GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

The iPhone takes some great pictures, but when it comes to organizing and, well, doing anything else with those photos, it sucks. LateNiteSoft aims to patch at least one gaping hole with Lab, a detailed photo-viewer for iOS.

Lab tells you everything you want to know about a picture, and it does it with a gorgeous interface that makes it easy to use. Fire it up and you see all the photos in your library (album support is “coming soon”). Tap a photo and you get an almost full-screen view, along with the date the photo was snapped, how many megapixels the camera had, and the file size.

Hit the big “i” button and you get the juicier bits. The photo sits at the top of the screen, like a Polaroid on a clothesline, and the info is arrayed beneath. You get the time and date, the kind of camera, the size in pixels (along with the size info from the previous screen). If the photo has GPS coordinates embedded within, then its position is shown on a map, and below that is a histogram. Finally, exposure information sits at the bottom (ISO, -number and shutter-speed).

While this is obviously best used on an iPhone, it works equally well on an iPad. The interface is pixel-doubled (and looks fine for it) but the photos are displayed at their proper resolution. The app didn’t do a great job of pulling the metadata out of my photos, though, but that’s more a problem with other apps, and iOS itself, which strips the metadata from pictures: an iPhone 4 HDR, for example, sent full-size from a friend, doesn’t give up much. The sizes and histogram always work, though (the histogram is generated in-app from the photo itself, it seems), as does anything pulled in via the camera connection kit.

LateNiteSoft is also responsible for the great Sketches app for iPhone and iPad.

Lab costs just $1.

Lab product page [iTunes]

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My HTC Evo, a traveling journalist’s workhorse, got me busted in open court.

It was the first day of the Xbox modding trial in Los Angeles last week, which I was covering for Wired.com. The reason wasn’t that the phone’s ringer sounded in federal court — I’ve been in too many courtrooms to make that mistake.

Blame it on my Evo’s Wi-Fi hotspot, which prompted U.S. District Judge Philip Gutierrez to suddenly halt proceedings in the first-of-it’s kind hacking trial.

From the bench, in the afternoon on Day No. 1 of the trial, the judge asked me to rise and state my name. After seeing my hotspot (with the perhaps-suspicious ID of “gethacked”) show up on his computer at the bench, the judge demanded to know whether I was transmitting a signal.

I pleaded guilty.

He ordered me to turn it off, but allowed me to use my MacBook Pro offline for “note taking” purposes, which came in handy the following day when Judge Gutierrez went on a 30-minute tirade bagging on the prosecution’s case, which ultimately was dismissed.

Normally, one must ask permission to use a computer from the gallery. I gambled. The payout was that I learned about one of the Evo’s few flaws: Its blazing-fast, 4G Wi-Fi hotspot cannot be made invisible. Despite that flaw, and after months using an unrooted Evo, my jailbroken iPhone seems so yesterday.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m still a member of the “Cult of Mac.” My Apple fanboyishness includes an iPad, a 13-inch Macbook Pro, a 27-inch iMac, and I’m a heavy iTunes software user.

But consider:

• The Evo, carried by Sprint, is a phone that actually makes and receives clear calls.
• I can use it as a removable storage device as easily as a USB stick.
• It’s big, thick and heavy, just the way a phone should be.
• It’s a data-hog of a mini computer that surfs the internet at amazing speeds.
• The password-protected Wi-Fi signal it emits is killer, and it only takes the press of a button to turn it on.

In my Los Angeles hotel room, the Evo became my media hub last week.

I had a great Wi-Fi signal, thanks to the Evo, to which I attached my MacBook Pro and iPad. There was a crystal-clear Bluetooth connection to my cyborg-like phone earpiece and, again, the call quality was superb. And when I wasn’t on a call, the phone’s speaker was blaring Eminem.

James Merithew, Wired.com’s photo editor, laughed at the mug shot I took of defendant Matthew Crippen using my Evo. (Technically, it’s illegal to take photos in a federal courthouse, so I snapped a few shots in a hurry after hustling Crippen over to a poorly lighted corner.) But with a little touching up, the photo was presentable enough for publication. Take that, Mr. Merithew!

The only thing the Evo didn’t do for me was dispense beer.

Trust me, I had that angle covered.

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The iPhone uses a lot of power. Whether the battery is too small or we just feel compelled to play with it more than with other devices doesn’t matter. What matters is that half way through the day, you can find yourself with a dead phone. Tjeerd Veenhoven decided to do something about it, and instead of just, you know, plugging the thing in, he made the iFan.

Fashioned from an old computer cooling fan and a bumper-style case to house the electronics, Veenhoven’s iFan charges the iPhone fully in six-hours. Sure, that’s a lot longer than using a power adapter, but it’s also a lot less than I would have expected. He plans to cut that time with a more efficient fan.

