Appletell

While most sites which offer online services are rushing to get into the iPhone hype, the web’s top photo sharing site, Flickr, doesn’t want to join the party yet with a native iPhone app of its own. Instead, Flickr is enhancing its Flickr mobile site to make it more iPhone-friendly. Others who have rushed into making their iPhone apps available in the iTunes apps store have failed to satisfy iPhone users, whereas Flickr’s mobile site has came up with a robust and satisfying Flickr experience on the iPhone.

The redesigned Flickr mobile site has higlighted the most frequently and widely used features of the Flickr website and made it quickly accessible once users visit the mobile site using their iPhone. These features—which are all included in the top-screen navigation—are Activity, Contacts and a Link to more Flickr features. In addition, photos are now automatically scaled to fit the iPhone screen. Unfortunately, when displaying photos, other sizes available are not accessible and viewable. And interestingly, the touch-enabled photo enlargement and shrinking feature cannot be performed with the photos. Scrolling through the photos is now better done, although not as seamless as the web-based Flash enabled Flickr site.

Despite its minor flaws, the iPhone-enhanced Flickr mobile is still a useful alternative for the lack of a native Flickr app. To visit the site, just point your iPhone’s Safari browser to m.flickr.com.

Read [News.com]

• Who’s On Crack in tech: 11.21.08 edition
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I was awoken this morning by a text message from o2, which read, “iPhone 3G is here. The iPhone you have been waiting to early upgrade to. Order from 8am today.“

Yup! If you’re an o2 customer/wannabe customer, you can now pre-order the iPhone 3G at o2’s website! o2 say that pre-orders are on a first-come, first-served basis, and if you order sooner, there’s a bigger chance it will arrive on July the 11th via courier!

If you’re going through the upgrade route, you will need to visit the o2 iPhone upgrade page where you will be asked to type in your iPhone mobile number. You will then receive a text message with an upgrade code, which you must then enter before the upgrade process can continue.

The website is acting extremely erratically (at time of writing), whether this is due to traffic or o2 not getting their web page up in time is unknown. The upgrade site currently throws me between being able to order the phone and a maintenance page (8 a.m., ey’ o2?).

No word on how new customers are getting on, but I have a feeling they might not be having as much trouble. I haven’t as yet been able to pre-order my 3G iPhone. Come on o2, fix your website!

Happy iPhone 3G pre-ordering UK o2 customers.

• Who’s On Crack in tech: 11.21.08 edition
• Apple launches new iPhone Your Life site
• HTC Touch Pro now available with Alltel

The folks over at 9to5Mac on Thursday posted a news item entirely about the leaked WWDC photo you see above. The article in question, if you can call it that, has an ultra-cropped version of the photo zeroing in on the iPhone in the background poster. Their charge is that the iPhone is much too square, even compensating for the squishing effects of foreshortening, to be the iPhone. Could it be the iTablet?

No.

Find out why after the break.

MORE »

Nakahara Informatic’s iGet Mobile, a nifty iPhone-Mac application that allows users to remotely access their documents on Mac through the iPhone just got a new Version 2.0 release. This new version boasts of the following new features; iPhone-specific features through the iGet Mobile web interface, an improved web server component, a redesigned user interface and other enhancements.

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La Repubblica, a well known Italian publication, is reporting, in Italian of course, that there will soon be a 3G iPhone in Italy.  However, this would be no normal release.  Supposedly there will be no carrier lock or two month agreement on the device whatsoever, it will just be sold at a higher retail price to begin with.  Telecom Italia Mobile will have the rights to sell the phone exclusively for the first few months, but customers will not have to use TIM as their carrier although it is estimated that 50% of Italian wireless customers use TIM anyways.

If this is the case, this would be a landmark deal for TIM.  Apple has been known to get whatever they want when it comes to deals about the iPhone.  If this rumor is true, Apple may have realized that in order for the phone to truly reach its potential, they need to make it more open.  It will be interesting to see how this unfolds as a 3G iPhone wasn’t expected to be even announced until WWDC in June.

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Market research firm Gartner released a report Wednesday showing that Apple’s market share for personal computers in the US is now 6.6%, a nice step up from the 5.2% they were at.  Shipping over 1.01 million machines, Apple is now the fourth under Dell, HP, and Acer respectively in the US market.  Unfortunately, Apple has not yet made the top 5 list when it comes to computer producers worldwide.  That list contained HP, Dell, Acer, Lenovo, and Toshiba respectively.  However, Apple has still made some very steady growth this quarter which is one thing they can be proud of.

