Tag Archives | Apple. iPhone

“Apple seen extending exclusive iPhone deal with AT&T”

Posted by Harry McCracken on February 9, 2010 at 6:07 pm

Can’t we all just admit that we have no idea when or if U.S. carriers other than AT&T will get the iPhone? AT&T may not know. Heck, Steve Jobs may not know.

(Okay, trying to suss this out is irresistible: Seems to me that the window for a Verizon iPhone 3GS has essentially closed, and that the one for a CDMA iPhone on Verizon at all is quickly narrowing, too. With every day that passes with no news, the chances are higher that AT&T will preserve its exclusivity into 2011.)

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Siri, a Promising “Virtual Personal Assistant” for the iPhone 3GS

Posted by Harry McCracken on February 5, 2010 at 1:08 pm

Siri, an ambitious new free iPhone application, is now available in the App Store–and it’s not Just Another iPhone Application. Based on $150 million of research by the Stanford Research Institute and DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Products Agency), Siri aims to be a “virtual personal assistant” that understands your spoken requests–“best sushi in san francisco,” “remind me to order flowers,” “order tickets to a show at the Castro Theater”–and takes action on your behalf.

Retrieving information by voice on the iPhone is nothing new–Google’s Mobile App is just one of several that let you search the Web by speaking. But Siri isn’t Web search. It’s all about actions you want to take, and it returns information and opportunities to do things, not search results. And it uses the iPhone’s GPS to refine its responses to your local area.

(Right now, Siri is designed for the iPhone 3GS; versions for the iPhone 3G and iPod Touch, as well as other mobile platforms, are in the works.)

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3G SlingPlayer for iPhone. Finally!

Posted by Harry McCracken on February 4, 2010 at 9:08 am

Way back in June of 2008, Sling Media began showing off a version of its SlingPlayer software–which works with the company’s SlingBox gadget to route TV across the Internet–for the iPhone. It took another eleven months until the app went on sale. And when it did, it turned out that AT&T had prohibited Sling from letting it work over the 3G network. You could watch your TV from your iPhone, but only over Wi-Fi. At the time, I wrote:

Maybe I’m a wild-eyed optimist, but I’m hoping that Sling will eventually be permitted to add 3G support, and that those of us who have paid thirty bucks for this first version will get free upgrades.

Then I sort of forgot about the whole thing, since I rarely used the Wi-Fi version of the app. (In fact I stopped using my SlingBox much, period–I still can’t figure out why the iPhone version was verboten but the Windows Mobile one was OK..) But I hadn’t hoped in vain. Today, AT&T and Sling issued a joint press release saying that the 3G version of the app now passes muster. It’ll be available (and a free upgrade to existing customers) once Apple approves it.

“Just as we’ve worked with Sling Media in this instance, we look forward to collaborating with other developers so that mobile customers can access a wider, more bandwidth-sensitive, and powerful range of applications in the future,” said Ralph de la Vega, president and CEO, AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets. “Collaboration with developers like Sling Media ensures that all apps are optimized for our 3G network to conserve wireless spectrum and reduce the risk that an app will cause such extreme levels of congestion that they disrupt the experience of other wireless customers. Our focus continues to be on delivering the nation’s most advanced mobile broadband experience and giving our customers the widest possible array of mobile applications.”

Good news, even if the process moved at a glacial pace. Presumably there are some interesting possibilities for video applications that developers didn’t even bother to consider after Sling was forced to hobble the original version of SlingPlayer. Now writing them won’t seem like a pointless exercise.

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iPhone File Frustration: Solution Impending?

Posted by Harry McCracken on February 2, 2010 at 5:31 pm

Everybody grouses about the lack of multitasking for third-party apps on the iPhone (and iPad). But another limitation of the current platform is at least as limiting: The data sandboxing files that hobbles third-party apps’ ability to move files on and off the iPhone or share them with other applications.

Today, there’s both bad news and good news on this front. Bad news: Apple made e-book reader Stanza (owned by Amazon.com) remove a feature for transferring books via USB, on the grounds that it violated the iPhone developer agreement.

