As I half suspected might happen, some clever people have torn the developer’s beta of the v3.0 iPhone OS to bits looking for clues as to upcoming Apple Stuff. And assuming Apple aren’t just putting this in there to yank our chains, they’ve found something pretty cool.

One of the files inside the ROM image itself is a file which holds USB configuration information for all the different models that firmware supports. For a long time, this file had four entries:

iPhone1,1  – 0×1290 (the first gen iPhone)
iPod1,1 – 0×1291 (the first gen iPod Touch)
iPhone1,2 – 0×1292 (the iPhone 3G)
iPod2,1 – 0×1293 (the second gen iPod Touch)

Note the strictly sequential ID attached to each model. V2.2 of the iPhone software brought a new one:

iPhone2,1 – 0×1294

and as I mentioned in my previous article, this ties into some evidence from an analytics firm dating back to Oct 2008 that it may be a prototype of a third iPhone model.

In the new v3.0 firmware  Boy Genius Report found several new versions:

iProd0,1 – 0×1295
iPod2,2 – 0×1296
iPhone3,1 – 0×1297
iFPGA – 0×1298
iPod3,1 – 0×1299

Analysis of these from Ars.Technica:

The iPhone3,1 and iPod3,1 are clearly references to next-gen hardware version of those products (perhaps Apple is skipping iPhone2,1?). Smith suggests that the iFPGA could be a prototype device that uses field-programmable gate arrays, a type of programmable microchip. It doesn’t conform to the standard numbering scheme that Apple uses for its hardware products, so it isn’t likely something intended to be released. The “iProd,” on the other hand, uses a 0,1 number, suggesting it is a prototype of an as-yet unreleased device that is neither an iPhone nor an iPod touch.

The use of FPGA in this context is puzzling, because it’s hard to see what they would be using FPGA chips for, even in an iPhone prototype. It also doesn’t have even a beta-grade “0,1″ model number. This one is a bit of a puzzler. We shouldn’t rule out Apple doing this on purpose to wind the bloggers up, either.

Meanwhile, some rumour sites are claiming the “iProd” could be a personal trainer type device, something Apple claimed a patent on last year: a device which tracks your workouts and actively moans (or “prods”) at you if you miss a session. The Nike+ shows that there is rich ground in the iPod/exercise cross-over market, but just because Apple have a patent doesn’t mean they will make an entire product for this. It seems more likely to me that it would be a physical add-on to an existing iPod Touch and an application to go with it. There’s also no way I could see Apple using such a lame, punnish name; it’s more likely to just stand for “Product” and be something that doesn’t have a proper name yet.

There’s more “new iPhone stuff” from elsewhere too. Here in the UK O2 have cut the cost of getting an iPhone, albeit only on the 24-month contract option. It’s difficult to see this as anything other than a modest stock clearing measure ahead of a new model, and it bears emphasising that committing to a two year contract when there is a new model around the corner is probably not a good move.

Finally, to finish off this roundup, AppleInsider claims to have a source saying the iPhone will have video recording capability, which may be supported by this screenshot at Engadget which shows an option called “publish video” in the v3.0 OS. And BusinessInsider claims the new iPhone may support faster internet speeds, probably through a newer 3G chipset with support for some faster variants of the technology. These two rumours, I would suggest, fall into the “likely to be true” category.

My standing advice to anyone thinking of buying an Phone 3G remains the same: wait a few months and see what happens.

Tech, iPhone

Apple watching is fun. It’s fun because, unlike most other computer manufacturers, Apple prizes the consumer over the enterprise. The way to please the enterprise is to give as much warning as possible of every little change, so the companies out there with 100,000 workstations world wide can work out months in advance how to fit the bits together; the way to please the consumer is with surprise launches with fancy new features and a minimum of forewarning. So, Apple don’t generally do things like public betas or product pre-announcements; this makes puzzling out their future direction from half-rumours and educated guesses a much more entertaining puzzle than for most computing companies.

