SuperSwitcher is a new jailbreak mod in Cydia that offers extended functionality and settings access to the Fast App Switcher on your iPhone.

Don’t you just hate searching for your favorite app icon in between so many Springboard pages? Wish you could just “bookmark” your favorite apps in the multitasking bar? Now you can with SuperSwitcher!

With SuperSwitcher you can bookmark your 9 favorite apps in the menu above the multitasking bar, and the apps can be set through Settings. But that’s not all! You can also change the system settings right from the menu above the multitasking bar!

• Toggle Bluetooth
• Toggle WiFi
• Change volume and brightness settings
• Respring
• Reboot
• Safe Mode
• Tweet, SMS, Mail or Call anyone on the fly

SuperSwitcher takes your multitasking bar to the next level!

This is a really great mod that adds a lot of value to the Fast App Switcher. You can customize your favorite apps for instant access, control brightness and other settings on-the-fly and then some.

If you run into any trouble you can always jump into our Jailbreak and Unlock forums or post it in the comments!

• $.99 — Cydia Store Link

Mail More Photos is a new jailbreak mod in Cydia that aims to get rid of the five photo per email limitation on iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.

Mail More Photos allows you to attach as many photos as you want to email. The default limit of 5 photos is removed from the Albums and Places views. The title bar is also updated to show the total size of all selected files.

The added value of showing how many photos you’ve selected, along with the total size of the photos you’ll be emailing is really great. Mail More Photos requires iOS 4 or higher, and is the perfect extension to an already useful feature.

• $.99 — Cydia Link

Have a ton of unreal messages and wondering how to just declare email bankruptcy and mark them all as read? iOS 5 still doesn’t give you that magical “mark all” button but it does let you mark multiple messages as read in the Mail app, which can help save a lot of time when you’re crunching through emails on-the-go.

1. Launch the Mail app
2. In the Mail app, tap Edit in the upper-right hand corner.
3. A bullet list will appear on the left allowing you to select emails individually.
4. Tap each email you would like to mark as read
5. Tap Mark in the lower-right hand corner.
6. Tap ‘Mark as Read’ from the menu list.

Now, all of the emails you selected will be marked as read and, if you’re using iCloud, Exchange, or IMAP, will reflect as such across all email clients you have connected to your email service. It’s as simple as that!

Daily Tips range from beginner-level 101 to advanced-level ninjary. If you already know this tip, keep the link handy as a quick way to help a friend. If you have a tip of your own you’d like to suggest, add them to the comments or send them in to dailytips@tipb.com. (If it’s especially awesome and previously unknown to us, we’ll even give ya a reward…)

iOS 5 adds lots of big new features, but also many more small tweaks like the ability to mark email messages as flagged or unread.

When reading an email, the word Mark appears in small blue text to the right of the date and time. Tap on it and options come up to flag a message or mark it as unread. Flag literally puts a tiny red flag icon on the message to help you find it later. Mark as Unread puts the little blue dot back so you can easily find and re-read it again.

Once a message is marked with a Flag or marked as Unread, tapping the Mark text brings up alternate options — Unflag and Mark as Read.

You can also mass mark or unmark messages using the Edit button in the mail box messages list view.

iOS 5 should be released to the public in early October.

Google has updated Google Sync for iOS devices, a service that lets iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users sync with Google’s Gmail, Calendar and Contacts via Microsoft’s ActiveSync protocol.

Google Sync keeps your phone’s native mail and calendar apps in sync with your Gmail, Calendar and Contacts. Today, three new updates to Google Sync for iOS will allow you to:

• Search all your emails in Gmail, not just the emails stored locally by the iOS mail app.
• Accept, decline or edit calendar events from the iOS calendar app.
• Send email from the address you want. We recognize that some of you manage multiple email addresses from a single Gmail account.Gmail’s “Send Mail as” feature lets you send messages with another email address listed as the sender instead of your Gmail address, e.g. joe@altostrat.com instead of joe@gmail.com. Now the iOS mail app will respect these settings.

All of these are welcomed additions to Google Sync, specifically the ability to search all mail in Gmail instead of just what’s stored on the device — right from the native Mail app in iOS.

Let us know how these new features are working for you in the comments!

[Google Blog via Phonescoop]

Switching to the Verizon iPhone, or any iPhone, from BlackBerry or Droid (or another Android phone) and curious how to transfer your data over? We’ve already told you how to switch from AT&T iPhone to Verizon iPhone, but crossing platforms can seem like a bigger headache. It isn’t. There’s lots of services available to help you transfer data from one device to another. Keep reading for some simple suggestions that can make the process of going from BlackBerry or Droid/Android to the iPhone just a little easier for you.

There are two main ways to move all your data over to iPhone: desktop sync via iTunes and cloud sync via Google, Yahoo!, Exchange, etc.

iTunes

If you want to move your music, TV shows, movies, photos, and other media over to your new iPhone and you already use iTunes on Mac or Windows PC then it’s pretty easy.

1. Just plug the dock cable into your iPhone and into your PC and your iPhone will show up in iTunes.
2. Go through the tabs and choose what information, media, and photos you want to sync.
3. Press sync

You can sync multiple iOS devices (if you already have an iPad or iPod touch) with one iTunes library or set up multiple iTunes libraries to keep things extra neat and tidy.

Google Sync

Here is a way to use Gmail or Google Sync to transfer your data. If you’re already using a Gmail or Google Account to sync your mail, contacts, and calendars, this process is dead simple. Just make sure you’ve done a sync on your current BlackBerry or Android device.

1. On your new iPhone tap Settings and go to Mail, Contacts, Calendars.

2. You’ll need to add your new account to your iPhone. Simply tap the new account and then Gmail option.
3. If you want full push, you can also set Gmail up as Exchange as well. Visit Google’s Exchange page for instructions on setting up this way.
4. After your account is verified, you can simply choose to sync what items you would like to sync by turning those options On.

5. If a message pops up asking what you’d like to do with the data, choose to replace your iPhone data.

Yahoo! Sync

To perform a sync with Yahoo!, you are essentially going to repeat the same steps you would for Google sync (see above), except you’ll choose Yahoo when you choose your new account type. All the options should be identical when it comes to syncing contacts, calendars, and email accounts.

Exchange and Hotmail

If you’re using Exchange at work, and/or Windows Live Hotmail at home, again the instructions are the same as above just choose Exchange ActiveSync as your account type. (If you have problems with a work account, check with your IT department for the proper settings)

Transferring contacts and calendars from your computer with iTunes

If you don’t use any Google, Yahoo!, Exchange or any online service and you’re just looking to transfer your contacts to your iPhone, you can do that too. Whether you have Windows or Mac, you can transfer contacts from your current smartphone to your iPhone pretty easily.

1. Plug your old device into the computer and sync them with either Outlook, Exchange, or Mac Address book. This process is pretty easy but varies from device to device, so you may need to refer to your specific device instructions in order to do this. If you still have an issue doing this, head on over to the Verizon iPhone Forum for some expert switcher advice and help.
2. Once your contacts are already on your computer, you can plug your new iPhone into your computer.
3. Open iTunes and click the Info tab under your iPhone sync settings.
4. You will see a Contacts option. Select that and choose what contacts you would like to be synced to your phone.

5. Click sync and wait for iTunes to do its thing. When complete, your contacts should now be on your new iPhone.

Note: You may have noticed iTunes has native options to configure Yahoo! or Gmail sync. You are more than welcome to use these options as well. They are just as easy. You can also choose to sync calendars via iTunes as well. Use whatever process is going to be more convenient for you on an ongoing basis.

