I agree, the iPhone looks snappy in those Apple TV commericals. I love my iPhone, but it doesn't work *exactly* as advertised. Some guys with too much time on their hands decided to make this comparison video- the "TV" iPhone versus the "Real" iPhone.
If chipsets are your thing, then feast your eyes on the latest iPhone teardown:
Apple announced today that iTunes downloads have now topped 5 billion. I posted back in January 2007 that iTunes had hit 2 billion purchases...
I note we're now comparing downloads with purchases- which may or most likely may not- be the same thing, but the growth curve looks very impressive:
Wow, who would have thought Steve's "One more thing" would be a $100 million fund dedicated to iPhone apps. (It's not everyday that I can blog about Apple AND Venture Capital in the same post...)
The only part that threw me was it's Kleiner Perkins and not Sequoia. Unless my history is wrong, Sequoia backed Apple, not KPCB- so why aren't they running the iFund? Accel are running the Facebook Fund. If you back the original, surely you back the ecosystem too?
That aside, I'm really excited that Kleiner are putting some muscle behind development for the platform.
The number one thing that jumped out at me during the conference was Google's report that there are 50x more searches originating from the iPhone than any other mobile handset.
Just to put that in perspective there are 4 million iPhones in the wild compared to 3 billion other mobile devices. This goes hand in hand with O2's report that 60% of U.K. iPhone users are sending or receiving more than 25 MB of data a month- which is unheard of on other handsets.
Android was only available on a few booths- AMD, Qualcomm, etc. From the demo I saw, it's clear that Android will offer iPhone-like touchscreen functionality along with a tightly bundled suite of Google Apps and browser. It's important to highlight that Android is using WebKit- the same as Safari on the iPhone (and Mac OS X desktop).
Opera was demoing their latest 9.5 release- showing off Opera Desktop, Opera Mini, Opera Mobile and Opera Wii. They've created a browser for many, many other non-handset devices (Wii, Airplanes, Archos, etc.) They allow users to sync their profile, bookmarks, widgets, etc across all devices. (This is the exact same functionality that Apple should be offering.)
I didn't see Mozilla, but Firefox is coming soon.
Great browsers, combined with device specific site optimization (e.g. iPhone) or server-side optimization (e.g. Novarra) mean 2008 could finally be the Year of the Browser on mobiles.
This one is straight from Apple's eNews March 10, 2005 newsletter: If you’re after the highest quality tunes and regularly import songs at bit rates higher than 128 Kbps, iTunes offers you the best of both worlds, letting you keep your high-quality songs in iTunes while exporting leaner versions of the songs, sized just right for iPod shuffle. Here’s how: Connect iPod shuffle, open the iPod Preferences dialog, and click the iPod tab. Click the check box next to “Convert higher bit rate songs to 128 kbps AAC for this iPod.” Then click OK. The next time you Autofill iPod shuffle, iTunes will automatically convert songs to 128 Kbps as it exports them to iPod shuffle. The original versions in your iTunes collection, meanwhile, will remain in your library at their higher encoding rate.With everything the iPhone offers you- video, podcasts, audibooks, etc., WHY didn't Apple offer this same option for saving space on the iPhone? If I'm out on the town listening to music, I'm probably not really going to notice the difference in quality, and would really like to more space for vodcasts, TV shows, etc... (that or simply more music!).
A cool European company I met at the Future of Web apps, Wakoopa, have introduced an iPhone version of their site that helps you track iPhone (web)applications. That should help tide you over until the SDK gets released early next year...
Six Apart have released an iPhone friendly version for their blogging platform, TypePad. If you don't have an iPhone yet (or live in unsupported regions such as Europe), you can give it a whirl here.
Grab Dave's video while it's free... (US store only)
