Another satisfied iPhone user, er....ex-user

I Quit The iPhone

Michael Arrington

TechCrunch.com
Friday, July 31, 2009; 1:46 AM

I have loved the iPhone, but now I am quitting the iPhone.

This is not an easy decision.

I was there in January 2007 when it was announced and I bought the first iPhone as soon as it was available. I happily bought the iPhone 3G a year later. I've proudly yelled "I Am A Member Of The Cult Of iPhone." I've been an unabashed cheerleader for the device to all who'll listen. And I've scoffed at developers who said they'd abandon the platform.

But I'm not going to upgrade to the iPhone 3GS. Instead, I'm abandoning the iPhone and AT&T. I will grudgingly pay the $175 AT&T termination fee and then I will move on to another device.

What finally put me over the edge? It wasn't the routinely dropped calls, something you can only truly understand once you have owned an iPhone (and which drove my friend Om Malik to bail). I've lived with that for two years. It's not the lack of AT&T coverage at home. I've lived with that for two years, too. It certainly isn't the lack of a physical keyboard, that has never bothered me. No, what finally put me over the edge is the Google Voice debacle.

Most of you won't know what I'm talking about, so I'll explain.

Google Voice is a a call management service that lets you determine what calls get through to you based on who's calling and what time of day it is, among other factors. It has amazing features, like automatically transcribing all your voicemails. And you can forward calls to any other phone easily and automatically. Here's an overview of the service if you aren't familiar with it.

I've always wanted to use Google Voice but there's a big switching cost - changing your phone number. Too many people have that phone number and use it to call in great stories. There's no way I'm giving that up. And there's another problem with Google Voice. When you make outbound calls from a phone, it (obviously) doesn't use your Google Voice phone number, so recipients don't know it's you calling. Those were two hurdles I wasn't willing to jump over.

But now Google is planning on rolling out number portability, so I can move my mobile phone number to Google. None of my friends, family or contacts have to store a new number.

That still leaves the problem of outbound calls, though. I can move my mobile number to Google and then get a new iPhone account, but outbound calls won't be identified because they are on the new number. Google has a solution for that too, though. They are releasing apps for a variety of handsets that effectively take over the native dialer, address book and call log. Problem solved. I can use any phone I like, or a bunch of phones, and just choose the one that makes sense at any time. I never have to be tied to a carrier and their restrictive contracts again.

Or so I thought. Apple and AT&T are now blocking the iPhone version of the Google Voice app. Why? Because they absolutely don't want people doing exactly what I'm doing - moving their phone number to Google and using the carrier as a dumb pipe.

So I have to choose between the iPhone and Google Voice. It's not an easy decision. Except, it sort of is. Google isn't forcing the decision on me, Apple and AT&T are. So I choose to work with the company that isn't forcing me to do things their way. And in this case, that's Google.

So what phone will I use next? Well, that decision is easy, too. I'd move to the Palm Pre because I believe it is the best phone out there other than the iPhone 3GS. But Google hasn't created an app for the Palm Pre yet, just Android and Blackberry phones. So for now I'm going to use the new Android myTouch 3G along with the Google Voice App. As soon as something better comes out, or Google makes an app for the Pre, I'll switch. And keep the same phone number. No long term contracts for me.

And Apple, if you ever decide to put the hammer down on AT&T and do the right thing for your loyal users, I'll consider switching back. In the meantime, I'll just use one of many iPod Touches laying around our office to test out new apps.

The Google gang versus iPhone

Ganging up with Google Android against Apple's iPhone

by Matt Asay

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Apple is currently king of the smartphone world. The iconic iPhone has doubled in market share since 2008, rising to 10.8 percent in the first quarter of 2009 from 5.3 percent in 2008, according to Gartner.

But Apple may be in for a Microsoft moment. Just as a steady stream of well-heeled competitors like IBM, Red Hat, and Oracle are aligning themselves with Linux as a way to undermine Windows in servers and desktops, so, too, are crowds starting to form around Google's open-source Android in the smartphone market.

Linux: the bete noir of proprietary operating system vendors.

