All about anything *but* the iPhone
Evidence of absence is not absence of evidence. Despite Apple’s non-attendance at last week’s Mobile World Congress, the event made clear that the introduction of the iPhone has had a wide-ranging effect on the industry. There’s no way that I’d say that the iPhone “dominated MWC09“, but the difference this year is that there seem to be some considered responses. Thinking 5 years from now, will Apple be considered a company that kick-started a new wave of smartphones and user experience, but ultimately got left behind?
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Changing the colour/color* on your iPhone calendars
Here’s some instructions on how to change the colours within iPhone’s calendars.
Since iPhone OS 2.0 was released, I’ve been slightly frustrated that the calendar colours on the iPhone are not the same colours used for the same calendars in iCal. For Windows users, I understand the same problem arises with Outlook calendar colours. Colours on the iPhone seemed to be assigned at random.
It’s only a small thing, but it’s slight mental disconnect. Such inconsistencies detract from the overall experience of a polished device.
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The Cons of the iPod Touch making it big in the world of the Nintendo DS
So my daughter’s best friend got an iPod Touch for Christmas. And she brought it round to our house. Whereupon a light went on in my daughter’s head and she asked to borrow my iPod Touch. Being very tech savvy (hey, it runs in the blood, you know?), she showed her friend how to browse the App Store and grab freebie after freebie.
Move over DS?
They were hours playing around.
Leaving aside the question of whether the iPod Touch (or iPhone – and either way, the iPhone platform) can replace the Nintendo DS as a mainstream kids gaming device, lending my iPod Touch out in this way brought out some interesting observations. On the plus side, the kids loved playing the games, demos and novelties. Loved. With a capital ‘L’. The App Store discovery process itself became a shared experience for them (“Hey, search for YYYY, it’s really cool”, etc.)
However, on the negative side, I have to balance this against a number of cons that rear their ugly head when you try and ‘share’ an iPhone or iPod Touch with another family member…
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.
Apple hardware – Love it. Apple software. Love it. Hate it.
A note of interest to committed readers to All About iPhone: I didn’t actually own a Mac until about four months ago. Not that owning a Mac is a prerequisite to owning an iPhone, but the two do go rather well together.
The thing I wanted to talk about here though was my enormous appreciation of Apple’s hardware. Until one owns a Mac or Macbook or iMac or iPhone, you can’t really understand the apparent fanaticism of Apple fans. Yet, once bought – at roughly twice the price of the equivalent spec PC (in the Mac’s case), the difference is obvious. It was like scales falling from my eyes when I handled my first (loaner) Macbook last spring. And then bought my own Mac Mini. And iPod Touch. Apple’s hardware is (more or less) uniformly excellent. With a capital ‘E’.
Mac Mini
Not that their software is shoddy. Oh no, Mac OS X is quite an achievement. As is iPhone OS ( a cut down OS X) in its own quirky little way. But, during compilation of my last Phones Show, it became apparent that, in my eyes at least, there’s something of a disconnect between the flagship excellence of Apple’s hardware and the flagship-wannabe patchiness of their software. But before branding me as a ‘heretic’, read on… (more…)
OK, I’m full. Now what? Here’s a suggestion…
I started out well with the AppStore, neatly organising my third party applications into categories: games, utilities, reference, music, and so on. No sweat, I thought. A slight problem when I wanted to get from home screen number 1 to home screen number 9, but at least there’s that handy shortcut (press ‘Home’ again) to get back to screen 1 since the last firmware update (2.2).
Then each category started to fill to overflowing. Meaning that applications spilled out onto the next home screen, polluting it. A month later, I’d reached the point where I’d lost control completely, with the first four applications screens now chock full and no blank ‘slots’ in sight for new apps.
Another month on and all the one hundred and forty-odd app slots are full. And only another 14,950 applications left on the App Store to install. Err……
Read on for an (illustrated!) solution to the problem.
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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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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MMS native app storms the App Store
I’ve been meaning to write about the options for picture messaging on the iPhone for a while, but that’s pointless now . A proper native MMS application was released on January 5th, and – unsurprisingly – it’s already the third most downloaded free app on the UK App Store.
I wrote in August that MMS sending was coming to your O2 iPhone. Ross McKillop wrote a web app (iPhoneMMS.net) that interfaced with O2; originally this just allowed viewing of messages, but was later expanded to include sending. He has now teamed up with Ed Lea, who wrote the highly-regarded TV Plus, to create a native version of the web app. And it’s superb.
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2009 – The Year Of Touchscreen
If the iPhone came of age in 2008, then’s what’s in store for 2009?
In line with releases so far, the successor to the iPhone 3G is likely to be available in the middle of the year. I see more storage on the horizon, with probably a better camera (maybe with a flash), possibly 802.11n wireless. But I’m not going to try and predict any more beyond that. People can judge for themselves whether the hardware specifications of the new iPhone match their personal expectations and requirements, as compared to other devices available on the market.
The real change for the iPhone is that touchscreen phones will go large in 2009. Apple’s flagship device is increasingly going to be one of many shiny touchscreen devices on offer to the mobile customer.
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