TamsIJungle

So far, developers of mobile devices have not felt the need to especially advertise the third-party extendability of their products in their Point-of-Sales demos. However, Apple’s iPhone 3G demo explicitly features third-party apps in Austria - read on for a few images and a Tam-Hanna-made translation:

	“Web applications directly on your Phone”
(this now shows a few applications in the iTunes app store. Note that all of them are free)
	(Now, Super Monkey Ball is selected)
(The icon now shows up in the launcher’s screen. Amusingly, the payment process and the application’s price have not been shown)
	(The game starts up and the screen begins to tilt)
(The device is shown toppling around as the game runs)

AFAIK, this is the first time ever that a mobile phone manufacturer explicitly advertises the expandability and third-party application availability of its platform. Palm once planned something similar, but never aired the TV spots…looks like another first for Apple!

Firmware 2.0 added a screenshot function to iPhones and iPod touch devices. This is very useful for analysts like yours truly, as it makes creating screenshots for reviews very simple. Unfortunately, these screenshots are not synchronized automatically by iTunes - getting them must be done by hand. Follow the steps below to get to screenshot syncrhonization nirvana:

Step 1 - connect device to computer
The first step is pretty logical. Connect your iPod touch (or iPhone) to your computer and make it link up with iTunes.

Step 2 - open “My Computer”
Amusingly, the iPod touch will show up in the My Computer form of your PC. The image below was made on a German PC running Windows XP Professional:

Step 3 - double-click the iPod Touch’s icon
Your iPod’s content will show up in a pane similar to the one below. Thumbnails can NOT be generated; however, the view mode can be changed to show the file names:

Step 4 - get the pictures off the box
The next and final step is straight-forward…just mark the pictures, right-click them and copy them off to whereever you want to save them to. The transfer will be very slow, however - getting 20 screenshots off my iPod touch took about 3 minutes on my dual-core 1.6GhZ machine… .

Treat the two images above as your proof - the process really works as outlined above! Good luck!

TamsIJungle has covered the iControlPad controller before - and we have just received futher information on the device:

First of all: the device will NOT support the official SDK - iPhones must be jailbroken if the iControlPad should be used with them. The device will cost about 30$ and should begin shipping in September.

I personally consider this the worst possible scenario for Apple: until now, the jailbreaking community consisted of freaks who just did it for fun. However, they now have the first company that depends on jailbreaks - the cat-and-mouse game can now become even harder as more resources are available to the “cracker” fraction…

The iPhone 3G’s camera is famous for producing weird and screwed-up photos every now and then. The latest pic comes from MobilityToday’s David Ciccone, who claims that this is his seventh replacement device:

Even though David probably won’t find this funny, we nevertheless post it for your collective enjoyment!

This one comes straight from our friends at Proporta’s:

50% off all iPod nano Cases… Just visit Proporta

With rumours of a new kid on the block, Proporta are on the edge of their seats and ready with open arms to take delivery of their new product range. Watch this space.

In the meantime, they’re paying tribute to the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Generation iPod nanos by offering 50% discount on all Proporta branded 1G iPod nano, 2G iPod nano and 3G iPod nano Cases* (there’s always an asterisk isn’t there?).

Simply visit www.proporta.com, select the case of your choice and enter the promotion code NEWBIE at the cart page to receive your discount

The reason why I post this is short and sweet: the boys at Proporta’s have an excellent link to both the TamsIJungle team and to Apple. Can’t say anything more though…

The reasons for the called drops become shadier every minute. First, analysts suspected hardware faults. then, Chuq van Rospach stepped up with his theory of software problems. Now, Daniel Eran Dilger’s Roughly Drafted news service has yet another theory:

According to him, the reason for the issues is a weird interaction between the iPhone’s software and the base tower’s transmitter. Base stations do not have unlimited transmission power available, and thus must kick out clients as power runs low.

As iPhone’s request way too much power, AT&T’s base stations run out of power in areas where many Appleheads are located. Daniel uses this to explain the weird issues why areas like San Francisco had worse issues than other countries, and why AT&T has sent out SMS asking users to upgrade ASAP…

In the past, Palm’s Treo smartphones have had issues related to data enclosure and emergency calls. Now Apple’s devices have chimed in - Gizmodo reports an issue that allows attackers to circumvent the password protection.

The issue involves starting an emergency call and then pressing the home button to open the Favorites bar. From there on, other applications including Safari, Email and SMS can be accessed…

Until Apple ships a firmware patch, the solution is simple: go to Settings, Click General, home Button and set it to Home…

The image on the left shows Polish soccer fans celebrating their team at this year’s soccer championship in Vienna. Unfortunately for Orange, the folks awaiting the launch of the iPhone 3G in Poland weren’t as active - in fact, some analysts even claimed that they were paid to stand there.

AdAge now received an explanation from a spokeswoman from the parent company France telecom Group. The unnamed spokesperson states that:

…As part of the excitement around the launch of the iPhone, some of our team have been joining customers outside our shops. Their aim is to welcome people to the Orange shop, share in their excitement and give information about Orange tariffs,”

She furthermore stated that her company was happy with the “strong sales” of the device in Poland, but refused to give specific numbers…

P.S. In case anyone of you wonders how Apple reacted: head-in-the-sand policy rules…

Apple may no longer advertise the iPhone 3G stating that it provides a “full web experience” in the UK, as the British Advertising Standards Agency has ruled this to be misleading, as the phone does not support Flash and Java (sic!).

The full ruling is as follows:

The ASA noted that Java and Flash proprietary software was not enabled on the iPhone and understood that users would therefore be unable to access certain features on some websites or websites that relied solely on Flash or Java. We noted Apples argument that the ad was about site availability rather than technical detail, but considered that the claims “You’ll never know which part of the internet you’ll need” and “all the parts of the internet are on the iPhone” implied users would be able to access all websites and see them in their entirety. We considered that, because the ad had not explained the limitations, viewers were likely to expect to be able to see all the content on a website normally accessible through a PC rather than just having the ability to reach the website. We concluded that the ad gave a misleading impression of the internet capabilities of the iPhone.

In case you wish to look at the ad in question - it can be found on YouTube!

Providing ads to mobile web sites gives you loads of data about mobile web browsers. Intelligent companies like AdMob make parts of this data available to the press to gain free PR (here you go) by helping the press do its job.

Anyways, this month’s “Mobile Metrics Report” was especially interesting, as it looked at worldwide browser market shares for mobile web browsers. The chart below is from the report linked above:

Classic smartphone web browsers surprisingly make up a minuscule of requests: Palm’s Blazer and Apple’s mobile Safari (which is a much better browser) both have 2% market share, Microsoft’s Pocket Internet Explorer and RIM’s browser both don’t exceed the 4% mark.

Nokia’s browsers (S40 and S60) and OpenWave (a classic dumbphone browser) both have about 30% of the market each, with Access’s Netfront (deployed on smartphones and embedded) coming in as a distant third with 12%. Amusingly, Sony’s CLIE handhelds make up for 4% of these 12%, which gives them a total market share of about 0.5%.

The real lesson which can be learned here is that smartphones and their users are an almost-ignorable minority when it comes to mobile web usage. We may be the most vocal bunch, but our numbers diminish compared to the millions of “dumbphone” users populating the mobile internet (and likely having a data contract). As each and every phone that has a web browser also is Java capable nowadays, the implications that this has on the size of the J2ME market are obvious: it is huge.

What do you think?

A big thank-you goes out to AdMob for providing the data!