Simplify Media Mobile For iPhone Lets You Stream iTunes Libraries Over Wi-Fi

Simplify Media’s just released a new version of their Mobile suite for iPhone that lets you stream iTunes libraries from your friends across the internet. It works in much the same way the desktop version does. Load up Simplify Media on a desktop with a library that you want to share, then log into your Simplify Media Mobile on your iPhone (with Wi-Fi) and you can stream all of your and your friends’ music back over the air.

If you really want to stream on the go, without Wi-Fi, you could probably rig up a Wi-Fi internet connection sharing thing with a Windows Mobile phone as well.

We tested it over Wi-Fi and it streamed back all of Adam Pash’s songs without a problem (eventually). It crashed and hung the first couple times. [Simplify Media]

iPhone on the Road: a substitute for paper boarding passes

Filed under: iPod Family, Cult of Mac, iPhone

Some things sound really cool — until you actually have to step up and do them in real time. TUAW reader Gerald Buckley’s story about traveling with his iPhone strikes me as belonging to this class.

When he approached the American Airlines counter to use his iPhone as a boarding pass, the coolness quotient for his entire trip got bumped up several notches. It seems that he navigated over to AA.com using Mobile Safari, signed in and displayed a PDF of his boarding pass on-screen. The American Airlines counter agent in San Antonio “humored” him and scanned the barcode as displayed on his iPhone. The scan worked, and Buckley proceeded with his travels (much to the envy and amazement of his fellow passengers, no doubt).

Here’s the thing though. If it were me, this would have totally gone another way. First, while waiting on line, I would have had bad WiFi. It would have taken me about 20 minutes to type in my information and the people behind me on line would have been coughing *significantly* to get me to keep moving along with the line as I tried to type, move all my luggage and possibly keep three extremely rambunctious children in order. Finally, I would get to the gate agent and I would have gotten the snarky impatient version — somehow I always do. Assuming that I could even get all the typing and navigation done, I know in my heart that the response would have been “you need a printed boarding pass, ma’am.”

Of course, this is entirely academic because I have not been granted a boarding pass for the last 5 or 6 years due entirely, I’m sure, to my last name. It’s always “You must check in at the counter” — which is way easier than even a boarding pass because I just swipe my credit card.

All that having been said, TUAW congratulates Mr. Buckley’s ingenuity and offers the example of his experience to speed you your travels in a uniquely geek fashion.

If you’ve got the travel bug (with or without your iPhone), be sure to visit our sister site Gadling for all things flight-related.

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DLO VentMount iPhone Car Holder is Practical, Convenient

Using a car’s AC vents to hold cellphones is an old idea. Using a car’s AC vent to hold an iPhone so you can watch movies/Cover Flow your way through your music is a new idea. DLO’s VentMount seems like an incredibly practical way to keep your iPhone/iPod Touch within short reach, especially in cars (like ours) that don’t have a convenient cupholder location to shove it into. It’s not mindblowing, but it’s $24.99 we’d gladly spend for usability’s sake. [DLO]

Unclog your sync (between Safari and your iPhone)
Has Safari been naughty and stopped syncing your bookmarks with your iPhone? The culprit, it seems, is the recent Safari 3.1 update. Fortunately, the fix is in, direct from Apple. According to this Knowledge Base article, running the following command in Terminal should fix all your woes: defaults delete com.apple.safari…

Vegas Hearts
The card game of hearts, for your iPhone or iPod touch.http://www.tictacwhoa.com/hearts.html

French iPhone May Receive Price Cut. Jealous Rage Builds in Montreal
Apple is rumored to be in talks with Orange, France’s exclusive iPhone carrier, to cut pricing on iPhone in hopes of stimulating sales in that country. Since it first marched down the Champs Elys es four months ago, iPhone has been greeted with as much acceptance by French consumers as bad Camembert cheese - selling just […]

iPhone to Become Blu-Ray Player Remote

According to NetBlender, iPhone and iPod touch users will be able to control their Blu-ray players using an application called BD Touch. The application will use the network capabilities of Blu-ray hardware and Apple’s handheld devices to transfer data, allowing you to do many different things beyond controlling movie playback. Update: we have spoken with NetBlender about BD Touch. As we imagined, it requires more than just an iPhone application:

Update:
Denny Breitenfeld, the CTO of NetBlender, told us that it’s not a standalone application but a technology for professional Blu-Ray authoring tool combined with an SDK for iPhone developers:

It’s a technology that is built into our professional Blu-Ray authoring tool that will allow studios, independent movie companies to enable BD Touch features.

These features send data in two directions from the Disc to the Iphone and vice versa. Video, Audio, text, and player commands can be sent.

So right now it seems everyone likes the “remote control” idea. However the player can control the IPhone as well. One idea is to automatically pull up IMBD of the movie you are watching right on your Iphone or send the movie information a movie database on your phone. The ideas are only limited to what people want and will use.

We are releasing an SDK for the 100k Iphone developers out there so they can take advantage of BD Touch features to build applications that easily work with all kinds of titles.

According to NetBlender:

• The iPhone application will be able to interact directly with movies, showing extra information in the iPhone.
• It will also be able to keep a database of your movie collection.
• BD Touch will also be able to get digital copies of the movies inside the Blu-ray disc, presumably already encoded for iPod touch and iPhone playback.

The only problem we see with BD Touch is the quote they gave to MacWorld UK:

The sophisticated user interface of the iPhone enables greater user interaction as well as the power to leverage the iPhone’s existing network. Search, e-commerce and advertising possibilities related to movie content abound when one imagines real-time communication between the iPhone and the content currently being displayed on a Blu-ray player.

