Trapped in Time

toddwickersty:

I love how my iPhone knows mattsimpson

Because there are multiple Matts in The Butter Room (and pretty much everywhere else), within the group my name is always written as a single word. Even Todd’s iPhone knows as much.

Modified Titanium iPhone 3GS Casing (view the full video on Engadget)

This looks very sexy and is undoubtedly a better case than the plastic backing or even the original iPhone’s aluminum backing. Check the video out.  The guy proves it actually gets full 3G reception and makes calls without issue. Pretty impressive.

Since Apple’s Newton project closed, many have wondered if and when Apple would return to the PDA/Tablet market. In many ways, the company already has. The iPhone does much more than the few Newton products - that actually made it to market - ever did. And yet, since the iPhone’s release, especially over the past twelve months, speculation has run rampant that Apple has been working on a tablet. On Wednesday the company will almost undoubtedly unveil the new product at a media event at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

I’ve been particularly interested in such a device and followed the speculation closely for a number of reasons:

1. The idea of a thin, powerful touch screen computer that can perform a variety of tasks is quite appealing, especially in light of the plethora of existing tablet devices that have come and gone over the past decade while doing little more than raising hope of what might be possible one day.
2. Since the introduction of the iPod, Apple has been ahead of the curve in numerous areas of technology and media: the iTunes music store (and iTunes itself), thin profile gadgets (MacBook Air, the unibody manufacturing process, the iPod nano, and iPhone), groundbreaking multitouch technology (iPhone, iPod touch, and magic mouse), and the proliferation of mobile computing through the iPhone, App Store, and MobileMe.
3. When Apple launches a new product such as the iPad/iSlate/tablet, they do so very carefully with the aim of redefining how consumers view an entire market. They won’t be bringing a tablet to market just to have one in the arena; rather they surely plan to create an entirely new arena that only they are currently competing in.

So what should we expect to see on Wednesday?  That still remains a mystery, but through patent filings, rumors that won’t go away, and past offerings, the picture has started to become pretty clear. Here are my general predictions based on the best evidence available:

Design and Hardware

• Unibody construction, with a very similar design to the original iPhone, though proportionately thinner
• WiFi (hopefully 802.11n), GPS, and 3G connectivity, perhaps supporting both GSM and CDMA networks
• Glass LED screen, likely not OLED due to current availability
• Dock connector ala iPod/iPhone on both vertical and horizontal sides of the tablet for easy access
• Front-Facing Camera ala Macbook and iMac (WSJ reports)
• Headphone jack
• No USB Port
• 32 and 64 GB Flash capacities
• 10 hour battery life
• Bluetooth for wireless peripherals

Software and Features

• A hybrid operating system that falls somewhere between the iPhone and OS X
• A suite of new applications for both productivity and entertainment that leverages multitouch for never before seen user interaction.
• Cloud computing that leverages the new North Carolina Data Center opening in March (probably the same time the device is available).
• Access to your home iTunes library wherever you are seems very likely, as well as MobileMe service to store your music on the cloud.
• Television streaming subscription service with both live feeds and weekly network sitcoms and dramas available - likely to include CBS, ABC, BBC, Disney and others
• Interactive eBook and Magazine reader that leverages multiple forms of content (traditional type, audio and video). Steve Jobs has said in the past, “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.” Don’t think he doesn’t want to change that!
• A focus on interactive learning (“Apple In Talks with McGraw-Hill”)
• Flash support in Safari
• Video Conferencing
• Face and movement recognition (patent)
• Multitasking
• Support of iPhone OS 4.0 applications
• Robust multiplayer gaming within various communities - location based and world wide
• Numerous new multitouch gestures

You Should Also Expect

• One screen size, not two or more
• Two models in different capacities (perhaps 4 depending on GSM/CDMA)
• No subsidized data plans. Apple will contend they want this in the most hands possible, but in reality they don’t have anything worked out with AT&T or Verizon
• A price tag of $800-$1,000
• iPhone OS 4.0 announcement which will add in new gestures, multitasking, improvements to the home screen, integration as a secondary device to the tablet

It’s still anyone’s guess what Apple will or will not drop on us all come Wednesday, but one thing’s for certain: this device will impact computers, mobile phones, and major media - print, television, movies, and music - in a very profound and culturally transforming way.