(Aside: one exception to the “no long pre-announcement” rule was the iPhone itself, which was announced on 9th January 2007 — six months before it became available. This is because of the way the mobile phone market functions, with people committing to 18 or 24 months of contractual lock-in with a vendor in return for subsidy on the handset price. Apple gambled they could pre-announce the iPhone and that at least some people would choose to delay their upgrade until the phone was available. Anecdotal evidence suggests this tactic worked handsomely. In addition, Apple had no current phones to suffer from the Osborne Effect.)

I think there is a new iPhone coming. That, in itself, is not a massive insight but I think it’s coming soon: specifically, in June or July this year. Why do I think so? My reasons, let me show you them.

Firstly, historical precedent. Apple released the first iPhone on 29th June, 2007 and the 3G iPhone on 11th July, 2008. Much like the tradition of iPod refreshes in the autumn, I think they are consciously sticking to an annual upgrade cycle with the iPhone.

Secondly, commercial pressure. For the first time since the iPhone was announced, there are phones appearing that can potentially outshine it; amongst others, the Nokia N97, the Palm Pre, and the Android phones (T-Mobile G1 and HTC Magic) are all pretty explicitly designed as responses to the iPhone. Few buttons, large touch screens, finger-friendly interfaces that don’t require a stylus. This is not the time for Apple to slow down the pace of their development.

Thirdly, the latest firmware for the iPhone, as with all of Apple’s firmware upgrades, has an XML datafile which contains the product version numbers that it can run on. So far, for the iPhone, there have been two versions in this file; “v1,1″ (the original iPhone) and “v1,2″ (the iPhone 3G). When Apple use these numbers for laptop and desktop computers, incrementing the second digit implies a minor change to the product; incrementing the first digit is for major revisions, like when the “iLamp” style iMac was replaced by the all-in-the-panel model.

As was widely reported by various sources, a “v2,1″ string appeared in the latest iPhone firmware. Furthermore, stat tracking firm PinchMedia have been seeing this in their Analytics product since October 2008, with all their hits in the San Francisco Bay Area around Apple’s HQ. Is it surprising that Apple are working on a new iPhone? No, of course not, but the timing of these two facts — a prototype device that has been in active use by testers since October and a current, shipping firmware that can run on this device — supports the idea of launch soonish.

Fourthly, the ship date for the just-announced version 3.0 iPhone software is simply “summer 2009″. It seems very likely to me that, once developers have had a few months to build apps to take advantage of new features, it would ship as both an upgrade to old devices and on a new version of the hardware simultaneously. This is exactly what Apple did with the lauch of iPhone OS v2.0 and the iPhone 3G.

What might the new iPhone bring?

My crystal ball is broken. There are the obvious iPhone++ type things:

• more memory (as in the iPod bit, likely 16Gb/32Gb)
• more memory (as in RAM, where programs run, likely 192/256Mb)
• faster processor
• better camera (I’d like 3Mp with a better lens, a macro slide switch, and a flash of some sort, please)

…but these are not hugely exciting.

Two things I don’t think we’ll see is a dedicated gaming device or an iPhone Mini, despite continuing analyst speculation that this will happen.Why? Because the iPhone’s real killer app is the App Store itself, and Apple know this. A well polished source of high quality software, accessible on the device, with uncluttered micropayment support and (in less than a year) a huge range of applications to choose from and developer success stories left and right.

Want proof? Look at how much work Apple have done to make the iPod Touch more like the iPhone: this is so developers can more effectively write a single app that works on both devices, giving them a market of 30 million wealthy consumers to sell to. And look at how Apple put the App Store front and centre in a lot of advertising (the main iPhone slogan in the UK right now is “solving life’s little problems, one app at a time”).

So, Apple won’t do anything to split the platform. This means no iPhone Nano. If they ship some sort of iPod Nano, it’d have to have a smaller screen. If the screen gets smaller, your fingers will be the same size, so everything on it has to get bigger or it’ll be unusable. That means developers have to support a second screen resolution and it means every single one of those bazillion apps on the App Store won’t work on the new device. Which iPhone do you want, the one with the bazillion apps, or the slightly cheaper one with no apps but maybe some apps later but probably never the full bazillion? Exactly, that’s why we won’t get an iPhone Nano, and congrats, you’re smarter than several analysts and journalists now.

