OSX Mobile

Looking for a chance to collect a piece of (mobile) Apple history and have more money to spend than the worth of an iMac? Your opportunity has finally arrived as a recent eBay auction for a prototype of the original iPhone has surfaced. The lucky buyer not only gets the Beta hardware so early in its infancy but a second, malfunctioning iPhone (only made weeks apart) to tinker with.

Needles to say this prototype forgoes the final builds or even early builds of OS X mobile for a quickly cobbled Firmware meant only for testing purposes. According to the buyer, calling and most features work and the lack of typing out a quick SMS is unfortunately one of the many penalties for the Beta build running on this iPhone. The working iPhone curiously has a matte plastic screen and a serial number that indicates it was manufactured in the 46th week of 2006 (the iPhone was formally introduced during January 2007). The working unit carries an OS version of 03.06.01_G (the first shipping iPhones ran OS version 03.11.02_G). The nonfunctioning prototype on the other hand has a glass screen, slightly higher serial… more...

If you’re a victim of the platform wars for computers (Mac! Windows! Linux!) you’ll remember that one of the arguments against the MAc was that there weren’t many programs available for the device. If you wanted to do anything useful besides Photoshop you had to use a PC. At least that was the gist of the argument.

That history makes it all the more interesting that the iPhone now has more programs available for the device than Windows Mobile. Immediately you can start arguing about the usefulness of the apps, pull my finger isn’t as useful as a mobile version of Word but the sheer number of apps in the App Store means that the concept is being well received by the developer community and that is great for the iPhone platform as a whole.

Get the complete story at Ars

You can’t mention “Flash” and “iPhone” in the same breath without people getting a little huffy. It is honestly surprising how passionate people can be about not having Flash on the iPhone. Passion aside people have a lot of reasons not to have Flash on the iPhone.

While Flash would be nice on my iPhone, I’ll be damned if I want Safari crashing every time it comes to a Flash-based web site because of the poorly developed plugin software.
D9

That is a moderate approach to the issue. D9 is willing to trade stability for the lack of Flash. Other points revolve around how slow Flash is on OS X. Some people maintain that it will max out a Quad core Mac Pro (when I experimented with various Flash intesive sites my machines experienced only a moderate bump in CPU usage. I tried it on a MacBook, MacBook Pro, iMac 3.0, and PowerMac G5 with similar results for each machine. I know, I know I own too many Macs). Then there is the issue of how it would run on the iPhone. The iPhone’s processor is slower than a full… more...

If you look through the specs of the HTC Fuze you’ll see a lot of overlap with the iPhone. Touch screen, tri band communications, decent looks. The Fuze has some features the iPhone lacks: slide out keyboard, ability to edit Microsoft documents 3.2 megapixel camera and a few others. The iPhone one spec sheet advantage: $100 cheaper (and with the Fuze you have to use a coupon). Fro the spec sheets it seems like it would be a fair battle between the two cell phones with a 50/50 split between AT&T users (like the iPhone the Fuze is AT&T only). But it won’t be a fair fight and you cna already tell that the Fuze is going nowhere.

How can you tell?
First: The hype.
You haven’t heard anyone clamoring for the Fuze and the only people that seem mildly excited by the thing are those that generate press releases.

Second: it runs Windows Mobile
Ah, the achilles heal of the Fuze. Windows Mobile is being rejected for both OS X Mobile and the RIMM OS. and both of those are dominated by Symbian used by Nokia. Windows… more...

Admob has a surprisingly detailed metrics report out (available here, pdf format). You’ve got stats of graphs for everything from the percentage of AT7T subscribers who use the iPhone to the breakdown of Smartphone requests by OS in Indonesia (Symbian 98%). If you’re into numbers it worth taking a long look at. If not, let iPhone Matters hit the highlights:

Apple clocks in with a 2.5% share of smartphone traffic (Nokia wins with 35.2%)

In the US Apple generates 3.9% of US smartphone traffic (Motorola wins with 28.9%)

The iPhone is 7th in among smart phone handsets. In fact the iPhone loses out even to the KRZR (3.2% to 5.4%). The KRZR?

Just as interesting as the Apple numbers are the near dominance of Symbian everywhere outside of the US. In the US people worry about Windows mobile versus iPhone OS versus RIM but if you look at the big picture it is all about Symbian.To put a finer point on it 9 points separate Windows Mobile (13%) from iPhone OS (4%). 51 points separate Symbian (64%) from Windows Mobile.

Check out the full report

If you’re paying attention you know that some lucky developers have their hands on the 2.2 Beta. And there is nothing that developers like doing than more than voiding the NDA and telling everyone what they are seeing. But some do mare than talk, some grab screenshots. Guess what. Someone got a hold of screenshots of the version of Safari in the 2.2 Beta. Want to see them? Of course you do it’s like some kind of iPhone p0rn or something. Check out this post at Wired. Bonus points: Cut and paste speculation.

Chris Howard over at our sister site Apple Matters has published an interesting piece. From the article:

The iPhone is a remarkably good computer. Don’t buy it because it’s a phone, or even a smartphone; buy it because it’s a computer.

Read the whole thing here

I didn’t see this coming, the website http://reader.mac.com appears to be iPhone only, as it refuses to load in Safari and Firefox (I’ve not tried any other browsers).

As it’s hanging off mac.com, can we assume this is an Apple website or one created by an iPhone developer? Also, the site states “This Application is viewable only on iPhone” - perhaps with ‘reader.mac.com’ as a name, can we assume this is an RSS reader? Only one more day to find out!

Apple’s OS X platform has long been recognised as one of the most stable and security concious operating system available, mainly due to it being built around the UNIX platform. However, with OS X installed on the iPhone, IBM’s security division, Internet Security Systems, believes that the amount of attention Apple has drawn toward the iPhone will prove to be some-what of a bad thing.

Neel Mehta, team leader of ISS, told Information Week that because Apple is so good at creating interest about a product that is yet to be released, the iPhone will become a “definite target”.

“We’ve been following it since it was announced. It’s going to be challenging for the bad guys to exploit them like they do other [smart phones], but there will be a lot of individuals willing to try because of the amount of buzz around it. We’ve seen some very determined attacks on other mobile phone platforms, like the Symbian platform. A lot of these attacks are going to be very hard to launch against the iPhone.”

“They’re [Apple] not telling anyone how to write applications that run on the iPhone,” added Mehta.… more...

It’s something that has puzzled all of us. Just why won’t Apple let us run our own applications on the iPhone? Jobs has said they’re trying to find a way to ensure stability and security but of what he doesn’t mention. The iPhone supposedly runs a full version of OS X minus all the unnecessary add ons like printer drivers and iLife. What could be preventing us from running our apps then? Windows Mobile 5 and 6 allows you to run applications just as you would on a PC, something fishy could be going on here…

OS X Mobile Isn’t As Full-Featured As Once Thought
Stability and security are two words always associated with a Mac and it’s operating system. We’ve gone from 10.0 (Cheetah) to 10.4 (Tiger) with little to no problems but 10.5 (Leopard) has yet to arrive to the mass public. But as any other OS X release we can count on it to be stable, right? We might be wrong this time around. Apple chose a mobile version of 10.5 to run the iPhone, something they haven’t done and want to optimize it as much as possible… more...