iPhone

There's one surefire way to solve the iPhone 4 antenna problem: don't let your hand or fingers come in contact with its metal band.

Easier said than done, right? Unless you're willing to constantly use the speakerphone, a headset, or a pair of gloves, your only viable option is to keep the iPhone in a case--or, as some have discovered, wrap it in a rubber "bumper."

iPhone Guru blogger Oliver Nelson crafted a clever DIY iPhone 4 bumper solution out of one of those rubber wristbands you probably have sitting in a junk drawer.

It'… Read more

Steve Jobs has become a prolific correspondent with customers via e-mail, but at least one of the e-mail chains recently published is now being called a fake.

This week alone, customers who wrote to Apple's CEO at his corporate e-mail address say they received replies from Jobs on topics on everything from the escalating concern over the iPhone 4's antenna design, to the ability to transfer high-definition video from the iPhone to the Web, to the possibility of including Blu-ray Disc players in Macs.

On Thursday, Boy Genius Report published a series of e-mails between one of its … Read more

Sometimes, genius can be erratic. Even when it's wearing a T-shirt and working in an Apple store.

Maria Avila had an old iPhone. It was time to give it some of that new 4.0 flavor. So she went to her local Apple store in Modesto, Calif., to have the iOS 4 software installed and came back with an installation she hadn't quite expected. Yes, a slide show of strange photos, 110 of them.

Thumbing through her new pictures, Avila told CBS13 in Stockton, Calif.: "I don't know these people."

Her upgraded iPhone seemed to have taken on a new personality. She couldn't send texts. The phone locked up. And then, having discovered the strange pictures, she found new information in her address book. As well as text messages.

"Someone named George is telling me I love you and we'll meet up in Costco," she told CBS13. Which must have not only been quite scary, but also made her wonder what on earth has happened to romance these days.

Turning her eyes upward to see whether she had not only had her phone upgraded, but perhaps also her whole persona, she looked to find her name and phone number at the top of her iPhone. Instead, she encountered the name and phone number of Marlene Hepner, a resident of Tracy, Calif.

So Avila called Hepner. And when she showed her the pictures that had suddenly appeared on her iPhone, Hepner was rather upset.… Read more

Instead of automatically sending your junk mail to the trash bin, send it over to the burrito artists at Chipotle. The casual food chain is now accepting your spam at nojunk@chipotlejunk.com and will donate $10,000 to The Lunch Box for every 500,000 junk mails it receives.

The campaign is an effort to bring higher-quality, healthier food with sustainable ingredients to school kids, but not to worry: Said food does not include Chipotle burritos, which contain 1,179 calories, according to Livestrong.com. Unfortunately, the call to action does not include sending Chipotle the other kind of SPAM.… Read more

Barely a week since the public got its hands on the iPhone 4, the first lawsuit over it has been filed.

Filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland on behalf of Kevin McCaffrey, Linda Wrinn, and others on Wednesday, the suit accuses Apple and AT&T of knowingly distributing a phone with a malfunctioning antenna. The plaintiffs are seeking class action status. The iPhone maker and its exclusive carrier partner in the U.S. are accused of a laundry list of infractions, including: general negligence, defect in design, manufacture, and assembly, breach of warranty, … Read more

I'm a big proponent of cloud-based music services for mobile devices. I struggle figuring out which 500 songs I want on my 8GB iPhone at any given time, and the problem gets worse as as I download more apps. So it's gratifying to see an explosion of mobile music services in the last six months. Start-ups and established companies alike seem to believe that the current model, where users transfer songs from a computer to their phone using a wired connection, is not long for this world. Instead, these companies are coming up with various ways to dispense … Read more

If you've been one of the many clamoring to see Firefox running on an iPhone, you may get your chance--of sorts.

Back in late May, Mozilla announced that it would be creating an iPhone version of its Firefox browser--though the solution is not a browser itself. On Wednesday, Mozilla submitted its Firefox Home iPhone app to Apple for testing--and, it hopes, for approval.

The free Firefox Home is more of a window to your Firefox browsing rather than a competing browser itself, … Read more

Let me start by saying that I bought my iPhone 3GS in October of last year and have no plans to upgrade to the iPhone 4. Luckily, while the new iPhone--antenna issues aside--has certainly been enhanced, the differences between the new model and my "old" 3GS aren't huge, especially now that I've installed iOS4. However, even if there was a big difference, I knew going in that I would largely be ignoring whatever next-generation model Apple put out because I'm not a serial upgrader.

But recently I've been thinking about how long a … Read more

Almost a week after the iPhone 4's launch, questions remain over why users experience signal loss when gripping the phone in a particular way.

Apple has called this a "non issue," despite users being able to repeatedly reproduce the problem. In the meantime, it's been suggested that it might be a problem that can be fixed with a software update. Others have said, and Apple has suggested, that users buy a case to prevent fingers from coming in direct contact with the antennas built into the metal band surrounding the iPhone 4.

Brian Klug and Anand Shimpi at tech blog Anandtech have conducted their own hands-on experiments comparing different smartphones and their reception when the antennas are covered. They sum up their findings this way: "At the end of the day, Apple should add an insulative coating to the stainless steel band, or subsidize bumper cases. It's that simple."

The bumper case is a rubber holder that just surrounds the exterior of the device, and that Apple started selling the same day as the iPhone 4 for $29. Apple has already said it's not giving the cases away for free. It's not clear why the company wouldn't do that, especially when the problem has been reproduced by many people, though it varies by place and person. … Read more