Best of all are Veenhoven’s usage scenarios, which involve catching the wind while “sun bathing at the beach, doing walking trips in the mountains or just holding it outside your car window while driving along”

That last one gives me a great idea: Attach this to your dog’s collar and take a road trip. What could possibly go wrong?

iFan, charge your phone with wind [Tjeerd Veenhoven]

Photo: Tjeerd Veenhoven

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Peel is a very clever universal remote for your iPhone, combining hardware and software to both clear the mess off your coffee-table and recommend shows.

It works like this. The app, free from the App Store, provides a customized TV guide based on your favorite shows (you need to tell the app which shows you like). Pull up the main screen and you can flip through the night’s time slots and see only shows that you’ll like and that are available to you. And if you really like something, you can tweet it or share on Facebook direct from the app.

But that’s not all. Touch the show you want to watch and the hardware part takes over. A small puck sits on the table, beaming instructions to your cable-box. And a second dongle plugs right into an Ethernet port on your Wi-Fi router. These two talk to each other using the wireless Zigbee protocol and allow you to control the TV via Wi-Fi.

The app will also learn from your habits to fine-tune its suggestions. Support right now is limited to cable-boxes, TVs, DVD and Blu-ray boxes, but soon updates will let you use it with the Apple TV, Roku, Tivo and home theater receivers. The Peel will be on sale in a few weeks, and the price will be determined by the offers that prospective customers make.

Peel product page [Peel]

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A high school coach claims that a first-aid app on his iPhone helped him save a basketball player’s life.

Can’t say we haven’t heard this story before.

Xavier Jones, 17-year-old basketball player at Verne Lutheran High School, stumbled when attempting to receive a pass, and his heart stopped beating.

Eric Cooper, coach of the basketball team, said he had downloaded a $2 iPhone app Phone Aid last week to brush up on CPR. Thanks to the app’s refresher, he was able to successfully administer CPR to Jones to save his life, according to LA Times.

“It was really fresh and clear in my brain,” he said. “We are trained in CPR, but the iPhone app was a stabilizer for us.”

This story is extremely similar to that of Dan Woolley, who used an iPhone first-aid app to help him treat his wounds and ultimately survive the Haiti earthquake in January. Woolley gave Wired.com a closer look at the tech he used until a rescue team dug him out of the rubble. Incidents like these highlight the implications of having data seamlessly integrated into our everyday lives through apps and versatile devices we carry everywhere, such as the iPhone.

Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com

Brian is a Wired.com technology reporter focusing on Apple and Microsoft. He’s also writing a book about the always-connected mobile future called Always On (publishing April 2011 by Da Capo).
Follow @bxchen and @gadgetlab on Twitter.

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The iFlash not a battery-sucking, CPU-choking browser plugin. Instead, it’s an LED lamp that plugs into the dock-connector of any iPhone or iPod and provides a “flash” for your photos.

It’s self-powered, so you won’t drain your battery, and you’ll have to switch it on and off manually, making the dock-connector little more than a mounting point for the light. And that’s not the only hole it will fill on the iPhone: a little plastic jack-plug will let you dangle the dongle from the iPhone’s headphone socket when not in use.

I’d probably avoid this particular gadget, though. If you’re going to add light to your photos, why go to all the bother of buying an expensive light and then just stick the thing right near the lens, where it will give you the same harsh shadows you get from any light so close to the lens. It’s like buying an SB900 strobe for your Nikon and then sitting it in the camera’s hot-shoe. No, better to just take the $40 this widget will cost you and buy a decent LED flashlight.

iFlash Product Page [Gadgets and Gear via Oh Gizmo]

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Rumors are buzzing about an impending Windows Phone 7 software update that will bring Microsoft’s new mobile OS up to speed with the iPhone.

While we like Windows Phone 7, it seems highly unlikely that it will catch up to the iPhone quite that fast.

Tech blog WP Central quotes Chris Walsh, who worked on an early jailbreak-like hack for Windows Phone 7 called Chevron WP7, claiming that in January 2011, Windows Phone 7 will get a “massive” software update that’s worthy of being called Windows Phone 8.

“MS took 3 months to do what Apple did in 3 years,” Walsh tweeted.

Walsh claims the update will introduce Bing turn-to-turn GPS navigation, custom ringtone support, copy-and-paste and some form of multitasking.

While I believe Windows Phone 7 will soon gain these features, that hardly sounds like a massive update to me. The only major new feature would be multitasking; custom ringtones I’d file under “meh,” turn-by-turn navigation is a thumbs-up but hardly mindblowing, and copy-and-paste is yes, an important tool, but not that big: Android has only partial support for copy-and-paste, and that hasn’t stopped it from becoming the most popular smartphone operating system.

Furthermore, to say such an upgrade would “do what Apple did in 3 years” is an incredible overstatement. To catch up with the iPhone, Windows Phone 7 devices would also need front-facing cameras, something comparable to AirPlay to stream video onto a TV box, and more — not to mention 300,000 third-party apps. Windows Phone 7 is just a month old; it’s got a lot of catching up to do, and it would take a few miracles for the platform to be up to speed with the iPhone by January.

Microsoft declined to comment.

Rather than rush out new features, I think Microsoft is probably prioritizing getting Verizon to hop on board with Windows Phone 7 a move that would boost its growth to compete with its more direct rival: Google Android. I’d place a bet on CDMA Windows Phone 7 handsets arriving before we see devices up to par with the iPhone.

Photo of Windows Phone 7 devices running software tests in a server rack: Mike Kane/Wired.com

Brian is a Wired.com technology reporter focusing on Apple and Microsoft. He’s also writing a book about the always-connected mobile future called Always On (publishing April 2011 by Da Capo).
Follow @bxchen and @gadgetlab on Twitter.

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Apple banned an iPhone magazine app because it contained content related to using Android phones, according to the app’s creator.

Apple refused to approve the magazine Android Magasinet, a publication about Google’s Android OS, according to Brian Dixen, managing editor of Danish magazine publisher Mediaprovider.

Dixen said when he asked why, an Apple executive replied, “You know… your magazine… it’s just about Android…. we can’t have that in our App Store.”

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

File this under “trivial” for now, because it’s questionable why an iPhone owner would want to read an Android magazine in the first place. However, Dixen said he’s concerned about the implications that this incident poses about editorial independence in the App Store. I’d agree the implications are more concerning than the end result: As I’ve argued before, the issue of Apple’s editorial control is poised to grow as the iPad matures into a major publishing platform.

From Fortune

Photo: laihiu/Flickr

Brian is a Wired.com technology reporter focusing on Apple and Microsoft. He’s also writing a book about the always-connected mobile future called Always On (publishing April 2011 by Da Capo).
Follow @bxchen and @gadgetlab on Twitter.

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Apple last week rolled out a major update for its mobile operating system iOS 4, and among the new features is a nifty free tool: Find My iPhone.

As its name suggests, Find My iPhone is a tracking feature to locate a missing iPhone 4, iPad or fourth-generation iPod Touch. (Only the latest models get the free feature.) If you’ve dropped your iDevice in a cab, or if someone’s stolen it, you can hop on a computer to follow the GPS coordinates of the iPhone on a Google map (see above).

Or, if you’re just absent-minded like me and you misplace your iPhone as often as you lose your keys, you can use your computer to trigger a beeping sound to help you find it. It should be loud enough to hear from under a couch cushion. (You’ll never have to bug a friend to call your phone again.)

If you do indeed think your iPhone is in the hands of a thief, you can use Find My iPhone to remotely lock the device or wipe the data. (Do note, however, that a clever thief could just remove the SIM card, and you wouldn’t be able to track or wipe the phone.)

Of the many new features in iOS 4.2.1, I found this one to be one of the sweetest bonuses. Find My iPhone originally was only available as part of a MobileMe subscription, which costs $10 per month. Making it free was a nice move on Apple’s part: An iPhone can potentially contain a treasure trove of personal information, so losing one is a big deal.

You need to activate Find My iPhone before you lose your phone, so do it now. Since the steps to turn this useful feature on aren’t immediately obvious, here’s how to do it:

1. Make sure you have the latest iOS update (iOS 4.2.1) installed. Plug in your iPhone and click “Check for updates” in iTunes to get the software.

2. With iOS 4.2.1 installed, tap the Settings app on your iPhone. Then tap “Mail, Contacts, Calendars” and “Add Account.”

3. In the account menu, enter your iTunes or Apple ID and password (i.e., the login you use to buy iTunes media on the iPhone).

4. The “Find My iPhone” option should appear. Slide it to “ON” to activate it.”

And you’re done! From here on, you can hop on a computer and enter www.me.com in a web browser. Then enter the same login credentials you used to register for Find My iPhone, and you’ll immediately get a GPS reading of the phone, along with a simple menu of buttons allowing you to lock, wipe, or send a message or sound to the iPhone.

Brian is a Wired.com technology reporter focusing on Apple and Microsoft. He’s also writing a book about the always-connected mobile future called Always On (publishing April 2011 by Da Capo).
Follow @bxchen and @gadgetlab on Twitter.

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iPad owners have had less than a week with iOS 4, but a software update offering news and magazine subscriptions targeted at them could arrive in less than a month.

Daring Fireball’s John Gruber reports that Apple’s Steve Jobs will join News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch on stage at a December 9th event to announce Murdoch’s new forthcoming tablet newspaper, The Daily. According to Gruber’s sources, The Daily will be an app in the App Store, but make use of new recurring subscription billing on users’ iTunes accounts, and “developers at News Corp building the app already have preliminary documentation on the new subscription billing APIs from Apple.”

