Posts Tagged ‘iPhone’

The iPhone 3G Price Drop Doesn’t Matter

Tuesday, June 10th, 2008

By now you know the bullet points: the new 3G iPhone is smaller, cheaper, and faster than its predecessor. But at what cost? While we know what Apple has told us, it appears that AT&T is having its own say about the iPhone 3G and what it means for the future of the carrier’s relationship with Apple.

As with the original iPhone, you’ll have to sign up for a 2-year contract in order to grab an iPhone. The iPhone 3G will have slightly higher data plan prices than the original model: individual users will now pay US$30/month for unlimited data, and business users will have to fork over $45/month.

The AT&T data plans don’t include any SMS, so including the minimum amount of 200 at $5.00 per month, the new lowest price for any talk, data and SMS plan is $75.00. Up $15.00 from iPhone 2G!

You will be paying $180.00 plus taxes more per year, negating that $200 savings from Apple within your first twelve months of service.

[via PC World]

You can use the iPhone SDK on a PowerPC Mac

Monday, March 10th, 2008

The readme for the iPhone SDK says it is only compatible with Intel based macs running OS X > 10.5.2. Apparently it is possible to get it to run on PowerPC based Macs:

By default, the iPhone SDK package available free from Apple’s site will run on a PowerPC-based Mac but omit the iPhone SDK-related files, installing only Xcode 3.1 beta and a series of other files. This routine is easily circumvented via the shareware tool Pacifist, which can be used to force an installation of the entire SDK package on PowerPC-based Macs.

Follow these steps:

  • Drag the iPhone SDK package onto the Pacifist icon
  • Select the top entry, “Contents of iPhone SDK”
  • Click the “Install” button in the upper-left corner and enter your administrator credentials

iPhone SDK File Contents - Pacifist

[Via iPhone Atlas]

iPhone SDK: No Background Processes

Friday, March 7th, 2008

The iPhone SDK presentation sounded great, but they didn’t answer every question. They also didn’t mention some important details. Most importantly:

Only one iPhone application can run at a time, and third-party applications never run in the background. This means that when users switch to another application, answer the phone, or check their email, the application they were using quits.

Apple iPhone SDKThis is one of the caveats explained in the 100 page iPhone Human Interface Guidelines PDF on the iPhone SDK website.

So what does this mean to the average non-programmer/layperson? Simply put:

If you are running an application such as AOL Instant Messenger on your iPhone, everytime you receive a call or browse away from the application you would be signed out, you would lose any unread messages, and your conversations would end.