While Gizmodo showed off a prototype iPhone HD/iPhone 4G just over a week ago, and revealed the identity of the Apple engineer who brought it to the now-infamous bar, the identity of the man who brought it from the bar to Gizmodo was not revealed — until now.

An investigation by Wired involving (we kid you not), looking at social network posts and confirmed via a source (which was not revealed) led them to Brian J. Hogan, a 21-year-old resident of Redwood City, California who, through his lawyer, said:

• a story broadly matching that previously provided by Gizmodo
• that he regrets not doing more to try and return the iPhone prototype
• that the $5000 he received from Gizmodo was for exclusive access to the device for review purposes

According to his lawyer, he’s also a good boy.

Police continue their investigation, the internet continues their discussion.

[Wired]

iPhone HD/iPhone 4G “finder” found is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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AT&T still remains reluctant to introduce US iPhone customers to tethering and judging from their latest response to Engadget’s inquiry, we wouldn’t expect it anytime too soon.

“iPhone tethering has the potential to exponentially increase traffic, and we need to ensure that we’re able to deliver excellent performance for the feature – over and above the increases in data traffic we’re already seeing – before we will offer the feature.”

Admitting their network is not up the challenge of providing tethering to iPhone users just yet gets them some points for at least being honest. However, with Verizon now offering MiFi-like free mobile hotspot service to all Palm Pre Plus owners, however, and Sprint intending to paid hotspot service for the EVO 4G when it arrives, the competitive ball is racing towards AT&T’s court.

Here’s an idea — how about this June/July when the iPhone HD/iPhone4G AT&T gives us a mobile hotspot app for that?

[Engadget]

AT&T network still hindering iPhone tethering? is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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

Choosing a live interview as his platform of choice, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen fired back at Apple and Steve Jobs’ open letter “thoughts on Flash”.

Roughly addressing each of Jobs’ points:

1. Narayan chuckled at the thought of Flash being considered closed. “Flash is an open specification.” They’re using different meanings for “open” here. Clearly Adobe owns Flash but they’re fairly open about its use. It’s a dependent standard.

2. It does not appear as though he addressed the full web question this time, but has said in the past 75% of video runs on Flash. He also didn’t address the growing number of sites bypassing Flash and going directly to H.264.

3. Security and performance were addressed by blaming Apple for Mac OS X. Since security for Flash (and Acrobat) are an even larger concern for Windows users, we’re not sure how seriously we can take him on that. We’ve also had enough Flash-related crashes on our Windows machine to not buy that argument either. Certainly, until the most recent version of OS X, Apple didn’t provide the low-level hardware access Adobe needed for better performance.

4. Narayan called Jobs assertion about battery life drain for Flash “patently false”. Jobs was fairly specific in separating out software decoding as being the drain. Narayan said every accusation Jobs made could be explained by an Apple proprietary lock. However, we’re not certain when Apple locked Sorensen decoding out of every chipset on the planet…

5. Flash websites being designed for point-and-click mouse interaction versus multitouch gestures was not addressed.

6. In response to Jobs’ “most important reason”, Apple’s desire not to have an intermediary exist between developers and iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad devices in the form of CS5 Flash packager-like cross-compilers, Narayan pointed to 100 apps already created in Flash and already approved for the App Store. However, he didn’t address Jobs’ point, which was that while easier for developers, it created a barrier towards platform feature implementation.

Countering a carefully prepared, piece-by-piece massacre of your product by someone like Steve Jobs and Apple marketing during a live interview is gutsy but probably not the wisest course of action.

Narayan also didn’t try to counter Jobs fatal thrust — that there’s still no functional, full implementation of Flash on mobile despite talk of it going back to 2007. He didn’t have to — no one should think for a moment that, even if Adobe could deliver functional, full Flash for mobile at some point in the not-so-distant future, that Apple would allow it.

Again, Apple views Flash just like IE6 and ActiveX — something that was once needed but is being surpassed by better, standards-based alternatives. That Microsoft held ActiveX and Adobe is trying to share Flash is irrelevant. To Apple, it’s just another anachronism, and we know Apple’s record on those.

Either way, both Apple and Adobe have now gone all in. Either Adobe ships an incredible version of Flash that blows mobile socks off world-round and gets users flocking to Android, webOS, and other alternatives by the millions, or Apple gets all the sites that matter to serve them direct H.264 and port their games over to the App Store.

The ground war has begun.

[WSJ blogs]

Adobe CEO responds to Steve Jobs open letter is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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

Steve Jobs has posted his “Thoughts on Flash” up on Apple.com, and like his previous thoughts on (DRM) music, it’s a fascinating insight into the mind and tactics of Apple’s CEO. As background, this follows up iPhone, iPod touch, and now iPad shipping without Flash support, Apple’s recent change in license to prevent the use of cross-compilers like Adobe Flash CS5’s Packager for iPhone (which let developers make Flash apps and output iPhone apps), and Apple’s recent addition of Mac APIs to allow hardware accelerated Flash on the desktop.

Jobs begins by stating how close Apple and Adobe were and how they’ve drifted apart. He then breaks down his case against Flash on mobile into 6 key areas:

1. Flash is not open, it’s wholly owned and controlled by Adobe. While Apple also has proprietary products, they believe the web should be open, and Jobs singles out Apple’s support of WebKit (the rendering engine behind Safari, Chrome, etc.) as an example of this in action.

