NEW YORK (AP) -- Best Buy Co. will start selling the iPhone on Sept. 7, becoming first U.S. chain to do so outside of Apple Inc.'s and AT&T Inc.'s own stores.
The announcement by Best Buy expands the availability of Apple's vaunted phone to 970 full-size stores and 16 smaller Best Buy Mobile stores. It's also a coup for the Minneapolis-based chain, which has been upgrading its cell-phone departments.
Last week, Best Buy announced it had completed a two-year conversion of its stores to include upgraded cell-phone departments under the Best Buy Mobile brand. It has upgraded its computer systems to handle cell-phone activation and spent 250,000 hours training its employees.
David Friedman writes in to let us know he’s thrown his hat into the ‘This is how I think Apple should implement cut-and-paste’ ring. His idea is simple, intuitive, and doesn’t look to interfere with the current magnifying glass insertion point UI.
Here it is in a nutshell — when you have the magifying glass up, there’s a button you can press to toggle the various things you need for cut and paste — select, cut, copy, and paste. David recommends that the options shown would be contextual based on whether or not you have anything in your clipboard. When you’re in a text-entry field, that toggle button would appear in place of the space bar area at the bottom, while areas with text that lack text entry (like Safari) would need an unobtrusive button to appear when in the text-selection mode.
All in all, we like it.
No convoluted finger gymnastics
No trying to remember how many fingers you need to use for a given action
Compatible with the current UI. In fact, it’s consistent and keeps the current text-selection metaphor of the UI intact. It just adds to it.
According to Fortune and analyst Michael Cote of the Cote Collaborative, Apple has already hit the three million mark, with many investors expecting only three to four million handsets sold by the end of the quarter.
It took over 10 weeks for the original iPhone to sell just one million handsets. The iPhone 3G accounts for almost a third of all iPhones sold, ever.
Cote says that meeting demand will be Apple's challenge going forward, as it enters 20 new countries on August 22 -- almost doubling its market presence worldwide.
In the month since Apple opened an online software clearinghouse called the App Store, users have downloaded more than 60 million programs for the iPhone, Chief Executive Steve Jobs said in an interview at Apple's headquarters.
While many of the applications were free, Apple sold an average of $1 million a day in applications for a total of about $30 million in sales over the month, Mr. Jobs said.
If sales stay at the current pace, Apple stands to reap at least $360 million a year in new revenue from the App Store, Mr. Jobs said. "This thing's going to crest a half a billion, soon," he added. "Who knows, maybe it will be a $1 billion marketplace at some point in time."
Apple is keeping only 30% of the proceeds from application sales -- about enough to cover expenses from credit-card transactions and other costs of running the online store -- while the programs' creators keep 70%.
I didn't want to write about this stupid application, that was added to AppStore several days ago. It is useless. All it does is it costs $999.99. Unfortunately 8 people bought it, 2 of them did that by mistake and will et moneyback.
Now Apple removed this application. So here is a video showing this application:
PwnageTool 2.0.2 released just a day ago. And now WinPwn - iPhone jailbreaker and unlocker for windows is avaliable. The main new feature - it supports firmware 2.0.1.
iPhone OS 2.1 beta 3 is now available and is to be used for testing only. View the Pre-Installation Advisory for iPhone OS 2.1 beta 3, Readme, and Release Notes before installing the new versions of the iPhone OS and SDK. As a reminder, pre-release software is Confidential Information and is subject to the terms outlined in your Registered iPhone Developer Terms and Conditions with Apple.
Again, there were 8 betas released for 2.0 between March and July. If Apple keeps this up, could we be looking at a September release for 2.1?
Newly arrived in the App Store is pTerm, an iPhone port of the PuTTY terminal emulator. It supports SSH and Telnet, among other things, and has a built-in Control key.
Eric Maland says that a 1.1 update is already on its way (it has been submitted to Apple and is awaiting approval). Unfortunately a handful of "major crashy bugs" (as Eric puts it) were discovered after the 1.0 release had been submitted.
Planned features for future releases include multiple simultaneous connections, custom sizes and colors, port forwarding and lots more.
And in the meantime, if you download and experience crashy behavior, Eric's message is: be patient. The fixes are done, but when they reach the Store is out of his hands.
This patent is for accessing your entire iTunes library from anywhere—streamed to your iPhone or touch either via Wi-Fi or EDGE/3G. Basically, this future iTunes will sync the metadata for your whole library, and all the music and videos stored back on your computer ("virtual media items") will be totally integrated with the content actually on your device, so it'd be just like having your entire library on your phone.
IBM has unveiled a sneak peek of its new Lotus iNotes, a web app client for its Lotus Domino messaging server to bring email, calendar, and contacts to iPhone. The move fulfills rumors of customized iPhone support for Lotus Notes and demonstrates IBM's evolving interest in Apple within the enterprise.
Planned for delivery later this year, Lotus iNotes is built upon IBM's existing Lotus Domino Web Access infrastructure. The company's web site invites users to "bring the enterprise to your Apple iPhone" and says the software will deliver a "rich Apple iPhone user experience."
IBM published a series of screenshots of the tentative iNotes user interface, with the disclaimer that details are subject to change without notice.
On August 22, 20 new countries will start offering the iPhone 3G for sale. Here's a list of the countries that are expecting launches that Friday (and their associated carriers, in parentheses):
There are several reports that updating to 2.0.1 on an iPhone in Airplane mode may result in bricked phones.
Users who paid Vodaphone to unlock their phones for international roaming have reported the update breaks connections with their carriers.
A few users report occasional lag in the Contacts, SMS and e-mail apps. From our testing, typing in the Contacts app is still laggy, but SMS and e-mail is faster.
No surprise whatsoever: Updating results in losing access to your jailbroken (i.e. hacked) apps. 2.0.1 updates iPhone 3G's baseband, you may never be able to unlock the handset again if you run this update.
Many users are reporting 2.0.1 is slow with backup. This more likely has to do with the version of iTunes they're running; many have said iTunes 7.7.1 sped up backup and syncing.
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.
Disable airplane mode before installing Prior to installing the iPhone OS 2.0.1 update, make sure that Airplane mode is not enabled on your iPhone. Having Airplane mode turned on can result in a non-functional phone when the update is applied. You may receive the error message:
“Information for activation cannot be obtained from the iPhone”
Fortunately, you can disable Airplane mode from the emergency screen if your iPhone is put into an inactivated state by a problematic update.
“iTunes could not update the carrier settings on your iPhone” Several users are receiving the error message “iTunes could not update the carrier settings on your iPhone. An unknown error occurred (OxE80000001).”
If this error occurs, try clicking the “Restore” button in iTunes rather than “Update.”