Update on “Potential Palm Pre Patent Portfolio Pugilism Puzzle”

We’ll be talking about the iPhone vs. the Palm Pre tonight on iPhone Live! (Hopefully with some special guests!). In the meantime our editor-in-chief, Dieter Bohn, writing on behalf of our sibling site, PreCentral.net, points to Engadget’s in-depth coverage. Dieter’s conclusion on calls the “Potential Palm Pre Patent Portfolio Pugilism Puzzle”?

Do Apple and Palm (which is increasingly Apple-esque after their recent hires) have the kind of corporate attitude necessary to just swallow their pride and accept that there’s space at the top of the hill for two smartphones, each licensing their patents to each other? If you take a look at the sorts of statements that Roger McNamee made in this Kara Swisher interview, you’ll see that the answer for Palm is clearly yes. They’ve said for a long time that they expect that there will be plenty of space for everybody in the smartphone market, nobody needs to fail for them to succeed. Will Apple be able to play nice too?

Reads like the haughty days of cold war mutually assured destruction to us, so we have to ask: Will Chairman Jobs push the button?

(Any answer beginning with “you’re goram right he will!” gets double comment points!)

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Update on “Potential Palm Pre Patent Portfolio Pugilism Puzzle”

Getting public radio on your iPhone now a bit easier

Two new apps offer shows and live radio from public radio stations around the United States.

Whatever Happened to Push Notification?

TiPb has theorized before that Apple’s promised-by-September-yet-still-undelivered Push Notification Service (their alternative to actually allowing 3rd party multi-tasking) hasn’t shipped yet because MobileMe taught Apple — very painfully and publicly — that it’s better to take their time and get push services right than rush them out broken and buggy.

Now it’s almost February, iPhone OS 2.1 has become 2.2.1 with still no PNS in sight, and rumors around Macworld this year whispered that, if PNS wasn’t dead, it was at least playing that way.

Macworld’s Dan Moran is sharing his own thoughts and theories on the issue, that Apple might have tried for more than it could accomplish, that PNS doesn’t really go far enough anyway, that too much notification can be a Bad Thing, that Apple will kill poor solutions, and most interestingly, that maybe regular users just don’t care:

Maybe that’s the simple answer: that people—to wit, users—just don’t care. They’ve learned to adapt to the iPhone’s way of doing things, and that way doesn’t include notifications or multitasking…at the moment, anyway. At some point in the future it seems likely that Apple will introduce a new feature that takes care of the issues that notifications would have addressed, and it appears that most users are content to wait until then.

How about it, regular users? Would you rather have bad PNS than none at all? Or are you really content to wait, figuring Apple will figure it out eventually? Or do you really just not care about PNS at all?

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Whatever Happened to Push Notification?

Review: Smart Dial for iPhone

By allowing you to dial by punching out contact names on your numeric keypad, Smart Dial is an immensely useful utility for iPhone owners.

Early iLife ‘09 Notes and Impressions

iLife '09 was officially released yesterday and people are getting their first experiences with Apple's latest updates to iPhoto, iMovie and Garageband. Apple has detailed the biggest changes in iLife '09 in a series of Guided Tours:

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Apple hints legal battle over Palm Pre multitouch

"We don’t mind competition, but if others rip off our intellectual property, we will go after them," said Apple executive Tim Cook about iPhone competition. A follow-up question specifically mentioned the Palm Pre by name, since the Pre has some very iPhone elements, like multitouch and touchscreen gesture technology. SlashGear ...

Where Did All the iPhone WebApps Go?

Sure, there are still plenty around — plenty of good ones even — but back before the App Store, before Apple released the iPhone SDK, WebApps were the development platform for the miraculous new mobile wireless platform.

HTML (HyperText Markup Language), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), and AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) were the only tools needed, Steve Jobs told us, to make delightful, dynamic applications for the iPhone. And — by the way — every web developer already new how to use them! As a bonus of sorts, Apple provided some simple URL handles for things like telephone numbers, and some attributes and sample behaviors that helped optimize the iPhone experience.

For a while there was a torrent of WebApps, from re-purposed websites like FaceBook and Amazon, to original content and even games. Some were great, some were okay; it depended how well the idea suited the WebApp platform.

Now, 9 months post-iPhone SDK, 6 months post-App Store launch, post 15,000 apps, and we don’t hear much about WebApps anymore. Almost three months ago TiPb asked if WebApps had a future. Three months later, is the silence we’re hearing our best response?

Palm has now announced their new webOS platform, which is similar to WebApps but runs locally as well and should — though we don’t know the details yet — provide far greater hooks into the smartphone system (perhaps somewhere between WebApps and Native Apps, like Widgets). Could this kickstart the iPhone WebApp developers back into gear?

Anyone out there make, use, or find a killer iPhone WebApp lately? Know of any in the pipeline? And where do you think WebApps will be another 3 months? In another 6?

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Where Did All the iPhone WebApps Go?

iPhone push notifications: dead and buried, or waiting in the wings?

The $64,000 question: what happened to Apple's push notification service? Dan Moren has some ideas—and only a few of them are ridiculous.

Missing iPhone notification system leaves some third-party apps out of the loop

Apple’s promised system for push notifications on the iPhone is months overdue and there are plenty of applications looking for a solution.