Find My iPhone works! A true life tale of crime and geekery

Here's a great tale of how a group of courageous geeks overcame dangerous criminals (well, almost)to rescue a missing iPhone with the help of MobileMe's find my iPhone function. It's a tremendous story. Read it here.

New iPhone announced!

And of all the possible names Apple could have chosen, they chose to just stick an 'S' on the end for 'Speed' and leave it at that. From the world's coolest gadget company, that's pretty lame.

The 'S' upgrade gives you improved speed (up to twice as fast they claim), longer battery life, a 3 megapixel autofocus camera, video recording, a built-in digital compass and hands-free voice control. And, of course, you get OS3.

The greater speed will come through a faster processor, more system memory and possibly snappier video circuitry. Also there'll be proper 7.2 Mb per second HSDPA.

For enterprise users, there'll be hardware encryption and a few other goodies in the OS to help silence those firms that really believe the Blackberry is a better enterprise tool.

It still looks pretty much like the old iPhone 3G though, and that name...well, it's not very exciting, is it?

All in all, iPhone OS3 is a big upgrade, but the step from 3G to 3GS is smaller. It's dramatic enough to make me want one though, and I hope my provider in Oz, Optus, makes hardware upgrades easy and cheap.

The name of the next iPhone

By calling the current 2nd generation iPhone the 3G after the telecomms technology incorporated, while iPod models are referred to by their iPod generation, Apple are facing a challenge with the naming of the rumoured new 3rd generation iPhone, possibly due in July.

It's possible that the new phone uses 3.5G telecomms technology, so could be called the 3.5G. Other possible names include iPhone 3, iPhone 3G2, iPhone G3 (I like that one), iPhone nano (if it's smaller), iPhone 32 (if it has larger capacity). Or maybe they'll just call it the new iPhone.

Does anyone have inside info, good rumours, or plain old wacky speculation? If so, please share.

Skype for iPhone will be released today

Sometime on Tuesday US time, expect to see Skype for iPhone hit the AppStore. It's not going to look much like Skype, rather more like a standard iPhone app, which will disappoint some people. Another downer is that it will only make calls over WiFi, not 3G, so it's not going to be VOIP in your pocket from anywhere. Why not, Skype? Your version for the T-Mobile G1 (or HTC Dream in Australia) works over 3G. Until it supports 3G this is something to be only mildly excited about, but excited nonetheless.

Great article on iPhone ebook readers at Macworld

The iPhone e-book readers' guide | Software | iPhone Central | Macworld

I've looked at a few of these apps and I think they all look a bit clunky. It's all well and good being able to change type sizes and faces, but you can't do that in a real book. Indeed, you wouldn't want to because highly trained book designers create the pages to be readable and select type to convey the text in a certain way. That's part of a book to my mind, and much of the pleasure of reading goes with it. None of these apps seem to really honour the book designers' art.

I've settled on using Stanza myself, but the iPhone screen is still a bit small for comfortable reading. I tend to read over lunch and the constant page turning is annoying, as is tendency for grease from the burgers to build up on my screen. At the end of the day nothing beats a good 'real' book, though I love the free Shakespeare app in the AppStore.

Pocket Informant for iPhone almost here

Pocket Informant, arguably the best Calendar, Agenda and Task management application for mobile devices, has now been developed for the iPhone and version one-point-oh has been submitted to Apple for review. Shouldn't be long before we see it in the Appstore and I for one am counting the minutes.

I've long spoken about the frustrations of the iPhone's pitiful Calendar application. For a device that's supposed to be a PDA, the iPhone lags  along way behind its rivals on other mobile platforms. For this reason I believe 'PI' as it's affectionately known will become one of the handful of killer apps for the iPhone. In fact, I am surprised that competitors like AgendaOne and Agendus are not rushing into the Appstore.

I've not even seen the application yet, folks, but I am confident this will be a keeper. Get your credit cards ready!

Documents to Go for iPhone (Good news!)

On my old Windows Mobile phone, Documents to Go was one of my killer apps. In truth I didn't use it all that often, but when I did it was often life-saving. I've been hagning out for it on the iPhone, and although the developers, DataViz, have promised it was under development for some time, they have been strangely quiet, even non-responsive, until just recently.

This morning's email, however, promised new hope, and as soon as 2nd Qtr 09. It's one of killer apps for iPhone, and you can read the email release and see some screens here: http://www.dataviz.com/ecampaigns/DXTGIP_UPDATE_FEB09.html?rgfull=