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Around SPE - 9 Nov 2008

Dieter Bohn — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 05:09:08 +0000

This week's Around SPE is sponsored by the the TiPb iPhone Accessory Store, which has long been your best source for iPhone accessories. A lot of iPhone 3G upgraders were left out in the cold when their car chargers turned out to not be compatible, but they've got plenty that are, not to mention plenty of headphones that are a step up compared to the standard white buds

Last week both CrackBerry.com and WMExperts found themselves on the cusp of major releases -- the BlackBerry Storm, BlackBerry Bold on AT&T, the HTC Fuze on AT&T, not to mention a few others on the Windows Mobile side. So while everybody has been anticipating new devices, all of the editors at SPE are anticipating something else that will be starting on November 17th. The hint is right up there in the picture!

Read on for the full skinny on what's been happening around SPE!

WMExperts

WMExperts made a big splash Friday afternoon with the 'net's first and only video of the HTC Fuze for AT&T! Be sure to check back Monday morning because we're also cooking up a full review of this latest and greatest Windows Mobile smartphone. It looks like the Fuze release date has finally been pinned down, too.

WMExperts also tends to cover some more general industry news, so all the action at the FCC last week definitely caught our eye. Lastly, we're more than a little proud of our writer George Ponder, who used a Treo Pro to help manage the election in his district.

CrackBerry.com

Over at CrackBerry.com, thousands of BlackBerry enthusiasts rejoiced as AT&T stayed true to their promised November 4th release date and launched the Bold. Picking election day turned out to be a smart move for AT&T and RIM, as stations like CNN played the new AT&T BlackBerry Bold commercial all day long.

The BlackBerry Storm, RIM's first touchscreen BlackBerry, continues to build on the hype leading up to its launch. Vodafone has dropped word of a November 14th release, and the Vodafone BlackBerry Storm bus has been traveling London which has turned out a bunch of Storm preview videos. While Verizon has not given official on the availability of their Storm, the educated rumor points to the week of the 23rd.

You'll want to keep it locked to CrackBerry.com this week. The What Would You Do for a BlackBerry Storm? Contest has come to an end and the top ten finalists have been selected. In order to win their new BlackBerry, the winners have to carry out their "To Dos" which will be published on CrackBerry.com as they come in. The first one hits on Monday!

The iPhone Blog

According to JD Power, the iPhone is absolutely destroying the Blackberry in *business* satisfaction due to it's drop dead ease of use and killer UI, but does Apple just not "get" the Four Pillars of PIM, something Palm nailed way back in 1997? Probably not, as the latest iPhone OS 2.2 leaks focus on over-the-air podcast downloads (admittedly super sweet!) and yet more App Store tweaks.

Speaking of the App Store, turns out Opera Mini was NOT denied (but probably would be), WeightBot's developers aren't done innovating on the iPhone just yet, and Shazam wants a piece of Midomi in our App vs. App battle royal for music mastery. (Leave a comment and you just might win an iTunes gift certificate). Of course, if you want to win a whole slew stuff -- an Ultimate iPhone Accessory Pack no less -- check out the Phone Different to find out this week's way to enter (hint: requires @theiphoneblog and rhymes with "sweet".)

TreoCentral

Over at TreoCentral, we learned via a Barron's article that analysts at Avian Securities and Morgan Keegan downgraded PALM due to the belief that Palm's cash position will significantly erode ($248 million at the end of the latest quarter to $75 million over the next year) which leaves "little room for error." The downgrade was also due to a U.S. retailer survey resulting in the belief that smartphone sales will come in below expectations for the next several quarters.

We also found out in that same Barron's article that we might not (corrected, thanks Scott!) be seeing the Treo Pro on AT&T and the Treo 800w on Verizon in time for the holiday shopping season.