As for the idea of a dedicated gaming device with a d-pad and some extra buttons, I very much doubt it. Once again, if they release that, games developers have to choose: do you sell your game to the 30 million people with an iPod Touch or iPhone, or to the pool of zero people who own the new device? And if games devs don’t write games for it, who will buy it? What I think we might see is some sort of snap-on case with the extra buttons in it, sold by someone like Belkin, which might get some games support if it’s cheap enough. This is possible with the new “remote device” support in iPhone OS v3.0, but I am digressing from the point.

Lots of people think we’re going to get one of these:

image credit: fotoboer.nl

Basically, an iPhone but four times or so the size, designed to address the netbook market. I don’t deny that the idea is palatable, although whether there is a big enough pool of potential buyers to make the numbers add up, I wouldn’t like to say. In any event, I don’t think this would be part of an iPhone announcement — it would be a new product.

So, apart from the “one louder” upgrades, I have no real idea where Apple will take the iPhone next, I am afraid. It may well turn out Apple are smarter than me though so don’t abandon hope for some innovation. However I am pretty sure we’ll find out in June or July. If you are considering buying an iPhone in the next few months, read my arguments, read my citations, and decide if you’d be better off waiting to see what happens next. I think you probably should.

Since this article was written, more evidence has emerged of the possible new iPhone — see my followup article.

Tech, iPhone

Twitter today went nuclear under the weight of a little hack dubbed the “don’t click” attack:

For a better description of how the attack worked than I could hope to write, I recommend you read Daniel Sandler’s page or Mack Staples’s writeup, both of which are excellent.

In brief, though, it was a tiny, simple web page with a button labelled “Don’t Click!”; hidden from the user, but overlaid with that website, was the Twitter homepage, with a tweet pre-loaded containing the text “Don’t Click http://tinyurl.com/aaaaa”. If the user clicked the “Don’t Click!” button, the browser sent the click to the Twitter homepage instead, which would post a tweet from the user. The tinyurl.com address leads back to the “Don’t Click!” button page. In this manner, it spreads from one user to another much like a virus.

How it worked was pretty simple; what interested me was finding the source of the hack, so I pounded on the advanced search in Twitter.com for a while. The earliest use of it in English I could find was from user @sfnick and dated 10:03 am on the 11th of February, showing that this attack spread rapidly once it was translated into English. However, digging further showed that this has been spreading around in French-language tweets for several weeks — with the prefix text “Le Truc du Jour”.

Searching Twitter for that phrase turned up a different tinyurl.com address, presumably leading to a similar attack page (although it has been disabled now so I cannot check). Tracing that different tinyurl.com further back in time eventually led me to this search which shows where the attack came from:

I contend that the user @umoor is where this attack came from, firstly, because he has the first three tweets in Twitter’s search index with the string and secondly, because the attack is hosted on the domain “umoor.eu”. All three of those tweets have been deleted from his history — I believe this was him testing the functionality of the exploit.

Amazingly, within minutes, the attack had spread to four more users — none of whom seem to follow @umoor. I would like to know what attack vector the URL was delivered by; it’s possible that they were all following @umoor at the time. If I worked for Twitter now, I’d be making some graphs of how this exploit spread from person to person — there is some fascinating research there.

@umoor, however, didn’t write the exploit. The exploit was detailed in theoretical form in a blog post by James Padolsey on Jan 20th, ten days before the search results from @umoor. Comparing the source code of James Padolsey’s example and @umoor’s in-the-wild hack show they are largely identical in details such as the ordering of CSS elements and HTML indentation, strongly suggesting that @umoor essentially cut-and-pasted Padolsey’s example.

On the left, the exploit source code from umoor.eu; on the right, Padolsey's example. Click to enlarge.

Additionally, at the bottom of his exploit page, @umoor links to (and credits) this page on the French-language site korben.info, which contains source code identical to that used in @umoor’s page. It’s not clear whether the information went from Padolsey->Korben->umoor, or if @umoor is involved in the Korben page is some way. (Edit — see the comment below from Korben himself, which confirms that my first explanation was correct).

Either way, @umoor doesn’t deserve any credit for figuring out the attack, and should probably be criticised for making a large number of people panic that their Twitter account had been hacked.

