iPhone Live! is on right now, come chat!

We’ll be discussing Apple’s “It’s only rock and roll, but we like it” special music, iTunes, and iPod event, all the news and views, and be taking your questions live in the chat room. 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! Right Now. Come Chat!

On the fence about downloading iPhone 3.1? Wondering what's changed since iPhone 3.0? Need a handy link to send your friends who may have questions? TiPb's got your back with our complete iPhone 3.1 Software Walkthrough.

Previously, we took you through all three beta versions, now we'll take you through the final release.

And we'll get started, right after the break.

What Hasn’t Changed

A lot. Too much to list neatly this time around. When you finish reading this walkthrough, go back and read our iPhone 3.0 walkthrough. It’s a giant compared to this.

iTunes 9 Features

It’s also worth noting that several new features touted for iPhone 3.1, like Genius Mixes, Genius App Recommendations, and App Management are actually contained in the simultaneously released iTunes 9.

TiPb will be providing a walkthrough of iTunes 9 shortly, so check back soon.

Bug Fixes

Big .0 releases are typically followed up swiftly with quick .1 bug fixes. While the swift part here is debatable — though on par with last year’s update — the bug fixes aren’t. Among the issues addressed:

• Better iPhone 3G Wi-Fi performance when Bluetooth is turned on
• Fixes issue that cause some app icons to display incorrectly

Note, we’d heard iPhone 3.1 would also fix the Spotlight issue that displayed deleted emails, but Apple doesn’t list it, and we’ve heard reports it isn’t yet fixed. (Though it apparently was in iPhone 3.1 Beta 3. Strange.)

Home Screen

The jigglies — what Dieter lovingly calls the little dance icons do when you hold them down long enough to make them moveable and rearrangeable — now make the iPhone vibrate, if your ringer switch is set to silent, as an alternate indicator of the change of state.

You can now also enable triple-clicking of the Home Button to toggle VoiceOver, Toggle White on Black, and Ask (which then will pop up a menu offering Turn VoiceOver On, Turn Zoom On, Turn White on Black On).

Voice Control

Voice Control in iPhone 4.0, after holding down the Home button for several seconds, let you speak simple commands to place calls and control music. With iPhone 3.1, it will now also work over Bluetooth.

Just hold down the Bluetooth call button as you would the Home Button, let go, and Voice Control pops up. State your command into the BT mic, and Voice Control will “speak” the confirmation (whether it gets it right or not) through the BT earpiece.

MobileMe Find My iPhone Remote Passcode Lock

Expanding on the Find My iPhone remote tracking and wiping service that came with iPhone 3.0, you can now also remotely assign a passcode lock. This is a nice half-way ground between leaving your iPhone wide open, or having to wipe it clean, if you can't find it but aren't sure you've permanently lost it.

Messages

Still no MMS for AT&T users. That’s being released on September 25 (though whether it will require an iPhone 3.1.1 update, or just a new carrier file is unknown).

For those outside the US with working MMS, you can tap the action button at bottom, left to save them to the camera roll, just like you could previously do with pictures under iPhone 3.0.

Calendar

Calendar gets a minor tweak in iPhone 3.1. Now event alerts also display the location of the event in the popup. Presumably, this is now considered important glance-able information.

Photos

Video trimming is now non-destructive. Previously, if you trimmed a video, it was automatically saved over the original, meaning you could never undo or go back to the full clip. Now, a Save As… dialog gives you the option of preserving the original and creating as many version copies as you want (an short clip to email, a longer one to share to YouTube, and the full clip to sync and bring into iMovie, for example).

Settings

Setting usually accounts for the longest list of changes in a new iPhone firmware, but this time it’s fairly short.

Settings: General: Accessibility includes that aforementioned toggle for the Home Button triple-click to enable quick Accessibility switching.

Settings: Safari now, finally, has that toggle to enable Fraud Warnings for malicious web sites (like phishing sites, malware sites, etc.).

iTunes Store

iPhone 3.1 lets you display available iTunes account credit both iTunes Store, and in the App Store. Also, iTunes U is now “better organized”.

In addition, joining the options under the More tab is ringtones, listed like music, and available ready made for $1.29.