Plus we learned that Apple almost bought Palm back in the summer of 1997. Jean-Louis Gassée noted in an article over at Monday Note:

A perhaps little known fact: in the Summer of 1997, Steve Jobs called Eric Benhamou, 3Com's CEO (the company owned Palm). "Give me the Palm and come and join my Board of Directors. Only Apple can make Palm a true consumer brand." Nothing happened. Apple's foray into the product segment had to wait ten more years.

Android Central

We've settled in over at Android Central, now that the G1 seems to be out there and getting used by a surprisingly large number of people. Just check out these download statistics for the Android Market to see what we mean, or check out some the backstory behind Android Apps.

Our favorite new app: the Android Gameboy emulator! A close 2nd favorite use for the G1 might be the newly discovered tethering method, though. Meanwhile, we're keeping our eye on the just-discovered Android Jailbreak and security risks that have popped up.

iPhone 2.1 Bug Watch: SMS Security and Mail Phishing/Spamming

Rene Ritchie — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 16:55:16 +0000

Reader Karl writes in to let us know his twelve year old son discovered a glitch in SMS security:

Being security conscious he turned on the passcode lock and disabled SMS Preview. [...] If a message is received during the passcode entry or while the screen is locked, a generic message of “New Text Message” appears, to prevent viewing of messages without unlocking the phone. [...] If however the phone is placed in emergency call mode, any incoming SMS messages are previewed instead of presented as the generic messages.

Next comes two issues concerning the implementation choices Apple made in the iPhone Mobile Mail client. According to Ars Technica, as disclosed by Aviv Raff, the first involves the way Mail truncates URLs for display on the iPhone. If a malicious URL is properly crafted by an attacker, the truncation can cause a fake URL to be non-obvious to the users, and thus more likely to result in phishing.

The second results from the lack of an option to display images in the full HTML Mobile Mail client. Since images are automatically displayed, spammers can gain confirmation that the email account that received it is active and ripe for spam attack.

As always, malicious attacks evolve and propagate at an alarming rate, and while we hope Apple fixes these immediately if not sooner, the onus is ultimately and always on we end users to pay attention and do everything we can to avoid them.

Got Camera Problems with iPhone 2.1?

Rene Ritchie — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 15:55:55 +0000

Since upgrading to iPhone firmware 2.1, from time to time my camera preview -- and the pictures themselves -- have taken to breaking apart and re-arranging themselves into something pretty much unusable (though likely to fetch a pretty penny at the snootier, more vacuous galleries, no doubt).

The above picture was of a plain surface, now broken into a patchwork of planes. Happens with faces, people, and just about everything. It's not happening regularly enough, however, that I'm close to considering the nu-cu-lar option -- full on restore.

Anyone else having this problem?

Got "Fetch"? POP/IMAP Email Broken in iPhone 2.1?

Rene Ritchie — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 11:55:53 +0000

As opposed to "push" style ActiveSynch, MobileMe, or Yahoo! iPhone mail, traditional POP or IMAP accounts, like Gmail or ISP mail, needs to "fetch", or check the server on a certain schedule to see if there are new messages.

Reader Mike wrote in pointing us to a thread on the Apple Discussion Forums about "fetch" email being broken with iPhone 2.1. I only fetch mail from Gmail, and Gmail IMAP is a strange and buggy implementation which gives me considerable problems beyond the iPhone, so I can't say whether anything is really broken or not in 2.1.

Reader Steffen, however, after thinking the problem could just be undocumented IMAP IDLE behavior, decided to run some tests:

Finally, I had some time to look into this thorougly. I dumped IP traffic all night to see what iPhone does. My iPhone is set to retrieve data every hour. Here's when the iPhone actually connected to my IMAP server:

09:36 PM, 10:44 PM, 11:02 PM, 12:36 AM, 06:36 AM, 09:38 AM, 09:45 AM, 09:57 AM

Looks like everything but an hour to me... Oh yeah, forgot to mention... I've turned off everything except for GSM radio do be sure to get all traffic. The last three connections occurred when I started to play around with the iPhone this morning. So, the effect that lead me to the assumption of IMAP-IDLE on the iPhone seems to be something else. It appears that the iPhone will contact IMAP more often while using it and somehow random while idling... So, no IMAP at this time, but maybe interesting as well...

