When Apple announced that the iPhone would be capable of tethering a computer to the Internet a lot of customers in the U.S. shrugged their shoulders because AT&T wasn't on the list of carriers who were ready to roll the service out.
Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) kicked off yesterday and missing from the event, of course, was Steve Jobs. In his place was Phil Schiller to give the keynote filled with some major announcements. While Schiller did a decent job, he is certainly no Steve Jobs.
I've been an iPhone owner for about a year now, and I have jailbroken it off and on throughout the time that I've owned it. When I first got the device I jailbroke it to play with some of the apps people were developing, but I really didn't see any that were must-haves, and they especially didn't touch the quality of what's available in the official App Store today.
Several days ago, Ryan and I were at a mall and we happened to overhear a conversation that went something like this:
There have been a few different radio applications that have come around, but one frequent complaint is that none of them offer a way to stream music in the background. This is a limitation that Apple has placed on third-party programs, but the native iPod app has this ability.
As promised, today Apple launched the iPhone 2.1 Firmware. They actually surprised us by including details on exactly what it was that they changed with this firmware instead of vaguely saying "bug fixes." This update has been highly anticipated, simply because it is supposed to fix issues with dropped calls, battery life, and accuracy of the 3G signal strength.
As expected the Best Buy consumer electronics retail chain will start selling the iPhone 3G tomorrow. They are really boasting the reduced cost of the phone with the 8GB model starting at $199 and the 16GB starting at $299. To make this seem like even more of an unbelievable deal they are stating that the regular prices are $599 and $699 respectively.
Ever since Apple's App Store launched, we have been waiting for a free app to view Wikipedia articles. Up until today, the only Wikipedia application for the iPhone that we knew of was called iWik, but you had to pay for it. Today Wikipanion launches, it's nearly perfect, and it's free.
Once again, Apple has unexpectedly released an updated version of the iPhone firmware. Version 2.0.2 was released last evening, but not many details were provided as to what the update included, other than it "fixes bugs." Which bugs you ask? Well, we're not quite sure.
Last year about this same time, rumor had it that Apple was preparing to allow their "revolutionary" iPhone to be sold in Best Buy stores. One site, AppleInsider said on August 3rd, 2007,." Interestingly enough, Best Buy never did get the opportunity to sell the original iPhones in their stores last year but they just might get the opportunity to sell iPhone 3G's this year.
