Tuesday, April 29, 2008

talks with Immersion to license its haptic technology for use in the iPhone

The current iPhone does not give sensory feedback when a person presses keys on its touchscreen.

An anonymous Apple employee says company executives are in talks with Immersion to license its haptic technology for use in the iPhone, according to a report at Palluxo.com.buy 3g iphone click here

Haptic technology gives people sensory feedback--in the form of a vibration or pressure--when they use a touchscreen. Essentially, it makes touching a key on a touchscreen more akin to pressing a real button. Right now, the iPhone interface does not have that kind of interactivity, which can make using the touchscreen more challenging because there is no sensory indication that a key has been touched and the phone has registered it.

In separate news, Immersion on Thursday named Clent Richardson its new president and CEO. According to Immersion's press release, Richardson has previously held prominent positions at TiVo, Nortel, T-Mobile, and a little company called Apple. From that release:

Previously, at Apple, he reported to the co-founder and CEO as vice president of worldwide developer relations and worldwide solutions marketing and built and led a global team that established and strengthened developer and customer relationships around the world. During his more than five years with Apple, Richardson was also senior manager of evangelism, responsible for building and leading a worldwide team that managed global strategic relationships with Adobe, AOL, IBM, Microsoft, Motorola, Sun, and other industry leaders for all Apple divisions.

So it wouldn't be too surprising if it turns out Richardson is getting back in touch with old friends and forming ties between Apple and his new company.

Immersion's VibeTonz feedback technology is already in use in more than 10 million mobile phones, including the LG Voyager VX10000 and Samsung SCH-A930, according to the company. And its medical division creates tactile feedback technology for virtual surgery systems that help train surgeons.buy 3g iphone click here

Dating DNA iPhone Web App

San Diego, CA April 29, 2008 -- Dating DNA, LLC (www.datingdna.com) today announced the immediate availability of their new Dating DNA Web App for Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch Internet devices. iPhone and iPod Touch users can immediately start browsing photos and compatibility scores with thousands of singles worldwide by visiting www.datingdna.com/iphone from the the web browser on these hand-held devices, or by visiting Apple's website at http://www.apple.com/webapps/socialnetworking/datingdna.html.


Dating DNA iPhone Web App
The Dating DNA Web App brings the photo browsing and compatibility scoring features from Dating DNA's popular free service to the palm of the user's hand. Dating DNA users, when not at their computer, can now browse photos of other compatible singles, then delete or skip each match, or select to have them added to their favorites section, called the "DNA Strand."

"Not only is it our desire to allow everyone to use their Dating DNA Number all across the Internet's social graph, but we also want to make our services available on a wide array of Internet devices, such as the iPhone," said Kevin Carmony, CEO for Dating DNA. "Just like online dating is shifting away from traditional dating sites such as Match.com and eHarmony to social networks like Facebook and MySpace, so too are many people moving to their cell phones for interacting socially on the Internet."

Kevin Carmony, recently-resigned CEO for desktop Linux vendor Linspire, started the free Dating DNA service in August of last year. Dating DNA provides free and open Web Services which bring 1-click compatibility scoring and other sophisticated dating features to Social Networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and Craigslist, as well as to Internet devices such as Apple's iPhone and the Chumby web appliance (www.chumby.com).

Carmony believes that just like everyone's genetic DNA is different, so too is everyone's "dating DNA." A person's "dating DNA" is represented by a unique 9-digit number, exclusive to that individual. Users can get their free Dating DNA Number by visiting www.datingdna.com and answering a series of questions about themselves and their dating preferences.

Once a user has a Dating DNA Number, they can use their iPhone or iPod Touch device to browse photos of users with whom their compatibility score matches that user's "Compatibility Threshold." Unlike traditional dating sites where literally anyone can view a user's profile and photos, and then contact them, Dating DNA keeps all information and photos private, except to those who meet or exceed a "Compatibility Threshold," set by each user. This means photos and profiles are only seen by those a user is compatible with, based on the rules and criteria they set.

Through a patent-pending system devised by Carmony, Dating DNA encapsulates over 300 pieces of information down into a single 9-digit number, including all the particulars about a person and the type of people they prefer to date. For example, encoded in the number is a person's hair color, height, line of employment, religion, if they have children, political leanings, and hundreds of other pieces of information. Also encoded in the number are the person's dating preferences, such as do they prefer to date a non-smoker, someone who likes pets, someone who wants children, someone who owns their own home, and so on, as well as the weight a person places upon each of the different criteria.

