Hasta La Gadget!

Apple’s highly anticipated iPhone 3.0 operating system has landed, squeezing in some major enhancements missing from preceding versions. Our first impressions? The free software update is significant enough to beautify even the two-year-old, original iPhone, making it feel brand new.

First things first: Right after we installed the new iPhone 3.0 software, it immediately felt snappier than its predecessor. Most important, the iPhone’s camera is quicker at snapping photos than before, making it better equipped for capturing the serendipitous. Even swiping back and forth on the home screen is slicker, as are launching apps and typing messages.

Keep in mind, however, that any operating system update feels immediately faster out of the box. The previous iPhone operating systems slowed down over time due to system caching and other stored files cramping their style. (My colleague Dan Moren of Macworld warned me that from his experience testing the iPhone 3.0 beta, the OS slowed down over time.)

Moving on to enhancements: The single most useful new feature is iPhone 3.0’s search capabilities. Apple added Spotlight, a systemwide search bar that you access by swiping to the left of your primary springboard screen, or by pressing the home button twice, slowly. A search bar appears at the top of a blank, black screen, and you can type a word to perform a search through your calendar, contacts, e-mail applications and the names of applications. (In the screenshot at right, I’ve typed “Yelp”; Spotlight’s results reveal the Yelp application as well as my friend David Lee, who is a Yelp employee.)

This feature will please iPhone-application addicts, because the more apps they download, the harder it gets to find them; this tool solves that problem. Apple also added a search bar for the Mail application, enabling you to easily search through all your e-mails, even ones that are still on the server and haven’t been  downloaded by the iPhone yet.

The major feature that users have been clamoring for is Cut/Copy/Paste. Apple made this tool extremely easy to use: To bring up the functions, you simply double tap on a screen where you wish to copy some text. A bubble appears asking whether you wish to use Cut or Copy, and a box encapsulates the area you tapped. Then, you drag the corners of the box to select the area you wish to copy and tap Copy. To paste, you launch the app where you wish to paste the text, double-tap once again and hit Paste. This tool is long overdue, and we’re relieved it’s finally here.

Another enhancement we’ve been dying for is broader support for landscape mode. That is, the ability to flip the iPhone sideways and use an application sideways. Apple added landscape mode for the iPhone’s e-mail, SMS and Notes applications, and boy is it ever easier to type on a landscape keyboard. It’s about time!

A brand new app on iPhone 3.0 is the Voice Memos audio recorder. We’re not all that wowed, because various audio-recording applications have been available through the App Store for quite some time. But it’s decent at what it does: You hit the Record button, and when you’re finished you hit Pause and then a Log button to store the clip. Then a menu containing the clips appears, where you can play back or e-mail the audio files — in MPEG-4, aka .m4a, format.

We also enjoyed some of the subtle improvements. In the SMS app, for example, you now have the option to delete or forward selected text messages from contacts. (In the screenshot at right, for example, I am individually selecting messages for deletion where a woman is rejecting my subtle invitation to hang out at Outside Lands, as well as her follow-up invitation to a show at Cafe Du Nord.)

Another minor enhancement is the App Store’s Redeem option (below) for gift cards and promotional codes. This eliminates the need to use your computer to redeem these codes and download free goodies through iTunes app. That’s a smart addition: Whatever Apple can do to keep the iPhone experience on the iPhone is a welcome change.

The Mail application also introduces a minor change: When you’re sending an e-mail, you don’t have to wait for it to finish sending before attempting to send another e-mail. Instead, the Mail app puts each message in the outbox and completes each request in the order in which it was sent. I tested this by sending four consecutive photos, and I ran into one problem: When connected on EDGE, Mail consistently failed to send the messages. It wasn’t until I connected to Wi-Fi that I was able to successfully e-mail the four photos.

There are two other features that consumers have been demanding: Tethering support (i.e., the ability to turn the iPhone into a wireless modem) as well as multimedia messaging for sending photos and audio files via a text-messaging-like service. We could not test either of these, because AT&T does not yet support them. The company declined to comment on the reasons why tethering and MMS are not available yet for iPhone customers on AT&T’s network, but a spokesman said it was not a network-related issue. Apple said AT&T iPhone customers can expect MMS support in late summer.

We’ll continue to test iPhone 3.0 over the next few weeks. We’ll also be testing new applications taking advantage of the new features in the operating system. Keep up with Gadget Lab’s iPhone 3.0 coverage.

