iPhone

Have you ever spent a long, happy evening with a new effects pedal and a pair of headphones? Do you have an Apple iPhone and $3.99 to spare? If so, open the iTunes Store and download Bloom immediately.

Released last Thursday by Brian Eno, who more or less invented ambient music, and fellow traveler Peter Chilvers, Bloom is like discovering a seashell you've never seen before--beautifully simple yet infinitely complicated.

It displays a pastel multicolored screen. You hit different spots on the screen to play different notes--bass notes at the bottom, treble at the top. The notes are … Read more

Earlier today, a colleague chided me for not highlighting some potential privacy issues in my post about Genius, the music recommendation feature in the latest version of Apple's iTunes application.

First, he didn't like the idea that he had to agree to send Apple information about his iTunes library from time to time. But as I briefly noted, this is how Genius works--it looks at the tens of millions of iTunes users out there to figure out who's playing what when, and matches up users with similar collections and playing habits. Apple claims that this information is … Read more

Apple continues to do well among some of the most fickle and influential consumers of technology: teenagers.

Piper Jaffray does a biannual survey on the purchasing habits of 769 teenagers as they related to devices like cell phones and music players, and released the results of the latest survey Tuesday. Not surprisingly, the market leader in portable digital music players is the market leader among high school students: 84 percent of those surveyed own an iPod, up from 82 percent last year.

The iPhone is also gaining ground, perhaps as a result of the new $199 entry fee to iPhoneland this year. … Read more

There has been much blogorrhea on Tuesday over Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak's offhand comment to the Telegraph that the iPod would go the way of the transistor radio and the Sony Walkman, becoming a cheap and eventually boring commodity product.

News flash: it's already there. Sure, Apple will still sell millions of units every quarter, and it might even continue to grow unit sales and revenue for a while. But it's clear from Apple's most recent announcements that the company no longer views the iPod as its main vehicle for innovation--new (old) form factors, colors, and … Read more

A 12-year-old who uses his iPhone mostly for texting with his girlfriend has discovered what looks like a new vulnerability with the device.

The unnamed boy, son of blogger Karl Kraft, turns on the passcode lock and disables SMS Preview in order to prevent his parents from seeing any messages, Kraft wrote on his blog.

Those settings block the display of incoming text messages and show an alert saying "New Text Message" if an SMS comes through while the phone is locked. However, if the phone is set to emergency call mode the incoming text messages are previewed.… Read more

The European Union is considering a requirement that all cell phone batteries be easily replaceable, which might cause a problem for Apple's iPhone.

AppleInsider spotted that particular directive in an article in New Electronics, a U.K. trade publication, on the latest set of computer-industry regulations under consideration in Europe. The EU is thinking about enacting a new directive on batteries similar to its RoHS (Reduction of Hazardous Substances) directives from a few years back that forced the computer industry to eliminate harmful chemicals and/or materials from its manufacturing processes.

The "New Batteries Directive" would require … Read more

Maybe iPhone users won't have to covet one of those shiny new features in Google's Android operating system after all: Google Maps Street View.

The driver's-eye view is a prominent part of the first Android phone, T-Mobile's G1, which goes on sale October 22. But according to Mac Rumors on Monday, Apple has snuck Street View into the iPhone 2.2 firmware beta release.

Other new features described in the report include the ability to disable the typing autocorrect feature and the inclusion of 461 small icons called Japanese emoji characters.

The iPhone 2.2 firmware … Read more

Has Apple really sold its 10 millionth iPhone? That's what several bloggers are saying. But a closer look suggests that it might be a bit too early to pop open the champagne.

A joint project of AFB and Investor Village's AAPL Sanity has been collecting data about iPhone inventory. Using a Google spreadsheet, the group has been unofficially tracking iPhone production estimates using International Mobile Equipment Identity, or IMEI, numbers that are used to uniquely identify every GSM, UMTS, or iDEN mobile phone.

According to the spreadsheet, AFB is reporting that 9,190,680 iPhone units have been … Read more

Apple's iPhone 3G apparently created a summertime switch itch: 30 percent of all the smartphone's buyers bailed on their existing carriers in order to purchase the device, according to an NPD Group report released Monday.

AT&T has been the iPhone 3G's exclusive carrier in the U.S. since the smartphone was released in June.

According to the report, which covers June through August, 47 percent of those switching to AT&T to get the iPhone 3G came from Verizon Wireless, 24 percent from T-Mobile, and 19 percent from Sprint.

"While the original iPhone … Read more