App Store

Since the App Store is closer akin to a local WebView, it’s fairly easy for Apple to update the App Store (or iTunes Store) without updating the firmware. Case in point, the night before iPhone 3.1 went live, the App Store was updated to feature “Top Grossing” as one of the view options.

As mentioned above, you can now also see your current iTunes Store credits in the App Store, and you can now also redeem iTunes gift cards, promo codes, and certificates here as well. Feature. Parity.

Phone

Copy and Paste comes to the Phone Keypad. Just tap and hold and the input area will change from dark blue to light blue, and the Copy Paste menu will pop up.

The iPhone Paste feature is “smart” enough to change alphanumeric phone numbers to pure numbers (i.e. 1-800-FLOWERS to 1-800-356-9377).

Conclusion

Like the recently released Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, iPhone 3.1 doesn’t provide a lot of fancy user-facing updates (we likely won’t see those until Mac OS X 10.7 and iPhone 4.0 respectively). What it does is fix things that needed fixing, and fill in missing functionality that needed filling in. And, it throws in a couple small feature enhancements, just because.

Free for both iPhone and iPod touch 3.0 users (iPod touch 2.x users will still need to cough up $9.95 to pay the subscription accounting devil’s dues), if iPhone 3.0 was a must-have for the sheer magnitude of it’s new functionality, 3.1 is a no-brainer update to make the must-have that much nicer-to-have as well.

[Thanks to everyone who contributed screenshots and descriptions for this walkthrough, especially Justin, Jeremy, and James. If you noticed we missed anything, drop us a note in the comments and we'll update as needed.]

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

iPhone 3.1 Software Walkthrough

Ten years ago today, 9/9/99, our fearless leader Marcus Adolfsson launched VisorCentral.com - a community providing news, reviews and forums focused on a single product: the Handspring Visor.  The Visor, you may recall, was the PDA that was destined to start the smartphone revolution with the VisorPhone.

Ten years later, we have grown from that single small site to a network of seven different communities, each focused on a core brand of smartphone and dedicated to providing everything a user could need or want to know about their smartphone – from news to chat, reviews to ringtones, podcasts to apps, accessories to wallpapers. The Smartphone Experts Network has over 1.8 million members in our forums; on any given day there are thousands of users logged in: finding help, talking about the latest news, reviewing products, and more. We still have plenty of active members that signed up literally within days of our 9/9/99 launch. Millions of visitors every month come to us to find out the latest information for their smartphone.

The original VisorCentral

On our blogs, we have moved from an average of a single post a day on a single site to around thirty per day across our network. In our accessory stores, we provide a wide variety of accessories for every major smartphone platform and were named the fastest growing retailer of 2007 by Inc500. Our stores also provide sales and support for a large and growing network of affiliate sites.

Back in 1999, it wasn’t at all clear that a ‘Blog’ (the term still needed quotes back then) and community could be formed around a single device and thrive – VisorCentral was one of the first to do it and looking at the landscape of the technical blogosphere today, the model has worked. Since then we’ve kept the same goal: give users a place to learn about their specific smartphone and use it better. We couldn’t have done it without an incredibly great team of editors and writers, but most of all we couldn’t have done it without you.

So we just wanted to say thanks to our users and readers – thanks for sticking with us on what started as a strange experiment in web communities, thanks for being so passionate, engaged, and intelligent about your phones. We’re grateful for the knowledge, the discussions, and the friends we’ve gained over the past ten years and look forward to even more in the future.

To celebrate our ten year anniversary, each of our sites is giving away ten $50 gift certificates to its respective accessory store. To enter, simply make a post in this forum thread (not here on this post) sharing how this site has helped you better use your smartphone before midnight Pacific this Friday.

The Smartphone Experts Team

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

Celebrating 10 Years of Smartphone Communities

Wow. Apple’s iTunes Store now has a Facebook Fan Page. During today’s It’s only rock and roll, but we like it special music event, Apple announced iTunes 9 and said it allowed users to share via Facebook. Apparently you can share some love for iTunes right back.

And if you do, you can get 20 free songs by indie artists. The process sounds hecka convoluted, but TUAW takes you through it admirably.

Let us know if you become a fan, and get your music!