Transferring photos from your old device to your new iPhone [PC users]

1. Simply sync or transfer the photos from your old device into your photos on your Windows PC. Whether you choose to do this with your actual device, or from removable storage like an SD card is your choice.
2. Plug your new iPhone into the computer and open iTunes and navigate to the Photos tab.
3. Navigate your way to where you save your photos to your PC when choosing what photos to sync and make sure to choose the pictures you’d like on your phone.
4. Click sync and wait for iTunes to finish. Your photos should now show up in the Photos app on your iPhone.

Transferring photos from your old device to your new iPhone [Mac users]

1. Plug your old device into your Mac and open iPhoto. (If iPhoto doesn’t recognize your Android or Blackberry, simply transfer the pictures from the removable storage in your device, if you have that option.)
2. Your device should show up in the left navigation pane of iPhoto.
3. Name your album and import the photos. Alternately, you could select just the photos you’d like on your new device if you want.

4. Open iTunes and go to the Photos tab. Select the albums or events you’d like to sync to your new iPhone.

5. Click sync and wait for iTunes. After the sync is complete, you should see your new Photos in your Photo app on your iPhone.

Next steps

The iPhone is a pretty easy device to transfer data to. Once you’ve gotten all your data from your other device into a cloud service or on your computer, it should be easy as pie. If you guys have any issues doing any of this, feel free to check out the TiPb Verizon iPhone Forums for answers to many questions.

For more on using your new Verizon iPhone, check out our iPhone Starters Guide.

Tips of the day will range from beginner-level 101 to advanced-level ninjary. If you already know this tip, keep the link handy as a quick way to help a friend. If you have a tip of your own you’d like to suggest, add them to the comments or send them in to news@tipb.com. (If it’s especially awesome and previously unknown to us, we’ll even give ya a reward…)

Have multiple email accounts set up on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad and not sure how to set the right one up as your default? If you’re replying, it should behave and reply from whatever email the person contacted you through. But what about when you compose a new email? Having to toggle between mail accounts can be annoying if you have to do it constantly.

If you typically send most of your emails through one mail account, click through to see how to make that account your default one.

This process should work the same on iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad but I’ll be using iPhone screens for this example.

1. Launch Settings from your homescreen.
2. Tap Mail, Contacts, Calendars.
3. Scroll down a bit and you’ll see a Default Account option.

4. Tap Default Account and choose the account you’d like your phone to use as the primary account.

You’re done! Your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad should now default to whatever mail account you’ve specified. Give it a try and let us know if it made emailing a better experience for you. And if you have any other email tips, leave them in comments!

Tips of the day will range from beginner-level 101 to advanced-level ninjary. If you already know this tip, keep the link handy as a quick way to help a friend. If you have a tip of your own you’d like to suggest, add them to the comments or send them in to news@tipb.com. (If it’s especially awesome and previously unknown to us, we’ll even give ya a reward…)

If you go to check your email in the iPhone’s Mail app only to see a blank — either literally a blank space between messages or a place-holder that says (No Sender) (No Subject) — you may have this bug. If you do we’ll tell you how to work around it, after the break.

I experienced the blank email issue frequently under iOS 4.1, as does Andrew, but I haven’t seen it (yet) under iOS 4.2. Ally has seen it over multiple iOS versions. (Ironically Ally captured this screenshot when she got a blank during an email exchange about blanks!) Whenever or wherever you have this problem, the only solution we’ve found so far is to restart the Mail app:

• Click the Home Button to exit Mail
• Double click the Home Button to open the Fast App Switcher
• Hold your finger down on Mail to put it into jiggly mode
• Tap the X at the top right of Mail to kill the app

Mail will auto-restart so you won’t miss any messages, but when you go back in your blank(s) should be gone.

Let us know if you’re experiencing this bug and, if so, whether or not this workaround works for you!

Yahoo! has released an HTML5 iPad friendly version of its mobile webmail.