Definitely interesting! Thanks Steffen!

Any other readers out there got "fetch" problems? Wacky behavior? Please let us know!

Phone Different Podcast 27

Dieter Bohn — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 17:53:08 +0000

Let's Rock, iTunes 8, iPhone 2.1 update, and of course, an extended rant [ED: with some cussin', beware!] on the App Store debacle. Tune in!

(Recorded on Sept 24th, btw, so you know the rant is original)

News

How To

Community

Credits

Thanks to the the iPhone Blog Store for sponsoring the podcast.

Our music comes from the following sources:

I Called You -- iPhone Remix by Pete Leidy

Sneakmove iPhone Ringtone Challenge

Updated: iTunes 8 + iPhone 2.1 = Apple Remote Problems?

Rene Ritchie — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 02:24:40 +0000

UPDATED: Reseting everything, including the router, solved the problem.

After Apple unleashed 2.1 today, and I downloaded and installed it with nary a snag or bump, I thought everything was pretty much apps with my Apps. Needless to say, tonight I whipped out my iPhone's handy Apple Remote App to help out with a little YouTube searching, only to discover that while my libraries (desktop, laptop, Apple TV) were all still set up, none of them would connect. (They'd all worked flawlessly, immediately prior to iTunes 8 and iPhone 2.1).

I removed the libraries and tried to set them up again, but can't get the iPhone to show up in iTunes in order to type in the verification PIN. I'll continue to trouble shoot and report back if I come across any fixes.

Anyone else having this problem?

Should I Upgrade to iPhone 2.1?

Rene Ritchie — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 20:45:41 +0000

With the Apple's release today of the iPhone 2.1 firmware update, that's the exact question many people will be asking. Hey, we at TiPb asked it ourselves -- for all of about 0.1 seconds before diving headlong into iTunes, for the good of our readers, of course.

So what's new in iPhone 2.1, is it compelling enough for you to update, and who should avoid it at all costs?

Answers after the jump!

What's in the 2.1 Update

According to Apple, iPhone version 2.1 contains many bug fixes and improvements, including the following:

decrease in call set-up failures and call drops
significantly improved battery life for most users
dramatically reduced time to backup to iTunes
improved email reliability, notably fetching email from POP and Exchange accounts
faster installation of 3rd party applications
fixed bugs causing hangs and crashes if you have lots of 3rd party applications
improved performance in text messaging
faster loading and searching of contacts
improved accuracy of the 3G signal strength display
repeat alert up to two additional times for incoming text messages
option to wipe data after ten failed passcode attempts
Genius playlist creation

In addition, there have been some minor UI tweaks, which can be seen in our iPhone 2.1 Gallery.

Who Should Update?

While some may feel, especially given recent history, that best practices are to wait a few days for the guinea pigs... er... early adopters to kick the tires and discover any deal-breaking bugs, if you're already suffering from any of the problems listed above, especially 3G connection issues, dropped called, frequent crashes, or severely long backups, or if the latest security fixes are a must, then bite the bullet and update asap. There's always a risk something might go wrong, but you're likely suffering immense frustration already, and the benefits in that case clearly outweigh theoretical drawbacks.

Who Shouldn't Update?

First and foremost: those of you who have jailbroken your iPhone 3G or 2G, or unlocked your 2G. While the 133t hax0rs over at iPhone DevTeam are Scotty-class miracle workers, they will always lag behind Apple and it might take them a few days, or even weeks, to crack whatever Apple's cooked into the latest/greatest firmware. (Like the iTunes 8 patch they've already let loose). If you're rolling with a jailbroken or unlocked iPhone, stay clear until you're given the all-clear. We'll always let you know right quick when/if there are any developments in that area.

