Vote: Does the iPhone Have a Killer App?
6680
Recent developments make it easier than ever to install third-party applications on an  iPhone or iPod Touch. But why bother? Is there a killer app that makes the risk worthwhile? Cast your vote in our online poll.
689715
Apple provides two iPhone connectivity options: Painfully slow and everywhere or fast and spotty.  Here's how to find the best way to connect.
58980
Does anyone have the young nympho's number? Comments The iPhone continues to dominate this week, with many comments telling us or fellow readers to shut up. Nobody seems to have any intention of doing so, which is as it should be.â¦
156524
Blog: An exhaustive test of the iPhone has produced several bugs that will require fixes, but few that will cause problems with common tasks.
230911
Blog: What's absent from the iPhone now may be added in the near future.
466863
Apple Inc.'s  upcoming iPhone  is shaping up as this year's must-have gadget, but several  perceived shortcomings are pushing some potential buyers to  wait for an updated version.
29172
âThe phone is so sleek and thin,â reports David Pogue (New York Times) in his review of iPhone, that âit makes Treos and Blackberrys look obese.â And the software transcends. âItâs fast, beautiful, menu-free, and dead simple to operate.â If you need âto answer a call, you can tap Answer on the screen, or pinch the microscopic microphone bulge on the white earbud cord. Either way, music or video playback pauses until you hang up.â As for email, itâs âfantastic. Incoming messages are fully formatted, complete with graphics; you can even open (but not edit) Word, Excel and PDF documents.â And âthe Web browser,â he points out, âis the real dazzler.â No âstripped down, claustrophobic My First Cellphone Browser; you get full Web layouts, fonts and all, shrunk to fit the screen. You scroll with a fingertip â much faster than scroll bars. You can double-tap to enlarge a block of text for reading, or rotate the screen 90 degrees, which rotates and magnifies the image to fill the wider view.â In short, Pogue calls the iPhone, âthe most sophisticated, outlook-changing piece of electronics to come along in years.â
227561
Like the star on a Christmas tree, iPhone is perched atop all the top 10 gadget lists for 2007, and with good reason. Not only did iPhone revolutionize the way people think about their mobile phones -- as many writing those lists crow -- but in my case, it has changed the way I live.Let&#39;s be clear: I&#39;m not your typical gadget or technology geek. I didn&#39;t have a cell phone until 2000, and even then I purchased a refurbished Nokia handset for $30 that resembled the Motorola brick phone Michael Douglas used in the 1987 film &quot;Wall Street.&quot;[Watch the three-part video series&#160;Two Geeks and an iPhone.]2008 will mark the first year in as long as I can remember that I won&#39;t be buying a leather-bound dayplanner to keep track of appointments, and I still read more books than blogs. Though I rampantly text-message, instant-message and e-mail, I&#39;d still rather open my mouth and speak than send a series of virtual messages to have a &quot;conversation.&quot;I covered the iPhone launch here in New York in June and didn&#39;t quite understand what all the fuss was about, especially as I interviewed people who lined up for days in the broiling heat just to be among the first to buy the gadget. I am a huge fan of Apple products and own several iPods and a PowerBook, but like many others, I didn&#39;t plan to buy an iPhone until the price dropped or Apple came out with the product&#39;s second wave.When someone gave me an iPhone in late August, I surprised myself by being giddy. I immediately chucked my AT&amp;T-powered Motorola Razr in favor of what would become my new main squeeze. At close range, iPhone, like other Apple gadgets, was just so -- for lack of a better word -- adorable. Even before I opened the box, I realized that my love affair with iPhone was about to begin.Four months later, I&#39;m still smitten. Until iPhone, I never thought a mobile device could so drastically change my daily life. Its cousin iPod was certainly a revolutionary product, disrupting an entire music industry that is still feeling the repercussions. But for the average person, iPod really only changed the form of device that plays your music or videos and how you purchase entertainment. iPhone, on the other hand, affects daily human behavior on a much broader scale.Soon after iPhone came into my life, I was heading to Brooklyn to see a friend&#39;s band perform. Like any self-respecting cabbie in Manhattan, my driver had no idea how to get to the venue, even when I gave him the address. Like most Manhattan-dwellers, I didn&#39;t either.But as we were zooming over the Williamsburg Bridge in the direction I knew we had to go, I used the Google Maps application on iPhone to find the best route. I had it before we exited the 1,600-foot-long bridge in Brooklyn.Now, iPhone isn&#39;t the only mobile device that provides maps or driving directions. But do any of them do it quite as niftily as iPhone does, with just a few taps on a screen? And do they mark your destination on the map with a cute little red pushpin icon so resembling a cherry lollipop that you just might want to lick it?This is the fundamental reason why my heart, like many others, is aflutter