March? In. Like a lion!
Skittles stages goofball Twitter stunt.
Apple desktop event rumors begin.
Microsoft scuttlebutt: Live Search revamp.
iPhone becomes an ancient Mac.
AT&T: bring back your handset?
Foxmarks becomes Xmarks, adds features.
Tag Archives | iPhone
TV.com on iPhone: Decent Enough. But I Want My Hulu!
The iPhone is really an iManyThings: iCommunicator, iMusicPlayer, iGameConsole, and iRemoteControl. I’d love it to be an iTV, too–a rich source of on-demand television shows from broadcast and cable networks that stream live over its Net connection and (unlike the stuff Apple sells via iTunes) don’t cost anything. Little by little, that’s happening. Back in November, Joost released an iPhone app, and today it was was joined by a TV.com one, featuring new and old content from CBS and sister networks–from CSI to David Letterman to Gossip Girl to The Bold and the Beautiful to MacGyver to the original Star Trek to tech stuff from Cnet.
The single most interesting thing about TV.com’s app–to me, anyhow–isn’t the content, but the fact that you can stream it over any iPhone connection you’ve got, including Wi-Fi, 3G, and 2G. Joost is limited to Wi-Fi, and while it uses that speedy connection to provide surprisingly high-quality images, the times when I’m most likely to have Wi-Fi is when I’m at home, in close proximity to my TV set. The TV.com programming I checked out didn’t look as good as Joost’s, and some of the audio was tinny. I can’t tell to what degree TV.com adjusts its quality level to match the connection you’ve got: David Letterman looked and sounded a tad better over Wi-Fi than on 3G, but Star Trek seemed about the same on 2G as Wi-Fi–it just loaded faster over Wi-Fi. On the plus side, I didn’t notice any hiccups or buffering issues with the video or audio–even over 2G, playback was smooth.
Speaking of speed, the TV.com app feels sluggish to me so far unless I’m on Wi-Fi–not just the videos, but other graphical images such as thumbnails pop into place at a leisurely pace. The search feature could use some work, too: When I searched for “Star Trek,” the results page didn’t show the episode titles, so I had to click through to see what was what.
TV.com touts that it streams full episodes of shows as well as clips, and that’s true–but all the full shows I saw had been broken up into chunks of a few minutes each. I’m not sure whether that’s for technical reasons or simply because TV.com thinks that iPhone users are more likely to want to snack on shows a bite or two at time than watch them from start to finish.
As with Joost’s iPhone incarnation, I’m pleased to see TV.com landing on the iPhone, but more than anything else, it whets my appetite for what a Hulu iPhone app could be, given that Hulu has by far the strongest content lineup of any free TV streaming site. There’s no word yet if or when Hulu might land on iPhones. But I’m also eager to see Sling’s SlingPlayer Mobile for the iPhone–and that, supposedly, may be just around the corner.
I remain confident that the iPhone is going to become a great mobile TV sooner or later, but I’m still not sure about how or when…
After the jump, a few images from TV.com for iPhone:
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5Words for February 26th, 2009
Good morning–news is served:
Nokia might make Symbian laptops.
Google Street View’s user photos.
Google News gets ads. Finally.
Find iPhone vulnerability, get money.
The president isn’t Tweeting nowadays.
LG phone sports detachable keyboard.
Jeepers, more Microsoft-Yahoo speculation.
Rumors about PSP successor persist.
Is Windows Mobile 6.5 obsolete?
Vista SP2 release candidate imminent.
Dell’s 10-inch netbook arrives.
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5Words for February 23rd, 2009
Monday? Again? Here’s what’s newsy:
Microsoft wants severance money back.
Sorry, no YouTube Oscar clips.
Yahoo management shakeup imminent.
Microsoft offers free tech training.
Streaming-only Netflix coming. Eventually.
That Last.fm RIAA story? Fiction.
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The $99 iPhone Arrives. For Certain Folks, Anyhow. And Only Until Saturday.
Every time I buy anything at Best Buy, the cashier asks if I’m a Reward Zone member. And every time, I say no. (If I added any more cards to my wallet, it would burst.) But here’s a benefit of Reward Zone that, for some folks, is pretty compelling: Members can save up to $100 on an iPhone until next Saturday. There are a number of limitations–most notably that you need to belong already, so you can’t join to get the discount–but if you’re a Reward Zone Silver member, buy the 8GB iPhone, and sign up for a new AT&T 2-year contract, you can get the seemingly mythical $99 iPhone.
