When iPhone was first released, just having one was enough to draw attention and establish hipness with beautiful women. Remember when girls crowded around for a demonstration of the magical touchscreen or to watch YouTube videos in the palm of your hand?

Their eyes widened with childlike wonder as you described the beauty and elegance of iPhone and its utter superiority to every device known to man.

Sadly, those days are gone. In the past year iPhone has become common place. With the coming price drop to $200 any goober will be able to get one.

Yet the iPhone is still a powerful tool. Here are the best ways to unleash the seductive power of iPhone.

1. Unlock it

Nothing tempts a girl’s wild side like a bad boy, and that’s exactly what an unlocked iPhone says: I don’t play by the rules, danger doesn’t scare me, and I have crazy skills you can’t even comprehend. Plus it gives you access to the 3rd party apps that are too cool for regular users.

Who cares if it can be done by any chump in 45 seconds. She doesn’t know that. Bonus points for using the term “hacked” and alluding to the danger of an iPhone being “bricked”.

2. All-Star Photo Album

So you just met a cute girl. How do you prove that you do amazing things all the time and have many cool friends? This is the ideal use-case for the All-Star photo album. Create a special album on your iPhone of all your most impressive pics: snow boarding in the Swiss Alps, you with your friends at the Radiohead concert, and pictures of you with other attractive women are all good candidates.

When you get her alone for a moment, say something like, “OMG you’ve gotta see this photo of me [insert cool thing here]” and proceed to go through the entire album, commenting about how great a time you had and how cool your friends are.

3. iPod Tunes Master

Dozens of targeted playlists in the palm of your hand. This needs no explanation. Create playlists to set different moods: chill, party-time, low key, and of course, romantic. To get the ultimate effect, invest in a set of portable speakers. When you bust out the tunes at the beach, park, etc. you will be the man. We highly recommend flipping through cover flow mode for maximum visual effect.

4. Contacts, the more the merrier

Make sure you have lots of contacts, because seriously, you are so freaking popular. To inflate your contacts count, import all of your email contacts into your address book and upload them to iPhone. She won’t know that 2/3 of those people have never seen you in person.

Expert tip: Complain about searching your contacts list saying, “I can’t stand looking for contacts on my iPhone — it only lets you search by 1 letter. How am I supposed to sort through 300 Johns?” Note: This is the only acceptable circumstance to complain about iPhone.

5. Stocks

Women like men with money and ambition. Show her you’re on the way to wealth by constantly checking your stocks. When you catch her trying to see what you’re looking at, casually comment on your gains and losses, throwing around buzz words like “credit crisis”, “oil bubble”, and “consumer confidence”. Assure her you will achieve superior returns by investing in commodities and precious metals that will be essential to the growth of developing nations.

6. Save the Day with Maps

Maps is the ultimate clutch iPhone feature. The best time to break it out is when you’re with a group of people and need to find something in an unknown area — pizza, hardware store, gas station, etc. As soon as the opportunity arises, execute a search in maps and lead the group to success. Even better if you can use iPhone to instantly call the place. By solving the problem and taking charge you’ll establish yourself as a resourceful leader — a quality highly regarded by women.

7. Look Smart with Safari

When an argument arises over a particular fact, look smarter than everyone else by finding the correct answer with Google. This is the only time you will wish to conceal iPhone use from females. It’s great for settling disputes about the proper definition of a word or the location of obscure African nations.

In case it’s not clear, using iPhone will make you look like a rich, smart, cultured, resourceful, exciting, and popular bad ass. We can’t wait for 3G.

TAKEN FROM www.peoplejam.com

Ever get the feeling that text messaging makes your cellphone bill just a little too expensive? A British space researcher, of all people, might finally have an answer for that end-of-the-month jawdrop.

Assuming the average price to send a text is 10 cents and the message itself is about 140 bytes in size, Dr. Nigel Bannister calculated that texting costs about $749 to send just one megabyte (MB).

According to the University of Leicester detector physicist, NASA stated that it costs just $17 per MB to download transmissions from the Hubble Space Telescope—at most. From there, Bannister made some “conservative assumptions” to account for “the cost of ground stations and the time of the personnel along the way.” Thus, getting data from the telescope—whose pictures are helping to generate Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope program—can range from around $17 to $170 per MB.

