Hasta La Gadget!

As quickly as gadgets evolve, their knockoffs do, too. Take a gander at some of the new counterfeit iPhones, which sport an uncanny resemblance to Apple’s proud creation.

iPhone knockoffs have come a long way in a short amount of time. Compare the image at top of a new iPhone clone to the image below of a HiPhone, a shoddy counterfeit iPhone we regretfully purchased in November. The older one is obviously fake — even to those who don’t own an iPhone. But the new copycat looks pretty impressive, doesn’t it?

New iPhone knockoffs are making their way onto eBay and Craigslist, reports Cult of Mac’s Leander Kahney. And they look so close to the real thing that the only warning sign is when the price is too good to be true.

MacMedics posted a video featuring a fake iPhone that a client purchased off eBay. Check it out below the jump.

See Also:

• Chinese iPhone Knockoffs Described With Hilarious Engrish
• IPhone Nano Clones Already on Sale
• Ipod Touch Knockoff Already Available a Month Ago
• Say Hello to Wired.com’s Fake Chinese iPhone — the HiPhone

Photos: Steven Fernandez/Flickr, Brian X. Chen/Wired.com

Palm is tightlipped about sales of the Palm Pre smartphone released earlier this month but one analyst claims the device is off to a great start.

About 300,00o Pres have been sold since the launch on June 6, says Edward Snyder, an analyst with Charter Equity Research. That’s the same number of phones sold in one month than Palm did in its entire previous quarter. Palm may have gathered about 70,000 Pre pre-orders in May, estimates Snyder.

An earlier estimate from analyst Mike Abramsky at RBC Capital Research pegged Pre sales at 150,000.

Palm is counting on the Pre to turn the tide for the company. Palm has been plagued by financial woes and in the fourth quarter, which ended before the launch of the Pre, Palm posted a net loss of $105 million, compared to $43.4 million the year before.

The company is now likely to capitalize on the success of the Pre, says Snyder in his report.  Palm is likely producing about 15,000 Pre phones a day and will ship one million phones to Sprint, its exclusive carrier partner,  in the first full quarter of production,  he says.

Still Palm has a long way to go before it can catch up with the Apple iPhone. The Pre has been often mentioned as one of the strongest rivals to the iPhone. Apple sold more than one million iPhone 3G S models in just three days after its release on June 19.

See Also:

• Palm Pre Scores a Modest Hit, Despite Problems
• Palm Pre May Launch in May; Rumor Machine Goes Into Overdrive …
• 6 Reasons Why the Palm Pre Is Special
• Palm Unveils Its Long-Awaited Smartphone, the Pre
• Palm Pre Review
• Palm Pre App Catalog Makes a Slow Start
• Palm Pre Hits Sprint Stores

Photo: Palm Pre (Patrick Moorhead/Flickr)

What you see above is not a calculator. Or rather, it’s not the calculator you think it is. Rather, it is the latest software-only implementation of the classic Hewlett Packard scientific calculator, the 15C.

It gets better. This emulator runs on the iPhone, and is joined there by its little brother, the 12C (a financial calculator). Both calcs are photo-perfect representations of the originals and both run the same algorithms as the hardware versions to do the actual number crunching.

Now, the catch is the price. Although by no means expensive, these apps do cost more than the free calculator that comes with the iPhone, which will be enough to put many people off. But compared to the price of an actual second hand 15C, something of a sought after cult classic, they look cheap. The actual 15C can go for up to $400. The software version is a mere $20.

Product page 12C [iTunes]
Product page 15C [iTunes]

Just a week after the release of Apple’s new iPhone, a few owners have complained about the handset’s high temperatures, which in some cases are high enough to start browning the white plastic on the back of the phone.

Only a small number of iPhone 3GS customers have reported their handsets are reaching very high temperatures. But because more than a million iPhone 3GSes were sold in the first weekend, the issue could put tens of thousands of new iPhones at risk, a component specialist told Wired.com.

Aaron Vronko of Rapid Repair, which performs teardowns of iPhones and iPods, said overheating is likely an issue due to faulty battery cells, and said he expected it could spur a recall of up to hundreds of thousands of iPhone 3GS units.

“My guess is there’s going to be a whole lot of batteries affected because these [iPhones] are from very large production runs,” Vronko said. “If you have a problem in the design of a series of batteries, it’s probably going to be spread to tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, and maybe more.”

Apple has not returned phone calls and e-mails requesting comment on the reports.

Of all hardware-related failures, overheating batteries have historically posed the greatest safety risks — in extreme cases causing fires, exploding and even killing consumers. The issues of overheating batteries are typically traced to faulty battery cells provided by a component supplier.

Apple products in the past have had battery-related woes. In 2006, Apple issued a recall for iBook G4 and PowerBook G4 notebooks, because their batteries contained cells provided by Sony that were causing some batteries to explode.

