Apple

One of the most useful things the iPhone does is find Wi-Fi networks in the area. This is something any device with Wi-Fi connectivity can do, but finding a Web connection with an iPhone in hand is a bit easier than driving around a neighborhood with a laptop in search of a strong signal.

This also happens to one of the most revealing and amusing features of the iPhone.

Sure, many network names are as mundane as "linksys," 2WIRE252" and "homenetwork." In San Francisco, you find a lot of service set identifiers such as "… Read more

Counting iPhones is harder than it looks, at least from the outside.

Coming off iPhone Weekend, the numbers game flew through the air as financial analysts tried to guess how many iPhones were sold by Apple and AT&T on June 29 and June 30, the last two days of the second quarter. Estimates ranged from 200,000 to 700,000 for the whole weekend, which is why AT&T's report of 146,000 iPhone activations on Tuesday was quite the buzzkill heading into Apple's earnings Wednesday. Apple's stock closed down $8.81, or 6.… Read more

[This entry has been revised: I didn't read the MediaNet release carefully enough...they are offering DRM-less MP3s, not WMA files. Apologies to anybody whom I misled. My bad.]

Back in May, EMI--one of the big four record labels--agreed to sell its songs through Apple's iTunes without digital rights management (DRM) protection.

Before this move, iTunes and the iPod were technically linked: if you bought a song from iTunes, you could only play it on an iPod (unless you burned it to CD then re-ripped it into an unprotected format). Offering DRM-less downloads severed this link, allowing … Read more

AT&T said it that it signed up 146,000 new subscribers in the first two days it offered the iPhone, slightly down from some Wall Street expectations, but the promise of iPhone madness is still alive.

Wall Street analysts had predicted that AT&T would activate 200,000 iPhones in June, but the actual number reported on Tuesday when AT&T discussed second quarter results fell short of this goal. The iPhone, which is only being sold through AT&T, went on sale June 29th. AT&T's second quarter officially ended June 30th.… Read more

Researchers at Independent Security Evaluators have announced at least two exploits that take advantage of the way the Apple iPhone opens a specially crafted Web page in Safari. Exact details of the vulnerability exploited will have to wait until a presentation at the end of next week's Black Hat conference in Las Vegas. However, some general information has been offered here.

In a preliminary draft of the Black Hat presentation, ISE researchers Charlie Miller, Jake Honoroff, and Joshua Mason note that there are "serious problems with the design and implementation of security on the iPhone," and they … Read more

So much for the theory iPhone designers were North Carolina fans. Cisco and Duke University are now absolving the iPhone of any blame for wireless network outages at the school, as was earlier alleged, but they aren't saying exactly what caused the problems.

In a news report earlier this week, a Duke official directly implicated the iPhone for causing network issues that knocked out parts of Duke's wireless network. But Duke spokeswoman Tracy Futhey, in a statement Friday on the school's Web site, said: "The reality is that a particular set of conditions made the Duke … Read more

One of the beauties of the iPhone is its supposed near-ubiquitous access to a huge amount of your personal information from one access point. Think about it: your contacts, text messages, e-mails, music, photos, stock portfolios and bookmarks, even to what you're doing and when, are all in your hand or pocket.

Over iced tea on a sunny day in San Francisco, a friend who is quite the entrepreneur noted that if you ever, god forbid, dropped your iPhone or lost it, or if it should get stolen, the next person who picked it up would have access to … Read more

On Microsoft's fourth-quarter earnings call yesterday, the company noted that it had reached its goal of shipping one million Zunes to retailers by June 30. (I don't know why Microsoft's fiscal year ends June 30, but it's always been that way.)

Looking at the Entertainment and Devices (E&D) section of the accompanying financial release, one can derive that the combination of Zune, consumer hardware (keyboards and mice), consumer software (Office for the Mac, Encarta, and so on), and TV platforms (Microsoft IPTV) earned about $315 million during the quarter. Microsoft doesn't break down … Read more

In a report that is guaranteed to make Apple fanboys proud and Apple haters scoff, the market research firm IDC has released a study claiming that Apple has officially become the third-largest computer vendor in the United States.

According to the study, Apple shipped 960,000 units in the second quarter of 2007, and the Cupertino, Calif.-based company now commands 5.6 percent of the U.S. market--a jump of 0.8 percent from the same time last year.

On the Windows side of things, Dell, while still firmly entrenched as the nation's No. 1 computer vendor, witnessed … Read more