Join Chad, Mickey, and Rene for all of this week’s iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad news! If you have any questions, leave a comment below, hit us up on Twitter @theiphoneblog, or better still — join us live in the chat room via http://www.tipb.com/live

REMINDER: You can watch us live on your iPhone with the Ustream Viewer app [Free - iTunes link]. Just wait until the show starts (8pm ET) and search for iPhone. We’ll pop up. Literally.

Chat with you soon!

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

iPhone Live! Tonight at 8pm ET/5pm PT (1am GMT)

Fox News is reporting that AT&T outbid all other GSM providers in offering those reasonable $14.99 and $29.99 data plans for the iPad, and while Verizon and Apple are still discussing both the iPhone and iPad, there’s still nothing approaching an agreement in place.

What about all those rumors of Verizon getting the iPhone like, now?

the two companies are still “very much talking and plan to bring an iPhone and an iPad” to the CDMA network this year, following the expiration of AT&T’s exclusive agreement with Apple.

Still talking? These guys have been talking since 2006 before the launch of the first iPhone! Stop talking already and consummate the darn relationship — or walk away. When asked for comment about these on-going talks, Verizon spokesman Jeff Nelson said, “no comment,” so officially the company isn’t talking about the talks.

Bottom line then, it still could be later in the year, could be as far away as LTE next year or the year after.

[Fox News via Apple Insider]

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

Fox News: AT&T Outbid Everyone on iPad, Verizon Still in Talks over iPhone, iPad

With the launch of Apple’s iPad tablet and iBooks eBook purchasing and reading software, Apple has significantly rounded-out their device and content offerings, but TiPb can’t help but think a few iApp holes remain, namely iChat, iMags, iNews, iFeeds, and iBlog.

Some of these will likely resonate immediately, others we might need to explain our thinking, but either way what Apple gave us last week and the hype and hyperbole, expectations and exasperations, hopes and howls that proceeded and followed it shows just how much we all think and feel about the iPhone OS platform.

First things first. None of these ideas are new or novel. In fact, most of them have been mentioned from early on and mentioned a lot. We’re just looking at where the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad are today, and listing — or re-listing — some of the remaining, wickedly obvious, gaps in their apps.

Second things second. As much fun as we think an iPad version of Mac OS X’s Photo Booth would be, we’re not going to include anything that would require additional hardware like an iSight webcam. We want it, believe us we do, but we’re going to stick with what Steve Jobs showed us on stage last week… for now.

iChat

Seriously, where the [redacted] is Mobile iChat? While Mac OS X power-users might gravitate to third party solutions like Adium, Apple makes sure every one of their computers ships with iChat, and for mainstream Mac users, that’s still the go-to app. That it’s on every one of Apple’s computers, along with Mail and Safari, shows just how core IM (instant messages) are to the internet experience. Yet three generations heading towards four, and we’ve seen no sign of it for the iPhone — and now the iPad — other than the always plentiful Apple patent filings.

There are great 3rd party IM clients for the iPhone in the App Store, no doubt about it. Maybe if there was a Mobile iChat that wouldn’t be the case. There are no other email clients or browsers in the App Store by way of worst case scenarios (just embeddable mail and webviews). There are other camera apps and photo viewers, however, weather and stock apps, contact managers and voice recorders, so there’s a best case as well.

Apple already has the built-in Messages (formerly SMS) app on the iPhone. Maybe carriers weren’t originally keen on the idea of 1st-party threats to their utterly plush text message business but that ship has sailed. Build out or build upon Messages and give us iChat. Give mainstream users base instant message functionality out of the box, with typical Apple simplicity and elegance, and of course the background multitasking that would come with such status. Power users who want more, and are willing to switch to push-notifications, could find other options in the App Store.

And yeah, we’re not bringing up iChat Video because we promised not to mention hardware, but you know that they know they we know we’ll bring it up again at some point…

iMags

At the iPad announcement we got iBooks, Apple’s answer to eBook buying and reading, but what about iMags for magazines? As much as we love our eBooks, we like the idea of getting our weekly or monthly magazines delivered with just as much iTunes automagical goodness.

