iOS Devices

We generally try to avoid Apple’s patent applications.  They have little to do with what end up as final products and they are about as exciting as Apple’s lawsuits.  That isn’t to say there aren’t some interesting ones.

This one certainly falls into this category.  Apple’s recent application for biometric security on iPhones had the following image (Via Engadget):

Yep, that’s a jailbroken iPhone with the Installer.app and the SMBPrefs jailbroken app drawn by the patent artist.  Hilarious! Apple’s lawyers Kramer, Levin Naftalis & Frankel have broken the law – in accordance with Apple’s interpretation of the DMCA as it relates to Jailbreaking – and could be sued by themselves on behalf of Apple.

So this isn’t going to come as a big surprise, but "Lauren" (if that is her real name) didn’t really go into the Apple store…or Crispin Porter had a bunch of extras walking around during the filming. 

How do we know?  Notice at 0:13 when she walks into the store, there is a balding guy with jacket and striped shirt and camera walking by.  He is still walking by when she leaves the store filmed on the other camera.  That gave her less than a second in the store.  She said she walked in and looked around but how could this be?. 

We also know she is an actress so the rest isn’t a stretch.  What LA actress wants a hulking, cheap  17 inch HP Notebook over a small white MacBook?!

Not that you believed it before, right? 

Thanks to Fanboy for the find.

See stills below.

1. AT&T is selling refurbs for $99 (again) with activation and plan

2. O2 is giving away free iPhones with their low cost plans (not their expensive plans)

3. AT&T and Apple are now selling iPhones without contract (or second line) knowing that more will go Jailbroken this way.  (If you have $600-$700 to spend)

4. France is now selling them unlocked at department stores.

5. China Unicom might get offloaded a few million on May 17th, ahead of new model.

6. AT&T executives have the new models for testing and are so excited they can’t keep their mouths shut.

7. UK retailers are selling unlocked 3G iPhones.

8. WWDC, the traditional launching pad for new iPhones was announced yesterday.  It will be June 8-12th.

9. Remember all of those extra iPhone part numbers found in the 3.0 build?  Yeah, those can’t all be Tablets.

10. Steve Jobs is coming back at the end of June.  You don’t think he will be empty handed do you?

From the Toys section:

We have the TomTom One XLS Widescreen GPS with Text to speech for $129.99  (Discount is taken at checkout.).  That is 62% off of list.

All it takes now is a easy and painless approval process by Apple’s App Store people and we’ll all be enjoying our home cable wherever we are*.

*easy and painless is sarcasm, wherever we go means wherever there is Wifi as AT&T won’t allow video traffic over 3G.

Nothing terribly significant except bugfixes.

Apple looks to have fixed the overheating NVIDIA GPU issue in 17- inch unibody MacBook Pros today with a firmware update.

There is still no fix for the screen issues plaguing 30-inch external monitors using the Mini DisplayPort on all Unibody MacBooks after the problem emerged last year.

The China Unicom story continues to unfold.  According to iPhonAsia (Via Apple2.0), China Unicom is promoting the following services along with the new iPhone:

• Wave-to-pay (Visa offers similar service in the United States, called Paywave, whereby cardholders can make purchases  by waving their Visa card in front of special point-of-sale cardreaders. In Japan, half of cell phone owners — about 50 million users — carry phones that have so-called near field communications capability built-in. )
• Mobile TV (CCTV has been heavily promoting this in China)
• Tethering (connecting a laptop to a cell phone’s wireless network)
• Video conferencing (start up the front facing camera rumors again?)

Check the screenshot below for details.

According to China Unicom’s website (translated by Google/iPhoneAsia)..

“Near-Field-Communication (NFC) swipe card handset a.k.a. “wave-to-pay,” offers convenience for those who use public transportation. It’s possible to use a handset swipe card to buy a ticket. This wave-to-pay has replaced the former public transportation IC card. Using the swipe card handset for shopping eliminates the needs to carrying cash. Using wave-to-pay also makes it easy to pay in the ferry terminal. Through the swipe card, the handset (phone) can purchase your passage and avoid the worry of lining up to purchase tickets. Not only does this technology eliminate the need to carry a public transportation IC card, you don’t even need a bankcard. All you need is the wave-to-pay handset (phone), to buy a ticket and do your shopping. One machine in the hand, opens access, and gives you control. Wave-to-pay makes life more convenient.”