“Domination Visualization” would be my title for this pie chart

Awesome. Bonus points for bluetooth keyboard support.

(via jhersh)

Because the iPhone does not handle disk mode like a traditional iPod, there has been no way to sync music, apps, files, etc… or so I thought, until I did a little research today, and found it’s pretty easy to trick iTunes into thinking you are syncing to the same library (on however many computers with iTunes you want).

Check it out, I’m headed home on the train with some new albums I didn’t have when I got to the office (including Vampire Weekend’s Contra which leaked today).

There’s so many iPhone apps these days I didn’t even know most of these existed. However, after looking them over, there’s a few very useful tools, especially for training puppies.

If you own an iPhone or iPod touch, or just got one for Christmas, you likely received a gift card for the iTunes store. I almost never buy music on iTunes, for a variety of factors, so I would almost always recommend spending your money on apps (especially right now, as many developers are offering end of year discounts).

I have a lot of apps (upward of 100) for my iPhone, so I thought I’d share some that I think are definitely worth buying.

1. AwesomeNote ($3.99)

I’ve always been disappointed with the bland notes application that comes with the iPhone.  There’s no way to organize your notes, no way to customize the look or feel (I hate the default font and paper style), and it doesn’t sync well with your computer.

ToDo and note taking applications are very popular because of the void left by Apple’s default application.  I’ve tried a variety of these type of applications, including Informant and Simple Note, but found AwesomeNote to do the job the best for my needs.  Why?  Well I don’t take and store notes on my iPhone specifically for work. Thus, I don’t need a ToDo app with note taking capabilities. Second, I’d prefer to keep my notes organized in folders so that I can quickly add new notes related to a category (see the screenshot above), which is why Simplenote is well, too simple.

AwesomeNote allows you to create folders, define the color of each folder, an applicable icon, and customize the style of the note - background, font size and color, a variety of easily customizable options depending on the subject matter. You can also choose various views in which notes within a folder display - i.e. thumbnails or list view. Additionally, you can use the app in either orientation - vertically or horizontally - and even lock the orientation if you prefer a particular view. The other great option is importing and exporting your notes to your Google or Evernote account. If you’re a Google Docs user, this makes a whole lot of sense.

For those who do prefer assigning due dates and using notes in a more task-oriented way, you can make your notes into ToDos with due dates and reminders!

2. Convert ($1.99)

Convert provides a very clean, intuitive interface to get a conversion from just about any set of units to another.  Conversion units include area, energy, currency, force, computer, angle, speed, pressure, time, temperature, and typography.  My favorite part of this app is the built-in calculator, which is similar to the default iPhone calculator. Essentially, you can replace one of your existing icons with this one and always have a handy reference at your fingertips!

3. Tweetie 2 ($2.99)

There are dozens of Twitter clients available for the iPhone. Some are free, some are a dollar, some are more. For the price, I can’t think of a more useful app, even for the not-so-interested Twitter user. The search features alone (particularly saved searches) allows you to keep on top of topics of interest to you. Tweetie 2 manages multiple accounts, integrates with various bookmarking and image hosting services, and features one of the nicest interfaces of any iPhone app on the market. For tumblr and Wordpress users, you can now also add your accounts to Tweetie 2 for a single source to find, navigate and share a variety of information.

4. Instapaper Pro ($4.99)

I hate bookmarking sites or articles that I know I won’t be interested in or need a few weeks from now, which is why Instapaper has taken a permanent spot on my bookmark bar. With Instapaper Pro, I can bring some unification to all of my browsing and bookmarking, wherever I’m at. While the free version does a decent job of this, the paid application allows me to better organize my bookmarked articles, which gives me more purpose when I try to navigate through my bookmarks after the fact.

For iPhone users the integration between Instapaper and NewsNetWire (I’ll cover that shortly) as well as Tweetie, make it a no-brainer.

5. CNN Mobile ($1.99)

CNN Mobile has one of the best iPhone interfaces I’ve come across.  You can view stories in various categories in Cover Art mode for easy navigation, access videos and analysis wherever you’re at, and perhaps my favorite feature are push notifications of breaking news. It’s nice to know when something important happens if your attention is currently elsewhere. CNN also has a portion of the app dedicated to your current location with local news and weather that are very up to date.