Considering that discounts of any sort on iPhones are hard to come by, that’s impressive–even considering that my advice for most would-be iPhone buyers right now is “Wait until June or so if possible–there’s a good chance that Apple will release a meaningfully better model by then…”
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Mobile World Congress: What If the iPhone Didn’t Exist?
I had a good time at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, but as big and bustling as the show was, it did feel a little like a donut: It was defined by a large hole at its center. That hole would be Apple, the one significant phone manufacturer who–as is its wont–chose not to show up.
Look at the major new phones introduced at the event, and you see iPhone inspiration almost everywhere, from hardware design to interface color schemes. Nokia and Microsoft both introduced apps stores that echo Apple’s app store. After I submerged myself in all this for a few days, I began to wonder: Just what would Mobile World Congress–and the smartphone biz in general–be like Steve Jobs and Apple had examined the cell phone market a few years ago and, after careful consideration, decided to keep out of it?
A few thoughts about that scenario after the jump.
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5Words for February 11th, 2009
Howdy–here’s what’s going on:
Twenty thousand iPhone apps? Wow.
For-pay Android apps imminent.
Remember BeOs? Haiku clones it.
Windows Mobile Firefox movin’ along.
New BlackBerry Curve arriving soon.
Ahoy! Treasure found in Google Earth.
Book authors hate talking Kindle.
Zuckerberg college buddies paid fortune.
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Google Syncs to New Heights
Over the past couple of weeks, Google has been releasing interesting new stuff at such a furious pace that I’m getting short of breath just trying to keep up. It’s now released a new version of its formerly BlackBerry-centric Google Sync service that syncs calendars and contacts between Google’s Web-based services and an iPhone or Windows Mobile-based phone. It’s both a free alternative a large chunk of Apple’s for-pay MobileMe service and an answer to Microsoft’s My Phone, even though that service hasn’t launched yet.
It’s also leaving me with a serious case of deja vu: Google’s new syncing features are practically identical to Nuevasync, a service I’ve been using recently to juggle information between Google and my iPhone. (Both services do their syncing via Microsoft’s Exchange technology.) Nuevasync’s a small outfit with a solid service, so I immediately began to worry on their behalf, thinking that the 800-pound Google gorilla had just rendered it superfluous. The company has an optimistic post up about all this, saying that it plans to offer far more features (including task syncing, a feature I’ve been pining for ever since I discovered Apple hadn’t bothered to implement it in MobileMe).
I’m glad to see Google taking calendar syncing seriously, since its browser-based mobile version of Google Calendar is pretty rudimentary. But I’m sticking with Nuevasync for the moment. I’ve wasted enough hours of my life fiddling with persnickety syncing tools (and sometimes losing data to them) that I don’t wanna mess with a setup that seems to be working just fine.
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5Words: A Really Short News Roundup
You’re a really busy person. I’m a really busy person. Enter our new feature, 5words. It consists of quick news hits from around the Web–and just to keep things moving right along, every item will be five words long. (If that leaves you hungry for more, click the links to get more words on these stories elsewhere–hundreds of them, sometimes.) Here we go…
Google’s Latitude: Track your friends.
Facebook celebrates its fifth birthday.
Palm’s Pre arriving March 15th?
Asus keeps introducing Eee PCs.
15,000 Panasonic staffers are toast.
India’s $10 laptop: thumb drive?
Firefox update patches security holes.
Cloud computing for…slot machines?
Amazon starts selling downloadable games.
Rumors of iPhone background tasks.
A two-million-laptop supercomputer.
Toshiba introduces another “iPhone killer.”
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Hey Apple, You Don’t Own My Contacts
Allow me to vent here for a second. As you may have read in my recent post about Mac products at Target, I have been in the midst of reloading things for my attempt at installing Windows 7 on the MacBook Pro. This included a wipe of OS X for good measure, which has been giving me some trouble anyway.
Part of that wipe took out my calendar and contacts–I knew I forgot to back something up, and that was it. Not to worry, though: I had them on my iPhone 3G, too. I could just merge them back on my first sync with my freshly-wiped and speedier MBP, right?
Not so fast.
I did not renew my service with MobileMe when it expired last December. Little did I know that once you sync once with the service, Apple all but owns your information.