iOS Devices

@AACDuke writes in asking what that mystery key above the ‘6’ is on Apple’s iPad keyboard dock.  The iPad doesn’t use function keys like the Mac/PC so there isn’t a backup ‘function’ like on keyboards we’re used to.  The easiest/simplest/most likely idea is that it is just there for aesthetic reasons, like the dummy screw on earlier MacBooks.

Image lifted from..

But it seems a little silly, even for Apple, to build a key with absolutely no purpose.  From a technology perspective they’ve likely taken the same internals from their aluminum keyboards, meaning it is a live key.

Something interesting to consider: The idea of a dashboard/widgets on the iPad has been brought up on a few occasions.  Might Apple be masking the Widgets function on the iPad by blanking this key for early viewing?

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Image via

So what do you think that key will do?  Will it be unveiled sometime later?  Will it be mappable to an app of your choice?  Comments appreciated (the home button is on the top left btw).

http://www.cnet.com/av/video/flv/universalPlayer/universalSmall.swf

We have compiled a bunch of new iPad tidbits with screenshots for your viewing pleasure below:

Lots of settings pop up if you know where to look:

YouTube Videos can play in HTML5 (this looks really good btw, not sure if a dedicated Youtube App is necessary):

Optional Battery Percentage Indicator: 

File Sharing (will this find its way to iPhone OS 4?):

Lock screen media controls:

Photo frame access from lock screen:

Playing Quicktime audio in Safari: 

Built-in Google Suggestions:

Handwriting for Chinese character input:

Square Home Screen Web Clip icons:

Did we miss anything?

Thank You @sonny788 for your help. 

If you went to ME.com on the iPad yesterday, you’d see this:

Today, Apple has made some changes

Mike Rose posts this interesting change in the iPhone developer agreement:

3.3.17 Your Application may include promotional sweepstake or contest functionality provided that You are the sole sponsor of the promotion and that You and Your Application comply with any applicable laws.

Apple is certainly going to frown on straight casino gambling apps but there is a whole lot of gray area in there between roulette and sweepstakes and contests which could be exploited by developers who perhaps want to make apps with cash/prize rewards.  

For instance, how about an ad supported sweepstakes app?  Or a bingo app?  Or a March Madness app with winner getting the proceeds?  It’s all for charity!

Since laws in the US are on a state by state basis, it would be hard to allow/disallow download of the application by jurisdiction as Apple states.  Currently, Apps are parsed by country and there doesn’t seem to be a mechanism coming to change that.

Perhaps developers could rely on the iPhone’s Internet connection location to determine if they are eligible for certain contests.

It will be interesting to see how this develops.

 

One of the seemingly perfect applications for the iPad is as an Internet TV.  Apple is down with this, but they’d like you to buy those TV shows from iTunes, albeit at half the $2/show rate they are currently charging.  But just about everyone else in the US is enjoying their TV for free from Hulu with *gasp* advertising thrown in at regular intervals.  These “commercials”, as we’ll call them, seem to have made Hulu a success while at the same time, funding the people who make the TV shows to continue making great shows.  Where did they come up with this model?!

So, it is with great wonder that we read that Hulu wants to go to a pay-per-view model on the iPad.  Not only because the built-in, Apple iTunes is already sitting there waiting with a pay-per-view model that would kill it before it was even born, but also because Hulu makes money as a commercial-based service on computers. Now.  Why mess with a good thing?

If Hulu wanted to, they could have an HTML 5 version of their site, ready to go on the iPad on day one.  There are no shortage of smart people working there and they’ve built a great site.

You browse the video selection in Safari and play the videos (with commercials) in Quicktime using the same H.264 codec videos that the current site wraps in Flash.  They would sell a boatload of commercials and have an instant success to the iPad audience plus the 50 million or so iPod and iPhone users who’d also have access to the site.

Or, they could also submit an app to the App Store for more interactive functionality, if Apple’d let them.

It is literally a no-brainer.

But instead, if you want to watch the Daily Show on your iPad you’ll have to pay $2 (maybe $1 if Apple gets its way) to watch it or head to the torrent sites and jump through a bunch of hoops and skip any commercials.

Clearly, the networks haven’t a clue.

What can we say about this?  Apple doesn’t seem to want to build in 3G to their laptops and AT&T won’t allow tethering on the iPhone or iPad (without some ‘modifications’).  So what’s a Mac user to do when they want Internet access on the road?

There are a few options out there, but I’ve been using a Verizon Mifi card for the last six months and think that this might be the way to go for Internet connectivity for all devices.  In fact, I think it was the most important new product introduced last year…David Pogue from the New York Times humbly agrees with me.