6. Simplify Music 2 ($7.99)

I’ve detailed this app in a lot of depth, but the bottom line is that if you consider yourself a music connoisseur, or use the term “library”, this app is worth the money (even though they raised the price by $2). I currently have about 60,000 songs from my own computer accessible wherever I’m at, and the social networking aspect of it allows you to have up to 30 friends’ libraries accessible as well. With the right people, you could easily have access to a quarter million songs wherever you’ve got phone or Internet access.

7. NetNewsWire ($4.99)

If you use Google Reader, NetNewsWire for OS X, or FeedDemon for WIndows to manage your RSS feeds, this app is perfect for you. If you’re an Instapaper user, it’s especially useful.  NNW allows you to sync your RSS feeds from your home computer with your iPhone, so you’re always up to date with what you have and haven’t read. Star items or send them to Instapaper for later reading, and organize and view by categories/folders defined by you. Great for picking out what you’ll read later in the day while you’re on your way to work.

8. Things ($9.99)

There are a plethora of task management/productivity applications available for the iPhone, but this one does it just right for me. Its interface is simple and clean, it syncs wirelessly over WiFi on your home network (assuming you use the equally impressive desktop version). Export ToDos straight to iCal, manage by project or client, set reminders for upcoming due dates. This has been one of my favorite apps from day one, even if the price tag does seem a bit hefty.

Free apps you should also consider downloading: Apple Remote, ESPN ScoreCenter, NYTimes, Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr, IMDB, iDisk, Dragon Dictation, DirecTV, Boxee Remote

I hate to sound critical, but after downloading the new Tumblr iPhone app today, I’m rather disappointed. While the saved drafts and iPhone notifications are nice, not much else is even at the level of the previous app. It seems pretty buggy, often crashing when going to post a video, which is the one piece I was looking forward to utilizing the most from the road, especially at shows.

Also, I’m denied access to all of my blogs, including The Butter Room, meaning I can’t even view activity surrounding my content, something you could at least accomplish in 1.0. The only piece that is improved and functioning properly is the dashboard.

Considering this was under review for 3 weeks, it’s a pretty awful update and will hopefully be quickly addressed by a bug fix and server-side permissions to the content you own.

Anyone else have any thoughts after giving it a try?

Edit: turns out my account had not been checked in the settings, even though I could view all of my followers. Oh and the app crashed 6 times before actually letting me edit this post !

marco:

What if Apple entered a massive iPhone partnership with Sprint, possibly by purchasing a significant slice of it?

Sprint has a great U.S. data network and desperately needs hot devices that can bring an influx of new customers. Sprint isn’t worth much and could really use some cash.

Apple has hot devices that deliver tons of new customers to their carriers, but desperately needs a great U.S. data network. Apple is worth a lot and is sitting on an assload of cash.

On the surface this sounds like a great idea, but could never happen.  A phone manufacturer/tech giant owning a significant portion of a company who has relationships with their competitors?  Apple owning a company that Palm’s Pre resides on?  Do they just give everyone else the boot? Anti-trust issues abound in this scenario.

The real issue that needs to be addressed is bigger than any phone manufacturer or telecom company, it’s systemic.  We need an open system in which any device can work relatively well without major contractual obligations or headaches for the customer. This is why Europe is selling so many iPhones and why both Europe and Asia generally scoff at our cell phones and our cellular networks.  Some conformity on standards, openness, and device compatibility would take us all a long way, and force shitty companies like AT&T to focus on voice and data coverage and quality, customer service, and differentiating features.

Simplify Music 2

Simplify Music 2 may be my favorite app for the iPhone. Over the past couple weeks I’ve been using it extensively, pretty much replacing the built-in iPod app on my iPhone in many instances. If you’re not familiar with Simplify Media, it’s basically a very small app that runs in the background, providing access to your iTunes library wherever you are. With the desktop version, you will see another network share when you’re logged into your Simplify Media account from another computer (i.e. at work or a secondary machine), and be able to access it.  This is pretty great, but takes a good amount of time to pick up your library in whole if you have thousands of albums, or 10’s of thousands of songs (over 60,000 songs in my case).  And it used to be that the iPhone app (the original Simplify Music) loaded song by song, album by album as well, making it essentially useless for someone like me, and many someones like me who are probably the core userbase of this app.

