The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Pity the poor iPhone 3G owner who now has to grapple with reality; yes, what was until Friday the world's coolest smartphone is now simply a piece of yesterday's tech, as current as a punchcard and as enduring as a wax cylinder recording on a hot afternoon. No, not really -- the iPhone 3G is just as cool as it was a week ago, and for $99 it's a relative bargain. Still, there's some envy on the wind.

Some of our readers have apparently been so dazzled by Apple's enthusiastic promotion of the new iPhone 3G S that they were fooled into believing that the hardware-linked features of the 3G S (the compass and the voice controls, specifically) would be made available on the 3G with the delivery of the 3.0 software update. They have written to us, irate and frustrated, wanting to know what happened to their promised features. We sympathize, and we want to help.

There is, as it happens, a way to get one of the marquee features of the 3G S -- voice control -- onto your iPhone 3G or original iPhone. The vlingo app, available free in the App Store since December of last year and also available for Blackberry & Windows Mobile, gives you voice command dialing from your address book, map search, Yahoo web searches, Twitter/Facebook updating, and more. The recognition quality is quite good; it's worked as well as Google Voice Search for me in most cases.

Vlingo is quite a bit slower to recognize audio on the 3G than the built-in Voice Control is on the 3G S (unsurprisingly, considering the horsepower boost on the new phone); it also does not allow iTunes control, while Apple's tool does. Despite these drawbacks, it's fun to use and very slick. Update: As Eitan points out in the comments, vlingo's speed is not necessarily limited by the local processing power, since it depends on the remote server for audio analysis.

One of the major points of contention regarding vlingo, and a cause of many negative reviews on the App Store, is that the app does have to do something a little bit touchy in order to enable voice dialing: it asks if it can upload your contact names to vlingo. While this is a necessary step if you want to use voice dialing, and while the company says it does not include phone numbers with that upload nor does it use the information for any purpose other than creating spoken profiles to recognize the names of your contacts when you speak them, there are plenty of users who aren't comfortable with this step. If you're not OK with it, you can still use vlingo without the voice dialing feature; at that point, however, it's not dramatically better than Google's Voice Search.

You can watch a video demo of vlingo in the 2nd half of this post. If you've got other workarounds or third-party apps that help 3G owners level up with their happy 3G S comrades, please let us know.

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We had a quick chat with Dr. Wm. Cameron Powell of Airstrip Technologies at the 5th Avenue Apple Store this morning, talking about his company's data visualization and monitoring tools for hospital use. Airstrip's FDA-approved application for OB monitoring is already on the App Store in demo form, and is being rolled out in sites around the country; the company was featured in the WWDC developer showcase video, which has really ramped up the volume of calls and emails that Powell and his team are getting from large medical systems integrators.

Airstrip's forthcoming Critical Care product is in the final stages of testing before rollout; the company also has cardiology, imaging and lab test versions coming soon.

As the night follows the day, surely an updated Pwnage tool must follow the release of a new iPhone operating system. True to form, the dedicated hackers of the iPhone Dev Team have posted a blog entry detailing the steps needed to jailbreak (and, in some cases, unlock) iPhones running the new software.

There are quite a few caveats and qualifications with this stage of the tool release; in particular, it won't work with 2nd-gen iPod touch devices, nor with the new 3G S phones. If you have unlocked your phone using the yellowsn0w tools, you are advised not to use this version of Pwnage as your phone will relock back to the original carrier assignment.

It should go without saying, but we'll say it: jailbreaking or unlocking your phone is done at your own risk.

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Freeverse president Ian Lynch Smith and dev lead Bruce Morrison were among the crowds at the 5th Avenue Store early this morning, and both are enthused about the promise of the new iPhone hardware for gamers. We took a few minutes to talk to them (pardon the loud store noise).

We snuck past the line into the glass cube, and got some pictures of the well-behaved crowd downstairs in the 5th Avenue store who were buying and activating their phones (and also checking out the new MacBook Pro lineup while they were there).



Erica's in line at the Cherry Creek Mall in Colorado and sent us a few quick snapshots.



If you want to catch every moment of launch day, take a look at Cnet's liveblog from around the country.

Good morning! All day today we'll be updating with reports from iPhone 3G S purchasers around the country, both here and on Twitter. So far the lines seem modest and activation is reportedly going smoothly. Victor notes that AT&T store lines are short where he is and if you are not the primary account holder on your cell plan, you have to go to AT&T anyway to upgrade.

Morning schedules and slow subways kept me from the 7 am store open at 5th Avenue (since Apple moved it earlier from 8 am due to AT&T opening its stores at 7), but by 7:30 the line was still active and purchasers were beginning to emerge. NYPD reports that about half the barricaded area was full at 7 am.

In the ecosystem of the App Store, the postcard-sending app occupies a healthy niche; about two pagefuls -- 60 apps -- show up in the store, for a category weighting of 0.125 flatulans. The flatulan, of course, is the unit of measurement of App Store penetration, equaling the 480 individual apps that include the word 'fart' somewhere in their description.

