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AT&T CEO outs 3G iPhone: “You’ll have it next year”

Of course the 3G iPhone is coming, that’s clearly in the evolution plan. As Jobs said himself, it’s only a matter of time until improved batteries allow for it. Still, when AT&T’s CEO Randall Stephenson says, “You’ll have it next year,” well, our ears tend to perk up. The remark was made at a meeting of the Churchill Club in Santa Clara. He didn’t say how much it could cost admitting that Jobs and Apple “will dictate what the price of the phone is.” However, it wouldn’t surprise us if fits back into the $599 slot vacated by the 8GB iPhone while toting a full 16GB of flash like the iPod touch.

via  http://www.pqdvd.com/blog/iphone/wp-admin/post-new.php?posted=824

After speculation that France Telecom would offer an iPhone unlocking service for around €100, the official word from the carrier has confirmed that customers choosing to buy the handset after its launch this evening will have the option of either an iPhone-specific plan, a generic Orange plan or of buying the phone completely unlocked. As in other countries with the iPhone, the carrier has put together a number of special iPhone contracts each with a 2-year service agreement and unlimited data access; these are priced from €49 to €119 a month, with the iPhone itself costing €399 ($589). Alternatively, for €649 and a €100 unlocking fee, Orange will sell you a carrier-independent iPhone; that puts it comfortably into the predicted price range quoted by network CEO Didier Lombard.

iApp-a-Day: November 29th - Hum

Hum is the 29th application of the iApp-a-Day project by Sean Heber. Nearing the end of the month, it looks like Sean is running out of ideas as this little application does pretty much nothing. It’s apparently an application where you can make robot sounds or something of that sort. If you move the sliders fast, you can jam to some random 8-bit tunes that are being made.

Hum can be obtained in installer.app after adding the iApp-a-Day source to your source list.

UK iPhone sales a quarter of what O2 predicted

Apple and O2 have been taking hits recently for poor sales performance of the iPhone in the UK, with would-be users complaining that the price is too high and those who have taken the plunge having problems with coverage. Nevertheless, O2 have been calling it the “fastest selling device [we’ve] ever seen” and the company estimated 100,000 handsets would be activated in the first fortnight of availability. Sources close to AppleInsider, however, cast a different light, claiming that the flagship Regent Street Apple store was still working from stock delivered prior to the 9th November launch.

New estimates peg the actual number of handsets activated at just 26,500, a quarter of what O2 predicted, with the Regent Street store selling less than 100 iPhones per day and making a relatively small dent in the several thousand-strong shipment they received.

While it’s dangerous to place too much stock in an unnamed source, the news joins a large body of existing criticism and reticence of the UK iPhone and points to a device that is suffering disappointing sales. It’s looking more and more likely that warnings prior to UK availability - that the user-base is significantly different to that in the US, and would be unwilling to pay a high price for a device that, on paper at least, lacks many features British users take for granted - should have been heeded when O2 and Apple made their sales predictions.

gpSPhone v0.5.0 - improved performance, updated save states format

After seeing a huge difference in terms of screen size from the last version of gpSPhone v0.1.5, ZodTTD has released the latest version of this GBA emulator for Apple’s iPhone and iTouch with gpSPhone v0.5.0. This latest version takes care of improving the application’s general performance, as well as updating the format for its games’ save states.

ZodTTD also answered one of the more frequently asked questions about the homebrew application concerning the correct bios used when running gpSPhone v0.5.0:

If you have md5sum you can check if it has this hash: a860e8c0b6d573d191e4ec7db1b1e4f6 that BIOS should work fine. I think that some others work fine too, although I haven’t confirmed this with absolute certainty. It’s also theoretically possible to use custom (and free) BIOS replacements, but I don’t know of any publically available ones.

This is particularly important since the application was based from Exophase’s gpSP homebrew for the PSP. Anyway, here’s the change log for this version of gpSPhone v0.5.0:

• Considerable performance increase due to moving to Exophase’s dynarec.
• Considerable compatibility increase due to moving to Exophase’s dynarec.
• Save states format has been updated! Old save states most likely won’t work!

