Light Table for iPhone released

Lingon iKorg Software Creations has released Light Table for the iPhone and iPod touch. It's available for download from the App Store for $0.99.

Light Table helps you make collages of your photographs. It lets you import photos from your photo library, drag them around and rotate them until they fit. You can save a screenshot of your compilation once you've got them arranged how you like.

You can manipulate photos in Light Table by pinching them, rotating and zooming in and out using the multi-touch interface. It's designed for photographers, designers and other creatives who might want to lay out catalogs and other photo collections.

Light Table works with iPhones and iPod touches updated with iPhone 2.0 software or later.

zCover Comes Up With iSAglove 3G cases for iPhone

zCover on Friday announced that it is shipping its iSAglove 3G cover for the iPhone. It costs $29.99 and joins zCover's line of iPhone accessories.

The iSAglove is a silicone cover for the iPhone that comes in black, grey and ice clear. It features reinforced corners to support a natural hand position in horizontal mode along with a reinforced layer of silicone that works as a "crash cushion" if the iPhone is dropped or falls.

A flip cover protects the dock connector from getting contaminated with sand, dust and dirt, and the case has been enhanced with the 3G revision, with an easier to press sleep/wake button, tooling for the new iPhone 3G's sensors, volume button and ring/silent switch protection and more.

The "Classic Pack" includes to cover, screen protect film and a disposable screen polishing cloth.

Apple's iPhone 3G hits shelves; Extras Store also Opened

Apple's international launch of iPhone 3G began in New Zealand and Japan on Friday, as a freshly-opened ‘App Store’ tempted fans with independently created mini-programs for the coveted devices.

New Zealanders were the first to be able to buy the much-hyped iPhone 3G when three stores opened just after midnight, and Tokyo followed shortly afterward.

Sales of iPhone 3G models begin later in the day in 21 other countries.

On the eve of the iPhone 3G launch, Apple opened an App Store stocked with hip, fun or functional programs crafted by third-party developers.

The shop, accessible through Apple's online iTunes store, opened with more than 500 mini-programs, many of them free.

Mini-applications include games, photo-sharing and mobile versions of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and eBay.

"Facebook is even cooler on the iPhone 3G, with the ability to discover friends nearby, or to effortlessly take pictures and upload them instantly to Facebook," said the social-networking website's founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Game makers are capitalising on touch-screen and motion-sensing technology in iPhones.

"The touch and tilt controls are natural and easy to learn, making gaming even more inviting, creative and rewarding," said Sega product development vice president David Cobb.

A version of the Japanese company's "Super Monkey Ball" tailored for iPhones is in the App Store.

"Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch open up the world of games to an entirely new audience," Cobb said.

Applications crafted for iPhones will also work on iPod Touch models, which are basically iPhones without the telephone capabilities.

Brian Greenstone, president of computer game maker Pangea Software, called the iPhone platform "truly ground-breaking."

Software creators are allowed to set their own prices, as long as figures end with 99 cents. Apple keeps 30 percent of sales prices to pay for operating the store.

Apple senior vice president of world-wide product marketing Philip Schiller said the iPhone "represents a new software platform for developers, combining the most advanced mobile operating system, sophisticated developer tools and a breakthrough way for developers to wirelessly sell and distribute their applications."

Apple released an iPhone kit to outside developers in March in an effort to make the hot devices even more popular and wrest market share from smart phone market powerhouse Blackberry.

The kit lets programmers customize programs for the touch-screen mobile devices combining telephone, video, music, and Internet connectivity.

Apple vets software creations before making them available exclusively at the App Store.

Apple will sell iPhone 3G models in the United States for 199 dollars and 299 dollars, depending on memory capacity. The original eight-gigabyte iPhone was priced at 600 dollars when it debuted in June last year.

IPhone 3G prices in some countries will be as low as one euro (1.57 dollars) provided customers purchase multi-year service plans that translate into lucrative long-term revenue streams for carriers.

Apple is continuing its strategy of locking iPhones exclusively to one telecom carrier per country.

Apple and numerous technology websites have posted online tips on how to navigate Friday's anticipated buying frenzy.

Auckland student Jonny Gladwell, 22, had been first in line outside the Auckland store since Tuesday after being dared by friends who promised to pay for his phone if he lasted the distance in the queue.

"I'm going to go home, put this on charge, have a play with it and have a nice big sleep," Gladwell told Television New Zealand after securing one of the first iPhones sold in the world

AT&T Paying High Price For iPhone 3G: Will Users Take It?

Consumers will soon be able to snag the iPhone 3G at an attractive price -- but what will it cost AT&T?
As a general rule, wireless carriers pay about $200 to subsidize the price of a smartphone. But AT&T may be paying Apple $325 per unit for right of carriage, Oppenheimer financial analyst Yair Reimer wrote in a report.

Additionally, Reimer said AT&T will pay another $100 for subscribers signed up in Apple stores. When you add these figures to the retail price of the handset, AT&T could be paying as much as $624 for the 8-GB iPhone 3G, and $724 for the 16-GB version.

Representatives from Apple and AT&T didn't comment, but other analysts said Apple is receiving a tidy sum from the wireless carrier.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster estimated in a report Apple will receive an average of $466 per iPhone. Bernstein Research's Toni Sacconaghi said in a report that he expects iPhones to be sold to carriers for anywhere from $350 to $700 each.

For the first iPhone, AT&T and Apple had a monthly revenue-sharing deal, an uncommon practice in the wireless industry. For the iPhone 3G, the mobile operator recently said it would adopt the more traditional practice of reselling handsets to consumers at a subsidy.

AT&T said this move would affect the company's bottom line short term, and it expects to reduce earnings by 10 to 12 cents a share in each of the next two years. But, this strategy is expected to add to profits in 2010 by drawing more heavy-data subscribers.

iPhone moves a step closer to getting IM

A recent patent filing indicates that Apple is getting closer to adding its own instant messaging client to the iPhone.
he filing is titled "Portable Electronic Device for Instant Messaging," and covers methods for sending, receiving, and viewing ongoing conversations. The proposed GUI is similar to Apple's current interface for SMS.

Built-in support for IM has been missing from the iPhone, to the dismay of many users. The patent filing shows Apple has IM on its mind.

At the recent launch of the iPhone SDK, AOL demonstrated an AOL Instant Messenger client, but it isn't allowed to run in the background, which normal IM applications rely on.

Support for IM is quickly becoming a must on mobile phones. Users want the same thing on their mobile phone as they have on their computers including IM, according to Leif-Olof Wallin, research vice president at Gartner.

"It will be a blockbuster in two, three years," said Wallin.

But instant messaging is also a threat to the massive amounts mobile carriers make from SMS messaging, which the iPhone currently supports.

"They can charge much more for SMS compared to IM," said Wallin.

Pressure from its carrier partners is a possible explanation for why Apple has taken a hands-off approach to a feature many users want, according to Wallin.

"At the same time it can't afford to be left behind" he said.

A new day for Macs in the enterprise?

When Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced that the iPhone was ready for enterprise use, the announcement caused a stir that few of the world's iconic businessmen could match. It seemed that everyone from rank-and-file worker-bees to CEOs wanted to get their corporate applications served up on the hot new device. Why? This was Apple -- a synonym for awe-inspiring design and coolness, the antithesis to stodgy old corporate technology that burns the eyes red and freezes computers blue.

But some Apple-watchers and evangelist IT practitioners who use Macs for business think the announcement runs deeper than the iPhone itself in its importance. Some believe it could usher in the era of a more enterprise-friendly Apple.

Such a paradigm shift, they argue, could serve as the final ingredient in the boiling cauldron being stirred by employees at the edge of organizations who have become dissatisfied with corporate technology and who have turned to innovative options in the consumer space to meet their needs.

Some tall hurdles related to converting an enterprise from PCs to Macs, of course, have been around for years. Many corporate IT departments find themselves beholden to decisions made by predecessors during the 1990s, when PCs and the Microsoft Windows operating system seized a chokehold on the corporate market. Companies planned everything from back-end servers to client software based on a Microsoft framework, notes Roger Kay, an analyst with EndPoint Technologies.

Integrating Mac equipment and other Apple products into such an environment requires time and money. "Despite the hairiness of Microsoft software, most companies crave compatibility with it," Kay says. "They have these existing investments that they want to get use of."

But a move to Web-based software, where users need nothing but a browser to access their applications, could alleviate the IT hang-up on integration.

Employees have been leading this movement. Instead of using the corporate-sanctioned software on their workstations, many have gravitated to technologies like wikis, blogs, and social networks to collaborate on projects horizontally, without IT's help or blessing. In the CIO Consumer Technology survey , the 311 IT decision makers surveyed conceded that nearly 25 percent of their employees use social networks for work purposes, while 21 percent utilize wikis and another 17 percent use blogs.

From a hardware perspective, Macs have increasingly become more people's brand of choice. Apple shipped 2.3 million Macs in the first quarter of 2008, which represented a 44 percent unit growth for the product and helped Apple realize 47 percent revenue growth compared to the same quarter the year before.

But businesses' adoption of Macs and Apple software has still been sluggish, perhaps, in part, due to this being a low priority for Apple.

While Apple of course deals with businesses, and has a business team at some of its stores, it undoubtedly remains a consumer-oriented company, by the numbers. Its iPod claims around 70 percent of the market share for MP3 players. Apple sold 22.1 million iPods in the first quarter of 2008. On average, the company says, an iPod has been sold every 1.7 seconds in the five-and-half-year life span of the product.

And evangelists who run Mac shops in SMBs say their experiences, not as dissimilar to those of large enterprises as you might believe, still demonstrate a mixed bag of results for those using Apple in the corporate setting.

The wholesale switch
Shani Magosky, chief operating officer (with IT responsibilities) of Jaffe Associates, a 25-person marketing and public relations firm, didn't need the iPhone to embrace Apple.

Magosky started looking into Macs for her traditionally PC and Windows-based company back in the fall of 2006, she says. She wasn't necessarily wooed by Bono singing in an iPod commercial. She was sick of PCs breaking all the time, she says. Then there was the "sticker shock" of learning what it would cost her to upgrade to Microsoft's SharePoint collaboration software (and the accompanying server technology).

Specifically, she'd been running an outdated version of Microsoft's terminal server, which allowed her employees (all of whom work remotely, as Jaffe has no central office) to connect to the network and share files. "It was unnecessarily slow and unreliable," she says. "We ended up spending a fortune on IT trouble-shooting."

With her terminal server being outdated, she was told the best option would be to upgrade to SharePoint, which, after purchasing and installing the server, buying the software licenses and all the support surrounding it, would have cost $100,000, Magosky says. "They nickel and dime you," she says.

Meanwhile, PCs became a costly problem. Between what Magosky views as poor manufacturing and tons of malware permeating the layer Windows leaves between the Web and the network, the PCs began to break with great frequency, she says. "There is just so much that can go wrong with them. All these viruses happen to PCs that don't happen to Macs. And then it costs you more to fix it than just buying a new one. So I said I wasn't going to waste anymore, and went out and bought a MacBook Pro."

Perhaps serendipitously, right around this time, her boss, President and CEO Jay Jaffe, was on vacation with his daughter in San Francisco and visited Apple's flagship store on Stockton Street. "He bought an iPod touch that he was infatuated with," says Magosky. "When he was there, he talked to the business team. They convinced him there was nothing we needed to do now that we couldn't do with them [Apple]."

Before long, Magosky set about switching her entire shop over to Macs. Since Jaffe Associates serves the legal industry, which makes wide use of Microsoft software, Jaffe began using Office 2008 for Macs. The company also chose Apple's Kerio software for e-mail, Entourage for archiving, and Apple's Xserve server for back-end storage of data. Magosky predicts that Jaffe will realize a savings of 50 percent in maintenance costs due to the Apple switch, which will pay for the hardware and implementation of Apple products in the first year, she says.

Third-party Mac support, by the hour, remains more costly than Windows support. But, Magosky says, her total amount of required support time has dropped so substantially that she's gaining that 50 percent in savings.

"It's going to increase the efficiency of our staff tremendously," she says. "On top of the hard dollar savings, it's going to free me up to do other, more value-added things." What about those cool iPhones? While Jaffe's users primarily use RIM BlackBerry devices for mobile needs, Magosky says that she might consider iPhones down the road, if enough users call for them.

Hurdles remain
Ditching PCs at a 25-person company is one thing. But introducing Apple to a large enterprise with legacy systems is quite another. Even some enterprises who've been managing mixed Mac and PC environments for years say that Apple still has some work to do.

Rob Israel, manager of desktop support at Digitas, a New York-based ad agency, says that 30 percent of his company runs Macs. Israel, who manages some 600 Macs across the enterprise, says that a hybrid environment of Macs and Windows can have its pitfalls, technologically and culturally.

"We barely deploy Apple servers here even though the culture has become Macintosh friendly," he says. "There is still a sense in the IT department that we are a Windows shop, and why bother complicating things by introducing more platforms."

The IT shop runs four Apple Xserves, one of which is used to host Filemaker Pro.

While Israel describes the company's relationship with Apple in terms of contracts as "great," the arrangement leaves some things to be desired, he says. "Apple does not provide technology roadmaps, which enterprise IT departments obviously need," he says. "What's worse, they make their hardware incompatible with the previous version of the operating system, and their schedule is impossible to keep up with."

For instance, Israel says Digitas can't deploy new versions of Leopard, Mac's operating system, as quickly as Apple demands. Every time Apple moves to the next version of an OS, Israel says, Digitas ends up having six months where they're forced to buy out-of-date equipment to stay compatible with the old OS. "We have complained about this for the last four years," he explains. "They [Apple] do not have any motivation to design their new hardware to support an old OS, so they won't."

Not quite a tipping point
Apple's buzz could hardly be louder. But have we now reached a time when many large enterprises can consider doing a rip and replace, swapping PCs for Macs? Not likely, says Kay.

Even if a progressive CIO who felt his or her company had sunk too much money into Windows wanted to switch wholesale, gaining the initial capital to get the job done, especially as the economy tightens, could be difficult, he says. "It's hard to see a time when you can change the paradigm that much for computing," Kay says.

For now, the iPhone might just be the starting point where businesses dip their toes in the Apple pool to see if the enterprise experience improves.

At New York Media (publishers of New York magazine and NYMag.com), Albert C. Lee, director of IT, says he has used Macs for some employees in the organization but has run into problems with service-level agreements. But that's not going to stop him from potentially adding iPhones to the enterprise when it the capability to access e-mail from a Microsoft Exchange server becomes possible in June.

"A good majority of our enterprise users already have an iPhone for a personal communications device," he says. "The idea of empowering a large population of your corporate users with enterprise push e-mail and remote calendar management, especially when they had none before, is pretty attractive."

NJ teen untethers iPhone from AT n T network

A 17-year-old hacker has broken the lock that ties Apple Inc.'s iPhone to ATnT's wireless network, freeing the most hyped cellphone ever for use on the networks of other carriers, including overseas ones.George Hotz of Glen Rock, N.J., confirmed Friday that he had unlocked an iPhone and was using it on T-Mobile's network, the only major U.S. carrier apart from AT&T that is compatible with the iPhone's cellular technology. In a video posted to his blog, he holds an iPhone that displays T-Mobile as the carrier.Although the possibility of switching from AT&T to T-Mobile may not be a major development for U.S. consumers, it opens up the iPhone for use on the networks of overseas carriers.The phone, which combines an innovative touch-screen interface with the media-playing abilities of the iPod, is sold only in the U.S.ATnT Inc. spokesman Mark Siegel said the company had no comment and referred questions to Apple. A call to Apple was not immediately returned. Hotz said the companies had not been in touch with him.The hack, which Hotz posted Thursday on his blog, is complicated and requires skill with both soldering and software. It takes him about two hours to perform. Because the details are public, it seems likely that a small industry may spring up to buy U.S. iPhones, unlock them and send them overseas."That's exactly, like, what I don't want," Hotz said. "I don't want people making money off this."He said he wished he could make the instructions simpler, so users could modify the phones themselves."But that's the simplest I could make them," Hotz said. The iPhone has already been made to work on overseas networks using another method, which involves copying information from the Subscriber Identity Module, a small card with a chip that identifies a subscriber to the cellphone network.The SIM-chip method does not require any soldering, but does requires special equipment, and it doesn't unlock the phone; each new SIM chip has to be reprogrammed for use on a particular iPhone.Apple may be able to modify the iPhone production line to make new phones invulnerable. The company has said it plans to introduce the phone in Europe this year but it hasn't set a date or identified carriers.