phones

There's really no better way to see how well you'll get coverage with a phone until you get your hands on it. This usually requires a purchase, or a friend or neighbor who has got the phone and service you're interested in. The next best thing is checking your carrier's site to see if it has a coverage map (here are links to AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint). A third option is SignalMap, a user-generated service that lets people search for and review cellular phone coverage by location.

It's about as simple as … Read more

Hardware geeks are gleefully prying their new iPhones apart to see what's inside them. Given the topic of this blog, I'm naturally most interested in the audio components--how does thing sound?

According to this breakdown by Semiconductor Insight, reported by EE Times, the iPhone uses the same hardware audio codec from Wolfson as the last generation of iPods, meaning it should sound similar. However, Wired's review suggests that the audio doesn't go as loud as most iPods, particularly the Shuffle, which could be a real problem if you listened to a lot of Rushover headphones … Read more

The Wall Street Journal reports that some companies -- instead of dictating what kind of smart phone their employees must use -- are giving them an allowance and letting them pick, and support, their own.

Before all you cubicle monkeys out there start having visions of corporate-subsidized iPhones dancing in your heads, the piece notes that the profiled company, KLM, only supports connectivity to corporate email and scheduling if the phone runs Windows Mobile.

The Macalope himself has tried Outlook Web Access on his iPhone and it's basically unusable because the buttons can't get large enough for you … Read more

Now that the iPhone is available, the hunt is on to prove or disprove claims from Apple that the phone's security is up to the public challenge.

Criminals and researchers alike have been working overtime to learn what they can about the hardware and operating system that runs the iPhone. While several researchers have quietly reported a few Bluetooth and Safari iPhone-related flaws directly to Apple, there is a public (albeit underground) effort to subvert the new mobile platform for fun and profit.

One underground site has collected information from the iPhone's Macintosh OS X Disk Copy Disk … Read more

Hey! Remember when eWeek used to be MacWeek and was a great resource for Mac and Apple-related news?!

Ahh, good times, huh?

Yeah, well, that was a long time ago, grandpa.

As evidence, here's two recent iPhone-related pieces from the erstwhile Apple rag.

FSF: The iPhone Will Betray You

Wow! The Macalope will have to keep an eye on his iPhone and make sure it isn't allowed near any knives or blunt instruments.

Well, actually, all the piece does is uncritically quote open-source proponents who speculate that Apple may have violated the GPL by restricting access to the … Read more

A teardown analysis of Apple's iPhone estimates that the company is making about $333 on each sale of a 8GB iPhone.

Market research firm iSuppli (watch them get sued for violating Apple's iTrademarks) put out one of their patented teardown analyses Tuesday. They estimated that Apple paid a total of $265.83 in hardware costs to build each 8GB iPhone, not including royalties or logistics expenses such as distribution, the report said.

The report confirms a few things we already knew, such as Apple's decision to use an ARM chip inside the iPhone. Samsung is the big … Read more

So in our excitement with the iPhone my friends and I all picked the "strum" ringtone on the iPhone. It's sunny, happy and seems to sound the best on the iPhone speakers. I think it's appealing to us since it sounds like the ads. With that, it's pretty confusing when our iPhones ring. A typical conversation: "Is it yours?" "No, it's my phone," followed by, "Oh, wait, no it really is my phone!" We're such geeks.

You can see where confusion lies. But this highlights the limited … Read more

Like a big summer blockbuster, the iPhone hype peaked the moment the doors opened last Friday. The waiting was over, the mystique had lifted--and by the end of the weekend, hundreds of thousands of people realized that their really cool iPod phones were missing quite a few features found on competing (but admittedly far less sexy) cell phones. The good news, of course, is that Apple can continue to roll out software updates to the iPhone, improving it piecemeal as the weeks and months progress. The bad news is that some of the device's drawbacks are hardware-based--so they won't be fixed until the iPhone 2 is released (if they're addressed at all).

Here's a rundown of the iPhone's main shortfalls--and my guesses as to the chances of them being added to the current model via a software update (the first number), or holding off for the inevitable iPhone sequel (the second number). And for the record, these are nothing more than guesses. … Read more

Well, the iPhone's now out, and it's pretty darn popular. Unfortunately, it's also pretty darn expensive. At $500 for the 4GB version and $600 for the 8GB model, the iPhone's steep price is enough to keep many gadget hounds away from the Apple-y goodness. Waiting a year or two for the iPhone's second or third iterations might be the best course of action. While purely speculation, it's a fairly safe bet that future versions of the iPhone will cost less and offer more features than the first iPhone.

Last year, Apple Matters published an article detailing the historical prices of the iPod, … Read more