Macstories’ Federico Viticci reports further that recurring subscriptions are part of a new version of iOS — iOS 4.3 — with a scheduled release date of December 13.

According to Viticci’s sources, iOS 4.3 wasn’t intended to be released so quickly after 4.2.1, which was originally internally slated for an early November release. It’s possible that 4.2.1’s later official release might also push back the release of 4.3. But with Apple playing such a large role in the release of The Daily, both companies may stick with mid-December announcement and releases after all.

Subscription-based recurring billing would likely increase the number of paid magazine, newspaper, TV, video and other media applications on iTunes. Really, any application that depends on continuous content or service delivery could introduce a subscription model: online gaming, data backup, GPS, office applications and more. Many subscription-based services already have iOS apps, but have to establish accounts and recurring billing separately from iTunes.

Another technical challenge posed by subscriptions that could require an OS update is automatic background content delivery. If you’re being billed automatically every week for a newspaper or magazine, you shouldn’t have to go through a long, complicated routine just to download a new issue.

A final open question: how much customer information will Apple and app/content makers share with each other about their subscribers? This data has value, too — as does customers’ privacy.

Image by Apple.

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Amazon has figured out a way to advertise its own products is everyone else’s stores, using a clever application that leverages the key features of smartphones — in particular, Apple’s latest iPhones.

Price Check for iPhone initially doesn’t seem very different from Amazon’s well-established, multiplatform “shopping cart” frontend, which has always allowed users to check prices and buy products on the go. The difference is the variety and speed of inputs you can use to find items in the store, which make the app particularly well-suited for in-store holiday comparison shopping.

• Say It brings up a picture of a microphone with an “I’m listening” message. Speak the product’s name into the smartphone mic, and Amazon will try to find it. The speech recognition is a little iffy, and obviously homophones give it some trouble (my search for “Kinect” brought up “Connect Four”), but it’s generally pretty good.
• Snap It opens up your iPhone’s camera, along with a textual reminder that the service “works best in good light with a book, DVD, CD, or video game” — in short, media objects with well-established cover art that Amazon can try to match in its database (and Amazon says it’s steadily increasing the size and variety of this database). “Snap It” worked extraordinarily well with every book I tried in the decidedly poor light of my office.
• Scan It is particularly powerful, since it can use a product’s barcode to find a unique copy: it won’t confuse hardbacks with paperbacks, or widescreen and fullscreen copies of a DVD. But it requires an autofocusing camera to get high-quality resolution on the barcode — which means iPhone 4 or 3GS. My iPhone 3G has the “Scan It” button grayed out; if I click it, I get a short, apologetic notice that my non-autofocusing camera can’t scan a barcode, at least up to the standards of Amazon’s new app.

Finally, you can also type in a product’s name in the “Type It” box at the top. Once you’ve found an item, you can browse specs and reviews, or share the price over email, Facebook or Twitter, or narrow the stores between Amazon and its partners (the “Prime” compatible button is quite nice.)

There’s also a handy list of “Recent Price Checks,” so you can keep track of products you’ve scanned, and a shopping cart, so you can buy products from Amazon directly. You can’t access your own wish list, which skews the app towards impulse buys or holiday shopping for other people.

When the app was first announced, I was confused; why was Amazon launching yet another shopping application for iOS? There’s the old standby Amazon.com, the Windowshop App for iPad and now PriceCheck? Did customers really need a whole page (or in iOS 4, a folder) devoted just to apps for Amazon?

Now I think I understand the strategy much better. Each Amazon application capitalizes on the unique hardware and anthropology of the device. Windowshop is a browsing catalog, suited to the full-sized screen and laid-back posture of the iPad. Even the name suggests voyeurism and fantasy. Price Check is mobile, pulling in camera, voice and autofocus to make something you can whip out of your pocket to make a snap decision while the Black Friday hordes crowd in around you.

Different devices, different scenarios, different shopping experiences — but all of them funneling you to just one store, up in the cloud. Smart. Now I wonder when and if other platforms (Android, Blackberry, etc.) will get their chance to play with similar new toys.




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This post was written by Journalist on November 23, 2010

Tags: 'Apple Store' Application: Buy an iPhone with Your iPhone, Amazon, Amazon iPhone App Adds Barcode Scanning, Amazon Shows Off Kindle for iPad, Amazon's iPhone App Remembers So You Don't Have to, Amazon's Price Check Might Be Perfect Smartphone Shopping App, iOS, iPad, iPhone, iPhone App Digitizes Brick-and-Mortar Coupons, Price Check, Tablet Catalogs Rethink Casual Page-Flipping, Windowshop

I’m not sure what’s my favorite part of this GPS-dongle for cars. Maybe its that it makes it impossible to misplace your car, or perhaps it is that fact that it’s called the AutoBot, clearly the most Transformer-tastic name for a car accessory ever.