Among those postcard apps, there are several standouts for virtual cards (ADA winner Postage, for example) and even a few that let you send physical postcards for a small fee (TapTapCards, goPostal and Postino).

With Postman (iTunes link/website), released today by Freeverse and Taptivate for $0.99 for iPhone OS 3.0 devices, the postcard-sending app category gets a social media boost. Postman lets you deliver your two-sided ecards (yes, the app gives you the option of simulating the back of a traditional postcard, complete with stamp graphic) via Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, email, or simple upload to the postmanapp.com website for public review. You can already track several tweeted postcards (some which probably should never have been sent.) You can also simply save your postcards to the photo roll on the device.

Creating postcards with Postman is fast and easy; all the controls are persistent in a small icon bar at the top of the screen and large front/back and 'share' buttons at the bottom.

Postman has style and several handy features. In addition to using your own camera images/photo library or the included stock images for postcard sources, you can locate yourself on a Google map and use that graphic instead (this leverages the Map API in iPhone 3.0). Once you pick a graphic, you've got a choice of one-click filters to apply that spice up the look of your card. You can easily switch fonts and colors for your text input on the card front or back, and then send with a couple of taps.

There are a few rough edges with the first release. I found the lack of a portrait mode frustrating, as I'm actually a faster typist on the vertical keyboard; not that you'll be keying in a chapter of War and Peace, but there's quite a bit of room for copy on the postcard back and I'd like to be able to rotate on that screen. The selection widgets seem cramped a bit, particularly the one for the stock templates. It would be nice to save postcards in progress and switch back to them, but for now there's only one card and no way to revert to earlier versions.

If you want to have super-slick, email-only postcards from your iPhone, and are willing to spend a couple of dollars more for some added flexibility, you may be better off with Postage or the still-awesome Comic Touch. For $0.99, however, the first pass of Postman delivers ease of use and some very handy delivery mechanisms on the back end.

Something's coming... Since having 100,000 people download a software update is just about as exciting as can be, we're opening up a liveblog in the 2nd half of this post to let you ask questions, share observations and generally get your 3.0 on.

The TUAW bloggers will be passing through the chat during the afternoon as everyone has a chance to download and install the new software. Looking forward to hearing how it goes for everyone!

UPDATE: Yes, iPhone OS 3.0 is here and should be available via iTunes. Read more here. We're still covering installs and reports below.

Another update: We are moderating comments, so if yours don't appear, we love you, but we're getting about 200 comments a minute and there's only so much bandwidth. Please be patient.

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We're not innocent of error, and on occasion we create our own dramatic bits of fail, but in this case we can help clarify things: If you are visiting an "official Apple site" that shows a release date of June 18 for the iPhone 3.0 software update, take a closer look at that URL before you start jumping up and down in panic.



Yes, that 'sg' does indeed signify that you are looking at the Singapore version of Apple's site, even if PC World mistakenly says that the US site has been updated with the "delayed" release date -- they are also linking to the incorrect URL. ComputerWorld has the correct info. Of course, Singapore is not on Pacific Time, but you can see here how the 10 am PT slot shows up around the globe. We're also getting links from folks mistakenly pointing to the Australia version of the site and saying "It's out now!!" Please, do yourself a solid and check in iTunes or in Terminal before engaging full freakout mode.

How did this spin out of control? A tweet sometime last night, from whom we do not yet know, with the Singapore link that got picked up and amplified over and over again. We did our best to squelch it, but it keeps coming back. The good news is, with any luck we'll all be on track with our watches very soon.

In the meantime, you can visit us on Twitter at our new Q&A address -- @ask_tuaw -- or, for some tunes to keep your mind off your anticipation, click through to the second half of this post for a custom TUAW's "Music To Wait For Upgrades By" playlist.

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We can't wait for iPhone 3.0 to arrive (c'mon, isn't it Wednesday somewhere already?), so in the meantime we're making a list and checking it twice. AppAdvice has posted a short list of apps known or expected to include Push Notification capabilities, including IM+, AP News, Tap Tap Revenge 2.5 and AIM. ESPN's ScoreCenter (promoed at the top of the store earlier today) was also announced as a push-capable app during the original iPhone 3.0 event.

We've got a few others that seem to be promising PN capability at or near the 3.0 launch, courtesy of reader Joachim's research help: Beejive IM and ngmoco's Touch Pets Dogs. A quick search of Apptism for 'push notifications' reveals a few more candidates, including David Fletcher's ChatMaster. Searching the iTunes Store itself shows a couple more interesting (and not necessarily shipping) apps: speed trap checker Trapster, killer Jabber/XMPP client OneTeam, personal finance tool BillMinder and IT manager's virtual machine toolkit VManage all list PN on the roadmap but no sign of new versions yet.

Once the 3.0 version is released and developers can loose their tongues, we fully expect to hear about scores of updates to take advantage of PN and other new features. If your app is among the revised horde, shoot us a line at our app review address.

Thanks to Will for the suggestion.