Thanks Andre!

Yesterday was no fluke. China Unicom, with its 150 million subscribers (much more than AT&T), has confirmed that it will be selling the Apple iPhone beginning on May 17th, 2009 to China’s 1.3+ billion potential customers. 

With a likely iPhone 3.0 coming out this summer and 3G roll outs just being tested in 55 Chinese cities, it isn’t clear how many of these devices will get swooped up right away and how many customers will wait (for the models their compatriots are building!).

China Unicom confirmed Wednesday that it would start to sell Apple’s iPhone in China on May 17.

China Unicom will see both chances and challenges if introducing iPhone to China, according to Gui Kai, an analyst from Guosen Securities.

By introducing iPhone, it will attract more clients, expand its market share and improve its business performance in a short term.

However, it might also have to give away large revenue share.

Wan Jinjin, an analyst from UBS Securities, said earlier in a report that China Unicom might have to shoulder a heavy burden, since iPhone is likely to be highly subsidized. Besides, it could limit the business expansion by setting a threshold of average revenue per user (ARPU) for its iPhone users.

According to Yi Difei, a China Unicom official in charge of news release, the company will start trial operation of commercial 3G business in 55 cities across the country on the same day. The concrete time for official operation depends on results of the trial operation.

Users need not to worry about shortage of terminals, since there are plenty of WCDMA phones on the market at present.

An insider from China Unicom said that all the WCDMA phones sold in China have been tested before and are qualified to be used for 3G services.

Dan Moren at Macworld reports on an interesting development in the Jailbreaking wars. Installer.app now has a desktop application that lets you install those nasty jailbroken apps directly from the desktop…without ‘jailbreaking’ your precious iPhone.  The application looks like iTunes and works almost as easily.  If we weren’t rocking the 3.0 firmware, we’d be testing this right now.  Anyone out there want to be the guinea pigs?

Update: a few brave souls in the comments have tried.  If you are using a Unibody MacBook, you’ll need a USB hub.  Overall, it looks like it isn’t really  working that well yet.  Reccomendation: wait and see.

Yeah, Apple doesn’t make it and they most likely won’t make anything like it.  But, this is cool…if not useful.

via

They don’t get any better than this!  It looks like the biggest mobile market in the world will be served the iPhone by China Unicom – unless there is something very shady going on.  China Unicom’s site today has the iPhone as one of the phone options available to its customers.  There is also a Flash animation on the top with the iPhone which seems to indicate that this isn’t just some random mistake or hacking (or if it is, it is a pretty well thought out one).

The only other explanation we can think of is that China Unicom is just advertising which products are compatible with its new 3G service? 

See translation below.

It looks like they are also carrying the G1 Android phone.  Hope Stevo doesn’t drop the hammer on them for their premature announcement.  En Anglais:

 Note that it supports WCDMA (don’t get your hopes up Verizon customers, not CDMA) and will be released in July of last year.(!!)

via Networkworld

More Ballmer bashing ahead.  Sorry.

Look, we don’t run the biggest software company in the world and we (thankfully) don’t own any stock either but it is hard to ignore the bad headlines that Steve Ballmer keeps making.  Today’s?  Regarding the Zune:

“We’re going to keep going with Zune. It’s two things: Service and a device. The Zune service, that’s going to fan out its footprint. Hardware will continue to improve. “The question is whether even if we flog them heavily, is their profit upside. We’re going to keep going I won’t say full steam ahead, because that implies acceleration of investment, but we’re going to sustain our investment. We like it and the future may be the software/ecosystem on other devices."

Jeez..if you are one of the few people in the market for a Zune, you sure have to now give pause.  As Ballmer puts it, it isn’t "full steam ahead", which means it is essentially dead and they are hedging their bets on it as a software only model, probably for Windows Mobile or Sidekick.  Can you imagine someone at Apple saying something like that about, say, the Bluetooth headset?