Hooking into the car’s on-board diagnostic brain via an OBD-II-port, the AutoBot works with a partner-app in your Android phone or iPhone. From here you can get walking directions to the car, or tap into the diagnostics for in-depth info on what’s happening under the hood.

Even better, the dongle will also let you track a stolen car (or sound an alarm when your kids drive to the local make-out spot instead of going to music lessons), and will send your location to both family members and 911 should your airbags deploy. The AutoBot will be in stores early next year for “less than $300″.

There is one catch. The monthly service comes in exchange for spam. If you don’t pay to opt-out, you’ll get “offers” based on what it going on with your car. Ominously, “AutoBot knows when you need an oil change, tires rotated, and how many miles you’ve driven,” and will “share this information with our partners.” No thanks.

AutoBot product page [Mavizon Tech via The Giz]

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RIM has released a video pitching the upcoming PlayBook tablet against the current iPad, and it’s pretty impressive. Clearly the tests were chosen to favor RIM’s own device, but even so, it beats the iPad handily in each one.

Loading a regular webpage, for example, sees the PlayBook finished with everything, rendering and all, while the iPad still ticks along. Next, it’s on to Flash, which the iPad doesn’t do at all. Smartly, RIM chose to use a non-video serving site (in this case Adidas) as most video providers offer iPad-compatible streams as an alternative to Adobe’s proprietary plugin. Even so, the animation on the Flash site stutters noticeably (this is probably Flash’s fault, not the PlayBook’s).

Then we move to Javascript and HTML5, and while the example shown clearly favors the PlayBook, there are plenty of sites where the iPad works great.

Still, the raw rendering speed of the PlayBook’s browser is obvious, and the Flash support will make it useful for browsing restaurant websites on the go (why do all restaurant sites use Flash?). RIM must be proud. It must also be aware that the PlayBook won’t be out until next year, when it will be up against the iPad 2, not the current iPad.

BlackBerry PlayBook and iPad Comparison: Web Fidelity [Blackberry YouTube Channel]

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If it seems like a lot more than a year that Google Voice has been languishing in the limbo between Google’s labs and the iTunes App Store, that’s because it is. Google’s one-phone-number-everywhere service served as the best example of Apple’s byzantine and opaque app “approval” process.

Now, Google Voice is back, and available as a free download for U.S iPhone owners. With it, you can all but replace the iPhone’s phone app, receiving push notifications for incoming texts and voicemails, read (often hilariously inaccurate) transcripts of those voicemails and make calls to contacts in the iPhone’s built-in address book. Your caller Google Voice caller ID is even shown to people you call.

This is really the last step in Google-fying your iPhone – Gmail has long been a first-class iPhone citizen, and the maps app is powered by Google.

Why use Google Voice? The service lets you assign all your phones to one number, be they mobile, home or office. Callers call this number but you choose where you answer, and you have fine-grained control over how incoming calls and texts are handled.

Calls are still routed over the regular cell network. As our own Brian Chen pointed out back in January, Google Voice isn’t VoIP: it uses the iPhone’s telephone app to place calls. Tell this to the metric-ton of commenters on the App Store who are complaining that the app won’t work on the iPod Touch.

So there we have it. Apple is finally “open”. Or at least those who like to complain that Apple is “closed” (by not supporting proprietary, inefficient and badly-coded browser plugins, say) have now lost their best weapon.

For more coverage, and a history of the Google Voice app, see this great post from our sister blog, Epicenter.

Google Voice [App Store]

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Most of your friends are on Facebook, only the nerdiest of them are on Twitter and your professional colleagues are on LinkedIn. Stalking everybody by checking all these sites can be a colossal waste of time.

Enter the Friends app from Taptivate, who developed the beautiful Postman app I covered previously. Friends takes your contacts from different services Facebook, Twitter, MySpace (whoever’s on there anymore) and LinkedIn and shoves them all into one tidy list.

If I were to select my friend Phill from the list, for example, I’d be able to tap a tab to check his Twitter feed, a different tab to check his Facebook stream and another tab to dial his phone. Check out the video below to get a visual sense of what I mean.

Friends from Oliver Cameron on Vimeo.

Friends isn’t out yet in the App Store, but I had some hands-on time with an early build of the app. I enjoy the detail and simplicity of the design; I’m probably going to be using this app to quickly check on some people while riding the elevator or standing in line at a grocery store.

Taptivate expects to release Friends in a few weeks in the App Store. It will cost 2 bucks. Keep an eye out for this gem.

Product page [Taptivate]

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The glass iPhone 4 is more likely to slip out of your hand, eat the ground and break than other phones, according to a report.

