The folks at iFixIt received a brand new iPod Touch, which they disassembled right away.
Both the touch's 3.5-inch LCD display as well as its Lithium-ion polymer battery are held in place with strips of double-sided tape. The WiFi antenna and circuitry, which are located at the top of the unit, are connected to the main logic board by wide orange cable that were designed to prevent external noise from interfering with the digital signals as they travel along the device, iFixIt says.
The specialty online reseller, which offers replacement parts for Macs and iPods, was particularly excited by its discovery of an unpublicized Broadcom BCM4325 Bluetooth chip within the device. The particular chipset supports BT2.1+EDR, and is necessary for the touch's built-in support of Nike+ iPod technology. It's unclear, however, whether the chip supports A2DP, which would pave the way for Apple and third-party developers to introduce stereo headphones for the player.
iFixIt also discovered brown rectangular component centered about three quarters of the way down the touch's logic board, which is suspected to be the device's speaker. Other discoveries include a 3.7 V Lithium-ion polymer battery with part number 616-0404, NAND flash memory from Micron with part number 29F64G08TAA, and an Apple-branded Samsung-manufactured ARM processor with SDRAM that's similar to the one employed by the iPhone.
Everyone who has owned a cellphone over the last 10 years should at some point pour one out in thanks to Cliff Kushler, one of the inventors of the T9 text entry system. Now Cliff is smartly shifting his focus on touchscreens with Swype—a way to type blindingly fast on a touchscreen by tracing your finger or stylus over the letters you want without lifting up, connect-the-dots style. It looks frankly amazing in a demo:
Exit Games has a multiplayer gaming platform, called Neutron, on PCs, mobile devices, game consoles, and BREW phones. It works across devices and hardware, so you can play someone on their PC via your handset. And now it's ready for the iPhone. Today it was announced that the Neutron system of social network-like gaming now has iPhone support, or will as soon as developers code for it.
Developers from Firemint published a video about thier new project GCDC 2008 - 3D racing game for iPhone. Game will support multiplayer mode via Wi-Fi and 3G. The release is scheduled for the end of this year.
There was a post about Qik:Broadcast video live from iPhone. At that time only users of old iPhones with firmware 1.1.4 could use it. Now there is a new version for 2.0 users.
You can get Qik with the iPhone 3G and old iPhone with firmware 2.0 by doing the following:
If you have not already, you'll need to sign up at http://qik.com/sign_up and receive an SMS from us to activate the application.
Launch Cydia.
Go to the "Sections" tab at the bottom and scroll down to "Multimedia."
Under Multimedia, you will find Qik. Tap on it then select "Install" at the top right, then in the same spot tap "Confirm."
Now you will see Qik get installed. You may hit the "Return to Cydia" button at the bottom or just quit Cydia when it is done installing.
You'll now notice a "Qik" icon on your home screen - Go ahead and launch it.
As long as your initial signup SMS/text message is still in your inbox for the first launch, your account will be linked to your device.
Make sure you have 3G service or are on WiFi (edge is not sufficient enough to stream video) before you begin broadcasting.
Qik has released its mobile video streaming application for jailbroken iPhones to the public. The service allows users to broadcast video live from their phones using Wi-Fi or the EDGE network which can be viewed on Qik’s site or through its embeddable player. Unfortunately, the application is only compatible with phones running the 1.1.4 firmware.
Users running the 2.0 version of the software will need to wait for Qik to release a compatible version, which the company expects to do in the near future. Unfortunately, it’s likely that the application won’t be available through the official App Store, as Apple still hasn’t enabled video capture using the phone’s integrated camera.
The new version of the popular NES emulator for the iPhone and iPod touch now includes accelerometer control for all games. The implementation is very simple: A tilt is equivalent to controlling input in that direction. This means that tilt control can be used in any game loaded into the emulator, but also that some of the controls are pretty much balls. Also, this app does not live in the official app store. NES.app 2.3.0 with tilt control is available now in Cydia.
As seen in the video, controlling Mario is fairly natural, though quick turns and exact jumps are difficult to execute (playing Mario with the stock controls is often worse, though). Bomberman sort of works, but in that case—and many others—the old touch control overlay is much easier. Obviously none of these games were designed with tilt control in mind, but a surprising number are at least playable.
AT&T has developed a software trick that will recognize voice commands without the need for specialized voice recognition software. It is based on a new version of AT&T's WATSON speech recognition engine.
As long as the software used to access Speech Mashups obeys certain web standards, particularly an AJAX framework and JavaScript, the technology can capture voice commands, interpret them at a remote server, and send them back to the device in a language a website or program can understand -- all without installing a dedicated app or plugin.
In a prototype mobile version of the YellowPages website, AT&T in a research video shows an iPhone user entering the business name and location into text fields on the page just by speaking them at the appropriate times. While typing would work in such a case, the company claims that voicing the information is faster and more convenient.
There is just one step from hate to love. There was a post about hate, now about love:
Here is a list of top 10 reasons to love:
10. Search improvements.
9. Scientific calculator.
8. Sync with Mobile Me.
7. Supports for Word attachments
6. Normal headphone jack.
5. It's cheaper ($199).
4. Microsoft Exchange support.
3. Applications. Especially games (from AppStore).
2. 3G
1. GPS
There is do such feature. But.. There is an application called VoiceDial. For old jailbreaked IPhones it is possible to install via Installer. For the new IPhone 3G VoiceDial is avaliable through AppStore. By the way it is not free, cost is about $30.
4. No cut and paste
Indeed, not in IPhone or IPhone 3G for now. But, read this.
3. Can't use as a modem
That is a problem. No such feature. And there will be no such feature in the future.
During WWDC 2008 keynote Steve Jobs compared EDGE and 3G by downloading the same site in Safari on both old and new IPhones. Guys from CNet performed similar testing:
The results are 31 seconds with IPhone 3G and 53 seconds with old IPhone (EDGE). Quite impressive.
PS: By the way. They said "I'm done" a bit slow. Progress bars were done in 29 and 49 seconds correspondingly.