Hasta La Gadget!

The Griffin + Threadless line of matching iPhone cases and T-shirts gets a spring lift with two new releases for the season. If you’ve never even thought of matching your iPhone case with your T-shirt, isn’t it even more goofy that you can now change your look with the season?

The first case/shirt combo is called Fail (above) and it shows the little cow that couldn’t. “The design is a childhood rhyme, all twisted up,” says creator Budi Satria Kwan. “I think cows are just the best subject matter.” I agree, except for dogs.

The second combo is called Rainforests, and it shows a watercolor-y view of trees, rain, spring, and new life. “The richness and freshness of the rainforests give us such great enjoyment. We should treasure them forever!” enthuses creator Yeoh Guan Hong.

For more info on the whole collection, check out the Griffin + Threadless product page.

When Wolfram Alpha first put its computational knowledge engine on the iPhone, it cost a staggering $50. The world laughed, then looked away, forgetting about it. What made this price even more ridiculous is that it put none of the knowledge nor the engine in your iPhone. The 0.8MB download is merely a front end to relay queries to and display results from the vast computational mothership out on the internet. As you need a connection to use it, and as the Wolfram Alpha site is optimized to look great on the iPhone, nobody bothered.

Now, though, the price has dropped to just $2, and presumably the Alpha team is suitably humbled. Actually, maybe the folks there are just happy that now at least one person (me) has downloaded and will use it. It’s still just a front-end to the man behind the curtain, but you do get a few advantages over the mobile web site, like bookmarks and a history browser. It is also a little quicker than the browser version.

So, if you care that the most common age for people named Charlie in the US is 63 years (I’m not there yet), or that garden sorrel has the Latin name rumex acetosa, head to the iTunes Store now.

UPDATE: It seems that some people did buy the $50 app. If you are one of them, and you’re feeling ripped-off right now, you can get a refund from the appropriately-named “I Want My Money Back!” offer. Sign up, submit your iPhone’s UDID number and some other details and you’ll get back $20 or $50 depending on how much you paid for the app.

Wolfram Alpha [iTunes]

See Also:

• Wolfram Alpha Knows the Secret of Time Travel
• Top 10 Wolfram Alpha Easter Eggs
• The Price Is Wrong: 13 Overpriced iPhone Apps
• Wolfram Alpha

AT&T has taken a lot of heat from iPhone customers complaining about network performance, but the carrier insinuated in an article today that Apple was partly at fault as well.

AT&T executives visited Apple last year to provide Apple engineers a “crash course” in wireless networking to reduce the load that iPhones were putting out on the network, said John Donovan, AT&T’s chief technology officer, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. As a result, Apple tweaked its iPhones to communicate with AT&T’s towers and mitigate network overload, according to Donovan.

“They’re well past networking 101, 201 or 301,” said Donovan, adding that Apple is now “in a Master’s class.”

That would imply that AT&T felt Apple engineers weren’t well versed in wireless networking, and the iPhone — not just AT&T’s network — was causing issues such as dropped calls, patchy coverage and sluggish downloads. A 2008 study by Wired.com found that iPhone download speeds were especially slow on AT&T’s network compared with international carriers, which suggested that AT&T was overloaded. However, a recent study by PC World saw significant improvement in AT&T’s network speeds — so perhaps AT&T’s crash course did indeed help address the problem.

However, iPhones keep selling, and network shortcomings are a prevalent problem. Donovan admitted that addressing these issues has increased his blood pressure 20 points.

See Also:

• Apple Doubles iPhone's 3G Download Cap
• TV 'Anywhere': AT&T Relents on iPhone 3G Slingbox
• What's Wrong With the 3G in iPhone 3G?
• Wired.com's iPhone 3G Survey Reveals Network Weaknesses
• AT&T Addresses Network Challenges, iPhone's MMS Delay in Video …

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

So this is what all those “yo’ network’s so slow” jokes were about. The Wall Street Journal has today penned a story framing AT&T’s hefty recent investments in building out its network as a defensive move against a “huge exodus to Verizon” when its rival gets the iPhone. These preventative measures include working with Apple on streamlining the iPhone’s network load, and infrastructure spending that is expected to be $2 billion more in 2010 than in 2009. The WSJ claimed yesterday that Apple was working on a CMDA version of its iPhone that could hit mass production as early as September. However, concluding that the iPhone on Verizon is a done deal seems something of a stretch. Sprint has shown a remarkable ability to attract cutting edge phones, and China Unicom’s exclusivity agreement is about to hit its precarious first anniversary about the time this handset is set to roll out. Still, setting aside the analyst blather and extrapolation, the picture that emerges is of AT&T feverishly patching up its service offering in the face of a rapidly expiring exclusivity arrangement.

AT&T building out network capacity to prevent exodus to Verizon’s iPhone? originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 31 Mar 2010 04:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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iPad owners will receive one major OS upgrade for free, but subsequent OS upgrades will cost a fee, according to documentation posted by Apple.

Apple on Monday began seeding the Golden Master version of its iPhone OS 3.2 software development kit to developers, which will be the version of the OS that ships on the iPad, according to MacRumors’ Arnold Kim. Apple also posted the iPad licensing agreement to its server. A clause in the agreement reveals that iPad customers will get a free download of the major OS following the one that shipped with the product, and after that, subsequent major OS upgrades will come at a cost:

Apple will provide you any iPad OS software updates that it may release from time to time, up to and including the next major iPad OS software release following the version of iPad OS software that originally shipped from Apple on your iPad, for free. For example, if your iPad originally shipped with iPad 3.x software, Apple would provide you with any iPad OS software updates it might release up to and including the iPad 4.x software release. Such updates and releases may not necessarily include all of the new software features that Apple releases for newer iPad models.

That implies that for first-generation iPad customers, iPhone OS 4.0 will be a free download, but versions that follow — 5.0, 6.0 and so on, will cost a fee.

The iPad’s upgrade policy would fall in the middle of the upgrade policies for the iPhone and the iPod Touch. iPod Touch owners had to pay a $10 fee when they upgraded to iPhone OS 2.0 and iPhone OS 3.0. iPhone customers, however, receive OS upgrades for free. Apple has cited legal accounting requirements when explaining the reasoning behind the iPod Touch’s policy.

iPad Documentation File [.ipd]

Updated 1 p.m. PT to correct a misinterpretation of the policy. Wired.com regrets the error.

See Also:

• How the iPad Is Already Reshaping the Internet (Without Flash …
• iPhone Hacker Thinks He’s Cracked the iPad, Too
• Ten Things Missing From the iPad
• The Wired Tablet App: A Video Demonstration

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com