The big news this week has been commentary, speculation, conjecture and downright silliness about the iPhone 4 antenna issue. Who knows what Apple will say at 10am Pacific / 1pm Eastern today (although Scoopertino has a humorous prediction). I'm sure that the announcement will be analyzed six ways to Sunday, but hopefully it will move us towards the end of this unfortunate chapter in iPhone history. There were a few other news items this week of note, such as:
- David Pogue of the New York Times wrote (again) about Line2, an iPhone app that provides you with a second phone line. The app is ever more useful under iOS 4.
- Pogue also iPhone apps that we wish we had, although frankly I think that several of these already exist. For example, he wants an app that can tell you the aisles for items in the grocery store, but I've been using an app called Grocery IQ for a while now that groups like items together based on where they are likely to be in a typical grocery store (even if it doesn't specifically say "in this store, Aisle 4, left side").
- As David Chartier of Macworld reports, yesterday Apple released iOS 4.0.1, which changes the formula used by the iPhone to determine how many bars of signal strength to display.
- If you are in the market for an external battery for your iPhone, I use the RichardSolo batteries. The company sent me free samples almost two years ago, and they are still working great. The RichardSolo 1200 normally costs $45 but is on sale until Monday for only $20. My review from 2008 is here.
- For just $10, you can buy a device that plugs into your headphone port and turns your iPhone into a universal remote control. MobileCrunch has the details. Looks neat.
- Dan Frakes of Macworld takes a first look at several cases for the iPhone 4.
- Rosa Golijan of Gizmodo reports that if you are a student with an e-mail account that ends in .edu, you can get a free year of Amazon Prime. I've long been a subscriber and my wife and I use Amazon all the time. iPhone J.D. is an Amazon Affiliate, which means that if you click here before you purchase something, for some of the items on Amazon, Amazon pays a tiny percentage of the sales to support iPhone J.D. It doesn't cost you anything extra.
- Steve Sande of TUAW has some tips for using FaceTime.
- Sebastien of the iPhone Download Blog describes how he went through three different iPhone 4s in three weeks.
- And finally, Benjamin Reece is a New Orleans-based filmaker who got a lot of press in 2008 and 2009 for his series of Fifty People, One Question short films (all worth watching). Reece and filmmaker Philip Bloom announced plans to team up to create a cinematic short film shot completely with an iPhone 4. They set up this site to solicit funding for a movie to be shot in Brooklyn, NY, but it appears that they didn't get the necessary funds in time. That's a shame because the following teaser film, shot in New Orleans on an iPhone 4, gives you some sense of how cool the final film could be. Hopefully it will still get made.
the first iPhone 4 cinematic film. from Benjamin Reece.
And by the way, here is one of the Fifty People, One Question films, one called PostSecret. It interviews interesting people and features Mastermind Theatre's great Pictures of Audrey in the soundtrack: