Jon Holato

The next iPhone is likely to offer video recording, voice control, auto-focus camera, and a digital compass. According to MacRumors, since the release of the iPhone 3.0 firmware, developers have been churning through the configuration files trying to find any hints of future iPhone functionality.

A new screenshot shown here courtesy of MacRumors provides conclusive evidence that the next iPhone will indeed offer video recording capabilities:

The Camera app in the iPhone will provide a similar look and feel, but will feature a switch on the bottom right to allow the user to toggle between photographs and videos. Other stuff found by developers in config files are auto-focus camera capabilities, voice control, and a digital compass (magnetometer).

Video capabilities, voice control and the auto-focus camera aren’t really anything revolutionary, as these features have long been available on other cell phones. What sounds interesting to me is the inclusion of a digital compass. A digital compass can determine absolute position values, something the current built-in accelerometers are unable to do. An example of utilizing the magnetometer would be pointing your iPhone’s camera at a building and having the phone tell you what it is by combining information from the digital compass, GPS, and accelerometer. Another example would be pointing your iPhone towards the night sky and having it tell you what stars and constellations you’re looking at.

Indeed, the future of the iPhone looks beautiful.

Apple and Stanford University have teamed up on iPhone programming education, and now videos and course materials from Stanford’s course on iPhone development are available via iTunes on iTunes U. The materials are free to download and the class is taught by two Apple engineers.

As someone who is just beginning to poke my nose into Objective-C and iPhone development this is a godsend. Sure, the books from Borders or Amazon are great, but for me personally nothing beats having an instructor, and I am very eager to start watching the videos.

The first video and PDF was posted to iTunes last Friday (April 3rd) and as mentioned above is available as a free download. Here is the direct link to Stanford’s iTunes U page (link opens in iTunes).

At the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco today, Microsoft Business Division president Stephen Elop suggested that Microsoft is actively working to bring its Office suite of productivity applications to the Apple iPhone sometime in the not too distant future. When pushed during an interview to elaborate, Elop admitted that the software wasn’t quite ready yet and that users should keep a watchful eye.

Currently, the iPhone OS ships with built-in read-only capabilities for Microsoft Office documents. Users attempting to make changes to Word, Excel, etc. files have had little options.

I’m curious to know exactly what types of updates these users are looking to make? In my experience, most of the users who access Office documents on the go simply view them quickly to get the information they need then later open the files on a computer to edit them and do the real work. I simply can’t imagine doing a vlookup() or countif() on my iPhone — don’t even get me started on pivot tables.

The point is it’s simply not practical for getting any real work done. Sure Microsoft will sell plenty of copies because of the novelty generated if they’re actually able to deliver on this. But as someone who spends most of my time in Microsoft Office from Monday to Friday, I can’t see how Office on the iPhone will realistically make me better equipped to do my job.

Today on its blog, Last.fm announced a fundamental shift in the way its streaming music works to most of the world. For users in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Germany, it will be business as usual. But for everybody else, no more free music after 30 days. That’s how long the current free trial Last.fm Radio subscriptions will last, after which a fee of €3.00 per month will be due. Note that everything else such as scrobbling, recommendations, charts, biographies, events, videos, etc., will remain free for all countries.

According to Matt Ogle, one of Last.fm’s developers, the reasoning is that CBS Interactive’s (Last.fm’s parent if you recall they purchased the site back in 2007) salesforce is primarily geared toward an ad-supported model in the three aforementioned countries where Last.fm radio will remain free. In the other markets the potential for ad revenue is significantly weaker, thus CBS Interactive feels that a subscription model is necessary to provide sustainable growth.

Personally I’m shocked by this. I don’t know how you can take such a wonderful service as Last.fm that has been free since its earliest days back in 2002 and all of a sudden start charging a monthly service fee. This is without a doubt going to piss off A LOT of users. And nowadays there is competition aplenty is the online music space, particularly this online music niche *cough* Pandora *cough*. I hope the suits at CBS Interactive are wiser than the masses on this one because I really love Last.fm as a service and use it on an almost daily basis. And although this won’t affect me daily as I’m located in the US, my geek-heart goes out to everyone in the affected geographies, this is truly bollocks!

The Boy Genius Report has confirmed 100% from a source “pretty high up in AT&T’s food chain” that a new iPhone will be announced around mid-June — who is really surprised let’s be serious, that’s when Apple’s annual WWDC takes places and that has also been around when the previous two iPhones were released, a duh!

According to BGR, the new iPhone will be faster than previous iPhone hardware — see my post from last week about the next iPhone supporting faster 3G — and will come with AT&T’s U-Verse software (which integrates control of other personal electronics such as your DVR, etc.). Of course it will ship with the new iPhone 3.0 software that was demoed last week.

Also rumored to be confirmed is a $99 3G netbook that will NOT run any Windows OS. Linux…or maybe Mac OS X?

As a lot of you may know — although I’ve yet to mention it on this blog due to lack of updating — I recently became engaged last December. It was a truly wonderful time and I have the absolute greatest fiancee anyone could ever ask for, but I’ll save that for another post.

