An iPhone on Verizon in 2010? With LTE, it could happen

Filed under: iPhone, Jailbreak/pwnage

Now, I understand this may be a very niche subject for our dear readership, but as many of you may remember, I'm a Verizon customer. That's why this morning's news about Verizon testing its Long-Term Evolution 3GPP (LTE) service in various parts of the U.S. has me excited.

Yes, while it's amazing that Verizon is getting 60Mbps downloads using LTE in Columbus, Minneapolis, and northern New Jersey, what's exciting to me is the fact that LTE plays nicely with GSM. If you could use a GSM phone on the Verizon network -- I think you can see where I'm going with this -- you might be able to use an iPhone with Verizon service.

While it's true that Apple and AT&T have an exclusivity agreement with each other, Verizon and Apple have previously used two completely separate kinds of technology (CDMA versus GSM, respectively) -- preventing any kind of interoperability. With Verizon at least speaking the same language as iPhone handsets, the possibility of keeping my carrier and having my dream handset comes closer.

In theory, at least; it isn't as easy as flipping as switch. If it works anything like, say, the procedure for using your iPhone with T-Mobile here in the U.S., it requires unlocking the phone with QuickPwn or yellowsn0w. Apple has recently suggested that it considers jailbreaking iPhones to be a violation of DMCA. Interpreted broadly, that may include unlocking software, too.

Add to that some SIM cards that don't work with unlocking software, like some from T-Mobile. There's nothing suggesting that Verizon's new LTE SIM cards will work right out of the box. Even if they are, advanced features like Visual Voicemail won't be available, but that's something I can live without.

For me personally, I wouldn't mind either an iPhone or a Palm Pre. Maybe it's just a waiting game to see whose exclusivity agreement expires first, rather than trying to hack something together.

Then again, maybe I shouldn't get my hopes up. We've still got another year to wait before Verizon rolls out LTE service to most of the country.

[Via Electronista.]

Continue reading An iPhone on Verizon in 2010? With LTE, it could happen

An iPhone on Verizon in 2010? With LTE, it could happen originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 18 Feb 2009 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

An iPhone on Verizon in 2010? With LTE, it could happen originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 18 Feb 2009 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Art wallpapers for the iPhone

Start Mobile announced the launch of a free mobile art gallery application for iPhone. The app features images from painted rooms at Hotel des Arts in San Francisco. Each image can be 'flipped' to reveal additional information about the world's premier emerging and underground artists and their artwork. According to John ...

Sauce Digital releases Killer Pool Lite for iPhone and iPod Touch.

  Sauce Digital has launched Killer Pool Lite, a free version of Killer Pool - the most realistic pool experience for iPhone and iPod Touch. It features the US 9-Ball game, playable against one of the artificial players.  It gives users a good idea of the realism of the physics, intuitive ...

Apple: iPhone jailbreaking breaks the law, voids warranty

Apple has publicly saying that "jailbreaking" (and seems it's involving "unlocking" as well) an iPhone is breaking the law and voiding the warranty. What?! Arik Hesseldahl of Business Week wrote: The statement was Apple’s first official comment on the practice of jailbreaking, which first emerged within days of the iPhone’s initial release ...

iPhone contributes 51% of US smartphone traffic

One of the largest mobile Web ad networks, AdMob, says that Apple’s iPhones now dominate the U.S. mobile Web traffic, gives the iPhone a majority 51 percent share of smartphone market in the country. Based on analysis of the billions of ad requests in January conducted by AdMob, here is the ...

Review: Keynote controllers for the iPhone

Rob Griffiths takes a look at three controller apps that let you run Keynote presentations through your iPhone or iPod touch

AT&T hopes to rollout 4G technology by 2011

On Monday, at the Barcelona Mobile World Congress, AT&T announced that it hopes to be able to roll out 4G wireless technology starting in 2011.

Eyes On: Sygic Turn By Turn GPS App for iPhone

There you see it, folks, a real live native iPhone app that provides turn-by-turn GPS directions with voice prompts, points of interest, support for multiple countries, maps stored in-memory instead of streamed from the internet, the whole nine yards.

Working off a tip/reminder from antonioj (thanks!), I scurried off to the TeleAtlas booth at the close day here at MWC to visit Sygic, a company that makes (you guessed it) downloadable GPS apps for smartphones and PDAs. They had promised a demo of their iPhone app at MWC09 and, well, they delivered.

Read on for more!

Sygic, as we said, looks to be a full-featured GPS app that stores all the maps on-memory (about 2 gigs for Europe). It uses TeleAtlas maps as a base — whether that means that they’ll be able to successfully navigate both the legal briar patch surrounding turn-by-turn on the iPhone and manage to make Apple forget about their SDK explicitly prohibiting such apps remains to be seen. For now (although I didn’t drive around with it), I can say that Sygic works and seems snappy enough. It took the software shown about 30 seconds to load up and initialize, however, which didn’t fill me with glee.

Otherwise, you can pretty much see the featureset from the gallery below. Sygic says they will submit to the app store and see how it rolls, there’s no real intention of just releasing it as a jailbreak app. What do you think, will Apple accept the app or are they still holding out for a cut of that sweet, sweet TeleNav subscription fee? Or is the hold-up with turn-by-turn something else entirely?

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

Eyes On: Sygic Turn By Turn GPS App for iPhone

The Oregon Trail headed to iPhone

The classic "edutainment" game The Oregon Trail is coming to the iPhone, thanks to Gameloft.

DocsToGo Demo’d on the iPhone!

What’s that? iPhone news at MWC09? It’s true. I just got back from a meeting with DocsToGo and they showed off an early version of their app. So far Word document editing is a go, Spreadsheet editing is definitely in the plan but not quite up and running yet. They’re tossing in document viewing for both plus PDFs as well — which means you can have all of your documents in one spot.

