Still, he has some interesting thoughts on the mobile market, like there's "no business reason" to develop for Android and that "Apple has proved that having a single app store does make sense to users as well as the offerers, so I believe Microsoft, Nokia and possibly Google will follow and we’ll have five stores, and that’s ideal."

Google has already announced that there will be an app store for Android, so that's at least two in the game (and I think he's right about the others). Check out the full interview over at Cult of Mac. [Cult of Mac, PhotoShare]

Even over 3G and not Wi-Fi, the video quality was remarkably good for something you're watching streamed live. You can seek to any part of the movie using the default iPhone movie playback controls—just like the kind you see in any embedded Quicktime movie. Audio quality was good and the 200 movies gives you a fairly ample selection that will only grow as the site matures. For $9.95, it's a pretty damn good deal if you're a frequent traveler or if you need to hide your habit from your wife. "Favorites" support even helps you get to your preferred scenes as quickly as humanly possible.

In our opinion, it's probably the easiest way to get porn on your iPhone without loading it up in iTunes beforehand. [iRoticNET]

Everyone at Giz has continued to test hardware and software in the iPhone 3G over the last week and we've updated our reviews with the following nuggets:
• Speaker Buzz: We've finally confirmed that the dreaded buzz you got with speakers and tape adapters too close to the iPhone with the GSM connection running during calls or data disappears when you're running 3G. (Thanks Damien for helping with testing.)
• Battery Life: gets murdered by 3G and 3D gaming. Here are hardware and software fixes.

Software:

• Safari has a new function that automatically types .net and .org domain suffixes.
• Safari also shows embedded YouTube videos on webpages as stills that link to the YouTube app.
• A lot of the apps aren't incredibly stable. Developers only had a couple months of play time with the platform, so stuff isn't nearly as stable as it could be. Most of the time when an app crashes it won't take down the system, but we've had our share of having to hold down the power and home buttons simultaneously to hard reboot.
• Apple hadn't really allowed developers to chat with each other because of the NDA, so they couldn't share notes on how to do this function or that function in a smart way. So, the quality of apps will go up starting now.
• Only about 20% of the apps are good. I'm not sure what people were expecting from the iPhone App Store, but like any open or semi-open development platform, there's going to be a lot of garbage apps that either aren't well made or are so niche that only a handful of people would use them. This is like that.
• Because Apple has to hand-review every update to the App Store, it takes forever for developers to patch their software. Many apps like NetNewsWire have a handful of point-releases that fix bugs already done, but are waiting on Apple to approve them.
• The "backup" portion of a sync takes a really long time if you've just made any changes to your applications. iTunes is taking a snapshot of your phone for restoring purposes (you get all your apps back when you do a restore). So keep that in mind if you want to do a really quick sync and get out the door.

"We have not made any announcement regarding free Wi-Fi and iPhone. The webpage was posted in error and is being removed. Wi-Fi is a real differentiator for AT&T and it is our intention to make it available to as many customers as possible, but we have no announcement at this time."

Can you just make up your mind then? [GigaOm]

Twinkle's UI isn't quite as info rich (like when you click on someone's tweet) as Twitterific's, and you can't check out a tweet someone is replying to like you can in Twitterific. But, it doesn't seem as prone to slowdown (Twitterific can absolutely drag if you're scrolling through a lot of tweets), and I dig the easy-to-digest convo bubble layout. Also, there's no ads for the free (and only) version of Twinkle. But it's the location stuff that really put it over the top. [iTunes, Tapulous]

Our own Chris said he played it over EDGE while driving around Southern California and didn't lose signal once. Other pros include album art and allowing you to skip, bookmark and thumbs up/down tracks for better accuracy. While all of these features make Pandora a great app, just thinking about it makes my battery drain. [iPhone App Marathon]

Microsoft
Nintendo
Sony

Microsoft
How your current themes will look on the Xbox 360
Why Microsoft made a new Xbox Experience
Netflix on Xbox 360!
You can play games directly off the Xbox's hard drive
Xbox 360 is getting Avatars
Newly colored Xbox 360 controllers

Sony
Sony knows what went wrong with the PS3's development
How Sony being cheap hurts the PS3
The PlayStation video store is open
The PS3 80GB model gets a $399 price tag in September
PSN gets a simple sign-on
PS2 gets a LEGO Batman bundle

Nintendo
Hands-on With the Wii MotionPlus
Wii Sports Resort gets a price
The Wii ain't so cheap
The Wii finally gets a mic

Elsewhere
Rock Band 2's Instruments look great
EA upgrades its iPhone games
The DS is not as strong as the iPhone
The Dreamcast IS as strong as the iPhone
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed on iPhone
The official Rock Band 2 track list

The points are used on blueprints and magicbooks, just timed versions of the mining game. They are supposed to enhance your power, but so far I haven't noticed any difference. Still, the game is fun and I'm hooked.

