One of my early complaints with the first generation iPhone, which remains to this day, was the inability to send my “card” to another iPhone or smartphone user. Just days before the purchase of the Apple phone, I was able to transmit my contact card to any other Windows Mobile or Symbian user via Bluetooth or even Infrared. So why wasn’t this greatest phone ever allowing me this same convenience? Well, with no IR port and a severely retarded Bluetooth stack, it just wasn’t going to happen. What a shame and yet another ding against the Enterprise user by Apple.
Tapulous, a group of guys in Palo Alto (home to Apple CEO Steve Jobs), have thought that iPhones should be able to share contacts. Not just your contact but any of your contacts. The makers of the widely popular Twitter application for the iPhone, Twinkle, will be releasing a new application called friendBook. In its third application for the iPhone (the other the popular game Tap Tap), Tapulous brings a more powerful contacts manager to the iPhone. Not only will one be able to trade contacts, but better manager them right on the iPhone away from the connected computer. Easily find duplicates, merge contacts, and even dial a member of your virtual black book by a picture of the person, friendBook is surely to be a hit once on the App Store.
There is no immediate release date or pricing details for friendBook but rumor has it that the application has already been submitted to Apple and is merely awaiting approval. So look for it through the week and download it quickly! Who knows, Apple may deem this “bad” and remove it like it did Netshare. 
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.
As both speculated last week and earlier reported that Exchange support was on its way by SvenOnTech, Apple has announced and demonstrated full support for Microsoft’s Direct-Push for Exchange server. Live from Building 4 on the Apple Campus, Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, created a new calendar event on a Mac in the room and added a new contact to boot. Within seconds, his iPhone had the updated information without any interaction from him.
No changes have been made to the iPhone’s easy to use Contacts or E-mail client. It’s all built into the iPhone firmware that will actively handle the Direct-Push. Apple has licensed ActiveSync from Microsoft to make all this “magic” happen right on the iPhone. Full Calendar, Contacts, and E-mail support is on the iPhone for Microsoft Exchange Direct-Push. Both Nike and Disney have been testing the Direct-Push feature internally and have had much success with it. The enterprise is now supported on the iPhone.
Users will have full ability to toggle on or off Exchange push for calendar, contacts, and e-mail right on the iPhone itself.
Other concerns from large companies has been data theft from stolen or misplaced iPhones. Apple now gives the ability to remotely wipe all data on the phone if such misfortune strikes an iPhone user. Cisco VPN, certificates and identities, WPA2/ 802.1x, and security policies round out the corporate enterprise wish list.
All these and the other reported updates (full third-party application support) will be available on iPhone firmware 2.0. All iPhone users will get the update for free and iPod touch users will have to pay a small upgrade fee for it. The SDK along with 2.0 beta goes out to developers today and the final release will be available at about the one year anniversary of the iPhone in “June”. So look for it just before Independence Day.
Macworld was a great time last week even if nothing ground breaking happened other than a very thin and a very expensive laptop was released. In my book, Apple TVs update and HD movie rentals was the big news. But what bugged me more than anything was the lack of something and that something was the missing feature of Cut-n-Paste in the iPhone. Without a doubt, this has got to be the most annoying omitted ingredient of the iPhone and yet still, Apple continues to ignore this chasm. Yes, chasm! I can’t understand why there isn’t more of an uproar about this must-have option in such a versatile device. I’m tired of typing in long web addresses from notes, address book notes, and iCal note fields that the iPhone seems to ignore and translate into hyperlinks. I’m tired of typing in redundant information into notes or iCal entries. I’m tired of hand copying text from web sites into other applications. Heck, try typing, from memory at best, long WEP keys for protected wireless networks! Tired, tired, tired! What gives?!
Well, I hunted someone down at Macworld to give me the answers and after a long search and pass off after pass off from Apple employee to Apple employee, I finally got an answer. The deal is, Apple is aware of the desire for this option and it is working on it in the labs as we speak. The trouble it is having is implementation. How to easily call up a copy or cut option and then the paste action. It’s probable that the zoom bubble (the one that brings up the edit cursor) is the issue as it has removed the obvious tap and hold position from Apple to use for a pop-up menu of some sort. Text selection is another difficulty to sort out. Certainly, the cursor could be added to the menu selection; however, Apple wants to keep this as simple as possible and that added step would not lend itself to simple.
My source would not give me any details other than to say that it has been working on the solution for some time and that there was no immediate release for it. So at best, we can hope that the interface hurdle will be leaped over very soon.
As to Exchange, a straight answer was more difficult to pull out of my Apple source. Yes, Apple knows that there are business professionals that want support for it (and Blackberry Enterprise Server) and Apple is not ignoring this demand. The source would not go as far as to say that it’s being worked on, but when I asked for clarification by questioning, “So is Apple not working on a solution?” he simply laughed and said, “Apple’s aware of the Exchange need.” So, take that at face value, business professionals.
While there is a slew of other unanswered features many have called for since day one, such as voice dialing, these two were my main concern and I was glad to at least get some kind of answer. My source suggested letting Apple know of my fire desires in encouragement that this would help push for a quicker resolve. So, folks, if you agree with my needs, head over to Apple and let them know now!
