iPhone Live! comes to you tonight (Wednesday, August 19) at 8pm ET/5pm PT.

Joining us tonight to discuss Revision3’s new mobile application show, AppJudgement [iTunes link], will be the co-host of AppJudgement, HD Nation, and Tekzilla, Patrick Norton.

If you have any questions or topics you’d like us to address, let us know in the comments below or tweet them to @theiphoneblog.

Join in via http://www.tipb.com/live

Chat with you soon!

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

iPhone Live! Tonight 8pm ET/5pm PT (With Patrick Norton!)

Tapped into the App Store and what did I see? Twitterrific 2.1, the latest version of the grand-daddy of all iPhone (and iPod touch) Twitter clients, locked and loaded, just waiting for me!

Updates include:

• Load more button to get older tweets
• Followers and following lists in author view
• Recording, posting, and viewing videos (presumably iPhone 3GS-dependent)
• Built-in WebView now goes landscape if you want it
• Saves battery via improved location update handling
• Tap and hold menus for tweet, links, photos
• Reply and re-tweet now have tap shortcuts
• In-app email support
• Optimized for iPhone 3GS

If you’re a Twitterrific user — or you want to be — and give it a whirl, let us know how the update works for you. I’ll be testing it out for the next couple days via @reneritchie, so feel free to drop me a tweet there and help out!

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

Quick App Update: Twitterrific 2.1 Twitter Client for iPhone

UPDATE: MacRumors is saying they have good reason to believe these images are, indeed, fake…

Boy Genius received some more screen shots of what’s alleged to be iTunes 9, showing a Samsung YH-J70JL Black — of all things — purportedly syncing with the front end of Apple’s media management empire. PreCentral.net jumped on this to ponder out-loud if Apple was having a change of heart regarding locking out Palm’s previous attempts to spoof an iPod ID and sync with iTunes on the down-low, and will now allow non-Apple devices access. TiPb, however, can see this playing out in only 3 ways:

1. The screen shots, or that specific feature at least, isn’t real
2. The ‘verse gets rebooted, Star Trek-style, and Steve Jobs ain’t in it.
3. Jobs is going nu-cu-lar and will allow every device except the Palm Pre to sync with iTunes.

Option 3 looking the most likely at this point?

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

Updated: Regarding iTunes 9 Allowing 3rd Party Devices to Sync

Yeah, so if the analysts are to be believed — and Hollywood is wrong about the world ending first - - Apple might just sell 82+ million iPhones in 2012 (not by 2012, but 82+ million that year alone!) accounting for 5.7% of the market.

RBC guestimates that Apple will dominate the media-centric category of smartphones, much as RIM will dominate productivity, leaving Palm and perhaps others to fill out 2-3 additional categories like personal information management, cloud-focused, etc.

The growth in smartphones is expected to come not only at the expense of feature phones, but of PC-class devices as well (fulfilling the so-called Post-PC prophecy).

Personally, we’re waiting for Apple to make an iPhone with the compute power of a MacBook Air that I can just dock into a MacBook shell when I need to do more serious work. Cloud storage, mobile compute power, dockable productivity. That’s the future we’d like…

[via MacRumors]

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

Analyze This: 82+ Million iPhones to be Sold in 2012?

Our sibling site, PreCentral.net has put together something we’re openly and admittedly jealous of — a brand-spanking new Homebrew Apps gallery for the Palm Pre. For those unfamiliar with Homebrew, think of it as something akin to the iPhone’s Jailbreak ecosystem, where apps are developed outside “official” SDK channels and installed without the built in App Store (or App Catalog in this case).

Jailbreak, of course, is and has always been one of the brightest, most creative and vibrant parts of the iPhone (and TiPb!) community, and it looks like Homebrew is every bit the same for the Palm Pre (and likely future webOS devices).

What makes this particularly interesting is that Jailbreak sprang up initially because Apple didn’t provide an SDK or App Store for 3rd party apps at all with the original iPhone 2G and iPhone OS 1.0. Jailbreak continued after the official SDK shipped and the App Store appeared with iPhone 3G and iPhone OS 2.0, however, because Apple took a very hard editorial line on approval (and rejection), creating a gap in functionality and leaving out whole classes of applications. And this has continued to be the case well after iPhone 3GS and iPhone OS 3.0 (See Jeremy’s most recent Top 5 Must-Have Jailbreak Apps Post-iPhone 3.0 Edition for examples).

Palm Pre and webOS, however, had an SDK (in limited beta) before launch, was built on web-standards like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, shipped with an App Catalog in place, and seems to be aiming for a far more open, encompassing approval process than the iPhone or Apple would ever allow. So why Homebrew?

