Jim Dalrymple:, regarding Verizon CEO's statement that the word unlimited "doesn't mean anything":
No – it doesn’t. Mostly because you cell phone providers have made it meaningless. You used it to sucker in customers and once you got your hooks into them, you removed or “redefined” the word to suit your needs – but not the needs of the customers.So you’re right, it doesn’t mean anything – when weasels like you use it.
Jeff Benjamin:
I can confirm that the Verizon iPhone 5 is indeed GSM unlocked. Even though I bought an iPhone 5 from Verizon under contract, I was able to cut down my AT&T Micro SIM, and use it in my Verizon iPhone 5 to pick up an AT&T signal. By doing so, I was able to hop onto AT&T’s HPSA+ network, or “4G” as they so ridiculously name it.
Jordan Crook, TechCrunch:
A trusted Verizon employee has just confirmed to TechCrunch that the carrier is having an all-staff vacation blackout from the dates of Friday, September 21 to September 30.
Makes sense to me.
Rene Ritchie, iMore:
A couple of weeks ago iMore reported that Apple would be holding their iPhone 5 event on September 12, 2012. We've since learned that iPhone 5 pre-orders are currently planned to begin that same day, at least in the U.S. Release is still planned for 9 days later, on September 21, 2012. We've also learned that the second wave of iPhone launches, the ones in international markets, will begin in the first week of October, likely October 5.
They like it!
Reuters:
Japan's Sharp Corp. will start shipping screens destined for a new Apple iPhone that is widely expected to be released in October ahead of the pre-Christmas shopping season.
The technology integrates touch sensors into the LCD, making it unnecessary to have a separate touch-screen layer. The absence of the layer, usually about half a millimeter thick, not only makes the whole screen thinner, but the quality of displayed images would improve, said DisplaySearch analyst Hiroshi Hayase.
BGR:
Absinthe 2.0, the untethered jailbreak solution for iOS 5.1.1, has already been downloaded almost one million times. According to the Chronic Dev Team, 973,086 devices had been jailbroken as of Sunday evening, 211,401 of which were Apple’s newest iPad.
And the jailbreak program was just released on Friday!
I've never been that interested in jailbreaking my devices, but the lock screen in this photo almost makes me want to give it a try.
Something for you to try if the regular stories about Android phones that can’t be upgraded seem befuddling or ponderous: don’t think of Android as an operating system the way you think of Mac OS X, iOS, or Windows as an operating system.
Instead, think of it the way you think of your car’s engine.
Generally speaking, the Android-phone you’ve purchased is married to the version of Android it shipped with, just like your car is more or less married to its engine, which has been customized to some degree just for your car. If a better engine is developed and you want it in your old car, it’ll take a lot of work to make that happen, and most people won’t (and likely shouldn’t) try doing it themselves.
The companies shipping Android phones are just like the automobile manufacturers in this regard. They start with an Android base, customize it for the smartphone they’ve made, and send it out the door. It does the specific things they’ve determined it should do in the specific way they’ve decided it should do them, and that’s it. If there’s a problem they can’t get around fixing (Pinto), they reluctantly push an update (recall).
The idea that you might later want to update the OS sometime down the road isn’t the kind of thing that concerns them. Nobody should be surprised about this and in fact, it makes good business sense for the carriers and Android phone manufacturers. What better way to encourage you to buy a new phone than to make your old one obsolete (at least from the software perspective) after only several months?
You could argue that Apple does this too but there is a difference: we can still run the latest version of iOS on all of the iPhones currently sold by Apple, which includes the three-year old iPhone 3Gs.
The Newer Technology Power2U AC/USB Wall Outlet gives you two USB ports in addition to two standard electrical ports.
My buddy Jim Dalrymple comments that we’ll need vendors to make longer USB cables.
Until they do, we’ll have to buy them ourselves. Here’s a 6-foot iPhone cable at Amazon for $7.
More follow-up from yesterday’s episode of The Talk Show via Wired:
According to Japanese blogger Nobuyuki Hayashi, the annoying clicky shutter sound of the Japanese-bound iPhone 3G cannot be switched off, even in silent mode. Why? Because perverts cannot be trusted not to shove their phones up some poor girl’s skirt and snap a picture.
Sometimes content magically appears in Newsstand on my iPhone 4S. Usually it’s a copy of the New York Times, which I have never subscribed to. It’s a large download and eats up space I’d like to use for other things.
Maybe Apple or the The Times or somebody else thinks I don’t read this paper frequently enough. This would be true, because I almost never read it.
Even so, I feel like it should be up to me if I read it. Also I have no idea why this happens or how to make it stop.
Two weeks ago, we introduced our Gmail app for iOS. Unfortunately it contained a bug which broke notifications and displayed an error message, so we removed it from the App Store. We’ve fixed the bug and notifications are now working, and the app is back in the App Store.
You can once again have a terrible experience with Gmail on your iPhone.
The iPhone is a fantastic phone, but if you’re a heavy user of Google services, it can be a little confusing to set up your Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Contacts to sync with iOS. The default method’s no good. Here’s the better way to do it.
Be sure to read the comments, which address a number of potential issues not covered in the article.