iPhone

Third-party iPhone applications to arrive Monday

The era of officially sanctioned iPhone applications should kick off on Monday.

That's the same day Apple CEO Steve Jobs is expected to take the stage at the Moscone Center to unveil the next-generation iPhone at the company's annual Worldwide Developers' Conference. A source at a software company that has been working on a native iPhone application tells us the company is getting ready to launch that application on Monday, which could also imply that Apple's App Store will be up and running that day.

The App Store is going to be the only way to get … Read more

Apple's iPhone loses U.S. market share in Q1

Apple experienced a bit of a setback in the U.S. smartphone market during the first quarter after coming out of nowhere last year to rank among the top companies.

According to data compiled by IDC, Apple's still the second-leading smartphone maker in the U.S. behind Research in Motion and the BlackBerry franchise. But it lost market share going from the fourth quarter to the first at the expense of RIM and Palm, according to the figures provided by IDC analyst Ramon Llamas.

RIM's market share went from 35.1 percent in the fourth quarter to 44.… Read more

Smaller, longer-lasting iPhone on tap?

Add another log on the iPhone rumor pile: it may be smaller.

The iPhone silly season is in full swing for the second consecutive year, as we get ready for Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference one week from today. A next-generation iPhone is expected to be the centerpiece of CEO Steve Jobs' keynote address, and a new report from Wired is claiming that the revamped iPhone will be 22 percent smaller thinner than the original.

The report also says the iPhone will connect to 3G networks--which isn't exactly a shocker--and will come with a GPS chip. Two tidbits that … Read more

Apple's Web strategy all about Me

It's hard to believe that no one in the "Me Generation" beat them to it, but Apple has apparently registered Me.com as a possible replacement for its .Mac service.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball has assembled a list of evidence that Apple is holding onto the domain, with the likely scenario that the company wants to launch a new Internet service. The domain is currently held by a company called MarkMonitor, but the administrator of Me.com bears an Apple e-mail address. Last month, Network World noticed that Apple had snapped up a bunch of Montenegro'… Read more

How do you get to 10 million?

There's been some confusion about how Apple expects to get to its stated goal of having sold 10 million iPhones in 2008.

Some have said that it's 10 million by the end of 2008 and therefore should include the 3.7 million phones sold in 2007 while other have said it's 10 million sold in calendar 2008.

Turns out it's the latter.

Google it up and you'll see that this has been confirmed by many an analyst and, to be honest, it is not what the Macalope thought -- he thought it included 2007. It … Read more

GPS coming to 3G iPhone?

It's pretty much a given that the next-generation iPhone will be faster, but it might be able to find its way home as well.

GigaOm is reporting that Broadcom is Apple's supplier for GPS chips that are inside the next iPhone, expected to arrive with a 3G cellular networking chip within a few weeks. GPS is an increasingly common feature inside smartphones, and is much more accurate than the cell-tower and Wi-Fi positioning system that Apple rolled out in January.

Rumors of GPS capabilities inside the forthcoming iPhone trickled out earlier this month, in the form of possible geotagging code … Read more

Code strings suggest name change coming for .Mac

Apple may be getting ready to overhaul its .Mac service--or at least change the name.

A Russian site called Deep Apple noted that code within the Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.3 software update contains placeholders for the .Mac name that would allow Apple to drop in a new name at a later date. Dmitry Chestnykh of Coding Robots also noticed similar code within Mail and Safari applications.

Apple's .Mac service is designed to help Mac users extend the capabilities of their iLife software to the Internet by publishing Web pages, sharing photos, and storing data, among other … Read more

Orange rolling out iPhone 2.0 upgrade path?

French iPhone carrier Orange might have an upgrade plan in the works when Apple ships the next generation of the iPhone.

Anyone with a pulse and even a passing interest in consumer electronics knows that the 3G iPhone is perhaps weeks away from making its debut, probably at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference on June 9. Those with longer memories will recall the outcry over Apple's decision to cut the price of the iPhone by $200 in September, forcing the company to issue $100 credits to iPhone early adopters to stem the criticism.

Perhaps this time around, Apple and … Read more

Waiting, wanting, wishing... or wasting time?

The new iPhone is looming, right? Current iPhone models are not being restocked or are 'sold out', buzz is being generated. It's a different kind of buzz than last time around though. There aren't 'leaked' pictures, there aren't many purported leaks, or any increased amount of feverish patent-trolling to see what's coming. It seems that there won't be a ground-breaking paradigm shifting this time around, right?

On the larger vein of waiting, though, I'm a pretty impatient type. A bit ADHD too. But you know the type of person I'm talking about: people … Read more