As Carin and I started to plan for our wedding we knew from the start that we’d need a tool to track everything: guestlist, invitations, budgets, etc., the list goes on and on for a wedding. Initially, we started out by using Microsoft Excel. We both use it pretty frequently at our day jobs and it seemed like the logical place to start keeping track of everything.

Excel worked fine for a few weeks, we started to manage our guestlist, starting off with about 4 fields of info per person, then finding ourselves adding new fields on a regular basis. We also started to keep track of expenses, which anyone who knows Excel reasonably well knows it is fabulous for working with numbers. Everything was working out OK until it came time to send out Save The Date notices to our potential guests. We quickly realized that the way we had been managing contacts, although useful for informational purposes, was useless when it came to taking action on the information such as compiling mailers, being able to track responses by type (yes, no, maybe). It finally hit us that we need something that was geared specifically to manage weddings. So I did what most people would do nowadays, consulted the Google.

After a bit of searching and reading through reviews of what other couples had gone through I settled on a program called iDo Wedding Couple Edition (there is also a professional version available for wedding planners at a significantly greater cost). I didn’t know what to expect from it and I wasn’t going to pay $30 for a license to use something I’d never tried before, so I took to Bit Torrent and stumbled upon a copy of it.

Once I got the software and installed it I was instantly amazed at how much easier it was to do everything in this program as opposed to Excel. Whereas in Excel Carin and I were constantly having to think of new ways to handle our wedding planning demands, it’s evident that the iDo developers have clearly thought through every last intricate detail of a wedding and have built a way to manage it into the software.

Some of the functionality built into the programs is the following:

• Contacts – manage your guestlist
• Invitations – manage invitations and the contacts they’re sent to
• RSVPs – track responses from returned invitations
• Attendees – gather additional information about people who will be attending your wedding: flight info, hotel info, seating chart, etc.
• Gifts – keep track of who got you what when it comes time to send thank yous
• Checklist – pre-loaded with 100 wedding related tasks, ability to customize as desired
• Budget – manage and track all wedding related expenses
• Vendors – keep vendor information organized to ensure wedding logistics are handled smoothly
• Events – manage anything related to your wedding (bridal party, etc.)
• Timelines – your detailed wedding itinerary
• Widgets – extra add-ons to assist in wedding planning
• Reports and Labels – every section of iDo has a printable report (over 100 reports can be generated) and it will also print labels for your contacts

It’s pretty amazing all the functionality they’ve built into a single program. It really is a one-size-fits-all wedding planning application. We loved it so much that after the first use we went to the company’s Web site and purchased a license.

To end this post, here are some screen shots of the aforementioned features of the iDo Wedding Couple Edition.

A report from the Silicon Valley Insider citing a “highly reliable mobile industry source” claims that Apple’s next release of iPhone hardware — most likely to be later this year according to the historical iPhone release cycle — will support significantly faster Internet connections.

Further, during a speech at Mobile World Congress last month AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega proclaimed that throughout the year AT&T would both extend its 3G coverage into more cities and increase network data speeds in an effort to maintain the title of America’s fastest network.

So just how fast will the next iPhone be able to go? Well, that all depends on the radio components Apple is able to source into the hardware. In the current iPhone 3G hardware, the radio chip supports HSDPA 3G networks up to 7.2Mbit/s, which happens to be the peak speed of AT&T’s current 3G network, also known as Release 6. According to de la Vega, the foundation for Release 7 has already started to be put down, and once ready AT&T will be able to offer speeds of up to 20Mbit/s (note: some countries already support such speeds and current iPhone hardware is unable to utilize these faster networks).

Release 7 will be AT&T’s focus for the rest of 2009 and into 2010, before they start to move into LTE in 2010-2011 — aka super fast speeds.

It’s been a great long while since my last post, and what better way to get back into the swing of things than with some wonderful iPhone news! Today Apple sneak previewed the next iteration of their iPhone/iPod Touch software, version 3.0. It’s been a long time coming and some of users’ longest standing complaints will now be alleviated. Further, some new functionality has been thrown in which makes iPhone 3.0 all the more irresistible. Let’s take a look in more detail…

New features in iPhone 3.0:

• Cut/Copy & Paste text
• Copy and Paste photos – no more sending one photo per email (this is huge for me personally)
• Spotlight Search – anyone who has ever used Spotlight on Mac OS X knows how truly great of an universal search it is, and now that amazing search will be available on the iPhone- Spotlight will return results from your Contacts, Maps, iPod, and even 3rd Party apps if developers hook them into the Spotlight API
• Search in Mail, Calendar, and iPod – no more scrolling amongst hundreds or thousands of listings to find what you’re looking for
• 3G data tethering – Apple is building support for data tethering into version 3.0 of the iPhone software, the onus will be on the carriers to bring it to market
• Landscape Keyboard – now available in other applications like Mail, SMS, Notes
• MMS – about friggin’ time
• Support for new calendar formats – subscriptions to CalDAV (used by Google and Yahoo) and .ics (used by iCal)
• Improved Stocks app
• Stereo Bluetooth A2DP Audio – finally
• Notes will sync with iTunes
• Automatic login with Safari – it will remember your login credentials
• Shake to shuffle music (within the iPod app)
• Auto login to Wi-Fi hotspots
• Anti-phishing built into Safari
• More comprehensive parental controls

