One of the big missing features on the iPhone is support for wireless bluetooth stereo, also known as A2DP. Naturally, the iPod Touch lacks the same, since it lacks a Bluetooth chip altogether. ...Or does it? Yes, it does. See, as MacRumors notes, the legendary disassemblers at iFixit took on the iPod Touch 2G and found a little chip called the Broadcom BCM4325 -- a chip typically used to provide WiFi or Bluetooth. There's already a separate WiFi chip, so Bluetooth is the natural assumption.
We mentioned before that PhoneSaber, everyone's favorite free iPhone dueling app, was pulled from the App Store over copyright issues (THQ, see, has sole mobile rights to all things Star Wars), but that it would soon be making it's triumphant return. Now developer Mac Box is telling us how, and it seems the Force (Unleashed) will be with it, and best of all -- it will still be FREE!
Yahoo! oneConnect wasn't the only news to come steamrolling out of the CTIA Keynote yesterday, and TiPb senior editor Dieter Bohn was there live to capture it:
The big story is BluePrint -- it offers a very quick mobile services development platform based on XML. Basically it's a large set of XML setup you can program a mobile app in and it will display very nicely on different platforms -- iPhone, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Symbian, etc. They are opening it up for anybody and anybody can distribute however they'd like. Yahoo would prefer you use Yahoo's ads on your apps, but not requiring it.
While we await more on this latest contender/pretender for the "build once, deploy many" crown, check out Dieter's gallery o'pics straight from the keynote (after the jump), and head on over to WMExperts for the full play-by-play.
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.
