Tag Archives | Apple. iPhone

Yelp Adds Augmented Reality

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 28, 2009 at 7:54 am

Yelp LogoAugmented reality–the process of overlaying computer-generated information and imagery on live video–is as good a candidate as any for tech buzzword du jour, and it’s come to the iPhone. As Robert Scoble discovered, the new version of the Yelp application contains an Easter Egg: Shake your iPhone 3GS three times (hard!) and it unlocks a new feature called Monocle.

Moncole uses the 3GS’s camera and compass to let you point the phone at a locale and see Yelp listings for nearby businesses bobbing along on top:

Yelp Monocole View

It’s a neat effect, although I’m not sure if it offers any real advantage over a more traditional map view–the Yelp listings are small enough that they’re tough to tap with your finger, and they don’t make clear where the establishment in question is. And as you can see, some of them even get covered up.

As ReadWriteWeb has reported, other existing iPhone apps are adding augmented reality, too. It’s a cool idea even if the first killer app hasn’t arrived, and you gotta think we’ll see increasingly sophisticated use of it. Me, I want to be able to aim my camera at a person I don’t quite recognize and be reminded who they are…

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Can We Cut Out the iPhone Bashing Already?

Posted by David Worthington on August 25, 2009 at 7:23 pm

iPhone SteamrolleriPhone bashing is the trend du jour among tech pundits. The phone’s flaws are being singled out as if they’re unique to Apple, and the condemnation arrives without one shred of quantitative evidence to support hyperbolic editorials that say it’s somehow ruining customers’ lives.

Initial delight over the iPhone has faded to complaints about Apple’s micromanaging behavior and propensity to create closed systems. Nothing’s changed–Apple’s been that way since day one, and no one has to buy anything from it.

In June, I wrote about an extremely hyped survey which suggested that the iPhone is more accident-prone than other smart phones–without including the damage rates for other phone models for comparison.

In a new story in Salon, author Amanda Fortini is guilty of a similar sin. She complains about how her iPhones have repeatedly failed–including the one she dropped in a parking lot–and cherry-picks comments from forums to support her feelings about its durability. Of course, the iPhone is not singularly vulnerable to someone’s carelessness. If you drive a Volvo straight into a brick wall, you will be injured, even though it’s a safe car.

My iPhones have been very resistant to damage: the screens have never scratched, and they survived being accidentally dropped onto my hardwood floors on a few occasions. I also protect my investment, and buy cases to guard the phone. When something did go wrong (my headphone jack contacts were touching, causing weird behavior), Apple replaced my phone free of charge.

An informal survey conducted by Technologizer last year found that a majority of people were happy with their iPhone purchases, and other surveys have similar findings.

The iPhone isn’t perfect, and neither is the AT&T network. But let’s be realistic–Apple is selling a great product that has forced the rest of the industry to innovate. There would be no Palm Pre without the iPhone. Can we please move on from the sensationalistic bashing?

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Apple and AT&T’s Colluding, Anti-Competitive Ways

Posted by Dave Z on August 24, 2009 at 1:38 pm

Metallica And Justice For AllApple, AT&T, and Google’s responses to the FCC inquiry have received plenty of coverage. So I’m not going to rehash those letters line by line. However, I did want to focus on the Net Neutrality angle. Perhaps, the crux of the matter. And while I may not know the legal standards or thresholds for collusion and anti-competitive practices, as a frustrated customer of both AT&T and Apple, that’s exactly the perception I’m left with.

Apple says that they make final decisions on all App Store approvals. Except when AT&T has “expressed concerns.” Or when bound by the conditions of their contract with AT&T.

The parties state that VoIP apps (like Skype) are blocked from AT&T’s data network to protect the pipe. But they’ve had no problems approving music streaming services, which could actually consume more bandwidth than a VoIP app and possibly for longer periods of time. Related, AT&T uses language to prevent customers from redirecting a TV signal to a mobile handset. Which is why Slingbox iPhone client has been crippled/restricted to WiFi usage. Yet AT&T upsells mobile TV video services (starting at $15/month) on many handsets and the iPhone facilitates baseball game video streaming (also for a fee). Content which is obviously destined for TV, given the simulcast commercial breaks of silence.