The Dating DNA site, Web Services and Web Apps are 100% free to use, and utilize Web 2.0 technology to create an integrated experience that is extremely easy, fun and enjoyable for the user.

Central to Dating DNA's strategy, is providing open APIs to their Web Services which allow developers to bring Dating DNA's 1-click compatibility scoring engine to other sites and devices. For example, there are Dating DNA-powered applications for Facebook and MySpace. The iPhone Web App was developed using these Web Services. Developers can learn more at http://www.datingdna.com/?a=developer

See examples of the Dating DNA service and the iPhone Web App at www.datingdna.com/screenshots or by visiting Apple's website at http://www.apple.com/webapps/socialnetworking/datingdna.html

About Dating DNA, LLC:
Dating DNA is becoming the Internet's central nervous system for online dating, allowing users to integrate all their dating information across the web's social graph with one 9-digit ID number. Dating DNA provides free and open Web Services which bring 1-click compatibility scoring and other sophisticated dating features to Social Networking sites such as Facebook (www.datingdna.com/facebook), MySpace, YouTube, and Craigslist, as well as to Internet devices such as Apple's iPhone/iPod Touch (www.apple.com/webapps/socialnetworking/datingdna.html) and the Chumby web appliance (www.chumby.com). Online dating continues to move dramatically away from traditional dating sites such as Match.com and eHarmony. Every day, more and more people are using Social Networking sites as a means of meeting new people to date. Utilizing these sites is free, and provides a more natural way of meeting people than traditional dating sites of the past. Dating DNA is the first company to capitalize on this trend, by bringing the convenience of matching tools from traditional dating sites to these new Social Networking avenues and across Internet devices.

For more information, please contact:
Dating DNA, LLC
858-926-5910

Audio

Audio
The iPhone's headphones are similar to those of current iPods, but also incorporate a microphone. A multipurpose button in the microphone can be used to play or pause music, skip tracks, and answer or end phone calls without touching the iPhone. The 3.5 mm TRS connector for the headphones is located on the top left corner (as seen from front upright). Wireless earpieces that use Bluetooth technology to communicate with the iPhone are sold separately. The headphone socket on the iPhone is recessed into the casing and is narrow when compared to some headphone jacks, making it incompatible with most headphones without the use of an adapter.

The loudspeaker is used both for handsfree operations and media playback, but does not support voice recording.

Composite or component video at up to 576i and stereo audio can be output from the dock connector using an adapter sold by Apple.
IPHONE VIDEOS CLICK HERE

IPHONE INFO CLICK HERE

Hardware

Hardware

Rear viewAccording to The Wall Street Journal, the iPhone is manufactured on contract in the Longhua, Shenzhen factory of the Taiwanese company Foxconn. Conditions for workers at the factory have been a matter of controversy.


Touchscreen
The 3.5 in liquid crystal display (320×480 px at 160 ppi) HVGA touchscreen topped with optical-quality, scratch-resistant glass is specifically created for use with a finger, or multiple fingers for multi-touch sensing. Because the screen is a capacitive touchscreen, no stylus is needed, nor can one be used. Bare skin is a requirement; users wearing gloves would have to remove them to use the touchpad, unless they are wearing electrically conductive gloves.

The user interface also features other visual effects, such as horizontally sliding sub-selections and co-selections from right and left, vertically sliding system menus from the bottom (e.g. favorites, keyboard), and menus and widgets that turn around to allow settings to be configured on their back sides.

Text input

Text input

Virtual keyboard on the touchscreen.For text input, the device implements a virtual keyboard on the touchscreen. It has automatic spell checking and correction, predictive word capabilities, and a dynamic dictionary that learns new words. The predictive word capabilities have been integrated with the dynamic virtual keyboard so that users will not have to be extremely accurate when typing—i.e. touching the edges of the desired letter or nearby letters on the keyboard will be predictively corrected when possible. The keys are somewhat larger and spaced farther apart when in landscape mode, currently only available using the Safari web browser. Not focusing more on texting has been considered a chief weakness of the iPhone, while at the same time others believe the virtual keyboard to be a bold step and a worthwhile risk.

David Pogue of The New York Times and Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal both tested the iPhone for two weeks and found learning to use it initially difficult, although eventually usable. Pogue stated use was "frustrating" at first, but "once you stop stressing about each individual letter and just plow ahead, speed and accuracy pick up considerably." After five days of use, Mossberg "was able to type on it as quickly and accurately as he could on the Palm Treo he has used for years", and considered the keyboard a "nonissue". Both found that the typo-correcting feature of the iPhone was the key to using the virtual keyboard successfully.

Interface

Interface
The display responds to three sensors: a proximity sensor that shuts off the display and touchscreen when the iPhone is brought near the face to save battery power and to prevent inadvertent inputs from the user's face and ears, an ambient light sensor that adjusts the display brightness which in turn saves battery power, and a 3-axis accelerometer,which senses the orientation of the phone and changes the screen accordingly. Photo browsing, web browsing, and music playing support both upright and left or right widescreen orientations, while videos play in only one widescreen orientation.

A single "home" hardware button below the display brings up the main menu. Subselections are made via the touchscreen. The iPhone utilizes a full-paged display, with context-specific submenus at the top and/or bottom of each page, sometimes depending on screen orientation. Detail pages display the equivalent of a "Back" button to go up one menu.

The iPhone has three physical switches on its sides: wake/sleep, volume up/down, and ringer on/off. All other multimedia and phone operations are done via the touchscreen.

The iPhone interface enables the user to move the content itself up or down by a touch-drag motion of the finger, much as one would freely slide or flick a playing card across a table with a finger. Similarly, scrolling through a long list in a menu works as if the list is pasted on the outer surface of a wheel: the wheel can be "spun" by sliding a finger over the display from bottom to top (or vice versa). In either case, the object continues to move based on the flicking motion of the finger, slowly decelerating as if affected by friction. In this way, the interface simulates the physics of 3D objects, giving it a real world feel.

The photo album and web page magnifications are examples of multi-touch sensing. It is possible to zoom in and out of web pages and photos by placing two fingers (e.g. thumb and forefinger) on the screen and spreading them farther apart or closer together, as if stretching or squeezing the image. As can be intuitively expected from multi-touch sensing, the two fingers don't have to be from the same hand.

Others

Others
The iPhone features a built in 2.0 megapixel camera, without a flash or autofocus, located on the back for still digital photos, but does not support video recording. It also includes software that allows the user to upload, view, and e-mail photos. The user zooms in and out of photos by "unpinching" and "pinching" them through the multi-touch interface. The software interacts with iPhoto on the Mac and Photoshop in Windows.

The built-in Bluetooth 2.x+EDR supports wireless earpieces, which requires the HSP profile, but notably does not support stereo audio (requires A2DP), laptop tethering (requires DUN and SPP), or the OBEX file transfer protocol (requires FTP, GOEP, and OPP).

Text messages are presented chronologically in a mailbox format similar to Mail, which places all text from recipients together with replies. Text messages are displayed in speech bubbles (similar to iChat) under each recipient's name. The iPhone currently has built-in support for e-mail message forwarding, drafts, and direct internal camera-to-e-mail picture sending. However, it does not yet have capabilities for delivery reports, instant messaging, MMS, or copy/cut/paste. Some of these functions are accessible via free Safari-based "applications" called "Web Apps", as well as by free "hacked" native applications, though at this time Apple only sanctions the use of Web Apps. Support for multi-recipient SMS was added in the January 2008 (v1.1.3) software update.

E-mail

E-mail
The iPhone also features an e-mail program that supports HTML e-mail, which enables the user to embed photos in an e-mail message. PDF, Word, and Excel attachments to mail messages can be viewed on the phone. Yahoo! and Google's Gmail currently offer a free Push-IMAP e-mail service similar to that on a BlackBerry for the iPhone; IMAP and POP3 mail standards are also supported, including Microsoft Exchange and Kerio MailServer. This is currently accomplished by opening up IMAP on the Exchange server; however, Apple announced it has licensed Microsoft ActiveSync and will fully support the platform in June 2008 when the iPhone 2.0 firmware (currently referred to as 1.2) is released. The iPhone will sync e-mail account settings over from Apple's own Mail application, Microsoft Outlook, and Microsoft Entourage, or manually configured using the device's Settings tool. With the correct settings, the e-mail program can check almost any IMAP or POP3 account.

Sunday, April 27, 2008

Web accessibility

Web accessibility

On the iPhone's Safari web browser.The iPhone is able to access the World Wide Web via a modified version of the Safari web browser. Web pages may be viewed in portrait or landscape mode and supports automatic zooming by pinching together or spreading apart fingertips on the screen, or by double-tapping text or images. The web browser displays full web pages as opposed to simplified pages as on most non-smartphones.

The iPhone does not support Flash. Although the iPhone does not include Java technology in its out-of-the-box configuration, Sun Microsystems announced on March 7, 2008 that it would make Java available after June 2008.

Apple developed an iPhone application for accessing Google's maps service in map or satellite form, a list of search results, or directions between two locations, while providing optional real-time traffic information. During the product's announcement, Jobs demonstrated this feature by searching for nearby Starbucks locations and then placing a prank call to one with a single tap. Though Flash isn't supported in Safari on the iPhone, Apple also developed a separate application to view YouTube videos on the iPhone, similar to the system used for the Apple TV. iphoneinfo click here

Internet connectivity

Internet connectivity
Internet access is available when the iPhone is connected to a local area Wi-Fi or a wide area EDGE network. The iPhone is not able to use AT&T's 3G or AT&T's HSDPA network. Steve Jobs has stated 3G would need to become more widespread in the United States and much more energy efficient before it's included in the iPhone. By default, the iPhone will ask to join newly discovered Wi-Fi networks and prompt for the password when required, while also supporting manually joining closed Wi-Fi networks. When Wi-Fi is active, the iPhone will automatically switch from the EDGE network to any nearby previously approved Wi-Fi network.

The EDGE network benefits iPhone users in the U.S. by providing greater availability than 3G, as carriers based in the U.S. do not have full 3G coverage. By contrast, 3G coverage ranges from 60 to 90-percent in the United Kingdom.

Since the iPhone's inception, the use of the handset for Internet connectivity has exposed one or more trends. According to AT&T and Google, the iPhone generated 50 times more search requests than any other mobile handset. The iPhone also increased the average wireless data usage as much as 30 times higher than on other phones, or 100 MB per iPhone customer. iphoneinfo click here

Multimedia

Multimedia

Cover Flow on the iPhone.The layout of the music library differs from previous iPods, with the sections divided more clearly alphabetically, and with a larger font. Similar to previous iPods, the iPhone can sort its media library by songs, artists, albums, videos, playlists, genres, composers, podcasts, audiobooks, and compilations. Cover Flow, like that on iTunes, shows the different album covers in a scroll-through photo library. Scrolling is achieved by swiping a finger across the screen.

Like the fifth generation iPods introduced in 2005, the iPhone can play video, allowing users to watch TV shows and films. Unlike other image-related content, video on the iPhone plays only in the landscape orientation, when the phone is turned sideways. Double tapping switches between wide-screen and full-screen video playback.

The iPhone allows users to purchase and download songs from the iTunes Store directly to their iPhone over Wi-Fi with the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store, but not over the cellular data network. iphoneinfo click here

Features

Features
The iPhone allows conferencing, call holding, call merging, caller ID, and integration with other cellular network features and iPhone functions. For example, a playing song fades out when the user receives a call. Once the call is ended the music fades back in. Voice dialing is not supported by the iPhone.

The iPhone includes a visual voicemail feature allowing users to view a list of current voicemail messages on-screen without having to call into their voicemail. Unlike most other systems, messages can be listened to and deleted in a non-chronological order by choosing any message from an on-screen list. AT&T, O2, T-Mobile, and Orange modified their voicemail infrastructure to accommodate this new feature designed by Apple. A lawsuit has been filed against Apple and AT&T by Klausner Technologies claiming the iPhone's visual voicemail feature infringes two patents.

A ringtone feature was introduced in the United States on September 5, 2007, but is not yet available in all countries where the iPhone has been released. This feature allows users to create custom ringtones from their purchased iTunes music for an additional fee, the same price of a song. The ringtones can be from 3 to 30 seconds in length of any part of a song, can include fading in and out, can pause from half a second to five seconds when looped, and never expire. All customizing can be done in iTunes, and the synced ringtones can also be used for alarms on the iPhone. Custom ringtones can also be created using Apple's GarageBand software 4.1.1 or later (available only on Mac OS X) and third-party tools.

Apple has released a video explaining many of iPhone's features through a series of demonstrations. iphoneinfo click here

A talking iphone news app demo