If you are short on Karma and are looking for some good high quality iPhone App’s, right now you can kill two birds with one stone by buying one of six Apps from the App store. For limited time, upon purchasing one of these App’s the developers will donate all of the proceeds to a charity. The app developers that are participating in the charity event are those for Groceries (soon to be released), FileMagnet, Sketches, Pennies, Kineo, and Where To?. The charities they will be donating to are the Prevent Cancer Foundation, UNICEF, Oxfam International, Teach for America, and American Humane. You can check out all of these App’s in the iTunes Store.
Over the weekend Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg and many other tech related sites, revealed in a podcast on his personal blog that he had heard news that a new iPod Nano would be coming out this September, and would be adopting a candybar form factor like the Nano two generations previous. In addition to this, he predicted that the iPod Touch would be getting GPS as a part of a speedbump. This is all however speculation.
One of my favorite free games in the App Store has just gone down. This game is called Tris, and it closely follows in likeness to every other iteration of Tetris in existence. The one thing it has on the others however, is it being very pretty. In spite of it’s “prettiness”, The Tetris Company (the company which owns the right to Tetris, is going after the developer of Tris for copyright infringement. Apple has pulled Tris from the Store in accordance. Some words from the developer:
That, I’m afraid, is essentially game over. Do they have a case? No. Not really. I am convinced that if it went to court, the “copyright” claim would get thrown out completely. The trademark, perhaps not — but if I changed the name, to e.g. “Trys”, that would be much harder for them to argue.
Rumors often come out to be untrue, and the latest one about the Nike + App for the iPhone may as well fall into that category. Though it is known that the two companies are working together to design a running App for the iPhone, it has now been learned that the recent screen shots found on the internet purportedly depicting the new App, may not be real at all. These screen capture were first published on a FRench website with a claim that they were beta screen from the new app. As of now there is no set timetable for the App.
It appears as though Apple intends to take over the world with it’s new-fangled iPhone 3G. Soon everyone will be under the control of Big Brother, er… Apple via their extremely addicting and GPS tracking ready phones! Though that is hopefully just a nightmare, it seems as though Apple wants to soon blanket the world in iPhone’s with a new yearly production estimate of 40 million units a year.
As it stands, Apple is pumping out 150,000 iPhones a day which roughly equates to 39 million a year (5 days a week, 52 weeks a year). Apple should have no problem selling these iPhones because of the international rollout and the Best Buy initiative, greater availability leads to more sales.
What does need to be fixed is the activation process, analysts deem the current process as the bottleneck that limits efficiency. Analysts are also pointing at a cheaper iPhone model to be announced during Macworld. That’ll certainly help Apple reach its ambitious goals.
In Poland there are two companies distributing the iPhone 3G. The first is T-Mobile Poland, which is operating it’s self as a normal company would when introducing a new product- advertise. The second company distributing the iPhone is Orange Poland, which is going to much more overt methods to advertise the iPhone. Orange Poland is not only advertising, but also hiring actors to pretend they are buying the phone, in order to spike the public’s interest. According to an Orange employee:
“We have these fake queues at front of 20 stores around the country to drum up interest in the iPhone,”
Seems like pretty good marketing tactics, but then again, couldn’t this be confusing to consumers? They may just be buying the iPhone because they think it is good enough for a celebrity. If a celebrity believes the iPhone is good, then there is no problem with doing this, but what about the celebrities who do not intend to use an iPhone because they think it’s a bad product. Isn’t that false advertising in a way?
As you may have already heard, M$ is recruiting Jerry Seinfeld to do a series of commercials promoting Windows Vista, as a part of a $300 million advertising campaign. These ads will likely be a counter to Apple’s highly effective Get a Mac ads, which spend their time lambasting Windows Vista. According to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft will pay Seinfeld $10 million to appear in a series of ads for its “Windows, Not Walls” campaign that will feature Seinfeld and Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chairman. According to AdWeek, other highly-relevant comics like Chris Rock and Will Ferrell may also appear in the ads.
Wired notes that Microsoft’s “choice of Seinfeld was an effort to avoid pandering to the kids with ‘a celebrity that was too hip.’” Mission accomplished.
Responding to a complaint via email about the pervasive crashing of App’s on the iPhone, Steve Jobs has pushed out this blunt and sans elaborative response:
This is a known iPhone bug that is being fixed in the next software update in September
I suppose this means we should be expecting another Firmware Update in the next few weeks, though I believe it will be 2.0.3 rather than 2.1.
Sometimes my iPhone tends to slow down or cause certain 3rd party applications to intermittently crash. Previously, every time this was bugging me I would just power-off, power-on my phone to clear the RAM. After this it would run beautifully without a snag.
Similar to how one would force quit a program on Windows or Mac via the Task Manager, you can do the same on the iPhone. If an Application is hanging or simply isn’t working correctly, this can be solved by holding down the Home Button for 6 seconds. This will allow you to terminate any tasks that are currently being run in the background, which by extension frees up RAM, and allows other Apps to run more smoothly. Enjoy!
Apple’s MobileMe staff has announced that they are no replacing MobileMe Updates with MobileMe News, which is now more easily accessible via a button located on the top right tool bar. This comes after Apple announced earlier this week that they would extend MobileMe subscribers plans by another 60 days on top of the 30 days already added.
Here are the exact quotations from what Apple has to say about their nuanced web service:
This will be the last MobileMe Status posting. Instead, we have redesigned the MobileMe Support page so it’s clearer and has an enlarged area, now in the upper right hand corner, to report on system status. This is the place to go if you’re experiencing a problem and want to know if it’s related to an issue with our servers. It’s also the page to visit if you’re looking for general information about setting up MobileMe on different computers and devices, for answers to frequently asked questions, and more.
In addition we’ve created a new place for regular posts about all parts of the service, including enhancements, updates, explanations, fixes, support announcements, and other news as it arrives. MobileMe News is now accessible via a link on the right hand side of the tool bar at me.com, and we expect to update it frequently.
