After reading Harry’s posts about the auctioning of two iPhone prototypes on eBay and auction and accompanying YouTube video being removed at Apple’s request, I decided to dig a little deeper. Early today, I conducted an interview with the seller of the prototypes, Jon F. (aka $$billions_of_money$$), via email about his rare and historically important offerings. Interestingly, he has no official connection to Apple.
He previously documented his iPhone find on the MacRumors forum in January.
[UPDATE: While I was working on this post, Apple decided to approve the Tweetie update in question after all, as I suspected it would. Good news. But I think the post remains relevant.]
[WARNING: Actually, I don’t swear in this post, but there are 150+ examples of one particular bad word in it. A very, very bad word. Mostly with asterisks, but three uncensored instances at the very end. Cover your little ones’ eyes; keep this post out of U.S. states with laws against public cursing. Thank you.]
This is just embarrassing. A new version of Tweetie, the most popular Twitter client for the iPhone–and probably the best-regarded one, too–has apparently been rejected from Apple’s App Store on the grounds that its trends feature, which can display popular Twitter hash tags, showed a hash tag that happened to be the F-word at the time that the app was in for review at Apple. Never mind that the trends feature isn’t new to Tweetie, and that other iPhone Twitter clients have it. Or that every Twitter client may display dirty words if they show up in Tweets. Or that there’s no imaginable obscenity that the phone’s Safari browser isn’t capable of displaying if you know where to go, or happen upon examples accidentally.
Today’s headlines incline dancing news!
Even more Apple netbook rumors.
iPhone developers can’t renew contracts.
Woz can’t dance, still lovable.
Will these ten newspapers die?
Cydia’s unauthorized iPhone app store.
Craigslist: “erotic services” ads dwindling.
YouTube kills British music videos.
Palin hacker’s in bigger trouble.
Jimmy Fallon! Palm Pre! Together!
Broadbrand growth is on decline.
This we know: Apple likes to release products which, in terms of general polish (if not features and reliability) feel as close to perfect as possible. This we can assume: It only gets there after making plenty of imperfect prototypes. And here’s what seems to be a rare glance of the process at work: German site iFun.de is reporting on an eBay auction for two iPhone prototypes from 2006, the year before the phone was announced–one running a primitive version of the iPhone OS.
I’m not expert enough to declare the auction legit rather than an enjoyable hoax, and the seller doesn’t explain the provenance of the phones. But judging from his feedback, he seems to be a solid eBay citizen, and the notion of getting a peek at a piece of Apple software that’s nowhere near ready for public consumption is fascinating. It lacks all of the final product’s visual splendor and contains some entertaining in-jokes (it claims it’s a Newton MessagePad 3000), but is supposedly in good enough shape to make calls and surf the Web.
Here’s a video on YouTube of the proto-OS in action:
As I write, the auction is in progress and bidding stands at $940. I suspect that Apple may ask eBay to pull the auction–it did so just a couple of weeks ago when an early iPod prototype went up for auction–but if the sale concludes successfully, someone will have himself or herself quite a conversation piece.
I still wonder, though: How would these rarities get out on the open market? You’d think that if any company on earth would keep careful tabs on its prototypes and get them back from whoever it entrusted them with, it would be Steve Jobs’ company….
Not a huge news day:
Snow Leopard: June eighth? Maybe!
Buggy Firefox gets fixed fast.
Robert Scoble leaves Fast Company.
GameStop mocks Amazon resale program.
Craigslist sued over prostitution ads.
Unauthorized iPhone software stores emerge.
TV converter box coupons return.
Washington types bash BlackBerry Storm.
MacBook Pro graphics card woes?
Chinese officials are chatting online.
Until early last week, there was one Kindle e-reader–the original one. Now there are two: Amazon’s Kindle 2 and the app for the iPhone and iPod Touch which the company released last night. They have one huge thing in common: 240,000 electronic books, mostly going for ten bucks apiece. And beyond that, the two Kindles have remarkably different sets of upsides and downsides. After the jump, we’ll compare and contrast.
I’ve written a fair amount about the annoying post-merger state of Sirius XM satellite radio, as well as chatted about it with folks offline, and nearly every time I’ve expressed frustration, I’ve said something to the effect of “if it weren’t for baseball, I’d consider dumping XM and just plugging my iPhone into my car stereo so I can listen to streaming radio apps.” And I’m sure there are other folks who feel the same way.