One strong point in sales for all the companies was mobile platforms, or laptops.  This is no surprise as laptops are becoming very powerful and people are becoming more mobile.  “Despite declining consumer confidence, U.S. consumers did not put off mobile PC purchases as evidenced by solid mobile growth,“ Mika Kitagawa, principal analyst for Gartner said. “This growth was stimulated in part by aggressive price cuts.”  Keep up the good work Apple, I would love see you on that worldwide list next quarter!

Via [AppleInsider]

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A while back I posted about how the a group of surveyed Chinese felt about the iPhone and its price.  This post also went over a little bit of the reasons why the iPhone hasn’t legally appeared in China yet.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t end there, news about an iPhone in China just keeps getting worse and worse.  A recent article from MacNN states that Apple and China Mobile, China’s largest cellular company, have not even begun formal talks over the iPhone yet.  According to China Mobile’s chairman, Wang Jianzhou, the main dispute is over business models.  Mr. Jianzhou also points out that, “Our door will remain open as long as there is customer demand.“

Apple has had a reputation for getting what it wants when it comes to negotiations about the iPhone, but will Apple have to set its pride aside for this one?  Either way, let’s just hope China gets an iPhone to call their own, and soon.

• Who’s On Crack in tech: 11.21.08 edition
• Apple launches new iPhone Your Life site
• HTC Touch Pro now available with Alltel

Many iPhone fans are awaiting Apple’s upcoming 3G iPhone, and unfortunately for them, Apple isn’t planning on commenting until everything is ready! All people can do is speculate, and most rumors that have been floating around seem to point at a summer date (specifically June due to the public release of iPhone Software Version 2.0 and the iPhone SDK) for the release of the 3G iPhone.

Scott Craig, Bank of America analyst, said Apple will start producing 3G iPhones this May, and is expected to manufacture 3 million units and reach 11 million units by this September. If the predictions are correct, the demand for the 3G iPhone will be extremely high, and Apple’s efforts will be well worth it. “Our latest channel checks point to a significant production build of a 3G iPhone beginning in the month of June after an initial small build in May,“ Craig told Reuters.

Of course, company representatives have had nothing to say about the rumors and speculations, so we’ll just have to wait a couple of months for the confirmation of these rumors, if they in fact turn out to be accurate.

How badly does Apple need to release a 3G iPhone? Pretty badly, according to analysts, if they wish to reach their goal of selling 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008. If iPhone sales haven’t been as high as Apple expected so far, a new 3G model could put the iPhone back in the spotlight. What Apple must now take into consideration is that competition on the smartphone market currently very high, especially with the coming of Google Android, and it’s not going to be easy for Apple…however, if the rumors are true and new 3G iPhones are released along with the iPhone Software Version 2.0 and the iPhone SDK, Apple should not need to worry.

Via [eFluxMedia]

• Who’s On Crack in tech: 11.21.08 edition
• HTC Touch Pro now available with Alltel
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MacNN has found a Microsoft patent application patenting a program with features similar to those of CoverFlow.

The patent idea revolves around “stacking wheels” and is mainly designed for mobile applications, and possibly the Xbox 360. Personally, the patent reminds me more of the iPhone, as it is based around the idea of having multiple windows open and rotating through them as if they are laying on a giant wheel, which is like swiping through pages of applications on the iPhone home screen or moving through Safari windows.

Overall, this is just another way Microsoft is adding Apple-like features to it’s products.

Read [MacNN]

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This is another great web app to add to your iPhone’s Safari bookmarks. Following the highly successful Facebook iPhone application, LinkedIn have launched two new mobile versions of their social networking website. The first is for regular WAP browsers, compatible with almost any mobile phone. The second is an iPhone-only site, similar to other web apps available on the iPhone. It looks and feels very similar to Facebook or Google for the iPhone, too. You can scroll through your contacts as you would with your music. It’s currently available in English, French, Spanish and Chinese - and most of the functions you get on the main site are present in this iPhone versions - of course, there are a few things like Answers and the Experts section missing.

I can see a trend of all the social networks creating an iPhone-only version. It makes a lot of sense to do so, seeing as the iPhone is such a popular device in the USA, and now in the rest of the world. And we’ve seen that social networks that don’t want to create iPhone based apps, have iPhone apps created by fans. Take Hahlo as an example, it uses Twitter’s API to be an iPhone-based Twitter application.

Via [iPodNN]

• Who’s On Crack in tech: 11.21.08 edition
• Apple launches new iPhone Your Life site
• HTC Touch Pro now available with Alltel