MacRumors iPhone and iPad Blog: Apps, News, and Rumors

Rubicon Consulting published data from an online survey of 460 "randomly" selected iPhone users. Full PDF of results is available from Rubicon. They claim there's a 3.8% margin of error with a 90% confidence interval, but the validity of the data depends on how truly random their sampling was. Summary of results: - Email is the #1 function. - iPhone increases mobile browsing with 75% of...

Apple has posted three new television ads for the iPhone: Bet, Brilliant, and Music Store. The new ads follow the same theme as their previous iPhone commercials, demonstrated specific features on the iPhone. 'Bet' shows how easy it is to lookup information on Safari to win a Bet. Brilliant demonstrates the iPhone's new "locate me" GPS-like functionality, and Music Store shows off the...

Appleinsider reports that the supply of iPhones across the U.S. are near sold-out. The sudden shortfall has been further confirmed by reports from AppleInsider readers. In several cases, their own investigations reported all stores in a given state running out, including Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Texas. Many if not all AT&T stores were also said to have run out of inventory. The...

Unity Technologies has announced they are porting the Unity engine to the iPhone platform. The Unity engine is used by desktop and web developers to create 3D games. The engine's port to the iPhone promises to allow rapid ports of games already developed using the Unity engine and expands its platform agnostic reach. A beta program is available for interested developers. Unity...

The GSM Association (GSMA) has announced that there are now more than 32 million Mobile Broadband connections worldwide compared with just over 3 million at the end of the first quarter of 2007. Recent figures from Wireless Intelligence, a comprehensive database covering the global mobile market, indicate that global Mobile Broadband connections have risen by more than 850 percent year-on-year (Q1 ...

John Hodgeman, known as "PC" to viewers of Apple's Get a Mac ads, was viewed to have an iPhone on Wednesday's Daily Show with Jon Stewart (iTunes link). Perhaps to add to the irony and humor, Hodgeman then used the iPhone upside down when he seemingly answered a call. In real life John Hodgeman is a professed Mac user, however TV depictions of him using Apple products can be...

AT&T is now offering refurbished 8GB iPhones online for only $249. They require a 2 year contract*, and a limit of 1 per customer. There had been rumors of this deal at select retail AT&T stores, but this is the first we've seen it offered online. $249 for an 8GB Refurbished iPhone represents a significant savings. A new 8GB iPhone currently retails for $399. * No contract is required ...

Twitterific's author, Craig Hockenberry, notes that enabling background tasks for an iPhone version of Twitterific resulted in battery drainage in 4 hours. The heart of the problem are the radios. Both the EDGE and Wi-Fi transceivers have significant power requirements. Whenever that hardware is on, your battery life is going to suck. My 5 minute refresh kept the hardware on and used up a lot of...

The early acceptance and rejection letters are arriving to developers who applied for the iPhone Developer Program ($99/year). More rejection than acceptance it seems. Many developers received the following non-acceptance email from Apple: Dear Registered iPhone Developer, Thank you for expressing interest in the iPhone Developer Program. We have received your enrollment request. As this...

Int13, a french mobile game developer, let us know that they had successfully started porting their Crazy Kart 2 game over to the iPhone. - 320 * 320 pixels playing area - Touch controls with a virtual steering wheel - 3 vehicle classes (karts, motorbikes, hovercrafts) - 6 characters with different vehicles - Downloadable content (new vehicles, new tracks) - Wifi online multiplayer...

While Apple's formal requirements for the iPhone SDK is an Intel Mac running Mac OS 10.5.2 or later, one enterprising individual managed to get the environment working more or less on his PowerPC iBook. Image courtesy of 3by9.com The only oddity Ive encountered so far is that you get 1 Warning when you build, because the target architecture doesnt match (PPC vs. i386) but thats to be...

Apple posted a Knowledge Base article points to this SkyHook Wireless page that allows you to enter corrections to Skyhook's wifi mapping. Skyhook provides the GPS-like location features in the iPhone and iPod Touch. It accomplishes this by a combination of Wifi and Cellular tower locations. To seed their database, Skyhook sent out teams of drivers to correlate hotspot locations with their...

Many iPhone and iPod Touch users and industry observers have noted that the iPhone platform is revolutionizing the mobile phone industry. Recently, Blake from iPodHacks.com analyzed the way the industry is transforming for the casual user, the enterprise, and even the gamer. With iPhone software v2.0 (expected in June) and the recently released SDK, Blake notes that casual and enterprise...

Blargkaboom points out that in one of the demo screenshots during the iPhone SDK event showed off a new search icon in the Contacts application. This search icon is not available on the current version of the iPhone firmware. At present, users can only slide their finger down the alphabet to scroll quickly through their contact list, and can not search for specific names. Hopefully the ...

Forum member, arkmannj, discovered how to emulate multi-touch in the iPhone Simulator that accompanies the iPhone SDK. - Option-Click: Allows you to pinch in and out, and rotate. - Option-Shift-Click: Allows you to perform a two finger drag. Meanwhile, we've heard that OpenGL is not supported on the iPhone Simulator, which means developers working on OpenGL applications will have to...

Apple has posted (iTunes link) a video podcast version of the March 6th Apple iPhone SDK event. With this version, you can download it and watch it on your iPod, iPhone or Apple TV. The 1 hour and 18 minute event details Apple's plans for enterprise and 3rd party applications on the iPhone. [vi...

iEmulator announced that they are developing a PC emulator for the iPhone and iPod Touch. "Apple's new iPhone and iPod Touch software development kit is allowing us to quickly port iEmulator to these innovative devices," he went on to say. "It's an amazing development and operating environment."iEmulator.com has a bit of a head start, as they currently offer a PC emulator for Mac OS X. The...

Mobile game developer Gameloft has announced that they will be developing more than 15 game titles for the iPhone in 2008. Gameloft is already responsible for a few Apple iPod games such as Block Breaker Deluxe and Brain Challenge. Wikipedia lists a number of games developed by Gameloft, including mobile versions of Prince of Persia, Rayman, Might and Magic and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six. ...