Tag Archives | Apple. iPhone

Is No Nudes Good News?

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 25, 2009 at 11:18 am

Among iPhone OS 3.0’s 100+ new features are parental control settings. But that apparently doesn’t mean that anything  goes on the iTunes App Store–or even that apps can be as racy as music or movies available from iTunes. There was brief, um, excitement yesterday when an existing iPhone app called Hottest Girls added photos of hot topless girls. I didn’t see it, but it sounds relatively tame. But over at TechCrunch, Robin Wauters is reporting that the new Hottest Girls is now missing from the App Store.

Robin says that other iPhone apps remain with the rating “Rated 17+ for “Frequent/Intense Sexual Content or Nudity,” so it sounds like nakedness isn’t taboo on the iPhone, period. As usual with the App Store approval process, I guess we’ll find out what’s permissable and impermissable over time as apps are accepted and rejected…and even then we may be kinda confused.

[VITAL UPDATE: TechCrunch’s MG Siegler says that Hottest Girls, which downloads images from a server, was temporarily withdrawn by its seller for being too popular. Apple isn’t apparently depriving anybody of their iPhone hotties. And that’s the naked truth.]

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Talking, Turn-by-Turn Driving Directions Come to the iPhone

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 24, 2009 at 4:29 pm

The iPhone 3.0 app goodness continues  roll in. An iPhone version of AT&T’s Navigator turn-by-turn GPS driving directions app is live in Apple’s App Store. It’s one of several navigation apps that have already appeared in the week since iPhone OS 3.0’s arrival. (The most eagerly-awaited one, though, is probably from TomTom–and it’s not due until later this summer.)

Navigator is powered by GPS stalwart TeleNav, and worked reasonably well as I used it on my iPhone 3GS while tooling around the Bay Area today. I was worried that it might not work as well as a dedicated GPS handheld, since early scuttlebutt had it that the iPhone 3G had a wimpy antenna. (I spent $150 on TomTom’s Windows Mobile version for my AT&T Tilt phone, and while the software was great the Tilt wasn’t much better at figuring out where it was than I am. And I have a cruddy sense of direction.)

Navigator had no problem keeping up with me even at 60mph. It has decent search for addresses and businesses, live traffic updates, and a bunch of other features that my current GPS system (a five-year-old one built into my Mazda3) lacks. However, it works only in portrait mode as far as I can tell–I wish it also offered a more windshield-mimicking landscape view. And the quality of its spoken directions was surprisingly muffled, which occasionally left me straining to understand them.

If you’re serious about using Navigator or any other GPS application for the iPhone, there’s no doubt that you’re going to want some sort of mounting system that pumps its audio through your car’s stereo and provides power–otherwise, the phone will be too hard to see and too hard to hear, and its battery will be drained in a jffy. Devices of that sort already exist, and TomTom plans to sell one as an option for its software.

AT&T being AT&T, it’s selling Navigator as a service, not a program–typical for phone GPS (although one of the benefits of getting the Palm Pre and paying for Sprint’s $99 voice and data plan is that it comes with driving directions). Navigator is $9.99 a month. I’d really like the option of paying a one-time fee. (Especially since I’m most likely to need this software when I’m on the road for business or pleasure in a rent-a-car.)

Bottom line: Navigator’s not bad, but I’ll wait until TomTom’s out before I decide which GPS application will live on my iPhone.  After the jump, a few screens of the AT&T product in action.

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New RealPlayer Moves Web Video to Devices

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 24, 2009 at 12:01 am

RealPlayer LogoWant a reason to check  out RealPlayer SP, the new beta of the next version of RealPlayer, a media player that most of us have used at one time or another but which is no longer omnipresent? It’s got a new feature that’s pretty cool: the ability to easily download video from YouTube and other sites, convert it, and then get it onto a bevy of devices.

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Is the iPhone Accident Prone? Survey Says: Not Much!

Posted by David Worthington on June 23, 2009 at 8:23 pm

Falling iPhoneA TechCrunch article citing research by SquareTrade, a company that sells insurance plans for smartphones, says that Apple’s iPhone is “an accident magnet.” I wouldn’t have drawn that same conclusion.