Samsung, LG, Motorola, and others are placing increasing stakes on Android. Indeed, BusinessWeek reports that Motorola has "one bullet left in its gun" and this bullet is Android. It can't afford to let the "iPhone killer" draw blanks. "Motorola's handset business depends on Android," as ZDNet's Larry Dignan suggests.

Importantly, Android is growing in the area that defines the iPhone's success more than anything else: applications. BusinessWeek's Stephen Wildstrom says that "Android is now a contender" in large part due to its growing array of third-party applications:

The Android Market is surprisingly well-stocked, considering the relatively small number of Android phones in use....[W]ith support from Google and from handset makers desperate to come up with something that can mount a serious challenge to the iPhone, Android could become a major player.

And not a moment too soon. With Apple iPhone margins as high as 60 percent by some estimates, the market already seems ripe for an open-source competitor to bring prices down while improving choice. I love my iPhone, but as Android-based phones become smarter and slicker, I just might change camps.

It appears that I'm not alone. The "droids" are popping up everywhere:

As with Linux in the server market, the smartphone industry is filled with second-place competitors. Most of these have a strong interest in banding together behind a Linux-based solution, in this case Android, though there is also momentum for Linux-based LiMo and non-Linux Symbian.

It may take a soup-to-nuts, integrated solution like the iPhone to create a market, but it takes an open-source solution like Android to foster choice and lower costs.

Game on.

Vulnerabilities of the iPhone

How To Hijack 'Every iPhone In The World'

Andy Greenberg, 07.28.09, 05:40 PM EDT

On Thursday, two researchers plan to reveal an unpatched iPhone bug that could virally infect phones via SMS.

If you receive a text message on your iPhone any time after Thursday afternoon containing only a single square character, Charlie Miller would suggest you turn the device off. Quickly.

That small cipher will likely be your only warning that someone has taken advantage of a bug that Miller and his fellow cybersecurity researcher Collin Mulliner plan to publicize Thursday at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas. Using a flaw they've found in the iPhone's handling of text messages, the researchers say they'll demonstrate how to send a series of mostly invisible SMS bursts that can give a hacker complete power over any of the smart phone's functions. That includes dialing the phone, visiting Web sites, turning on the device's camera and microphone and, most importantly, sending more text messages to further propagate a mass-gadget hijacking.

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"This is serious. The only thing you can do to prevent it is turn off your phone," Miller told Forbes. "Someone could pretty quickly take over every iPhone in the world with this."

Though Miller and Mulliner say they notified Apple ( AAPL - news - people ) about the vulnerability more than a month ago, the company hasn't released a patch, and it didn't respond to Forbes' repeated calls seeking comment.

The iPhone SMS bug is just one of a series that the researchers plan to reveal in their talk. They say they've also found a similar texting bug in Windows Mobile that allows complete remote control of Microsoft ( MSFT - news - people )-based devices. Another pair of SMS bugs in the iPhone and Google's ( GOOG - news - people ) Android phones would purportedly allow a hacker to knock a phone off its wireless network for about 10 seconds with a series of text messages. The trick could be repeated again and again to keep the user offline, Miller says. Though Google has patched the Android flaw, this second iPhone bug also remains unpatched, he adds.

The new round of bugs aren't the first that Miller has dug up in the iPhone's code. In 2007, he became the first to remotely hijack the iPhone using a flaw in its browser. But while that vulnerability gave the attacker a similar power over the phone's functions, it required tricking the user into visiting an infected Web site to invisibly download a piece of malicious software. When Miller alerted Apple in July of that year, the company patched the vulnerability before Miller publicized the bug at the Black Hat conference the following month. ("See: Hacking the iPhone.")

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Interesting article. Despite all the iPhone press out there. It certainly doesn't own the smart phone market. With less than 20% of the smart phone market, iPhone users, how many people will the bug

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The new attacks, by contrast, can strike a phone without any action on the part of the user and are virtually unpreventable while the phone is powered on, according to Miller and Mulliner's research. And unlike the earlier exploits, Apple has inexplicably left them unpatched, Miller says. "I've given them more time to patch this than I've ever given a company to patch a bug," he says.

