iPhone AppStore strategies!
Of course, you may well be happy to follow your nose in Apple’s iPhone on-device AppStore. If you’re anything like me, it’s proving rather addictive. Am I the only one who taps eagerly on the icon each day hoping for new updates, new apps, new ideas? The iPhone AppStore is certainly by far the most active third party software scene on the planet at the moment!
In an attempt to control my own addiction and perhaps help yours, here are some realistic AppStore tips… (more…)
Mobile Me had the Right Idea – but the Wrong Price
Today sees Google, HTC and T-Mobile unveiling the G1, the first Android phone, with (seemingly) all its data ‘in the cloud’. Essentially, your Contacts, Calendar, Documents, Emails and Photos all live in Google’s data cloud and sync in real time with local copies (if even appropriate) on the device, over the air. Think of it as equivalent to Apple’s Mobile Me but taken one step further.
The iPhone keypress quick reference
Yes, yes, I know this information is on other pages around the internet, but if you’re anything like me then you keep forgetting which iPhone/iPod-Touch keystroke is which. So, without further ado:
- Press and hold the ‘Home’ button for at least ten seconds to terminate the current foreground application. Use this when an application freezes while on-screen.
- Press and hold the ‘Home’ button, then press the ‘Wake/Sleep’ button once. The screen goes white and then fades in – to let you know that you’ve just grabbed a high quality screenshot – perfect for posting in blog articles.
- Press and hold the ‘Wake/Sleep’ button for five seconds. This offers to turn the iPhone/iPod-Touch off, physically. Useful when something’s gone wrong with the electronics (e.g. Wi-Fi’s stopped working) or when not planning to use the device for a few weeks.
- Press and hold both ‘Wake/Sleep’ and ‘Home’ buttons for ten seconds (ignore the option to ‘power off’). This performs a ‘soft’ reset, restarting OS X but with some core ‘state’ files reinitialised. Use this in emergencies if you’re having a problem and a simple power off/on doesn’t do the trick.
- Turn off, then press and hold the ‘Wake/Sleep’ button for ten seconds. This performs a ‘hard’ reset and – though I haven’t tried it – should wipe the iPhone/iPod-Touch and it will require restoring from iTunes. Treat this keypress as a strict last resort and it’s probably only to do it under advice from Apple!
All clear now? Phew. These keypresses (unlike the rest of the iPhone’s operation) aren’t exactly memorable. At least you’ll usually only need to remember two of them!
Joined-up applications and The Way Ahead
An article I’d been planning for a while involved comparing the third party application scenes of the Symbian, Windows Mobile, Palm OS and Apple iPhone worlds. While this will still happen in the fullness of time, the flavour of each ‘scene’ is becoming very obvious and I was struck by one specific point from the iPhone world.
Some of the early stars of the iPhone AppStore are simply very ‘joined up’, mashing iPhone and Web services together seamlessly. Well, almost seamlessly. Apologies for another link over to AAS, but hey, that’s where the article is hosted. I review Movies and Vicinity, two of the very top iPhone applications, explain why they’re so great and also address whether competing (Symbian) smartphones and their apps can rise to the same level.
The lure of the iPhone explained
Apologies for not posting this at the time (two weeks ago) but I’ve been a little distracted, as has Matt, with family matters! In this feature, hosted at All About Symbian, I’ve written about my experiences showing off the iPhone/iPod Touch platform to some ‘normobs’. What did they make of Apple’s interface and hardware and, perhaps more importantly, why did they react as they did? Find out in the full article (written from the point of view of an experienced, hard-nosed Nokia/Symbian viewpoint, note!)
iPhone 3G vs Touch Diamond – The Smartphones Show reckons it’s not even close…
Over in Smartphones Show 63, embedded below, I look at all the reasons why the theoretically outgunned Apple iPhone 3G manages to completely trounce the also-new HTC Touch Diamond. It’s not all about the interface, you know, but when one of said interfaces is a horrible kludge then picking a winning device really isn’t that hard.
You may want to fast forward over the first review of a budget S60 phone, although do note its amazing specs and price point – it’s not going for the same market as the iPhone, but it sets interesting precedents.
The rise of the iPhone and the demise of the ‘smart’ phone
I love the statistics behind an industry, watching trends, and so on. And yesterday saw AppleInsider publish a table from Gartner’s new stats on worldwide smartphone sales in Q1, 2008. It’s only a summary of the top 5 manufacturers, but it makes interesting reading. Nokia are top, of course, with their Symbian-based S60 smartphones selling 14.6 million units in Q1, with a fast-moving RIM in second place on 4.3 million units. And, the point of Apple Insider’s article, Apple are a relatively new entry at number 3, having overtaken all other established smartphone makers to achieve worldwide sales of 1.7 million in the quarter. So that’s HTC, Sharp, Sony Ericsson and Motorola all beaten comfortably by the new contender from Cupertino.
What’s especially notable from the statistics is that Nokia and Apple don’t market their ‘smartphones’ as such. (more…)
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery – but it’s not Elegant
You, me and next door’s cat know that a lot of the hardware and software designs coming from world phone manufacturers and mobile developers have been directly inspired by the Apple iPhone. All of a sudden full-screen interfaces are back in fashion, with even Windows Mobile getting finger-friendly additions bolted on wherever possible. From HTC’s TouchFLO to third party utilities, the finger-lovin’ starts off as reasonably impressive and then disappoints fairly soon afterwards. And there are a whole crop of proprietary OS devices with iPhone pretensions, such as the LG Viewty, about as close to the iPhone as you can get while still being able to say ‘hey, don’t send the lawyers round here, guv, this is totally different’. (more…)
The importance of a good background
For all the plaudits that Apple rightly got for the things they did well with their announcement of the iPhone SDK and their supremely well thought out AppStore ecosystem, there’s (at least) one major brickbat which needs aiming in Cupertino’s direction.
It seems that third party iPhone applications will be forced to exit when you press that ‘Home’ button to bring up the launcher – a big mistake that will limit (again) the iPhone’s potential as a true smartphone. As a longstanding smartphone user on other platforms (S60, Windows Mobile, etc.) (more…)
Stuck in the past?
OK, ok, so I promised Matt that my next post here would be more positive. But I’ll have to just get this one in under the wire first. I’ve visited several O2 and Carphone Warehouse retail shops in the UK in the last week – and ALL of them have the original iPhone firmware installed, i.e. without any of the new app improvements.
