The very talented planetbeing and jailbreak icon, MuscleNerd have claimed a successful unlock on the iPhone 4. It’s not ready yet for the public, so just feast your eyes on these shots below for the time being.
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RIM is finally catching up with the rest of the crowd with their “new” Blackberry OS 6.0 to be released later this year. Everything you see in the video below has already been done on the Android and iPhone OS platforms. The Blackberry OS needed a major overhaul in UI design. RIM is just riding on the reputation they established before other smartphones got it right… and people are still buying.
And as for the video itself, I think RIM is trying a bit too hard to appeal to the “younger generation”.
This is by far the best practical and useful augment reality execution I’ve seen to date. This simple but effective piece of technology is for the United States Post Office. It allows you to see which USPS box is right for your package to ship. I can easily see this be applied to other shipping companies in the near future.
A store in Moscow advertised super cheap laptops on sale at 80% off, but fail to mention in their advertisements that there were only 10 available. The result: Every man for themselves.
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For those living in the Great White North and eagerly anticipating the how Rogers might screw us over with the iPhone can wait no further. Though not yet official, pricing for Rogers iPhone has been revealed.
The good news, it looks like Rogers is adopting AT&T’s pricing structure as the iPhone will cost you a data plan of $30 a month for “unlimited” (email, web) or $45 a month for the enterprise email version. Both data plans includes Visual Voicemail when subscribed to any voicemail services. The plan then sits on top of a regular Rogers voice plan, system access fee, $10 3G charge, and anything else you might want tacked on. This coincides with Rogers CEO’s comment that the iPhone will cost the average customer about $90/month. While it’s still expensive for most hungry students, the plan is comparable to that of any Blackberry.
It’s still $199 for the 8GB version and $299 for the 16GB as Jobs has mentioned during the WWDC. There’s an optional upgrade to the iPhone for existing contract customers, but you will have to sign a new contract with them.
Speaking of contracts, here’s the bad news. Rogers is only offering the phone with a 3-year contract. There is also a short tether process to the phone, as it has to be activated in Rogers, Fido or Apple Stores where customers must accept Rogers and Apple terms of service, sign a 3-year agreement, and select the data plan for the iPhone 3G before leaving the store. If by chance you leave the Apple Store untethered, the phone will be inoperable until it’s tethered through iTunes where you then bind yourself to a 3-year contract.
If you plan on getting the phone then canceling service within the first 30 days, you will have to return the phone to point of purchase. After 30 days, you can keep the phone but you have to pay the ECF and DECF.
Oh, you can also buy up to 3 iPhone per customer, but means you have to sign three 3-year contracts if you are planning to leave the store with them.
In a way, I’m surprised Rogers’ plan echo AT&T’s plan so closely (minus the fact that the terms are 50% longer). $30 for “unlimited”, unrestricted data is a gift compared to their $100/1GB deal. Of course it still to be determined how “unlimited” you really are as the term usually comes with some rather restricted fineprint.
It could be me since I’m heavily medicated right now, or MSNBC wants to turn your boring old RSS newsreader in to a hallucinogenic drug.
The online news portal recently launched their new flash-based “visual newsreader”, Spectra, and is one of the most interesting and fun ways to communicate information I’ve seen in a long time. It presents headlines by either spinning them off of a colorful 3D spiral, or spawning them from the dominant colors in front of your webcam.
Now, I’m not a big advocate on using Flash for Flash sake, (meaning using the tool as nothing more than to gloss up a site) but MSNBC did a commendable job on Spectra’s very attractive and slick looking interface. There are nice graphical touches to convey user interaction with the newsreader such as when you filter the headlines, the ones that are not relevant sunk off the bottom of the screen, and then float back into view when you remove the filter.
This is not the first time MSNBC tried to have a fresh take on news consumption. Their last attempt with Fuel Industries was a game that plays out similar to Breakout and it arranges the falling headlines revealed from breaking bricks along the right side of the screen so you can read the headlines after your last life is lost or you pause the game.