SquareTrade’s report, “One-Third of iPhones Fail Over 2 Years, Mostly From Accidents,” should be viewed with skepticism. For starters, while SquareTrade used  a sample of many thousand smartphones covered by its warranty products, it didn’t cleanse its data (for instance by removing unlocked phones), and performed no statistical tests. Rightfully, the report includes the disclaimer:

SquareTrade has made efforts to ensure that the data we present is correct. SquareTrade makes no warranty, express or implied, about the accuracy of the data. SquareTrade is an independent third party, and has no affiliation with any of the handset manufacturers cited in this study. Users of the information in this document acknowledge that SquareTrade cannot be he liable for any damages whatsoever to any individual, organization, company, industry group or representative arising from the use of this data.

TechCrunch seized on the report’s findings that over 20% of iPhones have been damaged in the last 22 months, with cracked screens being the leading cause of damage. But the SquareTrade report doesn’t report on damage rates for other phone models, so it’s impossible to judge whether iPhones are any more likely to crack (or croak altogether) than other brands. Phones, after all, are more likely to get dropped than desktop PCs, HDTVs, or printers–no matter who manufactured them.

The study does say that iPhones are “significantly more reliable” than phones manufactured by Palm and RIM (9.9% of iPhones cited in the survey malfunctioned, versus 15.3% of BlackBerry and 19.9% of Treo phones). And it says that the iPhone 3G is a more reliable handset than the original iPhone.

My statistics are a bit rusty, but a common test called a T-test would have shown whether there was any significance difference between the iPhone’s likelihood of being damaged versus its competitors. The same goes for its supposedly higher manufacturing quality. Bottom line: It’s worth thinking twice before drawing conclusions about the iPhone from a single survey or news report. Colorful graphs always don’t tell us much.

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iPhone Push Notifications Are Live–Finally!

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 22, 2009 at 7:11 pm

iPhone AIMMuch of what’s neat about iPhone OS 3. 0 is what it does to let third-party developers build more powerful applications. And the most long-awaited feature in that department by far is push notifications, which Apple announced a year ago as an alternative to multitasking for third-party apps. The first programs to support notifications are starting to hit the App Store today. They’re both IM clients–here’s TechCrunch’s MG Siegler on the new version of AIM (which is available in an ad-supported free version and a $2.99 adless one) and the Boy Genius Report’s eponymous founder on the multi-network BeeJive (which is $9.99).

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What’s in a Name? Apple Removes a Space From “iPhone 3G S”

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 22, 2009 at 5:19 pm

I can’t believe I’m writing about this, but the iPhone 3G S is apparently getting a name change, three days after it showed up in stores. No, it’s not becoming the iPhone Pro or the iPhone Speedster or the iPhone Evolution. The Apple press release trumpeting the sale of a million units of the new phone calls it the iPhone 3GS–no space. And Apple seems to have gone back and tweaked the release from a couple of weeks ago announcing the phone’s imminent arrival, which originally called it the 3G S and now says it’s the 3GS.

Elsewhere on the Apple site, however, it’s still the 3G S–for now, anyhow:

iPhone 3GS

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Hey, Let’s Design the iPhone 3GS’s Successor!

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 22, 2009 at 4:20 pm

Future iPhoneNow that the iPhone 3GS is out and many (but by no means all) of the rumors about it turned out to be spot on, it’s time to start wondering what the next iPhone will be like.

I’m assuming for the moment that Apple will stick to an annual schedule for major flagship iPhone revisions and we’ll therefore see the next big makeover around June of 2010–although as the phone increasingly becomes the company’s primary hardware product, I think we’re more likely to see new versions and various tweaks throughout the year, as we do with Macs today. And for no particular reason, I’m calling it by a name I know it won’t have: the iPhone 3GS2. (“The 2 is for second-generation.”)

Oh, and please don’t call these Apple predictions–this is…idle speculation. Nothing more.

