Happy 200th Day Birthday iPhone

You're all grows up!

Steve Jobs just announced that he's sold 20,000 iPhones a day since they were released, which makes a total of 4 million iPhones in the wild. Yes, we know our math.

He's adding a couple more features to the 4 million iPhones (that are in his control.)

Maps with locations, webclips, customizable home screens, SMS multiple people at once, chapters, subtitles, and language support in video, and lyrics support in audio. The update is available today via iTunes.

The SDK is coming in late February. So no games or anything custom for now--unless you forgo the update and stay with your hacked iPhone.

Surf The Edge Network 5 Times Faster! (Part 2)

For those of you who are faithful readers, you probably know that iPhonePOV was the first to suggest using Google Mobile as a proxy for a five-fold increase in EDGE surfing speeds. While this may not have been the most elegant approach, it worked well and many of our readers used it on a daily basis.

Well, all good things must come to an end, and so did this (sort of.) A couple of weeks ago, Google introduced a new version of it's iPhone start page, which you will see whenever you navigate to google.com on an iPhone. Their actions had the unfortunate side effect of disabling the mobile proxy which was the life-blood of fast EDGE surfing. Well, we've tried and tried to get the mobile proxy back, and we finally found a way.

Here's the trick. You can no longer simply navigate to google.com/m (that will just send you to the Google's chunky iPhone page...) but, you can still get your mobile-mojo by utilizing a cool little bookmarklet that was submitted to iPhonePOV by a nice contributer named KENDRA.

Here it is:

javascript:location.href='http://www.google.com/gwt/n?safe=images&uipref=3&gwt=on&hl=en&source=m&sa=X&oi=blended&ct=res&cd=1&rd=1&u=' +encodeURIComponent(location.href)

Now bookmarklets aren't really bookmarks, they're tasty bits of javascript disguised as bookmarks that activate tid-bits of java code to accomplish things that mere bookmarks can't. In this case, if you are surfing a site that is taking too long to download (which is every site if you are using ATT's EDGE network) you can simply click this bookmark (while the slow site is trying to download...) and Google will take over and covert the slow site with its mobile proxy and quickly feed you a lean and mean version of that site (at least 5 times faster than the full-size site would take to load.)

There is one drawback. Bookmarklets are not links. They are bookmarks and must be used as bookmarks. So, in order to use this bookmarklet, you must first install it into your iPhone's bookmarks, and there's really only one way to do this: You have to create a new bookmark in Safari and cut and paste the text above into the new bookmark. After you have created the bookmark, simply sync it onto you iPhone with iTunes and you'll be rockin' super fast sites faster then you can say "Google screwed up my EDGE surfing."

We suggest putting this bookmarklet somewhere easy to get to in your bookmarks list, because you'll want to have easy access to it whenever a site is coming in too slowly. We named our bookmark "Google It" and put it at the root level of our bookmark list.

Oh, yeah, one more thing, once you've converted a page with this method, any link you select on the converted page will be processed through Google's awesome (and super-fast) mobile proxy.

If you'r looking at this page on an iPhone and would like to see an example of what this bookmarklet bad-boy can do to a web page, click here and this page will be re-loaded with Google mobile conversion--Don't blink, it's very fast.)

Happy New Year!

iPhone Firmware 1.1.3 Pending

As anyone with an iphone and an Internet connection knows, a new update (1.1.3) is on the way for iPhone.

It adds a bunch of so-so features and for some reason we can't figure out, still doesn't offer a any search function for the Phone application. (Come on, SMS has search, Safari auto-searches, Google Maps has a search, why doesn't the Phone application on a phone have a search feature?--trés annoying.)

Anyway, just in case you spent the holidays on the dark side of the moon, here's the scoop on the latest update:

* The ability to send an SMS message to multiple people is now there
* Google Maps application can now pinpoint your location using cell tower triangulation (this is a so-so feature at best, many factors have to be just right for this feature to work correctly, so don't get your panties all wet thinking they've added GPS functionality to the iPhone, cause it's not like that.)
* Google Maps can now display the Hybrid map view
* You can now drag and drop application icons on your home screen
* The home screen supports pagination
* You can now add web bookmarks to your home screen

Here's a link which will show you all of the 1.1.3 firmware's so-so features in an incredibly boring video.

We took a straw poll about how great these updates are at iPhonePOV headquarters and the result was a big 'Yawn.'

As an added bonus, the update installs a top-secret key that will make any unlocked iphone useless. Hacked iPhones will (probably) still work, but all your precious apps will stop working, so if you're in love with the hacker version of solitaire, you might want to wait until Apple officially starts supporting 3rd party applications (in Jan or Feb) so you can still get your game on.