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This week Steve Jobs answered an email question from Sweden. The question was from Jezper Söderlund:

I’ll keep it short.

I’m Jezper from Sweden, a long time Apple fan, currently about to replace the very last computer at home with a brand spanking new iMac i7. I’m also awaiting the release of the iPad. However, I have one question:

Will the wifi-only version somehow support tethering thru my iPhone?

Two devices, based on the same OS, with already built-in technology to share one data plan suggests a secondary contract could possibly be redundant.

From the look of your keynote, where the iPad sits well between my MacBook Pro and my iPhone, I was hoping the three of them could interact as seamless as possible.

All the best,
Jezper Söderlund

This is a very interesting question, since iPad’s network settings with tethering were found recently. Here is Jobs’ answer:

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After the news about Apple’s lawsuit many of us have been wondering why Apple did this. Obviously, the thing is not about money as the company already has $40 billion of cash and investments. Digital Daily’s editor John Paczkowski thinks the reason is a desire to extend iPhone’s growing lead on the market.

“Apple is suing to make an example out of HTC and lengthen the engineering time-to-market for Android handset builders.”

While other Android smartphone manufacturers will spend their time solving a problem with developing of noninfringing technologies to avoid lawsuits, Apple will continue to iterate the iPhone.

Ok, this is clear, but why Apple accused HTC now?

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The Unreal Engine 3 is a modern 3D gaming engine which powers games such as Bioshock, Gears of War and Unreal Tournament 3.

Anandtech spent some time with Mark Rein (Epic Games) last week and was shown a demo of the Unreal Engine 3 running on a 3rd Generation iPod Touch. The demo included a flythrough as well as a playable level from Unreal Tournament.

The game engine requires OpenGL 2.0 so this will restrict the game to 3rd generation iPod Touches and iPhone 3GSs only. Epic is planning on making the engine available to licensees at some point, opening the door eventually to Unreal-powered iPhone games. Epic tells Anand we’re going to see Unreal running on another mobile platform at CES.

Let’s watch the video demo:

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We published several news about new firmware 4.0 and even new iPhone 4 hardware. Recently one more iPhone developer has noted a single instance of iPhone OS 4.0 being used in their Pinch Media analytics. While such data can still be faked, it seems less likely to be. Testing of iPhone OS 4.0 may correspond with reports of new iPhone hardware also being tested. Any new iPhone would require a new version of the iPhone operating system to support the new hardware.

We can not yet imagine the features of this new OS or the new device. Apple is widely expected to release a new iPhone in the summer around WWDC 2010.

All iPhones are manufactured in China. Probably that’s why users can find so many iPhone clones. Here is the latest arrival: iFhone 3GS – one of the best iPhone clones ever.

The device is identical, however there is no Apple logo. Take a look at these interesting features:

• 3.5-inch touchscreen
• accelerometer
• WAP, GPRS, Bluetooth, WiFi
• 230MB of memory expandable to 15GB with a memory card
• VGA camera
• Java for games and apps
• Audio and Video support (MP3/3GP/MP4/JPG/TXT)
• Built-in FM Radio Tuner
• Voice recording

Even the interface of the springboard and the various applications is very similar to the original iPhone.

The box is identical, complete with Apple logo. Included: stylus, headphones, USB cable and an extra battery to attach to the dock. All this costs $123 without shipping charges.

More photos:

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It seems Apple is continuing to invest in advancing web-based technologies to provide a more full feature experienced on the iPhone and iPod Touch. Daring Fireball describes in detail an impressive new web framework called PastryKit. This kit is for making HTML, CSS, and JavaScript-based WebApps.
It is already deployed in Apple’s iPhone User Guide web page (when viewed from an iPhone). You can watch the video at hte end of this post.

Apple has implemented a few key interface features in Javascript that could make web-apps feel much more like native iPhone apps. These include:

• Completely hiding the address bar
• Allowing for fixed-position toolbars that don’t move when you scroll
• Allows for scrolling with momentum so you can quickly scroll long lists

Since these features have been implemented by Apple in Javascript, they could be available to any web developer.

Let’s watch the video:

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MacWorld performed several tests between all the Apple devices: iPhone 2G, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPod Touch, iPod Touch 2G, iPod Touch 3G. Here are the results, all in one table:

Results are in seconds. Best results in bold. All devices were tested running iPhone OS 3.1. Peggle and Star Defense were app launch times to end of initial load screen. PCalc was launch time to calculator ready. Sunspider was the time to run the WebKit Sunspider JavaScript benchmark. Page load test was amount of time it took to load nytimes.com.

via macworld

A few days ago we reported that the statistics showed an increase in speed of firmware 3.0 compared to 2.2.1. This factor, however, does not find confirmation in other applications, because, as you can see from the following table that 3.0 is slower than 2.2.1.

For example is takes 34 seconds to start for firmware 2.2.1 against 47 seconds for 3.0 firmware. The launch time of some applications on the old firmware also sees an advantage of 2-9 seconds compared to 3.0. This is just further evidence showing that the 3.0 firmware has problems and should be optimized. We hope that the update arrives soon!

Medialets today released the results of JavaScript benchmark tests performed using the SunSpider test suite on the iPhone 3G and 3GS, the T-Mobile G1 running Android, and the Palm Pre running webOS. The use of the SunSpider suite for benchmarking studies enables cross-platform comparisons among the devices, as they all utilize WebKit-based Web browsers. In the Medialets study, the iPhone 3GS outperformed the Palm Pre by a factor of three and the T-Mobile G1 by over a factor of five.

Notably, Medialets also tested the iPhone 3G running both iPhone OS 2.2.1 and OS 3.0, revealing that iPhone OS 3.0 provides a nearly three-fold improvement in performance over OS 2.2.1 running on the same hardware. The shift to the iPhone 3GS increases performance a further three-fold.

via macrumors

Here is a list of 113 new features in 3.0 firmware. The information is  from hackint0sh site forum:

1. Cut/Paste
2. Copy/Paste
3. Shake to undo/redo typing
4. Text selection for easy mass deletion
5. MMS
6. Landscape keyboard in Notes
7. Landscape keyboard in Mail
8. Landscape keyboard in Messages
9. Forward texts or picture messages
10. Delete individual texts or picture messages

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NimbleKit a good kit that will help to create an application for iPhone. Developers can use just HTML and JavaScript, there is no need in any special knowledge relating to Objective-C.

There is application fee, but you can download a trial version directly from the official site. Below is a video with the first tutorial that shows how to create an Internet Radio:

While still in beta, the Firmware 3.0 includes a new version of Safari that integrates the latest WebKit. It uses SquirrelFish Extreme (”Nitro”) as an engine for JavaScript. The benchmarkes shows that the new firmware is 3 to 10 times faster, depending on the type of action.

Here is a video from googletalks, where Arno Puder speaks about using Java for developing iPhone apps.

Net Applications is reporting that the iPhone owns 66.61% share, which compare to Java2ME (RIM’s OS) 9.06% and WinPho’s 6.91%, Android and Symbian’s 6.15% each, and Palm’s 2.37% and the assorted others’ at 2.75%.

Android, which Google released in October, came in fourth with 6.15 percent, following No. 2 Java ME’s 9.06 percent and No. 3 Windows Mobile’s 6.91 percent.

iSutra, this nice application. Thanks to jailbreaking and Cydia we can run and use. It updated to vesrion 1.1. Just in time for Valentines Day. Several bugs fixed. It is also translated into Russiand and Portugese. If you’re not familiar, watch the video here.