Orbit aims to do for your iPhone what Syngergy does for Palm’s webOS — aggregate all your contacts and their status — but with an equal and opposite focus on notification management.

So, not only can you link together your friend’s contact info along with their Facebook, Twitter, etc., you can group them into various “orbits” (and each contact can be in more than one “orbit”), create all manner of filters, and raise or lower the “volume” of notification you receive.

So, you can set the volume of your raging editor in chief to “high” and your in-laws to “low”.

TiPb has discussed this before — after the rush to Push Notification, we have devices pinging and poping at us all the time and that can become as useless as no notifications.

Orbit [Free -- iTunes link] has just gone live in the App Store, check it out. Video after the break!

[YouTube video link]

Following up on today’s announcement that AT&T would be making MMS available to US iPhone users on September 25, TiPb asked the logical followup — tethering?

We expect to offer tethering in the future. By its nature, this function could exponentially increase traffic on the network, and we need to ensure that some of our current upgrades are in place before we can deliver the expanded functionality with the excellent performance that customers expect.

They’re likely referring, at least in part, to their ongoing rollout of 850 MHz 3G — most recently in New York and New Jersey — which should put more width in their bandwidth.

So are we happy enough with MMS to cut AT&T some slack on tethering, or do we want it all and now?

Thus far making good on their promise of consistent updates, Apple has once again posted as to the status of their beleaguered MobileMe service. David G. — who may be the poster formerly known as “me” ? — chimed back in last night:

As you know, restoring full email access to the remaining 1% of MobileMe users is our first priority. We turned on web access to their current email yesterday and the feedback has been cautiously positive. Since then, we’ve restored full email history (minus the approximately 10% of mail received between July 18 and July 22 which may have been lost) and the ability to access email from a Mac, PC and iPhone, to over 40% of these users, and expect the remainder to be restored in the next few days.

G. goes on to clarify how some email is now time-stamped by server transfer rather than send time, and explains how to view long headers to extract actual send time info, and promises another update soon.

Kudos to Apple for stepping up the transparency. Given their corporate culture is so immersed in secrecy, its likely a painful, but hopefully transformative lesson for them to learn. Sympathies, however, for the some 60% of the 1%ers still waiting for their 90%…

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