The | Apple iPhone | Thread

SRASC · Posted: Fri Jan 30, 2009 1:39 pm Post subject:

The Wall Street Journal is weighing in on Dell's rumored smartphone offering, adding further weight to rumors predicting the PC maker will enter the arena to take on Apple's iPhone.

Citing sources familiar with Dell's plans, the financial paper reported the Round Rock, Texas-based company has an office in the Chicago area where a group of engineers have been working on the phone "for more than a year."

"They produced prototypes built on Google Inc.'s Android operating system and Microsoft's Windows Mobile software," said the report.

One model has a touchscreen with no physical keyboard, like the iPhone. Another is a slider-style phone with a keypad that slides out from beneath the screen, like the Pre. The report also notes Dell's recent hiring of two former Motorola employees.

"We haven't committed to anything," a Dell spokesman told the Journal, which concluded Dell hasn't finalized its plans and could still give up the effort without releasing a device.

Meanwhile, Kaufman Brothers' analyst Shaw Wu wrote in a research note released to clients today that the news is consistent with his supply chain checks and his own comments from earlier this month, predicting an entrance into the cell phone market for Dell as soon as mid-February.

Dell might make its announcement at the GSMA Mobile World Congress event (formerly 3GSM) in Barcelona, Wu said.

"We believe it makes sense for Dell and other PC makers to pursue more aggressive strategies in the smart phone space," Wu wrote. "We believe smart phones are moving upstream into the notebook space. Dell is the latest PC vendor to enter the market...So far, only Apple has made material inroads."

The analyst reiterated his warning that Dell will need to stand out from the crowded market in order to succeed, recommending the company use its own operating system because "most of the other players use the same software, including Windows Mobile, Symbian, and/or Google Android, leaving little room for innovation."

Dell, like Research In Motion's BlackBerry Storm and the anticipated yet unreleased Palm Pre, faces a formidable opponent in the iPhone 3G. Last quarter saw the Apple device outsell the Storm four-to-one.

Since going on sale last summer, the iPhone 3G has sold more than 4.3 million units in the United States. Recent signs also point to a major update to the iPhone in June, possibly making it that much more difficult for any competitor to gain headway in the sector.

The Wall Street Journal also reported Hewlett-Packard is selling phones in Europe with an automatic backup feature, while Acer is planning to join Lenovo in the smartphone marketplace as well. Together, the iPhone and BlackBerry control 70% of the U.S. market.

This is a critical time for Dell to find a "hit", as the company is losing PC market share, including a 0.9 percent year-over-year decline last quarter. Shares of the company's stock have fallen 60 percent since August.

Wolfie · Posted: Fri Jan 30, 2009 1:58 pm Post subject:

Their only hope lies with Android and a hell of a hardware platform.

SRASC · Posted: Fri Jan 30, 2009 3:37 pm Post subject:

SRASC · Posted: Fri Jan 30, 2009 10:59 pm Post subject:

Updated 2.2.1? What works & what doesn't?

SRASC · Posted: Sat Jan 31, 2009 1:17 pm Post subject:

SRASC · Posted: Sat Jan 31, 2009 5:59 pm Post subject:

QuickPwn for Windows (version 2.2.5-2) has been updated to work with the latest 2.2.1 firmware.

You can dowload the official torrent here.

It offers support for the iPhone 3G, iPhone 2G, and the iPod Touch 1G.

SRASC · Posted: Sat Jan 31, 2009 6:10 pm Post subject:

Digital Film Tools has released Light 1.2, an iPhone application that can add realistic lighting and shadow to photos.

Light and shadow is introduced using digital versions of the gobo library created by Gamproducts. Gobos (patterns) are widely used by lighting designers in theatre, film/TV and photography to enhance the visual impact of their lighting. Normally used in front of lights during photography, gobos can be applied to the entire image or inside a selected area using Light. Gobos from the Gamproducts collection are arranged into the following categories: Breakups, Foliage, Lights, Sky and Windows.

Features:
- Control light brightness, blurring, and displacement for light wrapping effects
- Adjust light position, rotation and size with on-screen controls
- Isolate light using the selection screen
- Position slider determines where to put the light
- Range slider selects the amount of light
- Lum (Luminance), Hue, or Sat (Saturation) buttons change the selection method
- Shake on the Gobo screens to choose a random gobo
- Shake on the image editing screen to reset controls
- Edit in portrait or landscape mode

SRASC · Posted: Sat Jan 31, 2009 9:02 pm Post subject:

Once thought to be building Flash for the iPhone mostly on its own, Adobe has mentioned at the World Economic Forum that it's not only continuing work on the animation plug-in but has teamed up with Apple to make it a reality.

