Maybe once your baby is tired of cuddling with her new kitty she will want to post about it on Facebook to all her peeps. So you’ll need to shell out $15 for this Fisher-Price “Laugh and Learn Apptivity Case” so she can use her iPhone in first-class style. (iPhone sold separately, some assembly required)
(thanks to bookofjoe for the link)
Typewriters going extinct — not yet
Large Hadron Collider scientists finding the “God Particle” — not so much
iPhone tracks your every single movement and rats you out to the Feds — sort of, but not really, and Steverino swears they’ve got a patch for that
Barack Obama releases birth certificate, proving he was born in Hawaii — still a no-good sekrit Muslin nigra according to almost 25% of the entire population of the U.S.
Steve Jobs is making a big public announcement today, and it’s expected that Apple will announce that they’re going to do something to fix the problem with the antenna on the iPhone 4G. Personally, I think it would be AWESOME if Apple promised to send each and every iPhone user a big ol’ roll of duct tape, but that’s probably not what’s going to happen.
Also probably not gonna happen: no official endorsement by Steverino of this awesome faux bacon carrying case for your iPhone (via bookofjoe), but I’m betting that Steve himself probably carries his duct-taped iPhone 4G in one of these beauties and shows it off to all the other bajillionaires at his Bajillionaire Club meetings.
Meanwhile, to much less fanfare…Apple has quietly announced that they are beginning a fix-or-repair program for Time Capsules purchased between February and June 2008. You will recall that there has been a well-documented problem with the hard drives inside Time Capsules overheating and failing after about 18 months of use. I’m guessing this isn’t high on Steve’s deck of Powerpoint slides today, either.
A brief pentimento in three parts:
Part One
“Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price” by Matt Richtel, New York Times
Part Two
Part Three
According to MSNBC, the average computer gamer is 35 years old, fat, and depressed. Well, I turned 46 years old yesterday, so I am way above average in at least one respect. Plus, I don’t live in my parents’ basement and I have had sex with a real, live woman (and have the offspring to prove it). Yep, WAAAY above average. Unlike this guy:
Or poor Dilbert:
Truth be told, I don’t play games on my computer per se except for my unending obsession with Civ IV. Most of the time when I want to play a quick electronic game, I play something on my iPod Touch. Apple, which never really had any luck in the past making a gaming platform with their hardware, totally hit it out of the park with the iPhone line as a serious competitor in the handheld arena. The huge popularity of the iPod Touch last Christmas was in no small part due to parents buying it for kids, who promptly turned around and downloaded a veritable shitload of games from the iTunes store. I have 8-10 different games on mine that I regularly use to entertain myself in waiting rooms, food courts, during commercials, and other similar short windows of down time.
Gear Patrol.com, which is one of those “guy” websites that keeps us manly men up to date on what manly men should be doing when being extremely masculine, last week ran a Top 10 list of iPhone games, which was really like a Top 20 list because they included a runner-up in every category. I only have two of them, but I am a notorious metrosexual, and not nearly manly enough to pack all twenty. Still, there are a few on that list that I will probably download, although you might be surprised that I don’t plan to add “Civilization Revolutions”. Some other iPhone losers I know have badmouthed the performance of the game pretty hard, enough to make me feel like I’d rather not bother.
Get your fingers off your forehead already, you look foolish.
When Charlotte gets her hands on my camera, her most favorite subject is herself. Every time I download pictures from the memory card, there’s at least a couple dozen shots of her own face from about three inches away. Plus, she always manages to look like she has been on a non-stop week-long weed-smoking binge in 90% of the pictures, so I don’t even want to save them for the “cuteness” factor. It’s a good thing we don’t have to use film cameras any more.
So whoever thought up this latest innovation clearly had narcissistic children and stoners in mind: a camera with an LCD viewing screen in the front.
I suppose it’s also useful for those embarrassing Facebook photos and avatars and such. Never again will the social networker be forced to comb their hair backwards to stand in front of a mirror to take their head shot and not look like their reflection. I expect this particular gadget to sell like hotcakes.
And here’s a bit of whizbangery that I can’t wait to get my hands on: an “augmented reality” app for the iPhone that can identify where you are via GPS and then annotate the live video from the built in webcam to provide you with information about your surroundings. (Here’s a direct link to the BBC video from that story, if you prefer).
Acrossair’s “New York Nearest Subway” and “Nearest Tube” (for London) will be available on the iTunes Store as soon as Apple releases the next upgrade of the iPhone OS (v.3.1), but the BBC story also refers to a Dutch company which rolled out an even more-comprehensive app called Layar which runs on phones using Google’s Android OS and can display information about shops, restaurants, ATMs, and even real estate listings. That service is limited to the Netherlands (in fact, I think it’s only for Amsterdam proper), but they anticipate expanding the service to other European cities soon.
Of course, the ultimate setup for a technology like that is to embed the display into a pair of glasses so that you wouldn’t need to look like a complete dork walking around New York holding your smartphone in front of you, but I suppose people have gotten used to looking like dorks walking around talking on their Bluetooth headsets, so what’s the diff? Nevertheless, I think this would be an extremely cool iPhone app.
I don’t know what took them so long, but FINALLY someone has come up with the ultimate MUST-HAVE app for your iPhone or iTouch: SitOrSquat.com is a site which is trying to catalog and geo-coordinate all the public toilets in the world and then make that data available to you on your iPhone or other mobile device, using the built-in GPS (or, as with the iTouch, triangulated location data based on known WiFi hotspots) so that you can get a list of all of them wherever you go.
