Tag Archives: iPhone

Jul 10 2007
Uncategorized

Zibland.com Works in iPhone :D

I took a visit to my local AT&T store today to test out the iPhone, and I’m proud to report that Zibland works almost 100%. The only thing which is broken (which I already knew), is the fancy slider you get if you press the ‘older’ link near the top of the page. This is because dragging your finger on the screen only scrolls, and doesn’t drag, which is how the slider works. I’m working on a fancy thing to figure out if you’re using an iPhone to offer you a more streamlined page (larger text, less fancy stuff, smaller images, etc…) Eventually, eventually.

iPhone review tomorrow! 😀

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Jul 05 2007
Life in general

iPhone activations hit a million?

Apparently, there have been 1 million iPhone activations since the start of sales last Friday. This (of course), would imply 1 million units sold, but doesn’t necessarily mean that. Hmm. Still, impressive figures.

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Jul 02 2007
1 Comment
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iPhone sells half-a-million

Heh. Hit that millionth unit yet, Zune? The iPhone sold 500,000 units in its first weekend. Cool. Yeah, it’ll probably slow down soon enough, but half a million in just over two days says something, I think.

Also the ringtones built into the iPhone suck.

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Jun 29 2007
Life in general

iPhone is out, world still standing

So the iPhone is officially out. People out there have one. People out there have 2, but that’s the most you’re allowed to buy, so yeah. The “first” unboxing video is this:

Cool stuff. Wirelessinfo.com, apparently. Yeah, I’m über-jealous. And I’m on the Cape now, so I don’t even get to see one of these suckers up close until the 9th. Goddamn. I wonder if there’s a Cingular AT&T store around here somewhere…

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Jun 29 2007
Life in general

iDay (Guess which phone comes out today?)

So yeah, in about an hour (here on the East Coast, at least…it’s being released at 6 PM local time) the iPhone will be unleashed upon the masses. Reports of what the lines are like are somewhat disappointing, the longest being The Cube in New York at about 200 people (The Cube is the 5th Ave. Apple store). There’s some buzz about who’s in line in different cities, for instance the Mayor of Philadelphia is waiting in line, fully decked in his rain poncho and a fold-out chair. The Woz is #1 in line wherever he is, and apparently there’s a troupe of circus people with a mini golf rig in line in San Fransisco (No, the prize is not an iPhone).

iTunes 7.3 was released earlier today, adding iPhone support, since it’ll be managed like an iPod…I took the liberty of constructing a paper iPhone which I think does justice to the real thing:
iPhone

No, I’m not buying an iPhone, I can’t pull off $599 at the moment. Plus the data plan, and I’m completely screwed over. Oh well. I did take the liberty of laughing at each Sprint and Verizon store as I walked past them today to check out the line at our AT&T store. There was actually a little 5 person line outside it! 😀 Made me feel so cool.

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Jun 12 2007
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OS X Leopard

So the WWDC (World Wide Developer’s Conference, an annual Apple event) keynote was given yesterday by Steve Jobs. Frankly, it was kinda boring. No hardware updates for anything, no new features for the iPhone (save for the addition of custom apps, more on that later), but a lot of updates on Leopard, Apple’s next revision of OS X.

There were 10 Leopard features either announced or elaborated on at WWDC:

  • A new Desktop – with the addition of Stacks, pseudo-folders on the Dock, a new semi-transparent menu bar, and a reflective, 3D dock
  • A new Finder – with a new Sidebar and the ability to browse your other macs over the internet, plus coverflow! 😀
  • Quicklook – a pseudo-app built into Finder which lets you quickly view documents without loading any other apps, great idea since I hate Preview…
  • Complete 64-bit support – a bit more technical than the others, OS X is now completely equipped to run on 64-bit processors. Just like most applications these days are “Universal,” meaning they run on Intel or PowerPC, the same will be true with 64-bit and 32-bit apps. Everything will work on either a 32-bit (like a G3, G4, or Intel Core Duo), or 64 bit (like a G5, Intel Core 2 Duo, or Xeon) processor just fine.
  • Core Animation – again, kinda techy, but in essence this means that any app can have really shiny animation effects without lag, without much effort from the guy making the app. There’s a really impressive demo of this in the Keynote, with that apple tv intro movie, but interactive. Thousands of videos, all playing at once and moving around really fluidly, with no lag.
  • Boot Camp – Boot Camp is faster, and now it’s built-in, which means no more disc burning to get the drivers. Yay!
  • Spaces – a virtual desktop manager, lets you organize windows into different sectors to keep everything neat and clean. This is one of my most anticipated features.
  • Dashboard – of course, the Safari web widget, over 3000 widgets written, yadda yadda…
  • iChat – cool stuff here. Better audio quality for voice chat (this is mostly improvements for the video aspect of iChat), the addition of backdrops, some cool Photobooth-esque effects, and Theater, which lets you stream video files, documents, etc. over iChat.
  • Time Machine – old hat, automatically backup stuff, instantly restore it, slick interface, uses Quicklook, all that good stuff. Another of my most anticipated features.