As the name implies, the makers claim this is is just the beginning of a complete iPhone MMO, and I'm looking forward to what games and interactive features will be added next. [App Marathon]

Not so shocking: Bold remains the email king, thanks to basic stuff that the iPhone doesn't have like email filters on the go and remote searching. Plus, BlackBerry corporate stuff is much, much deeper, with more hardcore security. iPhone's made enterprise strides, but the Bold is still the win there. Bottom line? "You won’t find many people dropping their BlackBerrys for an iPhone. They’ll carry both as long as they can afford it." [Boy Genius Report]

By comparison, the other main free app Twittelator is a bit more buggy (can't connect to server errors, etc) and is far less pretty. Neither can notify you from the background, though, so for timely updates a lot of people will still be using good ol' SMS to let everyone know when dishes are being washed, meals eaten, etc. One thing: Twitteriffic still not quite as good as the free jailbreak app Twinkle, which allows you to filter tweets by people who are within a certain distance of yourself. [App Review Marathon]

But how good is the iPhone in terms of being a game console? How good are the tilt controls for accepting input for programs that you to make small adjustments with the phone in 3D space? Here's what the same developer from EA said to better help you conceptualize its accelerometer. "Think of it as a loose analog stick...you get lots of random data." Developers need to create smoothing algorithms in order to take random data points and interpret them into a curve which can then be used as movement info. Think about the Wii Remote before the MotionPlus add-on in Wii Sports Baseball. Remember all that jiggling your bat did? Yeah, this is that.

Nice. I called the manager whose name is listed at the bottom of the documents, and he told me that he had emailed the articles to his employees but in no way intended for them to copy them and hand them out to customers. Instead, they were meant to be used as talking points for getting sales in stores where the iPhone wasn't available.

It's understandable for a retail operation to try to get sales when what the customer came in for isn't available. What's less understandable is laughing at customers and handing this kind of thing out to try to discourage them from buying their carrier's flagship phone.

If there's anything that we can learn from this, it's this: AT&T won't ever have the unified face that Apple store employees do if they're going to have third party stands with third party phone lineups. Also, don't buy phones from stands in malls in New Jersey.

[All Things D]

Pretty impressive, and saves all that fiddling around with buttons when you should be busy controlling your car. It's got background noise suppression, so apparently it can cope with driving noise. And its independent battery runs it for 10 hours, without affecting the iPod.

There's just one flaw: its price. At $159 it's more than a 4GB nano itself, and that seems a little crazy. They are planning on releasing new versions for other iPods and the iPhone "as soon as possible," but this one will be out in December. [DirectVoxx]

Force Unleashed really is a pretty game. Crystal clear 2D backdrops give the levels a lot of pizzazz despite that they are, you know, 2D. And lightsabers glow properly on the screen.

But where we'd hoped to run around and slice our foes with laser swords, the mechanics never gave us a chance. Much like the classic PC series Rebel Assault, you don't actually move your character through rooms. Instead, you reflect your foes' laser shots with properly timed/angled swipes of the finger and activating force powers (like throwing baddies or electrocuting them) by drawing out symbols on the screen.

As lame as this may sound on paper, the battles can grow enjoyably hectic as you block fire and toss your enemies aside. And it's all promised to be backed by the same soundtrack we'll hear in the Xbox/PS3 versions of the Force Unleashed (we just heard placeholder music during our hands-on).

Oh, and something really cool. You can rotate the game between portrait and landscape mode. Neither gave the characters the stretched look.

In addition to all of that, THQ promised us an uncharacteristically rich storyline for a mobile game and 2 1/2 to 3 hours of gameplay. For a cellphone game, it looks extremely good. But compared to something on the PSP/DS, it's going to be a tad disappointing. So depending on your expectations of the iPhone, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed may be worth checking out when it hits this September.