• Faster and more reliable: If you’re offline, Yahoo! Mail uses local caching capabilities to help you access and search your messages even without an internet connection.
• Smart: You can find and organize your messages using Full Search, personal folders and Smart Folders with messages from your most important contacts and optimized views for photos and file attachments.
• Feature Rich: View rich photo attachments in their full form, or as previews directly in the inbox view. Also includes a dual-pane view to make reading and organizing a breeze.

You don’t have to do anything special to begin using the new Yahoo! mail webmail experience on your iPad. Just visit http://mail.yahoo.com in Safari and you should see the change. Yahoo! promises to bring more features, improve performance, and Yahoo! Mail for iPad the “best it can possibly be.”

If you use Yahoo! mail on your iPad, let us know what you think!

[Yahoo! Mobile Blog]

So how’s iOS 4 Active Sync working for you? iOS 4 allows multiple ActiveSync accounts, meaning iPhone users can finally have their work Exchange setup alongside Google Sync, for example.

I’ve got both Exchange (2003) and Google Sync (Google Accounts) set up on both an iPhone 4 and an iPhone 3GS, and both mail and calendar are working fine (I don’t sync Exchange contacts, never mind the mess that is Google contacts — I use MobileMe for that).

Some users over on the Apple Support forums aren’t having as much luck. Calendars in particular seem to be giving them problems where they weren’t under iOS 3.x.

I did notice that, on my iPhone 3GS, the first time I added the second ActiveSync account the phone got hot and the battery started to drain so I deleted it, rebooted, and added it back and it hasn’t happened again — battery life has been surprisingly good.

What’s your experience with ActiveSync under iOS 4?

[discussions.apple.com, thanks Sagar!]

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Join Rene, Phil, and Keith for post-iPhone 4.0 event analysis on multitasking, app folders, iBooks for iPhone, Game Center social network, mail enhancements, enterprise enhancements, iAds, and more. Listen in!

Want to be part of the show?

Grab your iPhone, launch VoiceMemo, record yourself introducing the show. Tell us your name, where you live, your favorite app, and finish it off with “…and my favorite podcast is TiPb Live!” Then email it to news (at) tipb (dot) com with subject “TiPb Live intro”. We’ll pick one of you, and you’ll be on the show!

• Example: “Hi, this is Jon Rubinstein from Sunnyvale, my favorite app is… um… dunno, but my favorite podcast is TiPb Live!”

Credits

Thanks to the the iPhone Blog Store for sponsoring the podcast, and to everyone who showed up for the live chat!

Our music comes from the following sources:

• I Called You — iPhone Remix by Pete Leidy
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As part of the iPhone 4.0 announcement today, Apple introduced an updated Mail app that includes (as rumored) support for a unified inbox (so all your new home, work, etc. email shows up in one place). Also introduced was threaded conversation, multiple Exchange accounts (hello Exchange + Google Sync), and fast inbox switching.

Does that solve all our iPhone email woes?

More after the break!

For those with multiple email accounts whose previous iPhone experience involved tapping into and out of those boxes many, many times a day universal inbox is a hugely welcome addition. As with Calendars, Notes, etc. you can tap a button on the top left, in this case Mailboxes, to back into a selection screen where you can then go into All Inboxes, a specific account’s inbox (which is considered fast inbox switching), or into the complete folder and sub-folder system of a given account (how Mail has worked from iPhone 1.0 to iPhone 3.0).

Once inside, All Inboxes is visually indistinguishable from an account-specific inbox, it simply contains all of their messages.

What is distinguishable are the small carets (technically greater-than symbols) to the right of replies that indicate a message is part of a thread. A number, typically 2 or 3, accompanies the caret to indicate how many replies are in the thread.

Tapping on a message that’s part of a thread doesn’t take you to the message but rather to a second list-view, similar to the inbox itself, but containing only the messages from the thread. Tapping on one of them then takes you to the message. A thread view contains a small vertical bar at the top with the subject of the thread and time of the most recent reply. A button to the top left of the message that’s part of the thread also contains the subject of the thread and lets you back out and see the thread again. The button then switches to contain the name of the inbox so you can back out again, leave the thread completely, and see all your messages.