2. Flash is not needed for the “full web” because H.264 is becoming the standard and as sites update to support H.264 they automatically provide video supported by the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. He lists Vimeo, Netflix, Facebook, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ESPN, NPR, Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, People, National Geographic as examples. Jobs also says Flash games aren’t needed because the App Store has 50,000 games, more than any other platform in the world, and many of them free.

3. Security and performance. Flash is increasingly an attack vector for malware, and Apple still claims it’s the number one cause of crashes on the Mac.

In addition, Flash has not performed well on mobile devices. We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it. Adobe publicly said that Flash would ship on a smartphone in early 2009, then the second half of 2009, then the first half of 2010, and now they say the second half of 2010. We think it will eventually ship, but we're glad we didn't hold our breath. Who knows how it will perform?

1. Battery life, Jobs claims, would take a significant hit with Flash support. Since H.264 content already runs on the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad natively and with full hardware decoding, that only leaves the older codecs for Flash, and these would require the much more “expensive” software decoding.

2. The move to multitouch is not supported by a mouse pointer-centric Flash sites that use rollovers and other desktop behaviors and since these will need to be re-written anyway, Jobs believes they might as well be re-written in open HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript formats.

3. Most importantly, Jobs says Apple doesn’t want 3rd party cross-compilers sitting between developers and the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.

The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor's platforms.

Flash is a cross platform development tool. It is not Adobe's goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps. And Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple's platforms. For example, although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5. Adobe was the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X.

(Insert your Final Cut Pro jokes here).

Jobs ends with his characteristic “boom”:

New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

After his “thoughts on music”, we slowly saw DRM get dropped and iTunes music go “free”. Will Jobs’ “thoughts on Flash” cause a similar evolution of the open web?

[Apple]

Steve Jobs posts “Thoughts on Flash”: why you’ll never see Flash on iPhone or iPad is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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After drooling over the lost/stolen iPhone HD/iPhone 4G and mocking the incident on the Daily Show last night, Jon Stewart went after Apple and Steve Jobs, accusing them of losing their childlike sense of wonder and harshening his mellow both:

“Apple – you guys were the rebels, man, the underdogs. People believed in you. But now, are you becoming the man? Remember back in 1984, you had those awesome ads about overthrowing Big Brother? Look in the mirror, man! …It wasn’t supposed to be this way – Microsoft was supposed to be the evil one! But you guys are busting down doors in Palo Alto while Commandant Gates is ridding the world of mosquitoes! What the [redacted] is going on?!

…I know that it is slightly agitating that a blog dedicated to technology published all that stuff about your new phone. And you didn’t order the police to bust down the doors, right? I’d be pissed too, but you didn’t have to go all Minority Report on his ass! I mean, if you wanna break down someone’s door, why don’t you start with AT&T, for God sakes? They make your amazing phone unusable as a phone! I mean, seriously! How do you drop four calls in a one-mile stretch of the West Side Highway! There’re no buildings around! What, does the open space confuse AT&T’s signal?!

…Come on, Steve. Chill out with the paranoid corporate genius stuff. Don’t go all Howard Hughes on us.”

This is mainstream media (don’t tell Stewart we called him that) hitting Apple where it hurts.

US/Flash only Hulu after the break!

[Gawker.tv, transcript via InOtherNews]

Jon Stewart goes after Apple, Steve Jobs, AT&T on Daily Show is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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

It looks like AT&T’s new SIM cards will be double-porferated, meaning you’ll be able to pop it out along the MiniSIM lines to fit in current and previous generation iPhones (and most other phones), or along the smaller MicroSIM lines to fit the iPad Wi-Fi + 3G and if the leaks are correct, the 4th generation iPhone to boot.

The two SIM card sizes have always been compatible and we’ve heard for a while that jackets would let MicroSIM’s work in MiniSIM devices and that brave souls could grab a knife and cut some plastic off MiniSIM’s to make them Micro, but AT&T providing an official solution is all shades of awesome.

(Just keep in mind if you snap out the MiniSIM now, you can come back and snap out the Micro later. If you snap out the MicroSIM now, you might need some duct tape to get the rest of plastic back together later).

The new double-porferated SIMs aren’t in stores yet, but should be soon.

[Engadget]

New AT&T SIM cards to be compatible with old iPhones, new iPads and iPhones is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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

It seems Microsoft is almost ready to release their popular IM client, Windows Live Messenger for the iPhone and iPod touch. The app is said to arrive this June and will contain photo sharing, chat, and a social stream – which looks to include a Facebook stream and possibly a Twitter stream as well.

Their second major app following Bing, if the software giant is finally warming up the the iPhone platform perhaps Microsoft will get the ball rolling on Office in the not so distant future.

Screen shots after the break!

[Neowin]

Windows Live Messenger coming to iPhone and iPod touch is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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

We’ve heard from a couple readers that they’ve received shipping notifications with tracking numbers for their iPad Wi-Fi + 3G so it looks like that Friday, April 30 release date is firming up.

For their part, AT&T posted a online PDF document that detailing their data plans for the new 3G equipped iPad.

Some of the highlights that you may not be aware of are as follows:

• Your service will automatically renew every 30 days to provide a more seamless data experience.
• If you choose to select the 250 MB plan and go over that amount of data in your selected plan before the 30 day period is over, you have the option to choose to purchase another 250MB of data, or simply select the unlimited plan and either choice will be good for 30 days from the date you activated the new plan.
• All data plans for iPad include access to more than 20,000 AT&T Wi-Fi Hot Spots nationwide at no additional cost.

If you’ve gotten your shipping notification, let us know in comments!

iPad Wi-Fi + 3G start to ship, data plan details posted on AT&T site is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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