Image via Gizmodo

This one slipped by last week and not too much you didn’t know before, but some good hands on information about the new iPod Shuffle. If you are thinking about picking up one of these little guys, this might sway you one way or the other.

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/452319854

We’ve been using VUZE and its former brand Azureus since we first started Bittorrenting Linux ISOs and other totally legal stuff years ago.  While a bit bloated, VUZE/Azureus has always been the most feature-packed, cross platform Bittorrent client available.  When they changed their brand to VUZE, they added a HD video distribution network which had some good content, some not so good.  Now, in version 4.2, they’ve added client side video transcoding to all of your favorite devices. 

Along with iPods, iPhones and AppleTV’s, VUZE now supports Playstation and XBox MP4 formatted movies.

It is a relatively easy process to set up but slow to finish unless you have a some serious MP4 horsepower.  The good news is that the process is all automated so you won’t have to be there when your totally legal stuff is moved to AppleTV/iPod/iPhone compatible formats.

The Boy Genius, who seems to have friends at every Telco, has apparently gleened the following information from AT&T in regards to a certain next generation iPhone:

We can’t tell you where or who, but pretty high up in AT&T’s food chain, the following was reported to be said:

• New iPhone announcement around mid-June (duh)
• New iPhone will be faster and have a more seamless experience unmatched by any device (could be just talking about 3.0, but we think it’s also a new iPhone)
• U-Verse iPhone application; will allow control of your home DVR (play, pause, rewind, etc.)
• The annual iPhone launch is “becoming a tradition.”
• Nothing official is being confirmed, but they said that people should prep for an exciting time this summer.
• AT&T is said to be working with Apple to create a unified product with an unparalleled experience across all their products and services.
• Apple’s 3.0 software should tell us where the iPhone platform is going… uh, k?
• They said customers shouldn’t need to choose from AT&T’s high-end devices because of features, they should choose based on preferences. The gap in capability should be filled with the new iPhone. Ok, bets on slide out QWERTY, autofocus camera, video sharing, blah blah?
• Seems like the higher speed HSDPA (7.2Mbps) is being hinted at too which should confirm the earlier rumors of the new Infineon chipset.
• The $99 3G netbook will start selling this summer, and the first one won’t be a Windows OS.

For clarification, the above is 100% confirmed.

Excited yet?  That last point makes our head spin…

(image via Macrumors)

OK, file this into the "would be nice to have" or "making lemonade out of lemons" but Apple, this weekend, discontinued its mildly popular Bluetooth headset.  Bad news?  Maybe not.

We also know that the new iPhone version 3.0 software includes support for A2DP stereo Bluetooth.  So do current models of iPod touch and iPhone.  What better way for Apple to tout its new functionality than to introduce a "world’s XXXXXest" stereo Bluetooth headset?  June-Julyish?

Until now, if you’ve wanted stereo Bluetooth on your iPhone or iPod you had to buy a third party adapter.  There are also lots of A2DP Stereo Bluetooth heasets available out there now if you want to hedge your bets..

Yeah we know other phones have had A2DP funtionality for awhile…but it will be better this time, right?

Internet Explorer 8 is heading to PCs soon.  Microsoft made a 5 minute "History of the Internet" video to commemorate this "event".  The video isn’t too bad, but it didn’t include the part where Microsoft bought the Spyglass browser fron U. of Illinois and killed off Netscape by abusing its monopoly power.  Strange

From the toys section:

(Update: Deal OVER – Jump on this $75 Toshiba)Today only, Amazon.com offers the Iomega eGo 320GB FireWire / USB 2.0 Portable Hard Drive in Alpine White, model no. 34419, for $79.99 with free shipping ($0.25/GB). That’s tied with a February deal (which also required a rebate) and the lowest total price we could find for this drive in this color. It features Drop Guard, which protects it from falls of up to 51", and both FireWire and USB 2.0 connectivity. 

Or, Step up to the USB-only Toshiba 500GB Portable External Hard Drive for $102, also with free shipping.