Tech

A few people have been asking me lately for iPhone app recommendations — it’s almost like I have a reputation as some sort of evangalist. I have no idea why. Anyway, here is what I’ve been telling them. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but is simply a list of the first apps I would reinstall if I had to rebuild my iPhone tomorrow.

All links will open the application up in iTunes. Unless otherwise noted, these apps are free.

My personal must-have apps:

• Facebook — a pretty well-written app, and beats using the mobile site, but it is slightly buggy (notably, all my friends status updates always seem to be “8 hours ago”).
• Darkslide — Flickr client. Very featureful, and with comprehensive uploading support.
• Tweetie — amazing Twitter client that shows up even most of the desktop clients as lacking features. £1.79 at time of writing, and well worth it if you use Twitter at all. Free alternatives: Twittilator, Twitterific, Twitterfon. Update: my preferred app these days is Twitterrific Pro, although Tweetie remains a good choice.
• BeejiveIM — very nice IM client, but rather pricey at £9.49 unless you plan to use mobile IM a lot — I bought it on sale for £6. Does a clever thing: its own servers keep your IM account logged in and send you an email if someone IMs you, skirting the no-background-apps limitations of the iPhone. Free alternative: Palringo.
• TruPhone – VOIP app. Good for calling internationally, or 0800s or 0870s, without getting ripped off. There’s also a Skype client.
• Stanza — excellent eBook reader, with a baked-in bookshop including free access to tens of thousands of books from Wikibooks and Project Gutenberg.
• Showtimes — a location-aware cinema times app (i.e. it looks up cinemas around you). Seems decent enough to me, but I’ve been recommended the alternative Flixster; you might like to try both.
• WordPress — a pretty featureful client for writing posts on any Wordpress blog, either on wordpress.com or self-hosted.

Other apps to consider, but which I don’t use much myself:

• Shozu — a social networking client that allows cross-posting text or images to multiple places — for example, you can take a picture, and upload it to flickr, Facebook, and your own blog in a few easy steps.
• MyRail Lite – live departures board for train stations. Now been forced offline by Railtrack, but keep an eye out in case it comes back.
• Remote — allows the iPhone to become a remote control for any iTunes software on your network.
• Simplify (£2.39) – stream the contents of your home PC’s iTunes library to your phone, over WiFi or cellular data. Works well, but I don’t leave a PC on at home and my entire library fits on my iPhone, so not of much use to me.
• Air Sharing Pro (£5.99) — one of a large number of apps that let you move files on and off the iPhone over WiFi. Works well, but pricey; there are cheaper alternatives but I cannot recommend any of them particular.

Apps I’ve been recommended but haven’t used:

• ComicZeal (£1.19) — a comic viewer. I note that can consume all sorts of files (cbr, cbz, zip, rar), which I suspect are availabe from the usual internet hives of scum and villainy. I suspect that’s the main point.
• Urbanspoon – location based food finder that looks up where you are and shows you restaurant reviews. Doesn’t seem to have any data out here in the sticks, but you city boys might have more luck.

Webapps for your Safari bookmarks (these are web links, not iTunes ones):

• Train Times — iPhone-optimised live train routing and timetabling app. Good alternative to MyRail Lite.
• Several websites have well-designed mobile versions, including Flickr, Facebook, and Google Reader.
• Safari+ — special bookmarks which, when accessed, do things like scroll to the bottom of the page, open links in a new window, and solve other little annoyances Safari has.

Games I like:

• GeoDefense (£1.19) — brilliant fixed-path tower defense game, with perfect (though hard) difficulty level. There’s a free lite version if you want to try it out.
• GeoDefense Swarm (59p currently, £1.19 soon) — an open-map tower defense game, sequel of sorts to the previous entry. Also excellent (and sometimes infuriatingly difficult).
• Civilization Revolution (£2.99) — an almost perfect port of the Nintendo DS version of the game (which sells for £30!). Has a free lite version too.

Tech, iPhone

Are you a fan of neither getting lost nor spending money? Then read on!

