IRiver's IPhone-ish W10
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The Frankenstein-style gadget combines audio/video playback, VOIP, Wi-Fi, pseudo-GPS and podcast software. In Listening Post.
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When Steve Jobs hits the keynote stage at the 2008 Macworld Conference and Expo on January 15, he will face a ballroom full of bloodshot eyes, a sea of journalists, analysts, and bloggers knocked loopy by the culture shock of going to sleep in Vegas (where the Consumer Electronics Show was just held) and waking up in San Francisco. Talk about your tough crowd.Fortunately, Jobs doesn?t need to kick into charisma overdrive to capture minds, hearts, and wallets. This year?s conference is already a banner event, a coming-out party of sorts for a Mac platform that has seen its biggest evolutionary kick since the demise of the original Mac OS. The combination of OS X Leopard and new Macs based on Intel?s Penryn CPU will help Mac outsiders remember that Apple sells more computers than phones.iPhone, take 2 What will happen this week? Only Steve Jobs knows for sure, but here?s my best guess.Although Leopard and Penryn have pushed the Mac to dizzying heights and should thus gain some stage time, the Macworld Expo keynote will still go heavy on iPhone and iTunes. And this time, the hype will be justified. eBay will be awash in mint-condition, used iPhones the day that Apple ships the new model that links to AT&amp;T?s fast 3G network (in the U.S.). With the speed of the 3G cellular data network, lots of RAM space for cached maps, and a close partnership with Google, iPhone could blast a tunnel through the in-car navigation market. CES was packed with navigation newcomers, but none has the hook of iPhone?s multi-touch interface, much less the capability to make phone calls and purchase music from iTunes.Another indirect but even farther-reaching benefit derived from the faster cellular network is iTunes Tagging. When listeners with compatible receivers are tuned into terrestrial and satellite radio stations that have licensed iTunes Tagging, they can purchase music that catches their ear with a button press. This will see its greatest uptake among users of Mac and PC iTunes, but iPhone owners could have the song downloaded before the radio is done playing it. No more trying to figure out the title of a song from the words in the chorus.iPhone?s support for native applications will see its official debut in February, but third parties are undoubtedly already on board. If Apple doesn?t take up navigation, the likes of Telenav and TomTom surely will. Voice-over-IP would make a great keynote demo, and with native application support, Apple might not have to write it in-house.Do pre-show announcements clear the stage for new notebooks? Apple always gets what it considers to be its lesser product announcements out of the way just before Macworld Expo so that Steve Jobs can focus on the high-percentage pitches in his keynote.The pre-keynote rollouts for 2008 are Apple?s specialty machines: the Mac Pro desktop/workstation and Xserve rack-mounted server. Both have been reworked for Intel?s quad-core Penryn family Xeon CPUs, nicknamed Harpertown. Mac Pro buyers can now get 8-core systems for about $1,200 less than before, and the Harpertown Xserve is the first 8-core server Apple has ever sold. Both systems also support significantly faster front-side bus and memory speed. This sort of performance kick might go unnoticed by most home and mainstream commercial users, but Mac Pro and Xserve buyers are going to love it.With the power user, workstation and server Mac announcements out of the way, Apple has room on the Macworld Conference and Expo keynote stage for new notebooks. The story there isn?t necessarily limited to Penryn. AMD recently announced its ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3000 series GPU (graphics processing unit) for notebooks. Among the new GPU?s attributes are improved power efficiency, PCI Express 2.0, and direct HDMI output. The new ATI GPU has one other feature: on-chip decoding of HD and Blu-Ray DVD content. It may be a long shot for this Macworld Expo, but there is a high-def DVD-equipped MacBook Pro on the near horizon.What to do after the keynote Those Macworld Conference and Expo Attendees who don?t fly home after the keynote will be treated to a packed schedule of sessions targeting audiences from home users to scientists and IT professionals.Macworld Expo?s organizers -- IDG World Expo, which has the same parent company as InfoWorld -- have also managed to pack the exhibit hall. Attendees will find familiar faces such as FileMaker Pro, REALbasic, and the venerable BBEdit programmer?s editor, but they?ll also see Hewlett-Packard, Samsung, Xerox, VMware, Parallels, Iomega and, of course, Microsoft.Next to Leopard, Office 2008 for Mac will be the best-selling software for the Mac this year. It?s not only the first native version of Office for Intel Macs, but Microsoft?s first Office designed from scratch for OS X. The Mac faithful may outwardly jeer Microsoft for taking four years to catch a clue, but they?ll be buying Office along with all other commercial Mac users. Office 2008 will be just one of many new products showing at Macworld Expo that don?t need Steve Jobs to sell them. They?ll sell themselves.