A study by third-party warranty company SquareTrade tracked 50,000 phones over one year to analyze the accident report rates of different phones (that is, how likely each one is to fall to the ground or get spilled on), as well as their non-accident malfunction rates (i.e., how likely they are to fail on their own when they’re not dropped).

The iPhone 4 had the highest accident rate of 13.8 percent, but a reported non-accident malfunction rate of 2.1 percent, according to SquareTrade. That means the iPhone 4 is the most reliable phone over a year so long as you don’t drop it.

However, the iPhone 4’s higher accident rate is nothing to sneeze at. SquareTrade notes that 90 percent of the iPhone 4’s failures were due to accidental damage. So that means if you’re more likely to drop the iPhone 4 than other phones, it’s the most fragile handset.

Motorola and HTC phones were almost as accident-prone as the iPhone 4, both with an accident rate of 12.2 percent.

Bottom line: the more glass a device has, the more likely you are to drop it, and the more likely it is to break.

“The bigger issue for consumers is the vulnerability of phones to accidental damage, especially as the market evolves more and more to include large glass displays,” SquareTrade said in its study [pdf].

For comparison, BlackBerry smartphones had a 6.7-percent accident rate but a 6.3-percent malfunction rate suggesting they’re the least reliable because they’re more likely to fail on their own even if they’re not dropped.

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Yes, the iBend is yet another iPad stand, but this one is truly remarkable. Weighing in at around the same a sheet of card, and just about as thin, the iBend gains rigidity when it is bent into a curve.

The plastic iBendXL (the smaller iBend is for the iPhone) sips flat. You pull it out and bend it, producing two hooks at the front which grab the bottom edge of the iPad and a gentle curve at the back which creates a flat rest for the iPad to lean on. It reminds me of the fascinating models and diagrams in my old math classroom which showed variously truncated cones, cut by flat planes at different angles.

The iBendXL costs $10, and the smaller iBend is $5. Both are slim enough to be slipped betwixt the iDevice and whatever case contains it, and should be tough enough to last a good long time. What this stand really suggest, though, is a DIY project. I doubt the iBend folks are going to put up a printable PDF template anytime soon, but a rainy afternoon spent with some scissors, card and a French curve should get you pretty close. Available now, in plain colors or in fancy arted-up designs.

iBend product page [iBend. Thanks, Rishi!]

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With the iPad’s 9.5-inch screen, who needs an iPhone?

Indeed, after six months of using a tablet, I’m ready to ditch my smartphone for something simpler and more reliable.

The phone I want is a feature phone with a 3G connection and the ability to create a Wi-Fi hotspot for tethering my devices to it.

It should have long battery life, be able to grab and hold on to a voice signal with the tenacity of a bear trap, and be compact yet ruggedly durable.

It could even have an E Ink screen for super low battery consumption. Who cares if the screen is low resolution and has a one-second refresh rate, if all you’re using it for is looking at the occasional text message? (Thanks for the suggestion, Tim!)

The result would be a device I could use for phone conversations and basic texting. Mostly, though, it would supply internet connectivity to my other gadgets. I’d use an iPad or my laptop for e-mail, reading articles on the web, composing blog posts, Twitter, and in short everything else.

Basically I want something like the Nokia 3595 I used for years, before getting a first-gen iPhone, except with the addition of 3G data and Wi-Fi tethering.

After six months of semi-regularly using Apple’s tablet, I’m growing increasingly disenchanted with even the iPhone 4’s high-resolution “retina” display. The thing is just too small to use comfortably.

The more I read on my iPhone, the more sad and tired I get. Bending my neck to stare at a tiny, smaller-than-index-card-sized glowing screen a foot or so in front of my face makes me feel as if my world has shrunk to the size of a playing card.

With the iPad, by contrast, I feel like I’m reading a book. It’s too heavy to hold comfortably for extended periods, but I can prop it up in comfortable positions or slouch with it on my lap. I feel more a part of the world.

The iPhone has other problems, too. Don’t get me started on how often AT&T drops my calls or fails to give me a signal at all.

(And I refuse to get a 3G iPad, or pay extra for its month-to-month data service, no matter how good both are. I’m already paying for 3G data with my phone’s plan — why do I need to buy a second data plan?)

I’ve jailbroken the iPhone and am using the amazing app MyWi to give it Wi-Fi tethering capabilities, so whenever I have a signal, it can feed it to my iPad or laptop. That’s a step in the right direction.

I tried the same thing with a Nexus One awhile back, and that worked, too.

Unfortunately, the Nexus One and the iPhone, like all smartphones, are still too big and fragile. I don’t know of any feature phones that offer 3G and tethering.

Now if only I had something durable and compact, with long battery life, that did the same thing.

Is my ideal phone out there? Let me know if I’m overlooking something obvious. I’d love to be proven wrong on this one.