How it works: Basically it takes a 3G signal (in my case, a very reliable Verizon one but Sprint has a veeery interesting 4G Mifi-type device) and routes that into a Wifi access point that allows up to five connections.  The whole aparatus is the size of about 25 playing cards and lasts for about four hours continuously connected and about a day on standby (you can buy huge batteries or USB power adapters to make this almost infinite).  The cost is $40/month for 250MB of data or $60/month for 5GB (the device is free with a plan) –About $20 more/month than the iPad’s AT&T plans.

But, I’ll be able to connect my MacBook Pro and iPhone (for AT&T#FAIL) as well as my Wife’s/friends’/colleagues’ devices and only have to pay the carrier one time, where AT&T wants you to pay a seperate ‘unlimited’ fee for every device you use.

Now, Apple has introduced the iPad, and with it a seemingly-reasonable $15-$30 month AT&T plan.  But if you are already paying for 3G access on your MacBook and your iPhone, why would you want to pay for yet another wireless plan?

If you have a laptop and an iPad and want them both to use 3G, it is cost effective to get an Mifi…and it just got a bit better.

Novatel, who make the Wifi, have a new version coming out in a few months with GPS built-in.  This brings a few solutions to a few problems.  The iPad Wifi-only also doesn’t have a GPS unit built-in so this would make a great companion product for that, basically giving it all of the features of the iPad 3G — if Apple let’s the iPad interface with the Novatel GPS.

Additionally, I see this as a boon for camera enthusiasts who like tagging their photos with GPS coordinates and seeing them in iLife.  Camera manufacturers have been slow to adapt to GPS tagging but many have found the solution in the Eye-Fi SD card product.  This, along with automatically uploading pictures to many online services, tags photos with sometimes accurate GPS coordinates based on Wifi locations it detects when the shots are taken.  EyeFi is working with Novatel to allow the two products to work in concert to give accurate GPS tags and instant uploading of pictures (and video).  A very cool concept –especially for those who want to geotag professional shots on cameras with SD Cards like the Canon Rebel Ti1.

The Verizon Mifi also works with VoIP products like Skype and Google’s upcoming Google Voice with Gizmo5 integration, so technically I can finally dump my all-but-useless AT&T voice plan and go VoIP all over on a network with higher reliability.

So, before you plunk down for that 3G iPad, you might want to consider going Mifi instead (and getting your iPad a month earlier).

 

 

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5wSgWFh2ug&w=700&h=400]

Today we’ve got something interesting for you security-minded folks with iPhones or iPod touches.  You know how Apple only lets you use four numbers as your passcode to unlock your device?  That’s as weak as banks PINs and school lockers.  Everyone knows you need at least six characters and alpha-numeric at that.

We have your answer.  We’ve built a profile from Apple’s corporate developement kit that allows alphanumeric passcodes.  All you have to do is open this link (On your iDevice only!) and you will be prompted to pick a new passcode. You will be required to make a passcode with a mix of letters and numbers and you cannot put numbers in a consecutive order. For example you cannot choose “max1234” you would have to do something such as “max2746.” If you ever want to remove this feature simply go to Settings/General/Profiles/9to5mac/ then click remove and confirm.  Then change your code back to something numeric.

We aren’t responsible for you forgetting your passcode and locking yourself out of your iPhone.  Or anything else.  Use at your own risk.

If you want to know how to do this yourself, iClarified coincidentally has a good tutorial this morning.

 

Apple today announced the addition of 13 new App Stores to the world according to a note posted in the Apple iPhone Developer announcements.  If you are in Armenia, Botswana, Bulgaria, Jordan, Kenya, Macedonia, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritius, Niger, Senegal, Tunisia, or Uganda you are in luck.

iPhone OS developers are encouraged to update their App selling preferences in iTunes Connect so their apps could be sold there. If your apps already have the “sell in new territories” option checked, you are ready to rumble in those new countries.

Google Voice is a pretty incredible service, but not everyone understands what exactly it does (hint: it isn’t VoIP – yet!). Google is hoping to remedy that with a fantastic series of videos which I’ve painstakingly pasted below for you to view.

Although, Android phones allow full use of Google Voice services, even people with iPhones through AT&T can take advantage of Google’s Voicemail services. And Google Voice has a nice iPhone Web App.

