The iPhone 3G from Apple is one of the more multi-talented Smartphones and boasts a huge range of skills from the very basic to the rather special. Whether you are simply making calls or navigating yourself around a new city, the Apple iPhone 3G allows you do all this and much more. It doesn’t look half bad either.
Proporta have designed the Perfora Case with the iPhone 3G specifically in mind. This stylish case not only enhances the aesthetic of the device (even if we do say so ourselves), but will also keep your iPhone 3G fully protected from all of life’s little nasties.
Made from high quality, durable leather, the physical design of The Perfora Case or the iPhone 3G provides surrounding protection. The secure closure mechanism ensures that your iPhone 3G will be as snug as a bug in a rug and the matching belt clip also makes this case ideal for use on the move.
Proporta know that screen protection is vital at the best of times, but with a touch screen you really shouldn’t be without their Advanced Screen Protector (Apple iPhone 3G series). They’ve managed to increase the thickness without impairing screen brightness or clarity. Clever eh?
Today equinux has released Stationery Pack 2, a comprehensive collection of high-quality, interactive e-mail designs for Mac OS X Leopard Mail. Stationery Pack 2 contains over 660 e-mail designs, that can be generated from a total of 122 templates with a simple mouse click.
“We are proud that Stationery Pack 2 expands Mac OS X Leopard with a new feature: interactive e-mail designs,” said equinux CEO Till Schadde. “Particularly MobileMe users, who used to send greeting cards with .Mac, find Stationery Pack, with its wealth of e-mail choices, an ideal successor with even more possibilities.”
Many e-mail templates in Stationery Pack 2 change their designs: A click on the background alters color, themes and photos. A total of 122 high-class templates are thereby transformed into more than 660 possible e-mail designs for nearly every occasion: congratulations, invitations, holidays greetings and much more.
Stationery Pack 2 templates contain dynamic text fields, which adapt to the length of your message. To turn your own photos into a virtual postcard with a personal touch, you can insert photos from iPhoto, Aperture and any other picture folder in Mac OS X. Through sophisticated drop zones and clever combinations of place holders for pictures, you’re able to create exciting e-mails for unforgettable moments.
For an overview of the vast array of different e-mail designs, equinux delivers Stationery Pack 2 with useful software. The display surface is similar to iTunes and divides the template collection into seven categories. It also sorts according to key words and filters templates with the help of a text search. To give you a better idea of each template, an enlarged preview of each is also provided along with all its design variations.
Stationery Pack 2 is now available in the equinux online store at www.equinux.com/store from $49.95. The software appearing in a high-quality box is coming soon to Apple retailers.
Next up, 2.1. The rumors have cut-n-paste and MMS as new features as well as the push-notification API available for third-party vendors for use with such programs as Instant Messaging.
Apple took a leap into the enterprise market last Friday with the release of the iPhone firmware 2.0, a free downloadable upgrade for current first-generation users and pre-loaded on the 3G iPhone. The vault was the inclusion of full native support for Microsoft’s heavily used corporate email server, Exchange. Now, business men and women around the globe would be able to get their email on their iPhone in real-time. In other words, when new email appeared in their Inbox on their Mac or PC at the office, it would also be on the iPhone. This method is termed “push” as in pushing email to your phone rather than the phone checking for new email every 15, 30, or 60 minutes per user defined settings.
Push email has its advantages, like being constantly up to date with your email, but it also has some nasty cons. Users that see a large influx of email coming in throughout the day will find heavy battery usage due to the constant pushing of messages. Instead of holding off at a minimum of every 15 minutes to get your email, now your messages are filling up your iPhone every minute a new message is sent to you. If you receive 10 messages in 15 minutes, your iPhone will have 10 active sessions with your Exchange server within those 15 minutes. Multiple this by the hours in your day of heavy traffic and you’ll notice a red battery on your iPhones screen real fast. Add the 3G iPhone to the mix and it may be at 20% by the end of lunch. Not that this problem isn’t reserved just for Exchange users, but also Apple’s new MobileMe is effected by this issue as well. Anytime high traffic email is pushed to your iPhone, your phone will be draining its battery very quickly.