The Price: $9.99

The Verdict: Tetris isn't exactly the most ambitious project for a company like EA Games. That's probably why the company's iPhone port is just, well, overdone. A good Tetris implementation - one that would have been wildly successful on its own - wasn't enough for EA, who've loaded this port up with so much crap that it sometimes doesn't even run. EA obviously wanted to use a bit of the iPhone's rendering capabilities, but the graphics are gaudy to the point of distraction. Starting or resuming a basic game takes quite a while because of the layers of menus and loading screens, and the secondary gameplay modes and Magic Mode tools will be ignored by most. On our 3G iPhone, the app would often freeze at startup, a problem that has been reported elsewhere among iPhone and iPod owners. An update is forthcoming that should address stability issues as well as introduce a feature that allows you to draw your upcoming shape directly.

These inspired features, though, are sullied by the showy, buggy execution. Anyone looking for a simple, clean port like Tris (from the jailbreak days. See you soon, Tris...) should probably pass on this $9.99 monster as you can expect a decent competitor to pop up at a lower price point, if not for free. Also, there are already web apps that offer a traditional (though gestureless) Tetris experience in your browser that don't have a 40 second startup time. One more sticky point: if you exit out of the game to check email or take a call and return, it will save your game state. But to start playing again you have to sit through 10 seconds of the intro movie. Freaking annoying and a waste of battery.

[iPhone App Marathon Review]

Seeking Mass Market Acceptance, Apple Stresses Cost Reduction for iPhone 3G

El Segundo, Calif., Jul. 15, 2008—The new iPhone 3G sports an evolutionary design that favors cost reduction instead of cutting-edge features, supporting Apple Inc.’s goal of expanding its market share and achieving a worldwide presence for the product, according to a physical teardown analysis conducted this weekend by iSuppli Corp.
iSuppli’s Teardown Analysis Service on July 11 obtained an iPhone 3G and commenced a dissection in order to identify component suppliers, as well as to determine preliminary part and system costs.
Per the teardown analysis and subsequent examinations by analysts, iSuppli has issued a preliminary estimate of $174.33 for initial production costs for the 8Gbyte iPhone 3G.
This figure consists only of the iPhone 3G’s combined Bill of Materials (BOM) and manufacturing expenses. The total doesn't include other costs, including software development, shipping and distribution, packaging and miscellaneous accessories included with each phone.
iSuppli’s cost estimate is nearly identical to the $173 BOM predicted in iSuppli’s virtual teardown issued to the public in late June.

Cost considerations rule in new iPhone
At $174.33, the BOM and manufacturing cost of the new iPhone is markedly less than the $227 that iSuppli estimated for the first-generation, 8Gbyte 2G iPhone in June 2007. While using a new design, the iPhone 3G really represents a refinement of the original iPhone 2G, according to iSuppli.
“The addition of 3G wireless capability represents an evolutionary design step for the iPhone, not a revolutionary one,” said Andrew Rassweiler, teardown services manager and principal analyst at iSuppli. “iSuppli believes Apple aimed for a more cost-effective design for the 3G iPhone compared to the 2G, in order to lower the retail price—which will allow the company to seed adoption and to capture maximum market share now—while the company still has buzz and a perceived differentiation relative to its competitors.”
The iPhone 3G’s use of an Infineon Technologies AG baseband chip that supports the HSDPA, WCDMA and EDGE air standards, plus the integration of three separate TriQuint Semiconductor Inc. tri-band WCDMA Power Amplifier Modules (PAMs), reflects the fact that the iPhone 3G is suited for sale worldwide.

Infineon takes key baseband slot
The attached table presents iSuppli’s preliminary analysis of components and suppliers for the iPhone 3G, determined via physical teardown. iSuppli has conducted a teardown analysis of only one 3G iPhone. While there are variations in the components and suppliers for individual products, iSuppli believes that the vendors and parts identified in its teardown likely are representative of all iPhone 3Gs now being shipped—excluding certain memory devices and other commodity parts that are available from multiple sources.
After iSuppli has completed an analysis of a larger sample of iPhones, we will issue further information to the public.
Infineon AG was the big winner in the key baseband section of the iPhone 3G torn down by iSuppli, contributing its HSDPA/WCDMA/EDGE chip that includes dual ARM926 and ARM7 microprocessor cores.
Solely-sourced items include Infineon’s baseband solution, RF transceiver and Global Positioning System (GPS) devices; Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd’s applications processor integrated with Synchronous DRAM (SDRAM); Marvell Technology Group Ltd.’s WLAN device and Cambridge Silicon Radio’s (CSR’s) Bluetooth chip.
Multi-sourced items include Toshiba Corp.’s 8Gbyte NAND flash memory chip. Apple’s other likely sources for this part include Samsung.