Yet this version caches your library periodically, and only updates when the app running on your home machine (i.e. the server) detects you’ve updated your iTunes library. Thus, it becomes very easy to access any song, album, or playlist in your iTunes library from wherever you may have phone service.

If you have less than 20 GB of music, you likely would never need this, but if you have 500+ GB of music, this frees up space on your iPhone or at the very least gives you access to a virtually unlimited amount of music. I found while driving from Chicago to southern Kentucky that the streaming is quite reliable over both 3G and Edge. While it certainly works better over 3G, if the song is only a few minutes long, you’ll have no problems with buffering over Edge. I streamed Led Zeppelin IV end to end over Edge with no buffering on one drive through southern Indiana.

You can also search your library and find what you want, and add albums as favorites. Unfortunately the interface could use a bit of a boost in certain areas.  Adding an album as a favorite simply adds all of those songs to a master list with no organization, and shuffling could be much more intuitive.  For a live music fan, it’s hard to discern one version of a song from another on your favorites list.

Yet for an album listener with thousands to choose from, this may be the most valuable media app on the iTunes store. I know when we’re having a ball out in Palm Springs, our iPhones will be providing the soundtrack to our party from our desktops at home.

One thing I haven’t mentioned is the social networking feature.  You can approve up to 30 Simplify Media users at a time to have access to your library, meaning you can also tap into your friends’ libraries and vice versa if you coordinate.  All said, you could have terabytes of music at your fingertips wherever you’re at!

Ultimately I think Apple will be bringing similar functionality built into their remote app, allowing you to stream your iTunes library to your iPhone.  Perhaps sooner than we think too, with many of the cloud computing features rumored in the upcoming tablet running the iPhone OS on the horizon.  In the mean time, this is the best $6 you can spend if you have a huge collection that you always want access to.

If you’re using iPhone 3.0 or 3.01 and loving the tethering feature, and don’t want to upgrade to 3.1 and lose it, but still want to take advantage of today’s new MMS functionality, you can do so in a few easy steps.

1.  Download the new AT&T carrier file

2.  In order for iTunes to allow you to update the carrier file on your phone, you’ll have to make one change at the command line. Make sure iTunes is closed, and in OS X go to terminal and type in: defaults write com.apple.iTunes carrier-testing -bool TRUE

For Windows (32-bit) – Go to Start > Run and type in command, then hit Enter. Then, at the prompt, type “C:\Program Files\iTunes\iTunes.exe” /setPrefInt carrier-testing 1 and hit Enter.

For Windows (64-bit) – Go to Start > Run and type in command, then hit Enter. Then, at the prompt, type “C:\Program Files(x86)\iTunes\iTunes.exe” /setPrefInt carrier-testing 1 and hit Enter.

3.  Load iTunes and select your iPhone on the left nav bar.  Hold option in OS X, alt in Windows, and click ‘update.’

4.  Select the downloaded AT&T carrier file, and wait about 5 seconds.

5.  Disconnect your iPhone, reboot, and MMS now works!

Having been on the road with Phish for 11 days now, I was very excited when I found out that you can bypass the lockdown on AT&T tethering with the new iPhone 3.0 software. It is a very simple fix to allow 3G tethering. If you have a Mac and you’re interested in setting it up for yourself, and having a solid internet connection just about anywhere, here are the steps:

1. Download the carrier settings file for AT&T, and copy it to your desktop. This file is necessary to trick AT&T into letting you tether for free.
2. Open up terminal and copy the following command in and press enter: “defaults write com.apple.iTunes carrier-testing -bool TRUE” (do not include the quotes). Close terminal after you’ve added this line in.
3. Sync your iPhone with iTunes and wait for it to say, “OK to disconnect.” At this point, hold down the option key on your Mac and click the restore button for your iPhone. You will not actually restore the software, rather the carrier file.
4. The dialogue box will pop up, allowing you to browse to your desktop and select your AT&T carrier file.
5. You’re done, you can now tether via USB and/or Bluetooth.

Update: if you have any issues with visual voicemail working, go to Settings > General > Network > Cellular Data Network and change the voicemail address to acds.voicemail.