Going one strep further, how about an iTunes LP/Extra style format then that would allow easy and consistent eMagazines to be produced, seamlessly blending text, video, even music into something readers would be willing to pay for so that publishers can afford to create it. (And you bet we think an iLife ‘10 with iDVD turned into a super-slick iTunes TuneKit development tool would be a great idea no matter which road Apple chooses to take). Just like indie music, it would let independent writers/publishers get into the game. iZine, if that doesn’t make you shudder.

Okay, maybe iTunes isn’t set up to handle subscriptions yet and that’s the current show-stopper. Apple never pulled that trigger for music and is apparently having trouble getting the TV industry to let them pull it for video. Even season passes for TV series aren’t really up to the level of a real subscription service yet.

But Amazon’s Kindle is already handling magazines and newspapers (which we’ll get to next), and as much as iBooks is an ePub answer to the Kindle Book Store, Apple and the iPad need an answer for eMagazines.

iNews

While iMags covers weeklies and monthlies, the dailies need a solution just as badly. iNews, or eNewspapers, or whatever is the appropriate term for digital content that “just works” its way onto your iPad at 3am every day — again just like the Kindle is already doing — is the other missing piece of the iBooks puzzle.

Sure, Apple has the no less than the New York Times up on stage showing off their prototype iPad app during the introduction, but hundreds of independent apps clogging up our devices — and the App Store — is a very un-Apple-like solution. While it would no doubt lead to tons of creativity and variety, Apple prides itself on simplicity and UI consistency. (Otherwise why not just sell the OS and let OEMs and do-it-yourselfers build their own Macs, right?)

Maybe Apple is just taking its time, starting off with books the way they started off with music in iTunes, and they’re already intending to add magazines and newspapers the way iTunes has added movies and TV shows. Sure, no matter how big they are, Apple is still only one company and they have to choose how to spend their finite engineering resources. Hopefully they’ll choose to spend some on those subscription services, because we can’t help but think they’d be killer, especially for periodicals.

iFeeds

Say what you want about desktop Safari RSS, but at least desktop Safari has native RSS. Mobile Safari pushes RSS out to a webapp so abandoned it still uses .mac in its URL (which Apple changed to MobileMe back in summer of 2008 with the launch of the iPhone 3G/iPhone 2.0). Just like with IM, there are a lot of great RSS clients in the App Store, and they do something Apple would likely not choose to do — sync with the 900lbs gorilla that is Google Reader. So, we hope they don’t go anywhere. But for casual news reading, a built-in Apple client, even a native extension to Mobile Safari would be nifty, if only and again for background multitasking.

See, on desktop Safari our RSS just updates in the background and new articles are brought down and ready and waiting for us to peruse immediately and at our leisure. App Store apps launch, contact Google Reader, check status, start to sync or populate a list view from web data, and then and only then can we start reading. (Or they just function as a skin for a WebApp and then we can just as easily add Google Reader proper to our Home Screen).

This one is a tougher sell, no doubt about it. Mainstream users don’t use RSS and a certain segment of geeks is moving from RSS to social networks like Twitter and Facebook to crowd-source and crowd-sort their news. The former is something Apple just doing it could fix, especially with a few pre-populated, and popular, feeds ready to go. The latter still strikes us as far too subject to happenstance (if you stop following for a couple hours to nap or watch a movie, a story that matters to you could be plowed away by several newer ones that matter more to others).

iBlog

And we can already hear you complaining this one is thinner than an iPod touch, but again bear with us. As much as the iPad, and to the same extent the iPhone, is focused more on consumption of content than creation, but as the iPad iWork apps themselves show, we’re going to need some creation, including for web-based services.

If iDVD is going to be reborn as an easy iTunes LP/iTunes Extras development tool, why can’t iWeb be reborn to better handle modern web 2.0 content creation? Rather than static pages, blogs and micro-blogs are the web site creation mediums of today. There are dedicated apps for several of the more popular blogging platforms already on the iPhone App Store, but they’re dedicated apps and the web is more distributed than ever.

Microsoft makes Windows Live Writer and on Mac OS X there are a couple great applications that let you write for many of the most popular blogging platforms. Apple’s been accused of not “getting” social media for a long time but it’s getting to the point where it just has to be gotten.

iLife ‘09 for Mac contained iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand, iWeb, and (hidden away) iDVD. We’ve already seen iWork’s Pages, Numbers, and Keynote for iPad. We’ve seen Photos for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPhone. I’m sure many would like a multitouch GarageBand and iMovie (expanded from the iPhone’s trimming) as well as am iWeb 2.0 or iBlog that allowed for simple blog and micro-blog text, photos, and movie posting.