New Apple Applications that will ship with iPhone 3.0:

• Voice Memo app
• Send and receive files – dedicated to app to exchanged files between iPhones/iPod Touches

New Third Party App Features that will ship with iPhone 3.0:

• Peer-to-peer Bluetooth connectivity – opens up significant gaming possibilities
• Browse remote content – according to an Apple exec during the Q&A session today, third party apps could allow you to browse other people’s libraries on their iPhone or iPod Touch
• Use your iPhone/iPod Touch to control remote peripherals – a new API available to devs in the SDK will allow remote control of accessories such as external speakers, etc.
• Maps inside other applications – no more flipping to the maps app to look something up, thanks to a new API devs will be able to build maps right into their programs
• Turn-by-turn directions – devs will be able to create turn-by-turn directions apps using GPS information from the iPhone and combining it with their own maps, without depending on 3G connectivity or Google
• Push Notifications – FINALLY! (but I’ll still believe it when I see it)
• Voice communication in apps – apps in iPhone 3.0 will be able to utilize VoIP technology, meaning that you could chat with other users while playing a game against them, for example
• Access music from applications – devs will finally be able to access user’s libraries from within their applications (maybe we can finally get a decent Last.fm scrobbler app now)
• Various changes to app store purchasing options – subscriptions, purchase additional content for an app, purchase additional levels for games (all from within the app itself)

Now the big question, when will this thing be available. For paying iPhone developers enrolled in the dev program it’s available starting today, for the rest of us normal folk, Apple has said that it will be available “this summer.” Take that for code as “we’re not done with it yet, and really it’s not that close to being done either.” Remember, we were told push notifications were coming last September and this is the first we’re hearing of them, some six months later.

Oh Apple, why must you torment us so…

Mark me tardy on this entry as I’ve been tied up at work recently, but last week AT&T Mobility Chief Ralph de la Vega laid out AT&T’s futuristic vision for the iPhone and it is nothing short of something you’d see in Back to the Future.

Imagine this: even before your iPhone wakes you up with its alarm clock, it has already downloaded your morning news feeds and sent a message to your coffee maker to start brewing a fresh pot. If you’re more of a big screen guy/gal and want to read your morning news on a TV, no problem, just wave your iPhone toward the TV to throw your news on the big screen. Now you’ve gotten ready and it’s time to leave the house, no need for keys though, since your iPhone will be able to lock your doors as well as start your car. And don’t worry about the radio, either, because your iPhone will start reading the news feeds you didn’t have time to finish through its text-to-speech capabilities. Now you’re at work. You need to speak to some potential clients in the Far East but you don’t speak Chinese. Again, no problem, as your iPhone will handle automatic language translations in real time!

It’s easy to think of this as a bit far-fetched, and granted some of it may be at this juncture, but AT&T has historically been pretty good about reaching its visions and nobody can deny the revolutionary nature of the iPhone. Competitors like HTC and RIM are just now starting to come out with handsets that offer similar technologies — nearly two years since Apple first announced iPhone.

The beauty of it all is that every company will be looking to push the technological envelope like this, leading to better and faster (to market) technology for all. Isn’t competition just dandy?

Today Microsoft launched its web store for the United States. It may have also marked the beginning of the end for the contemporary method of distributing software. For nearly two decades the primary way that customers received software — be it an operating system, productivity suite, photo editing tool, etc. — was by going to a store, physical or virtual, and purchasing a CD/DVD which contained the software. The customer would then take the disc home and install it on his or her computer.

Under the new model via its web store, Microsoft is employing a technology called Electronic Software Distribution (ESD), whereby customers are able to immediately download the software they purchased once their transaction has completed. The major benefits of this approach are first and foremost, not having to pay extra money for shipping (or gas if you drive to a physical location), and secondly not having to wait for your package to arrive in the mail.

Microsoft has alleviated the most common fear of customers which is not having a physical disc of the software by allowing purchasers to re-download the product until mainstream support for the product ends — which is generally around five years.

Obviously from a Microsoft perspective this is a great move as it allows them to more directly interact with their customers while resolving some of the common, frustrating barriers of software distribution. Where it hurts is with the distributors and partners that Microsoft has formed strong relationships with over the past 10-20 years. These companies that have been selling Microsoft software and helping to expand the brand on a global level are essentially getting left out in the cold. Companies like Best Buy and Staples that sell a lot of Microsoft software could be facing a noticeable loss of revenue. Even if the profit margins on the Microsoft software weren’t that high to begin with, they’ll now be losing out on secondary purchases made by customers while they were in the store shopping for Microsoft software.