The webOS SDK wasn’t generally available to everyone who wanted it, when they wanted it, and the App Catalog didn’t have tons and tons of apps available when it shipped. Palm enthusiasts saw gaining dev access and developing Homebrew as a highly desirable mountain in their back yard that just demanded to be climbed. And now there are all sorts of wonderful Homebrew apps appearing and — here’s the kicker — Palm thus far seems to be okay with it. They didn’t lock down the system to the extent exploits are needed to Jailbreak (just the most awesome Konami code), and they’re not petitioning to prevent any exemptions from the DMCA… yet.

It’s easy to see the upside. You get super-passionate, uber-talented developers buying into your platform and building apps some of which will no-doubt end up in the official App Catalog, and some of which might just fill gaps that carrier or corporate policy require be filled unofficially.

Apple will likely never go the same route as Palm — despite the overlapping executives and engineers, the cultures are different and need to be to compete. Looking at the Homebrew community, however, it’s hard not to believe that even if Apple pulled a 180 and cracked the giant stone gates of the App Store well and truly open, Jailbreaking wouldn’t continue as well, a test bed for new ideas, fringe cases, and future development of the platform (oh, and carrier unlock, of course…).

In the meantime — we can’t resist — check out PreCentral.net and smellellellell what the Homebrew community is cooking!

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

The Competition: Palm Pre/webOS Homebrew the Flip Side of Jailbreaking?

Welcome to From the Forums. If you are curious as to what all of the hot topics are on the TiPb forums, this is the place to be. In order to create any new threads of your own or reply to any of the following threads, you must be a registered member. Becoming a member is a simple process that will only take a few minutes out of your day, so if you haven't already, head on over and register now.

The first thread comes to us from jaguar11 and he wants to know how many push applications do you currently have on your iPhone? Sure the availability of push notification enabled applications was pretty slow at first but a lot of developers are finally coming around. Hopefully that is a good sign of things to come.

Next up we have a great poll thread from toomanyphones - what iPhone GPS application are you using? It seems like the GPS application market has exploded the past few months as so many developers took advantage of TomTom getting to the party late. So what is your GPS app of choice?

This thread was started by yours truly - what native iPhone application or feature do you use the least? Is copy and paste all it was cracked up to be? How about the landscape keyboard? The possibilities are endless, let us know what you are thinking…

Last but not least, smileyboy started a poll thread that poses the question, what’s your monthly data usage? Are you someone who barely uses data with your iPhone or are you making sure you get your money’s worth for the high prices the carriers are charging?

See you on the forums!

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

From the Forums: Push Apps, GPS Apps, Native iPhone Apps/Features, Data Usage

Apple introduced the original iPhone 2G and 1.0 software in 2007. In 2008 that same hardware received the iPhone 2.0 update. This year, that same hardware again received the iPhone 3.0 update. A few quibbles about hardware specific lapses aside (video, MMS, A2DP), Apple has provided an unprecedented level of free updates to previous generation devices.

In a post-iPhone smartphone landscape, we’ve pretty much come to take these free updates for granted, and it’s hard to remember the old days when other manufacturers basically treated their older models as abandonware. We’ve even come to take them for granted on other platforms like Android’s 1.5 Cupcake and Palm’s webOS 1.1 update.

Our sibling sites remind us, however, that maybe we’ll all face a rude awakening one day.

First up, Android Central reports on the ongoing “will they or won’t they” confusion over whether the first Android device, the less than one year old T-Mobile G1, has enough storage to even be able to load future updates like Donut or Eclair (best. codenames. ever.).

Meanwhile, WMExperts takes us down the long and winding path of whether or not yet-to-be-released Windows Mobile 6.5 devices will be upgradable to yetter-to-be-released Windows Mobile 7 at some point (which will be built on a newer version of the WinCE platform).

Again, iPhone 2G owners — we at TiPb included — have enjoyed 2.0 and 3.0 updates over 2 years, maybe 4.0 will work to some degree or another in 2010, but we have to think at some point Apple will break compatibility with the original iPhone and when that happens — how will users react? “Thanks for all the updates” or “you @$$#0!3$!”?

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

The Competition: Android and Windows Mobile Remind Us Not to Take Future iPhone Updates for Granted?

Bigwords [Free - iTunes link] is the iPhone and iPod touch front-end for the Bigwords.com website and it aims to help students (and their parents!) find the best deals on text books.

How good is it at that task? Um… I don’t know. College and I got mutual restraining orders against each other over a decade ago, so I can’t go within 100 meters of this app without getting a major case of the wiggins. Bigwords tells us “at least 50%”, so if you’re headed back to school and you want to save a few (or a lot) of bucks on your way, give this a try and let us know how it works for you!

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

Quick Back to School App: BigWords Text Book Deal Finder for iPhone