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Ka Ching! Apple Sells a Million New iPhones–According to Steve Jobs

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 22, 2009 at 7:06 am

If everyone who’s bought an iPhone 3G S so far had been lined up at one Apple Store, the line would have stretched…well, a really long way. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, known for his optimistic take on Apple, had initially predicted that Apple would sell a half-million units of the new iPhone on its opening long weekend. This morning, he said it had really sold 750,000. But then Apple released its own figure, and it was over one million 3 GS units sold. That would mean that the 3G S is a bigger hit so far than the Apple 3G was on its first weekend, when Apple said that it sold a million of ’em.

The number is impressively large, especially considering that many reports from Apple Stores emphasized that the lines weren’t as crazy as they’d been last year. The company says that the phone is available in 21 countries, versus 22 that got the 3G instantly, so that doesn’t explain the high sales and (relatively) short lines. But you had to show up in person to buy an iPhone 3G, and the 3G S can be bought over the Web and received via mail, so apparently a lot of folks snagged the 3G S without ever leaving their homes.

One other tidbit from Apple’s press release on sales for the 3G S–it contains a quote from Steve Jobs:

“Customers are voting and the iPhone is winning,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “With over 50,000 applications available from Apple’s revolutionary App Store, iPhone momentum is stronger than ever.”

Anyone who’s ever been quoted in a press release knows that it’s not the world’s most demanding activity. (Oftentimes a draft arrives on your desk with a “quote” from you already there.) But I believe this is the first time that Steve Jobs has been referenced in an Apple release since his medical leave began in January. Perhaps it’s a hint that his late-June return to work is indeed happening.

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The Commodore 64 vs. the iPhone 3G S: The Ultimate Showdown

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 21, 2009 at 9:18 pm

Sad news: Apple has rejected a Commodore 64 emulator for the iPhone. It’s not surprising, and arguably not an utter outrage given that the iPhone developer agreement expressly forbids emulators, and the C64 app’s creator knew that when he began work on his brainchild. I’m still unclear on how a Commodore 64 emulator–one fully licensed by the relevant copyright holders–hurts the iPhone, iPhone owners, or Apple, though. Especially since other iPhone apps that use emulation techniques and which sound less delightful have apparently snuck their way into the App Store. Thinking about all this got me to thinking about the fact that the Commodore 64 was considered to have a lot of RAM (64KB) at a surprisingly low price ($595) back in 1982. The iPhone 3G S  has 4,000 times the RAM (256MB) for one-third the price (with an AT&T contract), and that’s not even taking into consideration the fact that it also has an additional 250,000 times as much memory (or 500,000, if you spring for the 32GB model) as the C64 in the form of its flash storage. Or that the starting price of $199 for an iPhone 3G S is really more like $90 in 1982 dollars. Did I mention that that the 3G S fits in your pocket? After the jump, what is almost certainly the most comprehensive comparison of the Commodore 64 and the iPhone 3G S that anyone has done to date. I’ll let you decide which one comes out on top. Continue Reading →

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iPhone 3G S: The Technologizer Review

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 20, 2009 at 11:19 am

iPhone 3G SOn Wednesday, Apple released iPhone OS 3.0–an operating-system upgrade that not only sports a hundred new features but is free to iPhone users. Today, it began selling the iPhone 3G S, a product that offers eight significant improvements over the iPhone 3G at most, and which is most definitely not free. (If you’re not under contract to AT&T, it’ll run you $199 for the 16GB model and $299 for the 32GB one; if you’re in the midst of an AT&T  contract that isn’t running out soon, it’ll cost you more.)

The iPhone 3G S isn’t a dramatic reinvention of the iPhone hardware–it’s an evolutionary advance, in an identical case. But that’s in no way a criticism. The iPhone 3G was an exceptional product, and the 3G S improves strategically on most of the earlier phone’s weak spots; it packs the iPhone 3.0 software and all its improvements; it’s an extraordinarily   well-integrated product. I’m not going to say it’s the best smartphone for everyone–for instance, if you refuse to buy a phone without a physical keyboard, you have no reason to feel guilty. But when you judge the iPhone 3G S’s melding of hardware, software, services, and available applications, it’s the best smartphone the world has known to date. By quite a bit.

Here’s what’s new, in rough order of importance.

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