Possibility of buying/snatching a song while I’m listening to it in the movie soundtrack? Great. Advertising popping on my iPhone while I watch a movie? I was going to say “no thanks,” but I just stopped at the “why?”

We will see how it exactly works when it gets announced this Thursday. [Netblender via MacWorld]

Nokia to Apple: Blah Blah iPhone Killer Blah Blah You Suck

Nokia said they didn’t care about the iPhone back when it was introduced, not even commented on it beyond a brief “smeh.” Then, they presented their iPhone killer concept, a demo that looked and acted exactly like Apple’s handset, even while it was “no competition for Nokia.” Now they have announced they are “readying” the final product, code-named Tube. They showed it yesterday, while pooh-poohing on His Steveness’ toy:

“We’ve done that [volume] since we’ve had dinner on Friday.”

That SteveBallmerism was pulled out of his hat by Tom Libretto, vice president of Forum Nokia, talking about iPhone’s sales, apparently forgetting that taller giants have fallen after similar words. Specially when he is conveniently ignoring that Apple’s record volume is just one non-subsidized model that competes with your top of the line—handsets like the Nokia N95 and the N96—in just a handful of countries (and for the longest period of its lifetime, in only one market, which is not as big when it comes to mobiles like Europe or Asia.)

Now, it’s not that we don’t think Nokia’s Tube can’t be a great success or that Nokia is in a bad position at all. They are clearly the N mero Uno, without a doubt, and for all we know, Tube could be the best thing since either the iPhone itself or the Beamz. However, publicly smashing a newcomer, a still small and young player in the cellphone market, doesn’t give credibility to Nokia, as the incumbent player: it gives credibility to the new kid on the block, who doesn’t only look smarter and cooler to the general consumer, but now also looks like a clear and present danger to the Finnish company.

And while all that happens in a single quote, there’s just a slide to show about Tube and still no planned date for shipment. [Inforworld]

Ivyskin Xylo T2 Reflect Chrome iPhone Case == Touchscreen Your iPhone Through a Hard Shell

Putting an iPhone in a case is still not something I’d do or recommend as necessary, but if you must protect your precious, here’s a case that claims to protect your touchscreen with a layer of plastic, but also allow you to finger the lcd just the same. It, of course, involves some patent-pending tech which sounds like hocus pocus to me. Here’s what Mike Wissman, VP of Ops for Ivyskin, gave me as an explanation.

The case uses a patent pending design called Surface Xylo Wave (SXW) technology passes ultrasonic waves that pass over the touch screen panel and transfer them to the iPhone’s screen without any interferences. When the panel is touched, a portion of the wave is absorbed. This change in the ultrasonic waves registers the position of the touch event and sends this information to the iPhone’s screen for processing.

Anyone care to explain that explanation to me? [Ivyskin]

Apple, Best Buy partner in China; NPD on iPods; PayPal clarifies
Apple and speciality electronics retailer Best Buy have extended their partnership to the Far East. Meanwhile, the latest data from NPD suggests second-quarter iPod sales remained relatively flat. And PayPal now says that it does not intend to block …

501 Darts
Cannot get to the pub to play? No worries mate, MyNuMo has bought the classic 501 darts game to the iPhone. Players start with 501 points and throw three darts at a time to get to zero before their opponent beats them to it. 501 Darts features MyNuMos new “press to play” sports game system […]

Flickr Find: Lilliputian iPhone unboxing

Filed under: Flickr Find, iPhone

Like it or not, unboxing is a ritual for many Apple users, and when there’s a new product on the streets, Flickr is home to many Mac users’ latest acquisitions. We don’t feature unboxing photosets for no-longer-new products all that often here at TUAW, but upon seeing a photoset on Flickr from user ntr23 this morning we couldn’t help but share these frankly incredible unboxing shots of an iPhone.

Lego men abound in the set, with precision unboxing being captured (including ladders to help scale those heights) in a truly amazing set of shots. Yes, it’s Apple unboxing shots. But of all the unboxing shots we’ve seen here at TUAW, these have quite possibly captured our hearts as the best we’ve seen to date.

Be sure to check out ntr23’s full set on Flickr and admire these works of art.

[Via]

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Battleship Peer2Peer
The first p2p iPhone game out there, and it a classic we all know and love! http://www.teamtpfl.com/iPhone/

iPhone SDK Beta 3 Now Available

iPhone Devs should go grab the newest SDK release, which comes with a new tutorial and extends the beta 2.0 firmware. It also has various bug fixes and “support for the latest iPhone OS.” [Apple]

Pwnage iPhone Unlocking and Hacking Tool Now Available, Works Great

After some delays, the iPhone Pwnage tool—which is used to flash your iPhone with hacked firmware that will allow you to run any application, use it unlocked in any compatible cellphone network, and basically do whatever you want do to with it, is now available for download. I have been testing this and previous versions for a few weeks now and it works well, but you will need a 2.0 version of the iPhone firmware to try the latest and greatest.

Pwnage is extremely simple to use. First you have to back up your iPhone data using iTunes.

Then, connect the iPhone, select the firmware from your hard drive and iPwn the iPhone. Pwnage will upload the new firmware to the iPhone and that’s that: the tool will take care of everything and, in a few minutes, your iPhone will be ready to go.

I tried this with the latest modified version of iPhone firmware update 1.2.0 and it works as good as with the previous version. So go ahead, punks, and make Steve’s day.

Note: if by any chance you come across a pwned version of the latest 2.0 firmware, my advice is not to use this version, as this Apple beta is not as stable as I wish. Instead, use the previous beta, which worked perfectly. [iPhone Dev Team]