The boys over at Rapid Repair have already gutted an iPhone 3G S. It’s built pretty much like the 3G, but this is interesting:
This phone is capable of 833MHz and 720p video.
Right now, Apple has it clocked at 600Mhz. No doubt running the processor at 833Mhz would eat through the battery, but it’s interesting that the hardware is capable of it. My guess is that at 600Mhz, the processor can’t render 720p video in reasonable time.
Time has posted a piece about a service I never knew existed:
Presto and Celery, which both launched in 2006, deliver e-mail printouts almost in real-time because they require subscribers to purchase hardware to handle incoming messages. (In addition to personal updates and interesting articles, caregivers can send reminders about doctors’ appointments or family functions.) Celery charges $13.98 a month to send and receive (color printouts of) e-mails — as well as Facebook and Twitter updates — via a fax machine, which costs $119 if you don’t already own one.
It happened last year, and it’s happening again this year: the iTunes servers are crumbling under the load of millions of users upgrading to 3.0.
I hate to say, but I told you so.
Well, well, look at this from Engadget:
The original plan was to offer mildly subsidized prices of $399 and $499 for the 16GB and 32GB versions of the iPhone 3G S to AT&T customers who weren’t currently “upgrade eligible,” but the carrier’s having a change of heart, ostensibly in response to… you know, people wanting to pay less. The new plan is to let anyone with an upgrade date in the months of June, July, August, or September get in on the fully discounted $199 / $299 price points, which should cover a good number of existing 3G owners.
One of the most awaited features, push notifications, requires a constant data connection. While the iPhone 3G can handle data and voice simultaneously when using a 3G/HSDPA connection, on EDGE (the cellular data service that the original iPhone uses) you are unable to take calls and maintain a persistent data connection. As a result, if you turn on the push notification service, you may be unable to receive voice calls.
Gizmodo has posted 94 ideas for iPhone apps - designed in Microsoft’s Paint application.
Jason Snell, on AT&T’s lack of support for iPhone OS 3.0’s keystone features:
From the outside, there’s just no way to know why AT&T does the things that it does. But given Apple’s attitude, the reaction from the crowd at WWDC, and the anger out on the Internet, something is obviously wrong. It makes me wonder if AT&T, as a company, is simply incapable of changing the way it does business, even if the changes might end up benefiting it in the end.
The Newton is back in the spotlight, and once again, is creating waves in the Apple community.
The Newton 2010 bug has made news before, but just re-surfaced on a prominent Apple blog. Here’s TUAW:
Apple’s ill-fated and technologically advanced personal digital assistant was hot stuff in the 1990s until it was axed in February of 1998. There are still a good number of Newton MessagePad fans who not only use their devices every day, but are also working together on hardware and software updates to their units to bring them into the 21st Century.
Documents To Go - the premiere mobile app for editing Office documents - has been released for the iPhone. This makes the iPhone even more attractive to businesses.
The New York Times has posted a lengthy piece on data centers - the buildings that power web services, store our data, and more. They interviewed Michael Manos, a former Microsoft employee:
At Tukwila — as at any big data center — the computing machinery is supported by what Manos calls the “back-of-the-house stuff”: the chiller towers, the miles of battery springs, the intricate networks of piping. There’s also what Manos calls “the big iron,” the 2.5-megawatt, diesel-powered Caterpillar generators clustered at one end of a cavernous space known as the wind tunnel, through which air rushes to cool the generators. “In reality, the cloud is giant buildings full of computers and diesel generators,” Manos says. “There’s not really anything white or fluffy about it.”
…the iPhone 3G S sports 256MB of RAM — up from 128 in the original iPhone and iPhone 3G — as well as a faster processor running at 600MHz, compared to 412MHz in the first two iterations of the device. The second-generation iPod touch also sports a faster processor than that found in the first two generations of iPhone, running at 532MHz.
Sweet.
From a DriveSavers email blast:
DriveSavers just launched the first and only hard drive simulator for iPhone and iPod touch! Known as DriveSaver, the free hard drive simulator features a virtual environment that allows you to explore the inner workings of a common hard drive. It simulates various types of hard drive failures using ultra-realistic sounds and visuals and includes essential backup and data loss prevention tips.
DriveSaver is a fantastic demonstration tool to help illustrate hard drive data storage technology. It’s educational, it’s functional and it’s fun! It might even help you identify problems with a bad hard drive. Anyone who has ever wanted to see inside a hard drive or learn how drives work and why they fail, must try it!