The Binatone X350 is available from Asda for £50, or perhaps even £25 as they seem to be on a clearance (they were still £50 in Asda Cwmbran where mine came from). They are £58 from Amazon. Damned cheap, I hope you will agree. First off, I must admit it isn’t perfect:

• battery life is average at a few hours or so; be prepared to use the (included) car charger. It might improve after a few charge cycles I suppose.
• GPS signal strength is also mediocre, notably weaker than my SiRFStar III unit. It couldn’t get a signal when charging in the passenger footwell of my car, whereas my SiRFStar will work indoors, which isn’t supposed to be possible.
• Probably because of the signal strength, it takes quite a long time (five minutes or so) between bootup and lock-on.

These are only really niggles though, and in light of the price point I don’t think they really matter. The biggest problem is that the included software isn’t very good, but it’s trivially easy to install TomTom on it instead thanks to the good guys at Binatone. It turns out that if an SD card is inserted, and that SD Card has a folder called MobileNavigator containing a file called MobileNavigator.exe, the Binatone GPS will (at boot time) load that EXE in place of the one built in to the unit.

Step-by-step instructions to get TomTom running are below. You’ll need an SD card of at least 512Mb capacity.

1. Format SD card to FAT16 — first time I did this with the card formatted to FAT32, it didn’t work, and I think this helps. You’ll need about 280Mb of space
2. Download the file from this site (they have BitTorrent or HTTP downloads) and extract it onto your hard disk.
3. Copy the contents of the zip file onto the SD card
4. Rename the TomTom directory to “MobileNavigator”
5. Delete “navigator.exe”
6. Rename “navigator_unchanged.exe” to “MobileNavigator.exe”
7. Insert the SD card in your device and power it off and on with the small switch on the back. Select Navigation and you should see TomTom load
8. During the install process, it will ask what sort of Bluetooth receiver you have. Select “Other NMEA Receiver, set the baud rate to maximum (115,200), and select COM7
9. That’s it!

I am informed these instructions also work for the Navigo satnavs, which are available cheaply from a number of online retailers. If you need further help, you’re best off posting in The PC Tailor forums.

I also have this link for a download for TomTom 7 which I haven’t tried yet. The file has a set of instructions with it that look somewhat more involved, but the maps for TomTom v6 are no longer updated so v7 is probably preferable.

(Note that although the instructions mention the Navigo GPS unit, the Binatone device works the same way. The instructions should work just the same.)

Tech

An email from Richie contained this summary of his first three hours of iPhone ownership. I thought it would make a great customer testimonial for Apple, so here it is. I didn’t have the Myriad Pro Semibold font that Apple use for their adverts, so I had to get Dave to do the Photoshop job for me. Thanks Dave! You are hewn from raw awesome.

I think Richie liked it.

Personal, Tech, iPhone Tech

One of the things I like about Twitter is how often it scoops my RSS reader. On my laptop I run the TweetDeck client, which can maintain regular polls of search terms into search.twitter.com. One term I search on is “O2″, dating back to the iPhone 3G launch hassles when I was monitoring the stock levels in Twitter. This search term meant I found out about the O2 MMS security problem several days before it hit the tech news, and it showed up something else interesting today: the contents of a customer survey that O2 had emailed around.

Finding an invite to the survey in my own email, I had a look. After a bunch of waffle about various things (”are you aware of visual voicemail? How many times a week do you use the App Store?”) I got to the stuff about MMS. From memory, the broad outlines of what the survey wanted to know were:

• was I aware that the iPhone couldn’t do MMS?
• had I used MMS before owning an iPhone?
• had I tried sending/receiving photographs via email on my iPhone?
• same, but using social networking sites instead of email?
• same, but using an alternate MMS-capable handset?
• how convenient/inconvenient did I find these alternatives, compared to MMS?
• would I use an app from the App Store to send/receive MMS, at the rate of 1 MMS = 4 SMS from the allowance, if it was free?
• same, but if it cost £2.50?
• same, but if it cost £5.00?

We’ve seen rumours that AT&T might be bringing an MMS app to the iPhone; I would suggest that O2 are in the early stages on considering this option too.

