Apple just published firmware 2.2 beta 1 for developers. It is accompanied by a new beta of the iPhone SDK (build 9M2611). There are not much news about new features and improvements... but iphoneatlas already published a screenshot of new Safari interface, that is in firmware 2.2:
The new MobileSafari doesn't have the magnifying glass and refresh buttons at the top of the screen. There are the URL bar and search fields side-by-side instead. It looks much like the desktop version. Page refreshes are now accomplished via a tiny icon located inside the URL bar.
Firmware version 2.1. It is supposed to display “more accurate” signal strength. Well... it appears that “more accurate” may mean “unreasonably generous.”
Users can actually see the results of iPhones dB meter. Dial *3001#12345#* then press “Call”. A dB reading below 50 generally indicates good strength.
Here's what I've got:
iPhone Atlas reader Michael did some testing, and found that widely varying dB readings resulted in the same five-bar signal indicator on his iPhone. He writes:
There are more than 500 000 iPhones in Russia already. But the official sales will start in October. There are tons of news about the prices and tarriffs, but there are no official announcements from carriers. Several resellers posted the following prices on their websites lately: 23 000 RUB ($920) for 8Gb and 27 000 RUB ($1080) for 16Gb version.
According to the South China Morning Post, the carrier wants Apple to supply a custom version of the iPhone which disables both W-CDMA (3G) and Wi-Fi. China Mobile doesn't yet have a 3G network in place and is afraid that customers will buy the iPhone and unlock it for use on more capable networks. This explains the lock-out for 3G, but killing the Wi-Fi is just spiteful.
Given that Apple ships an identical iPhone to every other world market, it's doubtful that China Mobile will get its way. But then, no other world market has a potential customer base of two billion people. If these functions are disabled, it will most likely be done in software.
You probably know about latest iPhone’s security issue. The good news is that there is a solution to fix it.
Jonathan Zdziarski has deviced a way to disable this writing to disk, so that screenshots cannot be recovered. On a jailbroken iPhone, you can disable these screenshots with the following commands in MobileTerminal or through SSH connection to iPhone:
Screenshots themselves actually get written to /var/mobile/Library/Caches/Snapshots. So these commands delete this folder and symlink it to /dev/null, so the screenshots don’t get written to disk.
The side effect to this is that when resuming an application, you’ll get the default screen in the zoom-in effect. Once the application resumes, however, you’ll have your application screen back. For example, your mail application will always zoom to the front as if you had an empty inbox, but will quickly correct itself once the application resumes.
“To return to the default behavior, just delete the symlink and the directory will get recreated. Mind you, this has no effect on the many other pieces of data stored on the iPhone, and therefore your iPhone will always be at risk for leaking private data, especially to seasoned forensic examiners. Use at your own risk.”
One of the major announcements during last week's media event was the return of NBC shows to the iTunes Store. NBC reportedly accounted for 40% of iTunes video sales prior to their removal late last year.
Hollywood Reporter reveals that over 1 million NBC iTunes downloads have been logged since the studio's return on September 9th. Some of those downloads may have been free HD episodes which are currently available from iTunes.
A list of all free HD iTunes episodes provided by TUAW include: