Well, the iPhone Nano didn’t materialise (or perhaps it did, but it is just really really small) but Apple’s final MacWorld Keynote did have one big surprise for iPhone owners - iTunes downloads over 3G.
Until now, iPhone users have needed a wifi connection to download music directly to their handsets or have had to rely on synching with a desktop copy of iTunes. Now, anyone with a 3G signal can download straight to the phone using the built-in iTunes app.
In other iTunes news, Apple announced a revised pricing structure (tracks can now cost 59p, 79p or 99p) and - finally! - tracks willl start to appear without any DRM in ‘iTunes Plus’ format.
MacWorld is reporting the rumour that Orange are considering giving the BlackBerry Storm BlackBerry Bold the heave-ho.
According to the rumour, the mobile carrier is fed up of user complaints about poor reception, call dropping and problems with the user interface. Orange had previously suspended shipments of the phone while RIM worked on fixes to several bugs that were present in an early release of the Bold’s operating system.
[Update: It's the Bold, not the Storm. The Storm is a Vodafone exclusive in Europe.]
It’s that time of year again - the post new year groanfest when you try to get into whatever clothes you wear for work and realise that due to the vast quantities of mince pies and turkey remnants you have consumed over the preceeding two weeks you are now barely able to sit down with risking popped buttons and unsightly tears.
Naturally, you make your annual vow to start attending the gym again but you know in your heart you will slack off again before February - exercise is just too tedious, too much like hard work.
PushupFu may not be the sole motivator that will coax you back to washboard-abbed perfection but it might make doing that most basic of exercises - the press up (sorry, we are not Americans) - a bit more fun.
Simply attach your iPhone/Touch to your arm using one of those daft looking straps and PushupFu will monitor you press-up-based workout, tallying your reps and offering encouraging/bullying words as your pump away.
The app really comes into its own if you have a similarly out of shape frined with their own copy. You can challenge them to a pushup ‘battle’ over the interwebs. Points are scored for battles and solo exercise and what do points make? Well, nothing, really - but you get some bragging rights I suppose.
Never let it be said that the Catholic Church is out of touch with the modern world. They even have iPhones now. Does that mean that they get 3G reception in Vatican City?
Father Paolo Padrini has (with the help of a friendly developer) created iBreviary for the iPhone & iPod Touch. A Breviary is a sort of small prayerbook and collection of readings, Psalms, etc. that could be carried around and used for services, blessings and contemplation.
iBreviary aims to provide the same ‘features’ in handy iPhone app form. As Fr. Padriani says, “Once we walked with the Breviary and the Rosary in the hands…. today, why can’t we do it with the iPhone?”
The answer, of course, is the lack of multitasking on the iPhone. You would need a seperate handset to run ‘iRosaryBeads’.
You know who had a good New Years Eve? Whoever at O2 is responsible for counting the money they make from text messages.
The mobile carrier (and current Millenium Dome landlord) has announced that on O2 alone, over 166 MILLION texts were sent to celebrate the start of 2009. Actually, some of them may have been sent for other reasons - unless O2 are secretly monitoring the contents of our texts they can’t possibly know if were were celebrating or not and several may have denounced the coming of 2009 entirely. There is just no way for us to be sure - but all the same, that’s a pretty flippin’ huge number of messages flying through the ether.
The messages were counted between 7:30 AM on the 31st and the same time on the 1st of January and averaged out to around 1900 messages per second.
Mobile Voice-over-IP (VoIP) is a confusing area for casual mobile users, seduced by the promise of ultra-cheap calls, but baffled by the masses of companies all touting similar-sounding services. Meanwhile, those of us who are less casual can’t shake the nagging question of how the hell are these companies going to make any money?
Vopium is the latest mobile VoIP startup to try and answer those questions and make a name for itself. It’s got the cheap angle covered, promising free calls to other Vopium users, and rates of £0.24 plus your standard local rate for calls to mobiles, and an array of cheap rates to call internationally (£0.13 to a mobile in Kyrgyzstan? Bargain!).
There’s also a £12.72 a month option that gives you 1,000 minutes and 100 texts to the most popular countries. However, Vopium seems keen to stress the quality of its calls too, which could become a way to stand out from the crowd. As ever though, it’s hard to tell if this really is the next Skype, or if it’s destined to be just another mobile VoIP startup that’s big on talk but light on actual users.
A rather nasty bug has been discovered in Symbian S60 (versions 2.6 through to 3.1) in which a specially formatted SMS can knock out a phone’s ability to receive SMS or MMS messages.
The ‘Curse of Silence‘ as it has been called by German hacker Tobias Engel, exploits a bug in the S60 code for interpreting incoming SMS messages. If an SMS has been marked as “Internet Electronic Mail” and the sender address is longer than 32 characters the SMS client gets a bit confused and locks up - rendering the phone unable to process incoming messages. To undo the ‘curse’ a factory reset is required which a bit of a pain, to say the least.
Recent Nokia phones - e.g. the N85, N96, 6650 - using S60 Feature Pack 2 are immune to the problem, but owners of earlier handsets will just have to hope that they haven’t offended any geeks who know their mobile numbers.
A short while back we reported on the iPhone/iPod Touch version of Truphone finally getting a release. Well there’s been an update and there’s good news and bad news. The app will now let you make cheap calls without WiFi, that’s the good news. The bad news is that the calls will be placed over the handset’s GSM connection and will not make use of 3G.
It’s not as bad as it sounds however. The way it works is Truphone routes your GSM call to one of its own private servers and then serves your call via VoIP. You need to buy credit with Truphone to do this, but the rates you get via the service tend to be much cheaper than those on a typical GSM call, especially where international calls are concerned.
Continue reading ‘Truphone brings VoIP sans WiFi to the iPhone’
I blame Dick Tracy. If it wasn’t for the lantern jawed lawman and his ‘futuristic’ watch phone then people might have stopped thinking that wrist-mounted mobiles were a viable prospect years ago.
Many manufacturers have decided to chance their arm by launching a watch phone. We have seen a good many of them pass through these parts but - perhaps tellingly - never on the wrist of an actual human being.
Now Korean giants LG have decided to have a crack at the elusive ‘non-rubbish watchphone’ ideal with the GD910 which it will officially launch at CES 2009, next week in Las Vegas.
The phone sports a touchscreen, built in camera (for video calls) and a 1.4 inch screen. Multimedia (MP3 playback, etc.) will be supported, as will text-to-speech in case you want to listen to incoming SMS messages because simply reading them may not attract enough attention to your new watch.
This is a pleasing little thing - to tie in with the upcoming David Fincher adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s reverse-aging fantasy The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (starring that Brad Pitt, from off of Fight Club) Magnetism Studios has knocked up an iPhone app containing the original short story.
The tale is in the public domain now, so in theory anyone could download it and slap it in a text viewer, but Magnetism have gone the extra mile and created a lovely sepia toned display and had the text professionally typeset. Pages ‘turn’ with a flick of the touchscreen and they have even thrown in a in biography of Fitzgerald and a second short story - The Tarquin of Cheapside.
The whole thing is only 99 cents from the app store, and is a great example of a simple idea well executed.