Personal, Tech, iPhone iPhone

I want some headphones that:
- sound OK
- fit like my Sennheiser CX-30s
- have the button/microphone thing like my pack-in Apple headphones
- aren’t outrageously expensive, say, £30 or so

Why do these not seem to exist? CX30s are widely available for £15 so it’s not impossible to meet these price points. I don’t believe in spending any more on out-and-about headphones, as they are likely to get damaged or lost. Plus, there’s not much point in buying high-end headphones for use on a train. For that reason I also prefer canalphones for noise isolation and portability (I find in-ear headphones very uncomfortable, whereas canalphones are fine).

Why don’t these seem to exist? Ultimate Buds UB3 look like they’d fit the bill but I can’t find a UK stockist. I’m on the verge of chopping up my Apple headphones and grafting Sennheiser drivers on. Bah. Bah, I say!

Personal, Tech, iPhone Tech

I normally try and resist randomly reblogging things — although XKCD makes it hard — but this find by John “DaringFireball.net” Gruber is just too marvellous to not pass on.

From the MSDN blog of Richard Sprague, a Microsoft marketing director, dated January 18th 2007:

I can’t believe the hype being given to iPhone.  Even some of my blindly-loyal pro-Microsoft friends and colleagues talk like it’s a real innovation and will “redefine the market” or “usher in a new age”.

What!?!?  Without even mentioning that the same functionality has been available on PocketPC, Palm, Nokia, and Blackberry for years, I just have to wonder who will want one of these things (other than the religious faithful).  People need this to be a phone, first and foremost. But with 5 hours of battery life?  No keypad?  (you try typing a phone number on that screen, no matter how wonderful it is — you will want a keypad).  And for all that whiz-bang Internet access, you absolutely need the phone to work, immediately, every single time.  Will it do that?

So please mark this post and come back in two years to see the results of my prediction:  I predict they will not sell anywhere near the 10M Jobs predicts for 2008.  Okay, it’s possible there are enough Apple religious people to buy a lot of them at first, but even the most diehard Mac fans who buy one of these will secretly carry two phones.  One to prove how loyal and “cool” they are, and the other to actually make and receive calls.

I remember the lessons I learned working with the Newton team many years ago.  I was in Apple’s marketing department at the time and we did this big fancy user study which basically proved that nobody would buy the thing at the price and functionality we were building.  So what did we do?  We shoved it into the market anyway because it was “cool”.  Cool is great, but you still need to make phone calls.

Two years, eh? He’s got about three months to turn it around then. I guess there’s a really fucking impressive WM7 shipping real soon now, yeah? Because right now, and I am speaking as someone who junked a WM6 smartphone for an iPhone and never looked back, I think he’s looking rather silly indeed.

Double irony points because the worst thing about my WM6 smartphone was that it absolutely did not work, immediately, as a phone, every single time. My favourite bit was when it would ring, and the UI would be so lagged it would have diverted to voicemail before responding to my “answer call” button press. That feature was aces.

Personal, Tech, iPhone

Forthcoming on the Apple App Store: a genuinely useful, not-nerfed, not-fiddly, reasonably-priced file sharing app (Briefcase) which adds the ability to do iPhone-to-iPhone file transfers, and one of the best handheld games I’ve ever played.

Puzzle Quest in particular is significant. I got totally hooked on this on the DS last year, it gobbled up over fifty hours of my life — longer than I spent on any other game in 2007 except for Oblivion. It’s not even all that good when you take it apart (the writing is terribly hackneyed, the game balance hopelessly broken to the point where I was getting near instant kills towards the end) — but somehow, it is just, well, digital crack. And given how the game works it should play really well on the iPhone’s touch screen interface.

I won’t be buying it on iPhone. I can’t afford to go through that again. For god’s sake, I was having Puzzle Quest dreams towards the end, where I would awake sweating and shaking, trying to just match four more gems. But I recommend you do! In fact, I echo the comment on Kotaku by NaeemTHM:

EXCELLENT! Puzzle Quest in meetings, on the bowl, while my wife is talking, at funerals, during sex, while playing Puzzle Quest on Xbox Live, and on the drive to work?

Hell yes.

Personal, Tech, iPhone iPhone