shell case for the HTC Hero, which we have received for review. First impressions of the case are that it’s hard rubber/plastic, and see-through. It’s got some texture to it, but seems nice.

The design of the Mizu Shell Case seems very nice after a few days of use, and offers a really nice bit of protection for your Hero.

The case seems to show a lot of holes, these are perfectly aligned for the different parts of the phone, for instance the loud-speaker, lanyard attachment, camera, headphone jack & volume rocker. On the bottom of the case it also gives access to the Extended-MiniUSB port and microphone hole.

The only real negative points of the design is that you can sometimes have trouble putting the phone into a dock, which means the case has to be removed. Although this is understandable, and is easily doable.

The skin is an affordable solution for form fitting protection for your HTC Hero, and can be purchased from Proporta.com for £19.99. This seems to be a very reasonable price for a high quality, high protection skin. I tested this skin by dropping it from approximately 6ft, and it protected the phone perfectly, almost absorbing the shock from the impact with the floor (hard tile kitchen floor), and it kept the phone perfectly safe and intact, internally and externally.

My opinion on this product is that I would recommend it to any HTC Hero owner, it’s very stable and a great piece of protection for your phone.

The Mizu Shell Case can be purchased from Proporta.com at £19.99. For more information, please Click Here.

So, want the proof? Here it is…

Let’s start with the basics, the phone’s design.

The design of the new iPhone 4G seems very industrial, with seems around the edging, which is metal, and now separated buttons. Also, the back of the device is either a solid piece of glass, or shiny thick plastic, this is a drastic improvement to the old curved back of the 3G & 3GS.

As the photo below shows, the 3GS sitting right next to the iPhone 4G, it’s quite shocking if you ask me, the sheer difference is huge. We’ve now got a much more streamlined phone, and a much nicer design, when you compare each version. Also notable, is that the screen seems to be darker, I don’t know if this is the photo, but it seems to me personally that the screen is of a much higher quality, which is always an improvement.

Remember how I mentioned those buttons? There they are, the new volume buttons and what seems to be the lock/mute button, all nicer and metal. This could be a much higher improvement from the very flimsy rocker seen on the 2G, 3G & 3GS. Also the lock/mute button seems different as well, which could be a better improvement.

Seems weird to put this photo up, but look closely… See the tab the person’s holding with the finger to the left? There’s an Apple emblem on it, which, to me, immediately indicates that this phone is real. Now, let’s move on to the specifications of this thing.

The next bit of proof is this image above, as you can see it doesn’t hold a model number, or any sort of FCC/IC ID number. Also the storage isn’t specified. This can be promising though for the phone, as it means we could see a much higher storage capacity, with some rumours already circulating out and about of a 32gb, 64gb & 128gb variety for the iPhone 4G. So now we move on to another pressing matter, Apple have contacted Gizmodo, wanting their device back, and it doesn’t sound nice. The letter, which was sent to Gizmodo, gives a formal request for te device to be returned to Apple.

So, what are the spec’s?

• Front-facing video chat camera
• Improved regular back-camera (the lens is quite noticeably larger than the iPhone 3GS)
• Camera flash
• Micro-SIM instead of standard SIM (like the iPad)
• Improved display. It’s unclear if it’s the 960×460 display thrown around before—it certainly looks like it, with the “Connect to iTunes” screen displaying much higher resolution than on a 3GS.
• What looks to be a secondary mic for noise cancellation, at the top, next to the headphone jack
• Split buttons for volume
• Power, mute, and volume buttons are all metallic

What do you think of this new iPhone? Do you think Apple will change it at the last minute? What do you think the hardware inside will be like?

Image Courtesy: Wall Street Journal

But unfortunately, Apple have delayed the international launch for the iPad, including the UK launch dates, until the end of May. Yes, I did say May there. Rumours are saying that the iPad’s delayed shipping is to tie in with the release of the 3G version of the device, which has been rumoured to be carried by Vodafone & Orange in the UK. All we know so far is that the iPad will be up for Pre-order on May 10th, which is also when the pricing and availability for the rest of the world will be specified.

the Google team working on Mobile operating system Android.

In doing so he re-affirms a long standing dislike of the Apple iPhone. He had this to say about the smartphone sensation and its creator:

“… a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger.”

This hiring by Google coincides with a distinct hotting up of what is becoming a very personal confrontation between the two companies. With Apple suing Android handset manufacturer HTC over numerous patents, and Google issuing statements to the effect that it will support its manufacturing partners.

Whether you are a fan of Android and Google, a staunch iPhone user, or just an interested consumer sitting on the sidelines – this particular competiton is and will continue to be one to watch.