Looks like that “if it weren’t for” will soon be inoperative. My friend Jason Snell of Macworld has blogged that the upcoming 2009 edition of the MLB At-Bat app for the iPhone will support Gameday Audio, allowing baseball nuts to tune in their hometown broadcasts (that would be the Red Sox for me) on the phone. As Jason writes, MLB At-Bat costs $5 and PC-based Gameday Audio costs $15 a season. But you gotta think that there’s no scenario in which Gameday Audio on the iPhone won’t cost far less than I’m shelling out for XM.
Is anything else that’s exclusive to XM so lovable that I’d keep the service to get it? I’ve grown sort of fond of the Siriusly Sinatra station, with its shows hosted by Nancy Sinatra and Jonathan Schwartz. But I think I can tune in Schwartz on an iPhone via his WNYC gig, and I suspect I can find enough standards music on the iPhone to keep myself entertained.
Oh yeah: I also have to figure out the best way to let my car stereo–which lacks an AUX port–tap into the iPhone. I have terrible luck with wireless FM transmitters, and have been using something called an FM Direct adapter that lets me connect my XM receiver directly to my car’s antenna. It works wonderfully well, but I don’t know if there’s anything comparable that’s iPhone-compatible. (if not, there should be!)
One way or another, though, I suspect there’s a good chance I’ll be an ex-XM subscriber come opening day.
Despite everything, it’s a delight to have Kindle on the iPhone. What makes Kindle Kindle isn’t software as much as it is content–240,000 books’ worth of it, by far the largest collection of e-books ever assembled. Getting access to those books on a phone is by far the biggest deal in content for Apple devices since Apple itself added moves and TV shows to the iTunes Store. And given that there are far more iPhones and iPod Touches on the planet than Kindle devices, this could be a bigger moment for electronic books than the introduction of the Kindle in 2007 was.
It may not have been inevitable, but it was a darn good idea–and it’s extremely cool to learn it’s reality, not just wishful thinking. Starting tomorrow, Amazon.com will be distributing a free iPhone application that puts Kindle e-books on the phone, giving owners of Apple’s handset access to by far the most comprehensive source of commercial published works. Not only will books you’ve bought for a Kindle be available on the iPhone, too, but stuff like your location within a tome will travel between Kindle and iPhone (a feature Amazon calls Whispersync).
What a win-win-win-win situation–it’ll be a boon for people who own both a Kindle and an iPhone, for people who own just an iPhone, and for Amazon and Apple. I can’t imagine that Amazon will lose a single sale of Kindle hardware because iPhones can double as Kindle readers–if you want to read dozens or hundreds of pages at a sitting, you’ll want the large screen and marathon battery life of a Kindle device. But the iPhone makes more sense when you’re out and about, sans Kindle, and want to kill a few minutes by dipping into a book.
You gotta think that Amazon may end up selling not only more Kindle books–the number of Kindle-compatible gizmos in the world will skyrocket tomorrow–but also more Kindle readers, since some iPhone owners will be more likely to spring for a reader once they’ve bought and enjoyed books on their phone.
I imagine everyone will take the fact that Apple okayed the Kindle application for the iPhone as evidence it’s not getting into the e-book biz itself. Probably. But not definitely. For one thing, I’m not sure if even Apple would nix an application in a market it hadn’t yet entered unless it clearly violated it developer agreement. For another, is it utterly unthinkable that Apple might come out with a jumbo iPod Touch for which book-reading was one significant application…and work with Amazon, who has more knowledge and contacts relating to books than Apple could ever develop, to sell the content?
[UPDATE: It’s available–if you’ve got iTunes, click here and you’ll go to the app. More soon…]
[UPDATED UPDATE: Here’s my review.]
Mac desktops aside, fairly quiet:
EyeFi Wi-Fi cards double memory.
T-Mobile’s fifty-buck calling plan.
HBO prepping more online video?
iPhone users dominate mobile Web.
Intel targets more mobile gizmos.
Apple’s quiet MacBook Pro upgrade.
Hey, Apple: no numeric keypad?
