Despite frequent, repeated denials from Microsoft that they aren’t making a Zune Phone to pit against Apple’s iPhone juggernaut, our sibling site WMExperts keeps compiling evidence that Microsoft might be doing just that.
The latest is that Pink (as it’s code-named) has an ad agency, will be based on Windows Mobile 7 but have it’s own proprietary UI layer, should be available next year-ish, and provide Zune, My Phone, and Windows Marketplace for Mobiles functionality.
So have Microsoft’s previous denials been based on crossed fingers and the “truthiness” of actually making a Zune HD Phone? Or as TiPb has been predicting, an Xbox Phone?
Let’s face it, Microsoft would be negligent and borderline daft not to integrate the technologies and leverage the brand of Xbox.
iPhone Live! comes to you tonight (Wednesday, July 1) at 8pm EDT/5pm PDT.
As always, pre-show will start about 10 min. before if you want to drop by early and reserve a space in our all new, all roomier chat room. See you then!
Apple has once again made some service improvements to MobileMe:
We recently updated the web applications at me.com. In Mail, you can now see your unread message count in your Inbox and in each of your Mail folders, and forwarding or replying to HTML (rich text) messages now maintains the messages’ original formatting. In addition, there is a direct link to Help in the toolbar. See this support article for more details and a summary of other improvements.
Coming on the heels of WWDC 2009 related improvements, like Find my iPhone, MobileMe updates continue to more closely resemble the steady, iterative process that best suits the web applications model, rather than the big splashy event releases of classic hardware and software. Kudos to Apple for that.
Two new iPhone 3GS commercials are now being aired by Apple, the first one focusing on cut, copy, and paste and the second on Voice Control.
While it’s interesting that the original iPhone 2G commercials were targeted at “the internet in your pocket” and the iPhone 3G commercials at “there’s an app for that”, new features aside, we’re not sure what overarching theme Apple’s going for this time — if any.
Some internet coverage has been less than kind about the new direction, however, welcoming Apple to cut, copy, and paste about a decade too late. That’s a little “inside baseball”, however. While many tech-savvy users — and bloggers — upgraded to the iPhone from Treos, BlackBerrys, or other smartphones, arguably most of the iPhone’s growth has come from consumer adaption — people who upgraded from Motorola RAZRs.
For them, and many of the close to 20 million iPhone users (2G, 3G, and 3GS alike) now able to run iPhone 3.0, copy, cut, and paste will be a decidedly new experience and one whose ease-of-use they’ll likely enjoy.
Firemint has put up the above video tech demo of their Real Racing game running optimized for an iPhone 3GS and…. wow.
“Since the game uses a high fidelity physics engine, adding cars is a good test for pushing the hardware. We started our tech demo with 8 cars on the track, then 10, 12, 16 and 20, and the 3GS still didn’t break a sweat,” wrote Firemint’s Alexandra Peters. “We finally stopped when we got to 40 cars on the track at the same time, still with no perceptible drop in frame rate. We think the results are mind blowing.”
No plans to release an iPhone 3GS version yet but again, that’s a switch that some developer will no doubt throw at some point.
If the iPhone and Twitter go together like chocolate and peanut butter, then for the most part current iPhone Twitter client developers give us many variations of the peanut butter cup. Tasty confections though they may be, and each unique and delicious in their own right, at the end they still tend towards variations of the peanut butter cup.
Enter Reportage from wherecloud [$2.99 - iTunes link], which rearranges those twin flavors like nouveau cuisine, utterly deconstructed and left for you to explore.
Too obscure? Okay, rewind. Reportage bills itself as a “radio tuner” for Twitter where followers are treated like stations on the FM dial and you can tune in (or tune out) to what they’re saying, and spin the dial to move from user “station” to user “station”.
It should be noted at the beginning that Reportage isn’t a general purpose Twitter workhouse. There are tons of those already. Like Birdhouse, which models itself on a “notebook” writing experience for Twitter, Reportage has also chosen to focus on one specific concept — pseudo-”live broadcast” of the Twitter users you follow.