The Windows bug he and Mulliner plan to reveal hasn't been patched either, says Miller, though he admits that he and Mulliner discovered the Windows flaw on Monday and hadn't yet alerted Microsoft to its existence.

The attack developed by Miller and Mulliner works by exploiting a missing safeguard in the phones' text messaging software that prevents code in the messages' text from overflowing into other parts of the device's memory where it can run as an executable program. The two researchers plan to demonstrate how a series of 512 SMS messages can exploit the bug, with only one of those messages actually appearing on the phone, showing a small square. (Someone could easily design the attack to show a different message or without any visible messages, Miller cautions.) The entire process of infecting an iPhone and then using the device to infect another phone on the user's contact list would take only a few minutes, Miller says.

The vulnerability of SMS to that sort of attack will likely be a hot topic at this year's Black Hat and Defcon cybersecurity confabs. Two other researchers, Zane Lackey and Luis Miras, say they plan to present other vulnerabilities in major vendors' SMS applications, though they declined to discuss which vendors or the specifics of the vulnerabilities before the companies had issued patches.

Lackey and Miras argue that SMS demands far more attention from the cybersecurity community and device vendors. "Like a lot of mobile phone software, it's been relatively unexplored in the past," Lackey told Forbes. "Only recently has there been proper debugging and development tools available. SMS exemplifies a common trend: once it was a simple technology. Now it's being used in devices far beyond its original purposes, and security is still playing catch up."

The researchers' concerns aren't merely theoretical. Finnish security firm F-Secure says it's found nearly 500 different variants of mobile phone malicious software since 2004, mostly using Bluetooth to hop between phones in close proximity. But in the last 18 months, cybercriminals have begun using text messages to send links to malicious Web sites that infect the phone with malware, says Mikko Hyppönen, an F-Secure researcher.

One seemingly-Chinese variant, known as "Sexy View" and currently targeting the Symbian operating system, is far more threatening than an iPhone attack, given that around 50% of cellphones use Symbian, Hyppönen says. "After years of the security industry wondering why we aren't seeing text message worms, it's starting to happen now," he says.

While many of those ongoing attacks are merely hacker experiments, some have used phones to text premium numbers that generate revenue for cybercriminals. "Mostly it's still about curiosity and fun, but eventually the criminal guys move in," says Hyppönen. "We're probably on the verge of that right now."

As dangerous as his iPhone attack sounds, Miller argues that it's important to expose flaws in SMS software before they can be exploited by more malicious actors. Texting applications' insecurity isn't due to the software's complexity so much as the security community's inattention and the expense of sending thousands of text messages to test a phone's security, Miller says.

"The bad news is that SMS is the perfect attack vector, but the good news is that it's probably possible to build it securely," he says. "As a researcher, I can only show [Apple] the bugs. It's up to them to fix them."

The Facebook App we've been waiting for?

Pigs Fly As Facebook And Google Work Together On An Android App

47 Comments

by Erick Schonfeld on July 28, 2009

Well, we never thought it would happen because of its intense rivalry with Google, but Facebook is almost ready to launch an official app for Android phones. Hints are already popping up here and there, but I’ve been able to confirm it. The app could hit the Android Market (its version of the App Store) as soon as the end of this week.

Facebook’s Android app will launch with a more limited set of features than its current, and very popular, iPhone app. For instance, it won’t have an inbox, I’m told by a source who has seen it. But it will have the full Facebook stream, which is really all you need. The Facebook Android app is built around the stream and status updates. It was built with Facebook’s new Stream API. Your updates keep coming in, with a notification number telling you how many new items are available at any given time.

As recently as last October, Facebook had no interest in building an Android app. Why help its arch-rival Google? Back then, Michael wrote:

From what we hear, Facebook has dedicated exactly zero resources to creating a version of the service for Android, and has no plans to launch anything at all.

So what changed? Well, for one thing, Android is now on the verge of becoming a serious competitor to the iPhone, with nearly two dozen new phones set to launch this year. For another thing, the Android team at Google offered to help, and even loaned Facebook an Android engineer. Facebook still doesn’t have one of its own, says my source. (Facebook wouldn’t comment). Some Google engineers are already using the app like crazy.

