The long awaited Apple iPhone software development kit is coming, it appears, on March 6. This is only a few days late. It’s not completely clear yet whether or not the kit will actually be released or whether it is just in beta and will be announced for testing purposes.
EDIT: Apple promises “exciting” new enterprise features. COULD IT BE? Might we soon have long-awaited Microsoft ActiveSync support? Only time will tell….
A Democratic bill in the House of Representatives would force AT&T and Apple to abandon their successful business model, interfering with the markets in order to allow customers to activate the iPhone without a subsidized contract. Rep. Ed Markey, the very liberal Democrat congressman from Massachusetts, wants the FCC to regulate the contracts between AT&T and its customers and force Apple to make the iPhone available without a contract. Though this might be good for the few people who want to use T-Mobile instead of AT&T, the net result would be MUCH higher prices for everyone. This is another example of the Democrats over-regulating the economy and trying to get involved in the tech sector, something about which they know absolutely zilch.
Congress ought to spend more time passing the legislation necessary to protect the American people from terrorists instead of going after enterprising businesses.
Facebook is making over its website in the coming weeks with a cleaner look inspired by its iPhone site, arguably the best iPhone optimized site available.
Facebook will continue to dominate that space, it appears, by staying ahead of the competition and creating a cleaner, stylized and more useful interface than MySpace.
For those of us who use OS X in an enterprise environment, it can be difficult to make our Exchange calendars sync with our iPhones. There is an excellent workaround, however. All of the updated versions of Office for Mac include a synchronization service that makes it easy as pie.
In Entourage, go to Entourage > Preferences > Sync Services.
There you have an option to sync your address book, calendar, or both with Apple’s built-in software. This works great for synching the iPhone.
For those of us lucky enough to own an iPhone, help is coming in the way of a delicious Apple SDK. The main fault of the iPhone has been, for quite some time, the lack of native third party applications. In the past, the only way to to run applications directly on the iPhone was to Jailbreak it, which could void your warranty. Most of us stayed away from this.
Here’s to hoping for some iPhone SDK goodness this week! Additionally, I sure hope Business Week was wrong in its prediction that the SDK could be several weeks to a month late.
In a move that will make potential iPhone customers happy, Yahoo Inc. announced that they will be providing unlimited storage on their free e-mail service. This is good news for existing customers, who will see their limit go from 1GB, past limits set by Google and Microsoft to an unlimited mailbox. In other words, you’ll never need to delete another e-mail if you use Yahoo.
Despite the FoxNews.com’s hilarious claim that floppy diskettes can hold 144 megabytes (they really meant 1.44 megabytes) of data, the article is an interesting read. It appears that online storage is finally getting cheap enough for this to be a good business model for Yahoo Inc.
For iPhone customers, this is great news because they can have unlimited, push e-mail synchronization on their Yahoo Mail account.
The Apple iPhone will be released on June 11.
Good news, if you’ve been (im)patiently waiting.
Recent events have changed the field in which the iPhone is going to compete. Since it was introduced earlier this year, Microsoft introduced Windows Mobile 6. Far from innovative, WM6 is merely a .x upgrade to WM5 with a few added features (like HTML e-mail) that should have been around to begin with. TechBlog.TheVanguard.Org noticed something else, too: AT&T seems to be making its EDGE data service network faster. In some ways, EDGE data will always be inferior to 3G (HSDPA) technology at AT&T. EDGE cannot be used while in a GSM phone call. With HSDPA, users can have simultaneous data and voice calls. However, we’ve recently seen EDGE coverage not too far from our offices (we’re in a 3G area, so we have to do some traveling to see EDGE) begin to increase in speed from about 100kbps to 170kbps.
As some of you may recall, one of our biggest complaints about the iPhone was its lack of 3G. It’s clear why Apple decided to go with EDGE data, however. Windows Mobile devices that operate on AT&T’s 3G network suffer from terrible battery life. In a device with a screen as vibrant and large as the iPhone (and with as many capabilities) battery life is likely to become an issue.
We think the increased speeds (with more promised in the future) make EDGE viable for light browsing and heavy e-mail. We’re also a lot more excited about the potential for use by business people who are turned off by Windows Mobile’s battery life problems and lack of compatibility with the Mac.
TechBlog.TheVanguard.Org predicted it, and it is now a matter of fact: Apple and Cisco settled out of court, and both companies will be allowed to use the iPhone name. This ends several weeks of predictions and Internet rumor that led some to speculate that Apple would be forced to change the name of the iPhone before it starts shipping this summer. The Apple iPhone lives!
With the explosive popularity of smartphones among ordinary people comes quite a few questions. One that was asked of me recently is “how do I browse all these java-laced web forums to view content?” Windows Smartphones sometimes have problems where the PDAs don’t. The culprit is Internet Explorer. There is a better way, however. Opera Mini is a handy Internet Explorer alternative that works fine on the Blackjack and the Q for this purpose. It is a free web browser that works on many platforms including Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone Edition. Until the iPhone comes out (which will have a fully-featured version of Safari) we’ll all have to make do. By the way, Java is pretty corny on the Blackjack. You might want to install IBM’s version to get rid of annoying messages that popup when running Opera Mini.