Steve Jobs on iPod Touch, Future Products and Ice Cream

While many of the predictions for Wednesday's Apple Media event were spot on, one of the most prevalent rumors didn't come true. The new iPod touch did not get a camera. David Pogue interviewed Steve Jobs and asked him why they omitted a camera fro...

Apple Posts “It’s only rock and roll, but we like it” Keynote Stream

If you just happened to miss today’s video of the “It’s only rock and roll, but we like it” keynote or just so happen to be having issues downloading the full 850MB podcast feed like I am, jump on over to Apple’s site and instantly view it in it’s entirety via Quicktime stream.

Sure good to see Steve back…

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

Apple Posts “It’s only rock and roll, but we like it” Keynote Stream

Steve Jobs Speaks: Why There’s No Camera in Third Generation iPod touch

Following Apple’s It’s only rock and roll, but we like it special music event, CEO Steve Jobs, fresh from his return to the keynote stage, sat down with the New York Times, and while several topics were discussed, here’s the “big question” (and answer):

POGUE: You put a camcorder on the iPod Nano. Why not on the iPod Touch?

JOBS: Originally, we weren’t exactly sure how to market the Touch. Was it an iPhone without the phone? Was it a pocket computer? What happened was, what customers told us was, they started to see it as a game machine. Because a lot of the games were free on the store. Customers started to tell us, “You don’t know what you’ve got here — it’s a great game machine, with the multitouch screen, the accelerometer, and so on.”

We started to market it that way, and it just took off. And now what we really see is it’s the lowest-cost way to the App Store, and that’s the big draw. So what we were focused on is just reducing the price to $199. We don’t need to add new stuff — we need to get the price down where everyone can afford it.

So Apple would rather have cheaper third gen iPod touches than more feature-complete ones. Interesting strategy, given what the Zune HD will soon bring to the market (that, admittedly, Apple owns 73% of….) Is Apple’s 30% cut of App Store profits suddenly more enticing than their traditional ~30% margins on hardware? Because here’s the thing, not many people will see the 3rd gen iPod touch as much of an upgrade path from the 2nd gen, so Apple’s leaving that money on the table. Add a camera and mic, and, well, there’s that hardware upgrade gravy train that usually runs so regular-like from Cupertino Central. Or maybe they just think the cheaper entry price will get more than enough new buyers interested to make it worth Apple’s while…

Other questions asked and answered include Jobs’ opinion on the Kindle (people prefer integrated devices), why the new iPod nano doesn’t shoot stills (VGA quality stills aren’t good enough), and how’s he feeling (enjoying the ice cream!)

Check out the full interview for the full Jobs…

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in!]

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

Steve Jobs Speaks: Why There’s No Camera in Third Generation iPod touch

Apple “It’s only rock and roll, but we like it” Keynote Podcast Now Available on iTunes

Apple has posted all 850MB of their “It’s only rock and roll, but we like it” special music event to their Apple Keynote podcast feed [iTunes link]. And, wow that was fast. Usually we get a streaming version from QuickTime Apple Events first, then the iTunes podcast later. This time, no waiting (but also no streaming version — yet!)

If you don’t mind beefy iTunes downloads, check it out and let us know what you think!

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

Apple “It’s only rock and roll, but we like it” Keynote Podcast Now Available on iTunes

‘It’s Only Rock and Roll’ Event Video Now Available, Steve Jobs’ Return

Apple has posted a podcast [iTunes Link] and QuickTime stream for today's media event which brought a number of new announcements:

- Apple Releases iTunes 9: New Media Syncing Options, Genius Mixes, iPhone App Organization
- App...

First Look: TUAW gives iPhone OS 3.1 the hands-on treatment

Filed under: OS, Odds and ends, iPhone

iPhone OS 3.1 made the scene today at the Apple event, with a number of new features and fixes that should make iPhone owners happy (and iPod touch owners -- although for them, the version number is 3.1.1 instead). After a slow start to the download, I was able to get the update loaded onto my iPhone 3GS and I gave some of the new features a test drive.

The first big new feature is the Genius for Apps. To turn it on, you go to the Featured screen the App Store, and click the Genius button at the top of the display. After approving the license agreement, Genius is up and running, and clicking on the Genius button gives you a list of what it considers to be good suggestions based on what I have purchased. I wasn't very happy with the first list it produced (see screenshot at right), since I don't live in NYC, don't read Time, and really don't want something called The Most Useless App Ever.

The Genius lets you refine this list by swiping items to remove them. I did notice by the third screen of suggestions that the Genius was starting to pick apps that were more my style, so I think it's going to work out.

Read on for more impressions of 3.1.

