Apple Insider brings us a huge roundup of recent Apple iPhone-related patent filings.

First up is an ID App which lets users select from RFID, camera, or infrared input, or location data like GPS, to identify objects in their surroundings. (We’ll spare you the tricorder jokes…)

Second is an outgoing voicemail recorder, which would record not the messages you receive, but those you leave for others.

Third is a way to sell iPhones and iPod’s with pre-selected content. Metadata would be inserted during or just after manufacturing that would then download the content automagically when the user receives the device.

Fourth is for SMS parental controls, to filter out “objectionable content”, and fifth would determine successful receipt of an SMS.

As always, there’s no telling when, or if, Apple will ever actually ship any devices using any of these features. But it’s fun to imagine the possibilities…

Waves iPhone around and makes tricorder noise

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

iPhone Patent Watch: ID App, Outgoing Voicemail Recorder, Pre-Selected Content, SMS Parental Controls, and SMS Confirmation

IM+ Forum Review by llofte. For more Forum Reviews, see the TiPb iPhone App Store Forum Review Index!

IM+ is an IM client with push notification support for 10 networks, including Twitter. I use AIM, Facebook, and Twitter, so these are the only networks that influence this review.

Design and Use

The design of IM+ is nice and intuitive. The bottom toolbar has tabs for contacts, inbox, favorites, status, and more. Under the contacts tab you will find find a list of your contacts organized by account, group name, or no group (selected in settings). If no group organization is chosen, then your contact list will by organized alphabetically based on availability. So, the top of your list will show available contacts, then idle or away contacts. At the bottom, offline contacts are treated as a separate group. There is an option to have offline contacts hidden.

Tapping a contact will open a chat window with that contact. If there is a previous conversation stored on IM+, then the window will include that conversation.

To the right of of every contact, there is an “i” to find more information. Tapping this will display the status of the contact, their user ID, as well as the ability to add to favorites, rename, and delete (provided that the IM service associated with the contact allows).

The inbox contains all current and past conversations. If a twitter account is enabled, then @replies and direct messages are treated as their own separate conversations. It is not possible to have twitter conversations treated as a conversation in IM+; only incoming messages are shown in the @reply and DM threads. Conversations can be easily deleted from the inbox with a tap of the edit button.

When writing a message, there is a smiley face on the left and a keyboard on the right of the text field. Tapping the smiley gives a list of symbols (mostly smileys) that you can insert into the message. Be careful with these though, if the receiving client doesn’t recognize a symbol, it will be displayed in text form, or worse, a smiley face with some symbols attached.

Tapping the keyboard symbol collapses the keyboard and the smiley face converts to an upload symbol. From here you can send your location, a picture, or voice message. You have to be careful with this too because once you make a choice, it sends without confirmation. This is a major problem, in my opinion. I attempted to send a DM tweet with my location and IM+ ignored the text and sent my location as a public tweet! I’m just glad I was at Starbucks and not my house! This also means that text cannot be included with any media type. All media gets sent as a link. Pictures and voice memos are hosted by IM+ and GPS locations send a link to GPSed.com. It would be nice if the link launched Google maps on an iPhone so the recipient could quickly get directions, but it doesn’t.

All links are opened in the built-in browser of IM+. This browser is very cool as it not only allows for reading and navigating through websites provided by links, but you can use it to visit any site by typing the web address into the text field at the top. This is very convenient for those times someone starts an IM conversation when browsing Safari. Just copy the URL before exiting Safari, launch IM+, paste the URL into the browser and quickly tab between conversation and browser. When your conversation is over, just tap the globe at the upper right of the browser to open the current page in Safari. Awesome.

Next is the favorites tab. This is simply a list of contacts that have been marked as favorites. You can add or delete contacts from this list and see more information about them, just as in the contact list.

The status tab is where you can choose your status message (for supporting networks). There are 6 options, Online, On iPhone with IM+, I am here (with link to GPS location), Away, Invisible, and Offline. To add a custom status message or edit the pre-existing ones, just tap edit.

The more tab gives access to your accounts, settings, and in-app web browser.

Twitter

IM+ is not intended to be used as a primary Twitter client, but makes for a great secondary client. It’s convenient to be able to access twitter while holding an IM conversation without having to go back and forth between two apps. Reading tweets on IM+ goes against the conventional style of most recent on top, but this doesn’t bother me because I find uniformity within an app to be important and it doesn’t make sense for normal IM to read like Twitter.

What makes Twitter so great on IM+ is of course push notification. All DMs and @mentions get pushed within 4 minutes of being sent. Ideally, they would arrive faster, but 4 minutes isn’t too bad. The problem with Twitter push on IM+ is that there is no way to choose what you want pushed. It is also a little glitchy and randomly pushes tweets from your timeline that aren’t directed at you. It’s not horribly intrusive as I’ve probably only had at most 5 in a day get through, but it needs to be fixed.