Meanwhile, we are still waiting for the next version of Facebook’s iPhone app, which will include events, video uploading, and so much more. The current app, which many social networking junkies find indispensable, launched a year ago.

Plilips goes Android

Philips' first Android endeavor, the V808, caught on camera?

by Laura June, posted Jul 27th 2009 at 3:24PM

Not a ton of details to be found here, but the first shots of what certainly appears to be Philips' first Android handset have emerged from China. The V808, as it's called, certainly looks Androidy enough, with a 3.2-inch, HVGA display, and it will supposedly boast a 3.2 megapixel camera and video recording. In Philips fashion, we can probably expect to see it Xenium branded, but as yet, we have no other details on specs, pricing, or availability, and sadly the phone isn't powered on in any of the photos. There are two more images after the break -- hit the read link for the whole set.

[Via Cloned in China]

More Donut info

Morning Donuts (Updated With Pictures!)

by Tyler Miller on July 25th, 2009

Nothing better than having some surprise donuts with my late morning coffee. The sweet, sweet round deep fried sugar treats with a couple of sprinkles, or a look at what Android OS 2.0 will have in store for us; either will do. And the latter is what we got. RootMaster cyanogen uncovered the latest release as well as some of the sweet features it has in store for us. Features which range from gestures, to automated backups, to “tons of performance tweaking”.

From his thread over at XDA, cyanogen taunts us with what he’s found in a small bulleted list.:

• multitouch
• gestures
• cdma
• search integrated into everything
• wpa enterprise
• vpn support
• automated backups
• tons of performance tweaking

First off, multitouch. One of the things that Android was seriously lacking; and it was allegedly not included because they didn’t want to make Apple mad? Well, put that in your iPod and smoke it. The first things that comes to mind is that I’ll finally be able to fire up my emulators on my myTouch 3G and can permanently closet the G1, which is so last year.

Tons of performance tweaking? Faster is better; and yes, that’s what she said. I recall reading somewhere that the Weather Channel has their hands on Android SDK 2.0 and can comment on how smooth Android 2.0 (Donut) runs. Does this confirm it? I hope so.

One thing that I did notice to be missing was a mention of additional bluetooth suport. Sure A2DP was nice, but times are moving fast. And while bluetooth is by no means my favorite protocol for anything, I would still like to see full support for it. However, the day is young, and so is Donut.

One thing to note is that as of last read on the XDA thread, cyanogen did say that installing the current build fails on the Dream. So no donut testing quite yet; but that doesn’t mean that the massive community of modders cant relinquish some of the features and throw them into their personal builds.

[via cyanogen@ XDA | Thanks, Carl C!]

[Update 2]
According to cyanogen’s twitter, he has successfully flashed it to the HTC Dream!

[Update]

Didn’t take long to get some sweet screen shots; and Carl C once again came through with a record breaking tip off time. These screen shots originated from cyanogen on this post at XDA. And I have shamelessly stolen them.

Android Donut

Google release Android 2.0 Donut with CDMA and multitouch

By Chris Davies on Sunday, Jul 26th 2009 No Comments

Worth Reading?

Has the HTC Hero’s moment in the spotlight been short-lived? Google have released an early development build for Android OS 2.0 Donut, the follow-up to OS 1.5 Cupcake which debuted alongside the HTC Magic, and with it delivered the promise of multitouch support, CMDA and similar homescreen control widgets to those found in HTC Sense.

Among the key changes in OS 2.0 Donut are much improved speed and performance, automated backups and gesture support. There’s also full universal search across all applications, together with WPA Enterprise encryption and VPN support.

While we’re far from an official release for commercial devices, this hasn’t stopped the frontline developer community from playing with Donut and getting it to run on existing handsets. One project has already seen a release, with a build of the new version for the original G1; however this is very unstable and early, with core functionality such as network support missing. Of more interest to general users is the news that developers are working on bringing some of Donut’s more interesting aspects to new builds of Android OS 1.5 Cupcake, adding elements such as mutlitouch and universal search to current smartphones in a more stable form.