Conclusion

So that’s TiPb’s top five iApps we’d still like to see added to the iPad, iPod touch, and iPhone. Agree, disagree, or have alternatives or additions all your own? It’s still 2 months to the iPad’s debut at the end of March, and 6 month until we likely get the final release of iPhone 4.0, so let us — and Apple — know what you think!

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

iChat, iMags, iNews, iFeeds, and iBlog — TiPb’s Top 5 iPad and iPhone iWants!

The iHarmonix Platinum i-Series stereo earphones for the iPhone [$59.95 - Store Link] are sleek, lightweight, and stylish with great sound quality. To find out more, follow us after the break!

The earphones comes with a right and left specific earbuds, three different sized ear gels, and a small velvet carrying pouch. The plug is 3.5 mm and fits easily and securely into my iPod touch, old-school iPod and iPhone. The three different sized gels — small, medium, and large — allows everyone to customize the fit for to suit their own ear size. I have a lot of discomfort with large earbuds so I choose to use the smallest sized gel. It fit comfortably and did not feel like it was going to dislodge even when I was dancing (I can’t dance so no video but for the curious, it looks something like this). The carrying pouch is a wonderful addition, though I usually let them run wild in my purse or put them in the side zipper of my Golla bag.

The microphone hangs off of the wire where the two earphones converge, which is well positioned for talking on the phone or recording sound. Its position on the earphone wire also makes it easy to find even when you are wearing bulky clothing. Its rounded form also makes it less likely to get caught on your clothing and dislodge the earbuds, something I find endlessly annoying. The microphone is also a multi-function button that’s able to send your phone calls, hang up and pause your music. It has a nice click to it, so you are well aware when it has been pressed and won’t mistakenly double-click and end a call after it has been just sent. Every now and then I do mistakenly press the decorative nameplate which hangs further down the earphone wire. This could have been easily fixed by having the nameplate be a different shape or placing the logo on the actual microphone button.

The most important aspect, of course, is sound quality. These earphones pack a punch in the sound department and are small enough to keep with your iPhone at all times. The base is surprisingly strong for earphones of this size and sounded clearer than many earphones I have tried which were much more costly. The microphone picks up sound with incredible accuracy and when I used it for phone calls people were unable to tell I was using a mic.

All in all if you are looking for a good set of earphones that are portable and do not skimp on the sound department then iHarmonix Platinum i-Series stereo earphones are the ones to get. They sound great and look stylish while doing it. They make a great gift for that special someone in your life, and the brushed stainless steel matches any case or accessory.

The iHarmonix Platinum i-Series stereo earphones are in stock and available now from the TiPb iPhone accessory store.

Disclaimer: the earphones were provided for review by TiPb's iPhone accessory store.

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

iHarmonix Platinum i-Series stereo earphones for iPhone

Are you checking out the iPad’s big, mostly empty Home Screen and wondering where the iPhone’s Weather, Stocks, Clock, and Calculator apps have all gone? Are they missing in action, simply unfinished for now, or like Kevin Fox of Fury.com seems to think, could Apple be planning on turning them into Dashboard-style Widgets?

Imagine that a five-finger pinch caused the screen to dim and a bevy of widgets flew in to the screen for quick consumption and calculation, and then were dismissed by another five-finger flick? With props to Entourage, 'Is that something you might be interested in?'

It is, because we’d not only love to see full fledged widgets on iPad but on iPhone as well. But TiPb asks you this: would you actually prefer a Dashboard-style fly-in-fly-out set of widgets that live separately in their own screen mode, or would you prefer widgets that live on the Lock Screen, or stay put on the Home Screen alongside app icons, similar to how Android does it?

[Fury.com via Daring Fireball]

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

Could Missing iPad Apps Reappear as Dashboard Widgets?

Every week a few of us from team TiPb, bloggers and forum crew alike, will bring you our current favorite, funnest, most useful App Store apps, WebApps, jailbreak apps, even the occasional accessory, web site, or desktop app if the mood strikes us. As long as they’re iPhone (or iPod touch, and soon… iPad!) related, they’re fair game.

