I have had every version of the iPhone since it has come out, and let me say the latest design mockup they they are talking about on macrumors has me extremely excited.

http://www.macrumors.com/2011/03/07/iphone-5-to-get-aluminum-backing-redesigned-antenna/

Now this may not be what the iPhone 5 actually will look like but due to the change in the design of the recent iPad I can definitely see this happening.

Now I love the new design of the iPhone 4 versus the design of the iPhone 3′s curved back. The problem was the thickness and I don’t think that will be the issue with iPhone 5.

Another benefit with the new potential deisign is that with the oringinal iPhone didn’t have to worry about the death grip, which crippled the antenna and left you saying “Can you hear me now?” So it makes sense to bring this design back.

I also think all of you Apple lovers out there will rejoice as much they did during the iPad release when they mentioned that the white version would be released at day one. I see the same thing happening with this launch.

I guess time will tell.

what other features would you like to see on the new iPhone 5?

Feel like hacking your phone today? If you’ve got about 10 minutes to spare, you can turn your iPhone into a Wi-Fi hotspot using a combination of the latest “jailbreaking” software and an app called MyWi. The app takes your iPhone’s 3G data connection and shares it out so other computers can connect to it as if it’s just another Wi-Fi network. You can even share your 3G connection with your iPad, if you’d like.

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Before You Get Started…

A few caveats:

• Jailbreaking, the process of opening up your phone to allow for the installation of unapproved 3rd-party applications, voids the warranty on your phone. If you’re a stickler for these types of things, this may not be the hack for you. (If you really want a phone that functions as a Wi-Fi hotspot, maybe you should wait for the Evo instead.)
• That said, jailbreaking is reversible in the sense that you can always return your phone to factory settings then reapply your backup and no one will be the wiser. Your iPhone is automatically backed up every time you sync with iTunes, but you may want to double-check that your contacts, photos, calendar items and any other critical information is safely stored somewhere else…just in case.
• The MyWi app is buggy. Really, really buggy. Upon first launch, it crashed repeatedly in our tests. The issue seems to be with the “Rock You” sign-in/registration process. But I got it working and you may be able to as well. In fact, it’s the crashing problem that makes the entire setup process take so long – not the jailbreak itself. That’s downright speedy.
• MyWi isn’t free, but comes with a trial period (thank goodness!). The app costs $9.99 when you’re ready to purchase.

How to Turn your iPhone into a Wi-Fi Hotspot

1. The first step is to jailbreak your phone. If you’ve never done this before, you can follow our guide here for the iPad – it’s the exact same procedure, from start to finish. For those who are familiar with jailbreaking and just need the software, go here: spiritjb.com.
2. Once your jailbroken phone is up-and-running, launch the Cydia application store.
3. In Cydia, search for “MyWi.” There are two apps listed, but the one that says “No Rock” next to it never installed for us. Grab the other one instead.
4. Tap on the search result for the app, tap the “install” button in the upper-right corner, then tap “confirm.”
5. When installation is complete, tap the “Reload SpringBoard” button. (If this part gets stuck, just reboot your iPhone).
6. Launch the MyWi app. Accept the agreement and tap “OK.” Now comes the tricky part. In our tests, the app would barely stay open for more than a couple of seconds at this point. In fact, we were about to write it off as a total loss. But after a bit of perseverance, we got it working. It appeared as if the problem was with registering for a RockYourPhone account via the app. (RockYourPhone is a paid application store for jailbroken phones where MyWi is sold.)
7. Instead of registering for an account via the app, we went to RockYourPhone.com and signed up there instead.
8. Before returning to the app, we copied our registration email address to the clipboard so we could quickly paste it in instead of typing it in.
9. Re-launch MyWi. Tap “sign in.” Paste in your email, type in your password. The app will check for your registration (and probably crash again).
10. The app will check for license updates and then allow you to use it on the “trial” license. If you can’t get past this step because the app continues to crash, we’re sorry. We can’t help you. Like we said, the app is buggy. You may be able to get it going, but we’ll make no promises. Hopefully, a future version will be more stable.
11. Assuming you do get the app to (finally!) launch, you’ll see the option to turn Wi-Fi Tethering on via a toggle switch at the top. You can also turn on USB and Bluetooth tethering using the toggle towards the bottom. With tethering on, your phone’s Internet connection, 3G or otherwise, is made available as a Wi-Fi hotspot to nearby computers. You can even use WEP security if you’d like.
12. When you’re finished, you can switch tethering off and close the app.