Good news: Ars Technica is reporting that iPhone OS 3.2, the version on the iPad, has a shared-storage folder that’s accessible to third-party apps–including computer apps that can see the folder when the iPhone is attached via USB. If that shows up on the iPhone (which it presumably will) it’ll go a significant way towards reducing the every-app-is-an-island feel that iPhone software tends to have.

As long as I’m at it, another request: The iPhone/iPad e-mail clients should allow detaching of attachments into this shared folder, so that applications such as word processors and spreadsheets can get easy access to documents for editing. Maybe this is in iPhone OS 3.2 and I just don’t know about it yet–I’d assume that Apple would want it for the iPad versions of the iWork apps, and it would be a major bummer if Apple apps could get at attachments and other programs couldn’t…

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Snap Judgments! The Early iPhone Skepticism

Posted by Harry McCracken on February 1, 2010 at 4:03 am

A month ago, before any of us knew anything for sure about Apple’s tablet, I looked back at the period before any of us knew anything for sure about Apple’s phone. It turned out that about 95% of the speculation and rumors about the iPhone had nothing to do with the device that Apple actually announced at Macworld Expo in January of 2007.

Now that we know quite a bit about the iPad, a massive rush to judgment is already underway, with pundits predicting everything from historic success to epic failure. Which led me to wonder: How accurate were the first predictions that got made about the iPhone’s fate? So I went back and read scads of stories from the first couple of weeks after the phone’s announcement.

Overall, they weren’t bad. Lots of pundits said it was a landmark product with the potential to transform the phone business. But there were plenty of dissenting opinions, too. This article is devoted to them.

I’m not dredging up these stories to mock anyone. For one thing, some of them make reasonable arguments about the original iPhone’s limitations; it’s just that the phone managed to thrive despite them. For another, I thought that famous flop the G4 Cube would be an influential hit, and am therefore in no position to taunt anyone for making inaccurate forecasts about Apple products. I’m doing this because I think reviewing iPhone predictions is a useful exercise as we think about the future of the iPad.

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Google Voice on the iPhone–Finally!

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 26, 2010 at 8:48 am

Apple may still officially be “pondering” whether it should approve Google’s Google Voice app for iPhone,  but there’s finally good news: Google has released an entirely Web-based version of the service (at m.google.com/voice). It works on the iPhone as well as Palm’s Pre and Pixi handsets, and brings a large chunk of the functionality of the native Voice apps for Android and BlackBerry to your phone’s browser.

This new version, like mobile Gmail, is among the most app-like browser services I’ve ever seen, period, letting you dial from your Google contacts list or a keypad, read and listen to messages, send text messages, and configure the app right within mobile Safari. When you make calls using it, the person who answers sees your Google Voice number, not the “real” one associated with your phone: Google makes an outgoing call from the iPhone, then reroutes it over a line of its own.

There’s only so far that a Web-based telephony app can go. On Android and BlackBerry, Google Voice can insert itself as your default phone interface, and it gets access to the contacts stored on your phone. On the iPhone, it stays a secondary interface and can’t see your local contacts. (You can, however, use Google Sync to sync your phone’s contacts with your Google Account.) When you make an outgoing call, your iPhone confirms you want to do so and shows Google’s routing number rather than the one you’re really calling–kind of confusing. And while the interface for wrangling messages is a vast improvement on the rudimentary one in the old Web-based Google Voice, it still send you out of Safari and into QuickTime when you want to listen to a message.

In short, the new Web-based Google Voice is impressive–but it doesn’t eliminate the value that a true native Google Voice for iPhone might bring. I’m gloomily assuming that its arrive eliminates whatever remaining chance there was that Apple might approve the app, unless the FCC decides to weigh in further. But I’m also relieved that around 80% of the Google Voice experience–just to pick a number at random–has landed on my iPhone.

Here’s a video Google produced about the new version. A few screens after the jump.

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