So yes, the tap, tap, tap of inbox navigation persists, albeit shifted from moving into and out of inboxes to moving into and out of threaded messages.

Although not yet implemented in the current beta, like iPhone OS 3.2 for iPad, you’ll be able to open email attachments in apps. Now there’s no iWork (Numbers, Pages, Keynote) for iPhone yet, and the app Apple used to introduce this function doesn’t exist on iPhone yet either. Interesting.

Lastly, in previous versions of the iPhone OS, when you wanted to abandon an email, you would hit Cancel and get options to Save (store the email in Drafts), Don’t Save (trash the email), and Cancel (go back to writing the email). The naming of these options was likely too confusing so in iPhone OS they’ve been replaced with a big red Delete button (to trash the email), Save as Draft, and Cancel. And yes, you can still cancel a cancel. (iPad, by contrast, still has Save and Don’t Save, but no Cancel since it’s in a popover rather than full-screen menu and you can just tap away to cancel).

Tomorrow at 10am PT, 1pm ET, Steve Jobs puts sneaker to stage and, along with SVP of iPhone software, Scott Forstall, gives us a sneak preview of the highly anticipated iPhone 4.0. No one outside Apple knows exactly what new features and paradigms iPhone 4.0 will offer. However, tradition demands we make our best guesses and ask you to do the same.

This isn’t what we want, mind you. We told Apple what we want back on December 25, 2009: multitasking, better notifications, widgets for the home screen, instant access to important settings, themes, gestures like pervasive pull-down-to-refresh, system-wide “back” implementation, orientation lock, and resolution independence, along with a ton of great reader suggestions in the comments. We’ve also asked for a Finder app, like the Photo but to store document files.

This is what we think we’ll actually get, given the rumors and the direction Apple looks to be going. This is us, TiPb staff and TiPb readers reading the tea leaves…

iPhone 3.2 (aka iPad) features

This is the most obvious, really (and we’ve written about it before). All the little tweaks and enhancements Apple has made to the underlying OS, like adding “replace” to cut, copy, and paste, adding spell check to auto-correct, adding dictionary lookup to text select, etc. Wallpaper for the Home Screen, week view in Calendar and the other, sometimes small but still important, chance to the built-in apps, should be there as well. So should Bluetooth keyboard support. Oh, and iBooks.

Better Mail handling

Steve Jobs himself reportedly responded to an email saying a “universal inbox” was coming. That means, like Mac Mail but unlike current iPhone Mail, users with multiple accounts would have the option of seeing all their new messages in one place and not have to tap into and out of multiple folders every time they wanted to check every new message in every account. (Yes that sentence was crafted to feel as laborious as the current process!). Whether we’ll see more than that — IMAP IDLE, multiple exchange accounts, “synergy”-like messaging integration, etc. is unknown.

Multitasking (of a sort)

We’ve been hearing this for a while now — that Apple will offer some level of multitasking in iPhone 4.0. We’ve even seen it in the shadows. The three use-cases that it could cover are background tasks (listening to streaming internet radio while you browse Safari, keeping navigation running while you check Mail), fast task switching (going from Notes to Contacts and back), and multi-window workflow (dragging data from one application space into another).

While the “Pandora” model could easily be handled by allowing streaming accounts to be entered inside iPod (which already has background access going back to iPhone 1.0), the navigation model won’t be solved unless there’s a more universal background implementation. However, Apple has always put stability and mainstream user friendliness ahead of power-user functionality. A compromise seems most like — full background access for a highly limited number of applications.

