TamsIJungle

So far, Apple was very successful when it came towards keeping carriers close - carriers didn’t dare to do anything to the iPhone which Apple didn’t like. However, a large Swedish carrier called TeliaSonera felt like fighting back…

Back to reality: according to MacWorld Sweden, a TeliaSonera representative stated that an official MMS solution will soon become available to Telia customers.

I personally understand why the boys stand up here - MMS is a huge business for carriers. While data costs next to nothing nowadays (one megabyte for a cent or so), transferring a single MMS (90KB) can net the carrier up to three Euros for essentially the same service.

Apple probably refused to implement MMS in order to entice customers to switch to more-affordable push email solutions - while this is understandable (and, to some extent, noble); millions of existing MMS senders were isolated in the process. This unfortunately back-fired…which is why MMS solutions for jailbroken iPhones have always been immensely popular!

Readers currently using PDANet should be extremely careful when it comes to updating their jailbroken apps via Cydia - mobilityToday reports that the boys at June Fabrics have performed a really devious bait-and-switch trick.

While version 1.40 adds a variety of valuable features, it also contains a hidden timer which eventually expires and forces you to cough up 29$ in order to continue using the program.

Don’t get me wrong: developers should (and IMHO have to) stop giving away iPhone apps for free in order to make money more effectively - however, performing bait-and-switch tactics not only is bad business behavior, but also is illegal under some jurisdictions (e.g. Austria and other parts of the EU).

Once again: if you currently use PDANet, don’t upgrade!

Brandon Miniman’s recent rant about the rotten state of mobile flash apparently motivated manufacturers to improve their flash offerings – here is the round-up of all things flash:

ARM and Adobe cooperate on Flash
IMHO, one of the reasons why Java is as popular as it is is the so-called Jazelle unit found in most ARM processors – it can accelerate some types of Java code significantly by executing it in hardware.

Flash may soon get similar treatment according to Reuters - they claim that a series of optimized CPUs is upcoming:

The two companies said in a statement on Monday a series of ARM-based processors for cellphones, set-top boxes and other devices adapted for Adobe’s Flash 10 and AIR should be available in the second half of 2009.

The collaboration, part of Adobe’s Open Screen Project, was endorsed in the statement by several chipmakers including Texas Instruments, Nvidia and Freescale.

Full-featured Flash upcoming
As already stated in Brandon’s rant, the current version of Flash Lite can also be called YouTube enabler – as it is incompatible with most recent flash files.
However, this will change soon according to CNet:

The company has worked on Flash Lite for mobile phones for years, but a new generation of powerful smartphones has enabled Adobe to bring the full-fledged version for PCs to the mobile market. Lynch urged programmers and content producers to treat mobile devices with the same priority as regular computers.

Flash goes Android
One of Apple’s main competitors in terms of buzz (the T-mobile G1) is said to get Flash shortly. This singles out the iphone as one of the few mobile platforms not capable of Flash – I predict that Apple will cave in sooner rather than later…