Feckin’ brilliant!!
Before you rush out to download it, be aware of its limitations: the database is VERY incomplete. The initial focus for the developers was New York City, and a number of people have complained on the website that their area has no entries listed. Of course, the complainers are partially missing the point, because the app lets you add information a la wikis to flesh (or should I say “flush”?) out the database. They’re relying on the power of the lazyweb maybe just a little too much and might have made a point to spend some time making sure that there were datapoints for more places than Manhattan, but if they get the participation they want, in short time this could be a very valuable app indeed for people traveling in unfamiliar cities.
It’s sponsored by Charmin toilet paper (how cute), so you do have to put up with an advert at the bottom of the screen, but that’s a small sacrifice when you’re about to pee your pants in a strange place. Given the number of Starbucks locations that are already listed, I think the developers ought to approach them for a sponsorship as well.
A few recent bits of interest about everyone’s favorite gadget.
Well, unless you’re Japanese, that is. Maybe. Last week Wired blogger Brian Chen posted a story about how poorly the iPhone has been received in Japan. His assertion: Japanese cell phones and handheld wireless gadgets are so far beyond the middling media services and stupid fart applications that we beknighted Americans love that the ultra-tech-savvy Japanese gadgeteers won’t buy iPhones, and the expensive service plans are too spendy compared to what the average Japanese teenager gets for his/her yen. His proof: Apple is putting on the big push to reposition the product to appeal to the market, including giving away the iPhone to get people to sign up for the service plan. Sounds plausible enough to me, but this Japanese freelance journalist/tech consultant says Chen is full of sushi. Hayashi says that Chen misrepresented some of the information he gave him, and while he doesn’t dispute that the iPhone doesn’t sell well in Japan, he says it’s less a case of hating the device as it has been a combination of weak media attention and loyalty to the DoCoMo telephone company, which is NOT carrying the iPhone. It will bear watching to see if the iPhone can indeed gain traction in Japan.
The “man stuff” website Gear Patrol offers up their list of twenty-five “must-have” iPhone apps today, and only one of them involves farting, belching or scratching, which, considering the source, seems very odd. Instead, they’ve actually got the good stuff like the Pandora app, AirShare (for transferring files between your iPhone and your computer over WiFi), Urbanspoon, and even a few things that only work if you have jailbroken your iPhone like Winterboard and iPhoneModem. There are even a couple that I had not heard about before that I am going to have a look at myself: RSS Runner (because trying to use Google Reader on my iTouch is unbearable) and Pageonce as an account/password manager.
The problem with the vast majority of iPhone apps is that after you play with them for a bit, they’re often not terribly useful. It’s like the early days of personal computers where anyone with half an hour seems to be able to gin up some twiddly little app and get it on iTunes. Luckily, the vast majority of these bits of software are free (a venerable tradition in the Mac world), and so there’s no significant downside to downloading and trying them until you find a few that you like. You might have seen the story a couple of weeks ago that 80% of iPhone users only use a newly downloaded app for one day and then never touch it again. Only one percent of users stick with an application long-term. Moreover, free app downloads outnumber the downloads for paid apps by almost 7:1, and even when people pay for the apps, they are only marginally more likely to use them after Day One. I haven’t gone through that much churn with trying out apps — there have been a couple of games that I lost interest in pretty quickly, and I deleted the Amazon app on my last sync because I’d had it for two months and never opened it one time. Beyond that, I have become utterly devoted to a few apps like Twitterrific, WiFinder, and the Facebook app, but could still probably drop a few that seem to just take up space. Killer apps are hard to come by on any platform, and the iPhone is still less than two years old, so the best are probably yet to come.
Here, for example, is an app that puts an intriguing twist on the concept of social networking on the iPhone: Distant Shore uses the conceptual notion of being stranded on a deserted island and occasionally finding random messages in bottles washing up on the beach. You can reply to the messages, but you don’t really know who you are communicating with, and new messages coming in continue to be random. It’s as if you had a random feature on Twitter where you couldn’t follow anyone in particular, but might receive messages from anyone at all, and you have no idea who is reading yours. Now, this could be REALLY interesting, or it could be the app that reveals the randomness and banality of Twitter for the non-existant communication it really is. I’m considering giving it a whirl just for the experience.
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…
No sooner was the rumor last week about a $99 4Gb iPhone at Wal-Mart posted around the web (including here), than it was swatted down by several other tech news sites. Ars Technica says that Bloomberg News got the straight poop: WallyWorld will be selling the same 8Gb iPhone as everybody else, but at their own price point a couple of bucks cheaper than Apple’s MSRP.
But don’t stop believin’ in Steven, because this morning Engadget found this story from a generally-reliable Mac rumor mill that shows a prototype of a smaller iPhone that could be one of the new product announcements from Steve Jobs’ keynote at the January MacWorld Expo. The smaller device is being touted as being branded the “iPhone Nano”, and the only difference between it and the existing 3G iPhone is size. THIS could actually turn out to be the $99 Wal-Mart iPhone…stay tuned for more rumor control…
(Oh, and speaking of oft-rumored-but-still-unseen products, Engadget also reports that the FCC has issued its technical approval for the Garmin Nuviphone I lust after, but that’s a whole different story.)
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