Continue reading First Look: TUAW gives iPhone OS 3.1 the hands-on treatment

First Look: TUAW gives iPhone OS 3.1 the hands-on treatment originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 09 Sep 2009 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

First Look: TUAW gives iPhone OS 3.1 the hands-on treatment originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 09 Sep 2009 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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iPhone Live! Right Now. Come Chat!

iPhone Live! is on right now, come chat!

We’ll be discussing Apple’s “It’s only rock and roll, but we like it” special music, iTunes, and iPod event, all the news and views, and be taking your questions live in the chat room. Join in via http://www.tipb.com/live

Chat with you soon!

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

iPhone Live! Right Now. Come Chat!

Dev Team: iTunes 9 is Safe But iPhone Unlockers Should Avoid iPhone OS 3.1

Leyio quietly intros 8GB personal sharing device, iPod / iPhone firmware update

Leyio had a lot going against it from the word go: it utilized a nearly-dead wireless format in UWB, it could really only share information with other Leyio devices and it cost quite a bundle for what it did. Unfortunately for the company, we've little confidence that clearing up two of those issues now will trigger mass adoption for the so-called personal sharing device, but either way, users looking for a cheaper option can now select an 8GB version for "just" £99 ($163). The existing 16GB model has slipped slightly to £129 ($213), while users around the world anxiously await a forthcoming firmware update that'll enable data stored on a Leyio to be wirelessly transferred to an iPod, iPhone or a slew of other PMPs. Seems as if that bit of functionality should've been there to start, but hey, what do we know?

Filed under: Handhelds, Wireless

Leyio quietly intros 8GB personal sharing device, iPod / iPhone firmware update originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 09 Sep 2009 18:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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iPhone 3.1 Software Walkthrough

On the fence about downloading iPhone 3.1? Wondering what’s changed since iPhone 3.0? Need a handy link to send your friends who may have questions? TiPb’s got your back with our complete iPhone 3.1 Software Walkthrough.

Previously, we took you through all three beta versions, now we’ll take you through the final release.

And we’ll get started, right after the break.

What Hasn’t Changed

A lot. Too much to list neatly this time around. When you finish reading this walkthrough, go back and read our iPhone 3.0 walkthrough. It’s a giant compared to this.

iTunes 9 Features

It’s also worth noting that several new features touted for iPhone 3.1, like Genius Mixes, Genius App Recommendations, and App Management are actually contained in the simultaneously released iTunes 9.

TiPb will be providing a walkthrough of iTunes 9 shortly, so check back soon.

Bug Fixes

Big .0 releases are typically followed up swiftly with quick .1 bug fixes. While the swift part here is debatable — though on par with last year’s update — the bug fixes aren’t. Among the issues addressed:

• Better iPhone 3G Wi-Fi performance when Bluetooth is turned on
• Fixes issue that cause some app icons to display incorrectly

Note, we’d heard iPhone 3.1 would also fix the Spotlight issue that displayed deleted emails, but Apple doesn’t list it, and we’ve heard reports it isn’t yet fixed. (Though it apparently was in iPhone 3.1 Beta 3. Strange.)

Home Screen

The jigglies — what Dieter lovingly calls the little dance icons do when you hold them down long enough to make them moveable and rearrangeable — now make the iPhone vibrate, if your ringer switch is set to silent, as an alternate indicator of the change of state.

You can now also enable triple-clicking of the Home Button to toggle VoiceOver, Toggle White on Black, and Ask (which then will pop up a menu offering Turn VoiceOver On, Turn Zoom On, Turn White on Black On).

Voice Control

Voice Control in iPhone 4.0, after holding down the Home button for several seconds, let you speak simple commands to place calls and control music. With iPhone 3.1, it will now also work over Bluetooth.

Just hold down the Bluetooth call button as you would the Home Button, let go, and Voice Control pops up. State your command into the BT mic, and Voice Control will “speak” the confirmation (whether it gets it right or not) through the BT earpiece.

MobileMe Find My iPhone Remote Passcode Lock

Expanding on the Find My iPhone remote tracking and wiping service that came with iPhone 3.0, you can now also remotely assign a passcode lock. This is a nice half-way ground between leaving your iPhone wide open, or having to wipe it clean, if you can’t find it but aren’t sure you’ve permanently lost it.

Messages

Still no MMS for AT&T users. That’s being released on September 25 (though whether it will require an iPhone 3.1.1 update, or just a new carrier file is unknown).

For those outside the US with working MMS, you can tap the action button at bottom, left to save them to the camera roll, just like you could previously do with pictures under iPhone 3.0.

Calendar

Calendar gets a minor tweak in iPhone 3.1. Now event alerts also display the location of the event in the popup. Presumably, this is now considered important glance-able information.