Photo: Jonathan Snyder / Wired.com

Follow us for real-time tech news: Dylan Tweney and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Dylan edits Wired.com’s Gadget Lab blog, and likes to write about technology, science, gadgets, and their impact on society and culture. Follow @dylan20 on Twitter

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The WOWKeys keyboard from Omnio, an Apple-certified iPhone dock, manages to beat out Apple’s own offerings in almost every way. The keyboard features a bay on the right-side, where a number-pad would usually sit, into which your iPhone slides. From there, you can proceed in two ways.

First, and most obvious, is that you now have a hardware keyboard for your iPhone, giving you an iOS version of Asus’ Eee keyboard, only for $100 instead of $600 (not including the iPhone, of course). There are a slew of special keys dedicated to the iPhone, including volume, display-off,brightness, media keys, keyboard toggle and a home-screen button. Even Apple’s own Bluetooth keyboard can manage all those.

The second option is to hook this up to a Mac or PC (via USB-cable) and let the iPhone take on some extra duties. Coupled with any of a number of third-party apps, you can turn the iPhone into a trackpad, number-pad or full-on remote for your computer. You could of course do this without the WOWKeys, but locking the trackpad to the keyboard makes sense, and it’ll also charge the iPhone as you use it. Flipping between these two modes is done by toggling a switch.

The WOWKeys should be available in Korea soon for the equivalent of $105. Start harassing your friendly, neighborhood gray-importer now.

IPhone PC keyboards and fusion [AVING via the Engadget]

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Filmmaker George Clarke recently discovered a clip that some people believe is evidence of time travel.

It appears in the DVD extras from Chaplin’s The Circus, and shows a woman in the background using what appears to be a cellphone. Since the footage was shot in 1928, that’s an anachronism to say the least.

The discovery excited not just the blogosphere, who are ready to gawk at and dismiss anything the least bit interesting, but news-hungry cable TV, which presented it as news with about as much journalistic scrutiny as Ron Burgundy gave the water-skiing squirrel in Anchorman.

If it were a one-time thing, we’d chalk it up to a fluke. But we’ve seen this before. “Time Traveler Captured on Film” has graduated from meme to trope.

There’s something about the juncture of photography, consumer tech, history (near and far) and our readiness to believe in conspiracies, science fiction and the occult that leads us to fall for this shtick over and over again.

In this gallery, we’re going to examine purported physical evidence of time travel, or our belief in time travel. And our point of departure is the actor and filmmaker shown above in his classic Modern Times whose films are still tramping their way through our modern times.

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Software upgrades are supposed to fix things, but sometimes they do the opposite.

Disgruntled about the effects of an operating system update on her iPhone, a customer wants to battle Apple in court with a class-action suit.

San Diego resident Bianca Wofford last week filed a lawsuit seeking class-action status, alleging that Apple committed false advertising and unfair and deceptive business practices by encouraging iPhone 3G users to download iOS 4, the latest version of Apple’s mobile OS. Wofford claims that even though the iOS upgrade promises fixes and improvements, it made her second-generation iPhone unusable.

“The true fact of the matter … is that the iOS 4 is a substantial ‘downgrade’ for earlier iPhone devices and renders many of them virtually useless iBricks,” Wofford’s lawyers wrote in thecomplaint [pdf].

Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

Apple’s iOS operating system has received a major upgrade once a year, and the company has disclosed that some new features do not work with older handsets because they carry less memory or slower processors. When Apple announced iOS 4, it said that multitasking would not work on the second-generation iPhone, for example, but it would be supported on newer handsets. Also, Apple said iOS 4 was not compatible with the original iPhone at all — but it was supposed to work with the more recent iPhone 3G.

However, when iOS 4 shipped in the summer, some iPhone 3G customers complained that the update caused performance to become very sluggish. Months later at Apple’s Apple TV press conference, Steve Jobs said iOS 4.1 would address performance issues on the iPhone 3G. Some tests showed that iOS 4.1 improved the iPhone 3G’s performance only slightly.

In her complaint, Wofford claims that Apple was aware that iOS 4 would cause degraded performance on older iPhones, and she accused Apple of purposely creating an incentive for customers to purchase newer iPhones.

“Apple has falsely, intentionally and repeatedly represented to owners and consumers of the iPhone 3G that its new operating system for the device, iOS4, was of a nature, quality, and a significant upgrade for the functionality of all iPhone devices, when in fact, the installation and use of the iOS4 on iPhone 3G resulted in the opposite a device with little more use than that of a paper weight,” the complaint read.

Wofford’s suit, filed in the judicial district of the county of San Diego, requires approval from a judge to gain class-action status. If it became a class-action suit and won, Apple would likely be forced to pay damages to iPhone 3G customers.