Fast task switching was accomplished in large part by the speed of iPhone 3GS. What remains missing is the consistent saving of state by apps on exit (if you leave a twitter client or a race game and then go back it should be at exactly the place you left it), and a more elegant way to quickly move between apps — swiping between two apps 11 screens apart isn’t very Apple. The rumor here is for a Mac OS X-style Exposé implementation where a double-click of the Home Button would cause the current screen to fly out and a grid of active (background) apps to fly in. That sounds much more Apple.

Multi-window drag-and-drop may not be obvious given the small size of the iPhone, but given how Palm’s webOS Cards view presents apps — and how the iPhone Safari Pages view does likewise — is remains a tease. Still, we don’t expect it. Not yet.

New home screen (SpringBoard)

SpringBoard is the internal name of Apple’s Home Screen UI, which right now consists of an 11 page-wide application launcher grid with SpotLight search bolted on to the right. Rumors have persisted since before iPhone 3.0 that Apple has a new SpringBoard experience waiting in the wings. Again, there are several elements that could be at play: better organization, glance-able information, themes.

We’re not wishing here, so no grandiose “Apple will re-invent the metaphor for home screens with some ingenious new approach”. We’re looking at what Apple has already done for clues as to where they’re going. Stacks, then, where groups of similar apps are combined together until a tap expands them into a grid-launcher would be reasonable. Likewise, Dashboard where useful, glance-able information is always just a tap (or swipe) away. Dashboard could even integrate SpotLight, allowing it to replace a singletasker with a multitasker (how fitting). It could function similarly on the Lock Screen, for ultimate glance-ability.

We don’t see themes, however. Though they’d be a boon to users and designers/developers alike, they don’t seem very Apple (beyond the home screen wallpaper already mentioned).

Improved notification handling

We’ve beaten this one to death — if you get a constant stream of SMS, IM, game challenges, or any heavy amount of notifications each new one obliterates the one before meaning all but the most recent functionally never existed and hence never notified you of anything. Both Android and Palm webOS do this more functionally, though developers have complained to us that it may be too complex for the mainstream market Apple is targeting (too much management for mom). Could Apple create a more robust yet still drop-dead-simple notification system for the iPhone? Sure, and given how fast and far push notification has been adopted, we think it’s likely they will.

The simplest solution would be a Notification app (please, no smiley face logo) that listed all new notifications. When you’ve received multiple notifications, the dialog would show the most recent but also inform you of how many others you’ve missed, and an option to “see all” would be presented.

But that would likely make no one happy. This more than multitasking might be the most difficult nut to crack, and may end up being part of that new Home Screen mentioned above. That’s closer to guess work than we’re comfortable with for this post, however, so we’ll just leave it there for now.

iAd platform

“iAd” was rumored to be shown off on April 7, and April 8 is just a day later. Apple’s mobile advertising platform could certainly be part of the iPhone 4.0 SDK feature set unveiled for developers. Gossip says Steve Jobs wants to do for mobile advertising what iTunes did for digital music — make it not suck. We certainly hope so. Punch-the-monkey with push notifications is certainly not the new Home Screen experience we want.

iTunes.com

It’s fairly certain iTunes is moving to the cloud and becoming something akin to iTunes.com. We’d love to see streaming video from Apple, MobileMe “whispersync” to keep our place between iPhone and iPad, and other great, media-centric features. But Apple typically saves those for September to coincide with the new iPod touch and lately, new iTunes releases.

###Mobile iChat

We put this here just for Chad. We still think Mobile iChat (text and audio/video) is coming but not until the 4th generation iPhone is revealed at WWDC 2010. Apple usually holds a few new OS features back to show off the new hardware (like Compass, VoiceControl, etc. last year). Patience, Chad!

MobileMe 2.0

Beyond “whispersync” MobileMe has fallen so far behind Google services, DropBox and others that Apple really has to up its game here. Photo sync, cloud backup, and other features have gone from nice-to-have to must-have. Again, however, that feels more like a WWDC 2010 Phil Schiller announcement to us.

One more thing…?