“The bottom line,” Bannister said in a statement, “is texting is at least four times more expensive than transmitting data from Hubble, and is likely to be substantially more than that.”

So unless you’ve got more pocket change than an astronaut or DIY rocketeer, next time send an email or just make an actual phone call.

TAKEN FROM www.popularmechanics.com

Steve Wozniak is much more than a throbbing brain with a tie. He knows that the quickest way to a girl’s heart is to jailbreak her iPhone… on TV. As he tells Ms. Griffin, “You know, some people would criticize you for not having hacked your iPhone.” Certainly not you, Mr. Apple Co-founder? Watch it all go down after the break.

P.S. Looks like Woz’s watch is a Nixie — the man’s nerd to the core.
TAKEN FROM www.engadget.com

Verizon Wireless is finally fessing up to three LG phones that it will be delivering to customers in June and July:
• The Dare, aka VX9700: This has a touchscreen but is slim thanks to the absence of a hidden keyboard (like on the bulkier Glyde and Voyager).
• Chocolate 3: A phone we hadn’t seen before, that ditches the slider of the old Chocolates for a full dual-screen flip configuration. Still has a touch-sensitive face, but the buttons inside are all real. Other additions include FM transmitter and SDHC MicroSD support up to 8GB.
• The Decoy has a hidden Bluetooth headset that pops out when you need it, good because it eliminates the need for two separate chargers.
Those are just the salient points; there are more factoids and availability information down below.

Today is D-Day: Steve Jobs will announce the Second Coming of the iPhone, just 20 days before its first anniversary. Think about it. It has been less than a year, and the iPhone is in the minds of everyone, getting almost-sickening front page treatment in every newspaper, magazine, and blog all around the world. Even if it’s not the best selling phone or the one with the most features, the impact has been so big that it has permeated popular culture and language itself. Here’s one of many examples.

This is the unmistakable iPhone outline on top of the word “Mobiles,” found in the “Quiet Zone” carriage in the Chiltern Line, while I was traveling down to London from the English countryside. Not a generic standard cellphone with a keyboard, which is what we have been using for the last two decades, but the iPhone.

It may seem like a capricious selection by the designer, but I’ve seen the same use everywhere: a newspaper chart showing some generic data about the cellphone market, a sign in a shop, advertising from companies completely unrelated to Apple… it’s everywhere, like a virus, popping in printed and TV material, and also affecting the look of other generic products—like the original iMac or the iPod did—not only other cellphones.

The fact is that—whether you like it or not—the iPhone has become The Cellphone. Not just The Smartphone, but The Cellphone, a benchmark that serves to measure every other terminal out there. Anything new with a big screen from Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, or LG are now iPhone-killer wannabes. The theoretical market leader, Research In Motion, is now seen by analysts and the public as “struggling” to catch up with the iPhone, even while its executives try to minimize the impact of Cupertino’s iconic gadget.

One random example: I was buying a new SIM card last week, and I overheard a client talking to a shop clerk who was showing to her one of the latest LG touch smartphones. Her comment was something like:

“…but the touch screen doesn’t work well. It just doesn’t. It’s not like the iPhone. It’s not… smooth, you know?”

The shop guy looked at her and nodded “I know, it’s not very good, but unfortunately we have no more iPhones, you’ll have to wait.”

It may be anecdotal evidence, but it is true. Of all the touch cellphones I have tried, the only one that feels right, smooth and perfect, has been the iPhone. And every other person I’ve asked is saying the same thing, friends, colleagues, family, people who I know were Apple haters, and people who I know were complete gadget newbies. All of them swear by their iPhones, even while they recognize what it lacks, and want more from it.

We will see if His Steveness gives them what they want today, live at Gizmodo.

(And by the way, don’t forget that if you have the iPhone, you can go into the Quiet Zone too and avoid Apple by clicking here.)