Read on to find out how it all works, where the iPhone kinks are (since Apple limits what developers can do easily), and how we’re loving their implementation of (in-app) Cut and Paste!

Apple obviously won’t let DataViz go in and mess with their mail client, so email attachments are going to be pretty rough (read: non-starter). However, and here’s where things get mysterious, DataViz does plan on having a desktop client that will allow you to sync your documents over to the iPhone and back again and the DocsToGo app on the iPhone will be able to “get around the sandbox” of not being able to store files locally. How exactly will all this happen? DataViz will wink, but can’t say yet.

I did get a pretty good look at the Word doc editing and I have to say it’s pretty slick. There’s a single editing bar at the bottom which you can swipe left and right to get at all the various options. Full support for inline images, formatting, outlining, and more is all here. Also here, Cut and Paste done in a very clever way. You can:

• Double tap a word to select it.
• Triple tap a paragraph to select it.
• In magnify view, you can hold down your finger with the cursor in the same spot until the magnifying glass “pulses,” which will then let you select character by character.

Apple — please make sure you let this app in and when you do, take a very close look at their text selection method, because we’re liking it.

DataViz hopes to have the whole shootin’ match (perhaps minus spreadsheet editing, depending on their dev timeline) sometime in Q2 2009.

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

DocsToGo Demo’d on the iPhone!

Origins of iPhone Multi-Touch… the Piano?!

We know the score. Apple now holds a veritable smorgasbord of multi-touch patents, some dating way back before the iPhone, and some coming from their 2005 acquisition of a company called Fingerworks, and the innovative talents of Wayne Westerman and John Elias. But from whence did they draw their inspiration? MacRumors pulls the relevant quote from a University of Delware article:

“I had an ergonomic problem and I paired it with a motivation,” Westerman said of the early inspiration. “I’d always felt that playing the piano was so much more graceful and expressive than using a computer keyboard, and I thought how great it would be if I pulled some of that expression from the piano to the computer experience.”

Having suffered plenty of joint/wrist injuries, I know from personal experience how difficult it can be to type with traditional, hard smartphone keyboards. I abandoned my old Treo 680 when it was too physically painful to push in the tiny keys anymore. The iPhone, however, is nothing but a pleasure, so the above comments truly resonate with me.

It’s also interesting to note that history aside, Apple is also looking towards the future, with job listings for multi-touch ninja “gesture algorithm” wizards.

So anyone else going to jump on the piano and try to figure out what iPhone 3.0 might hold for us?

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

Origins of iPhone Multi-Touch… the Piano?!

Apple blocks streaming South Park app

Filed under: iPod Family, iPhone, App Store

There's yet another case of heavy handedness from Apple in rejecting potential apps from the iPhone store. The creators of South Park have put almost all of their back episodes online at South Park Studios for Flash-based streaming, and last year it was announced to fans that they would be putting together an iPhone app to give mobile users access to that content.

Now Boing Boing is reporting that the app is "dead in the water" because Apple has rejected it twice for being "potentially offensive." Goodness knows there's a lot of offensive content on the App Store, so it's really hard to see how Apple is holding any kind of line of good taste here (if that even applies in this case). Boing Boing's original post from last year announcing the app reveals something of how nice the interface was going to be. I can't help but hope that the evolving standards of the app store that eventually allowed in applications like RSS Player (which was previous banned as Podcaster) will come round for the South Park app. I can just hear Cartman yelling for his mom.

Apple blocks streaming South Park app originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 18 Feb 2009 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Apple blocks streaming South Park app originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 18 Feb 2009 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Dear Apple: Please Steal Features From Nokia’s Ovi Store

If you haven’t heard, Apple’s a no-show here at Mobile World Congress 2009, this show pretty much belongs to Microsoft, HTC, and Nokia (with a side of Samsung and Sony Ericsson). However, as with other trade shows like CES and CTIA, Apple’s presence is felt in its absence. Rather than join their brethren in the mobile community, Apple sits it out and watches while other companies are forced to make their announcements in a context Apple has created. To wit: Both Microsoft and Nokia announced App Stores this week. Microsoft’s Market is basically a no-show, though, all we have is promises. Nokia’s isn’t ready yet either, but it will be in May.

Actually, we know quite a bit about Nokia’s App Store, called the Ovi Store. It’s an extension (and replacement) of their earlier services and includes everything from apps to ringtones to wallpapers to widgets. Here’s the thing, folks: Nokia may have solved the #1 problem at Apple’s App Store: finding apps that are 1. good and 2. interest you.

What Nokia has done is build a sophisticated relevancy engine that can sort apps based on a variety of factors that are actually relevant to you — like what you friends are using, or what kind of app you like to download, or what music you tend to prefer. It looks to be much better than your standard “top 50″ list and if Apple is smart and shameless (we know they’re both), they’ll steal these features as soon as humanly possible.

The Ovi Store also looks to be a little kinder and gentler on developers too, giving them more power over how (and if!) their app will be distributed.

I’ve written the whole thing up over at sister-site Nokia Experts, go on and take a look.

[How about Apple needs to expand iTunes GENIUS recommendations to the App Store immediately? -- Rene]

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

Dear Apple: Please Steal Features From Nokia’s Ovi Store

Review: Shuffle Board for iPhone

The pub classic (not the cruise ship game) comes to the iPhone.

Apple’s Multi-Touch Designer Describes His Inspiration, More to Come?

Wayne Westerman and John Elias are the two engineers who are responsible for much of Apple's multi-touch technology found in the iPhone and notebook trackpads. Westerman and Elias originally founded a company called Fingerworks in 1998 and developed...