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

iTunes Launches Facebook Fan Page, Offers 20 Free Songs

Attention iPhone users on Microsoft Windows, Apple’s MobileMe News “blog” has announced an update to the MobileMe Control Panel:

With the new MobileMe Control Panel for Windows version 1.5 you can assign your primary MobileMe calendar to sync with the default calendar in Microsoft Outlook. Any other MobileMe calendars you have will continue to sync with Outlook and appear as separate calendars. The new control panel also delivers improvements for syncing bookmarks between Internet Explorer and Safari, and provides compatibility with Windows 7.

iTunes 9 will install the new control panel automagically for current users. For new users, Apple provides separate install instructions.

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.

Apple Releases MobileMe Control Panel for Windows 1.5 with Improved Calendar and Bookmark Sync, Windows 7 Support

Apple’s MobileMe News “blog” is touting a new feature: you can now remotely set a passcode lock with Find My iPhone and iPhone 3.1:

With Find My iPhone, you can help protect the information on a missing iPhone by remotely assigning a four-digit passcode lock. This is especially useful if you’ve never set a passcode before or if you want to set a new one.

This is a nice half-way ground between leaving it wide open, or having to wipe it clean, if you can’t find it but aren’t sure you’ve permanently lost it.

And, again, it shows MobileMe is all about the incremental update. Very incremental…

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

iPhone 3.1: Remotely Set a Passcode Lock via MobileMe

Now that the dust is starting to settle after the return of Steve, we would like to take a moment and issue another friendly reminder to all of you who currently using an unlocked iPhone 3G or the 3GS – do not install the iPhone 3.1 update via iTunes. You will lose your unlock and it may be permanent as Dev Team’s MuscleNerd stated on Twitter earlier today:

3G+3GS unlockers..you must not update to official 3.1! unlock needs pre-hacked 3.1 with 04.26.08

So what does that mean, well like I mentioned earlier do not update via iTunes. You must first hack the 3.1 software to include modem firmware 04.26.08. If this confuses you, please do not attempt to unlock your phone until an easier way is released.

We here at TiPb are wondering, what about iTunes? Have any of you with unlocked iPhones updated to iTunes 9.0? Let us know how it went in the comments!

As always, be safe out there, as we are not responsible if you blow up your iPhone.

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

iPhone OS 3.1 and Unlocking Don’t Mix Well: Yet…

Steve Jobs isn’t the story. But he’s the story. And today, arguably the most important and influential CEO in technology returned to the stage he’s so effectively owned. And he owned it once again.

Sure, he let Phil Schiller and Jeff Rubin do some of the work, but he’s been doing that for a while now. Was the reality distortion field back in full effect? Well, given no iTablet, no iPod touch video, and looking — in his own words — vertical, we got Steve Jobs, and it was good to see him back in action.

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

Steve Jobs Returns to Keynote Stage

So, as part of the It’s only rock and roll, but we like it special music event, Apple pretty much gave the one big feature everyone wanted for the third generation iPod touch… to the nano instead.

• Camera and mic for video (with nifty iChat style special effects!)
• VGA 640×480 recording, H.264
• Sync photos and video to PC (iPhoto on Mac)
• FM Radio + Live Pause, Tagging
• Nike +
• Genius Mixes
• VoiceOver
• Still nanochromatic in wide color range
• $149/$199 for 8GB/16GB

Still, sounds like a jogger’s, or ultra-light traveler’s dream music player, with a great amount of convergence built in… What do you think?

More pics after the break!

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

iPod nano, Has Video Camera and FM Tuner, Will Travel!

Yes folks, given the release of iTunes 9 today, our sibling site PreCentral.net rushed out to check and surehawtdang, Palm Pre sync is deader than dead dead… again!

Will Palm, also again, pick up this latest, brick filled gauntlet from Apple and re-enable Pre Sync, maybe on the molecular level this time?

Sigh. We hope they don’t. Their resources are better spent, you know, making the Pre and Pixi even more spectacular. But given the odd father/son issues between Jobso and Ruby — and for the sake of fun internet soap opera everywhere — they probably will.

Game. Back. On.

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

Yes, Ruby, iTunes 9 Kills Palm Pre Sync Dead. Again.