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Blog: With patience wearing thin because of iPhone's bugs I consider restoring the iPhone's settings.
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According to Saul Hansell at the NY Times, Apple intends to break phones that have been unlocked.  But Francine Hardaway and Patrick Scoble both updated this afternoon, and bad things happened. Hardaway's phone was "fried," she needed a new phone, and Scoble lost all his data. Hardaway: "Trust me, I didn't hack it." Jeff Clavier: "This effing piece of s..t is bricked." Robert Scoble, Patrick's dad, updated successfully, and got the new features. Spaley's iPhone is "a useless piece of crap." Looks like Josh Bancroft's iPhone was hosed too. I would hold off on the update until we find out what's going wrong.  Sugar Attack: "It wasn't until I saw a friend tweet about the new iPhone firmware upgrade that I realized I could now access the iTunes WiFi store."
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Also: Impending Apple phone to be Cingular-exclusive upon launch. Read these stories and more from around the Web on News.com Extra.
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Look, ma, no PC/Mac iPhone hackers have released a tool that allows owners of firmware 1.1.1 iPhones and iPod Touches to open up their devices to third-party apps - all without the need for a host Mac or PC.â¦
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How to have fun with your iPhone right now.
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AT&amp;T Inc. and Apple Inc. on Tuesday said wireless service for the iPhone will range from $59.99 per month to $99.99 per month.
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Blog: Exploring future product opportunities using the iPhone's components
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Reg review Aka i-mate PDA 2k, O2 XDA IIs, Orange M2000, Vodafone VPA III, T-Mobile MDA III etc, etc
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(InfoWorld) - New technical details about Apple's iPhone leaked to the Web by a University of Washington technology group but since yanked from the school's site confirmed that the device will not support Adobe's Flash, will rely on QuickTime to display audio and video, and can keep only eight Safari-displayed Web pages in memory at one time. The University of Washington's emerging technology team posted information gleaned from an iPhone session at last week's WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference). The nitty-gritty details spelled out during the "Designing Web Content for the iPhone" presentation, according to the team, include: * No support for Flash, Adobe's multimedia Web content format. * No Java. * JavaScript runtime limited to five seconds. * QuickTime used for audio and video. * A maximum of eight documents loaded in Safari on the iPhone. * Links to video on a Web page take users directly to full-screen playback. * Support for PDF through Apple's own DisplayPDF code, not Adobe. * Multiple gestures automatically available to Web sites viewed through iPhone without any additional coding, including pinching content to shrink, double-tapping to zoom, and two-fingered scrolling. Although the blog entry has disappeared -- replaced by a message that reads "The topic you are looking for have been deleted" -- the page was still viewable in Google's cache late Tuesday with a text-only version also available. Oren Sreebny, director of emerging technology at the school, said it wasn't Apple that called for the deletion. "Someone else in our organization who had [also] gone to WWDC, pointed out that it was probably in violation of a nondisclosure agreement. We didn't want to get into any trouble, so we removed it," said Sreebny. Apple requires all developers attending WWDC to sign an NDA that bars them from revealing any conference content except for CEO Steve Jobs' keynote. Earlier this week, the owner of a Web site that provides gas prices at local stations said his server logs showed several iPhone-equipped users had visited the URL using a browser identified as Safari Version 419.3. "[That's] the 'old' Safari, not the 3.0 beta," said the unidentified site owner. That information matches what Sreebny's group had posted; according to the WWDC session notes, the iPhone version of Safari IDs itself to sites as Version 419.3. The GasApp.com site owner also reported that Safari on the iPhone was running in 320 x 396 resolution for the Web viewing area. "But I don't know if that includes the controls at the bottom or not," said the site operator. The iPhone goes on sale June 29 in the U.S.
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Apple Inc.'s flashy new iPhones may be jamming parts of the wireless network at Duke University, where technology officials worked with the company Wednesday to fix problems before classes begin next month.
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âIf lovinâ this phone is wrong,â pines Etan Horowitz , âI donât want to be right.â He calls iPhone âthe most fun and easy to use gadget Iâve ever laid my hands onâ and says that âcarrying it in my pocket made me feel connected to the world the way I do when Iâm surfing the Internet on a high-speed connection.â In fact, âSafari, the iPhoneâs Internet browser, lets you display up to eight Web pages at once, and itâs easy to move among them.â Horowitz âwas also impressed by the battery life, which gave me nearly six hours of talking, Internet browsing and video watching before I needed to charge it.â
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Overshadowed by all the iPhone hoopla was the release late last week of a software update for some other Apple hardware.