Design insights
Other observations made by iSuppli’s analysis team include:

· The redesigned internals of the iPhone 3G include only one large Printed Circuit Board (PCB), instead of the two nested PCBs found in the 2G version. The iPhone 3G uses a 10-layer board, compared to the less-expensive six-layer PCBs commonly employed in mobile handsets.
· The battery is not soldered into the iPhone 3G as it is done in the 2G, making it more serviceable.
· Some chips have the Apple logo or are unmarked. Although iSuppli has been able to identify many of these parts and their true manufacturers by de-capping the chips and examining their dies, some devices remain unidentifiable at this time.

iPhone costs
Beyond the $174.33 BOM and manufacturing cost of the iPhone 3G, Apple is spending an estimated $50 on IP royalties per unit shipped. With the 8Gbyte version retail-priced at $199, and the estimated $300 subsidy paid by AT&T to Apple for each unit, Apple is selling the product at a price of $499, and spending $224.33 to produce each one. This gives Apple a BOM, manufacturing and royalty margin of 55 percent for each 8Gbyte iPhone 3G unit sold.
Please respond to this e-mail to receive photos depicting iSuppli’s iPhone teardown analysis findings.

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There are some hedges that need to be made here that almost no one is making. Because of 3G, you'll kill batteries faster, but you're also downloading much faster, so can get more browsing done in a set amount of time. What's the math on the total number of web page refreshes vs. the old one? Secondly, no one yet is checking on the battery life while playing a high-end 3D-game like Monkey Ball or Motionx-poker; these games are not only running the GPU and CPU full bore, but the screen too. Gaming is probably the most intense activity you can do. Just wait for the multiplayer gaming to start and see what happens. Thirdly, because the apps give new functionality to the iPhone, you're going to be using it a lot more often than before. Especially in the first few days.

But back to the scores. As you can see, they're kind of all over the place.

One takeaway seems to be that as far as straight-up 3G talk time goes, the iPhone 3G is near the top of the range—Wirelessinfo and PC World both found it to be among the best 3G handsets they've tested for voice talk time. For mixed use and browsing numbers, the range is pretty wide, since the variables at play are nearly infinite.

Ars Technica: 3:00-4:30 (mixed use); under 4:00 (video playback)
"Using the iPhone constantly for various tasks like reading e-mail, surfing the web, sending updates to Twitter, and using other apps that make use of the network connection, we managed to get anywhere from 3 to 4.5 hours of Internet use out of the device. As for video playback, we watched several TV shows purchased from iTunes back to back until the battery died completely. Doing this, the battery went from full to empty in just a hair under 4 hours."

Wirelessinfo: 5:50 (3G talk time)
"The iPhone 3G lasted five hours fifty minutes in our test of call time. This is significantly above average and is the best time amongst our comparison phones. The web browsing test on the iPhone 3G has been one of the most vexing. So far our results have been 162 minutes, 168 minutes, 253 minutes and 409 minutes. One possible factor is that we leave the backlight to set itself automatically as our standard is to leave settings in default except for a few like making sure the screen stays on."

PC World: 5:38 (3G talk time)
"The battery life on Apple's new 3G iPhone isn't great, but it beats that of other 3G smart phones we've seen. PC World's Test Center ran it through our standard talk-time battery life test, and found that on average it ran 5 hours, 38 minutes, a running time that we consider earns a Fair rating...Of other handsets that support AT&T's HSDPA/UMTS network, only the HTC Touch Dual came close, with an average talk time of 5 hours, 18 minutes."

Engadget: 5:24 (video playback)
"We managed just 5 hours and 24 minutes of continuous playback of our 320 x 176, H.264 video encoded at 127kbps. (Our tests were conducted with the screen at half brightness, half volume, with Apple's stock headphones, WiFi on, but not connected, Bluetooth off, 3G and cellular radios on, and location services on — pretty much all the defaults.)"

