Free iPhone 3G

Via the San Francisco Examiner : People chatting on their iPhones in Hayes Valley have been popular victims in a recent string of Hayes Valley robberies. Police are still looking for a teenager who simulated a gun, had friends with a gun or disguised himself with a black ski mask in three separate incidents Saturday. In one case, the victim felt someone walking too closely behind him in the 500 block of Grove Street, turned around and saw a teenager put on a black ski mask but was able to run away before anything happened, police Officer Boaz Mariles said. In another, the victim was walking out of a store at Gough and Ivy streets talking on his iPhone when three teenagers approached him — one who brandished a gun — and they took his phone, Mariles said. And another person was robbed of their iPhone just blocks away at Buchanan and Ivy streets by a teenager who simulated a gun. “They try to grab it while you’re using it so it’s not locked and they can see all your information,” Mariles said. This is a growing problem in Chicago too. iPhones are easily resold online for cash.

Via the San Francisco Examiner : People chatting on their iPhones in Hayes Valley have been popular victims in a recent string of Hayes Valley robberies. Police are still looking for a teenager who simulated a gun, had friends with a gun or disguised himself with a black ski mask in three separate incidents Saturday. In one case, the victim felt someone walking too closely behind him in the 500 block of Grove Street, turned around and saw a teenager put on a black ski mask but was able to run away before anything happened, police Officer Boaz Mariles said. In another, the victim was walking out of a store at Gough and Ivy streets talking on his iPhone when three teenagers approached him — one who brandished a gun — and they took his phone, Mariles said. And another person was robbed of their iPhone just blocks away at Buchanan and Ivy streets by a teenager who simulated a gun. “They try to grab it while you’re using it so it’s not locked and they can see all your information,” Mariles said. This is a growing problem in Chicago too.

The new iPhone app Football – Real Kick ($0.99, link ) uses what little air the iPhone speaker produces to push around a tiny styrofoam ball: The guys at TechCrunch say “You hear that sound? That’s the sound of my mind being blown.” Ummm, ok.

Will there be a sports armband for the iPad? Find out in the video below:

Ryan Block of GDGT.com guest posts on GigaOm : The first time you walk into an Apple Store and pick up an iPad, you’ll understand the hype: Apple has managed to create a beautiful, thoughtfully designed, compelling product in a space where mediocrity was, until now, status quo. But odds are you probably won’t buy one — at least not yet. And that’s OK. For despite the high level of anticipation for and proclamations associated with the launch of the Apple device, the fact remains that outside of a few select vertical uses (like medicine), tablets are constrained by their own form factor, stuck in the nether realm between productivity and portability. Standing onstage during the device’s unveiling, Steve Jobs himself posed a question that acutely underscores the tablet dilemma: Is there room for a third category of product that sits between your two most essential devices, the laptop and phone? As much as I’m looking forward to the iPad, I’m still not sure there is. Is the word between really how we should think about the iPad? I mean, Block is right, the iPad doesn’t fit into our lives

There are bound to be some political fireworks this weekend as the House votes on health care reform. If you want to get raw, unfiltered access to all the debates on the floor, we recommend C-SPAN Radio (free, iTunes link ). The app offers access to 3 streaming audio channels: C-SPAN Radio as well as the C-SPAN and C-SPAN 2 TV channels (but no video).

In a new commercial, Sprint takes a shot at AT&T’s 3G network while also introducing its Overdrive 4G WiFi Hotspot ( $49 ), a small portable device that creates a WiFi hotspot anywhere you go using Sprint’s 3G/4G networks. A character in the commercial states: My friend Steve’s iPhone’s cool, but it’s limited to AT&T’s 3G speeds, so I’m going to use the Overdrive 4G mobile hotspot to make it up to 10X faster.” Steve proceeds to connect his iPhone to the 4G WiFi hotspot and exclaims “Woah” as streaming video appears. I have Sprint’s 4G network in Chicago, called Clear, and my 4G laptop card is rarely faster than than AT&T’s 3G network on my iPhone, although my larger Clear 4G home modem does get speeds up to 3.5mbps. But that’s still hardly revolutionary. I like the wireless nature of the 4G service, and it’s a good deal, as I pay $50 a month and get both home and mobile wireless 4G broadband for my laptop. I’m just somewhat disappointed that the speeds aren’t faster than last generation broadband.

Last week at the Games Developer Conference , Tommy Refenes, developer of the game Zits and Giggles , had a few choice things to say about the iTunes App Store and the iPhone as a gaming device in general. This week, Apple removed his game from the App Store. During his GDC rant, Refenes said the App Store “is kind of shit for most things,” claimed the “App Store is the Tiger handheld game of this generation,” and made fun of the controls for games like Mega Man , Sonic , and Street Fighter IV

The Wall Street Journal , on Apple-watcher Victor Castroll’s efforts to count iPad preorder numbers: Castroll primarily follows Apple as an investor because clues are available to create such an assessment. “If you want to know Apple sales, you can look at order numbers or you can see people walking into a store,” he said. Other companies, by contrast, are “a black box.” There’s been a lot of silly hype about how the preorders “fell off a cliff” after the first day, mostly by Apple haters. But even if we were to accept it as a negative indicator, the WSJ points out it’s no prediction of a product’s long-term success: ….Yet early sales numbers are far from definitive. Studio executives can tell their technology counterparts all about the dangers of paying such figures too much heed. A year ago, “Watchmen” debuted to an impressive opening-weekend box-office take of $55.2 million, according to Hollywood.com. It didn’t make that much in the rest of its domestic run, finishing with a gross of $107.5 million. Eight months later, its studio, Warner Bros., released “The Blind Side” and raked in a more modest opening-weekend total of $34.1 million. That film’s box-office total is $252.7 million and counting — more than twice the total for “Watchmen.” And the iPhone experienced similar bad guesses from “experts” at launch: Gene Munster, senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray, recalled taking phone calls from investors who considered the iPhone “dead on arrival” soon after its launch when early numbers from AT&T Wireless missed early sales forecasts.

John Gruber dropped a subtle bomb over on his blog Daring Fireball concerning Apple’s lawsuit against HTC and the New York Times recent write-up of the growing Apple vs. Google rivalry. That last bit, regarding a general belief that Apple is gearing up for war against Google, echoes what I’ve heard lately from several sources who work at Apple. ….Hence the patent suit against HTC.