So I’m calling BS on their FCC responses. I pay $30/month for data access. And it seems to me that Apple and AT&T are collaboratively and selectively blocking apps that could compete with their own service offerings. The app that triggered this investigation isn’t even a “bandwidth hog” and doesn’t provide VoIP connectivity. However, it does allow me to make phone calls at better rates than AT&T offers. Bottom line: If AT&T (and Apple) were solely concerned with protecting their network, they’d institute bandwidth caps and/or maximum streaming bitrates/resolutions. But, as it stands, the wireless industry is protecting their antiquated business model and needs to grow up evolve. We customers are ready. These two providers clearly aren’t.

[This post is republished from Zatz Not Funny.]

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RingCentral: It’s Like Google Voice for the iPhone!

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 24, 2009 at 11:57 am

Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt points out that Apple long ago approved an iPhone app that’s very much like Google Voice and presents all the issues that it says it doesn’t like about that application: RingCentral.

The app is called RingCentral Mobile and not only does it perform most of the same functions as the Google (GOOG) app that’s making all the headlines — universal telephone number, voicemail, dial-by-name directory, click-to-call, call forwarding, answering rules, call screening, music on hold, etc. — it was the template on which both Google Voice, and its predecessor, GrandCentral, were built.

As Elmer-DeWitt says, it’s hard to imagine that Google Voice being a Google product didn’t play a part in Apple’s unwillingness to approve it in a prompt fashion. (RingCentral’s from a venerable but small company.) And we already knew that one of the most significant issues with the App Store approval process is that it’s deeply inconsistent.

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Rhapsody is Coming to the iPhone. Let’s Hope!

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 23, 2009 at 10:51 pm

Rhapsody Logo RealNetworks’ Rhapsody is a very nicely done music service. But like all subscription music offerings it’s been profoundly hobbled by the fact that it’s incompatible with iPods, the devices that dominate portable digital music. That’s about to change. Sort of. Maybe.

Over at its corporate blog, RealNetworks its reporting that it’s submitted a Rhapsody application to the iPhone App Store. The app would bring Rhapsody to the iPhone and iPod Touch, letting owners of those devices pay a monthly fee ($14.99, apparently–the price of a Rhapsody to Go account) for unlimited access to the millions of tracks in Real’s catalog.

Here’s a video from Real showing the app in action:

[vodpod id=Groupvideo.3266941&w=425&h=350&fv=]

Rhapsody for iPhone is missing one key feature offered by Rhapsody to Go on other devices: It can stream music (over both 3G and Wi-Fi) but can’t store it locally. That means it only works when you have an Internet connection. Real says it may add local music storage later, and that an upcoming Android version of Rhapsody will store music locally.

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Whose iPhone is It Anyway?

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 21, 2009 at 6:05 pm

tugofwarThe great silence is over. Apple has responded to the FCC’s questions about the Google Voice app in particular and the iPhone App Store in general–and it not only sent its answers to the feds, but published them on the Web. It’s the first time the company has talked about App Store procedures and processes in public. And Engadget has posted the letters Google and AT&T sent to the FCC. All of a sudden, we know way more about what’s been going on behind the scenes.

Some of the tidbits in the three letters reconfirm stuff that was already known, such as Sling’s SlingPlayer being crippled because of concerns over network congestion in general and violation of AT&T’s terms of service in specific. Others make the obvious official, such as AT&T’s statement that it does not like the idea of VoIP services such as Skype running over its 3G network. Apple’s statement emphasizes the good news about App Store approval–95% of apps get the okay within two weeks–and stresses that most rejections are because of bugs. It also says that the App Store gets 8500 new apps and updates a week, that there are more than 40 full-time reviewers, and that every app is checked by two reviewers. Assuming that the average reviewer puts in a ten hour workday (not including lunch) that would mean that he or she must crank through around eight apps an hour–which means that the average inspection must be profoundly superficial, and that most must involve snap judgements that may be prone to error. (We kind of knew that already.)

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TomTom GPS Comes to the iPhone: So Far, Not So Good

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 17, 2009 at 4:44 pm

TomTom Car KitTomTom’s long-awaited–relatively speaking–GPS navigation software for the iPhone is now available on Apple’s App Store. It’s $99.99 for a version that includes maps for the U.S., Puerto Rico, and Canada–pricey for an iPhone app (and almost three times as much as CoPilot Live, which I haven’t tried yet) but not outrageous given the extreme usefulness of turn-by-turn driving directions.