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Though he has never come out against it publicly, Steve Jobs seems to be championing a move away from Adobe’s Flash technology, the latest action being revealed by Gawker today.  According to their sources, Jobs told the Wall Street Journal executives meeting on the third floor of the News Corp building:

Jobs was brazen in his dismissal of Flash, people familiar with the meeting tell us. He repeated what he said at an Apple Town Hall recently, that Flash crashes Macs and is buggy. But he also called Flash a “CPU hog,” a source of “security holes” and, in perhaps the most grievous insult an famous innovator can utter, a dying technology. Jobs said of Flash, “We don’t spend a lot of energy on old technology.” He then compared Flash to other obsolete systems Apple got people to ditch….

… like the floppy drive, famously absent in iMac,
…. old data ports, including even Apple’s own FireWire 400, gone from iPods and now all Macbooks,
….LCD screens, now entirely replaced in Apple’s lineup by LEDs (except for 30-inch Cinema Displays),
…and even the CD, with Jobs apparently crediting Apple’s iPod, iTunes Store, CD-ripping software and “Rip, Mix, Burn” campaign with doing in the old music medium (sort of: though CD sales are in free fall, around 300 million were sold last year in the U.S. alone, 80 percent of all albums).

Jobs even claimed the iPad’s battery performance would be degraded from 10 hours to 1.5 hours if it had to spend its CPU cycles decoding Flash, we’re told.

Jobs supposedly told an Apple Town Hall meeting that Adobe was lazy and Flash was an inferior product last month.  Apple has also kept Adobe’s Flash technology out of any of its iPhoneOS software.

Image via TiPb.com

It is happening slowly but it isn’t hard to see where this is going.  Apple bought Lala to help it stream music from the Web but they are also putting iTunes App, Music, Movie, etc. Stores on the web as well.   

Over the past few months, those links you click to go to the iTunes Store have opened up web pages as well.  Today, the iPhone App Store is now a category on the iTunes “Preview” page which allows you to browse through all of the different categories of apps before you buy.

Everything but the final purchase of an item can now be done on the Web.  You can even preview music on the right in the Webpage before you buy.  The next step would be for Apple to make the sale on a web page and then communicate that via the cloud to your iPhone/iPod/iTunes/iPad.  The question is: Will Apple go this next step, and if so, when?  

 

This one sort of slipped through the cracks on us, but AT&T and Apple have doubled the size of the “over the air” app downloads to 20MB.  The update came sometime earlier this week.  Is this a good move?  Perhaps AT&T is getting cocky with all of that extra bandwidth they have laying around.

Update: We’re hearing that the limit was raised in Germany and Canada as well, so we’re going out on a limb and saying it is global. We are also seeing that Apple has raised the 12MB download limit in the iPhone’s iTunes app to 20MB as well. 

 

Glow is a free iPhone app that allows you to find out how people around you or in a specific geographic location are feeling. Imagine you are at a concert and you want to know the mood of the audience right this instant. You open up Glow on your iPhone and submit your feeling. Five stars for “awesome” and one star for, well…”not so awesome”. Each of these stars represents a color. One star is red and five stars is blue and everything in between is the combination of these two colors. Once you submit your feeling, Glow takes you to the Map View and shows you the general sentiment for a given location based on these colors and the mixing of them.

The point is being able to share emotion with the cloud; to quantify happiness. Glow’s purpose is to show you right now how people are feeling around the world. With your participation through sharing your feeling/color with the people around you, you add to this evolving painting of the world. Imagine witnessing a wave of blue over Vancouver as the US wins the gold medal. That is what Glow is about; quantifying happiness in a visual way.

Glow provides multiple ways to view these feelings. For example, the Street View uses augmented reality to look at the feelings around you. Looking through the iPhone camera, you are given a view into the the real world, with an additional head’s up display showing nearby feelings as you move with your phone.

Glow integrates with popular social networks including Facebook and Twitter, allowing you to share your feelings with your friends and contacts. When you send your feeling to Glow, it will be shared as a status update, including a link that your friends can click to be taken to a custom webpage, showing them where you are and how you are feeling.
   
All in all, Glow is about bring emotions into the “cloud” and sharing. The more users that Glow has the more useful it becomes. Being able to see in real-time how people are feeling is what gets us excited. Hopefully it will get all of you out there excited too.