So yeah, that’s Leopard. Some time in October release date, I’ll be buying it. 🙂 For more info and deets, check out Apple’s page on the matter. Speaking of Apple’s website, there was a complete and total redesign of the site to finally bring it out of the Panther-era tabs it had at the top. It’s very slick now…but it’s hard to find the movie trailers page, and the newest trailers section has disappeared…Too bad…

Anyway there were two other announcements. One was Safari for Windows, which from what I’ve heard, sucks. It’s got too much smoothing or something, and apparently there are already 8 serious security flaws in it. Of course, it is in beta (the beta is available for Mac as well, it is crazy-fast…), so some amount of issues are to be expected, but really, 8 holes? That’s pretty rough.

The last announcement was the inclusion of AJAX and Web 2.0 support on the iPhone, meaning that developers can write their own webapps for the iPhone and basically have custom programs like that. However, this isn’t realizing the iPhone’s full potential as a portable Unix machine (it has all of the pieces required to make OS X: Unix, cocoa, darwin, core image, all that good stuff). This means that only Apple will be able to make real apps for the iPhone, which I don’t really have a problem with, but there could be so much more. Oh well, maybe they’ll change their mind.

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Jan 17 2007
Life in general

iPhone Followup

Well, it’s been a while since I posted anything. Last time I talked about the iPhone, and how awesome it is. Well, now I’m going to do a (sadly) negative post about the same phone. It has to be done.

So, the downsides of the iPhone. First of all, the keyboard. All the people (very few, but still some people) who used the iPhone said that the on-screen keyboard was tricky to use, and a bit unresponsive. I think Apple would have been better off putting a slide-out keyboard on it, because despite the fact that you cannot change the functions of hardware-based buttons, you can pretty much assume things that need a keyboard will be ok using that keyboard.

Next, the screen. That thing’s going to get scratched.

The back. It’s part white, part black, all wierd-looking.

The camera: 2 megapixels. This isn’t horrible, but it’s not very good for a smartphone camera.

And of course, the price. $499 or $599 for the phone, but if you add on the voice and data plans you’ve spent over $1000 in the first year. While this is average for a smartphone, and this phone is (despite its faults above) much better than an average smartphone, it’s still extremely pricey.

Oh well, I wasn’t planning on getting one anyway.

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Jan 09 2007
Uncategorized

The iPhone Released

Well, new iPod/gadget from Apple Inc. (no longer Apple Computer Inc.) is here (or actually, it’s been announced. It’ll be here in June), and it’s called the iPhone. The name is a bit deceiving, since it’s really a lot more than just a phone, it even tops most of the smartphones out there (think Blackberry, Treo, etc.).

So, the features. It is a phone, yes. It lets you make calls at the touch of a button (a virtual button, the thing is like one giant touchscreen), and access your “visual voicemail”- a list of the missed calls with voicemail messages attached. That way you don’t have to listen to all the previous saved messages to get the one you want, just scroll until you find it. It also lets you access your e-mail (via any IMAP or POP3 e-mail service), send SMS text messages, and all that jazz that phones do. It also has a 2 megapixel (better than the built-in iSight and most other webcams, also currently the highest megapixel count in a cameraphone) camera in the back.

Aside from the standard phone features, the iPhone acts as a full-screen iPod as well. It allows you to scroll through the menus of artists, albums, songs, etc. by “flicking” the screen up, as if you were dragging it. One tap, and the song starts playing, with standard iPod UI. It shows the album art, as well as all the other album art you have, and lets you flip through the art like in iTunes 7. If you turn it on its side, the picture on the screen rotates to landscape view. Video? It does that. It shows video in landscape mode by default, on its 3.5″ 340×480 screen.

The iPhone does internet, too. It comes with both WiFi and EDGE (so you can connect to the internet anywhere you get phone coverage, basically), as well as Bluetooth compatibility for the new wireless headphones (mad ugly, in my opinion) that come with it. The iPhone has its own version of Safari built into it, and supports syncing of your bookmarks from a Mac or PC.

It comes in both 4gb (at the standard inflated Mac price of $499) and 8gb (again, $599) models, and should be released this June.

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