After all, with Android based devices gaining almost 2/3 of the iPhone’s daily sales figures, the boys over in Cupertino must be feeling the heat.

Upon first installing the program I’ll admit that I was very impressed with the look, feel and simplicity of the thing. Most mac users will agree that installed 3rd party software can often feel clunky, out of place, and unfinished when placed alongside the clean, brushed metal approach of OS X. This is emphatically not the case with Tweetie.

Perhaps it is because it is specifically designed for Mac that its user interface is well … more Apple than Apple! Whatever the reason though, my proverbial hat comes off too the designers behind tweetie – its stunning. What is more they have been able to capture some of that mac simplicity.

I hate to quote (often dubious) testimonials, but Wired magazine didn’t get it far wrong when they said “Tweetie’s interface is so clean you would think it came straight out of Apple headquarters.”

I should probably move onto features, and at this point I dial down the excitement a few notches.

Tweetie isn’t devoid of features, but compared to competing products like tweetdeck there are some notable exceptions. There is for instance, no anti spam feature, which considering the recent findings about twitter usage is a serious blow. There is also no option to integrate other social networks, such as monitoring your friends facebook updates. Lastly, there is no functionality in tweetie for previewing or sharing videos/images…

That, for me, is a deal breaker – let me explain why:

Twitter is a simple service, and what it does, it does pretty well through the web interface of the site.

That said, the only reason to actually use a twitter client at all (unless you are on a smartphone) is if it brings new functionality to the service. This could be an antispam module, or something as simple as the ability to prioritise updates from specific users. If it doesn’t address this issue, Tweetie could become a piece of ‘eye-candy‘ software, whose sole purpose is to streamline an already lightweight process.

I’m an unashamedly huge fan of spotify, which (for those of you who don’t know) is an itunes-esq desktop music client that uses a mixture of P2P/Direct streaming to place a library of over 3.5 millions tracks at the user’s disposal … virtually instantly. I’m not alone in this opinion either, and spotify has been widely welcomed, both by an internet community sick & tired of fighting the outdated business models and practices of Industry labels, and by proponents of the “Cloud” computing model that has gained so much media focus recently.

Perhaps the music labels too realise that spotify is a way of angling across the current of the increasingly powerful anti-copyright lobby  ? The significant shares owned by labels such as Sony would seem to support this theory.

Other than its continued(and increasingly conspicious) absence in the U.S. then, all is rosey in the Spotify camp.

Be warned though, those with their ears to the ground may predict the honeymoon period coming to an abrupt end in the near future, as questions arise from the Artist community that strike at the heart of one the product’s principal selling points.

Swedish Artist Magnus Uggla accused spotify of being “too good to be true!”, and branded it as dishonest. This attack is owed, apparently, to the expectation among artists that as the music labels own large stakes in the service, they will be paid a good rate for their music. Infact, Uggla described his first six month earnings statement from spotify as “less than a Busker would earn in one day”.

The number of  artists who subscribe to this view is, as yet, relatively small. However, if Uggla’s sentiment were to gain significant traction amongst the worldwide artist community, spotify could face real questions about its strategy and future.

I can’t say who I blame more in this scenario: spotify or the respective music labels. Whichever it is though, please, Please, PLEASE consider a different payment scheme which includes paying artists on the basis of rising stock value. Or perhaps even pay those that opt in in spotify stock ?!

Cheers,

Hugo [as reported on torrentfreak.com and techcrunch.com]

I fear we may have to backtrack a little here. While I am gratified that the gunman above (patently an avid tbv reader ! see last post) took my advice to shun the iphone very seriously indeed – I have to say that his blunt nosed, macho and frankly stupid response has done nothing more than take a serious debate and discredit it, Allowing apple to shrug it off with the time honoured phrase : ‘There’s always one’.

In future, if you have $200 to blow – may I suggest you write a blog post, contributing to the debate, and spend $200 getting it exposure. You achieve more, keep your phone, and you  don’t look like an idiot.

Rant over/ Have a nice day

And at $199/$99, who can blame you right ? That’s certainly better pricing than you’ll find for a lot of smartphones out there.

Well no …not exactly…

See the thing is, as fantastic as the iPhone may be, in the long run I Guarantee you it will make your wallet squirm. Here’s how:

- Apple may carry on touting its price cuts, but $99 is actually still $99 more than anyone else is asking. I don’t know how it is for you guys in the US, but over here the carriers predominantly cover the entire cost of their smartphones as a part of the contract. My ‘Blackberry Bold’ for instance, didn’t cost me a single cent.The reason you still pay money for your iphone then, is that the true cost of the device is much more than is let on. This would perhaps be easier to excuse if the iPhone was on a different playing field to all its competitors, but it isn’t. Devices such as the Bold, Storm or HTC Magic all offer comparable experiences, so there really isn’t any excuse for the charge.

