The new iPhone 4 can play high definition video, but with a 3.5″ screen, you probably won’t notice the difference. On the “Summary” tab in iTunes you can tell it to sync the standard definition copies of videos if you have them. Anything you buy in iTunes that’s HD comes with an SD copy, too.
A new version of NetNewsWire for the iPhone is out, free (with ads) or $2 “premium edition” (no ads). It syncs with Google Reader. Recommended.
Apple forced the makers of a dictionary to remove “objectionable” words before allowing it onto the App Store. Waiting for that Steve Jobs blog post saying they’re changing how they’re going to run that any day now…
I’d been looking for a good iPhone dictionary and was unhappy with the Dictionary.com one, which I deleted almost immediately. Since I already know all my curse words, I’ve bought Ninjawords and will give it a try (link opens iTunes).
Netflix is reportedly going to start offering its Instant Queue streaming service for the iPhone and the Wii. This makes a great value-add for the Wii, which has been on the XBOX for a while now. It’s already plugged into your TV, which is likely placed in a better spot for movie-viewing than your computer.
YouTube - New York Nearest Subway Augmented Reality App for iPhone 3GS from acrossair
It’s like the future. Reminds me of the locative art in Spook Country.
stevenf.com - My loving homage to every breathless unboxing…
Hilarious. Worth watching all the way to the end to see every single thing that’s inside the box.
Handy webpage you can add to your iPhone’s home screen that lets you copy special characters to the phone’s clipboard.
(Just doing some fanciful thinking about an iPhone with video.)
If a new iPhone comes out that has a built-in video camera, it’s not a leap to imagine they’d introduce an iChat app with it that lets you transmit video while you talk. Problem is, the camera’s on the opposite side of the phone from the screen, so if you point it at yourself, you can’t see the other person’s video. They could put two cameras on it, with one facing toward you, but I don’t see that happening. Maybe instead it’d more one-way in design. The idea that you would be talking to someone and want them to be able to see something cute your cat’s doing or whatever. You take the phone away from your ear (Maybe it automatically switches to speaker even), hit “send video”, and then point the camera at it. Your friend gets the video in realtime, and then you go back to talking. It’s not video chat, but honestly, how useful is video chat? Seeing someone’s face adds a little to the conversation, but not a whole lot, and it means you’re devoting your eyes to the task and not doing the stuff many people do when they talk on the phone like fold laundry, play video games, etc.
I guess Belkin or someone could sell a little video iPhone conference call stand. You’d put your iPhone in it and it would have a few mirrors to get your face into the phone’s camera while still letting you face the front toward you. Or of course a snap-on front-facing camera accessory for $50.
Of course every Mac has video chat built in already, and I don’t know that people use that often. Partly just because my phone can ring at any point, but I need to have my computer awake and be signed into iChat to receive a video chat invitation. Maybe a video iPhone could let me receive a call on my phone and then transfer it to my Mac? The conversation could keep going through Bluetooth but I’d get the video on my Mac with its iSight camera in a better position to have a face-to-face conversation.
I’ve played around with Google’s new sync services for a few days now, and mostly it works well. Since I use Google Apps instead of regular Gmail I had to go into my administrator panel and turn it on first, then reload the mobile page a few times to get it to work. I’ve found three problems so far, two of which I’ve solved.
So basically I’m left with less than what I had before. I can use iCal and Google Calendar, but I could do that before with CalDAV. Now my Google Contacts stay up-to-date, but Gmail already knows people’s email addresses, and for anything else my phone is where I need them.
(I’ve deleted and started this post over five times now. For some reason I can’t put words together about this topic I’m happy with.)
The Kindle 2 doesn’t appeal to much more than the Kindle did. Though I can see some uses for e-readers, and there are good arguments for their advantages, especially in saving printing and distributions costs for publishers, I really like reading novels.
What I’d like is not a book reader but a magazine reader. I actually feel guilty reading newspapers and magazines because I’ll often only read a few articles. I look at all that paper that was printed for my to read just a small percentage of the words. Sure, most of the articles are online, but the Web isn’t a great place to read newspapers or magazines. You get a column of text with maybe some embedded photos. None of the nice layout you get on the real deal. You often don’t get the sidebars or inset graphs, or if you do, they’re squeezed into what the Web can do.
I’d like to see a device with some size to it, maybe 7″×10″ or so with a color screen that can display a full page of magazine text. Give it pinch-to-zoom like the iPhone has for smaller text, and a sensor to let it flip to landscape for double-page spreads. Then you just need a subscription service (I think the Kindle already has this) where you can pull down each new edition of a publication when it comes out. Ditto for comic books. Lots of time is being spent trying to replicate comics on the Web, but reading tiny lettered text on a computer monitor feels unnatural. On a handheld device I think it’d work very nicely.
In other words, someone please invent this.
Google turns on Exchange for iPhone and Windows Mobile users - Ars Technica
Seems like it only syncs calendars and contacts now, not push mail. I haven’t tested it out yet.
The iPhone now has the ability to add the location a photo was taken to its metadata. Flickr’s been able to handle this for a while, but you had to map the photos manually. To enable it to understand the location data, first you have to authorize it to “Import EXIF location data” in your Privacy & Permissions settings. Unfortunately, according to Macworld, this data isn’t included if you email the photo directly from your iPhone, but if you copy it to your computer first, then upload it, it should work. Emailing a photo directly from the phone also resizes it, though, so it’s better to upload them from your computer anyway. I’m hoping that Flickr will release an iPhone app at some point.
Sweet: Pandora’s Streaming Radio App for iPhone
Sounds like it’s worth checking out, but sadly I don’t have much occasion to listen to these sorts of things as it won’t work on the Metro.
The Real Price Difference Between the Old and New iPhone
Since you’re dividing the true cost of the new iPhone over time, if you invest the money it’s actually cheaper than the old ones.
The Cost of the iPhone: More Per Month for Data
New data plans cost $10 more, meaning over time the new iPhones actually cost more than the previous ones.
Everything TypePad: Introducing TypePad for iPhone and iPod touch
Everything TypePad brings you the latest TypePad news, along with advice and ideas for making your blog great.In the tiny way that such things can, it bothers me that the button on my iPhone that lets me listen to music is called “iPod” instead of “iTunes”. An “iPod” is a thing you hold in your hand, “iTunes” is a program that plays music. If I want to run the music program on my iPhone, I should be launching the music program, right?
The new iPod touch (and soon the iPhone) lets you buy music online. The button for doing that is labeled “iTunes”, but it’s just the store, not the whole program.
So now the program that’s called “iTunes” on your computer is a program that lets you play music (and videos), lets you buy music, and lets you sync stuff to your iPod/iPhone. The program that’s called “iTunes” one your iPod is just a store. Somehow this naming bothers me. iTunes is more than just the store, but Apple seems to want people to think it’s just that. But really you can use it without ever entering the store or buying any music. Most people have much more music that they’ve ripped from CDs than they’ve bought from the store.
Very nice custom iPhone portal for TypePad. Emailing in posts was easy enough, but this is great for making edits or approving comments on the fly. Update: and one for Movable Type.