Confession: in all the iPad hubbub last week, Rene didn’t get around to posting everyone’s pick. Bright side, you get almost twice as many this week!

So who’s on deck this double-dose and what are our picks? Find out after the break!

Chad’s Pick I: MobileMe Gallery

Apple’s new MobileMe Gallery app is awesome. I really like the way it previews photos at the top (just like Apple TV) and you can easily share photos, albums or movies. Adding friend’s galleries are bonus too! I just wish you could comment on photos…

Just like with the MobileMe iDisk app, once you view an image, it saves it to your iPhone for easy access later. You can also tap and hold to save your images to the iPhone’s camera roll. [Free - iTunes link]

Chad’s Pick II: Engadget

This week I decided to look at some news apps, specifically Engadgets new app. What is nice is that they have all three of their sites available to view: Engadget, Engadget Mobile and Engadget HD. The app remembers the last news source and looks beautiful doing so. The standard fanfare is there too such as posting to Facebook and Twitter any articles that you find interesting. One nice bonus is streaming video, including the Engadet Show. Give Engadget a try for all of your gadget news from TVs to robots! [Free - iTunes link]

Chris’ Pick: TaxCaster Mobile

With tax season upon us, Turbo Tax has given iPhone user an easy tool for a quick tax estimate. With basic deductions and incomes, you can get a rough idea if you will owe money or (hopefully) get a nice hefty refund. You can enter exact amount or just estimates to see what your fate will be this year with the IRS. You cant export data for your return, but for a free app, this is a useful tool to have. [Free - iTunes link]

Derrick’s Pick I: Homerun Battle 3D

Homerun Battle 3D is hours of fun, mainly because it has online play. I’d suggest to try out the LITE version of this game and I’m sure you will love it and buy the full version. [$4.99 - iTunes link]

Derrick’s Pick II: Booooly!

Booooly is a fun little puzzle game that is very entertaining and I would suggest it to anyone looking simply to pass some time. Even better, Booooly has a free version you can try out on the App Store! [$0.99 - iTunes link]

Matt’s Pick I: Readdledocs 2.0

I know in the past, I have picked Readdledocs before; however, with the version 2 having come out, it adds a whole slew of new features that make it easily worth mentioning! Readdledocs is a document viewer with so many feature, it’s ridiculous! I think it is probably one of the best, if not the best PDF viewer for the iPhone.

The new application includes numerous new features – a new interface, capable to view PDFs in “text reflow” view (allows the text to be made larger or smaller), better handling of large documents, zipping files, text file creation, file filter views/tasks and lots more! [$4.99 - iTunes link]

Matt’s Pick II: SoundHound

Recently I have been digitizing my parent’s CD collection and quite often my Mom has come up to me humming and asking me if I knew the song. I rarely have a clue. So the other day I grabbed SoundHound and had her hum the tune and the app found it. We spent much of the evening using the app exploring songs from the same artists. I’ve been an avid user of Shazam, but SoundHound blows it out of the water with all it’s features! [$4.99 - iTunes link]

Rene’s Pick I: DropBox

When MobileMe’s iDisk stopped syncing on me the last time, turned out it was also for the last time, and I decided to give the much geek-loved DropBox a try. It’s free for up to 2GB of data, and $10/m or $100/y for 50GB, but it’s features are so far ahead of iDisk that Apple really should buy them up before Google does. For those not familiar, basically it lets you store your files on their cloud server, and with the Dropbox desktop client, mirror that folder on any Windows, Mac, or Linux computer you own. You can see the sync status of each folder and file and easily share them, and the photo folder gets special gallery-style treatment. And, of course, it has an iPhone app that lets you browse your cloud-stored files, or star them to keep a copy locally on your iPhone. Note for the security conscious — you can, of course, encrypt files or directories before uploading them to Dropbox, but then you lose the web and iPhone access. The battle over convenience rages on! [Free - iTunes link]

Rene’s Pick II: Classics

Interested in that iBooks app Steve Jobs showed off for the iPad and upset you can’t have one or both new? Users of the existing iPhone app, Classics, know from whence iBooks borrows a lot of its look and feel (with an even earlier nod to Delicious Library!), but that means that if you want to get your bookshelf storing, multitouch paper flipping, eBook read on, you can do it now… With one caveat: as the name suggests, Classics only contains free, public domain, classic books. As a bonus, however, following the iBooks announcement, the makers of Classics have decided to give it away from free, so it’s definitely worth a download. [Free - iTunes link]

Your Pick?

