The false panic over Crackulous
Yesterday Hackulo.us released Crackulous, which strips the DRM protection from iPhone applications. This allows any application bought from the App Store to run on any other iPhone. Writing about this, The Unofficial Apple Weblog has gone with “Crackulous is released, chaos imminent”. I don’t buy that.
Carnival of the Mobilists 159
You lucky people – not one, but two posts from Steve have made it into the Carnival this week. The second looks at mobile phone photography – and I have to admit it made me wince a bit. The quality of the photos from the Samsung INNOV8 is superb, and is a huge contrast to the 2MP non-flash effort on the iPhone. When the new revision of the iPhone comes out (around June, probably), I really hope that Apple bump the camera quality and software.
Read this week’s Carnival over at Mobile Broadband Blog. It’s not quite as jam-packed as in the past couple of weeks, but there are some excellent articles. My favourite was from James Parton (Head of O2 Litmus), writing on wipJam blog. He has an interesting comment on music and application stores:
Research has shown that over 90% of digital music catalogues are never downloaded. It’s an extreme example of Prato’s law. Are App stores already following the same path?
Read the full post for his surprising conclusion on the most important API of 2009.
Next week, stay tuned to All About iPhone for your Carnival fix!
Mobile gaming – the iPhone effect
There’s an interesting article on The Grauniad’s Games Blog this week. Keith Stuart discusses the buzz around Apple at the Mobile Games Forum, and the iPhone’s impact on games for mobile phones.
With the iPhone, developers have a decent Software Development Kit and solid end-hardware on which to run their code. This makes developing a lot easier, and I think we are seeing a shift away from Java and Flash-based games. As TUAW says, “iPhone is dominating independent gaming“. When developers can easily create and sell games that make US$250k in 6 months, then you are going to attract a lot of developers.
But the main differentiator is the distribution channel, which attracts the users. Or as Keith puts it:
the App Store…is a familiar, enjoyable browsing experience. It doesn’t suck the very soul out of you
100 iPhone Wallpapers
Just a quick one: Smashing Magazine is a great resource for web developers, bloggers, and anyone who likes design. I was emailed yesterday (arigato gozaimasu to Jason) that SM had recently presented 100 really beautiful iphone wallpapers/. There are some really stunning images available.
So check it out if – unlike me – you’re not legally obliged to have a photo of your children as your wallpaper 😉
Carnival of the Mobilists 158
There’s another cracking Carnival this week at VoIP Survivor. Apart from another contribution from Steve, my personal favourite was Jonathan Greene wondering if Palm’s Synergy is a game changer. He observes that:
Sync is just too damn hard and even when it works well across systems you typically end of up data that’s intermingled poorly.
Absolutely. I’ve had some utter balls-ups trying to sync stuff before, not aided by prompts such as “Are you ready to accept changes?”, without any of those changes being identified. And I’ve certainly found it as well with my iPhone. Syncing to iTunes works like a charm, but things got a bit screwy when I allowed iTunes to sync to Gmail as well.
The commenters to Jonathan’s post expand on the difference between sync and aggregated view. Perhaps phones should stop trying to sync, run an embedded web server instead, and interact with them through a browser? Much simpler.
This and other excellent articles are available at: http://blog.radvision.com/voipsurvivor/2009/01/26/the-carnival-is-back-in-town-carnival-of-the-mobilists-158/
Carnival of the Mobilists 157
A thoroughly excellent Carnival is available this week over at mjelly, including Steve’s post on the fullness of his iPhone.
There are two stand-out articles for me:
Dean Bubley thinks that the mobile industry is being insufficiently pessimistic about 2009; and,
Tomi Ahohen has a masterful essay on Nokia phones as incredible convergence devices.
Read the Carnival here: http://blog.mjelly.com/2009/01/carnival-of-the-mobilists-157.html
O2 opens WAP pages to iPhone customers
Tip of the hat to reader Gerry for this one. Previously, I posted that you can retrieve your O2 account balance by sending a blank text to 21202. This sends back a text with your remaining minutes and text until your next billing date. It also sends back a WAP link to your account balance page. This was inaccessible to iPhone users, as Mobile Safari is not WAP-capable.
Now, it appears that O2 have made that link accessible.
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We’re 1 today!
All About iPhone launched a year ago today. Since then we’ve gone from zero to almost 15,000 visitors a month.
This is thanks to the hard work of our contributors – Steve, James and Jim. Many thanks to them. And thanks also to you, our readers. I hope we’ll continue to bring you interesting stuff in the future.
If there are any improvements or changes you’d like see, do drop us a line.
Thanks and best wishes,
Matt
Will jailbreaking survive the next iPhone?
All the signs are pointing towards the jailbreak for the 2nd generation iPod Touch being released very soon. The iPhone Dev Team – responsible for the Pwnage jailbreak – has uploaded a photo to their new website redsn0w.com. It now shows a chipset that one of the commenters on their blog has identified as being from the 2nd gen iPod Touch. This is excellent news. It brings the latest Touch up to par with all other devices running iPhone OS, and it shows that Apple’s chain of trust on the device can be broken.
You may remember that the jailbreak for the original iPhone could be done via the website jailbreakme.com, which took advantage of a flaw in Safari. Recently I was reading a Slashdot discussion on the iPhone 3G unlock. Coupled with the Dev Team’s talk at CCC, this brought home to me how far Apple has moved on in securing the 2nd gen iPod Touch, compared to the original iPod Touch and iPhone. I also wondered how far Apple will go. Could the iPhone 3G and the 2nd gen iPod Touch be the last ones that can be jailbroken?
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App Review: iBonsai
In another facet of my existence, I practice a Japanese martial art called Aikido. The central themes of Aikido are harmony and calmness. So when Tyler Streeter asked me to review his app iBonsai, which grows a virtual bonsai tree on your iPhone, I didn’t rush to write it up, but took my time and serenely composed my thoughts…
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