There are ways around this battery dump for your iPhone. In the Settings section, you will find the third icon labeled “Fetch New Data”. Tapping this brings up various settings. The first is “Push” which lets you turn it on or off. If you have more than one push account, say your Exchange server at work and your personal MobileMe, you can tap the “Advanced” selection on the bottom of the screen and then individually disable push for each account to allow you to retain, say your work email to be pushed and not your personal mail.
Push technology is not a new problem for batteries and it’s one Apple needs to actively find a solution to. Other manufactures such a Research In Motion (BlackBerry) have made great strives in keeping the battery juiced throughout the day while still receiving lots of email. If Apple wishes to overtake the millions of BlackBerrys in the enterprise, it needs to get this battery drain plugged.
James Tagg, Truphone’s CEO, said: “What Truphone for the iPhone does is really simple but absolutely sensational: it gives people low-priced international calls, whether they want to phone someone abroad or avoid roaming charges when making calls from abroad.
“With just a few clicks to download and install Truphone, anyone can afford to take their iPhone on holiday this summer – or call their friends and family abroad,” he added.
Truphone enables an iPhone to make calls to any number over the internet instead of over GSM, at Truphone’s fabulous internet rates. The rates are especially competitive for international calls, including landlines in 40 countries at GBP0.03 [USD0.06] per minute and mobiles at just GBP0.15 [USD0.30] per minute. To Canada, the USA and China, even calls to mobiles are just GBP0.03 [USD0.06] per minute.
Making a call using Truphone is exactly like making any other call on the iPhone: a single touch to bring the dialler up on the touch screen, touch-dial the number or choose from the iPhone’s own address book, and a touch to start the call. [Visit www.truphone.com/iphone to see a preview video of Truphone on the iPhone.]
Truphone for the iPhone is available to download from Apple’s new App Store for free. There are no monthly subscriptions or other charges. Visit www.truphone.com/iphone for more information.
Truphone pricing
Wi-Fi calls to countries in the Tru Zone always cost the same amazing flat rate, from anywhere in the world. This means a Truphone call on your iPhone to Sydney or London or Moscow or Rio always costs just 3p/6c per minute to landlines and 15p/30c per minute to mobiles. The majority of the world’s mobile users are in the Tru Zone - it includes the UK, Brazil, Australia, Thailand, Japan, Russia, Hong Kong, almost all of Europe, and loads more countries besides. Calls to USA, Canada and China are even lower still: a flat 3p/min to call landlines and mobiles. Customers receive free credit worth GBP2.00 [USD4.00] when they first sign up for Truphone.
SvenOnTech has already told you about this fun loving group of guys and gals that believe there is an under estimated market in first-generation iPhones and now we’re telling you about its crazy ways with the newest Super Phone. Rapid Repair has fully dismantled a new 3G iPhone and completely documented it on its web site. With only hours of the release of the follow up to Apple’s widely successful smartphone, Rapid Repair has yanked its new treasure apart. For us! The great thing about Rapid Repair is that it doesn’t want all the glory for itself and is giving away instructions with needed tools on how to take apart your very own shinny new black or white iPhone. If your sense of adventure is high, or your pocket book with green stuff, then you may want to travel this road less traveled and give it a shot!
If you’re looking to upgrade your current iPhone to the 3G and desire to keep the new one in one piece but would like a discount on it, check out Rapid Repairs buy-back program. You could get up to $150 for your iPhone!
Apple Nailed with Nasty Trojan That Takes Over Macs Emailing, Passwords, and Even Takes Your Picture
Mac fanboys love to point out the fact that Windows users must waste immense systems resources to protect themselves from the millions of viruses, trojans, and spyware that live on the Internet. Even Apple makes light of this Windows malware problem in its commercial entitled Viruses in which Mac says to PC, “I run Mac OS 10 so I don’t have to worry about your spyware and viruses”. Sadly, however, Macs are no more protected from such attacks as is the Windows operating system. With holes and security vulnerabilities found in OS X and its default applications, such as Safari’s Zero-day exploit, Apple needs to start taking some defensive moves as it increases sales of its shinny machines to unsuspecting “switchers”.