SvenOnTech has been told by a source at an Exchange ISV that Direct Push support will be on the iPhone in about “a month or two”. The feature set will include not only updating the Mail application upon arrival of new e-mail but will also support over-the-air syncing of contacts and calendar events exactly like it is done on current devices running Windows Mobile. New contacts added either from Entourage, Outlook, or from the iPhone itself will automatically be synchronized to the Exchange server and thus passing it off to all the clients attached to it. Calendar events will updated in the same fashion.
Support Microsoft Exchange will allow Apple’s iPhone to continue its success by allowing millions of enterprise workers to keep up-to-date with their corporate affairs through out the day.
The absence of Exchange support in the initial release of the iPhone is most likely due to the fact that the software was still in its testing phase and not ready for release.
I downloaded iTunes 3.7 to activate my gorgeous new iPhone and within minutes I was activated and my Verizon Wireless number ported. Now it was a matter of syncing.
Why Apple can’t have iTunes look at your Library size prior to attempting to sync is beyond me. I have never had an iPod that could hold all of my music (not even my 5.5G 80GB iPod) and it’s really annoying when iTunes attempts to sync 100GB plus of music onto your 8GB iPhone. But hey, it figured it out eventually.
After that, it started to sync my Outlook data and issue number one was my Exchange server settings. iTunes ran its course while Outlook took 50% and more of my 3.0GHz CPU time. About five minutes later, Outlook finally responded to my mouse clicks and I was able to use it. iTunes displayed all the POP accounts but absent was my Exchange account. Even though I checked one of the POP accounts and hit Apply in iTunes, after as started re-syncing, iTunes unchecked my selected POP account. This happened over and over never sticking. As for the Exchange account, I’ll have to manually set up the IMAP connector to it on the iPhone itself.
Calendars seems to be another issue. I instructed iTunes to sync all of my calendar events. With over four years of events, I know it’s a large task, but dude, if my lame XV6700 Windows Mobile phone could do it, so should the iPhone with its 8GB, right? Well, no. Not a single event appeared after syncing.
My 452 Contacts all came over without a hitch. In fact, the couple dozen of contacts with pictures also made it smoothly and when I made a test call from my business line to the iPhone, there was my hyperSven logo. A bit squished in a perfect iPhone made square, altering the actual graphic size, but still, the image made it. Something I figured wouldn’t.
Over all the sync process is slow. After syncing once and trying again to get my Calendar events, Contacts took forever to sync even though not a single change had occurred since the last sync mere minutes before. Unlike when syncing music or video content which displays each file name as it is being synced, Contacts and Calendar simply give the black-and-white motion bar with no detailed information.
Besides hanging Outlook for five minutes, the Calendar issue and slowness of syncing, not bad for 1.0. I hope Apple resolves this issue in the next week with an iTunes update. BTW, I’m still waiting for iTunes to finish up to see if the second full sync got my Calendar.
Verizon has finally released its update to the UTStarcom smartphone XV6700. The nearly 40 MB download will zap your current install so back everything up as there is no way to restore your old ROM install. For the most part, many are reporting easy without-a-hitch installs; however, one comment we read turned their XV6700 into a brick that even Verizon couldn’t fix.
New for this firmware update is Microsoft Messaging and Security Feature Pack. This will allow for true e-mail pushing to your device. No band-aid fix of sending your device an SMS message when new mail other PIM entries are made to your Exchange data like the old firmware. But do note this, your radio (EV-DO or 1xRTT) will always remain on unless you specifically turn off your phone now. This is done to insure that data connection is always kept with Verizon. This means a further reduction in battery life.
Also new for the XV6700 is Voice Dialing, as shown here in screen capture. While not as intelligent as Microsofts VoiceCommand, it is at least included in the ROM and free of charge. Like lesser-model phones, you’ll have to “teach” the device with voice tags for each person you wish to call by your command. This means for every phone number, home, business, mobile, you’ll have to make a voice command for them. So while you save some room in your RAM not having to put MS VoiceCommand on, you lose what you gain with your voice tags. It’s also unclear if your Bluetooth headset button will activate the application, like any voice dialer should, though the release notes does state that it allows you, “to leverage the hands free capability already on the device.”
Other updates include a way to lock the device from the Today Screen (what, you mean no more draining the device when it’s in my pouch?), a bug fix that would put the phone into “Flight Mode” without the users knowledge, and the ability to be in both Wi-Fi and phone mode simultaneously without the needed regedit hack.
Now SvenOnTech does not know if the Bluetooth DUN profile hack we reported on previously will work in this new firmware update. It’s highly likely Verizon asked for the unlock code to be changed; however, it’s also possible that it still works. Truth is, this is one of the reasons we are cautious not to install this update. We like surfing on our MacBook Pro on the beach.
Our hopes is the that the Bluetooth DUN hack still works. Either we’ll wait for posts elsewhere confirming or denying the hack and react to that or we’ll just bite the bullet and do the upgrade…only if the good far out weighs the bad. Voice dial from the BTh is a huge plus. The device lock is another plus. As for the e-mail push, we’re happy with how it works now, so no biggy there. We’ll see and keep you informed.
UPDATE: Kevin from jkOnTheRun, the site we reference above, has told us that the Bluetooth DUN codes in fact still work! So I guess we’ll be taking plunge after NewsGator Mobile completes its first download here.