Spectra also reminds me a little of the Google newsmap, by Marcos Weskamp and Dan Albritton, released several years ago. It’s not as pretty as Spectra, but I find it more useful due to the fact it prioritises news stories based on how popular they are on the Google news search. The results are then displayed in similarly colour coded categories, and scaled based on its chronological importance meanwhile fitting perfectly within the screen.
Steve Jobs dumped a truckload of new reasons to buy an iPhone today at a town-hall meeting at Apple’s Infinite Loop campus in Cupertino. Check below in case you missed the whole shebang:
- The SDK will include four API’s: core OS, core services, media layer, and the brand new Cocoa Touch, made specifically for the iPhone. There will be a ton of features to help iPhone developers including Interface Building support, remote debugging, an iPhone emulator that runs on a Mac, and Xcode support.
- GAMES!! EA showed off a demo of Spore running on the iPhone. AOL showed off their new AIM app. SEGA showing off Super Monkey Ball with full tilt controls.
- The App Store, which will be included in the next update. This searchable store will let you download apps over Wi-Fi and EDGE.
- Developers choose the price for the application and get 70% of the sales. Apple keeps 30%. If a developer wants the app to be free, there is no charge from Apple for hosting the files.
- Finally!! True enterprise software. The iPhone will support: Push contacts, global address list, Cisco IPsec VPN, they want authentication and certs, enterprise class WiFi (WPA2 / 802.1x), security policies, enterprise configuration tools, and remote wipe. The big news, however, is that they are licensing ActiveSync from Microsoft to build exchange support right into the iPhone!
- $100,000,000 iFund has been set up by venture capitalist, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byer for companies developing applications for the iPhone & iPod Touch.
- Bad news for iPod Touch owners. Whereas iPhone owners will have the enterprise and developer kit in the next firmware for free, iPod Touch owners will have to cough up another “nominal fee” just like the last update. Here’s hoping that it will be less then $20 (should have gotten an iPhone).
Gizmodo has a more in depth coverage of the March 6th event, or you can head on over to the Apple site to learn more about the SDK and watch the keynote.
Overall, this event clearly marks Apple’s commitment to strengthening their phone platform. Though no announcements were made concerning possible 3G versions, I will put money down that the 3G iPhone will come out around the late July when the 2.0 firmware will be released. So, did all this hoopla got you itching for an iphone? If not, what’s holding you back?
Inspired by the simpler, cleaner look they adopted to adapt to iPhone, Facebook is redesigning the site for those of us who still visit it online. Though there are no live changes as yet, and they have yet to determine a date for them, the developers are working on putting together something a little more functional and a little less cluttered.
This is great news, because I hate digging through all those “FluffFriends”, “SuperPoke” and “Are You Interested?” just to find someone’s wall to write on. This redesign seems like just the tonic the social networking world needs.
It was only a matter of time before someone out there would form their own rock band using PocketGuitar and iAno apps on the iPhone and iPod Touch.
Consisting of three guys and their Nintendo DS and two iPhones (each running iAno and PocketGuitar respectively) formed their own band and called themselves iBand. Below you will see a video of them jamming away. One of the band members, a reader of Gizmodo released the following statement:
Since Electroplankton on the Nintendo DS we constantly think about implementing those sounds, and since the iPhone we like to play with PocketGuitar (played in the clip by Roland Dell’mour.) Now that iAno came out (played by Marina Dell’mour) we just had to try this out! As you said in your article: there has to be an iPhone band! It’s the next step. And as we’re devoted Giz readers we thought we’d give it a shot and sat down to improvise a little and pressed record on that digital camera.
Unfortunately we only have two iPhones, so we dug out that dusty Nintendo DS. But we want to take it further. There are some guys with iPod touches in our neighbourhood, so we’ll gather them and add a drumset with the BeatPhone app and a guitar and lose the DS. So you can expect another song in the next weeks.
And here’s the iBand in action.
Bento Box 