TAKEN FROM gizmodo.com

Despite what we and other media have hinted at, despite what Sprint itself is spending a lot of money trying to convey, the Samsung Instinct is not an iPhone killer. To be sure, Samsung and Sprint borrowed liberally from the iPhone playbook when it came to look and feel. But the comparison itself isn’t fair: The iPhone is a software platform that is growing every day, soon to have a host of applications that put it squarely in the smartphone category along with BlackBerry, Palm and Windows Mobile. The Samsung Instinct will never be mistaken for a smartphone. Then what is it? It’s the best carrier-centric feature phone I’ve ever seen, a delight to use for many—though not all—of its intended purposes.

Due to business decisions Apple and the US carriers have made, most Americans are still not faced with the choice to buy an iPhone or not. They have to pick the best “feature phone” that their carrier has to offer. That is, a phone that costs somewhere between $50 and $250, built first and foremost to make voice calls, then serve additional social purposes—messaging, photos, etc.—and, finally, offer data connectivity to the web but more importantly to e-mail.

In this array of duties, there are some where the Samsung Instinct falls flat on its kiester, but there are an unusual number of ways in which this phone makes life easier. I’ll start with them, then get to the grimmer stuff:

Snappy Interface: Other touchscreen phones we’ve seen have annoying split-second lags. The Instinct, for the most part, does not. Some of its visuals were obviously borrowed from Apple, such as pop-up option screens, lists of settings, etc., but at the same time it has features that are original, albeit inspired by Cupertino: When a call comes in, you tap the center then slide up to accept or slide down to ignore. Hanging up is a slide from left to right. (The phone interface has other cool features, too, like “personal” call history for each of your contacts—so don’t go cheatin’—and the ballyhooed visual voicemail, which unfortunately wasn’t available to test at this time.) The UI only got stuck a couple of times, and never permanently. As with any other “natural” interface, it takes a few minutes to figure out the physics of the system, but once you do, it’s intuitive.

Favorites: The Home button actually takes you to one of three panels, Favorites, Main and Fun. When you get the phone, the Favorites pane is blank, but you can add all kinds of stuff. As you can see up top, I’ve added Weather, E-mail, Alarm, Camera, Navigation and Settings, but it can get so specific, you can have a Favorites button for sending text messages to Brian Lam, cuing up your “I’m So Sad” emo song playlist, or launching Gizmodo.com. This sounds retardedly obvious, but I can’t think of a carrier phone that lets you do it. Certainly not the Voyager, the Glyde, the Venus, the Rumor or any other Verizon or Sprint phone that comes to mind.

E-Mail: Feature phones most typically have bad e-mail programs, some of them hidden away where you can barely find them. The message? Do Not Use! But on the Instinct, the e-mail program is really easy to setup, with all the major webmail providers preconfigured for instant log-ins. You can put in more than one account, naturally, and easily jump from one to the next. The mail’s vertically oriented view is great, with header frozen in place at the top of the screen and the message itself scrolling along with an iPhone-like flick of finger. And you are alerted to new e-mails with a blue star on the top of the phone’s screen.

Web Apps: I’ll get to the web browser down below (yes, in the “grim” section), but first I want to sing praises for the numerous web apps on the phone. Weather, News, Sports—your typical need-in-a-hurry information—have been organized in an attractive way that delivers maximum info with the least effort on your part. Sports in particular is amazing (and I’m not known for being a sports fan): You tap one of your pre-selected teams to see a schedule. Any game in progress will immediately show a score. Tap it and you get stats and a write-up from AP or another wire, plus other data breakdowns as necessary. Photo Viewer: Another feature with some iPhone-like traits, the photo viewer lets you finger through your images in either a grid of shots or a Cover Flow-like stream of them. Videos you shoot are in there, too. You can add photos from your computer by copying them to existing folders or, better still, creating your own folders. This means you can have a nice organized gallery of pics, separated out how you want. You don’t just have to settle with looking at shots from the passable but by no means award-winning built-in 2-megapixel cam. (There’s an auto upload feature too, but it has PhotoBucket and MySpace but not Flickr, Picasa or Facebook, so I’m going to ask Sprint the deal with that.)GPS Navigation: Usually, I’m down on cellphone turn-by-turn GPS navigation, but Telenav has finally gotten it right, ahead of everyone. AT&T and Sprint both use it, but this is the first time I’ve really been happy with it, even in areas of questionable phone coverage. It’s still an iffy proposition if you’re in the middle of nowhere, but it works better than any I’ve seen, and looks far better than Verizon’s sorry also-ran, VZ Navigator. (Hint to Verizon: Ditch your white-label software provider and pay a few more bucks for Telenav.) My only complaint is that the live map itself isn’t oriented horizontally, like portable GPS products are.

