Here are some of the news stories about the iPhone that caught my attention this week, along with a few other tidbits that might be of interest to you.
Today marks the one year anniversary of the App Store, which opened on July 10, 2008. Happy Birthday! Apple is celebrating by posting a list on iTunes of favorite games and non-game apps. It is amazing how much the iPhone—not to mention the mobile phone industry as a whole—has changed over the last year simply because of the App Store.- Some people don’t like the iPhone because it doesn’t have a physical keyboard. John Gruber writes a great essay on this issue on his Daring Fireball website, explaining that “Apple tries to make things that many people love, not things that all people like.” I agree 100% with what he says.
- Documents to Go by DataViz (my review is here) was updated to version 1.1 on Tuesday. New features include (1) DataViz abandoned its proprietary copy-and-paste system for the iPhone 3.0 system. This means that you can copy from a document in DtG, paste into another app, and vice versa. (2) You can now use pinch to zoom in and out, and the line breaks on the text reformat as you do so, which is nice. (3) You can now view Word documents full screen, either in portrait or landscape mode, another very nice feature. It’s a nice update to a great app that every attorney who uses Exchange e-mail should have.
- I frequently talk about the speed of the AT&T 3G connection on the iPhone 3G and 3GS, most recently here. Glenn Feleishman wrote an interesting article for Macworld reporting that because of the chip Apple put in the iPhone 3GS, the fastest that it can upload data is 384 Kbps, regardless of what AT&T supports. I don’t see this as a big deal—download speeds are far more important, and that is a reasonable upload speed—but if you upload a lot of videos to YouTube or MobileMe, then you might be interested to know that this is a limitation of the device.
- I got a report from a Miami attorney that his new iPhone 3GS was freezing up on him. According to this thread on the Apple Discussions, others have had the same problem. His solution was to bring his iPhone to the Genius Bar at the Apple Store and they swapped it out for a new iPhone 3GS which, fortunately, doesn’t have this problem. If you are having similar troubles, I suggest you head to your friendly neighborhood Apple Store.
- Have you ever bought an app and then realized that you made a mistake? I didn’t think it was possible to return an app, but iPhone Download Blog explains that you can get refunds from Apple if you submit a nice request. Read their post for more info.
- And finally, for those times when you want to get dressed up for a night out on the town, you won’t want to leave home without your iPhone cufflinks from Cufflinks.com. (Via CraziestGadgets.com, submitted to me by Ernest Svenson.) These are too funny:
One other aspect about the 1.1 update to the DTG app: for us non_Exchange users, we can now email Word docs directly from the app by tapping the icon. Sweet.
I just finished Gruber’s article and like his stance because I see Apple relying more and more on voice making the keyboard more and more obsolete. For example, besides the Google Search app (which I use a lot and is amazingly reliable) and the Voice commands in 3.0 OS (which needs work but so do I), I just downloaded a free app called Voice4Mail which allows you to send voice emails and the recipients don’t have to download anything to receive and hear the mp3. It’s a great app for driving and I still can’t believe it’s free. Although I have no objection to using the iPhone keyboard, let RIM and Palm get kudos for their physical keyboards. I think Apple is leaving them in the dust. The clincher would be Dragon Naturally Speaking for the iPhone. Just a dream but perhaps someday we will see it.
Thought I’d share an event I had over the weekend. The 3GS has worked flawlessly except for one annoying little problem. I’ve been having wifi connectivity problems at home but not at work. Because my office wifi has been great I thought the problem was with my router or firewall at home. Then I started reading on MacWorld that others were having the same problem on their 3GS. A commenter linked to an Apple help page (which are usually second only to Microsoft in uselessness) and a remarkably quick and easy fix solved the problem. All I had to do was reset the factory network settings, reboot, and the 3GS asked for my router’s password. Voila! All wifi systems are go.
I just recently bought some iPod cufflinks from tiesncuffs.com.au but now I wished I bought these iPhone ones instead. They are pretty detailed for such a small thing. If only the iPhone did come in small sizes ehhehe =)