Photos

Video trimming is now non-destructive. Previously, if you trimmed a video, it was automatically saved over the original, meaning you could never undo or go back to the full clip. Now, a Save As… dialog gives you the option of preserving the original and creating as many version copies as you want (an short clip to email, a longer one to share to YouTube, and the full clip to sync and bring into iMovie, for example).

Settings

Setting usually accounts for the longest list of changes in a new iPhone firmware, but this time it’s fairly short.

Settings: General: Accessibility includes that aforementioned toggle for the Home Button triple-click to enable quick Accessibility switching.

Settings: Safari now, finally, has that toggle to enable Fraud Warnings for malicious web sites (like phishing sites, malware sites, etc.).

iTunes Store

iPhone 3.1 lets you display available iTunes account credit both iTunes Store, and in the App Store. Also, iTunes U is now “better organized”.

In addition, joining the options under the More tab is ringtones, listed like music, and available ready made for $1.29.

App Store

Since the App Store is closer akin to a local WebView, it’s fairly easy for Apple to update the App Store (or iTunes Store) without updating the firmware. Case in point, the night before iPhone 3.1 went live, the App Store was updated to feature “Top Grossing” as one of the view options.

As mentioned above, you can now also see your current iTunes Store credits in the App Store, and you can now also redeem iTunes gift cards, promo codes, and certificates here as well. Feature. Parity.

Phone

Copy and Paste comes to the Phone Keypad. Just tap and hold and the input area will change from dark blue to light blue, and the Copy Paste menu will pop up.

The iPhone Paste feature is “smart” enough to change alphanumeric phone numbers to pure numbers (i.e. 1-800-FLOWERS to 1-800-356-9377).

Conclusion

Like the recently released Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, iPhone 3.1 doesn’t provide a lot of fancy user-facing updates (we likely won’t see those until Mac OS X 10.7 and iPhone 4.0 respectively). What it does is fix things that needed fixing, and fill in missing functionality that needed filling in. And, it throws in a couple small feature enhancements, just because.

Free for both iPhone and iPod touch 3.0 users (iPod touch 2.x users will still need to cough up $9.95 to pay the subscription accounting devil’s dues), if iPhone 3.0 was a must-have for the sheer magnitude of it’s new functionality, 3.1 is a no-brainer update to make the must-have that much nicer-to-have as well.

[Thanks to everyone who contributed screenshots and descriptions for this walkthrough, especially Justin, Jeremy, and James. If you noticed we missed anything, drop us a note in the comments and we'll update as needed.]

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

iPhone 3.1 Software Walkthrough

Celebrating 10 Years of Smartphone Communities

Ten years ago today, 9/9/99, our fearless leader Marcus Adolfsson launched VisorCentral.com - a community providing news, reviews and forums focused on a single product: the Handspring Visor.  The Visor, you may recall, was the PDA that was destined to start the smartphone revolution with the VisorPhone.

Ten years later, we have grown from that single small site to a network of seven different communities, each focused on a core brand of smartphone and dedicated to providing everything a user could need or want to know about their smartphone – from news to chat, reviews to ringtones, podcasts to apps, accessories to wallpapers. The Smartphone Experts Network has over 1.8 million members in our forums; on any given day there are thousands of users logged in: finding help, talking about the latest news, reviewing products, and more. We still have plenty of active members that signed up literally within days of our 9/9/99 launch. Millions of visitors every month come to us to find out the latest information for their smartphone.

The original VisorCentral

On our blogs, we have moved from an average of a single post a day on a single site to around thirty per day across our network. In our accessory stores, we provide a wide variety of accessories for every major smartphone platform and were named the fastest growing retailer of 2007 by Inc500. Our stores also provide sales and support for a large and growing network of affiliate sites.

Back in 1999, it wasn’t at all clear that a ‘Blog’ (the term still needed quotes back then) and community could be formed around a single device and thrive – VisorCentral was one of the first to do it and looking at the landscape of the technical blogosphere today, the model has worked. Since then we’ve kept the same goal: give users a place to learn about their specific smartphone and use it better. We couldn’t have done it without an incredibly great team of editors and writers, but most of all we couldn’t have done it without you.

So we just wanted to say thanks to our users and readers – thanks for sticking with us on what started as a strange experiment in web communities, thanks for being so passionate, engaged, and intelligent about your phones. We’re grateful for the knowledge, the discussions, and the friends we’ve gained over the past ten years and look forward to even more in the future.

To celebrate our ten year anniversary, each of our sites is giving away ten $50 gift certificates to its respective accessory store. To enter, simply make a post in this forum thread (not here on this post) sharing how this site has helped you better use your smartphone before midnight Pacific this Friday.

The Smartphone Experts Team

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

Celebrating 10 Years of Smartphone Communities

Price cut on Palm Pre not a sign of bad sales

The price on the Palm Pre may be dropping, but analysts caution against assuming that the price cut is because sales of the smartphone are less than stellar.

