Apple on Tuesday said that iphone battery life was the main reason for the delay behind a faster 3G version of the iPhone and that it is not expected to be released in near future. Following the announcement of theUK iPhone deal with O2, Apple chief Steve Jobs and a representative of UK cellular carrier O2 agreed to a Q&A session during Apple’s special event at the Regent Street store in London. Jobs said the faster third-generation (”3G”) wireless technology will come to iPhone once the company can maintain at least five or more hours of battery life, countering recent claims by analysts, The industry has been waiting for faster mobile connectivity, as many have lamented the speeds of the woefully slow AT&T EDGE network.

Jobs said that limited battery of the 3G chip sets would severely restrict use of the phone and that Apple’s 8-hour battery life was designed to allow users the freedom to use their phone’s internet and music services without thinking of battery life.

“The 3G chipsets that are available to semiconductors work reasonably well except for power. They are real power hogs,” he told the audience. “So as you know, the handset battery life used to be 5-6 hours for GSM, but when we got to 3G they got cut in half. Most 3G phones have battery lives of 2-3 hours [of talk time].”

While Jobs believes that the battery life will increase to th, he said that users may not see that until “late next year.”

In addition, the Q&A revealed that the bundled WiFi service for UK/O2 customers will be powered by Cloud.

Apple’s boss also suggested that the iTunes-Starbucks deal could migrate overseas but that the decision rests in the hands of the coffee company.

Interestingly, the session also revealed that contract length and usage limits in the UK will stand at 18 month contracts with a limit of 1,400 pages per day. Confirming earlier reports, O2 is investing in EDGE technology and currently has 30 percent coverage, according to SlashGear.

Jobs also admitted that Apple is already working on the next two versions of the iPhone, and says he hasn’t planned any more iPhone price cuts — after the recent controversy over the $200 price drop that some believed was staged — but warned that it’s technology, reaffirming statements made in his apology letter to early adopters.

Posted on September 19th, 2007 by admin
Filed under: iPhone Videos, iPhone Plan, iPhone Bug | No Comments »

Apple’s latest iPhone software update appears to repair camera issues and improve wireless performance, according to various owners of the cellular handset. Apple said the update included unspecified bug fixes, but those fixes are making some iPhone owners extremely happy. “My Wi-Fi reception is definitely better,” said one forum poster cited by Computerworld. “While in my office, I have never been able to connect to the wifi hub in the conference room down the hall [but after the update] I was surprised that the Edge connection seemed faster, until I realized I was connected to the wifi hub with two bars.”"For me, this is a huge issue, as I was preparing to try to deal with whatever hassle it would take to get the wifi connection extended to my office area,” the user wrote.

“Wifi reception and connection is much improved,” said another forum poster on the same message board thread. “The phone works better. Some places I had problems with before now work like a charm.”

Other users suggest the update could boost Web surfing performance via Safari on the iPhone, and others say iPhone reception has also improved. Many iPhone users insist that the camera has undergone drastic improvement, no longer blurring the live video preview with the sweep of a hand across the camera lens.

“Before even small hand movements would blur the screen really easily,” said a different forum poster. “But now it seems to have much higher refresh rate or some kind of stability enacted.”

Posted on August 24th, 2007 by admin
Filed under: iPhone News, AT&T iPhone, iPhone Bug | No Comments »

Apple on Tuesday evening addressed concerns about potentially dangerous security holes in the mobile version of its Safari web browser with the first ever software update to its new iPhone handset.

Targeting vulnerabilities that could be exploited through malicious websites, version 1.0.1 (build 1C25) of the handset’s software updates Safari’s JavaScript handling to prevent cross-site scripting and a buffer overflow in the Perl code library.

The latter scripting flaw was heavily publicized last week when consultants from Independent Security Evaluators used it to effectively hijack the phone’s core functions.

Also addressed by software patch were three separate issues within the company’s WebCore and WebKit platforms that form the backbone of Safari. Two of the fixes guard against false XML requests and frame rendering glitches that could be used to control the phone or crash the browser through memory errors.

Like recent iPod updates, the iPhone fix is downloadable solely through iTunes and can be installed the next time the phone is docked or detected by the jukebox software.

In a brief set of release notes, Apple said the iPhone software update also includes several “iPhone bug fixes.” The company recommends that users install the patch “immediately.”

Posted on August 2nd, 2007 by admin
Filed under: iPhone News, AT&T iPhone, iPhone Bug | No Comments »

TUAW reader Jamie Phelps has possibly stumbled upon a nasty iPhone synching bug when keeping one’s iTunes library on an external hard drive. While tips like our how-tos for setting up iTunes with external drives or even an AirPort Disk work pretty well even when synching iPods with them, Jamie found that his iPhone gets the brainwash treatment when he’s away from the drive containing his external iTunes library. As the story goes, Jamie synched his iPhone with a few songs and playlists, made a couple new playlists and then synched again. Hitting the road, however, and getting away from his external iTunes library drive is when the bug rears its nasty head: plugging the iPhone in while on the go caused iTunes to wipe out the new playlists and songs from the second sync operation, basically reverting them to their state before the second sync. To verify, Jamie even got adventurous and tried this whole thing a second time, once again watching iTunes blow away changes from the previous iPhone sync when the external media library isn’t mounted.

This is the first time I’ve heard of iTunes handling this kind of setup in a poor way; for as long as I can remember, iTunes has been clever enough to realize what’s happening and and would either not sync anything to an iPod when away from the library drive, or it would actually sync any media downloaded or imported while away (as we’ve mentioned before, you can use the Advanced > Consolidate Library command to move all this new media once reconnected with the library drive). Since we don’t really have any evidence of Apple deliberately changing this behavior for their iPods or iPhones, it makes sense for this quirk to be classified as a bug that will hopefully be squashed with an inevitable iPhone software update. But what say you, TUAW readers? Anyone else get bit? Sound off.

From TUAW

Posted on July 16th, 2007 by admin
Filed under: iPhone Bug | No Comments »