Voice Command: This is something that the iPhone lacks, and that’s a shame. I have been a fan of voice command for years, especially the stuff built by VoiceSignal (now part of Nuance, the Dragon NaturallySpeaking people). The better Samsung and Motorola phones use it, so it’s no surprise to find it here, but the good news is, it works. Not only can you dial people quickly, but you can pull up a text message or picture mail (”Send picture to… Dad”). Though you still have to tap the screen a few times after you’ve got your message cued up, the voice command eliminates a lot of menu digging.

There are a few features that work well in most instances, but have weaknesses that shouldn’t be overlooked:Touch Typing: The typing feature looks a lot like the iPhone’s, only it doesn’t have the pop-up letters, and doesn’t let you shift letters on the fly or auto-correct. However, for some reason, when I’ve typed on it quickly, everything has looked good. It’s like the iPhone in that sense: When you just plunge ahead, results are better. In most scenarios, you can choose whether to type horizontally with QWERTY config or vertically with letters in alphabetical order. In some cases you can even get a third option: graffiti. Yep, like the Palms of yore, the Instinct lets you scrawl in characters one at a time. I can’t imagine why you would, and frankly this implementation isn’t very good, but it’s fun to know what’s hidden beneath the surface here.

Music Player: By the look of the thing, it should be fine. It’s got all the typical categories, and unlike some Sprint and Verizon phones, it was clearly designed to support your own files as well as purchases from the carrier music store (if anyone was dumb enough to buy music that way). It’s a decent player, but it has a potentially fatal flaw: It can’t read all MP3 tags, only most of them. That means your “All Songs” lineup will have tracks by artists you can’t see under “Artists.” The saddest part is that you can’t fix it with any hocus pocus either on the phone or on your computer.

Video Player: At the top of the TV/Video menu, there’s a “My Videos” option, where you can see stuff you’ve recorded or sideloaded. I dumped in four different kinds of videos, and while my .avi, .mov, and .mpg failed, the one that worked was a .mp4. It was a Postal Service video, and it looked really good. The file type gave me hope that my vast iPod/iPhone-friendly video library would also be supported, but though the files show up in the queue, they do not play. That means a buttload of time consuming file conversion for yet another device… yippee!

The semi-bungles above can be tolerated, either by working with them or just totally ignoring them. But the Instinct gets one big ole check-minus in particular:

Web Browser: I gotta say it: The Instinct’s browser is an ABYSMAL failure of design. It’s not that I’m surprised. Nobody has pulled off the mobile browser quite like Apple has. But for some reason, despite Sprint’s EV-DO Rev. A network, the browser is slow slow slow, too slow to do much of anything. Beyond that, the interface is streamlined almost to the point of unusability. I can’t figure out a way to add a current page to favorites, and zooming in and out requires a tap of a button, that increases or decreases the page—again, very slowly—to an arbitrary size. As you can see in the gallery below, it’s junk, and I don’t see myself using it.

There are some other issues that I had with the phone: I turned off the vibration feedback, since it seemed out of sync with the visuals and was frankly just annoying. As you probably guessed, you still can’t make your own songs into ringtones, and you can’t even turn Sprint’s Music Store songs into ringtones either (full 3MB song download for $1.99 vs. 500KB partial song download for $2.50—you do the math). The ringtone-getting process was a bitch, partly because it’s based on that slow-ass browser. I mentioned the camera wasn’t award-winning, and I will stress that again, though in video mode, it seemed to do the trick in most well-lit cases.

