iPhone 3G

We’re proud to say that The iPhone Blog is now TiPb: your #1 iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad blog!

A little SPE network news before we get to our weekly list o’links. We’ve been calling TiPb ‘TiPb’ instead of ‘The iPhone Blog’ for so long now, we figured we may as well make it official. Add in that the iPhone platform now encompasses the iPhone, iPod Touch, and the newly announced iPad and renaming the site pretty much became a foregone conclusion. Same great content, new shorter URL to type in!

Say Hello to TiPb: The iPhone, iPod, and iPad Blog! is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

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Could spray-on liquid glass be the future of the iPhone and iPad? It is thin, flexible, transparent and even anti-bacterial. This liquid glass was invented in Turkey and held by the company Nanopool.

For more about this new technology, stay with us after the break.

The liquid glass is incredibly thin, only about 100 nanometers thick (a penny is 1550000 nm, thanks nanozone) When used in this thickness is flexible and breathable, and easy to clean with only a damp cloth. It repels bacteria, water and dirt, so this layer could be used to keep your iPhone or iPad clean and antibacterial (Germophobes look away, your phone is one of the most bacteria infested objects you own). It also repels UV light and is acid resistant (Oh no, diabolical Mr. Evil you can not destroy my iPhone by dropping it into that vat of acid, but one step closer and Mr. Bigglesworth gets it!).

I can see how this could be useful in a multitude of iPhone, iPod and iPad technolologies. One of the ways I see it being used, is in order to make the iPhone waterproof. It could be sprayed all over the phone and seal off any small holes and mesh, allowing sound waves to travel.

My own futuristic wish is that one day I have a flexible easy to store and carry iPad. Now that glass can be made in a flexible manner this opens up a wide range of possibilities.

To find out more about this new discovery, head on over to Nanopools website.

What do you think ?

Spray on Glass — Could this be the future of iPhone and iPad Technology? is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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Qik VideoCamera [$1.99 - iTunes link] has gotten an update and to celebrate they’re giving away four (4) FREE copies to TiPb readers!

For a quick look at the Qik VideoCamera update — and the give-away — follow along after the break!

If you haven’t yet, check out my first Qik VideoCamera review because we’re only going to focus on the updates here. Finished? Good!

Qik VideoCamera can now be used on 2G, 3G and 3GS. Plus this amazing video application has gotten even more useful — and fun. Qik VideoCamera added new on-screen functions, so it is much easier to choose your effects and enlarge, brighten or increase audio of your videos. This mean you can alter things in real time, with the camera rolling.

You can also now post your videos to facebook, SMS videos to your friends and they’ve added 5 more effects

Sepia

Area Zoom

Twirl

(I feel it is more of a fun house mirror.)

X-ray

Wiper

(My favorite — there is fog on screen and your touch wipes it away!)

Give-away

And now the give away! If you want a FREE copy, just head on over to Twitter and tweet us this shoutout:

“Hey @TiPb, love the new @Qik VideoCamera! Can has? http://bit.ly/bH9eoy”

One entry per tweep. The contest starts now and ends Wednesday, February 10th at 12pm PT. And remember, promo codes require a US iTunes App Store account (Apple’s rule, not ours!) Good luck!

TiPb Give Away: 4 FREE Copies of Qik VideoCamera for iPhone! is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

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Confirmed Mac chick Megan Fox, photographed on dozens of occasions sporting her beloved iPhone 3G, took a dive for the Motorola money to pimp the Devour in a brand new Super Bowl ad. It sickens me to see Fox, an iPhone goddess, soaking wet in a bath tub pimping some inferior mobile device.

Millions of people were forced to witness this farce, this grand mockery of two shams.

I don't care how hot Megan Fox is, we all know she's ten times hotter when she's holding her iPhone. She looks ridiculous holding that box-shaped excuse for innovation. Motoblur? Seriously? After watching this video for the twenty seventh time in a row, it's starting to give me the douche chills. I feel dirty.

I wonder what will happen when Motorola finally puts out this device? Probably nothing.

[Motorola]
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For me, the best part of the Super Bowl is the commercials. And after you see this one, you may have to agree. Just note that you’ll have to play the video several times over before you realize there’s a phone there – the Motorola DEVOUR with MOTOBLUR, to be exact. So, what happens when Megan Fox uses her DEVOUR to send out a hot, wet image via a social network?

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This is the so-called HTC Incredible running on Verizon. It has a Snapdragon CPU with 256RAM and a bold and beautiful screen a la the Nexus One. Interestingly, it has two rear LED flashes and appears to be clad in a red backplate which reminds me of butterscotch pudding although a video, now unavailable, shows it is really red.

Click through for a UI shot. Also, can I just say that I am more in love with Android every time I see it? It just seems fresh.

via PocketNow

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Now you’ll be able to understand what Zee Germans yell when they score a goal

Check your calendar, friends, for the first time in a long time I was just wowed by a tech story. Google says it’s working on smartphone software that would automatically translate foreign languages into your native tongue. So, if you’re talking to your Venezuelan pen pal, and he says, “No me gusta el fútbol americano,” you can react in horror as you try to explain to him the importance of a game where more time is spent setting up plays than actually executing them is the greatest sport in the world. Porqueria.

If all goes according to plan, the software could be ready in just a “couple” of years, which is to say Google has no idea when it’ll be ready for public consumption.