This isn’t a full-blown review, but I’ve been using TomTom for a few quick trips around my neighborhood, and so far I’ve found it far less appealing than AT&T’s Navigator (a $10-a-month iPhone service powered by TeleNav)–even though the two products are comparable in many ways and TomTom is packed with worthwhile features.

That’s for two basic reasons:

A) TomTom offers spoken directions available in multiple languages with a variety of voices in both genders with a variety of accents. They sound nice and crisp. But so far in my trips, they’ve never spoken the names of roads–not even major highways, let alone neighborhood streets. Navigator offers only one voice (plus a Spanish-language option) and it sounds pretty muffled even over my car stereo. But when it tells me to turn, it mentions the street by name. Every time so far.

B) When TomTom wants to give me a heads up that I’ll need to do something before long, it specifies distances in yards. Odometers, most road signs, and my brain all use fractions of miles. And so does Navigator.

Between the lack of spoken road names and the frequent references to yardage, I’m finding it mighty tough to follow TomTom’s directions through the audio instructions alone; I have to glance at the iPhone a lot, and even then it’s not always clear what TomTom wants me to do. With Navigator, by contrast, it’s pretty easy to keep on track simply by following the spoken directions.

Other notable differences between the two packages relate to the fact that TomTom is an app-plus-maps package sold at a flat price, while Navigator is a service that downloads maps and other info as you need them. TomTom occupies a hefty 1.2GB of space on your iPhone, works even if you don’t have a data connection, and doesn’t offer live traffic info. (Maybe the company will offer traffic data as an optional service–it’s available for its hardware devices.)

Navigator, by contrast only uses 3.2MB of memory on your phone but requires a working data connection. And it does offer live traffic info–a feature which helps to justify the monthly fee.

Both Navigator and TomTom have done a good job of keeping pace with my wanderings via the iPhone’s built-in GPS so far, but I’m still intrigued by TomTom’s car kit, which builds more powerful external GPS into a mounting bracket. TomTom doesn’t seem to have announced the price for this optional accessory yet.

Bottom line for now? I’ll take Navigator over TomTom for now, but I’m still looking for my dream iPhone GPS solution, and want to check out other available options. Are you using an iPhone for GPS? Any recommendations?

After the jump, a couple of TomTom screens.

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Building an Android-Based iPhone Killer: Doable?

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 17, 2009 at 10:51 am

androidquestionsDaring Fireball’s John Gruber has a smart post up exhorting somebody–anybody–to build an Android phone that’s better than the iPhone. As far as I can tell, no manufacturer of Android-based phones has set out to do that–Android phones are getting better, as shown by the significant improvement that T-Mobile’s myTouch 3G represents over the first-generation G1. And some Android phones sport better specs in certain areas than the iPhone, or features that the iPhone doesn’t have. But nobody’s used Android to get to an overall phone experience that’s neck-and-neck with the iPhone yet. (And the overall iPhone experience remains so remarkable that folks are willing to forgive the phone for its many limitations.)

Android has gotten off to a slower start than I expected; even so, I still think it’s likely that it’ll provide the iPhone with its stiffest competition in terms of sheer market share in the years to come. I’m less optimistic about there being lots of Android phones which are just as good as the iPhone, for the same reason that there aren’t lots of Windows PCs that are just as good as Macs–the PC-like business model behind Android encourages manufacturers to build commodity products (albeit potentially good ones), not unique and ambitious ones of the sort Gruber is hoping for.

(Which doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to build something unique on Android; the best Windows laptops, such as Voodoo PC’s Envy 133, use the platform for products of Apple-like refinement and creativity. It’s just that the economics of building products on a common platform encourages those products to be…common.)

As of right now, the iPhone’s most formidable competitor in terms of overall experience is unquestionably Palm’s Pre. It’s anything but a coincidence that it’s also the smartphone that came out of the design process most similar to Apple’s approach, with one company designing the software and hardware from scratch. Very few companies will ever get that ambitious. But I hope that many companies do the next best thing: build Android phones that are so thoughtfully designed and customized that you forget they run an OS that’s available on scads of phones from scads of manufacturers.