Note: Problems Sharing 3G?

If you run into problems with MyWi not being able to share your 3G data connection, a simple reset of your network settings may resolve the issue. Go into the Settings app -> General -> Reset -> Reset Network Settings. Reboot the phone and try MyWi again.

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Apple announced that it has already sold over a million iPads. The millionth device was sold on Friday, which was the day the 3G version was launched, and only 28 days after the first ones were introduced on April 3.

In addition to the million plus devices sold, users have also downloaded over 12 million apps from the App Store and over 1.5 million eBooks.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in a statement: "One million iPads in 28 days–that’s less than half of the 74 days it took to achieve this milestone with the iPhone. Demand continues to exceed supply and we’re working hard to get this magical product into the hands of even more customers."

Clearly the success of the iPhone played a huge role in the demand for the iPad. Competition for the device is just around the corner though, and it will be interesting to see how the demand keeps up as devices from others penetrate the market.

Google, which is widely being considered among Apples’ chief competitors at this point, is making move after move to position itself as a prime rival. Some of the acquisitions from the company that are likely to contribute to this include: Agnilux, LabPixies, Plink, and most recently 3D desktop maker BumpTop. Apple is making its own acquisitions as well. A couple recent ones include: Siri and Intrinsity.

Apple of course launched its iAds product recently, based on its acquisition of Quattro Wireless, after losing out to Google on AdMob. Google’s AdMob acquisition is not looking good however, as reports suggest the FTC may reject it.

Apple’s announcement says that developers have created over 5,000 new apps for the iPad, which take advantage of the device’s multi-touch user interface, large screen, and graphics, though the device will of course run other App Store apps.

Early last month, Apple changed the terms of service agreement on its software development kit for the iPhone and iPad to include section 3.3.1, which effectively prohibited developers from using Adobe Flash on it’s mobile devices.

Today, the New York Post is reporting that this move may have brought about some unexpected results – an antitrust investigation.

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According to the Post article, “the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission are locked in negotiations over which of the watchdogs will begin an antitrust inquiry into Apple’s new policy of requiring software developers who devise applications for devices such as the iPhone and iPad to use only Apple’s programming tools.”

If you are friends with any iPhone developers, then you’ve likely heard all about last month’s changes to the SDK terms of service, which states that all applications “must be originally written in C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs”. This meant that any other workarounds to bring Flash-based applications to the iPhone, such as compilers, were suddenly outlawed.

As Nick Bilton of the New York Times’ Bits Blog noted last month, this change was “sure to set off a brush fire at the headquarters of Adobe Systems” and now it seems to have done more than that. So, although Apple CEO Steve Jobs penned a long explanation last week as to why Adobe’s Flash would not be allowed on any of Apple’s mobile devices, it looks like security flaws and technical glitches may not be reason enough.

According to the Post, the decision on which agency will launch the antitrust inquiry is just days away and “doesn’t necessarily mean action will be taken against Apple, which argues the rule is in place to ensure the quality of the apps it sells to customers.”

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For some of you, your brand new iPhone 3GS came with the newest OS 3.1.3. For others, you unknowingly upgraded your OS without realizing what it would mean. Either way, we know that you’ve been stuck obediantly following the terms of your license agreement and running only authorized apps. Well, those days are finally over.

A new jailbreak called Spirit just been released and works on the latest iPhone and iPad operating systems.

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The latest jailbreak was announced late last night on the iPhone Dev-Team blog.

The Spirit jailbreak is now out! Congratulations to @comex for the first userland jailbreak since the 1.x days.

Spirit provides an untethered jaibreak on those newer devices which used to require a computer nearby to finish the boot process. Spirit is able to do this because it doesn’t actually kick in until after the kernel is running.

Spirit is an “untethered” jailbreak for any iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch running firmware 3.1.2, 3.1.3 or 3.2. Untethered means that the user does not need to plug the device into their computer every time they reboot it, as opposed to “tethered”, which requires this.

This latest jailbreak works on both Mac and PC and is available free for download. The Reddit discussion of the new jailbreak indicates that Spirit works on the 3GS with the latest software updates, but as with anything of this sort, a full backup would be strongly advisable.

Spirit is not a “carrier unlock”, which allows the iPhone to be used with carriers other than AT&T, but a “jailbreak”, which allows users to run unauthorized software. If you’re wondering why you would want to jailbreak your iPhone, give Sarah Perez’s article, “Why You Have To Jailbreak the iPhone” a quick read.

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We were surprised to find a long missive penned by Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs posted to the web this morning. The subject? Why Apple hates Adobe Flash. Ever since the Cupertino-based company opted to reject the plugin-based technology from the iPhone and its Wi-Fi-only companion, the iPod Touch, people have questioned and debated not just the decision itself, but the reasoning behind it. Was Flash buggy? Was is a matter of it being proprietary product? Did it use too much CPU? The answer, as explained by Jobs in rich detail, is all of the above.

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Why No Flash? The Bullet Points

In a lengthy piece posted here: http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash, Steve Jobs explains all the reasons why Flash is not allowed on its mobile lineup which now includes the slate computer called the iPad as well.

Much of what he says has already been suspected to be the case. Technology pundits have (correctly) reasoned that there isn’t just one reason why Flash is not permitted in the Apple mobile ecosystem, there are several.

To sum up quickly (the full release is below), Jobs says this of Flash:

1. It’s proprietary.
2. Most web video plays on the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad
3. Who needs Flash games? We have apps for that.
4. Flash has poor security.
5. Flash doesn’t perform well on mobile devices.
6. Flash negatively affects battery life.
7. Flash was designed for PCs, not touchscreens.

Jobs also addresses the recent decision to ban apps built with Adobe’s iPhone app creation tool, a tool that allowed Adobe Flash developers to write iPhone apps using the skills they already had then export those apps to an iPhone/iPad-compatible format. Says Jobs:

We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform…This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor’s platforms.

Does Google Scare Apple?

The deeper question that remains unanswered in this missive is: why now? That is, why share all these thoughts now after remaining silent for so long?

Like the reasons for banning Flash, the reasons for Jobs revealing these sentiments are also multi-layered. For starters, there’s the iPad. Positioned as a netbook replacement, the device functions in an unchartered “in-between” zone where website owners aren’t sure whether to display a mobile site or the regular site to iPad web surfers…or maybe just build an app. That decision is made even more difficult as developers must debate whether to build an iPad-friendly website where the Flash content is rendered in another iPad-compatible format or removed entirely. Or again, should they build an app? Or both?

Despite “leading the way” to the new tablet era, the iPad will soon go up against a number of other tablet PCs running everything from Windows 7 to Google’s mobile operating system (OS), Android, and even an OS called Google Chrome OS, built on top of Linux but with the Chrome web browser as the only interface. An important side note here: Google has now partnered with Adobe to bundle Flash Player into it’s web browser. Buggy or not, Google’s position appears to be that “the most widely used web browser plug-in” (quote from Google’s VP Engineering, Linus Upson) should be made available to users, not kept from them.

Another issue that may have influenced the timing of this post: after the news about the Chrome/Flash partnership efforts, Google’s Andy Rubin told the New York Times just this week that Google’s Android mobile OS, currently the fastest-growing OS on the market thanks to numerous OEM partnerships,  will receive Full support for Adobe Flash in the next release, code-named Froyo (yes, for frozen yogurt – Google likes its desserts), rumored to be released at the upcoming Google I/O Conference.

At the end of the day, it comes down to this: Apple is eschewing Flash in favor of open web standards – most notably, HTML5, the upcoming version of web markup language that allows plugin-free video viewing. Google, however, is in favor of giving people what they want says Rubin. “When they can’t have something, people do care,” he told the Times.

Now it’s up to the consumers to vote with their wallets to declare a winner. An open OS with a closed, proprietary standard? Or a closed OS with support for open standards? What will you choose?

Steve Job’s Statement

Israel today lifted its ban on the iPad. After two weeks of banning the popular tablet computers, the Ministry of Communications is allowing them in and returning the confiscated tablets.

Moses Kahlon, the Minister of Communications, announced the lift in a press release. The original decision to ban the iPad was made without the minister’s knowledge, inspiring a governmental squabblefest in Israel.

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iPads were initially banned out of fear that the the tablet’s wireless would interact improperly with communications frequencies because they did not adhere to Israeli Wi-Fi standards. Technical tests carried out by both the ministry and an international lab proved that this was not so.

The Ministry is allowing the importation of only one iPad per person.There is no information explaining this restriction in the press release. If there is no risk, it does not immediately make sense.

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SugarSync is one of several companies competing these days to benefit from the disruptions in the market created by the new ways that people organize and share information from the any number of devices they use in their day.

That’s a fundamental shift that is happening as people move beyond the desktop as a place to keep their documents, their media and their productivity applications.

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Services like SugarSync serve in many ways as personal clouds that people use for their own work. They seem like plain vanilla services but that as well is the benefit the services provide. They are very simple to use. Data is automatically backed up to the cloud.

SugarSync’s latest hosting numbers are revealing as they demonstrate how much data people are storing online.

SugarSync reports that in the past year, the amount of data added to the SugarSync data centers went from an average of 1 terabyte of data to 5 terabytes of information. In total, the company now hosts two petaybtes of information.

What’s fueling this growth? The customers may provide some clue. About 33 percent of customers are from outside the United States. Mobile devices are far more predominant outside the U.S. It makes sense tht people would need an alternative place to store infromation besides their smart phone or netbook.

In light of the booming mobile device market, SugarSync, Dropbox and a host of other services are companies that seem like it would make most sense to develop mobile apps. That appears to be true. In the past 18 months, Sugar Sync has released apps for the Android, BlackBerry and iPad.

Services like SugarSync show how the data we create will become part of a personal cloud network. These services lay the grounwork for a new generation of personal and business offerings that work with users to create data as a service opportunities.

That’s down the road a bit but people do want so share. And they want to share outside the borders of a social network. Personal clouds could be a means to do that.

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Despite the now infamous absence of Adboe’s Flash, video aggregator MeFeedia says that video on the iPad is a flourishing and growing trend according to the data the company has collected over the past three weeks.

The company offers a few stats and postulates that, among other reasons, the “lack of distractions mean people watch more video, for longer.”

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MeFeedia added HTML5 video support earlier this month – one of several alternatives available for video on the iPad – and says that its internal numbers show the iPad to clearly be a media consumption device, moreso than other users.

The company offers the following observations on its blog, noting that the “iPad was only launched a few weeks ago & this sample is for MeFeedia and MeFeedia Network only.”

• iPad is now the 5th most popular mobile device*
  *In terms of unique users, trailing only iPhone, iPod Touch, SymbianOS, and Android (in that order)
• iPad users consume 3X as many videos as web users (up from the 2.5X number that we first reported a few weeks ago)
• iPad users spend 4X as long watching videos as web users (up from 3X)
• iPad users consume 5X as many videos as iPhone users (up from 3X)

We think that the lack of multitasking as a reason for people to watch more video, longer, is likely a fair point. And, as we’ve previously argued, the iPad makes a great media consumption (rather than creation) device.

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Apple announced second-quarter revenue of $13.50 billion today for the quarter ended March 27, 2010. Net quarterly profit was $3.07 billion, or $3.33 per diluted share. Q2 2009 showed revenue of $9.08 billion and net quarterly profit of $1.62 billion, or $1.79 per diluted share. International sales accounted for 58 percent of the quarter’s revenue.

2.94 million Macs were sold, a 33% increase, along with 8.75 million iPhones and 10.89 million iPods.

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“Looking ahead to the third fiscal quarter of 2010, we expect revenue in the range of about $13.0 billion to $13.4 billion and we expect diluted earnings per share in the range of about $2.28 to $2.39,” said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO, in an official statement.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs stated it was the company’s “best non-holiday quarter ever, with revenues up 49 percent and profits up 90 percent.”

Apple has a reputation on Wall Street for estimating low on its upcoming revenue, which has an influence on analyst expectations. Apple currently anticipates a gross margin of 36 percent, a significant decline.

Apple beat analyst expectations this quarter.

Although attention on the iPad was enormous, and sales were good, insufficient time has passed to tell what effect that new product will have on earnings. It will need to sell a great many to be a contender against any of its other products.

Bottom photo by Sonny Hung

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Today at the Politics Online Conference, Microsoft unveiled a new crowdsourcing system hosted on Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Town Hall.

TownHall is advertised as “software that allows you to easily create a destination for folks to voice opinions, identify problems, offer solutions and come together around common interests and concerns.”

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TownHall focuses on “rich engagement” in the political sphere, aimed at candidates and politicians as well as political interest groups. It allows for the creation of a social media-rich site that runs across platforms and provides methods for gathering information as well as expressing opinions, by furnishing architecture where visitors can make queries, vote on issues, posit and respond, and create community conversation.

TownHall is currently available only for the PC. In the coming months, Microsoft intends to provide TownHall clients for the iPhone, the iPad, Google Android and Windows Phone 7.

The software for TownHall can be downloaded free of charge. Users pay to host their site on Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing program.

TownHall is just a part of a new Microsoft Initiative called Campaign Ready.

The power of social media – the electronic version of listening to what the voters say – started with Howard Dean’s abortive bid for the White House in 2004 and came to full fruition with Barack Obama’s successful one. Subsequent to his election, Obama has shepherded through a series of open government initiatives, which require federal government agencies to seek transparent avenues toward public engagement.

Microsoft has posted more Town Hall screenshots on Flickr.

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Today, digital textbooks for higher education and career education account for only 0.5% of all textbook sales in the United States. According to a new study by social learning platform Xplana, this could soon change. Xplana predicts that digital textbooks will account for almost 20% of all textbook sales within the next five years. This will make digital textbooks a $1 billion market.

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According to Rob Reynolds, who is one of the co-authors of this report and also the director of product design and research for Xplana, this rapid growth will be driven by a number of factors, including the proliferation of tablets and e-readers like the iPad and Kindle, the availability and pricing of e-textbook content and an increasing interest in online learning.

According to this study, sales of digital textbooks will increase 100% year-over-year in 2010 and the continue to grow rapidly for the years to come.

Factors in Favor of Digital Textbooks

Pricing, as the authors note, is a major factor that will make digital textbooks more interesting for students, who often spend hundreds of dollars per semester on textbooks. Flat World Knowledge, for example, offers its e-textbooks for free and only charges students for the print versions. Currently, teachers at over 400 colleges use Flat World Knowledge’s textbooks for their courses. Other e-textbook companies like CourseSmart and MBS Direct also saw very strong growth in their sales last year.

Other factors in favor of digital textbooks include the increasing availability (and affordability) of e-book readers and netbooks, as well as the move towards the ePub publishing standard for e-books. It is also important to note that textbooks publishers have long seen digital textbooks as way to shut down the market for used textbooks, which accounts for close to 35% of the textbook market today and which – of course – doesn’t earn these publishers a single dollar.

What Will these E-Textbooks Looks Like?

It will be interesting to see what these textbooks will look like. Thanks to new initiatives from Wolfram Alpha and other data and service providers, interactive textbooks could soon replace static texts. The problem there, of course, is that these textbooks are more expensive to produce than today’s textbooks. The lower cost of digital distribution and the publisher’s ability to cut out the middlemen (distributors, campus bookstores etc.) will help to offset some or all of these additional costs.

You can find the full report here
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Virtualization is a star – at least in the big stage of the iPad. Since the device launched, Citrix Receiver has been one of the top ranked business apps in the store.

Chris Fleck, mobility leader on the Citrix team shares this demonstration showing a Citrix Receiver application enabled with four applications running side by side on iPad. He goes further to show the same apps running on a host of other devices.

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Born to Multitask

Citrix Receiver uses HDX, the name of the remoting technology Citrix has innovated based on the ICA Protocol (Independent Computing Architecture) the company has been developing on for over 15 years. Fleck tells us that HDX is conceptually similar to RDP/VNC but it includes significant optimizations for WAN performance, Multimedia, and user experience across multiple devices and OS’s.

Here is a clip from the demonstration video showing four side-by-side apps running on iPad. Citrix Receiver is able to zoom on in each application to make it full screen, or display all four simultaneously.

Many Apps – Many Devices

The demonstration continues showing each device in this picture, from Mac to PC, iPhone to Android, all running the same applications.

At one point, Fleck goes on to demonstrate how to “flick” multiple applications on the iPhone. This demonstrates one app showing full screen and the four other applications are swipable, like photos in your photo library. This seems like a natural extension of the iPhone and really could be useful for building larger enterprise applications or portals.

This demonstration reminded us of one thing, the apps matter. When we see an iPhone application on Android, or Windows 7, it still looks pleasing to navigate. Perhaps there is room in the enterprise for a Apple’s Mobile Human Interface Guidelines.

Enterprise designers, maybe it’s your time to build insanely great apps for the enterprise that follow patterns of the iPhone and iPad. Whether new, or old, Citrix Receiver is breathing life into applications and iPad is getting down to business.

The company plans to release this capability with its partner SoftwareFX at the Citrix Synergy event next month.

Virtualization could become a default way to connect iPad in the enterprise – at least in year one.

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Just 13 days after it launched to the public, the iPad is the subject of the latest Silicon Valley developers’ unconference event. At 5 PM this evening iPadDevCamp kicked off at the PayPal/eBay offices in San Jose. The photo above of developers waiting in line to enter was posted to Twitter by Portland, Oregon based iPhone (and now iPad) push notification service Urban Airship.

Build some cool apps in there, folks!

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