Iron Ink Media: Inked Up

Apple has announced today what everyone has been drooling over for months. That’s right, here comes the new iPhone 4, which will be available on June 24th (they most likely mean 2010).

Steve Jobs was the keynote speaker at the Worldwide Developers Conference, where he introduced the new iPhone 4. Before highlighting the new phone’s features, he said that it is “beyond a doubt, the most precise thing and one of the most beautiful things we’ve ever made.”

Here are some of the new features.

-24% thinner than previous iPhones.
-Five megapixel camera with LED flash
-Front-facing camera for conferencing
-720p HD video capabilities
-Available in black and white, at $199 for 16GB and $299 for 32GB
-Same great f’ing two-year AT&T contract (seriously, when does this madness end?)
-Gyroscope for six-axis motion sensing
-Talk time is up from 5 hours to 7 hours; 6 hours of 3G browsing; 10 hours of Wi-Fi browsing; 10 hours of video; 40 hours of music; and 300 hours of standby.

So there you have it. The new iPhone 4 is on its way. We’re sure it’s a very nice device and we’ll probably be upgrading to one in the next six months.

There have been a ton of third-party Twitter applications for the iPhone, but nothing officially from Twitter. Well, no longer! Twitter has unleashed their official app for the iPhone and it looks pretty sharp.

This is actually an upgraded version of Tweetie, which the company bought recently. But still, it’s pretty clean and easy to use. It’s also free of all the obnoxious ads and spam crap that can show up in other third-party apps.

But it’s got everything you could really want in a Twitter app. You can search tweets, make your posts, shrink your URL’s, pretty much everything you’d need Twitter for. And of course, it’s free. So you can go to iTunes or just use the search function on the app store on your iPhone to go ahead and download it.

I might do that right now. I’m sick of Twitteriffic.

If you’ve been waiting until the AT&T exclusivity contract with Apple ran out before you got an iPhone, you’ll have to wait a couple of more years. Verizon customers are probably shedding a few extra tears since it was widely rumored that company could be getting the iPhone as early as this summer. But Apple has now confirmed on record that the contract they signed in 2007 was god for five years.

The contract term was made public after Apple filed court documents in an ongoing California class action suit. The lawsuit, which was filed three years ago, alleges that Apple and AT&T have an illegal monopoly over both the iPhone and the App Store.

While it’s not completely out of the realm of possibility that the contract could be changed, it isn’t going to happen without a lot of legal wrangling. Of course it might be worth it after a recent survey revealed that more than half of Verizon customers would buy an iPhone if given the opportunity.

Twitter has launched its official application for smartphones using Google’s Android operating system. The new app allows Android users to access the microblogging site on a number of different places on their phone.

See a photo or a link you like? Share it! Use the “share” button in an application and choose Twitter. Actually, how was this not out before?

Twitter announced this on Friday and posted some photos on their blog.

The great part about this is that the app will only work if you are using Android 2.1. Older Android phones won’t be able to use the Twitter app, meaning you’ll have to go buy a new phone if you really like your Twittering.

So this one is getting ugly, huh? Local Bay Area police have raided the home of Gizmodo editor Jason Chen, allegedly in connection with the iPhone 4G story where the website allegedly paid $5,000 for a lost iPhone 4G prototype.

According to the warrant, police seized several digital cameras, external hard drives, flash drives, a credit card and credit card bills from Chen’s home. It is a felony in California to pay for lost merchandise. I guess it’s the “lost” part that got a bit hairy so they just made a law out of it.

Gawker Media, Gizmodo’s parent network, thinks this is an outrage.

“It is abundantly clear that under the law a search warrant to remove these items was invalid,” Gawker Media Chief Operating Officer Gaby Darbyshire said in the letter. “In the circumstances, we expect the immediate return of materials that you confiscated from Mr. Chen.”

This should get pretty good.

According to CNET.com, the police are investigating Gizmodo after the tech blogging giant paid $5,000 to a guy who found an iPhone 4G in a Redwood City, CA bar. Apparently, it’s against the law to buy found property in California.

Apple has spoken to police about the incident and according to CNET.com’s source, the investigation is being spearheaded by a computer crime task force led by the Santa Clara County district attorney’s office.

According to the editor’s at Gizmodo, they explained that they paid $5,000 to someone who claimed to have found a new iPhone 4G. Yeah, we get that. That’s why you are being investigated. That’s exactly what the complaint is about.

The investigation is to determine whether or not sufficient evidence exists to file criminal charges. Gawker, Gizmodo’s parent company, said that no one had spoken to them about this yet.

Apple doesn’t let stuff like this go, so if it’s possible to pursue charges, we’re sure they’ll stay on it. Apparently, they have no interest in getting any positive stories out of Gizmodo ever again.

