We've posted before how popular the iPhone is as a camera on Flickr, with people uploading tons of photos, both shot by and straight from the iPhone. But now, The Next Web has covered a huge drop in photos referencing the iPhone over on the popular photo sharing site. The suspected culprit? Flickr themselves.

TNW suggests that the problem is the Flickr iPhone application, which will upload pictures straight to the service -- but not include metadata information like the fact that the pictures were taken with the iPhone. Still, even they sound a little skeptical: not all of that drop can be attributed to just the Flickr app's shortcomings. They also suggest that the iPhone is wearing out its welcome -- lots of people jumped to use it as a camera when the 3GS introduced a better lens and the video capability, and now in day-to-day use, they're not using it as much. Other commenters to the post suggest that the vastly improved Facebook app may be eating away at the use of the built-in Camera app.

I know that my photo habits for the phone haven't changed -- I use the iPhone quite a bit to take pictures, but looking at my own usage, I don't use Flickr nearly as much these days, as I use services like Twitpic and other sites built up directly around the iPhone. A drop in usage on Flickr doesn't mean people aren't using their iPhones to take snapshots -- they could just be sending their photos and media somewhere else.

Update: One of our commenters, echoed by our old friend & past colleague Barb Dybwad at Mashable, notes that Apple's change to the EXIF data recording for iPhone photos (breaking out the different iPhone models to indicate which specific phone took the picture) may be partly responsible for the drop.

Cara Tia TUAW,

I need your help please. I am in Mexico and have an iPhone with a 150 MB data plan and 300 minutes. My carrier says that I have passed my data limit and owe them around $150 usd. According to the Cellular Network Data on my iPhone, I have used 35MB and 83 minutes (Settings > General > Usage). My question is, is this information technically good enough to fight back these charges? I think it must be, but I have to be sure. Can you help me, please?

Love, Joe P

p.s. Why I don't have an unlimited data plan? because it costs around $110 usd a month, that's why. My current data plan costs about $55 a month. Thank you!

Dear Joe P,

Auntie wishes she had better news for you, but the usage meter on the phone is notoriously unreliable. If you've restored or updated your iPhone in the last month (2.0.1 anyone?), you may have accidentally reset those values. Personally, we at TUAW can sneeze through 150 MB just by loading our own home page (or maybe it just seems that way).

Of course, feel free to contact customer service -- but relying on the onboard usage stats isn't going to take you very far.

Sorry for the bad news, caro.

Love,

Auntie TUAW

I always pay my iPhone bill with the phone itself. It's simple -- touch settings, then phone then AT&T services. In just a few seconds, I can wave about $70US goodbye. What a world!

There are other options on that screen, like "View my minutes," which I usually check when I pay my bill. As of right now, I'm looking at 1300 roll over minutes. This can only mean one thing:

I rarely use my iPhone as a phone.

I'm not alone. According to a report on International Business Times, 46.5 percent of iPhone owners spend the time they use their iPhones engaged in voice calls (that number is 71.7 percent for BlackBerry owners).

Also, iPhone owners in the US claim to spend 12.1 percent of their iPhone time on the net (compare that to 2.4 percent for all other mobile phones on average), and nearly 12 percent of their time listening to audio (compared to 2.5 percent for others).

In observing my own behavior with the iPhone, I use it most often as an iPod, and then to check email and use the net (Twitter mostly). For me, the iPhone is a computer that just happens to make phone calls, not a phone with some cool features. It appears I'm not the only one with this opinion.

According to a recent Macworld UK post, the Mac's sales are surging, and Apple has ramped up production on the Mac lines. Macworld received its information from recent Banc of America Securities research, which leads to the conclusion that along with raising Mac production, Apple has lowered production on the iPod lines (keeping in mind that this research predates the product announcements today). According to researchers, the production orders of Macs rose nearly 20%, while the production orders of the iPod fell 10-20%. The analyst speculates that Apple will be seeing an increasing demand for Macs.

On a related note, Macworld UK also posted about the Mac and iPhone online usage being slightly up. The post states that Apple's hardware accounted for 7.57% of internet traffic for the month of January. iPhone traffic was also up, .13%, of total traffic from .12% in December. The iPod touch accounted for a whopping 0.04% of internet traffic. Contrast this with Windows Mobile traffic, which accounts for .06% -- Macworld states that this figure has remained constant since June 2007, which (oddly enough) is when the iPhone was released.