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As warned, several owners of unlocked iPhones are reporting that the latest software update to the iPhone has rendered their phone essentially useless.
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(InfoWorld) - So much for Apple Inc. raising the bar in the mobile phone industry. Since Apple announced it would soon start selling a combined music player and mobile device called the iPhone, industry experts have predicted that competing cell phone makers would rise to the challenge and start producing equally exciting phones. They may yet do that, but so far they haven't. I took a quick stroll around the show floor of the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona checking out the music phones from some of the biggest handset makers out there to see if anything might compare to the hype aroundÂ expectations for the iPhone. Apple is known for great hardware designs and simple, intuitive user interfaces. While I saw a dizzying array of form factors and a multitude of user interface styles, I was unimpressed with the hardware I saw and downright confounded by the complexity of all the user interfaces. My examinations were quick -- the show floor is incredibly crowded and hot, so sometimes it took some sharp elbows to even get to touch a phone. I took a brief look at the overall form factor of the phones and then did some navigating around the music player. I started out at the Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB booth, perhaps because I know the company has been pushing its Walkman handsets. The W880 is a really nice looking phone. It's incredibly thin and has unusual raised keys that work nicely. Sony Ericsson gets high marks for the hardware form factor on this one, but the software user interface was a different story. I never did manage to find the music player from the home screen. Ultimately, I just moved along to another phone in the display area that was already running the music player. I had a similar navigation problem on Nokia Corp.'s 5200 music phone. From the home screen, I clicked on an icon with a music note in it, which seemed a logical place to launch the music player. But that took me to a music-related game. I scrolled and scrolled through a horizontal bar of icons but didn't find a music player there. Then I noticed that floating in the middle of the screen were two long bars: one for the music player and one for the calendar. That threw me -- of all phone functions, why were the music player and calendar the only two to be presented that way? At least Nokia had loaded the demonstration phones with music. Some of the other handsets I tried out, such as the Sony Ericsson one, had just one song on them. That makes it difficult to get a feel for navigating around the music player. I don't love the form factor of the 5200 but I think some people might. It's sporty, in white and bright red, and a shape reminiscent of Motorola Inc.'s PEBL phones. It slides open. Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.'s SG HF300 "Ultramusic" was next up. I couldn't help but be struck by the cool design. One side of the phone is nearly all screen; the flip side has a keypad for dialing the phone. I never managed to figure out how to use the control panel on the music player side of the phone. It looks like the iPod's but square. I don't have an iPod so maybe iPod users can easily figure it out. If you're not an iPod user -- and you may not be if you're in the market for a music phone -- the SG HF300 might require a steep learning curve. Motorola was next in line. I'm probably least impressed with the Z8 than any of the others. I think the design is clunky and looks and feels like a slider phone from a couple of years ago. For the innovator of the thin phone, Motorola should have done better with the Z8's size. I found it difficult to figure out which buttons corresponded with the words at the bottom of the screen so even hitting "back" proved difficult initially. Then, when looking for the music player application, I suddenly found an error message on the screen and the phone froze. Not a great sign. My final stop was Neonode AB, a Swedish company that has been touting its music phone, particularly its touch screen. The device is in a category of its own and is very un-phone like. About the size of a business card, though not as thin, its touch screen definitely requires training to use. I would have never been able to figure it out without instruction. Users sweep up along the home screen within three columns. The first opens a navigation page with icons for functions such as the music player, calendar and calculator. The middle column opens a touch pad for dialing calls. And the final column opens a tools menu. Sweeping left along the screen goes back a page and sweeping right opens a function that is highlighted. When presented with a list such as albums, you touch the item to highlight it and then touch the middle of the screen to open. Sound confusing? It was. Still, I'm not panning it. It may require a bit of direction and practice but I think it'd be pretty easy to get the hang of how it works. While the small size was attractive, it also meant that it felt a bit designed for a child. Most adults have fingertips that are bigger than the icons on the screen. Overall, I was largely underwhelmed with my experiences. But there's time -- Apple only just announced the iPhone and its competitors haven't really had time to respond. Also, my search was by no means exhaustive. For example, I didn't make it to LG Electronics Inc., which recently unveiled a phone, the KE850, that is being compared to the iPhone. Even at the booths I visited, I chose to look at the phone that appeared to me to be the most focused on music but that may not be the one the manufacturer would direct me to and other models may compare more directly with the iPhone. And finally, I'm the first to admit my exercise was a bit silly given that I've never even seen an iPhone. But such is the power of the Apple marketing machine.
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Blog: The iPhone has landed in the real world and at my house it's been more of a thud than a revelation. Find out how everyone's tech fantasy is squaring with one busy family's reality.