Also, Apple in August 2008 issued a recall for defective iPod Nanos, which caused three fires in Japan. In that incident, Apple said only 0.001 percent of iPod Nanos were affected. Even so, that’s still a large number of consumers, considering the millions of iPods sold.

Over the past weekend, a small number of iPhone 3GS owners reported in forums and on blogs that their handsets were reaching oddly high temperatures. The issue was most visible in white iPhones, which were turning brown as a result of the high heat (right).

“At some point, I became aware the handset had become very hot,” wrote Melissa Perinson, senior editor of PC World, who felt high temperatures while gaming and browsing the web on her iPhone 3GS. “Very, very hot — not just on the back, but the entire length of the front face, too…. Toasty doesn’t even describe how surprisingly hot it got. It was too hot to even put the phone against my face.”

Vronko said the iPhone 3GS’s heat problem is evidently tied to the battery, because the pictures of discolored white iPhones reveal the outline of the battery. He noted that although thousands of iPhone 3GS users probably own defective handsets, the risk of causing fire or explosion is low because the iPhone’s battery cell is extremely small.

“[An overheating iPhone] is much less dangerous than a laptop,” Vronko said. “It’s extremely rare for a cellphone battery to explode. A little bit of smoke eventually is probably the best bet.”

He stressed, however, that overheating will more likely cause complete failure of the iPhone 3GS over time. When a battery overheats, it’s getting a runaway reaction that produces gas, causing expansion to occur inside the sealed battery. This expansion puts pressure on components, damaging them and eventually killing the iPhone.

Wired.com polled iPhone 3GS owners via Twitter asking if they were experiencing any problems with their new handsets. Only one out of 21 respondents said his iPhone 3GS felt like it was overheating.

Eleven of those respondents, however, reported the iPhone 3GS had poor battery life — even shorter than its predecessor — a different topic Wired.com will investigate soon.

Wired.com will continue examining the iPhone 3GS’s battery issues and keep you posted. Look forward to a battery test comparing the new iPhone to its predecessor in the near future. Meanwhile, e-mail any of your iPhone 3GS-related problems to Brian_Chen [at] Wired [dot] com.

See Also:

• IPhone 3GS Handsets Overheat, Turn Brown
• Gallery: iPhone 3GS Teardowns Reveal Underclocked CPU, More …
• T-Mobile Accidentally Posts Secret iPhone 3G S Specs
• iPhone 3GS Picks Up the Pace With New Features – Video – Wired
• Review: The iPhone 3GS By Steven Levy
• iPhone 3GS Trounces Predecessors, Rivals in Web Browser Speed Test …

Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com, Le Journal du Geek

The iPhone 3.0 software update brought some great new features: search, cut and paste (at last) and background notifications. It also, for many users, brought a return to the bad old days of long, slow backups.

Everyone who upgrades their iPhone to a new OS will have a slow first backup, as the entire thing is redone from scratch. And having an automatic, mandatory backup is a good thing for a very lose-able portable device. But for me and many others, the bad old days of iPhone 2.0 are back, with some users waiting for hours each time they sync their device.

This quote from nancy_m on the Apple discussion forums:

14 hours and counting on my iPhone. It looks like it’s about 50% of the way there. I spoke to Apple Support and they said “this is normal.”

At this rate, I’ll be happy to have a backup by Monday.

Murariua, in the same place:

I have same issue, first backup after OS 3.0 upgrade took about 45 minutes, now regular backups take 5-10 minutes to complete. On 2.2.1, it was 2-3 minutes for a backup.

The problem is, there appear to be almost as many solutions as there users. Some report that deleting the ESPN application fixes things (we suspect this has something to do with the application using a lot of disk storage between syncs). Others have fixed things with a simple restart.

We have a suspicion, founded on nothing but speculation and some reading, that this may be related to applications which haven’t yet been updated to be fully compatible with OS v3.0. Stanza, the e-book reader, appears to be having some trouble:

Prior to installing Stanza and Shakespeare, my backup times were normal. After installing these two applications, my backup times sored… 4 to 5 hours….
After deleting both applications… my problem is gone… Backup takes a swift 20 minutes.

There are two ways this can go. Apple can issue an all-fixing update, as it did with v2.0, or applications will be updated one by one and the problems will go away. We’ll see which it is.

For me, my backups were taking around ten minutes each on a 32GB iPod Touch with around 23GB used. The problem? Encrypted backups. Tick the box on this new feature, conveniently placed on the first iPod page in iTunes, and I could happily enjoy slow, slow sync, every single time. Untick the box and wait for another full device backup and subsequent syncs are a lot quicker, although still more sluggish than we’re used to. Thanks, Apple.

Topic : Really slow iPhone backup with new 3.0? [Apple Discussions]
Slow backups on 3.0 GM? [MacRumors Forum]