You’re part of team TiPb too, so what’s your pick? What app was your absolute fav last week? Let us — and everyone — know in the comments!

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

MobileMe Gallery, Engadget, TaxCaster, Homerun Battle 3D, Booooly, Readdledocs 2, SoundHound, DropBox, Classics — TiPb Picks of the Week

Cookmate made by Tapmates [$1.99 - iTunes Link] for iPhone and iPod touch lets you tell it what you already have in your pantry and then finds you a recipe to use it.

The graphics are so beautifully rendered and the interface so user-friendly it makes choosing what to cook for dinner much less stressful. In fact, it’s so easy that I even allow my 4 year old to help out.

Cookmate includes a grocery list that you can use to add and later check off any ingredient or items you may be missing.

There is also a user-based rating system for each recipe. On the downside, that means that if no one likes the high-rated meal you prepared, it is probably not the recipe but your cooking.

Video after the break. If you try it, let us know what you think!

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

Quick App: Cookmate Recipe Finder for iPhone

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that publishers, McGraw-Hill Cos, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt K-12, Pearson Education, and Kaplan Inc., have signed with ScrollMotion to adapt their textbooks for Apple’s new iPad tablet.

Though Apple didn’t outline its strategy to target the educational sector with its iPad last week, people familiar with Apple’s thinking have said that the iPad’s use in schools was one of the focal points of discussions in developing the product. In its exploration of electronic book technology, it thought particularly about how it could re-invent textbooks, these people said. Apple declined to comment on the role of textbooks on the iPad. Apple has an edge in the educational sector becauseits Macintosh computers have always enjoyed a strong following in the academic sphere, and it already offers educational audio and video content through its iTunes U service.

ScrollMotion is signed to provide video playback, text highlighting, lecture recording, note taking, text search, and interactive quizzing.

If the original iPod was 10,000 songs in your pocket, is the iPad poised to but 10,000+ book in your lap, and is that ultimately the “killer app”?

[Wall Street Journal via Macrumors]

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

Major Textbook Publishers Sign with ScrollMotion to get on iPad

Over the last 5 weeks of the 3rd Annual Smartphone Round Robin, the editors of our sibling sites, Casey from AndroidCentral.com, Kevin from CrackBerry.com, Matt from NokiaExperts.com, Dieter from PreCentral.net, and Phil from WMExperts.com have all had their chance to review TiPb’s flagship iPhone 3GS. And we’ve just had to sit here and take it, the good and the bad, the raves and the rants. Well, it’s week 6 now, baby, and TiPb gets to retort!

PreCentral.net’s Dieter Bohn

Week 1 saw our Editor-in-Chief, Dieter Bohn, this time representing PreCentral.net, return to the iPhone he’s reviewed about 5 or 6 times already, and… he was remarkably fair and I’m kind of sad there’s nothing much to pick him apart over. Thanks for nothing! One of his negatives is something I’ve been thinking about for a while, though:

I will admit to being a little tired of the iPhone’s design. It’s iconic and singular, but honestly it doesn’t feel as ‘high end’ as it once did. Not that the Palm Pre or Pixi is the picture of luxury, but sometime soon Apple will need to remember that phones are fashion and fashion changes.

iPhone 3G was indeed a departure from the original iPhone 2G; it lost the aluminum and gained a new, curved-for-thinness form. And people got really upset their cases didn’t fit any more, their docks didn’t fit anymore, and accused Apple of changing just to force people to re-buy all their accessories. Then the iPhone 3GS came out, new model same as the one before, and people got really upset that it wasn’t refreshed. Fashionistas complained one could tell they had the new model. Both the iPhone casing and the iPhone home screen wouldn’t be hurt for an update, but Apple won’t win either way.

As for Dieter’s conclusion:

We try not to pick winners in the Smartphone Round Robin, but rather talk about user needs and preferences. If you need apps and music, right now your choice is iPhone. If that’s not big and you care about openness and multitasking, webOS has a serious leg up. What’s sort of amazing is that most users don’t need to dismiss either out of hand.

