The Social

It may be true that no cell phone is perfect, but the handset world isn't taking too kindly to Apple CEO Steve Jobs' public assertion that other smartphones suffer from the same antenna and signal problems that have been widely reported regarding the iPhone 4. And, in what's turned into an ugly back-and-forth PR mud fight, Apple is firing back by making its internal signal test results public to insist that it's not just pulling rivals' flaws out of thin air.

Hui-Meng Cheng, chief financial officer at HTC, told The Wall Street Journal on Monday that "… Read more

Earlier this month, an octopus named Paul living in a tank in Oberhausen, Germany, proved capable of successfully "predicting" the results of his home nation's World Cup soccer matches--and then went a step further and correctly selected Spain as the winner of the final.

Of course, there's now an app for that.

An iPhone app development company called uTouchLabs just released an app called "Ask the Octopus," which lets users input two options for any query and then has a cartoon "octopus oracle" choose one much in the way that Paul would … Read more

NEW YORK--One thing that anyone could learn from the three years (!) of Apple iPhone launches at the city's midtown flagship store is that things go best when they're kept simple. The original iPhone launch was remarkably smooth, but the next year, when in-store activations were added into the mix and AT&T's servers were swamped, it got messy. The iPhone 3GS launch last year was, in comparison, very calm.

So this time around, for the launch of the iPhone 4 at 7 a.m. on Thursday, the store has two lines--one for people who preordered, and … Read more

This was, to put it plainly, not a great week for many developers. Modifications to Apple's software development kit license for its just-announced iPhone OS 4 software ban non-approved application program interfaces (APIs), including Adobe's Flash Compiler. That decision led Adobe's platform evangelist to blurt out an incensed "Go screw yourself, Apple" blog post.

But unrelated, and more surprising--OK, not really that surprising since we'd been able to augur the entrails of this one for some time now--is Twitter's decision to launch proprietary BlackBerry and iPhone apps. The former was built for … Read more

Could the geolocation wars be the next browser wars? Maybe. There's a fresh $8.4 million in venture funding for Gowalla, a game-like mobile app that lets you "check in" to locations around the world, see where your friends are, and swap virtual goods along the way.

The Series B funding round, announced Wednesday, is led by Greylock Partners with contributions from Shasta Ventures, Maples Investments, previous investors Alsop-Louie Partners and Founders Fund, and individual investors Ron Conway, Kevin Rose, Gary Vaynerchuk, Shervin Pishevar, Jason Calacanis, and Chris Sacca.

Interestingly, at least two of Gowalla's individual … Read more

Well, this hacker has quite the sense of humor.

Reports started spreading this weekend that iPhone users in Australia had been falling victim to "ikee," a worm that replaces default wallpaper with a picture of Rick Astley, the British pop singer whose song "Never Gonna Give You Up" has gained eternal infamy thanks to the mainstreaming of the "Rickrolling" prank craze. The photo is accompanied by the message "ikee is never gonna give you up," and it's apparently quite difficult to remove. According to security firm Sophos, this is the first worm detected that targets the iPhone.… Read more

Well, we finally have a glimpse at "Square," the new mobile payments venture coming from Twitter co-founder and chairman Jack Dorsey. As expected, it's a little hardware add-on that can turn an iPhone into a credit card reader.

The funny part: Details about the small-business-oriented project have been on the Web for months. It was just that nobody had put two and two together until some eagle-eyed folks at Engadget realized that a URL on a screenshot of the "Square iPhone Payments Venture" first reported by Coolhunting matched a domain registered to Dorsey.

Dorsey, who … Read more

Bears have some awfully funny inclinations. Back in 2004 there were all those wackynews stories about the bear who'd downed three dozen cans of beer at a campground and proceeded to pass out.

But this one takes the cake: this summer, when Vermont hiker Kris Rowley was approached by a bear and it kept following her, it proved more interested in chowing down on her iPhone.

Rowley, who serves as Vermont's chief information security officer, tells CIO.com: "In a semi-panic, I threw the phone at the bear."

The bear proceeded to ignore Rowley and started … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--It's like the ultimate yuppie geek convergence: there's finally an iPhone app for car-sharing company Zipcar. To put it in the most stereotypical of terms, you now no longer need a computer to book that Prius for your weekend Whole Foods run.

Apple gave a green light to the free download earlier this week, so Zipcar members can now use the app to find and book available cars using GPS-enabled maps, access account and car database information, contact the company's headquarters, and use a "virtual key fob" to lock and unlock their reserved … Read more