Iron Ink Media: Inked Up

Hats off to Tom Krazit of CNET who did a great job live blogging the Apple event yesterday. You can read his entire coverage here because it’s too lengthy to cut and paste into our blog.

Hey, speaking of cut and paste, it will be available on the iPhone OS 3.0! Kevin Rose’s leak turned out to be pretty accurate. Here are some of the 100 new features that got us excited:

– Apple will support several new app business models such as subscription and in-app purchasing
– Support of “seamless” peer-to-peer networking
– Turn-by-turn apps can be developed thanks to GPS technology (but they can’t use built-in Maps)
– More than 1,000 APIs will be available to developers
– Video-streaming tech will allow game highlights can be delivered to the iPhone, rather than pulled by the user
– MMS support (it’s about time!)

Also noteworthy is the fact that Apple has sold 30 million iPhone and iPod Touches through the end of 2008 and the App Store has seen 800 million downloads. Not too shabby! And even though there has been a lot of talk about the app approval process, Apple claims they have given the green light to 96% of submissions.

The update is schedule for “this summer” and is free to iPhone users, although not all upgrades (like MMS) will work on the original iPhone. iPod Touch users will have to pay $9.95.

Digg.com founder Kevin Rose has released a video he filmed at SXSW discussing the new iPhone 3.0 OS cut and paste feature. According to Kevin, you double tap on a word and the magnifying glass comes up with quotation marks at the beginning and end. You can then drag the quotes over the content that you want to manipulate and a pop up will give you the choice to copy, cut or paste.

Kevin said that his source told him the iPhone will match the capabilities of the Palm Pre, but did not give any specifics. Rumors suggested it might include MMS but Kevin shoots that idea down. He also says the iPhone will still not run background apps or have video capture.

You can check out PC World’s list of what the iPhone 3.0 OS should have here. What new features are you looking for?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__TNGzMMgu8&feature=player_embedded]

Adrants.com gives us a report on what’s being talked about at the SXSW show.

Saturday’s session at SXSW 2009 on Emerging Trends in Mobile gave audience members food for thought and panelists a run for their money.

The heavily international crowd (which included an estimated 25 percent non-American attendants) seemed to be, from a show of hands, a well-informed group with a good number of mobile developers in attendance.

Topics ranged from better device-charging solutions to developing for devices that come closer to standard Internet browsing every year. All in all, it was given that WAP technology is dead, fully Flash-enabled devices are the next step, image recognition capabilities and more detailed location-based information are crucial, and the idea that you’d have to actually plug a device into an outlet for any reason is becoming increasingly laughable

PC Mag has a list of 10 things that the iPhone’s 3.0 OS should have. And we tend to agree with all of it so we just copied it and pasted.

10.) Cut and paste. This is painfully obvious. Cut and paste is a core Apple feature, all the way back to the first Mac, and it’s something everyone expects in text editing. When the iPhone 3G launched, Apple’s Greg Joswiak told me that Apple didn’t have anything against cut and paste, they just hadn’t gotten around to it. It’s time.

9.) MMS support. No one has ever been able to explain to me why Apple disdains picture messaging. MMS support is a no-brainer.

8.) A shared sandbox. iPhone apps each run in their own little data space, which is great for security but awful for apps that want to work on the same data (like an office program trying to read e-mail attachments.) Apple needs to build a shared data area that apps can drop “public” files into.

7.) Some background functionality. Maybe it’s push notifications, like Apple promised a year ago. Maybe it’s true background tasks. In any case, it’s absolutely silly that instant messaging apps, Twitter apps, and such have no way of telling you that you have new messages while you’re doing something else.

6.) Wireless stereo. Steve Jobs rightfully disdains Bluetooth stereo audio because it generally sounds awful. But there have been a lot of innovations in wireless stereo recently, and whatever technology Apple chooses to bless would instantly become the leader. Whether Apple goes with Kleer, one of the new lossless Bluetooth stereo codecs or something totally new, it’s time to free us from the tangle of headset cords.

5.) Better power management. The iPhone burns through battery because it’s used more heavily, and in more different ways, than any other device. That means many iPhone owners feel their phones have relatively short battery life. Since Apple will never allow a replaceable battery, let’s suggest some smarter power-management software to keep the phone going for longer on a charge.

4.) Better home screen customization. Let’s be able to throw away the default icons, like that stupid stock widget. And let’s be able to fully theme our iPhones, the way the illicit WinterBoard program lets hackers do.