The last thing I want to mention is that the phone has an all-you-can-eat service price of $99 per month that includes EVERYTHING. That is to say, everything but song downloads and some very peripheral video-on-demand options. Most streaming vid and music is included, all data for e-mail, all messaging including video mail, unlimited use of the GPS navigation, plus unlimited talk time. I believe that’s a pretty good price when you consider all of the features. The key with a plan like that is to have a phone where those features can be used. That’s what the Samsung Instinct is, to me—the best feature phone option for people who don’t mind playing in Sprint’s walled garden of services, but don’t want to feel like a chump. I’ve been playing with it nonstop for days now, and it continues to impress me. And while I’m no iPhone fanboy, I’m not easily impressed. Now, if only Verizon would get something this nice…

TAKEN FROM gizmodo.com

After much speculation, Sling stopped by to show us they have indeed been working on a native app for the iPhone, and gave us a quick hands-on with the proof-of-concept. The demo, which also runs on the iPod touch, offers the ability to connect to your Slingbox and control it using the iPhone’s touchscreen.

While Sling plans to develop and distribute the software through the iTunes App Store, the demo build we were shown runs on a jailbroken iPhone because of current testing limitations with the iPhone SDK. And since this is in the early stages of development, the demo was limited in function, but from what I saw, it looks like a totally awesome alternative to mobile TV.

Once you connect to your Slingbox, you control channels with an on-screen remote whose buttons scroll horizontally at the bottom of the screen. There’s also a scrollbar full of channel icons that provide shortcuts to specific stations. Video ran pretty smooth and looked good over a wi-fi connection. And it goes without saying, but Sling also has their fingers crossed for a 3G iPhone.

While the current proof-of-concept software is using a WMV codec to stream video, Sling is hoping Apple will make its video decoding assets available on the iPhone so they can use that instead. There’s no word on an official release date for the application, but for those iPhone owners with Slingboxes, dreams of mobile TV just became an afterthought. [Sling on Giz]

TAKEN FROM gizmodo.com

Sorry, we don’t have pictures but Apple took us into a dramatically lit back-room to check out the new iPhone 3G. Here’s what you need to know:

• We did a quick data test — at our location we went from 104Kbps on the EDGE iPhone to 215Kbps on the 3G model. 2x ain’t bad, yo.
• The enable/disable 3G setting is real, and buried a few menus deep. There is no automatic switching, Apple just assumes you’ll leave 3G on, and that the iPhone has the juice to support that usage.
• It’s tri-band 3G, as we reported the other day. This same phone will ship worldwide.
• WiFi is still 802.11b/g, no support for n yet.
• Yes, that GPS is A-GPS, just as we mentioned.
• Geotagging photos is a thumbs-up. We were deep indoors though, so native GPS wasn’t working and we couldn’t get a clear idea of satellite acquisition time.
• The screen looks exactly the same — maybe a tiny bit brighter, but the unit was new, so it’d be negligible.
• The camera is identical to the first — 2 megapixels. No front-facing camera (of course).
• It’s certainly thicker feeling, but they rocked it Treo-style and really tapered those edges, so it just doesn’t feel that different. But because of that curved back, it’ll dance around on your table a little more than your completely-flat original iPhone.
• The plastic back didn’t feel too cheap. In fact, it felt pretty solid. It’s very glossy, so it’ll pick up fingerprints just as well as the glass up front (yay).
• It comes with a ridiculously, absurdly small power adapter. It basically looks like a tiny square with a USB port on one side, and power prongs on the other. It will power any other iDevice (iPod touch, 1st gen iPhone, etc.), and sell separately for those that want a smaller adapter.
• The dock (now sold separately) and adapter (if you want an extra) will both go for something like $29, although that price is not yet confirmed.
• No mention was made of copy/paste, MMS, etc.
• It doesn’t look like this thing is going to fit in your old dock. The new dock does look smaller and more sculpted to the new iPhone’s curves.
• The headphone jack is flush, as mentioned. It’s still 3.5mm, so if you don’t like the out of box phones (which won’t stay in our ears), bring your own, no problem — and no adapter needed!
• Yes, original iPhones are totally gone, you won’t be seeing those made anymore. Long live the aluminum back!

It looks like they took an amazing device and made it significantly better. If the battery life is as good as they claim, we think this will steamroll the competition in the enterprise space. And even if it doesn’t, at $199 it’s going to be extremely hard for people to resist.

Update: Laptop managed to sneak a couple photos of the white one — yep, that’s what it looks like.

TAKEN FROM www.engadget.com