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reMail: All Your E-Mail, All on Your iPhone

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 13, 2009 at 2:03 pm

reMailGoogle’s Gmail has trained a lot of us to think of an inbox as a place with near-instant access to all our e-mail. reMail–an e-mail search application for the iPhone that’s available in an all-new version on sale for $4.99 today–brings some of the same sensibility to the iPhone. (Makes sense: Gabor Cselle, CEO of reMail maker NextMail, is a former member of the Gmail team.) As of iPhone OS 3.0, Apple’ Mail app offers search and does a good job of extending searches to messages that are on the server but not your phone. But reMail puts all your mail on your iPhone, then offers full-text search of every message. (Apple’s Mail only searches header info.)

reMailReMail works with Gmail and IMAP e-mail accounts, and begins by downloading all your messages. (It’s estimating that it’ll take about seven hours to download about 13,500 messages from my Gmail account via Wi-Fi.) It compresses messages and trips out formatting and graphics, so a boatload of mail doesn’t take that much space: It estimates that those 13,500 messages will occupy about 88MB, which is practically a pittance on my 32GB phone. And reMail says its search is five times faster than Mail’s.

If reMail was a full-blown e-mail client, I’d go bananas over it, and probably use nothing else. But beyond the excellent search, what it offers are basic e-mail features: You can create messages, reply, and forward, but it displays messages in text mode only, and only works in the iPhone’s portrait mode. It also doesn’t support Exchange. Basically, you’re unlikely to use it as your only e-mail client, but for instantaneous searching, it’s an excellent tool. And reMail plays up its usefulness during international travel, when looking up old mail on a server back in the U.S. can cost a fortune in roaming charges.

Apple’s Mail is a good mail client with pretty good search; Google’s Safari-based Gmail for the iPhone is an amazing Web app that’s mostly meant for use when you have Internet access (it does have rudimentary offline capabilities); reMail is excellent search attached to basic mail features. I’d kill for an e-mail client that combined the best features of all three into one app. For now, though, I use both Mail and Gmail–and, as of today, reMail.

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Phil Schiller is Listening on iPhone Issues. That’s a Good Start.

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 11, 2009 at 7:01 pm

Phil Schiller is ListeningLast week, Apple marketing honcho Phil Schiller dropped a note to Daring Fireball’s John Gruber on issues with iPhone app acceptance. It said, basically, that Apple isn’t perfect, but its intentions are good and it tries to learn from its mistakes. The e-mail didn’t resolve any outstanding issues, but it was encouraging to hear an acknowledgment that problems existed and Apple intended to do better.

Now Schiller has been heard from again: He e-mailed Mac developer Steven Frank, who is so disgruntled with Apple’s iPhone policies and practices that he’s boycotting the phone. Schiller told Frank that Apple’s listening to his feedback, and that rumors of a sweeping ban on iPhone e-book readers were false.

Strangely enough, I somehow forgot that I engaged in a conversation about iPhone App Store approval with Phil Schiller myself. Back at the iPhone 3.0 special event in March, I asked him a question during the Q&A about the controversy over app approval–which hadn’t yet peaked–and what Apple’s response was. Here’s Brian X. Chen’s liveblog summary from Wired News:

Harry McCracken asks if Apple will give developers clarity about what apps get approved or rejected.

Phil Schiller says, we have a lot of apps, we also want customers to feel comfortable about the quality of the apps they get.  96% approval rating is tremendous. There are some things we need to check and filter for. Simply that it technically works well.
That things don’t crash. Other things: we watch for profanity in applications. pornography. Things that try to violate a customer’s privacy. Those are things customers want us to watch out for. That’s in the developer’s agreement. There’s also stuff about content suitable for children. Parental controls will help manage that.

At the end of the day with 25,000 apps we have a great solution that’s working and we’re constantly making it better.

Basically, Schiller was courteous and made some reasonable points, but didn’t even address the controversy enough to sound defensive about it. His response now is quite different. The best way to judge Apple’s intentions is, of course, through its actions–let’s hope that the Schillergrams hint are a sign of things to come.

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