In an interview with Bloomberg at the Davos, Switzerland event, Adobe chief Shantanu Narayen describes development as a complicated two-way process rather than maintaining the previous image of a one-sided effort that would depend on App Store approval before it could launch.

"It’s a hard technical challenge, and that’s part of the reason Apple and Adobe are collaborating," he says. "The ball is in our court. The onus is on us to deliver."

What hurdles Adobe has to overcome aren't mentioned by the executive, though the company's long porting process has underscored the difficulty involved. Narayen had said that he was "pleased with progress" as far back as June of last year -- just three months after the iPhone SDK made native third-party apps an option on the touchscreen device.

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs has maintained since nearly a year ago that the real obstacle is the nature of Flash itself. While desktop Flash is too resource-heavy for the small processor and low memory of smartphones like the iPhone, Jobs has warned that Flash Lite is too feature-limited and doesn't do many of the things users expect Flash to do -- such as playing video on the web or showing complex animations on websites.

Most Flash Lite implementations actually depend on an app that runs entirely outside of the web browser and are often based on older versions of Flash that limit their performance and feature set; Jobs has argued for a "product in the middle" that does more.

Whether or not the collaborative process involves working on that app is very much a mystery, but it may be necessary for Flash to appear in Apple's preferred form, as third-party iPhone apps aren't allowed to serve as plugins based on the iPhone SDK's guidelines.

And in the meantime, the cellphone maker has publicly advocated HTML 5 as a replacement and is collaborating with fellow browser developers Mozilla and Opera to perform many of the same functions of Flash but in a more universal and less resource-hungry standard.

SRASC · Posted: Sun Feb 01, 2009 11:14 am Post subject:

SRASC · Posted: Sun Feb 01, 2009 5:56 pm Post subject:

The iPhone Dev Team have released a tethered jailbreak for the iPod Touch 2G named "redsn0w lite."

Unfortunately, this is a tethered jailbreak, meaning each time you turn your iPod Touch on, you must connect it to your computer, and do some steps over again. The Dev-Team is still trying to find out a way to have an untethered jailbreak.

Redsn0w Read Me
http://redsn0w.com/README.txt
Redsn0w Lite
http://redsn0w.com/rslite101.zip

shagadelic99tt · Posted: Sun Feb 01, 2009 6:33 pm Post subject:

new iphone firmware available...2.2.1...ne suggestions?...aspecially for 3g iphone owners?

SRASC · Posted: Sun Feb 01, 2009 6:36 pm Post subject:

SRASC · Posted: Sun Feb 01, 2009 8:46 pm Post subject:

Is Apple about to release a new iPhone?
The world of Apple is awash with rumours that the Californian computer maker may be close to releasing the third version of its highly successful iPhone and that a number of handsets are already being used.

Several sites have already reported that the latest firmware update for the phone - version 2,1 - contains references to a new hardware version - also 2,1.

Earlier this week, Macrumors reported that the reference to the new model could be found in the upgrade’s USB configuration section. “These numbers do not change for simple storage increases and instead represent functionally different devices,” the site said.

Now software developers claim to have found evidence in site traffic analytics that at least two dozen new iPhone handsets are being trialled by Apple in the San Francisco area and that they may have been in use since last October.

No details of the new device’s capabilities are known and Apple has refused to comment although Macrumours reported that it could have a new architecture based upon multiple core processors instead of the single chip in the current iPhone.

SRASC · Posted: Tue Feb 03, 2009 9:33 pm Post subject:

Occipital has released ClearCam, an application that improves the quality of your iPhone camera.
ClearCam takes 6 photos in 2.5 seconds, fuses them together using an algorithm called super resolution, and creates a sharper, 4 megapixel photo with less noise. There is also a QuickShot mode that takes 4 photos in under 2 seconds and saves the sharpest to the camera roll.
The capture and enhance steps have been separated so you can keep snapping photos and enhance them later. It typically takes 30-40 seconds for a good enhancement.
We spent a lot of time optimizing our code to make it run fast enough on the iPhone. A lot of our effort went into being able to align photos precisely with sub-pixel accuracy (required for super resolution), and to also do it fast.
You can install ClearCam from the BigBoss Cydia Repository.
(Only reason I haven’t downloaded it myself, its a 15 day trial)

SRASC · Posted: Tue Feb 03, 2009 9:34 pm Post subject:

After leaving its once-touted background push data feature by the wayside, Apple is now reportedly mulling an option that would let iPhone apps run background processes and give the phone true multitasking.
The hint of a change in strategy was given to Mac Rumors, which now hears from unspecified sources that Apple is considering the switch away from its original approach and may let programs operate as “user selectable background processes.”
Why such a move would occur isn’t known. When the iPhone maker first unveiled background push notification at the Worldwide Developers Conference in 2008, the company famously chastised Microsoft and most other smartphone OS developers for challenging users with difficult solutions to quitting or switching between apps and suggested that then-current phones couldn’t handle the task. Even so, the solution precludes background use of third-party apps that need always-on access, like radio or VoIP calling software.
At the June event, Apple said it considered background push notification an ideal compromise that would close apps but keep them “listening” for data through an Internet channel; an instant messaging app could signal that it has received new messages without having to stay open and chew up system time.
However, the company has since remained almost entirely silent on the matter. Where early iPhone 2.1 beta firmware included background notifications, the fourth developer test version pulled the feature altogether without any commentary on Apple’s part beyond an alleged reply e-mail from CEO Steve Jobs, who stated that company wanted to get background push “100% right the first time.” The official 2.1 and 2.2 releases have similarly passed on the feature while adding others.
While no additional evidence has come up to support theories that the delay is being used to implement true background processes, speculation has surfaced that Apple may have to wait until its next major iPhone revision to implement the necessary code. With a 412MHz ARM processor and only 128MB of temporary memory, the first- and second-generation iPhone lines may struggle to support more than one or two background apps before becoming unusable. If the feature requires a new ARM processor or additional memory to be useful, Apple could either restrict the number of background processes on older models or else disable the feature entirely for these devices.
The Cupertino, Calif.-based firm may nonetheless be under pressure to add the support in spite of cutting off legacy support. In addition to existing competitors that already had background support but have only recently launched direct iPhone alternatives, Palm’s new Pre smartphone will have authentic multitasking in an iPhone-like interface by letting users shuffle or toss “cards” that represent active software.

SRASC · Posted: Tue Feb 03, 2009 9:36 pm Post subject:

In today’s Business 24-7 article, it stated that a new iPhone would be due out in June. It also stated that the current iPhone 3G will be available in UAE on February 15, as we covered here
June does seem like a logical time for the next iPhone, since Apple usually releases a new iPhone every year.

The latest 3G model will become available on February 15 according to Dow Jones, and etisalat will be targeting private and business users. Both post-paid and prepaid subscribers will be able to use the product and voice, data and SMS services will be available. And the next version of the device, which is due out in June, will be launched in the UAE at the same time.

Click for full-size.

(Mock Up)

SRASC · Posted: Tue Feb 03, 2009 11:33 pm Post subject:

Also released in Cydia today, MultiTap Keyboard for those of you that missed or prefer the T9 Predictive Text format of typing on a phone.

SRASC · Posted: Wed Feb 04, 2009 8:00 am Post subject:

The Tiffen Company has announced a special version of its Tiffen Dfx Digital Filter Creative Effects software for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch owners.

Tiffen Photo fx software is currently available on the Apple iTunes app store at an introductory price of $2.99 and features 26 filters/effects with slider controls for an infinite range of custom effects within five different, fun groups and an extensive range of 27 different film looks. The software, launched just two days ago, is already ranked in the top 10 on the iTunes photo app site.

The Tiffen Photo fx software allows users to enhance images from photos taken or stored on their iPhones, saves the new images for display later without overwriting the original image, to email friends, family and business associates.

The easy to use, fun software includes a wide range of creative variations such as: Face fx, Outer fx, Fun fx, Classic fx, and Wild fx. The Tiffen Photo fx application even includes a random filter selector feature. Just open any photo in Tiffen Photo fx, shake the iPhone slightly for the application to randomly choose a filter that can be applied to the image, then permit another filter to be selected or again randomly have one picked.

SRASC · Posted: Thu Feb 05, 2009 9:23 am Post subject:

How to get bmobile carrier logo
Credit: zscrugby

Code:

/System/Library/Carrier Bundles/ATT_US.bundle

Drag both files there
Do the same for

Code:

/System/Library/Carrier Bundles/Unknown.bundle

Then go to Make It Mine and set your carrier as ATT (not AT&T)
Respring phone (if necessary) and voila

Default_CARRIER_ATT.png

FSO_CARRIER_ATT.png

Default_CARRIER_ATT.png

FSO_CARRIER_ATT.png

Result: