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iPhone / iPod Touch Updates
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Eric Dahl
InsideTech General Manager, Eric Dahl has followed technology since his dad brought home a 28 lb. Compaq luggable in 1983. He started his first website in 1995 back when “tables” were a hot new thing and the preferred web design atrocity was the blink tag.
Before joining Affinity Labs, Eric spent eight years covering the technology industry at PC World. As a Senior Editor, he wrote columns on digital music and future technology and edited award-winning feature stories on tech tips, electronic voting, and more. In 2006 he edited a November special issue on the future of technology that won PC World a Maggie Award as the Best Computer Technology, Consumer magazine.
Having grown up in suburban Chicago, Eric was cursed with Cubs fandom at an early age. The exorcism is yet to be performed. Eric holds a BA in Journalism and Mass Communications from Drake University. He now lives in San Francisco’s Noe Valley.
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Eric Dahl
January 15, 2008
It’s still about a month and a half until Apple will release its real SDK so that third-part developers can write their own iPhone apps, but Apple’s paved the way this morning with an iPhone update that introduces a reconfigurable homepage, Wi-fi-based location-tracking, an easy way to SMS multiple people at once, and some other neat new features.
Those same updates will make their way to the iPod Touch, but current owners will have to pay $20 to get them. iPhone owners get this update (version 1.1.3) for free. Here are some more highlights of this update:
Reconfigurable home screen. Hold your finger over an icon for a while, and it will start to jiggle, indicating that you can drag it to a new place on the screen, or up to nine screens worth of space for icons. You’ll need those nine screens, too, because of…
…the new Webclips feature. If you’ve seen this work in Leopard, you have an idea of what you’re in for. Fire it up, and you can select a portion of a Web page and save it as a Webclip that gets added to your home screen. You can use that to add Safari-based iPhone apps to your home screen, or to grab small portions of a page, such as a news feed or scoreboard. Tap the button on your home screen and your iPhone will go out and update the clipping with live data from the Web.
Better mapping. Search and direction buttons are now built in to the Google Maps app. You can drop pins in key locations, select a hybrid, satellite and street label view, and even ask the iPhone to locate your current position. There’s still no GPS in the iPhone, so it uses cell towers and a network of 23 million Wi-fi hotspots mapped by a service salled Skyhook to find your position.
Chapter search in videos. Videos from the iTunes store now come with thumbnails that let you jump to a specific chapter, just like in a DVD.
Multiple SMS. This one is pretty self explanatory. Send SMS messages to a group of people at one time. Actually, it’s surprising this wasn’t added before now.
More apps (and fees) for the Touch. The good news: iPod Touch users will be getting access to the same Mail, Maps, Notes, Stocks, and Weather apps found on the iPhone. The bad news: In easily the sourest note of the keynote, Steve Jobs revealed that while new iPod Touch buyers will get these apps for free, current users (like, say, ME!) have to pony up $20. Boo.