First Look: iPhone 3.1

iPhone's 3.1 software update brings some new features with it, and also patches a few bugs along the way.

iTunes Launches Facebook Fan Page, Offers 20 Free Songs

Wow. Apple’s iTunes Store now has a Facebook Fan Page. During today’s It’s only rock and roll, but we like it special music event, Apple announced iTunes 9 and said it allowed users to share via Facebook. Apparently you can share some love for iTunes right back.

And if you do, you can get 20 free songs by indie artists. The process sounds hecka convoluted, but TUAW takes you through it admirably.

Let us know if you become a fan, and get your music!

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

iTunes Launches Facebook Fan Page, Offers 20 Free Songs

Apple Releases MobileMe Control Panel for Windows 1.5 with Improved Calendar and Bookmark Sync, Windows 7 Support

Attention iPhone users on Microsoft Windows, Apple’s MobileMe News “blog” has announced an update to the MobileMe Control Panel:

With the new MobileMe Control Panel for Windows version 1.5 you can assign your primary MobileMe calendar to sync with the default calendar in Microsoft Outlook. Any other MobileMe calendars you have will continue to sync with Outlook and appear as separate calendars. The new control panel also delivers improvements for syncing bookmarks between Internet Explorer and Safari, and provides compatibility with Windows 7.

iTunes 9 will install the new control panel automagically for current users. For new users, Apple provides separate install instructions.

Let us know how it works for you!

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

Apple Releases MobileMe Control Panel for Windows 1.5 with Improved Calendar and Bookmark Sync, Windows 7 Support

iPhone 3.1: Remotely Set a Passcode Lock via MobileMe

Apple’s MobileMe News “blog” is touting a new feature: you can now remotely set a passcode lock with Find My iPhone and iPhone 3.1:

With Find My iPhone, you can help protect the information on a missing iPhone by remotely assigning a four-digit passcode lock. This is especially useful if you’ve never set a passcode before or if you want to set a new one.

This is a nice half-way ground between leaving it wide open, or having to wipe it clean, if you can’t find it but aren’t sure you’ve personally lost it.

And, again, it shows MobileMe is all about the incremental update. Very incremental…

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

iPhone 3.1: Remotely Set a Passcode Lock via MobileMe

Tick Talk is your little newsreading friend

Filed under: iPhone, iPod touch, App Review

I'm still amazed by the diversity and fun of iPhone apps, even after downloading over 1,000 of them (yes, seriously). Tick Talk [iTunes link] wandered into our review queue and I happened to be delighted by what is a clever little app. It doesn't set out to change the world, and it's about a hair away from being just a tech demo, but I found it a lot of fun. What does it do? It is a clock and alarm, but it will read the time and top headlines off an RSS feed aloud, in a British-sounding computer voice.

It's easy enough to add an RSS feed (no Atom that I could see, just RSS) by typing in a website that you know has an RSS feed. I typed in TUAW.com, for example, and it switched from The New York Times to our TUAW feed. Remember, it only reads the headlines. Things can get garbled, of course, but the glowing blue mouth and eyes are soothing to watch. Maybe I just want a pocketable robot assistant, but I found Tick Talk quite fun.

Current price is $1.99.

Tick Talk is your little newsreading friend originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 09 Sep 2009 16:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Tick Talk is your little newsreading friend originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 09 Sep 2009 16:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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iTunes 9 Released: Allows Users to Organize iPhone Home Screens; Home Sharing & More

iPhone OS 3.1 and Unlocking Don’t Mix Well: Yet…

Now that the dust is starting to settle after the return of Steve, we would like to take a moment and issue another friendly reminder to all of you who currently using an unlocked iPhone 3G or the 3GS – do not install the iPhone 3.1 update via iTunes. You will lose your unlock and it may be permanent as Dev Team’s MuscleNerd stated on Twitter earlier today:

3G+3GS unlockers..you must not update to official 3.1! unlock needs pre-hacked 3.1 with 04.26.08

So what does that mean, well like I mentioned earlier do not update via iTunes. You must first hack the 3.1 software to include modem firmware 04.26.08. If this confuses you, please do not attempt to unlock your phone until an easier way is released.

We here at TiPb are wondering, what about iTunes? Have any of you with unlocked iPhones updated to iTunes 9.0? Let us know how it went in the comments!

As always, be safe out there, as we are not responsible if you blow up your iPhone.

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

iPhone OS 3.1 and Unlocking Don’t Mix Well: Yet…

Review: CubeLex for iPhone

This very polished puzzle game -- reminiscent of Tetris and Bejeweled -- offers detailed graphics and great sound effects.