- The iPhone is still locked into AT&T (or O2 if you live over here in the UK), and the contracts are expensive! If the iPhone was an open device, then carriers would be introducing new price plans, (and extras etc.) all the time to try and persuade you to ‘buy theirs’. This drives down the prices of tariffs, increases innovations in the features of a contract and can only be good news for the consumer, which is the point …right ? Well apparently not. This is especially important, as phones like the Bold are available on multiple carriers (so far as I know, the HTC Magic is only being shipped by vodafone over here in the UK, but hopefully that will change in the not too distant future).

- Lastly, I come to part which most would lift on high as the ultimate reason for the iPhones success, and justification for all past wrongs etc… The App store. I on the other hand, would argue that this is the side to the iPhone that will cost you the most money of all. All recent iPhone adverts I have seen have been focusing on the capabilities of various apps to make your life easier, and yes, I love them too. There are some truly great apps, and I would have to say that the active developer community behind them is one of the biggest plus points to the iPhones credit (and who can argue with 1,000,000,000 downloads?). Its not so much the apps that bother me then, as the way Apple sell’s them to you. Psychologically, it is far to easy to spend money you don’t have and just one more cool application.

Now at this point, you are probably crying foul, and pointing out that Blackberry has an app store all of its own, so what makes the iPhone so bad ? The thing is though, blackberry apps are charged through your paypal account, and every time you log onto paypal (about once a day for me) you can see a precise breakdown of how much you spent and where you spent it. The apple app store is much more faceless than this, not giving you the option to say … see how much you have already spent that week ? (If such a feature does exist, then I apologise, but if I couldn’t find it, then it amounts to the same thing anyway)

Instead it just siphons of money from your credit card, and before you know it, you’re buying a couple of apps a week (not unbelievable by any stretch) and you’ve added at least another £12 onto an already £30-35 per month contract.

It could be said that its your responsibility to keep your spending in check, and why should Apple make it easier for you to dissuade yourself from ‘just one more purchase’ ? But when the Apple platform is built up in the media to be so dependent upon/enhanced by these apps, I think the responsibility (at least in part) does lie with Apple.

There you have it, Apple iPhones are great, but perhaps no greater than the competition and are rather more expensive on top.

Don’t get me wrong, in some ways I love what Apple are doing with the iPhone. But at the moment, we, as consumers, are enjoying something of a smartphone gold rush, with companies trying to up the ante left, right and centre – if we don’t question some of Apple’s downsides, and allow them to occupy an almost Google like position at the top of the smartphone market, the other companies will fade into relative obscurity, carving inroads in their own small niches. The competition, and pressure for market-wide innovation, will drop off, and developments could slow to a crawl.

I’d love to hear whether you think the iPhone is justified in its status, and long-term price tag ? .

Looking forward to the next couple of days now, I would just like to make you aware of the fact that the web host for thebytevine.com’s VPS (servercomplete.com) have decided that in order to continue providing premium bandwidth (and not just Cogent! I wonder why …. ? ), all San Jose based servers must be migrated to alternative DC locations.

What will this mean for you ? Well … hopefully nothing – if all goes to plan the site will only be down for as long as is required for the dns to re-propagate – but I like to think (in my infinite wisdom) that this is your site as much as it is ours, so fair warning seemed to be in order.

On a more general note, you may have noticed from the 1200 word giant of an article on new iphone rumours, that we have a new associate editor here at the Bytevine. Dylan (or Tracker, as he prefers to be known) has been writing about technology for a long while now over at themodshop.net, and we are delighted to have him on board here, helping us bring you stuff really worth a space on your feed reader!

Lastly, I’d like to thank those few who have already commented and/or subscribed … you early contributors are really why we blog and we won’t forget it (when we’re all rich and famous and stuff …). Please continue to come back, it won’t be a waste of your time!

Cheers, Hugo

Apple … that wondeful company that brought us such fun stuff such as iPods, OSX and the iPhone. In this article I am going to talk about the iPhone – all of its previous generations, and the one that may be on its way into a apple store near you following the upcoming Apple WWDC!