I’d add the mobile web to that. iPhone Safari still hasn’t been exceeded and there’s a reason iPhone-optimized sites are still what other mobile WebKit clients want to pull. The point itself is spot on though — iPhone is owning the app and media space while BlackBerry owns messaging, and Android, Palm, Nokia, and WinMo battle it out over “openness” and “in-between”. Multitasking we might get in a future update (iPhone 4.0?) but it’s tough to see Apple loosening their ties on the App Store until and unless competition forces them to. Geeks and philosophers notwithstanding, some users and some developers prefer the level of trust a “gate-keeper”-style store provide (though Apple could certainly do better on the consistency side).

WMExperts’ Phil Nickinson

Week 2 brought us Phil Nickinson, editor of WMExperts.com, and again he was frustratingly fair. He also raised some good food for thought:

Some of the best conversations surrounding smartphones these days have to do with Apple’s singular vision. It designs the phones. It keeps a tight fist on the manufacturing process. It largely controls the marketing of the devices. Even the act of selling an iPhone is controlled by Apple. Want to use the iPhone? You have to connect to iTunes at least once. Apps? Only (official) way to get them is through Apple’s App Store. Everything, at least at some point, must pass through Apple. Do not pass Go, head directly to Cupertino.

I’ve been toying with the over-simplification that iPhone involves surrendering control to Apple in exchange for user-experience, Android involves surrendering privacy to Google in exchange for free services, and BlackBerry involves surrendering serenity to RIM in exchange for constant connectivity. There’s no perfect device or perfect model; everything is a compromise, and for a large swath of users, that’s a good deal. They don’t want to control (or have to worry about managing) their device — they just want to easily use it.

Phil’s conclusion:

We don’t believe in iPhone killers. That’s a phrase that was coined by writers who couldn’t think of any other arguments to make. No, we’re not looking for Windows Mobile 7, if and when it’s announced and later released, to “kill” anything, save for maybe the bad taste that Windows Mobile 6.5 left in a lot of mouths. But even that isn’t entirely fair. Microsoft announced Windows Mobile 6.5 and for the most part delivered exactly what it promised. No more, no less. A stopgap to hold things over until WM7.

Actor and gadget aficionado Stephen Fry uproariously so elegantly phrased:

Does anybody seriously believe that Android, Nokia, Samsung, Palm, BlackBerry and a dozen others would since have produced the product line they have without the 100,000 volt taser shot up the jacksie that the iPhone delivered to the entire market?

That the iPhone jumpstarted a complacent smartphone industry in 2007 is undeniable, as is the impact its made since. In that context, the media contrivance of “iPhone killer” makes sense. Until something makes that same original-iPhone-in-2007 level leap, it’s likely the media will keep comparing everything to the iPhone. Steve Jobs was recently rumored to have said Google’s Android wants to “kill” the iPhone, and likely the Windows Mobile team does as well. They have to if they want any hope to be competitive. No doubt the iPhone G4/4.0 team at Apple wants to kill the iPhone 3GS/3.0 as well. That is one of the keys to Apple’s success.

AndroidCentral’s Casey Chan

Week 3 had Casey Chan, editor of AndroidCentral.com share his thoughts on the iPhone 3GS, and forget the conclusion, he starts with the bang:

Ah, the iPhone. For better or worse, the iPhone has become the starting point for many consumers looking to buy a smartphone. In a sense, it’s become the standard for everyone to measure themselves against. Because of its position at the forefront of consumer’s minds and the fact that it’s in everyone’s pocket, that’s completely fair. But because of Apple’s sometimes senseless decisions in dealing with all things iPhone, it leaves the rest of us a little uneasy.

Our own Chad Garrett likes to say the iPhone is the first smartphone for everyone upgrading from the RAZR and there’s some truth to that. With the iPhone, Apple mainstreamed the smartphone — they took it from a power device for power users with a powerful requirement for tweaking, managing, and messing around with, and carefully packaged a subset of important features for the masses. That means that, for any particular user — and especially for a power user — there’s a high chance that subset doesn’t include an important feature.

That’s Apple’s modus operandi, however. They’d rather start limited and add slowly. They’d rather leave something out completely than add in something they don’t think just works well enough. They’re masters of always leaving something else on the table for the next update. And they’re laser-focused on those features they consider essential for the user they’re targeting.