That’s what we think is most likely to come with iPhone 4.0 tomorrow, but Apple has shown they can always surprise us (who expected the long, long list of previously missing features rattled off at the iPhone 3.0 event?). What are you expecting to see?

Apple’s lone outstretched hand to the social web, the MobileMe News “blog” is back with another helpful hint for users, this time about using iPhone 3.0 to search older email on the server:

select your Inbox or another folder from your MobileMe Mail account and access the search field by scrolling to the top of the message list. (Tap the status bar at the top to quickly reveal the search field.) Type what you want to search for and tap To, From, or Subject, or All to search all three. You’ll see the messages that match the search on your device, and you can then tap “Continue Search on Server” to see the remaining messages that are stored in the MobileMe cloud.

I’ve used this to find old order info, network machine names, and scads of other stuff buried in server-side email. Since it doesn’t (yet?) search the body of the email, it’s not as useful as Gmail’s WebApp, for example, but it’s lightyears ahead of where it was under 2.2.1.

The previous attempt to make an end run around the iPhone’s lack of cut/copy and paste involved shared code called OpenClip and relied on a loophole Apple closed in iPhone OS 2.1

This latest tilt at the text editing windmill targets only 2 apps instead:

Pastebud—as the service is called—works using two bookmarks in Safari. One prepares and loads the page you are viewing, ready to select text at the touch of a finger. From there, you can copy any text you want and create a new mail message with that text in it. In addition to that, you will be able to copy and paste in the text field of a different web page.

Check out the full story and video over at Gizmodo. And then let us know if you think this is enough — for now — to satisfy your cut/copy and paste cravings?

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.

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!

Engadget honcho Ryan Block got his techie mitts on a pre-release version of the iPhone 2.0 firmware, and here are the highlights (and lowlights!):

Exchange over Wi-Fi is not instantaneous (!). No contact search he could find. New button in Calendar don’t do nothing for him yet. App Store error’s out. Cisco branded VPN screen. Parental controls are good-to-go. Wi-Fi order can be specified in prefs. Calc has new widescreen scientific mode and icon. And his favorite new feature — Multi-Select in Mail!

Head on over for a full rundown and gallery o’ pics!

Apple’s Thursday press release (via Ars Technica), while big on Enterprise and chock-full of SDK goodness, also snuck in some new, long sought-after features for one of the built-in apps: MobileMail (Mail Touch?).

In addition to these new iPhone network and security features, the beta iPhone 2.0 software provides several new Mail features such as the ability to view PowerPoint attachments, in addition to Word and Excel, as well as the ability to mass delete and move email messages.

But what about the other built-in apps like Calendar and Contacts?

Our own eagle-eyed Chad Garrett has already spotted a mysterious new icon on Calendar, and predicted we may indeed see Task integration (GTD’ers, put it on your to do’s!).

Now BlargKABOOM (via TUAW) has hauled out the iMicroscope and discovered yet another tantalizing new icon, this time in Contacts:

It is a little spotlight icon right above the A on the alphabet.

Does this mean we may just be getting search as well? If so, how will it be implemented, and will it be limited to contacts or (dare we hope?) system wide, SDK-level CoreSearch?

iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store, YouTube, the Weather, Stock and other widgets, and MobileSafari Touch have all had search for a while now. C’mon Apple, share the love!

Google has been enabling IMAP access for everyone that has been using GMail. IMAP, like POP, is a method of downloading mail from a mail service. POP works really well if you just use one computer, but it’s a nightmare if you use more than one. And you know, the iPhone is a lot like a computer, enough that using POP on it has kind of been a nightmare in terms of checking my work email. The option for IMAP hasn’t showed up on my account yet, but it’s showed up for Dieter, and he has a good account of how it works up at WMExperts. If you prefer, there’s also an official Google video available at YouTube, catered specifically for iPhone users. If you want article help on how to install everything on your desktop email, GMail has posted a help file on their site.

And now, that video for any iPhone users out there: