Friday Mobile Movie

Hello again. It's that time of the week where we watch our Friday movie clip thing. Again, this tradition started while I was in college, when movie tickets were $3.50 for a matinee and Fox in Westwood, California was (is) one of the better theaters to watch movies.

This week's movie is ABC's upcoming series, V. I've been waiting for this for a long time. It's here. It's looking awesome and I hope V and sci-fi fans will flock to this show and support in next season.

Have a great weekend!

Jobs To iPhone Fans "No Rebate"

It's obvious how much Palm loading up with ex-Apple execs and engineers has irked the people currently occupying the halls of Cupertino that is Apple's headquarter. What's not known is just how much Jobs and Co. is willing to let that slip out into the public.

Outside of thinly veiled patent threats surrounding the Pre, there really hasn't been much said about the issue.

Now, most bloggers (and Wall Street analysts with these blogs) believe that Jobs will officially return to work from his medical leave by introducing the next generation of new iPhones. No one knows if it'll be at the WWDC in early June or at a special planned media event.

Whenever or wherever the new iPhones are unveiled, I can totally hear what Steve Jobs is going to say about the prices.

"We have three models. $99. $199. And $299. (PAUSE) And no rebates required," to thunderous applause and laughter. (I don't know if there will be a $99 model. However, given how aggressive Apple wants to grow the iPhone platform, I wouldn't rule it out.)

Note: I wonder if his return will also be marked by declaring what a fine job Tim Cook has done in Jobs' absence and that Tim should keep the CEO title on a permanent basis while Jobs run the show from being the curtain. Sort of a Medvedev-Putin thing.

Slingplayer on EDGE (T-Mobile's T-Zone)

It's done.  Slingplayer is now working with T-Mobile's T-Zone.

But as you probably guessed, it didn't work right out of the box...ah...download.  It took some tweaking, frantic calls to Dave the mobile warrior, and persistence to get it finally working.

It simply irks me that in this day and age we are limited by terms dedicated by self-professed wireless overlords who are fine with milking what they can from us with public spectrum.  But that's another issue.  The main issue is that I refuse to abide by those terms.  And I whole-heartedly encourage my fellow mobile warriors to put ATT on notice.  In your own manners.

Now, back to Slingplayer.  I'm putting together a video that I'll have on youtube tonight or tomorrow showing Slingplayer for the iPhone working on the wireless network.  You'll notice it's on T-Mobile and not ATT.  Well, others have gotten Slingplayer to work on ATT's 3G network.

Quality.  How is it?  Well, it works well enough.  The quality, I don't know if you'll be able to see it on the video later today, is adequate for EDGE-like speed.  There a lot of buffer.  A few times, it would buffer every 30 seconds, while other times, I had streaming without any issue.

It's my belief that had ATT not crippled Slingplayer, it is conceivable that Sling would have made efforts for wireless streaming.  Now, that's less likely to be the case.

Oh, and it works fantastically over Wi-Fi.  No buffering at all.

I got Slingplayer working on the iPod Touch a day after it appeared in the App Store.  Piece of cake.  Five stars out of five.  Getting SP to work on the 2G iPhone required that I update the underlying OS to 2.2.1 (it was at 2.2).

My Mac Mini was kept at OS X 10.5.5 and iTunes was version 7.  After downloading iPhone 2.2.1 and the latest QuickPWN (2.2.5) tool, I updated the iPhone and proceeded with the QuickPWN application.  That was when I ran into trouble.  During the process, I was met with the Steve Jobs cartoon and an error message from iTunes.  For those who have unlocked or jail-broken iPhones, some of you might know what I'm talking about.

Luckily, Dave the mobile warrior advised that I download iTunes 8 (latest version) and repeat the process.  It took a while to repeat the process.  Longer than I anticipated.  Eventually, iPhone 2.2.1 was installed on the 2G iPhone without incident.  I quickPWNed it.  After making sure that it worked as advertised, I synced the iPhone including Slingplayer.

Why QuickPWN?  It's to unlocking the iPhone to work with T-Mobile.  Just as important is to install VOIP3G that tricks the iPhone into believing that when it access the Internet, it is going through Wi-Fi when in fact it's going through EDGE (3G access for the 3G iPhone).  But I had issues with it so I downloaded another variant.  I think I used Tricker 3G.  I don't have access to the iPhone as I'm writing this entry but it's a simple enough matter to search for "3G" on Cydia.

After syncing ("synching" is also correct, BTW), I met up with a couple of college friends to watch Star Trek.  It was pretty good.  A bit rushed in my opinion.  It was really made to recruit a new generation of Trekies.  Sorry. Back to the Slingplayer on the iPhone.

Next step was setting up Slingplayer with my account information.  After going through the setup (very simple), the video started to stream.  Love it!

And the added benefit to this is that Skype calling is also enabled.  I had a few calls domestically and no one had any idea that I was call them via EDGE.

So, would I recommended going through this?  Well, that's entirely up to you.  Personally, it was more the rebel in me than anything else.  I just hate being screwed over and I'm sure a lot of you feel the same.  I'm sure there is an enterprising attorney out there now looking to see if ATT violated anti-competitive laws (word on the street is that while ATT is truly concerned about 3G overload, they are also paving way to offer their own TV service) and the FCC looking into this matter.

If you do give this a try, love to hear what you think of the quality.

MacWind Battery Life Benefit From 10.5.7 But Not Macbooks?

Like all Macbook and desktop Mac users, I can't get enough of updates from Apple. New features, stability, and general bragging rights over our Windows peers. With the latest update, 10.5.7, there may be a bit of a surprise for hacintosh netbooks. In particular, for some users who bought a MSI Wind like myself and Dave the mobile warrior who turned them into "MacWinds", are experiencing longer battery lives.

Is that possible?

I'm gonna hold off on that until there are more evidence that this is actually happening. A couple of guys on forums reporting this is nothing. But that may change in the next few days as people give this recent update a try.

The greater issue, if this happens to be true, why aren't there an explosion in reports of longer battery life for Macbooks? Also, why the optimization for MacWinds which Apple doesn't support. Here are possible scenarios.

• Imagination. All in the heads of these few individuals. Some lucky few are benefiting from this. Perhaps, their installation was flawed to begin with and now that they've updated their MacWinds, things are the way it should have been.
• Apple fine-tuned the OS update's battery optimization protocols and the benefit is now spreading to the MacWinds. Folks have long observed that the Winds have longer battery life under XP than under OS X. This is not unexpected since the Winds are officially supported under Windows, not as a Mac. The OS update likely tweaked some codes for bugs that coincidentally benefits the Wind.
• In optimization the iPhone 3.0, the benefits between the mobile platform and the Mac platform are being shared. Why 3.0? Let me ask you this, have you seen an update from Apple for the iPhone or the iPod Touch recently? - but let's not jump to any conclusions here. New iPhones are coming. New iPod Touches in the fall. 3.0 Will benefit old and new hardware. No evidence that unannounced hardware release is imminent. Though I hope I'm wrong...

What's unlikely happening here is that Apple decided to throw the loyal legion of MacWind users a bone. What's also unlikely is that Apple has something in the works that involves Intel's Atom chip for some sort of a netbook. There are tons of speculation brewing along this line. Trust me on this one. There isn't an Apple netbook built along the traditional line coming. Cupertino finds Atom disgusting.

The iPod Touch and the iPhone are Apple's netbooks until a bigger form Touch is introduced. Remember that.

Links:

• Wired
• MSI Forums

Note: I won't be upgrading to 10.5.7 for a while since I'm happy with the setup on the MacWind at the moment. Dave the mobile warrior said he'll get on it after he has a good idea of the MW's battery life under the current OS regime before upgrading. Perhaps then we'll be able to get to the bottom of this mystery!

Another note: I've yet to update my Macbook with the most recent update. One of the reason is that it's possible Snow Leopard may be only weeks away. The other reason is that even at 10.5.6, my Macbook works just fine. But once I hear anything about better performance or battery life, I'll be all over it. Now, I have to ask myself whether Apple can do more to give us better battery life. I know there are applications that control the speed of CPUs. I imagine at the moment, OS X does it behind the scenes for us. But suppose I'm only writing my...ahem...memoirs and I don't need my Macbook running anywhere near 2.4Ghz when one core running at 1.6Ghz like the Atom will suffice.

iPhone At WWDC and Palm Pre

I'm a Palm fan. I've been using Palm PDAs since Palm III. Their best work was, I still believe that to be the case, is the Zire 72. However, I'm I bigger fan of Apple fan and I totally love my Apple gears. With that said, I'll gravitate towards whoever provide the best technology along with the best user experience at the end of the day.

With that said, I read an article in Silicon Alley Insider that speculated on whether we'll see the iPhone at the WWDC. Personally, I don't think that'll happen. I'm not even sure we'll hear about the iPhone 3.0. But one of the points they made in favor of the iPhone being shown off at the WWDC is the idea that Pre will be available around the same time as the developer conference and Apple will want to spoil the party.

Insider said "With the Palm Pre on the market as possible temptation, Apple will want to have its new iPhone out ASAP."

It's certainly a valid point. But it's not something Apple will do. I think what Apple may push the iPhone release into late June or July. Why is that? You're wonder if I'm saying Apple is afraid of a little competition.

Not at all. If anything, it shows Apple's confidence in its mobile platform. People with the first generation iPhones will see their contracts ending. Anyone who wants a new mobile device will want to see what Apple has in store while Pre may already be out on the market or is close to it.

By pushing back the launch, Apple puts a few weeks between Pre's release and iPhone's own debut. It freezes the market. And not just for Palm but Windows Mobile phones and Blackberries. More importantly, it freezes some segment of the Pre market.

What does it do? Well, we hear media reports of Palm limiting Pre availability just so that they can call the sellout a win. Three hundred and seventy five thousand units is the Pre figure what Wall Street is floating around. I doubt that's true. Come on, it's Wall Street. Given the "Pre-"hype, that's a pretty low number.

Imagine if Apple manages to make it so that Palm can't even sell out 375,000 Pre's. And all Apple has to do is do nothing. Maybe to spice things up, the Week, Pre is announced for sale or goes on sale, Apple will announce a special iPhone event a couple of weeks later.

What do you think? Palm is playing chess while Apple maybe playing go. Cupertino can win the war without firing even a shot.

Via: Alley Insider

Note: Apple is doing major house cleaning with the iPhones. Don't be surprised if Apple to ratchet up a notch or two until the new iPhones are out by lowering prices. Pre will have to go against lowered priced iPhones now and newer and more powerful iPhones later. Not an enviable position to be in. Remember what Jobs has said previously. No umbrella room for their competitors. Ouch.

Crippled Slingplayer to Spur Lawsuits?

I am not an attorney and I know no more about the law than the average mobile warrior. However, can ATT's crippling of iPhone's Sling app end up being in the courts?

I think that is a possible scenario given that Sling's attorneys or iPhone users can make a case out of this. We all know that Slingplayers on other networks and devices work well enough over 3G networks.

ATT's argument against the 3G use with Slingplayer on the iPhone is just utterly nonsense. It's one of those things you say and you struggle to take it back. We'll likely hear more about this in the coming days.

And we've yet to mention net neutrality as a critical issue in all this as more and more people rely on their smartphones and mobile devices like the iPhone.

Links: Wired, Appleinsider

Note: It may be that ATT's argument that the iPhone isn't a smartphone for legal reasons. We doubt they really believe that but we've argued all along that the iPhone is a mobile device with telephony functions.

Tracking Apple's Gaming Progress

There has been a plethora of articles and blogging posts (line continues to be blurred between the two) about Apple's iPhone platform and the inways its made in the mobile gaming market.

Personally, I think the final ruling is a bit further out.  Two or three years.  Still, there has been quite a bit of attention, including our own blogs (Onxo and here) about mobile gaming in general and how iPhones and iPod Touches can benefit as more mobile warriors use it beyond playing music, making calls, and surfing the Web.

I have to say that 90% of all my apps, both paid and free, are games.  They range from $1 and up.  And you know what?  During that time, I've not touched my other gaming gears.  And this isn't just coming from me.  Others have also noted this change. 

Perhaps it's time for me to make a declaration about Apple's gaming but honestly it really is too early to say.  Nintendo and Sony have yet to respond to the app store in any meaningful way.  And let's not forget that on the smartphone and mobile device markets, there are others like RIM, WM, and Android that can still come out of nowhere and make a meaningful move in the mobile gaming market (though not likely).

So, this is what we're gonna do.  We'll put together a list of articles on iPhone gaming as they come out.  We'll track them and see where we are with each article.  An iPhone gaming platform progress report that can give everyone an idea how Apple is faring in DS-PSP land. 

Here's the first one from NY Times.  "Electronic Playground" is what the Times is call Apple's mobile platform.  It's a must read as it details Apple's attempt at transforming mobile gaming and how DS and PSP is different from the iPhone.

The main issue the author has with the iPhone is very valid and one that I've been crying about to anyone who'll listen:  battery life.  Boy, crummy is crummy and the iPod Touch and iPhone really really short battery life.