Conclusion

IM+ is very well designed. Although the implemenation of Twitter push is not perfect, it’s a decent first attempt and I trust it will only get better with updates. The advantage of using IM+ is that you can use twitter, hold multiple IM conversations, and browse the web all within one application. At $9.99, IM+ is not cheap, but competive with Beejive. Version 3.2 has been submitted and is in review with Apple, so SHAPE Services has decided to lower the price to $4.99 until release; so if IM+ is something you’re interested in, snatch it up quick and let us know what you think!

Pros

• Push notification for Twitter
• Support for 10 networks
• Basic IM push is flawless
• In-app web browser
• Favorites

Cons

• Twitter push
• Cannot name accounts
• Not all avatars show
• Only one twitter account is supported
• GPS links don’t launch google maps

TiPb Review Rating

IM+ is available for $4.99 from the iTunes App Store.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

App Review: IM+ with Push for iPhone

More big news for Android — and no, not just HTC finally going 3.5mm with the headphone jacks — but Sony Ericcson’s new “Rachel” Android device and it’s UI.

Hot on the heels of the HTC Hero’s Sense UI, it’s again showing the power and flexibility of Google’s other OS.

Is that model, separating hardware and software development, finally going to pay off in the mobile space? And, ironically, will it be Google rather than Microsoft who realizes it first?

[Android Central via BGR]

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

The Competition: Sony Ericcson Android UI

Macworld is reporting that while the iPhone 3GS chipset does indeed support the new (for North America!) HSPDA download speed of 7.2 Mbps, Apple didn’t see fit to equip it with the matching HSUPA upload speed of 1.4/1.9 Mbps. Indeed, they claim the iPhone 3GS will top out its uploads (sending videos to YouTube, emailing photos, etc.) at a comparatively anemic 384 Kbps.

Perhaps not a big deal in North America where, as noted, the GSM networks are still building out their speed. (Hold your laughter, CDMA, your upload speed is faster but it’s not like you’ve flipped the switch to Rev B yet either — you all have your hidden shames!).

In Europe, however, where HSPA networks are as mature as their coffee is good, well… they’re going to suffer senselessly slower upload speeds.

We’ve asked you in the past how fast your downloads were, now let us know how your uploads are doing, and how much HSUPA — or the lack thereof — matters to you.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

iPhone 3GS Doesn’t Support HSUPA for High Speed 3G Upload

Matt Miller over at our sibling site, NokiaExperts, takes issue with a prediction that Nokia will drop to 20% while Apple and the iPhone soar to 35% worldwide market share by 2012:

The iPhone has a singular form factor and has been doing incredible the first couple of years in existence. However, as more Android devices roll out, Windows Mobile 7 shows up in force, RIM keeps chipping away with the BlackBerry OS, and Palm struggles to find itself with WebOS I doubt Apple will pass up Nokia.

Matt also points out that Symbian Foundation could replace the ailing S60 by then as well, making the situation even more of an unknown.

Granted, in North America we sometimes forgot the goliath that is Nokia internationally. They’re huge. I’ve argued before, however, that raw market share isn’t exactly the same thing for Apple. They already have massive mind share, clearly setting the pace for smartphone development for the last couple years (multitouch, better user interfaces, centralized application stores, etc.), but they maintain a very high profit share as well.

Back in January, it was reported that while Apple ships nowhere near the amount of handsets that Nokia does, it makes double the profit. So, every percentage of market share Apple does gain comes not with loss leaders and commensurate financial losses, but with huge, brimming bags of money to shovel back into iPhone R&D and marketing.

Apple has also figured out how to take iPhone innovations and leverage them for Mac OS X (like the upcoming QuickTime X), and vice versa — something no other company seems able to do yet.

All that to say I agree with Matt’s overall assessment, it’s ridiculous and risky to try to look 3 years out in a market like smartphones. After all, no one really predicted the iPhone in 2006, and many pundits thought it would fizzle and fail in 2007. Now look at it.

Who knows what the market will be in 2012? Microsoft could have shipped Windows Mobile 7.x — RIM could have a new OS as well. Heck, Nokia could snap up Palm and be selling PreN99’s like hotcakes…

What’s your prediction?

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Will Apple’s iPhone Surpass Nokia by 2012?

tap tap tap points out something that perhaps should have been obvious from the start regarding the iPhone 3GS‘ 256MB of RAM — that doubling the memory, once the OS loads and programs start eating away at it, often leaves more than double the free space.

The older iPhone models have been often considered underpowered when it comes to RAM, so even though the RAM amount is technically doubled, in actual use, you'll often be working with 4x to 10x the amount of free RAM. And that's one major aspect that's contributing to the overall speedier feel of the 3GS.

As we saw in our video iPhone 3GS vs. iPhone 3G app launch smackdown, this translates directly into keeping Mobile Safari pages loaded, for example, when you exit out, load a large app, and then come back.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

iPhone 3GS — Twice the RAM… 10x the Impact?