We aren’t sure how accurate this is, but we’ll run with it anyway because it’s what we do. And a lot of other people are running with it too. And we all know that if someone else does it, then it’s perfectly ok, regardless of what it is.

Ok, but seriously, there are rumors that Apple CEO Steve Jobs replied to a customer email (he responds to customer emails?) by saying that if someone wanted porn, they should just buy an Android.

Matthew Browning, the customer, emailed Jobs regarding Apple’s blocking of an app by satirical cartoonist Mark Fiore.

Browning wrote: “I’m all for keeping porn out of kids hands. Heck–I’m all for ensuring that I don’t have to see it unless I want to. But…that’s what parental controls are for. Put these types of apps into categories and allow them to be blocked by their parents should they want to.”

That makes enough sense. But Jobs supposedly responded by saying that Apple has some moral responsibility to its customers. Whatever.

“Fiore’s app will be in the store shortly,” Jobs wrote. “That was a mistake. However, we do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone. Folks who want porn can buy and [sic] Android phone.”

This is all well and good, but does anyone realize that you have a Safari (or Opera) browser right on your iPhone? You know you can go to whatever website you want, right? Why all the fuss about having porn in apps? Just friggin’ go to a website on your phone!

Some how, some way, Gizmodo.com came across an iPhone 4G, which so far no one has seen. Where did they find it? Lost in a Redwood City, CA bar. It was camouflaged to look like a 3G so no one would notice. But Gizmodo did, and they took it apart and analyzed it and determined that this is in fact, a rare prototype of an iPhone 4G. The packaging and final details may get tweaked, but this is it.

We could just re-write what Gizmodo said about the phone, or we can let them tell you directly:

What’s new

• Front-facing video chat camera
• Improved regular back-camera (the lens is quite noticeably larger than the iPhone 3GS)
• Camera flash
• Micro-SIM instead of standard SIM (like the iPad)
• Improved display. It’s unclear if it’s the 960×640 display thrown around before—it certainly looks like it, with the “Connect to iTunes” screen displaying much higher resolution than on a 3GS.
• What looks to be a secondary mic for noise cancellation, at the top, next to the headphone jack
• Split buttons for volume
• Power, mute, and volume buttons are all metallic
What’s changed

• The back is entirely flat, made of either glass (more likely) or ceramic or shiny plastic in order for the cell signal to poke through. Tapping on the back makes a more hollow and higher pitched sound compared to tapping on the glass on the front/screen, but that could just be the orientation of components inside making for a different sound
• An aluminum border going completely around the outside
• Slightly smaller screen than the 3GS (but seemingly higher resolution)
• Everything is more squared off
• 3 grams heavier
• 16% Larger battery
• Internals components are shrunken, miniaturized and reduced to make room for the larger battery

That’s a pretty sharp phone, now what is it going to cost me?

Yep, that’s right. There is a new DROID phone coming out and it’s called the DROID Incredible. The DROID was first available last November through Verizon and this latest Android phone will be coming out April 29th.

DROID Incredible features the newest version of HTC Sense with a seven-panel home screen for all your widgets. What’s more, it’s the first Verizon phone to use Qualcomm’s 1GHz Snapdragon processor and have an eight megapixel camera.

Sweet!

Features (that we essentially lifted from BestStuff.com….we love that site):

* Android 2.1 with HTC Sense experience
* 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor for maximum responsiveness
* Friend Stream for unified Flickr, Facebook and Twitter updates (yay!)
* “Leap” view for quick access to all seven home-screen panels
* Eight megapixel camera with dual-LED flash for better images
* 3.7 inch WVGA (480×800) AMOLED capacitive touch display
* Optical joystick for smooth navigation
* Dedicated, touch-sensitive Home, Menu, Back and Search keys
* Proximity sensor, light sensor and digital compass
* Integrated GPS
* Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g)
* 3.5 mm headset jack

You can pre-order your DROID Incredible at VerizonWireless.com. It’s priced at $199 after a $100 mail-in rebate (we hate those).

There is a popular desktop computer game in Europe known as Football Manager. And supposedly, it is so addictive that it destroys marriages. Well if that’s the case, now you can destroy marriages while on the go!

That’s right, there is now a version called Football Manager Handheld 2010 that is available for download on your iPhone. It features more than 20,000 real players and has 34 leagues for you to choose from. You decide who to keep, play, trade or drown in a dirty river (that last part probably isn’t true) as you manage your way to victory.

We know it sounds kind of boring, but we see how it can be addictive. We know people that start leagues on Fifa ’10 and stuff like that for XBox 360 and it can get out of hand. So be careful when you download it and be mindful that it doesn’t ruin your marriage.

Oh, and this one ain’t cheap. It’s $10 in the US, £7 in the UK, €10 in Europe and $15 in Australia.