phones

Regardless of what P.T. Barnum said, we can't legitimately call the buyer of this $100,000 iPhone a sucker because it was all for charity. An anonymous bidder won the phone (pictured here), the first sold at Apple's Soho store to Spike Lee, on eBay as part of the "Keep a Child Alive" auction to raise money for children suffering from AIDS in Africa.

It's not all blinged out (blung out?) like some others we've seen, but that's actually a good thing. And BornRich does say it comes with other fringes, including &… Read more

Speculation about iPhone 2.0 is already well underway, and the latest tidbit involves an iPod Nano-like phone supposedly scheduled for later this year.

Kevin Chang with JPMorgan Chase in Taiwan thinks a slimmer iPhone is on the way, based on conversations he had with unnamed sources and an Apple patent filing for a slim device that uses an input method similar to the familiar iPod scroll wheel, Reuters reports. This would allow Apple to ship a cheaper version of the original iPhone, he said.

I'm not sure what to make of this one. The iPhone's main selling … Read more

We have more iPhone battery results from CNET Labs. The talk time, video time, and music time tests are completed and we can report that the iPhone largely delivers on its power promises. And just to remind you of those promises, the iPhone has a rated battery life of 8 hours talk time, 24 hours of music playback, 7 hours of video playback, and 6 hours of Internet use.

Talk time: When we tested the iPhone with the Wi-Fi function turned off, we got about 7 hours, 45 minutes of talk time. When we tested it with the Wi-Fi activated, … Read more

This weekend has been a rather busy one for iPhone developers. Adobe Systems hosted the iPhoneDevCamp in its San Francisco offices, and the result is 50 new Web apps specifically designed for Apple's shiny new toy. Earlier today we wrote about some of our favorites, although one of the more important ones that didn't come out the developer's event was the new iPhone-optimized version of Trillian from Cerulean Studios. From the looks of the pictures on their blog, it looks a lot like iChat, and more important is finger- and eye-friendly, especially when compared to Meebo's current offerings.… Read more

All of this touch-screen talk sometimes makes us pine for simpler times, when products were made with more tactile aesthetics in mind. We're apparently not alone, as manufacturers such as Lenovo are making such items as notebooks clad in leather.

Now Vertu, the king of luxury phones, is bringing the cowhide concept to its latest handset, identified as the "Ascent T" in FCC filings. The proposed phone has a 3-megapixel camera, a scratch-proof LCD and UMTS mobile Internet access, according to BornRich, but it's the bovine component that's most easily noticeable. It's not the … Read more

Today the iPhone is the alpha gizmo, the one item of consumer electronics that dominates all the others.

But in 1993, the hot new gizmo was Apple's Newton, and it was a whole different thing.

Not very many people had Newtons. Apple sold fewer Newtons over the whole life of the product than it sold iPhones the evening of June 29.

Also unlike the iPhone, the first Newtons weren't even very useful. Although called "personal digital assistants" (PDAs), using a Newton was significantly more difficult than using a Day-Timer. The original MessagePad had very poor handwriting … Read more

Hundreds of Web developers, designers, and ordinary geeks gathered this weekend to build usable applications for Apple's iPhone. The barcamp.org event was hosted at Adobe Town Hall and featured dozens of sponsors. The hack-a-thon began on Saturday morning, and wrapped up late Sunday afternoon when each team had a chance to present its app.

Some teams included a group of Yahoo! developers, and others included complete strangers who had just met the day before. I give credit to all teams who participated, but here are the 10 most memorable creations:

10. iPhoneVote This application was the first one presented at the hack-a-thon, and it was used as a voting system for the event. You would tilt your iPhone in portrait mode to vote yay, and tilt it horizontally to give a negative vote. There was a laptop set up in the front of the room, and it was updated in real time. Unfortunately, I don't think the app reset each time a new team would present, so the votes just tallied up into the 80s. Even though it wasn't used for its official purpose, it was a great burst of hope for future apps like this, and boosted the morale of the developers in the room.

9. AppMarks If you have an iPhone, make AppMarks your Safari home page. The interface models the iPhone front door, but instead, each icon links to a Web app or HTML bookmark. I mentioned AppMarks in this blog post a few days ago. AppMarks is cool, but I want to see more functionality. If the AppMarks people want users to add AppMarks as their home page, they need to always be thinking of new features. There are other products, like Mojits, that are right on their heels.

8. PickleView The only sports application presented was called PickleView. Ryan Christianson from the Walt Disney Internet Group explained that in baseball, a pickle is a play in which a base runner is trapped between bases with fielders tossing the ball back and forth and usually ending with the runner being tagged out. Most will remember it well from the 1990s classic,The Sandlot.

Their iPhone app visualizes a box-score view of your favorite teams’s stats, and then displays a mock Twitter feed of PickleView's friends. I am not sure if that's how this app works, but the developers have a cool concept.… Read more

The large screen and landscape viewing mode that come with the iPhone could make for a cheaper video iPod that can't phone home.

Apple watchers Piper Jaffray released a report Monday predicting that Apple will soon update its high-end iPod lineup with a wide-screen model that looks an awful lot like the iPhone, just without the phone and data connections. It's been a while since Apple released a new iPod, and rumors have been circulating for a long time that Apple has plans for a wide-screen iPod.

With the launch of the iPhone, Apple does indeed have that … Read more

Samsung has been holding out on us. The company did say last month that it would be issuing limited-edition phones in honor of the Beijing Olympics, following the likes of Lenovo and its "Cloud of Promise" laptops. But they didn't tell us the handsets would be made of gold.

Crave has a special relationship with all things gold, as some readers may have gleaned, so this phone naturally caught our eye--and it's not so ugly that we had to poke it out. True, some might find the P318+ a bit garish in its 18-carat gold casing, … Read more