Anyone interested in finding out more details on this nifty application can read more about it through the via link below. We’ve also provided a copy of gpSPhone v0.5.0 available for download from QJ.NET’s download site, so make sure to check it out.

Download: gpSPhone v0.5.0

NES.app v2.0.0

For those of us who want some old school retrogaming action on their Apple iPhones, then there’s nowhere else to look but Apple iPhone homebrew developers nervegas (jonz) and jordan’s brainchild, NES.app. The nifty little homebrew emulation program is now standing proudly on version 2.0.0 legs. Let’s look and see what’s changed from the previous version, via the changelog:

2.0.0   

[jonz]

• Fixed preference labels and removed show selection of buttons
• Changed main ROM list to be section list (like contact list)
• Removed “can delete roms” feature
• Significant code cleanup

Well, there you have it. Cosmetic changes, a removal of the “Can delete ROMs” feature, as well as a significant tightening and cleaning up of code. Certainly good news that both nervegas and jordan are still making sure that their program offers the best, as far as gaming on the iPhone is concerned. Just make sure to read the documentation included in the archive before doing anything.

Download: NES.app v2.0.0

Tim Berners-Lee dream for Facebook five years hence

Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee visited Silicon Valley to speak with scientists and tech executives at HP Labs in Palo Alto, Calif. this week. In this video clip he offers his view, which he previously expressed in this blog post, about how social networking will evolve in the next five years. Responding to a question […]

Can LinkedIn CEO’s hot air inflate the company’s valuation?

LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye told Fortune that it would take a “helluva lot” more than $1 billion to get the company to sell.
Rumors have been flying about News Corp. being interested in LinkedIn, but the valuation could be sticky. Why not tell Fortune you’re worth more, get Henry Blodget crunching a few numbers and see […]

Micron rolls out solid-state drives

Memory giant Micron Technology rolled out its lineup of solid-state drives Wednesday.
The move is another data point in a march toward solid state, NAND memory drives. Micron said its drives are designed for PCs, enterprise servers and networking gear. The family of products, dubbed RealSSD, have densities ranging from 1 gigabyte to 64 GBs. Here’s […]

Finding your way without GPS

Google introduced a new “My Location” feature in version 2.0 of Google Maps for mobile that will help alleviate my map reading and orientation problems. It offers GPS-like positioning by using cell tower ID information and algorithms to approximate location. It’s not as accurate as GPS (within about 1000 meters on average, according to […]

SANS Institute paints gloomy security picture

The SANS Institute report on the state of security circa 2007 is enough to make you want to pull your ethernet cord out. Is anything out there secure?
On Wednesday, the SANS Institute released its top 20 security risks update for 2007. It’s pretty bleak across the board. There are client vulnerabilities in browsers, Office software […]

Google’s FCC deadline approaches: Will it bid for 700 Mhz wireless spectrum?

Google’s filing deadline with the Federal Communications Commission’s auction of 700 megahertz wireless spectrum is rapidly approaching, but we won’t know the search giant’s real intentions until 2008.
The FCC’s filing deadline is Dec. 3 for the upcoming 700 Mhz spectrum auction. This auction is a big deal for many parties including Verizon Wireless and AT&T, […]

34 Free Songs at iTunes

TuneCore is offering 34 free song downloads at the US iTunes store. No, it’s not any 34 songs, it’s 34 songs by artists who are TuneCore customers. TuneCore  is an iTunes listing service that helps artists get their music on the iTunes Store. To get your free tracks, visit their free album page and generate a unique iTunes code. Artists on the free album include the Dandy Warhols (famous for the Veronica Mars intro) and Maureen McCormick, of the Brady Bunch. How is the actual music? The quality, er, varies. Let us know what you liked or disliked in the comments

Several Fun Undocumented iPhone preferences

Not all preferences appear in your iPhone Settings application. As I discussed rather thoroughly in my Modding Mac OS X book, it’s not that hard to dig through applications and discover undocumented–or in this case unpromoted–preferences that add spice to your Mac or iPhone. I decided to put the iPhone’s SpringBoard to the test. That’s the app that runs your main home page. This core application contained over a dozen user-settable preferences. I tested them all and selected my six favorites. If you have access to the command line, you can start having fun with these settings yourself. This post shows you how.