over iPhone. It&#39;s not just what the gadget does that makes it a life-changing device, it&#39;s HOW it does it -- and, more importantly, how it lets a user do it.Much of the functionality of iPhone can be found on many current handsets. But even when I could access my Gmail account on my Razr, I found the steps I had to take to launch and use the application, and then the interface on which I was reading my e-mail, a frustrating and, frankly, ugly experience. The Web-browsing experience was pretty much the same, if not worse.But iPhone actually presents an e-mail and Web-browsing experience the way they are meant to be on a computer. To sweeten the deal, you can also play your favorite music, map out your destination for the night and perform many other functions of typical handsets, all on a simple, engaging touch-screen that is not just easy to use, but an actual pleasure.This is why, for the first time, my entire appointment schedule is digital, and why I check the weather and my e-mail before I even roll out of bed. It&#39;s why I never worry about buying maps or printing out directions anymore and why I sometimes forget I own a digital camera.iPhone also makes you seem really smart, even when you&#39;re only medium-smart or not bright at all. Ever find yourself in the middle of a conversation with friends and someone asks, &quot;Who invented that?&quot; or &quot;What actor was in that movie?&quot; or &quot;Who wrote that Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel?&quot;Now instead of being befuddled, I excuse myself and privately fire up Wikipedia on iPhone. Then I return to my friends with all the correct answers. Suddenly, I am as erudite as Jeopardy&#39;s Alex Trebek.I&#39;ve used a similar tack to get answers to trivia questions at a local pub quiz, though I don&#39;t recommend doing this because it&#39;s against the rules and competing players get really angry if they catch you. But did you know the full name for the Statue of Liberty is &quot;Liberty Enlightening the World&quot;? Neither did I until a recent pub quiz in Queens. (And neither did anyone else, because my team was the only one that got the question right and thus received two points instead of one.)Of course, iPhone 1.0 is not without its flaws, which have been widely documented. It&#39;s true that AT&amp;T&#39;s network sometimes crawls about as fast as an inchworm on Valium and anyone whose fingers aren&#39;t the size of a stylus (that is, just about everyone) will likely send a text message or two in pig Latin if they&#39;re typing too fast and skip proofreading.Actually, while the message bubbles in the text-messaging interface are super-cute, they also can lead to embarrassing recipient flubs if you haven&#39;t returned to the home text-message screen after sending someone a message. I learned this the hard way when, in an early-morning fog, I sent a text message about a wild night out meant for a friend to my ex-boyfriend&#39;s number.But overall, unlike said ex-boyfriend, iPhone has never disappointed me, and has so far been an unfailingly loyal and faithful companion. Since we&#39;re still in the honeymoon phase, I know there is much more to discover about the joys my new companion can bring to my life. It may be early to say, but I think my relationship with iPhone will turn out to be an affair to remember.
598599
âTo call the iPhone the best phone Iâve ever used is the biggest understatement of the decade,â enthuses Michael DeAgonia . âItâs like saying Jupiter is big, or infinity a long time. From the moment you pick it up, you can feel the weight and sturdiness of the phone, inspiring the sort of confidence you get from a quality build. The display is gorgeously integrated, the streamlined face covered by glass. Finally â a design worthy of being called a design!â iPhone is so good, in fact, that it even passed DeAgoniaâs most critical test. âOver the years, not a single device ever made it through my motherâs hands without being returned to me with a frustrated laugh and a shrug. With the iPhone, once the screen lit up and my mother discovered that Swipe to Unlock really did mean swipe to unlock, she was sold.â
47672
(InfoWorld) - What a world. We have to fight off viruses, zombies, bots, phishing, and on and on. Can you believe how many just plain evil people there are in the world? And what is their point? Simple thievery? To prove they are smarter than the rest of us? And think of all the money that's spent on defending, as best we can, against these miscreants or in cleaning up the mess when they get the better of us? Indeed, what a waste. While viruses have appeared on mobile devices, they are, thankfully, few and far between. Part of the reason for this has been a lack of standardization of software environments on handsets, and part is due to the minimal functionality that is typical on these products. It's hard for the socially challenged to overwrite boot sectors, corrupt data, or otherwise run amok on most cell phones today. Apple's decision to limit local software execution on the iPhone is undoubtedly due, at least in part, to a fundamental fear of hackers. While the Macintosh hasn't been much of a target for the hacker community, the iPhone could be a lot more tempting. There will be far more iPhones than Macs in the world in just a few years. Plus, Apple partner AT&T doesn't need the