News tagged ‘iCan’

It seems that Apple has reached a new milestone with the App Store. It now has more than 40,000 applications available to download all in 10 months. There is no official news yet, but AppShopper found 43,154 applications of which 40,253 are currently available in the American Store, AppTism instead found 41.611 which we certainly reached and exceeded the 40,000.

via

Here is a list of changes from iSapzio (sorry, screenshots are in Italian):

1. You can now enter to Settings-Store to see the balance and billing information:

2. Another change concerns volume control in the iPod app (or the "Music" on iPod Touch). While using Firmware 3.0 beta 4 on iPod Touch first generation, we can see that the controls for the volume are gone. This is an intelligent system, that turns on and off volume control, depending on USB, headphones and AD2P connection:

3. Fixed problems with iPhoto and displaying thumbnails of the screenshots / images from the CameraRoll.

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Clippy is an iPhone addition for copy/paste functionality. It was updated to version 0.98. There are significant improvements that make the application much more stable, and moreover it is important to note that starting from now, Clippit becomes a completely free.

Avaliable via Cydia and Icy for jailbreaked iPhones.

Changelog for 0.98: March 29, 2009:

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AT&T today reported financial results from the fourth quarter of 2008 and announced that they had activated 1.9 million new iPhones during the quarter. Here are some numbers from Fortune:

1. AT&T has activated 4.3 million iPhone 3Gs since its launch, 1.9 million in Q4 alone — more than double its iPhone activations one year earlier.
2. The average revenue from Phone users is 60% higher than the typical AT&T customer — thanks to that $30 per month data fee. Their heavy use of Web services helped drive AT&T wireless data use up 51.2% year to year, which as reader Jon in Brentwood, Calif., points out is not necessarily a good thing.
3. About 40% of the iPhone activations this quarter were new AT&T customers, either buying their first cellphone or switching from another carrier.
4. The churn rate — the percentage of customers who drop AT&T’s service — among iPhone owners is significantly lower than the rest of the network, sharply reducing marketing costs.

The iPhone is still an expensive proposition for AT&T. The payback to Apple is between $288 and $432 per phone over the life of a 2-year contract. The company spent $450 million last quarter on network upgrades to provide high-speed 3G coverage.

On the other hand, Q4 revenues were up 2.4% (to $31.1 billion) in a tough economic climate thanks to results in the wireless division that CEO Randall Stephenson attributed largely to the iPhone.

Google Mobile App (AppStore link) is updated with voice control support.

Features include:

1. Voice search - Speak your queries instead of typing them.
2. Search with My Location - Search for nearby businesses and more without specifying where you are.
3. Saving suggestions for web site shortcuts, like Wikipedia articles, search history, word completions.
4. Fast access to Google services like Mail, Earth, Photos, Talk, Reader and more.

Voice Search is supported only on iPhone, and works best for North American English accents. Other languages coming soon.

The iPhone 2.1 is out. It contains the following updates as listed by Apple:

- decrease in call set-up failures andcall drops
- significantly improve battery life for most users
- dramatically reduced time to backup to iTunes
- improve email reliability, notable fetching email from POP and Exchange accounts
- faster installation of 3rd party applications
- fixed bugs causing hangs and crashes if you have lots of 3rd party applications
- improved performance of text messaging
- faster loading and searching of contacts
- improved accuracy of the 3G signal strength display
- repeat alert up to two additional times for incoming text messages
- option to wipe data after ten failed passcode attempts
- Genius playlist creation

The 2.1 firmware is build 5F136 (weighing in at 237.8MB) and can be directly downloaded through iTunes. The new firmware also contains a number of security fixes including the well publicized passcode flaw.

Jailbreak for 2.1 is not avaliable yet.

One of the common complaints about Apple’s iPhone–and one that did not get solved with the launch of the iPhone 3G–is the lack of a copy-paste function. An independent developer Zac White has taken matters in his own hands and founded a non-profit, open source, community project called OpenClip which is offering iPhone developers a free Copy and Paste framework that will add this functionality to their applications.

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Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics giant that produces the iPhone 3G for Apple, has ramped up production to 800,000 units per week, says a source close to Apple with direct knowledge of the numbers.

Apple sold just 6 million of its first generation iPhones. Foxconn factories will be able to ramp production up significantly over time, says our source. But at current sell rates, the company is producing iPhones at a run rate of over 40 million units per year, well beyond early estimates of demand for the product of 25 million over the 3G product lifecycle.

via techcrunch

There is not much defference between Safari 1.1.4 and 2.0. But Under the hood, MobileSafari 2.0's performance is hugely improved over 1.1.4. Everything related to web surfing feels faster, web pages consistently load faster on 2.0, both via Wi-Fi and EDGE. This has nothing to do with the new iPhone 3G hardware — this is about dramatic performance improvements on original iPhones upgraded to the 2.0 OS.

Using MobileSafari simply feels faster, especially with web applications. Feel is by nature subjective, but JavaScript benchmarks back this up.

In August last year, Craig Hockenberry posted a few simple benchmarks to compare the iPhone's processing power and JavaScript interpreter against Safari 3 running on a Mac with a 1.83 GHz Core Duo. At that time, the current version of the iPhone OS was 1.0.1. Here are the results of those same benchmarks on original iPhones running the 1.1.4 and new 2.0 OS versions, with Hockenberry’s 1.0.1 results included for comparison:

The last column shows how many times faster the 2.0 version of MobileSafari was versus 1.0.1 and 1.1.4. The same results, charted (smaller bars are faster) can be viewed above.

The results are obvious. WebKit JavaScript performance has improved steadily and significantly in just one year, with a huge jump between 1.1.4 and the new 2.0.0. In side-by-side page loading tests between two original iPhones running 1.1.4 and 2.0.0, the new version consistently finished at least a few seconds faster.

For all the hubbub regarding the new App Store, most “iPhone software” runs in the web browser. But improvements in WebKit performance often help native iPhone app performance, too — a slew of my favorite native iPhone apps have built-in WebKit browsers (e.g., NetNewsWire, Twitterrific, Instapaper, and Cocktails). When WebKit performance improves, any app that uses WebKit improves, and WebKit improved a lot between iPhone 1.1.4 and 2.0.0.

via daringfireball.net