Likewise, if you're one of the 98% Apple claims already has a rock-solid 2.0.x iPhone, and won't absolutely die if you don't get Genius Playlist functionality, like, immediately, then you have nothing to lose by hanging back and waiting a few days to make sure 2.1 doesn't blow up in anyone's faces. Keep reading TiPb, and in a week or so, when confidence levels are high, you can take the plunge -- if you feel like it.

Also, Vista users who haven't yet fixed their iTunes 8 problems are encouraged to do that first, before chancing even greater BSOD wrath with 2.1.

Conclusion

Bottom line, if you're happy with your 2.x (or even 1.x!) iPhone right now, save yourself the potential pain frustration and wait to update until there's a compelling reason to update.

If, on the other hand, 2.x is giving you nothing but headaches, or the 2.1 features are must-haves, go ahead and update now. Things can't get any worse, can they? And ZOMG! you can has Genius Playlists in ur iPhone like nowz!

Whatever you do, let us know. And if you do run into problems, be sure to head on over to our forums and harness a little crowd-sourced help!

iPhone 2.1 Screenshot Gallery

Rene Ritchie — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 17:48:16 +0000

Running 2.1 (5F136) now, and here's what we're noticing: WiFi works fine (tried on Apple and Linksys routers). New icons for connection type (3G/Edge) in the top bar. New blue filled and half-filled dots to describe state of video and podcasts (watched/listened to). Genius Playlists don't seem to work as well as iTunes 8, at least for me, with lots of songs coming back as "not related".

We'll update this post as we discover more (sadly, doesn't look like cut/copy/paste to turn-by-turn this go around!). What have you found so far? Any surprises?

Screen cap gallery after the break!

iPhone 2.1 Beta 3

Rene Ritchie — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 01:19:56 +0000

Another week, another iPhone 2.1 beta. Yup, Apple is maintaining a breakneck pace on the next firmware point release, updating it more regularly that blogger David G. from MobileMe! (Still waiting on "laster [last?] week" there Dave!) More typically Apple, of course, is the lack of details to the release, with TUAW reporting:

"iPhone OS 2.1 beta 3 is now available and is to be used for testing only. View the Pre-Installation Advisory for iPhone OS 2.1 beta 3, Readme, and Release Notes before installing the new versions of the iPhone OS and SDK. As a reminder, pre-release software is Confidential Information and is subject to the terms outlined in your Registered iPhone Developer Terms and Conditions with Apple."

Again, there were 8 betas released for 2.0 between March and July. If Apple keeps this up, could we be looking at a September release for 2.1? Something times with the anticipated September special event for new iPod Touches and general holiday announcements? (Which last year included the Wi-Fi Music Store and the infamous $200 iphone price drop...)

iPhone 2.1 Beta 2: Push API Unleashed + OS X 10.5.5 Beta + Security Update 2008-005

Rene Ritchie — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 15:55:03 +0000

iPhone SDK and Firmware 2.1 Beta 1, released to a very small group of developers just last week brought us rumors of direction and speed based GPS (turn-by-turn?), Notification Server API's, and the holiest of holy grails, cut, copy, and paste. Now Ars Technica reports Apple has dropped Beta 2, and while the hints hold true on the Notification "Push" technology, what else will our deep diving developers discover in the coming days? (I'm hoping for video recording!)

While Apple went through 8 betas for version 2.0 between March and the July 11 release, two updates for 2.1 in two weeks is a brisk pace, probably necessitated by Apple's pledge to have the Notification Service -- which allows developers to "push" alert badges, sounds, and popups -- out to users as a way to prompt applications that aren't running, simulating multi-tasking but without the negative impact of task management or resource obliteration that have plagued WinMob and Palm (though BlackBerry's NOC outages and Apple's own MobileMeltdown are harbinger that no scheme goes unpunished).