support headaches that come with having a large number of users jamming its 800 numbers with reports of bizarre symptoms on their iPhones. Regardless, being a Web services guy, I absolutely applaud Apple for moving the Web services art forward a notch or two with a very capable platform that might indeed replace PCs for many of us over the next decade or so. We don't need to run a lot of local code to have a meaningful IT experience while on the go. Of course, the iPhone will be hacked over time, requiring updates and fixes, just as is the case with the PC. There are already reports of hackers working diligently to unlock the phone so that non-AT&T SIM cards can be used, and to avoid cellular activation so that the device would be used only Wi-Fi networks -- with VoFi services, of course. Any programmable device runs this kind of risk, and defending against unauthorized code will remain a challenge for some time to come. Which brings me to a really obscure but very important, shall we say, "opportunity" for hackers. Last year, I wrote about one of the most exciting technology developments in wireless, software-defined radio (SDR). Basically, SDR simplifies radio hardware design by replacing specialized circuitry with software. Among the many benefits of SDR are over-the-air bug fixes, the ability to add new features on demand, and dynamic reprogrammability -- turning, for example, a GSM phone into a CDMA phone or even Wi-Fi or Bluetooth or UWB or whatever on the fly. With so much software at play here, the question has to be asked: Could an SDR get hacked? Suppose someone figures out how to build a virus that quickly spreads to SDR-based handsets, disabling them or using them as jammers or worse? What if those handsets are being used for public-safety applications? This is not to say that hacking is the only vector for wireless disruptions. After all, anyone can use a jammer to disable communications in a local area, and any moron with a reasonable shortwave transmitter can pretend to be an air traffic controller. That fact that we still use an unencrypted, unauthenticated communications protocol for such a critical service boggles my mind. The FCC is rightfully concerned about SDR hacking and has issued new regulations for SDRs that mostly attempt to deal with open source software in SDR applications. There is significant concern that open source software creates specific vulnerabilities that hackers could exploit. I don't think this is very likely for two reasons. First, open source isn't the same as open architectures. Each product vendor would of necessity keep certain elements of their implementation secret, locking out all but the most determined hackers. But secondly, and more importantly, the real issue is how to protect individual phones from ever loading harmful software. We already have pretty good techniques for this from the PC world, and there are many effective approaches to solving this particular security concern. It could even be argued that the technical scrutiny that comes with open source actually enhances security and integrity; the real issue is controlling what software, open source or not, gets onto the mobile device. As I noted in my last column, the big issue with SDR isn't hackers or security: It is the need to lower the power demands of SDR implementations so that they have a prayer of running on batteries. The road to SDR-based handsets isn't at all paved yet, but open source is a relatively minor concern.
556421
Apple announced that there will be an SDK for the iPhone.  Hooray!
164043
Blog: AT&T and Apple are both banking on the iPhone, but will people switch subscribers to get it?
434808
Less than a year after its introduction, itâs clear âthe iPhone has had a profound impact on the mobile phone business and likely will keep on influencing it for years to come,â Troy Wolverton  reports. âWith its large, full-screen display, its notable lack of a keypad and its simple black-on-silver color scheme, the iPhone instantly became an iconâand a model for the rest of the industry.â
625594
A round-up of reviews from around the country  weighing the merits and shortcomings of Apples's latest gadget
28497
Shortly after activating his new iPhone, Michael DeAgonia  received his â first phone call. A few moments after that, I got another. I was able to swap between calls, merge them, put them on hold, and separate them without hassle. Other phones, of course, do that as well. Whatâs the difference here? The multitouch screen and interface. I can confirm what early reviewers have already pointed out: it works like magic.â The iPhone, DeAgonia indicates, â isnât a collection of features, itâs a well-thought-out multi-function device with functions bound together by a drop-dead simple, drop-dead gorgeous interface. The sum is more than the parts.â
142805
Even if you think there's nothing more to say about the new Apple iPhone, there is. Here's what you need to know if you're about to take the plunge.
497315
I was talking with Bijan Sabet, an early user of FlickrFan, and he asked a question that I didn't know the answer to. Bijan: "I'd love a way to have FlickrFan photos on my iPhone." Early-on, I turned off synching for my iPhone, but it should be possible to synch one or all of the FlickrFan folders with the iPhone. I'll investigate, but I'm interested in knowing what other people think.