Now to be fair, many cell phone makers fail when they are too ambitious, adding cutting-edge features way before their time or taking a design risk. Without these noble failures, perhaps no iPhone would ever have been possible.The phones in our dirty dozen list all suffer from either design flaws or functionality failures, or both.
The smartphone sales race may be closer than expected.Research In Motion’s BlackBerry Curve overtook Apple’s iPhone to become the top-selling consumer smartphone in the United States during the first quarter of 2009, according to research published by NPD Group on Monday.
The classic adventure game Myst (.99) has arrived in the App Store, now playable on the iPhone and iPod touch.But don’t get too excited just yet, you’ll need some patience, Myst for the iPhone is over 700MB! And due to the way iPhones install apps, you’ll need at least 1.5GB of free space on your iDevice to successfully install.
jarrettwold2002 writes “Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails announced via his Twitter account today, ‘Apple rejects the NIN iPhone update because it contains objectionable content. The objectionable content referenced is “The Downward Spiral.”‘ The initial NIN Access iPhone app garnered much fanfare (Wired article, Guardian article) and was approved by Apple. The update has been rejected due to an album reference. If Nine Inch Nails is having problems with censorship and approval what kind of problems are you having with the iPhone app approval process?”
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Will Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) do to the camcorder industry what it has done to the music industry? Yes, according to an article in BusinessWeek today, which strings together a number of events to make the bold prediction that we are “about six weeks away from the next big thing.”
crankyspice writes “I work routinely in environments where a camera cannot physically be present (e.g., federal court), which really limits what I can carry with me. For instance, I’m a Mac guy, but there’s no way to order a MacBook without a built-in webcam (which I’ve never used on the machines I’ve owned that have had one). Ditto the iPhone. I’m left with a BlackBerry 8830 and the bottom rung of the [W|L]Intel portables. Even then, when I ordered a Dell Mini 9, I had to wait more than a month because I specified no webcam when I placed the order. This is a relatively common (government, law, sensitive corporate environments) requirement; what have other Slashdotters done? Disabling the camera with a script or somesuch won’t convince the /hour security guard that there’s no camera. How can one easily find portable devices without a built-in camera?”
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je ne sais quoi writes “The April data is out for the Net Applications ‘market share’ survey of operating systems (more accurately referred to as a usage share). For the first time, Linux has reached 1%. This past month the Linux share increased by 0.12% which is well above the average monthly increase of 0.02%. Historically, the Net Applications estimate of market share has been lower than that of other organizations who measure this, but the abnormally large increase reported this month brings it closer to the median estimate of 1.11%. For other operating systems, Windows XP continued its slow decline by 0.64% to 62.21%, whereas Vista use is still increasing to 23.90%, but its rate of adoption is slowing. That is, this month’s increase of 0.48% is well below the 12-month average increase of 0.78% and down from the peak rate of increase of 1.00% per month on average in January-February 2008. The total Windows share dropped to 87.90%. Mac OS use decreased slightly to 9.73% from 9.77%, but usage share of the iPhone and iPod Touch combined increased by 0.1%.”
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As cool and advanced as the iPhone is, it still can’t do a lot of things that “lesser” phones can. The next version of the iPhone OS will deliver many of these features, and more. Of particular interest: Indications are the iPhone OS 3.0 will enable not just the capture of video, but the editing of it as well.
An anonymous reader writes “Ever wished your iPhone could do more than just play some cool games? How about using it as a spread spectrum transmitter to fly your R/C Toys around, complete with using a Linksys router as a receiver?”
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afabbro writes “There are scattered reports today that Apple is building a team to design its own chips, with an eye towards reducing power consumption on iPods and iPhones.”
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