Did you know that the iPhone Touch was the best-selling gadget of the recently-departed and greatly lamented Christmas season? iTouch sales alone were enough to push Apple’s year-over-year profit to an 80% increase for the time period. It almost makes one wonder if anyonew would really care if the cell phone part of the product was made to disappear once Apple is done with AT&T in a couple of years. Indeed, were it not for the fact that free public WiFi is nowhere near available enough to guarantee that you can always get online, they might not even have to wait for that deal to die.
Aaaaaaaaaaanyway…tech-nerds and gadget-heads know that the annual Consumer Electronics Show and the winter MacWorld Expo both happened a couple of weeks ago, simultaneously, and you might have caught wind of it because of the bigger news about Steve Jobs’ failing health. It was simply impossible to keep up with the assorted tech and gadget blogs I normally follow while they were posting every last little scrap of silicon and plastic that could be found in a booth, but through all of that I fished out several upcoming iPhone/iTouch things that I thought I’d post about.
The one I am most excited about is the promise from Sling Media that there will be a Sling iPhone app coming out in April. Sling Media is the company that introduced the Slingbox a couple of years ago. The Slingbox is essentially a network node that lets you send a video signal to any viewing device on your network, thus allowing you to take something you’ve recorded or downloaded on one device and watch it on another, using your home network or the Internet to connect via IP. In other words, you can record a show on your home DVR and watch it on your laptop in a hotel room while away on a business trip, using the Slingbox as the node both devices can talk to. Now that functionality will be extended to the iPhone/iTouch with a viewer app. Apple has been mostly unwilling to let any third-party video players get much of a toe-hold on the iPhone platform, and maybe they feel that there aren’t enough people using the Slingbox to worry about the competition. It won’t be as simple as downloading the app, since you’ll have to have the Slingbox as well, AND you’ll have had to figure out how to connect all your various media devices to that, so it won’t be a toy for the masses. But geeks will welcome the challenge of getting it all worked out and being able to show off their latest torrented episodes of “Flight Of The Conchords” to dazzled lamers everywhere.
Second on the hit parade is one that will appeal to people like my wife’s boss, who is completely hooked on his iPhone but spends a lot of time in conference calls. (Tangent: one of the few good things about unemployment is not having to sit through any mindless conference calls anymore) If you are a cubicle-dweller, you have almost certainly encountered WebEx, which is a service that lets people share presentations, whiteboard space, and even remote control of one another’s PC desktop via a browser plugin. Everyone sitting at their desk can call into a conference call, sign on to WebEx, and see the inevitable PowerPoint presentation as the sales person or corporate windbag drones on about their bullet points. The best part abou using WebEx, though, is that you can open a separate browser window and surf the Internet while you mute your phone and everyone thinks you’re paying attention…because they’re all doing the exact same thing. And now you can use WebEx on your iPhone, so you can pretend to pay attention to conference call presentations while you’re at the golf course or screwing your mistress! Brilliant!
And while Apple is loosening Steverino’s death grip on the company with Sling, it’s also worth mentioning that they’ve decided to let third-party browsers work with the iPhone, too. Personally, I won’t be satisfied until Fennec, the mobile version of Firefox, shows up in the iTunes App Store, but for now having ANY option other than Safari is a good thing.
What I frankly don’t get, though, is that THE most popular application for the iPhone is iFart Mobile. Yes, for 99 cents, you can download an application that makes audible fart noises through the speaker (I have a 1st-gen iTouch that does not have a built-in speaker, so lucky me) and gives you 26 different sounds to choose from…but wait, there’s more…plus you can RECORD YOUR OWN FART SOUNDS! And the sonofabitch who came up with this made $40,000 in the first TWO DAYS. As my wife and daughter will attest, I can make well over 26 different kinds of fart sounds myself…SO WHY DIDN’T I THINK OF THIS?!?!??!? Maybe I need to start considering what other bodily functions can be replicated and turned into a colorful little piece of software…hmmm….excuse me while I go have a little “quality time” in the bathroom…
Not sure why people pay for the iFart Mobile app either – there’s so many more useful FREE apps out there. For example, I like to snowboard, so I just downloaded a free snow report app from REI. It’s interesting to see what people will pay to be entertained.
NewTeeVee.com has a post today about the Sling app that is already available for other mobile devices like Blackberry and Symbian OS, which should serve as a good sneak preview for the iPhone version.