Welcome to iPhone Analysts vs. the Magic 8-Ball, where we take the often outlandish, sometime surreal predictions of iPhone analysts and pundits, blogeratti and the ‘net elite, and compare them to the potentially equally precise prognostications of a… magic 8-ball (running on an iPhone, of course!)
This edition checks back post-Let's Rock to see was right, and what's still left!
[This is a GRAND PRIX App vs. App Review! Comment on this post for your chance to win... the winning racer! Make sure you leave a valid email address in the comment form -- it won't be made public, but it will be used to contact you if you win! Check out the full contest details, then grab your iPhone and get ready race -- the GRAND PRIX starts now!]
Kicking off our TiPb GRAND PRIX and starting from the pole position, we give you Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D (available from iTunes for $9.99) versus Cro-Mag Rally (also available from iTunes for $1.99)! Who is going to get the checkered flag today? The wily Crash Bandicoot or those lovable Neanderthals? See how they compare and see who we choose as the winner of heat #1. As I've always wanted to say, "Gentlemen (and ladies), START YOUR ENGINES!" (and keep up with us after the break!)
Seems like it's been an eternity since the pulling of the NetShare application officially brought us into the age of Apple pulling apps from the App Store on an almost daily basis. Without NetShare, the only folks who have been able to utilize their iPhones' 3G connection for Laptop connectivity have been the crazy ones.
There are now over 3000 apps in the App Store, many of them games, and many of the games are... racers? Yup, sure seems that way. A half dozen or so at least, and more on the way. How's a gamer to decide? Simple, the TiPb GRAND PRIX!
Once a week for the next few weeks we're going to review 2 racing games head-to-head and app-vs-app. Based on our review scores, we're going to pick the winner... and one of you, our readers, is going to win that app! (Technically: an iTunes App Store gift certificate in the amount of the winning race game app).
But wait! There's more! Every GRAND PRIX needs a Grand Champion, and every contest needs a Grand Prize. So, when all the reviews are done, the TiPb staff is going to pick our Grand Champion race game app -- and one of our readers will win that game AND an iPhone Blog Store gift certificate in the amount of $50!
How can you win? Leave a comment on any GRAND PRIX review. We'll randomly pick a comment and announce the winner the next week on the following Grand Prix review. (First winner announced on second review, second winner on third review, etc.) For the Grand Prize, we're going to randomly pick one comment from any of the preceding GRAND PRIX reviews, so make sure you hit them all!
While our own Dear Leader is off live-blogging in San Francisco (no, sadly not for Apple but for CTIA oh, so close by), he hasn't forgotten us, and indeed has just sent in word from the field of Yahoo! oneConnect for -- what was last year's "device unmentionable" -- the iPhone.
"Pulse feature is sweet!"
And just was is the pulsey sweetness of which Dieter speaks? Yahoo! says:
The. Whole. Screen. Is. A. Flipping. Tic. Tac. Tile. Button.
Seriously. We kid you not (though RIM could be kidding us all?). Sister-site Crackberry.com has all the deets, but...
Seriously? Who's the usability wizard who came up with this one? Who came up with the single-click point of failure concept? The one mechanism to break it all?
Gizmodo confirms what we feared during our meta-live-blog -- the bits that receive the information from the shoe-insert are built-into the 2nd Generation iPod Touch and not any other Apple device. That's not surprising -- hardware is as hardware does.
That's not the real bad news, though. The real bad news is that the 'dongle' that iPod users have been able to use for those transmissions in the past continues to be incompatible with the iPhone and the 1st Gen iPod Touch and that's not a situation that's likely to change.
In all of the about 10 seconds devoted to the iPhone in this year's Apple pre-holiday event, Steve Jobs let rock with the iPhone 2.1 announcement. No demo, though we suspect it will be very similar to the iPod Touch 2.1 software that received so much loving. Jobs did run down the "feature" list, however:
Seems iTunes 8 for Vista 32/64 will crash if you hook an iPhone or iPod up to it, or, you know, look at it funny. Gizmodo says some users are having luck reverting back to 7.7, or doing a complete uninstall and then installing 8.0. Apple, meanwhile, is asking for crash logs to try to figure out what's happening.
Could Apple's Quality Assurance department really not have any Vista machines in-house to run tests on? Any other company, and we wouldn't even ask but as reader Bryan points out in the comments:
Jim Goldman over at CNBC.com scored a one-on-one, on camera interview with Steve Jobs, fresh off the stage from Apple's "Let's Rock" event.
Jobs chats iPods, 'natch, and after (and off-camera) joked that rumors of his ill-health were being spread by "hedge funds with a big short position in Apple." Other than that? He could stand to gain a few pounds. Maybe the stress on uber-thin products is just creating a little negative peer pressure?
Love him or hate him, Jobs is the soul of Apple, and its great to see him in action again.