First AT&T botches what is probably the most significant activation event in mobile phone history, and now they're including the complete data records - and I mean complete - in the first iPhone-related bills they're sending out to customers. Both David Pogue and John Gruber are reporting that their first post-iPhone bill from AT&T includes multiple pages (6 for Pogue, a whopping 45 for Gruber) of every chunk of data they downloaded for the account period. Now this isn't a rational listing like "nytimes.com, tuaw.com, goapeshirts.com," no no - every graphic downloaded from every page and the time and data of every message sent and received laid out in tree-obliterating detail that could only appeal to a rabid accountant.

Considering that every iPhone data plan includes the term "unlimited," no one can really figure out why AT&T went to all the bizarre trouble of listing all this information out. Is it some sort of vague warning for how much we might have to pay should they decide to threaten us with billing by kilobyte or megabyte? Did some AT&T billing engineer think that, since we're downloading 'just the internet,' we'd like to see detailed records of every bit and piece of what we're downloading? Or does some accounting intern simply have a grudge against a tree farm somewhere?

Whatever the case, this latest AT&T blunder reminds me why Apple likes to keep things locked down and under control. No one's going to want to read this stuff, but at the very least: if they just had to make it available, they should have included an announcement with paper bills that this detailed data usage could be accessed online. After all, the vast majority of iPhone customers probably have at least heard of the internets, so they would arguably have little to no problem accessing this useless bundle of info via AT&T's online account access.

Ugh - you just can't find good help these days.

Yesterday, I wrote about setting up the iPhone with pay-as-you-go service. Without purchasing feature packs, the data plan goes for an exorbitant $0.01/KB. (With a feature pack, the data goes down to $2/MB, or $0.002/KB.) This got me wondering. It's been almost a month since the iPhone debuted. How much data have you used? My iPhone tells me that I've sent 608 KB and received 2.9 MB--although with all my resets and restores, that number is probably much lower than my actual usage. Still, that's nothing compared to our own David Chartier. He's at 12.2 MB sent and 59.8 MB received. (Data junkie!) So I'm curious. How much EDGE data have you sent and received? You can find out by selecting Settings -> Usage. Let us know in the comments how big a data user you are. Bragging rights to everyone who beats out David.

Update: It looks like the average is currently around 150-200 MB for readers who aren't hovering around WiFi hotspots. The current high is near 2.7 GB. The few of us who have ready WiFi access are way, way down in comparison.

Disk Inventory X takes a unique approach to helping you analyze your disk space usage by visualizing it as a graphical chart. You can see a breakdown of which types of files are hogging the most space, and clicking on a graphical portion will display the file's location in your Mac's system. Let's hear it for the use of color, shapes and sizes in helping Mac users clean up their hard drives; those Britney Spears MP3 duplicates and abandoned BitTorrent downloads aren't going to trash themselves.

Disk Inventory X is donationware and available from derlien.com.

Safari's market share has been slowly climbing the charts over the last couple of years, and depending on which statistics you google, it has now reached an all-time high of 3.19%, up from 1.93% from June 2005. MacNN interestingly points out that, in a way, this statistic could also be viewed as a (very unofficial) barometer for general Mac usage, since Safari is one of the few Mac-only browsers (though I bet many Mac users ride the Firefox wave as well).

Either way, this should be great news for Safari-using web surfers and web designers alike, as the so-called web design 'standards' have yet another browser to get customized and tweaked for.

iStat nano, a handy system monitoring Dashboard widget, has been updated to version 1.51b with support for CPU temps on Intel Macs. The one catch is that you'll have to install SpeedIt, a System Preference pane and kernel extension that allows this kind of functionality (and much more). We've heard nothing but good things about SpeedIt and the features it provides (such as controlling CPU whine by regulating voltage), but we'd understand if the thought of installing kernel extensions has already made you skip this post in your newsreader.

If you're still reading this, however, it seems both iStat nano and the SpeedIt kernel extension are provided free, so have at it.

[thanks Aaron]

CoreDuoTemp, the handy little app for monitoring your Intel Mac's temp, CPU usage and frequency, has been updated to version 0.8. New features include:

• window position saved
• menu extra indicator
• new panel prefs
• correction of the English translation
• German language added

You can grab your own copy here.