDisappointing

Posted by Harry McCracken on February 24, 2010 at 10:42 pm

Everyone knows OLED screens look amazing, right? Well, everybody is wrong, or at least that’s not the whole story. My old friend Dr. Ray Soneira of DisplayMate, who’s been testing screens of all types for years, compared the OLED display of Google’s Nexus One to the iPhone 3GS’s LCD screen, and found that while the Nexus One’s icons, text, and menus looked terrific, images suffered from artifacts, banding, and inaccurate colors. (It didn’t help that the Nexus One only does 16-bit color.)

Ray’s testing is so thorough that it’s a multi-part story; even if you’re ultimately happy trusting your own eyes to judge if you’re happy with a display, his examination of the two phones makes for fascinating reading.

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Should Apple Police the App Store for Sleaze?

Posted by Harry McCracken on February 19, 2010 at 4:37 pm

Apple appears to have decided that the iPhone App Store should be less smutty. As the Business Insider is reporting, developers of sex-oriented apps are getting notified that their apps are being removed from the store. TechCrunch has the text of a message Apple sent to the developer of something called Jiggle iBoobs saying that the tougher stance is a response to complaints from iPhone owners.

Of all the many and varied controversies over App Store acceptance policies, this is one I have trouble getting worked up over–sorry, Jiggle iBoobs, but I’m not going to defend to my death your right to be in the App Store. I am, however, fascinated by the fact that Apple’s app policies are vastly more puritanical than those for movies and music.

I mean, the iTunes Store has the movies with six of the top twelve nude scenes ever filmed, as rated in this (semi-SFW) list. It has five of the eight most sweartastic movies of all time. It’s full of music whose very titles will offend many people. And all this stuff can be purchased from iTunes and transferred to the same iPhones that will tragically be denied Jiggle iBoobs from now on.

Steve Jobs is fond of saying that software developers are artists. He’s right. But the developers whose work is getting booted off the App Store aren’t artists–they’re schlockmeisters selling (mildly) prurient stuff with no artistic value. The basic cheesiness of their offerings is what separates them from other stuff on iTunes that’s more explicit. Apple may be relaying bad news to the developer of Hooters Calendar Girls Crazy Eights, but I kinda doubt it’ll do the same to Martin Scorsese anytime soon.

Still, I’d vote for Apple erring on the side of allowing the possible offensive into the App Store–and having at least vaguely consistent policies for movies, muisc, and applications–as long as parents have a way to prevent their kids from seeing it. As Jason Kincaid says over at TechCrunch, the rules are nebulous. And subject to arbitrary change: The App Store’s short life can already be divided into the Puritan Era, the PG-Rated Era, and the Puritanism All Over Again Era.

More important, even if there are no possibly-offensive apps of genuine artistic worth right now, there will be someday–but only if Apple doesn’t shut down the whole idea before it even gets started.

What’s your take?

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Opera on iPhone: Here But Not Here

Posted by Harry McCracken on February 17, 2010 at 2:51 pm

Engadget’s Thomas Ricker is in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress. He got a preview of Opera’s Opera Mini browser for the iPhone and was impressed by its speed. He was also confused by Opera’s unwillingness to let him share any images of it in action. And of course, there’s no guarantee that it’ll ever be available in Apple’s iPhone App Store. (Actually, the odds seem against it.)

Please, Apple, surprise us by promptly approving this app so we don’t need to waste any time or brain cells squawking about it…

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