Customizing with plutil

To customize your settings, you need to access and update SpringBoard’s preferences file. This is found in your home Library folder in /var/root/Library/Preferences/com.apple.springboard.plist. You can do this by copying the file to your Mac and using Apple’s property list editor or you can do it in-place using a utility I wrote. This is handy for anyone using Windows and without Apple’s developer tools.

Plutil is part of my utilities for the iPhone and iPod touch. It allows you to view property lists and to check and set properties from the command line. The original OS X version does not let you do all this but I got carried away while writing it and gave it lots of features I wish the OS X version would have had. (You can download a universal Mac binary here, named plusutil so as to not compete with the existing plutil name. Plusutil contains all my additional features). With plutil, you can directly customize com.apple.springboard.plist file and set and update these secret preferences.

Each of the following examples uses plutil and restart (also in the same package) to set and then update the look of your iPhone or iPod touch. Unfortunately, there’s no way I’ve been able to find to send SpringBoard a notification to update itself from the preferences file. Restart uses the blunt force approach of restarting SpringBoard. It does this by issuing a launchctl command.

6 fun iPhone Preferences

I’ve tested each of the following iPhone preferences on my personal unit. They are, as a whole, pretty useless, which explains why they didn’t make it into the Settings application. On the other hand, they are extremely fun. So, user beware but also user enjoy. Use these tricks at your own risk.

1. Set a fake “time”. SpringBoard offers two fake time preferences: SBFakeTime and SBFakeTimeString. When SBFakeTime is set to YES, the time at the top of your screen gets replaced with the contents of SBFakeTimeString. Sure, you can set this string to, say, an actual time. Or you can make it fun using pretty much any arbitrary text. You can see the SBFakeTime result in the image at the head of this post.

iphone # plutil -s SBFakeTime -v YES com.apple.springboard.plist
 Setting property SBFakeTime to YES
 iphone # plutil -s SBFakeTimeString -v "TUAW Rocks" com.apple.springboard.plist
 Setting property SBFakeTimeString to TUAW Rocks
 iphone # restart

2. Setting a fake carrier. The SBFakeCarrier preference allows you to change your carrier from AT&T to any string you like. I liked this preference so much, I put together the Make it Mine application to let anyone do this without having to use the command line.

iphone # plutil -s SBFakeCarrier -v "Erica" com.apple.springboard.plist
 Setting property SBFakeCarrier to Erica
 iphone # restart

3. Hide certain apps for your keynote The SBEnableAppReveal preferences is just plain goofy. It hides YouTube, iTunes and Safari. Handy for giving keynotes, odd otherwise. Double-tap the spaces to reveal the apps. Double-tap again to hide them.

iphone # plutil -s SBEnableAppReveal -v YES com.apple.springboard.plist
Setting property SBEnableAppReveal to YES
iphone # restart

4. Use a different dock As you know the iPod touch dock differs from the default iPhone dock. If you want to switch between the matte dock to the shiny dock, SBUseNewDock will accomodate.

iphone # plutil -v YES -s SBUseNewDock com.apple.springboard.plist
 Setting property SBUseNewDock to YES
 iphone # restart

5. and 6. See numeric signal strength values Two iPhone preferences, SBShowGSMRSSI and SBShowRSSI allow you to view your cell and WiFi signal strengths as numbers instead of pictures. This is a great geek mod that’s absolutely useless.

iphone # plutil -s SBShowRSSI -v YES com.apple.springboard.plist
Setting property SBShowRSSI to YES
iphone # restart

via http://www.tuaw.com/2007/11/27/a-half-dozen-fun-undocumented-iphone-preferences/