3.) Video recording (and a better photo app). We know the iPhone can record video, because various people have hacked its software to do so. Time for that feature to become official. Also, would it hurt the photo app to have a settings panel, for folks who want to be able to play with things like picture resolution and night-shot mode? And the home button should be the shutter.

2.) Tethering. AT&T lets you use a wide variety of smart phones as modems for your laptop, with the appropriate service plan. It’s never been clear why the iPhone was left off the list. Apple and AT&T should fix the problem with iPhone 3.0.

1.) Breaking the AT&T agreement. In two years of covering the iPhone, the number one complaint I’ve heard from iPhone owners of all stripes is about AT&T service. I know it’s a hopeless dream, but I’d love Steve Jobs to get up on a stage in Cupertino and cry, “iPhones for everyone!”

Check out this link from The Onion. Their “What do you think?” section never gets old with me, even if other (ok, most) sections have kind of jumped the shark. They ask “random people” what they think of the fact that iPhone free app usage drops off after the first month of downloading. That link is here.

Even though you went out and bought an iPhone, Apple claims it still owns the software your phone runs on. Therefore, jailbreaking your iPhone is illegal. And if jailbreaking is illegal, then Cydia and any other virtual store selling apps must be illegal too. I think we all know where this is going. Apple doesn’t want users buying apps from any place other than the app store.

And why should they? They have created a dominant marketplace where they not only get to control what apps are approved, they get to take 30% of the sales to boot. But if you’re an app developer, frustration is rising. You can spend lots of time and money developing an app only to be rejected, and if you are accepted you have to fork over some of the profits.

This one may land in the courts. TechSpot has more.

MacWorld tipped us off on a new app, PageOne’s A Personal Assistant, that “attempts to simplify the task of monitoring your digital life by collecting and displaying account information from a variety of services.”

Basically it puts all of your online accounts for services such as banking, movies, travel and social media in one place so you don’t have to go to multiple websites and log in. The simplified version is available for free, but has built-in ads.

The premium version, which goes for $10, offers more services and real-time data for some services such as travel. And if you think putting all of your personal data in one place is asking for trouble, you’re right. So developer PageOnce added passcode locking and the ability to remotely erase all personal information from your phone on the company’s website.

Guess who is absolutely sick of hearing about Watchmen? The next thing these guys will watch is me puking.

Now, it seems that there is a Watchmen game for the iPhone and it retails for less than $1. The game, Watchmen: Justice is coming, allows players to fight in a 3D environment that looks like NYC in the 1970′s. If you like the movie and/or books or comic books or whatever the hell it is, chances are you’ll dig the game.

People may be complaining that Apple’s censorship is too tight (and we agree), but the apps are still rolling in.

Information Week reports:

The company [Apple] said that as of Monday there were 27,131 applications in the store that can be downloaded for an iPhone 3G or iPod Touch. The number of mobile programs is staggering considering the App Store has been open for about a year. By contrast, Microsoft’s mobile operating system has been out for a lot longer than the iPhone, but analysts estimate there are about 20,000 applications.

We’ve been hearing about App World, the BlackBerry equivalent of the App Store, for awhile. It’s still not here yet, but a little more information has come out.

Wireless solutions company Research in Motion is making App World for the BlackBerry, but it will be quite a bit different from Apple’s store. Developers will be able to give away their products for free, but if they decide to charge there will be a $3 minimum price tag. Also, BlackBerry users will pay for all of their purchases through PayPal.

According to Wired,

RIM is the latest handset maker to launch its own app store. Since Apple introduced the iTunes App Store in July 2008, the idea of a simple distribution platform for third party smartphone software has taken off among handset makers. Google offers the Android Market for the HTC T-Mobile G1, while Palm has the Mobile Software Store. Even Microsoft is planning to introduce Skymarket, an app store for phones running Windows Mobile operating system.

So far Apple leads the pack. Apple iPhone app users tend to be young and they favor entertainment and games apps, for which the $1 price point is appropriate, says Sobhany [vice-president of marketing for Medialets]. But in the BlackBerry App World, productivity and utility applications are likely to be in higher demand, which could justify the $3 minimum price point.

I can see things from two different sides. BlackBerry is known for being a more business-oriented phone, so the apps may offer services that truly warrant the higher price tag. Perhaps App World won’t have 97 different farting applications – what a shame. And since they will still offer free apps, this might encourage developers to go that route and just add advertisements.

On the other hand, the App Store has dominated because 99 cents is such an easy number to pull the trigger on. If you buy an app and use it once, you don’t feel like you threw your life savings down the drain. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see if this strategy pays off.