The First iPhone:

This one was really a big hit. More so than I myself ever expected it to be. It brought a lot of new stuff to the phone market. Things including the multi touch screen and a simplistic design. However the first iPhone was really not much better than any other phone at the time, or at least in my own opinion. This is mostly because it did not have any 3rd party app support like its contempory, my Palm Treo, had . It also had a recessed headphone jack that in my opinion was a bad idea from the start as it made most headphones useless.

Combine that with no GPS and no multi media messages [picture messages] it was just another phone that was not able to do what the current phones could. It was however an apple product so every person knew about it and thus they went out and bought it. It did have some nice features such as its multi touch screen and full web browser. However at the time I needed more so I myself passed up the iphone all together, not even wanting one .

The 2nd iPhone [The iPhone 3g]:

It Came along and changed all kinds of stuff. Some of the things that it changed was the headphone jack was now flush with the case. The back of the phone went from a metal and plastic [at the bottom] combo to just plastic, The corners got rounded to make it fit a bit better in your hand and it got built in GPS. When it was first released however it still lacked the 3rd party app support that I so needed in order to adopt the phone and thus I moved on to a windows mobile phone. When Apple released its 2.0 firmware they added what is know the very well known App Store.

Now this was a big deal because it added all that 3rd party app love that everyone wanted. It made the iPhone rank up with some of the top smart phones out right now. However it still kind of has its down sides. It still lacks Multi Media Messages [Picture messages] along with no cut and paste support. [Oh how I miss my cut and paste]  It also is still locked down to AT&T [There are ways around this but that is for another article ]. However the current firmware does provide everything that you could need in a phone. Combine that with iTunes and the result is the iPhone I am currently using to text people with.

The rumored iPhone 3g 2009:

Right now every tech blog out there is buzzing with the supposed iPhone 3g 2009 and what it may or may not have. Some people seem to think that the leaked shots prove that it will have a forward facing camera along with video chat support and a whole bunch of new features. However I am going to show you some of the images and point out where/why they are false.

The first one is of the supposed video chat support.

Now on the left hand phone notice the location of the green dot as compared to the one on the right. See how they are in different positions? I am not convinced that this is a new iPhone.

Look at the bottom of the image on the left and notice the icons. To be more precise the one on the right hand side of the phone. Ya the icon that is covered by there cleverly placed logo. That icon is a skype icon. Thus leading me and the writers over at Gizmodo to the same conclusion that the images are fake. I am, of course, not saying that there is no possibility of a new iPhone with a forward facing camera. However these images do nothing to  prove that feature as a probability.

Here is another image of the skype hoax proved.

You see it now? All they did was replace the image of the person they called with a photo shopped one. Kind of a clever yet dumb thing to do. Guess they just wanted there 15 minutes of fame.

Lets move along to another image that I am not at all convinced is any sort of proof what so ever…

Look at the image on the left and you will notice that the speaker is moved up just a bit. Now that is possibly a true image of the new iPhone , once again though, I’m not fully convinced it isn’t just a photoshopped image or a knock off of a current Handset. However the image on the right points to a few dots on the case at the top where the camera might be. This is something I found to be a deal breaker for me. If you take a current iPhone 3g and hold it in the right light you will see those same sensor dots to the left of the speaker. These dots are for the control of the back light if you select auto backlight adjustment and they are also to shut the screen off when you put the phone up to your ear to make a call. Go grab a iPhone and try it. Place a call and cover those dots with your finger and the screen will shut off.  I am not sold at all.

In my opinion the new iPhone wont be coming out when everyone seems to hope it will be (The next WWDC). However I do believe a significant change will happen with current iPhones.

iPhone 3.0 firmware:

This is what I think will come out before a new iPhone. I could of course be way off. The new firmware has been out for beta testers and app developers for a while now. It brings quite a few new features to the current iPhones such as multi media messages [YAY!!!!] as well as copy and paste [double yay!!]. It will also introduce a whole bunch of new SDK tools that will allow a bunch of new features. According to the keynote that apple released about the new SDK manufactures will be able to make accessories that will talk with the iPhones sync port or over bluetooth and be controlled using the iPhone. So lets say you buy a new set of speakers. You will be able to control the EQ and Volume from the iPhone rather than on the speakers themselves. Kind of a big deal if you ask me. It will also bring the ability to add turn by turn navigation to the iPhone. App developers will be able to add turn by turn navigation apps to the app store. That in my mind is a huge deal and I am happy to see that ability coming. There will be a whole bunch of other abilities coming with the new SDK’s and hopefully less fart applications.

So that is my take on the iPhone and what is to come for the device/platform in the WWDC . If you have anything to add be sure to post it in a comment we would love to hear it.

[Image Source: Gizmodo]

-Tracker

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