iPhone

It's clear from the list of top applications downloaded from the App Store this year that iPhone and iPod Touch users are looking for entertainment.

Every year around this time Apple releases the most-downloaded songs and videos on iTunes, and this year is particularly interesting because it's the first year of the App Store. Six of the top 10 paid apps were games, including Apple's Texas Hold-Em and the heavily promoted Super Monkey Ball from Sega, but Koi Pond's mesmerizing virtual aquarium led the way as the top-selling paid application for the iPhone and the iPod … Read more

Few analysts were prepared to call Apple's Black Friday performance a blowout, but in general they thought consumers responded well to Apple's products and pricing last week. Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray, Shaw Wu of Kaufman Brothers, and Maynard Um of UBS have weighed in with their thoughts on Apple's sales during the first official shopping day of the holiday season. Expectations had been muted going into the weekend, which many had thought would be dismal given the economic environment.

But the overall picture wasn't as bad as some had feared. And despite sticking with its … Read more

A new front has opened in the ongoing arms race between Apple and iPhone hackers, with one hacker group making the iPhone boot with a Linux 2.6 kernel.

The announcement of the successful kernel porting was made on the Linux on the iPhone blog, complete with instructions and source code.

Although a bootloader, kernel and a Busybox terminal are able to be loaded -- many features of the iPhone remain unimplemented: touchscreen, sound, accelerometer, networking. Input to the terminal must be made via a USB interface from another device that the iPhone is attached to (humorously summed up by … Read more

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has banned another iPhone ad after consumers complained it exaggerated the speed of the device.

A recent TV ad for the iPhone 3G stated: "So what's so great about 3G? It's what helps you get the news, really fast. Find your way, really fast. And download pretty much anything, really fast. The new iPhone 3G. The Internet, you guessed it, really fast."

The ad showed a close-up of the phone being used to surf a news Web page, view the Google maps service, and download a file -- and all the … Read more

Google acknowledged breaking the official rules of Apple's iPhone software development kit when it created the latest version of the Google Mobile application for the iPhone, but denied a more serious charge.

A Google spokesman confirmed Tuesday that Google Mobile uses undocumented APIs (application programming interfaces) in order to use the iPhone's proximity sensor to prompt a verbal search. iPhone developers were only supposed to use the APIs that Apple published in its SDK when they create their applications under the terms of that agreement.

Google has denied, however, a more serious charge that it was linking to … Read more

Despite the fact that Apple has yet to produce an iPhone chip based on its own design, and that IBM doesn't design smartphone chips, the judge overseeing the Mark Papermaster noncompete case views the two companies as chip competitors.

Judge Kenneth Karas of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York filed his opinion Monday (click here for PDF) on why former IBM executive Papermaster should not be allowed to join Apple as head of the iPhone and iPod hardware engineering team. Karas' decision to grant a preliminary injunction preventing Papermaster from working at Apple … Read more

The reviews are in on the Storm, the new touch-screen phone from Research In Motion, and nobody loves it. Check out takes from CNET, Engadget, Gizmodo, and Time for a sample.

In particular, the mechanics of the touch screen--you have to press areas on the screen with some force, as if they're actually keys--have been greeted with almost universal frustration.

But for a would-be iPhone killer, the reviews are remarkably light on the Storm's music features. It's true that BlackBerry users are traditionally e-mail junkies, and the phone's communications features (apart from the touchscreen weirdness) are … Read more

Apple appears to have upped the processing speed of the iPod Touch in order to help it go after the portable-game market.

Touch Arcade reports that the applications processor inside the second-generation iPod Touch unveiled in September is actually running faster than the processor inside the iPhone 3G, which runs at the same speed that the original iPhone and iPod Touch used. The new iPod Touch's ARM-based processor is running at 532MHz, while the iPhone 3G's processor runs at 412MHz.

A game developer interviewed by Touch Arcade noticed a huge difference in 3D-rendering speed as a result of … Read more

Apple has been hit with a patent-infringement suit from an inventor who claims to have patented iPhone-like mobile Web surfing.

EMG Technology, which appears to be a holding company for the interests of inventor Elliot Gottfurcht, filed suit against Apple on Monday in the 21st century rocket docket, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas in the Tyler Division. EMG was awarded U.S. Patent number 7,441,196 in October after filing its patent application in March 2006, and thinks Apple's iPhone has run afoul of the claims in the patent.

In a basic … Read more