Archive for the 'iPhone' category

Opera just announced that, while they are not the larger player in the browser field, they cornered a nice piece of turf: 100 million users of Opera (about 50 millions on the Desktop, and a 50 million chunk on the mobile phone).

This impressive position in the mobile phone market is probably going to get a serious boost with the other announcement from Opera: Apple just approved the Opera free browser on iTunes for application on the iPhone. Up to now, the iPhone user had no other choice than Safari (from Apple), but it seems that the competition will now be open with Opera mini which is generally considered as the best mobile browser (at least on the Windows-based phones).

I started to test it as early as this morning on my own iPhone 3G-S and I can tell you: it feels great.

• Installation and configuration in a whizzzz (near instantaneous (including the synchronization of bookmarks and Speed Dial with my Opera on PC Win7)
• Overall feeling: Very fast browser, a little jumpy. Sometimes, it even feels more nervous than most iPhone applications, but the operating mode is still 100% consistent with the rest of the iPhone apps, so it feels right)
• Screen surface well used and very good rendition of all the web sites I could rush to.

Highly recommended up to now.

All phones are not born equal. Some people seem to believe that the iPhone has a marvelous touch panel. But is this pure marketing BS? Is it Apple fans going overboard? MOTO, a small company supporting the development of high-tech gadgets and products, has created a (rather simple) test to check the precision and comfort of touch panels. It’s very easy: The tester will just draw simple lines on the screen and the software will display what the phone has recognized. Long lines drawn at an angle on the screen should display as such: Long lines.

Then, you apply that to a set of high-end phones: iPhone, HTC Droid Eris, Motorola Droid, Google Nexus One (the most prominent product on this mobile market). Of course, there is a difference if you press very lightly or if you push significantly on the screen with your finger.

Light finger touch

Light pressure

Medium pressure

Medium pressure

All in all, it seems quite obvious that the iPhone has a strong advance in terms of sensitivity (light touch) while the HTC and Nexus One (HTC apparently designed this phone for Google) are quite good if you accept to press a little more.

So, Apple is not only marketing the iPhone through the roof; They also have a very good product and this explains (in part, at least) that the customers are so happy with the man-machine interface.
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In the recent Black Hat conference, it has been revealed that the iPhone/iPod OS 3.0 had a severe vulnerability to hackers. A series of SMS messages could be used to get full access to your phone. Apple issued a revision of the OS that you can download from iTunes: rev 3.0.1.