And yes, it drives us all nuts, even as they’ve sold 70,000 devices on the iPhone OS platform and used it to familiarize everyone with the next-step in multitouch iPhone OS UI — the iPad.

CrackBerry.com’s Kevin Michaluk

Week 4 was our best frenemy forever, CrackBerry.com’s own Kevin Michaluk and he embraces the same yin/yang theory about iPhone/BlackBerry as TiPb:

I’ve said it many times over the past two years, be it in blog posts, on our CrackBerry podcast, or to individuals asking advice on what device to buy, that if you want the absolute no-compromise best smartphone solution that you keep a BlackBerry in one pocket and an iPhone (or iPod Touch) in the other. Though both Apple, RIM and every other manufacturer and platform in the smartphone space for that matter have the aim of developing the one device you need (in other words they’re trying to be both Yin and Yang), I still think as of now it takes two devices to have Best of Class everything. A device like the BlackBerry Bold 9700 is the ultimate communication and productivity tool, which excels in areas that matter both in enterprise (security, deployment, IT management) and to people who run their business and their lives depending on the phone, maximizing every minute of their day (one-handed speed of use, battery life, push everything, etc.). Apple hit the market with a compelling touchscreen experience that’s both intuitive and enjoyable to use that fits into the Apple ecosystem of products and services (ie. iTunes) and took it to the next level by causing a revolution in the mobile app space. So while the BlackBerry is still the ultimate communication / utilty tool, the iPhone arguably remains the ultimate convergence device.

Kevin being Kevin, however, he can’t resist tweaking us either. The Man who, in the first year called the iPhone 2G the iSmudge (before BlackBerry copied its black and silver design) and in the second year called it the Ah Frak Phone (on the eve of the BlackBerry Storm launch no less), decided this year he’d call the iPhone 3GS the douchebag phone (he owns one — as do almost all the Smartphone Experts editors).

NokiaExperts’ Matt Miller

Week 5 closed things out with NokiaExperts.com’s Matt Miller, who like Dieter is a multi-handset mobile gadgeteer with a lot of experience and a global point of view. His take:

As a guy who has used every smartphone operating system I am also quite frustrated with the iPhone OS because I know Apple can do better as they have shown glimpses of in the past. One of the main things people mention with the iPhone OS compared to other smartphone operating systems is the lack of multi-tasking with 3rd party applications. [...] Personally, the major thing I want to see in the next version of the iPhone OS is support for some kind of Today or status screen where I can put widgets or parts of applications on a single screen so my key information is glanceable without having to dive into applications. [...] Another area I would like to see addressed is notifications. Palm's webOS and Google Android have the best implementation of notifications while the iPhone's is pretty poor.

Setting aside that these are some of the most popular reasons people still Jailbreak their iPhones, Matt (and the other editors who took similar issue with iPhone functionality) will likely find many TiPb readers agreeing with him, yours truly included. Only built-in Apple apps can multitask, only your latest push message is shown on the Lock Screen (if you haven’t already dismissed it), and that same one message/dismissal is the crux of the notification problem.

This brings everything sharply into focus. Apple prides itself on making software “5-years ahead of the competition” (see iPhone virtual keyboard). They would rather not provide a solution than provide one that they don’t think answers the problem simply and elegantly (see cut, copy, and paste appearing only in iPhone 3.). They would rather provide a highly focused subset of functionality for the mainstream than to check off every power-user want (see everything all of us, er… want). Every version of the iPhone adds features that were considered “missing” to the previous version, either as technology and development resources allow, or Apple deems us sufficiently learned on what came before, and sufficiently motivated to buy what’s next.

So, if RAM and CPU are at the level where multitasking will almost never crash the Phone app and Apple decides they have the UI for it they want, if Dashboard goes mobile but can remain uncluttered and Apple-esque in execution and DashCode joins the iPhone SDK, if… well, given the rapid rise of push notifications, there’s no if — we need better alert handling — we just might get some or all of these things in iPhone 4.0.

Conclusion… Coming Soon

Week 6 is my turn. The iPhone 3GS comes home to TiPb and given everything every other editor has written about it, and everything I’ve written about the Nokia, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Phone, and Palm webOS, I have to re-examine and re-review the iPhone 3GS.

While that may not be conclusive, it will be TiPb’s conclusion for this year.

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

TiPb Responds to iPhone Reviews — Smartphone Round Robin