Iron Ink Media: Inked Up

It’s that time of year: Apple rumors abound. OK, let’s be honest… when is it not that time of year? Regardless, the latest info Apple “experts” are talking about is video capability coming to the iPhone. PC World reports:

Reitzes [ Barclay's Capital analyst Ben Reitzes] predicts that a device designed with a video camera on the iPhone’s face and back will replace the current iPhone. The front camera would support video chat, while the regular iPhone camera would work as a video recorder to rival the Flip line of camcorders. This predicton is also supported by yesterday’s rumors that the new iPhone OS 3.0 has extended video editing support.

Reitzes also predicts that Apple will increase iPhone production (we agree), and will make more than one model of the phone. One of those will be a netbook-like model (yeah, we’ve heard that before) and another, with less features, will be released to the Chinese market.

Bottom line: We’ll have to wait until June for the Worldwide Developers Conference to know for sure.

This is pretty neat. Hendrik Kueck has released Colorsplash, an application that allows you to selectively desaturate your photos. Basically, it takes a photo and makes it black and white, except for a certain aspect that you’d like to retain its color. I could explain it further, but I think you get the idea. The new app is available for $1.99:

Our good friends over at 9to5mac.com (they have no idea who we are) have pointed out that the new wireless chip in the next-gen iPhone and iTouch will allow the units to send and receive FM radio signals:

According to the fine folks over at AI, the soon-to-be-released iPhone 3,1 references the Broadcom BCM4329 wireless chip in the boot script. This is a significant upgrade over the current Broadcom BCM4325 for a number of reasons. As they pointed out, the component upgrade adds power savings and new support for 802.11n features, including the ability to find and join 5GHz networks.

But they neglected to mention that it also adds the ability to receive and send (the previous model could only receive) information through FM radio signals which theoretically could be used to broadcast sound into car stereos..without external adapters. It could also be used to pick up FM radio music, news and sports broadcasts on their iPhones and even, in August, on iPods. Currently the FM reciever is only used to pick up communications from the Nike+ peripheral.

Thanks to Quickoffice, a new iPhone app that will allow you to read and edit MS Word and Excel documents right on your iPhone.

Quickoffice for iPhone has an intuitive user interface and supports comprehensive functionality including cut, copy and paste, font formatting, content selection and bullets within Word documents. Users can also leverage a wider keyboard to edit and create documents in landscape mode. Excel functionality includes extensive mathematical and statistical formulas.

Other useful features include file sharing capabilities via Wi-Fi desktop connectivity and access to one’s MobileMe iDisk account. Editing is done with maintaining perfect data integrity, in addition to ‘auto-save’ to ensure none of your work is lost on-the-go.

Sweet! However, it will cost $19.99 to download once it is released later this month. Seems like it has to be worth it though.