One of the bigger stories this week out of the MWC is Opera Mini for the iPhone.  Opera Mini isn’t a normal web browser, however. When you click a link, Opera Mini sends the request to one of Opera’s servers which renders the page and sends back a much smaller file that represents that page – usually just a image file with mapped links

For those who haven’t had a chance to play with the iPad Safari simulator (or the real thing) here’s a quick 6-minute run-through of the iPad’s browser features: http://embed.break.com/MTc0MjI0OQ==
iPad Safari Walkthrough 

   

Wired today offers an update on their tablet work from their earlier concepts.  While they say that they are designing for the iPad and iPhone, they’ve created this product on Adobe Air from the same Adobe InDesign files they use to create their award-winning magazine.   If it isn’t obvious by now, Apple isn’t going to allow Adobe Air or Flash on the iPad.  They say:

Although the Wired Reader starts as an AIR app, Adobe has created tools that allow us to easily convert it for major tablet and mobile platforms. In Barcelona this week, Adobe announced that AIR would run on Android, and Adobe has already announced its Packager for iPhone tool that will allow Flash apps (including AIR) to run on Apple mobile platforms. And AIR already runs natively on Mac, Windows and Linux operating systems.

So is Adobe offering some magical Adobe Air to iPad conversion tool?  It isn’t out of the realm of possibility, since they’ve got a Flash CS5-> iPhone app exporter already in production.

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9/56328629001?isVid=1&isUI=1&publisherID=1564549380

First of all, I must say I like the design of the new Windows Phone 7 series OS (but what a horrible name!) It is very ZuneHD-like which in my experience has been quick, minimalist OS. Microsoft boasts of Facebook and Twitter integration right into your “People” contacts list.

It integrates your photo albums into Facebook and Windows Live. gives you a feed of your friends’ status updates. Don’t forget Xbox Live.

This is every CIOs dream phone!

Time to ramp up the help desk to deal with those Facebook/Twitter calls and get them trained up on Xbox issues.

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I’ve got absolutely nothing solid to go with here, but doesn’t it seem strange that Skype has been promising 3G/Push notifications for months on the iPhone yet they announce an “always-on app” for Blackberry and Android on Verizon first?

I’ll let Skype do the talking: 

Russ Shaw, General Manager of Skype’s mobile business in December 2009:

Many of you have also been asking when we’ll release a version which allows you to make calls over 3G – the holy grail of Skype on the mobile, if you like. We’ve had a 3G-capable version ready for some time now, but Apple’s current restrictions mean that they won’t allow us to make it available on the App Store for the moment.

Apple, of course, lifted this restriction last month when vendors such as Fring released 3G versions of the Skype client.  AT&T lifted any restrictions on VoIP apps last year.  

Nothing from Skype.

Push Notification requests flood our comments and those of Skype every time they make an iPhone announcement.  They clearly know this is the first (and often only) feature request people have yet they’ve failed to address this at every update.

Let’s not pretend Skype is a mom and pop shop and need some help figuring out this Push notification thing either.  Skype has over half a Billion user accounts.  That’s almost two accounts for every man, woman and child in the US.  They had revenues of $185 million in the last quarter on 27.7 billion Skype-In minutes and 3.1 billion Skype-Out minutes. 

Skype is the world’s largest international voice carrier, bigger than Vodafone, AT&T, Verizon or anyone else.  They have versions of Skype for just about every platform imaginable: Symbian, Maemo, Linux, Windows, Mac, WinMob, Blackberry, Java phones of all shapes and sizes, etc.

Skype for iPhone was a smash hit.  They had a million downloads in two days.  It is one of the most popular apps on the iPhone.

So after all of that let me get this straight: Skype hasn’t been able to get 3G and Push Notifications working on the iPhone why?  The only reason besides complete ineptitude that would possibly make sense is that they threw that into the Verizon deal.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd9hNq4ZIqU&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

Even at $9.99/month the iPad edition of the New York Times isn’t necessarily going to clean up -mostly because the free website will have almost all of the same content and will still look great on the iPad.  But imagine trying to sell people on the idea of a $30/month version of the Times – the same cost as the paper edition.

According to Gawker, that is a very real possibility.  If the paper group at the Times gets their way, you’ll have to pay around $1/day to access the Times on the iPad.  It isn’t an insane price but it is a lot when compared to online editions of the Wall St. Journal for instance.  The rationale for the paper people is that the iPad edition will be cannibalizing sales of the print edition — so the cost should be a break even. 

But, it will also be killing printing costs and delivery costs.  And it is a joke to think it will do well at $30/month.

But at $10 or under and a product that gets content better/quicker than the free web version, I could see a strong following and am personally considering making the plunge when it becomes available. 

Let’s hope smarter heads at the Times prevail

Apple today notified developers that its iPhone (iPad/iPod) Developer guide (PDF) had been updated to 5.3.  

Some of the updates you