See Also:

• Apple Rolls Out iPhone 3.0 Operating System Upgrade
• Why Apple Can Afford to Phone It In With the Next iPhone
• iPhone 3.0 Wish List: Accessory-Powered Apps We Want
• Apple Bestows Cut-and-Paste, MMS on iPhone Users
• iPhone 3.0: Will the Gold Rush Continue?

Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

On Friday, you can buy the new iPhone 3G S, which despite being an incremental upgrade to the current iPhone 3G (non-S) has caused plenty of fuss amongst current owners eager to upgrade. There will always be people who have to have the very latest hardware, but for the rest of us, is it worth it? Especially as today we can upgrade all our iPhones and iPod Touches to a new operating system which brings almost all of the new toys to the gadgets we already own.

IPhone OS 3.0 is available today, June 17th 2009. But today, in Apple speak, means morning in Cupertino, California. Morning after a relaxed breakfast, perhaps a decaf latte and a mango smoothie. I say this because it has been today in Spain for 17 hours and the Apple.es software update page still says “Disponible el 17 de junio.” And the reason I keep hammering the “refresh” button is because there are a lot of goodies in the new update.

First, the actual, real hardware differences. A better, 3MP camera which shoots video, a compass and a faster processor. That’s about it. And while applications may open a little faster, that chip won’t be making much difference to games: developers won’t be writing code specifically for the 3G S chip, at least not until there are more 3G S phones in the world than 1G and 3G iPhones and all iPod Touches put together. So the biggest advantage is somewhat useless, at least right now.

Compass? We can do without it. Sure, it will make the maps function way easier to use in a strange city, but for that I could always buy a real, physical magnetic-needle compass for a few bucks. Actually, this $6.50 Military Marching Lensatic Compass on Amazon is pretty neat looking.

And the camera? Tell me there’s an iPhone owner out there without a camera of at least 3MP somewhere in the house. One that will shoot video and likely give a much better picture from its dedicated hardware than a hybrid phone/MP3 player/camera ever could. You could even buy a decent DSLR camera for much less than the $400- $500 you’ll be dropping to get the new iPhone.

Of course, we know the real answer (although that last point about the camera is actually pretty compelling). It’s all about the software. Sure, it’s handy having all your gadgets in one package, but other phones do that, too. The trick with the iPhone is that all these parts jigsaw together seamlessly. For instance, what other device has a video camera, built-in (and usable, by the looks of it) editing software, and an internet connection to send it off to YouTube? (And before you argue that point, make sure that the editing software, if any, doesn’t make you mad enough to throw the phone out the window).

And that’s the real reason so many people will pay the upgrade tax. Not just because of the hardware, but because clever developers will come up with all sorts of new and fun ways to make all that hardware play together. What about, for example, an app that talks to the compass, knows exactly which way you are pointing the camera, and turns videos into 3D worlds you can later explore?

See Also:

• Top 5 Hollywood Answers to Israel’s New ‘Robot Snake’
• T-Mobile Accidentally Posts Secret iPhone 3G S Specs
• How to Avoid Paying the iPhone 3GS Upgrade Tax
• Gadget Lab Podcast #78: iPhone 3GS
• iPhone 3GS Will Cost an Extra $200 for 3G Upgraders
• New iPhone 3GS: 3MP Camera, Video, Compass and Voice Control …

Those tears of joy shed by iPhone loyalists are turning into cries of grief with the announcement by AT&T that it will impose a $200 fee to upgrade to the next-generation iPhone, which lands in stores Friday.

For iPhone 3G users who are not eligible for subsidized pricing, the upgrade “tax” brings the grand total to not $200 or $300 — but a hefty $400 or $500 for the iPhone 3GS, depending on the model (16GB or 32GB, respectively).

But tech geeks and criminal masterminds share one philosophy: They understand there’s a way around everything. You don’t have to pay that extra fee, iPhone 3G customers. Here are a few quick, painless methods to shave off that $200.

Sell your iPhone 3G to Gazelle

Gazelle, an e-junk trader, is offering $200 to $300 for used iPhone 3G handsets, depending on their condition. The site makes it extremely easy to sell your iPhone: Just enter “iPhone 3G” in the search bar, select your model, click “Sell it now,” rate the condition of the phone, mention which of the included accessories you still have and then click “Calculate.” Then, Gazelle will give you an estimate. As you can see in the screenshot above, a 16GB iPhone 3G in perfect condition, including accessories and the instruction manual, will sell for $232. Not bad!

From there on, Gazelle will send you a shipping label to print out. Then you’d pack your iPhone in a box, slap the shipping label onto it, drop the package at a UPS location and wait for payment. Oh, and it gets better — this week you get an extra 10 percent for your iPhone if you use the coupon code “iPhone.” Pretty sweet, huh?