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

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This is the Table Connect, a rather wonderful-looking hardware hack which connects an iPhone to a 58-inch capacitive multi-touch display, allowing full control of the iPhone’s navigation functions, only using hands instead of fingers.

Or is it? Look closely and you’ll see that the demo-guy presses the sleep-button on the top of the iPhone as he fires up the controller “app”. What you are actually seeing in the video, unless this is some weird kind of double-bluff, is some amazingly well rehearsed mime, in which the protagonists manage to match their movements up exactly with what is going on on-screen.

Distracted by the homo-erotic excitement of zooming in on an already oversized Sly Stallone by stroking his biceps with two hands, I almost fell for this one, so well is the trick executed. Is it a pre-recorded sequence, or is this really a live display piped from another jailbroken phone being controlled off-camera by a third stooge? We may never know.

If nothing else, the table itself is a beautiful piece of work, kind of high-tech meets 1950s diner-style. Good job, anonymous tricksters at Table Connect. Good job.

Table Connect for iPhone – video demo launch [Table Connect]

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Switch on the pocket-sized Tizi, pull out the antenna and fire up the companion app on your iPad or iPhone. Congratulations. You are now watching live TV.

Elgato’s EyeTV already lets you watch TV on your iDevice, but you need a computer to be switched on, near an antenna and running server software to do it. The Tizi is a tiny, standalone box that does all this for you. It is battery powered, for use both at home and on the move, and gives 3.5-hours of use on one charge. You can also hook it to any USB power-source to charge and power it.

How does it work? The Tizi pulls in local DVB-T/DT signals, decodes them using its ARM 9 processor and then sends them to your iPhone or iPad via Wi-Fi (802.11b/g). Yes, you’ll have to tune your iPad to this Wi-Fi network, but you can still stay connected to the internet via 3G if you have it.

A channel-guide helps you find what to watch, and during ads you can switch away to other apps but keep the audio running in the background so you know when to tune back in.

This looks like a great product. I don’t watch much TV, but I could hang this in the living room, which has a clear view of the sky, and beam signals to anywhere I like in the apartment. Neat.

The Tizi is available now for $150, and the companion app is in the App Store for free.

Tizi product page [Tizi. Thanks, anonymous Equinux mailing-list people!]

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Steve Jobs has successfully prevented Adobe Flash from getting on the iPhone for years, but a new iOS app promises to bring Flash video to the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch without upsetting the CEO.

Demonstrated below, Skyfire is a web browser that automatically transcodes Flash video into HTML5 so that it can be displayed on your iDevice (instead of the blue LEGO block symbolizing a lack of Flash support).

To our knowledge, Skyfire will be the first app of its kind to offer a roundabout method for watching Flash videos, when it goes live in the App Store this week.

Apple has prohibited Flash from running on iOS devices ever since the original iPhone launched in 2007. In an open letter published April, Jobs said that Flash was the No. 1 reason Macs crash, and he didn’t wish to reduce reliability on iOS products.In the same letter, Jobs vocalized his support for HTML5, a new web standard that does not rely on plug-ins.

“New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too),” Jobs said.

The Skyfire app only transcodes Flash videos into HTML5 not games. A Skyfire spokesman said the Skyfire app was developed with oversight and feedback from Apple.

“It adheres to every guideline put forth by Apple regarding HTML5 video playback for iOS,” the spokesman said. “Skyfire will allow consumers to play millions of Flash videos on Apple devices without the technical problems for which Jobs banned Flash.”

The app was submitted late August, and it will go live in the App Store on Thursday.

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Apple has released the “Gold Master” of iOS 4.2, and it is available for developers to download today. IOS 4.2 is the unifying version of iOS that will bring the same multitasking and UI features to all iDevices. This is most significant for the iPad, which has been waiting patiently for features that it is clearly desperate for. Apple has also asked developers to submit iOS 4.2 apps to the App Store.

“Gold Master” is software talk for “finished”. Barring any horrible last-minute discoveries, the GM is the same version that would, in the days of software on CD and DVD, be duplicated and then sent to stores. Apple promised iOS 4 for the iPad in November, which we took, as always with Apple, to mean the very last days of November. Could it be that it will be here sooner?

Aside from the multitasking and the folders which the iPad needs so much, the latest OS version brings a new multitask-bar, the little panel that is revealed with a double-tap on the home button:

Here you see that you have quick-access to volume and brightness (at last!) controls, as well as the standard music controls and a screen-orientation lock toggle. To the right of the media controls is the new AirPlay button. Press this and your media, be it audio or video, will then stream to compatible gear like the Airport Express or the new AppleTV. AirPlay, as well as AirPrint, will also come to the iPhone and iPod Touch with this update.

Apple Releases iOS 4.2 Golden Master to Developers [MacRumors Forums]

iOS 4.2 iPad sneak peek [Apple]

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