Point in case, today SecureMac is reporting that the AppleScript.THT Trojan Horse runs hidden on a Mac and , “Allows a malicious user complete remote access to the system, can transmit system and user passwords, and can avoid detection by opening ports in the firewall and turning off system logging. Additionally, the AppleScript.THT Trojan horse can log keystrokes, take pictures with the built-in Apple iSight camera, take screenshots, and turn on file sharing. The Trojan horse exploits a recently discovered vulnerability with the Apple Remote Desktop Agent, which allows it to run as root.” Ouch! The trojan is distributed through web sites, iChat, and Limewire. This trojan only effects OS X 10.4 and 10.5.
There are a few ways to protect yourself from this trojan. One, do not download an AppleScript named ASthtv05 (60 KB in size), use sharing services such Limewire, or use a virus scanner such as SecureMac’s MacScan. SvenOnTech does not endorse this product; however, it would recommend it over Norton or McAfee as we have tested those on the Mac and they are horrible.
President of SecureMac, Nicholas Raba, cautions OS X users by telling SvenOnTech, “The increased number of threats, security advisories, and security updates is an indication that Mac users must pay attention to computer security issues. As Apple’s market share continues to grow, so will security research and hack attempts against OS X.”
Recommended reading: MacForensicsLab Malware document.
Aaron Vronko thinks a lot of people are too caught up in the 3G iPhone frenzy and thus are missing something big right before their eyes. In fact, it’s right there in their hands: the first-generation iPhone.
Aaron Vronko is the co-founder of Rapid Repair, popular for its iPod repair and used sales, and he spent some time on the phone with SvenOnTech last week. Building a strong business from an abundance of used and damaged music players by Apple, Vronko believes that it can continue its growth by adding iPhones to the mix. Vronko senses that there are two markets with the first-generation iPhone come July 11th, the date of release of the 3G iPhone. The first market is that of sales from the slew of five to six million 2G iPhones in the wild. Rapid Repair intends to see one to two million of those iPhones being shipped to its facilities in Michigan. This leads to the second market: sales of used iPhones. Vronko estimates these cleaned, repaired (if needed), and certified iPhones will be in the sub-$100 range (or lower) when Rapid Repair puts them on sale.
“Why would anyone want to buy a first-gen iPhone near the same price Apple and AT&T are going to offer the 3G iPhone at?” I asked Vronko. He responded that many people out there are not going to want to lose a ton of cash on activating the new iPhone (AT&T and Apple will require in-store activation at purchase) when they can just purchase the older one and easily unlock it. “People can’t live without it,” Vronko told SvenOnTech about their phones. Not wanting to have to wait two years on AT&T to jump ship to T-Mobile or any other GSM network, this desire creates a strong demand for old iPhones. Being on par with the 3G iPhone, sans the updated network support and GPS, the older iPhone will continue to have shine factor.
Then there is those who don’t want to upgrade and just want to stick with their current love. Come June 29th, warranties will run out on iPhones and those that did not opt for the extended warranty from Apple Care will now be able to use Rapid Repair’s service to fix their iPhone. “Fifteen precent of these devices will break in the first year,” Vronko told SvenOnTech on the phone last Friday. Vronko continued, “That’s a huge parts supply”. Yes, that means Rapid Repair will even purchase defective iPhones. Rapid Repair will pay between $50 and $75 depending on the condition of the phone. So even if you’re looking to upgrade, or are forced to due to a damaged iPhone, then you have a reputable place to sell it to. Vronko warned that, “You don’t know what you’re getting with eBay,” and such services. With Rapid Repair’s well respected reputation and reasonable purchase price, selling your iPhone couldn’t be easier.
Sale or buy, Vronko wants you to come to Rapid Repair first and see what it has to offer. Drop by to get your sale underway or to start your purchase today. Tell them SvenOnTech sent you.
Remember the first version of Windows Media Player that came with Windows95? Ya, it was a joke. A big one. When compared to Apple’s QuickTime (QT), Microsoft had a long road of acquisitions ahead of it. Instead of standing still Apple pushed the envelope with QuickTime and added innovating features such as QuickTime VR. QT VR allowed a user to “spin” an object 360 degrees around and look up and down a bit with the movement of their mouse. This was a decade before it showed up in Flash on web sites! As the web became popular, Apple’s attention to it gave programmers interaction (QTi in 1998) with its users.
