iPhone News

Meet the world's first iPhone worm, aka "ikee." The pesky worm is annoying, embarrassing and disruptive. It also has a wicked sense of humor.
Reports started spreading this weekend that iPhone users in Australia had been falling victim to "ikee," a worm that replaces default wallpaper with a picture of Rick Astley, the 80's British pop singer whose song "Never Gonna Give You Up" has earned its place in Internet history, thanks to the viralizing of the "Rickrolling" prank craze. The photo is accompanied by the message "ikee is never gonna give you up," which may be the case, as the worm is apparently not easy to remove. According to security firm Sophos, this is the first worm detected that targets the iPhone.

Im going to break from the well-established tradition of comparing Netbooks to notebooks. This time my yardstick is going to be the smartphone. And no better yardstick than the Apple iPhone.

This post updates a year-old piece (which, by the way, at least one writer took exception to).

As the holiday season approaches, many consumers face an ostensible choice between an inexpensive Netbook or more expensive notebook. I personally face that choice (or, at least, I thought I did).

Let me state up front that though I have used Netbooks on a temporary basis, I have never owned one.

I (now) believe that Netbook comparisons to mainstream laptops (which will always disappoint because Netbooks are slower, screens smaller, keyboards more cramped--and this list of comparative shortcomings is long) is really the wrong way to look at it. Let me illustrate.

I recently interviewed the chief technology officer for a large school district in Louisiana that had purchased a lot of Netbooks. And I asked what I thought was the most pertinent question: werent performance and screen size a concern? She quickly pointed out that my perspective was all wrong.

In short, students in K through 12 are accustomed to iPhone-size screens and performance. So moving to a Netbook is a big step up. From this perspective, the screens are large, the keyboards expansive, and the performance more than adequate.

This suddenly made a lot of sense to me because of my personal experience. Take the iPhone 3GS (or Motorola Droid or BlackBerry Storm, take your pick ). To state the obvious, in many respects, this is a personal computer platform for e-mail, texting, Web surfing, music, navigation, YouTube, and the list goes on.

Recently, I removed my iPhone e-mail accounts so I could troubleshoot a problem with the Mail app. But when I reinstalled the accounts, I found that I wasnt able to delete messages from one accounts in-box.

The account in question was a POP3 account used to retrieve messages from my spam e-mail filtering service. It was sending and receiving e-mail just fine, but whenever I tried to delete a message from the in-box, my iPhone would present the following error:

Unable to move message to folder "Trash" because the folder does not exist.

Luckily, I was able to locate a fix on Apples support site that solved the problem. Here are the steps you should take to resolve this issue:

A new front has opened in the ongoing arms race between Apple and iPhone hackers, with one hacker group making the iPhone boot with a Linux 2.6 kernel.

The announcement of the successful kernel porting was made on the Linux on the iPhone blog, complete with instructions and source code.

Although a bootloader, kernel and a Busybox terminal are able to be loaded -- many features of the iPhone remain unimplemented: touchscreen, sound, accelerometer, networking. Input to the terminal must be made via a USB interface from another device that the iPhone is attached to (humorously summed up by Geek Hero Comic).

The group that ported the kernel is derived from the iPhone DevTeam group that has been responsible for jailbreaking previous iPhone software.

iPhone Linux Demonstration Video from planetbeing on Vimeo.

Via http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10110018-37.html

As Apple promised in early October, the company has posted an updated Software Developer Kit (iPhone SDK) Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) which allows iPhone application developers to more openly discuss their development plans. In order to facilitate such discussion, Apple has also opened a forum especially for iPhone developers.

Many who resisted purchasing an iPhone were waiting for the release of the first Google-powered handset. That phone -- the HTC T-Mobile G1 -- launched Wednesday, but the decision to invest in a handset still isn't easy, as Android is a young operating system with as much to learn as Apple's iPhone. Will you go with the tightly controlled, somewhat mature iPhone or the brand new, open-platform G1?

Apple has asked a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit brought by dissatisfied iPhone 3G owners because they did not ask the company to repair their iPhones or refund their money, according to court papers made public Friday.

In the motion, Apple’s lawyers moved to dismiss the suit filed in August by an Alabama woman who said her iPhone 3G dropped calls, couldn’t reliably connect to AT&T’s network and was slower than advertised.

“The Defective iPhone 3G appeared to connect to the 3G standard and protocol less than 25 percent of the time,” Jessica Smith’s suit said. “Additionally, Plaintiff experienced an inordinate amount of dropped calls.” Smith was later joined by another iPhone owner, Wilton Triggs, in the lawsuit, which has also sought class-action status.

The presidential race has moved to the iPhone, with Sen. Barack Obama taking the clear lead in a slick-looking free application that turns the iPhone into a tool aimed at getting the faithful to phone a friend for the candidate.

So far, GOP rival Sen. John McCain's supporters have nothing similar available on the hugely popular Apple App Store, which distributes programs to the estimated 8 million users of the phone.

The Illinois senator is also one of those iPhone users. Campaign videos have shown him pulling it out of his pocket and checking something on the screen.

While there are various election countdowns, political blog posts and applications that track the latest survey data, the Obama '08 application that became available for a free download this week was programmed by Obama volunteers and feeds news reports, videos, campaign talking points and photos to the device.

Adobe confirmed yesterday at the Flash On The Beach (FOTB) conference in Brighton, UK that it is actually developing a Flash Player for the iPhone. Even though it's still work in progress, with the iPhone is at its second generation, it's about time Apple!

Flash is basically the only thing that keeps the iPhone from not delivering and now Adobe confirmed that such an application is in development. Ever since the iPhone was launched in 2007, one of the most sought after features that were missing from the phone's Web browser was the possibility to run Flash content.