PC Magazine: 5:43 (3G talk time)
"On our 3G talk time test, the iPhone lasted 5 hours, 43 minutes." [Spare words, eh guys?]

CNET: 5:00 (3G talk time); 9:00 (EDGE talk time)
"On EDGE the iPhone 3G fell about an hour short of its rated time of 10 hours, while 3G calls matched the promised time of 5 hours. Those times aren't bad, but we'll run another round just to be sure."

Anandtech: 3:17 (3G web browsing)
"At 197 minutes, the iPhone 3G can keep you browsing for a little over 3 hours before completing dying. That's with no additional phone calls or anything else going on in the background, just constant surfing. The problem is that this is a very realistic scenario for many users."

DVICE: 2:54 (3G web browsing /mixed use)
"This is a real-world test, too. Just as Apple tested its iPhone 3G, I had Wi-Fi running but not associated with any network, call forwarding on, and “Ask to Join Networks” and Auto-Brightness were turned off. Then I just browsed from site to site as I would normally do, checking email and downloading a few apps from time to time. It was all 3G, all the time."

Walt Mossberg/WSJ: 4:27 (3G talk time); 5:49 (3G web surfing)
"In my test of [3G] voice calling, I got 4 hours and 27 minutes, short of Apple’s maximum claim and nearly three hours less than what I recorded in the same test last year on the original iPhone. In my test of Internet use over 3G, I got 5 hours and 49 minutes, better than Apple’s claim, but far short of the nine hours I got using Wi-Fi in last year’s tests."

One point where a lot of the international carriers get you is in a lack of unlimited data. You can't be keeping a running total of kilobytes consumed this month when you pull your phone out of your pocket to look up a movie time or find a restaurant—that's just not the way this phone works, especially considering the range of data-consuming applications available. Many of the Euro carriers max out at 1GB before by-the-megabyte charges set in, which you'll suck down before you know it over 3G.

But on top of that, here are three that have found even more creative ways to reach into your pocket and/or piss you off.

Mobistar (Belgium): Ridiculous Unlocked Hardware Prices, With a Contract
Due to Belgian law, all phones must be sold unlocked. That means the iPhone is not eligible for a subsidy, and the 16GB will run you a massive €615 (that's $982). You can buy it without activation of a contract, but if you want to actually use the phone in Belgium with Mobistar service, they've still got you for a two-year contract, the most generous of which has a 1GB data cap and 540 minutes for €60 ($96)—kind of defeats the purpose of forcing sales of unlocked phones, no?

Rogers (Canada): Longest of the Long Contracts
Despite compromising somewhat by offering a discounted 6GB-per-month data plan on top of any of their regular voice plans, Rogers will still have you for three years. Insane. Plus you can only pair the 6GB promotion with any of their standard voice plans (not their iPhone packages), so you'll be paying extra for visual voicemail and SMS. And when you factor in the Canadian-to-US dollar exchange rate being $1=$1 right now, it gets even uglier.

Movistar/Telefonica (Spain): 3G Data Tease
Even though you can walk away with a free iPhone if you get on an expensive enough plan (Movistar hits you up either €15 or €25 per month for their iPhone plans on top of a minimum voice charge per month that ranges from €9 to €90, depending on usage), Movistar's "unlimited" data plans have an evil twist: after consumption of your first gigabyte under the Plus plan (or a paltry 200MB for the standard), your speeds are capped at 128kbps down/64 kbps up. Those are basically EDGE speeds, folks—according to our tests the 3G can manage 769kbps download speeds on AT&T's NYC network, which means for the rest of the month, you may as well save some battery by disabling 3G—you're not gonna use it. [A personal note from a Spaniard with a long experience dealing with Telefónica and Movistar: like always, the greediness and lack of vision of their execs—and by extension of most cellphone companies in this country—defies any description. Their secret mission statement remains the same: "screw the consumer when you don't have to compete with others". Which is exactly why I left my contract with them a long time ago, and I'm sticking to my iPhone classic until I can get the 3G somewhere else. — JD]

So our condolences to you, our Canadian, Belgian and Spanish readers. You're probably not alone though—there are still at least 49 more countries waiting for their iPhone launch, so the worst may yet be ahead of us. If you're getting screwed now or in the future, share below. You'll feel (a little) better.

[Rogers, Mobistar, Movistar/Telefonica]

We can't wait for the tool to be released. [iPhone Dev Blog]