I sold my first-generation MacBook Pro through the site, and I got a pretty good deal. I procrastinated on shipping it out, and Gazelle even sent me a notebook-friendly box to ship it in. After dropping off my MacBook Pro at UPS, I received the promised payment within a week. (If you lie about the product’s condition, of course they’ll dock some dollars off the provided estimate.)

Unlock your iPhone 3G and sell it on Craigslist
This is a pretty obvious option: Stick an ad on Craigslist asking for a reasonable price for your iPhone 3G. Don’t expect much from AT&T customers, though, since Apple is still selling the iPhone 3G for a new low price of $100. Your target market is non-AT&T customers who have intentions to Jailbreak and unlock the iPhone to work with their carrier.

Want to add value to your used iPhone 3G? Jailbreak and unlock the thing yourself, before you put it on Craigslist. To figure out how to do that, visit the Dev-Team Blog, where a group of hackers is providing all the instructions and tools to stick it to the man.

Pay the early termination fee
We’re listing this trick last because it’s the least beneficial. You pay a fee to cancel your AT&T account before the two-year contract is up. Here’s the kicker: The fee is pro-rated; Each month AT&T shaves $5 off your termination fee. That means if you bought the iPhone 3G when it hit stores in July 2008, you’ll be paying $120 rather than the initial $175 termination fee ($175 – $55 = $120). Then, you start a new AT&T contract with a new iPhone 3GS.

With this method, after adding the $120 and the $18 account setup fee, the total for the 16GB iPhone 3GS comes to about $340. That’s $60 less than you’d have to pay normally. The cons: You’re committing to yet another two-year contract with AT&T; sometimes early cancellation is subject to extra fees and a new number, according to Cult of Mac.

Not ideal — and what are you going to do with an extra iPhone lying around anyway? Just sell it with one of the tips listed above.

See Also:

• T-Mobile Accidentally Posts Secret iPhone 3G S Specs
• iPhone 3GS Will Cost an Extra $200 for 3G Upgraders
• New iPhone 3GS: 3MP Camera, Video, Compass and Voice Control …
• AT&T Taking Pre-Orders for iPhone 3GS
• Apple Debuts Aggressively Priced iPhone 3GS, MacBooks
• How to Take Your iPhone Overseas

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

One week after its launch, the Palm Pre appears to be a modest success for the struggling handset maker and its carrier, Sprint.

Despite problems with supply and consumers who are disappointed by the device’s puny battery life, the companies together sold enough smartphones — helped in part by a well-orchestrated publicity campaign — to put the Palm Pre well on the road to success.

“Palm has launched the device without any major snafus so far,” says Jonathan Goldberg, an analyst with Wall Street brokerage firm Deutsche Bank in a research note. “This is a big change from the Palm of the past and the company deserves credit for improving its execution abilities.”

So how well did the Palm Pre do? Here’s a quick score card.

Launch: Since the iPhone, the Palm Pre has probably had one of the best debuts a phone could ask for. Sure, there weren’t any long lines outside stores as with the iPhone but the device built up tremendous buzz on the internet.  From its near-flawless press conference to introduce the Pre to the closely managed access to the phone before its retail debut,  Palm seemed to have put its past as a bumbling yet well-intentioned company behind it. Instead a confident and aggressive gadget maker seemed to emerge.

The Pre seems to have lived up to its initial billing. The phone garnered favorable reviews and has put Palm back in the game. There’s a lesson here for Research In Motion with its botched launch of the Storm, the touchscreen phone on Verizon that was marred by poor reviews and visible lack of excitement over its launch.

Grade: A

Sales: Sprint or Palm aren’t ready to disclose any numbers yet but the Palm Pre is a hit, says Sprint. Last week, Sprint announced it to be its best selling phone ever.

The Pre sold about 50,000 units in its first two days, estimates Paul Coster, an analyst with J.P. Morgan. It’s a good beginning for Palm and if it can keep up the interest in the face of the new iPhone 3G S and the now cheaper iPhone 3G, then Palm can boast of having a real blockbuster on its hands.

Still, it is no iPhone 3G, which sold a million phones in its first weekend. The T-Mobile HTC G1 Android phone reached the million mark about six months after its release.

Grade: B

Supply and production: Since its first glimpse at the Consumer Electronics Show in January’s year, the drumbeat over the Pre’s arrival has been steadily building up. But Palm seems to have stumbled a bit in its efforts to keep up with demand.