You’ll recall that Google already has a fairly robust translation software suite, and it’s totally free. It’s not entirely machine translation, though, which is generally rubbish, since people can help contribute with certain words and phrases that might not mean what the literal definition suggests.

Like, I just used the word “rubbish” to mean that machine translation is not always very accurate, not that it’s refuse.

All part of Google’s plan to ensure that humanity is fully dependent on its services, I suppose.

Here’s a tip: learn Spanish or French or Italian in high school, and you can pretty easily pick up any other romance language with not too much effort. Spanish and Italian and Portuguese are pretty much “mods,” to use a PC game word, of Latin, so it all works out.

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Since we all know that Android runs a modified version of Linux, you’d think that the creator of Linux, Linus Torvalds, would absolutely love Android handsets. Nope. As a matter of fact, the man hates cell phones. Torvalds says that he got the G1 when it came out but rarely used it because of his distaste for the distracting gadget. So why does he call the Nexus One a winner?

Unlike us phone geeks, Linus Torvalds doesn’t rush out to buy the latest and greatest when it hits the market. The Nexus One has been available for over a month and he has waited until now to take the plunge. Why? The Nexus One finally received a pinch-to-zoom or multitouch update last week. Torvalds says:

What a difference! I no longer feel like I’m dragging a phone with me “just in case” I would need to get in touch with somebody – now I’m having a useful (and admittedly pretty good-looking) gadget instead.

It appears that the addition of pinch-to-zoom, especially in Google Maps, helped Torvalds get over his hatred of cell phones. So there you have it. If you were on the fence about purchasing the Nexus One, the man who made Linux has given it his seal of approval.

[Via Linus' blog]

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Here are two totally unrelated things I like to do: order gadgets and smartphones online, and travel with loads of spare batteries. Well, perhaps they’re not all that unrelated. Both offer a lot of convenience and save a good amount of cash, but with a new proposal from the U.S. Department of Transportation, that could all soon change.

We’ve all seen exploding iPods, cell phones and laptops thanks to faulty Lithium-Ion batteries and connectors, so the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration wants to make air travel much safer by changing the policies on shipping and transporting these dangerous goods. Ultimately, vendors and shipping companies would be forced to use stronger and safer packaging for LiIon batteries or gadgets which contain them. These costs would undoubtedly be passed onto us, the consumers.

But wait, there’s more! Tightening down on these battery rules would make it much more difficult, if not impossible, to carry spare batteries in your check-in luggage. It’s not just LiIon batteries in question as NiMH and alkaline batteries would be prohibited from checked luggage, too. I’m all about safety when traveling, but if these proposals pass, traveling could easily become a pain – more so than it is now.

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We all know by now there’s no Flash on the iPhone or iPod touch, and it doesn’t look like there’ll be Flash on the iPad, which is probably why Adobe’s Chief Technology Officer fired off an impassioned defense of the plugin, while a software engineer shows how a still-unfixed bug crashes it, and the first full on HTML5 video player concept makes its debut.

First up, Adobe CTO, Kevin Lynch has posted a full throated defense of Flash on his Adobe Blog and in a follow up comment notes:

Regarding crashing, I can tell you that we don’t ship Flash with any known crash bugs, and if there was such a widespread problem historically Flash could not have achieved its wide use today.

How does this reconcile with Apple CEO, Steve Jobs saying something along the lines of “Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash“? TUAW draws our attention to Matthew Dempsky who found a bug that causes Flash to crash in Safari and Chrome, and Firefox to crash completely. And Adobe hasn’t fixed it some 16 months later… Dempsky has created http://flashcrash.dempsky.org/ to demonstrate (remember, it will crash Firefox completely!), and says:

This page exploits a bug that I reported to Adobe in September 2008, and has affected every release of Flash on every platform since then. Despite numerous email exchanges with the Flash product manager about the bug, the bug report being hidden from the public for “security” reasons, and [although] Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch’s claims otherwise, it continues to be an issue. [...] I’m just a software engineer who at one time had to deal with Adobe’s sorry excuse for a development platform and made an earnest effort on several occasions at helping them improve it for everyone. (This issue is merely the tip of the iceberg of ridiculous bugs and random backwards and forwards incompatibilities known as Adobe’s Flash Player plug-in.)

TUAW makes the case that Adobe’s been resting on their de facto-standard laurels.

Daring Fireball, meanwhile links to SublimeVideo, the first (to our knowledge) full on HTML5 and JavaScript alternative video player. It’s still early days, of course, but it works without a plugin, doesn’t buffer until you tell it to, and lets you jump to any point in the video with fairly robust controls — and more to come.

(And Gruber also notes that MPEG LA, owners of H.264, the proprietary codec used by Apple’s gear and online in Safari, Chrome, and Flash — but not in Firefox — have announced it will remain without charge for free-to-end-user video through 2016)

Lynch, and former Macromedia Flash MX co-creator, Jeremy Allaire on TechCrunch, make valid points that HTML5 can’t replace Flash and that Adobe works really hard on both.

In an ideal world, however, perhaps HTML5 can relieve Flash of some of the duties for which it’s unsuited, give us back a lighter, cleaner, faster web overall, and let Flash and Adobe concentrate on those tasks for which there is no Flash alternative — complex data visualizations, for example.

(And we’d also appreciate it if Flash stopped allowing websites to abuse local settings by storing “cookies” on our system — okay Adobe?)

[Via TUAW, <a href="Daring Fireball">Daring Fireball]

On Flash Crash and Sublime HTML5 Video Clash is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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