Also over night, Apple seeded the first beta for Mac OS X 10.5.5 to developers, which may portent further 2.1 related news, and for security conscious Mac users (and that should be all Mac users), Apple released Security Update 2008-005, which among other things patches the nasty DNS vulnerability that's been all over the news recently, and the more Mac-specific ARDAgent issue. Rev up Software Update now.

How's iPhone 2.0 Treating you?

Dieter Bohn — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 14:57:40 +0000

Pre-iPhone 2.0 (remember those days), we managed to snag an early leak of the iPhone 2.0 firmware and install it on our original iPhone. We found it to be buggy, but chalked that up to the distinct possibility that the firmware wasn't technically designed for the iPhone 2G. Now that we all have official 2.0 ROMs, is the picture any better? TUAW and Engadget Mobile and Ars aren't so sure -- and to be frank neither are we. Take a perusal through our iPhone 3G forums and you'll find all sorts of examples of bugs and hassles. Heck, it even has our Twitter followers (find us on Twitter, here) checking out the competition!

I myself have noticed significant instability in the few minutes immediately following either installing or deleting an App from the on-board App Store. I'm also still pretty darn unhappy with the various lags and slowdowns in certain apps -- the most egregious of which is Contact/Phone. I timed myself trying to make a call to somebody not on my favorites list yesterday. Out of 900 contacts, it took me around 25 seconds to get the call placed. Anything more than, say, 5 is pretty much unacceptable to me.

How about you? How's iPhone 2.0 treating you? Will the 2.1 firmware save us all?

iPhone 2.1 Rumor: Cut/Copy/Paste Cometh?!

Rene Ritchie — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:05:44 +0000

Last night Apple began seeding iPhone firmware 2.1 and SDK Beta 1 to registered developer program members (those who paid the $99 fee and were accepted, and have App Store uploading privileged's). Word came in early about new features in CoreLocation and Notification Server APIs. Now Engadget is adding the nigh-mythical holy grail of basic smartphone functionality to the list of maybes: Cut, Copy, and Paste!

Another bit which may or may not make it into 2.1 is copy/paste. We're still both hopeful and skeptical, but supposedly in the new version of the WebKit framework exists commands for "plugins," "copy," "paste," "cut," and some others. We can't confirm if these really exist (and if they do, we don't know how they've actually been there, or if they're simply holdovers from the desktop WebKit frameworks), so don't hold your breath.

Greg “Joz” Joswiak, Apple’s head of iPod and iPhone marketing has previously stated that cut, copy, and paste is on the future feature list, but with limited time and resources, Apple didn't get to it for 2.0. Will 2.1 be different?

What do you think? Any breath holding on your end?

iPhone 2.1 Beta 1: GPS Boost + Notification Server APIs

Rene Ritchie — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 01:55:14 +0000

Apple has reportedly seeded an early beta of firmware 2.1 (5f90) and a new and improved SDK to developers. Among the changes, CoreLocation (which covers GPS and other location-aware services) gains direction and speed tracking abilities (leading to a fresh round of turn-by-turn speculation, 'natch), and API's for the Notification Server that, come September, will be used in-lieu of background multitasking to push alert badges and sounds to Apps (like Instant Messages, Tweets, etc.). Given how MobileMe is doing with Push, that one may prove interesting...

On the negative side, 2.1 is one way street. Developers using 2.1 can not create binaries compatible with the current 2.0-centric App Store, so they either have to maintain two independant development environments (Update: possibly 3 environments and up to 6 devices, 2.0 and 2.1 for iPhone 3G (with mandatory carrier plans), iPhone 2G, and iPod Touch -- expensive much?), or wait for App Store 2.1 to launch (in September along with Notification Server?)

Of course, before 2.1 we'll likely see the already being tested 2.0.1, which will hopefully fix many of the bugs plaguing upgraders and new adopters both. Like, really soon, right Apple?

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