Cody Taylor

magacious writes “March 10 is the 133rd anniversary of the first telephone call. It occurred between Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant Thomas Watson back on this day in 1876. But there is some debate about whether Bell is actually the rightful owner of the crown for such invention. Having worked on the idea of transmitting speech using electricity for some time, Bell filed his patent on 14 February 1876, either just before or just after his main rival for the title of inventor of the telephone, Elisha Gray, filed his own. Bell won the patent and Gray died in obscurity.”

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Here are 13 other people and one dog who also feel the same way.

Yes, Apple’s App Store carries great stuff for your iPhone. But some of the best applications Apple banned from the App Store are now found at an unauthorized store, called Cydia. But Apple is already prepping to send its legal sharks after The Cydia Store by leveraging DCMA in order to push jailbreaking into illegal territory.

Two free apps for the iPhone and iPod touch give users the ability to add any text they’d like, or their upcoming Google Calendar appointments, to their home/unlock screens. Check out how they work in screenshots.

It looks like someone got their mitts on a piece of technology history over at 1 Infinite Loop. Someone is selling some prototype iPhones with a wacky pre-iPhone type of OS on it. One of the iPhones actually even works.

Owen Goss writes “Everyone is familiar with the story of the iPhone developer who spends two weeks of spare time making a game that goes on to make them hundreds of thousands of dollars. The reality is that with the App Store now hosting over 25,000 apps, the competition is fierce. While it’s true that a few select apps are making developers rich, the reality is that most apps don’t make a lot of money. In a blog post I take a hard look at the first 24 days of sales data for the first game, Dapple, from Streaming Colour Studios. The post reflects what is likely the norm for developers just getting into the iPhone development game.”

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Palm essentially has to bet all of its money on the Pre phone – may go bust. But here’s the problem: No phone yet. All that buzz, and if you want a cool touch-screen phone, the choices are still pretty much your local Apple store, or a BlackBerry outlet. The Pre is nowhere to be found. And now, Palm admits that re-starting the buzz…

TechDirt is reporting that in response to the frustrations with Apple’s app store dictatorship, a few developers are looking to set up their own alternative app stores. Alternate app stores would only work on jailbroken phones, making their adoption scope limited, so the question is whether Apple will go after these start ups on the legal battlefield. “Apple, which collects a 30% commission from sellers on its store, doesn’t break out the site’s revenue. Brokerage firm Piper Jaffray estimates the site generated about 0 million in sales last year and projects total sales will grow to 0 million this year. Apple did not respond to requests for comment. But it has said in the past that with the iPhone it was trying to strike a balance between a closed device like the iPod and an open device like the PC.”

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The iPhone’s lead over smartphone upstart Android may be short-lived, according to an industry watcher’s predictions.

An anonymous reader writes “It’s not sci-fi, but rather advanced robotics research which is leading Intel to envision shape-shifting smartphones. ‘Imagine what you would do with this material,’ says Jason Campbell, a senior researcher at Intel’s Pittsburgh Lab who’s working in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University. ‘If you want to carry the device, you’d make it as small as possible by making it pack itself as densely as possible. When you go to surf the Web, you’re going to make it big.’ The material being studied is transparent silicon-dioxide hemispheres, which can roll around each other under electrical control to create different shapes. The lab has built 6-inch long actuators, which it’s working to reduce to 1-mm tube-sized prototypes. When will we see a shape-shifting phone? ‘In terms of me being able to buy it, that’s a difficult forecasting problem, because I have to guess about manufacturing costs,’ Campbell said. ‘I won’t do that. But we hope the science will be proved out in three to five years.'”

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