There have been reports of a Pre shortage immediately after the launch of the phone and a recent report suggested that Palm may have some problems with production of the hardware.

“The Pre is probably a little more complex than the iPhone 3G in terms of its production,” says Aaron Vronko, CEO of Rapid Repair, a site that has taken the Pre and the iPhone 3G apart. “The Pre uses some new chips, one of which is likely holding up production.”

The slider design of the Pre allows the device to offer both a touchscreen and a physical QWERTY keyboard. But the design also splits the phone’s build into two sections and adds another element to the process that the iPhone 3G doesn’t have to contend with, says Vronko.

But it is the advanced chips and processors in the Pre that are likely to pose the biggest challenge for a company looking to scale production effortlessly. The Pre is the one of the first major consumer devices to use Texas Instruments’ new TI OMAP 3 system-on-a-chip processor. The iPhone 3G uses an older processor from Samsung, says Vronko. The Pre also has 256 MB of system memory compared to the 128 MB in the iPhone 3G. (The newer iPhone 3G S also has 256 MB of system memory, according to reports.) “It could be an issue of how these new chips in the Pre can scale up to production and yield quality,” Vronko says.

So far Palm hasn’t commented on any of problems relating to production. The only way for the company to silence its critics will be to get the Pres cranking out fast and furious.

Grade: C

Battery life: The Pre’s poor battery life is proving to be in its weakest link. The Pre’s multi-tasking capabilities and fast processor take their toll on the device’s battery. Wired.com’s Pre review showed that the charge on the phone lasted less than 12 hours. Twitter and Palm’s own message boards are full of complaints from users who say they have seen the battery on their Pre die with just few hours of use.

“We don’t think the Pre is a phone where you can get away with charging it just once a week,” says Paul Cousineau, director of software product management, webOS, at Palm. “But we do agree with the user expectation that they get at least a full day’s worth of battery from their phone.”

Palm says it has found a bug with its support of the AIM protocol that draws a lot of power, especially if users have a large number of buddies.  “This bug will be fixed, at which point the power draw will be much less,” said Palm in a statement. “For now, we recommend not using AIM until this power draw issue is resolved.”

And contrary to popular perception, Palm suggests that users turn on the Wi-Fi setting on their phone since the Pre is “very efficient at doing data over Wi-Fi.”

To Palm’s credit, the company is moving fast to fix battery life issues. “We are turning the crank relatively quickly to take care of it,” says Cousineau.

Last week, Palm sent out its first over-the-air software update for the Pre to improve on the battery life. And there are more on the way. Cousineau says Palm is working with AIM and Hotmail to resolve issues that impact the Pre’s battery.

Grade: C-

Hardware: Though there have been some reports of problems with the Pre’s screen, the overall build quality of the Pre is excellent. The device feels as comfortable as a bar of soap in the hands and it is well constructed, says Vronko. The Pre’s touchscreen is responsive and Palm uses some of the latest hardware and processor to keep its phone at the top of its peers, he says.

Grade: A

Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com

This article was written on December 18, 2007 by CyberNet.

I’m not sure how many of you have used the free GOOG-411 service before, but I’ve used it over a dozen times since its release. The speed and accuracy of the automated system is rather astounding, and the fact that you don’t have to pay $1.25 just to get a phone number is what really catches people’s attention.

Have you ever thought to yourself “how is Google benefiting from offering the service for free?” You may think that they are planing some sort of advertising system, but as it turns out Google themselves are actually skeptical about its profitability. Their real investment for the system is in the speech-to-text model, where they essentially turn all of the GOOG-411 users into lab monkeys:

Whether or not free-411 is a profitable business unto itself is yet to be seen. I myself am somewhat skeptical. The reason we really did it is because we need to build a great speech-to-text model … that we can use for all kinds of different things, including video search.

The speech recognition experts that we have say: If you want us to build a really robust speech model, we need a lot of phonemes, which is a syllable as spoken by a particular voice with a particular intonation. So we need a lot of people talking, saying things so that we can ultimately train off of that. … So 1-800-GOOG-411 is about that: Getting a bunch of different speech samples so that when you call up or we’re trying to get the voice out of video, we can do it with high accuracy.

That snippet was yanked from an InfoWorld interview with Google’s Marissa Mayer. As you can see the data that they are able to collect should play a huge roll in speech-to-text conversion for videos on YouTube. With that they would not only be better at filtering out copyrighted content, but they would also be able to show ads related to the content of the video.

So now that you know the true purpose behind GOOG-411, do you mind being a lab monkey?

InfoWorld Interview [via Google Blogoscoped]

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