But Apple’s direction seemed to have made a change by 2002 when it released 6.x. Now supporting the competition through Flash 5 and scriptable ActiveX controls, outside of MPEG-4 support, there was little innovation anymore. Certainly the release of 7.x and H.264 was a great addition; however, by this time, less and less use of QuickTime could be found on the web. Flash was king and QuickTime seemed to no longer sing. While Adobe was thrusting user interaction features to developers in Flash, Apple seemed to slowly add a bread crumb here and a bread crumb there to QuickTime ignoring the flashy San Jose-based company’s web progress.
What used to be considered an excellent medium for multimedia presentation on the web is now not even considered by most web developers today. Apple’s limited supply of user interaction has left it in the cold of consideration and oddly enough, Apple doesn’t even seem to care. Using the same underlying architecture created in 1991, QuickTime is the heart and soul of iTunes and thus seems to be Apple’s only true intention for this multimedia maverick. With all the money Apple paid Apple Records, Ltd. in settlement fees all those years ago, one would think any company with half the brains of Apple would push such a ground breaking application. So why the disinterest? What happened? While Apple announced QuickTime X this week at WWDC 2008, it won’t be out for at least another year in which its market share will have been even more eroded. Even upon release, will it deliver?
SvenOnTech has spoken to and heard many developers complain about QuickTime. The complaints range from how heavy QuickTime is now (does Microsoft make this?) to its near zero user interaction interface. Even though it looks great for movie trailers and other video footage, the latest version of Flash handles this just as well if not better because of all the other goodies that come along with it. QuickTime is just not usable anymore. Sad. Once die-hard fans of the multimedia application are now completely ignoring it, just like Apple.
The rumors can finally be weeded out and now we know to be true:
CEO Steve Jobs did not make mention if the 3G will be an unlocked phone, but with no AT&T presence on the stage and the push for 70 countries to have the 3G iPhone, it is most likely the next generation iPhone will indeed be unlocked.
As for subsidies, note that Steve Jobs stated the phone would be a maximum of $199. This definitely indicates you can expect stores, such as AT&T, to take a bigger bite out of the price and offer new customers another 50% discount to entice more users to the once named Cingular network.
Other highlights included (Firmware 2.0):
The 3G iPhone, which even Steve Jobs tripped over trying to say once, will be available July 11th, for $199 for the 8GB and $299 for the 16GB version which will be white (no photos shown.) While nearing Wi-Fi speeds for download, the 3G iPhone will also suffer in battery life when compared to the current version. Talk time is halved to 5 hours with standby at 300 hours. Web browsing comes in at about 6 hours with video an hour more and audio enjoyment clocking in at a full day. With browsing now 3.6 faster than EDGE and even 36% faster than Nokia’s N95 or the Treo 750, users of the new iPhone should be impressed with the speed gains until they have to plug into a power jack to recharge the internal battery.
What limited applications Apple did show off, they were far from limiting in what the iPhone SDK can do. Some really amazing applications where previewed such as God of War which rivaled that of the DS and even comes close to the PSP. Medical students and professionals will be happy with the two med-apps shown to the developer crowd available soon after the July App Store launch. Don’t worry sports fans, the MLB has you covered with its application that’ll keep you up to date pitch-by-pitch with any game in progress. The blues simulator from the Band application brought resounding applause to the Moscone West building when demonstrated as did the eBay application.
MobileMe, the replacement for .mac, nearly replicates the iPhone on Apple’s servers. Nearly looking identical to the Mac desktop versions of iPhoto, Mail.app, and iCal, MobileMe will bring Exchange-like features to the rest of the crowd. Pushing mail, contacts, and calendar events upon creation, iPhone users will always be up-to-date with MobileMe and firmware 2.0. The Gallery, pushing photos to the web, will allow users to share pictures on the go - finally! - anywhere one might have an EDGE, 3G, or Wi-Fi connection. The price remains $99 a year. No details were given pertaining to current .mac users.