It’s been a little more than a month since the Apple iPhone 3G hit the street and users are complaining about one of its biggest selling features: speed. The phone is supposed to operate on a third-generation network, a major upgrade from other networks the iPhone operates on and an even bigger advance over the older Edge network. Unfortunately, 3G iPhone users are finding that their shiny new piece of hardware isn’t all roses and faster downloads. One analyst believes the perpetrator of the problem is an Infineon chip.The iPhone 3G sold more than 1 million units in its first weekend, based largely on the selling point of a faster network. But like the lines anxious consumers encountered at the Apple store, using the phone is taking longer than expected.

Nomura analyst Richard Windsor believes the complaints that have been cropping up on blogs and Apple’s own Web site point to something more than an isolated incident.

“There are too many instances on iPhone blogs and Apple’s own Web site for it to be coincidence,” he wrote in a report dated Aug. 12.

“Furthermore, it is not just the U.S. but other countries as well,” he also wrote in the report.

The most common complaint is that Internet speeds have been inconsistent, with a 3G network being available sometimes before users slip back onto a slower network such as Edge.

Windsor believes the problem can likely be traced to Infineon, a German chip manufacturer that provides the majority of chips to Apple for the iPhone 3G.

“We believe that these issues are typical of an immature chipset and radio protocol stack where we are almost certain that Infineon is the 3G supplier,” Windsor wrote.

Meanwhile, AT&T, the exclusive carrier of the iPhone in the U.S., hasn’t been confronted with the problem. In fact, the carrier has had very few complaints.

“This is not something that’s high on our radar screen. It’s not something we’ve had a lot of complaints about,” said AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel.

A spokesman from Infineon declined to comment.

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Of course it couldn’t be Apple’s fault.

REPORTS OF DROPPED connections on the Iphone could be down to a dodgy network communications chip made by Infineon, according to an analyst at Nomura.

Reuters dug up a report by Nomura European Telecoms Analyst Richard Windsor who wrote this week: “We believe that these issues are typical of an immature chipset and radio protocol stack where we are almost certain that Infineon is the 3G supplier.”

“There are too many instances on IPhone blogs and Apple’s own website for it to be coincidence. Furthermore, it is not just the U.S. but other countries as well,” he said.

Businessweek carried a report online that also blamed Infineon. It said the fault afflicts two or three per cent of Iphone traffic.

Neither Apple and Infineon have deigned to comment.

We can make up an Apple comment though: “Of course it’s not our fault. We are put on this earth to spread joy and enlightenment, not woe and misfortune. If one of our toys won’t work it can’t be our fault. Steve Jobs is our leader therefore we are infallible. We blame the Germans. µ

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The single best feature in Apple’s second-generation iPhone 3G isn’t the increased speed or the GPS location-finding feature. It is something called the “App Store,” a clever distribution mechanism for third-party programs that can run on the iPhone and on its close cousin, the iPod Touch. And you don’t even need a new iPhone to get the App Store. It is also part of a free software upgrade for older iPhones and a $10 upgrade for the Touch. 

In the first 10 days alone after the new iPhone and the App Store launched on July 11, more than 900 programs — applications, or “apps” in tech jargon — have been introduced by numerous developers. Over 90 percent cost less than $10 or are free. 

Even more noteworthy: iPhone and Touch users have downloaded 25 million copies of these programs, including silly sound effects, challenging games, news readers and business applications. 

We have been furiously downloading and trying out scores of these programs, using a new iPhone 3G, an original iPhone and an iPod Touch, and in general, we are very impressed. We found the process of choosing and downloading apps to be easy and quick, and most of the programs to be useful or entertaining. The vast majority are 

with great graphics and effective, simple user with great graphics and effective, simple user interfaces. 

The wide availability of so many programs written by developers beyond Apple itself makes the iPhone a true computing platform, like a pocket-sized Windows or Macintosh PC. With so many programs already available, and many more in the pipeline, iPhone and Touch owners can have a device with fresh, different capabilities every day. 

But the process isn’t perfect. For one thing, it is controlled by Apple, which can theoretically bar a program from distribution or take its time making one available. 

There are also some glitches. If you download a lot of apps in a short period, it can slow the phone’s next synchronization with iTunes to a crawl, while iTunes tries to back up all the new programs, each of which can contain numerous hidden files. 

And there’s a bug in the new iPhone operating system that causes apps to crash, and can even force the iPhone or Touch to reboot, if you use a large number of the new apps in quick succession. Apple says it is working on fixing the latter problem. 

Also, Apple’s claim of more than 900 programs is somewhat misleading, because more than 100 of those are individual books you can read on the phone. 

Apple’s baby isn’t the first smart phone that has attracted developers. Thousands of third-party programs already exist for Nokia phones, BlackBerrys and phones running the Palm and Windows Mobile operating systems. But, compared with the graphically rich, snappy iPhone apps — many of which fetch data from the Internet at high speed — the typical program on these older platforms looks positively primitive. 

The App Store can be accessed either from the device itself or from Apple’s iTunes software on a Windows or Mac computer, which then transfers the app to the iPhone or Touch. The programs cover a wide range. 

Some fill in obvious holes in Apple’s original complement of iPhone software, things the iPhone has lacked that other phones have. These include AOL Instant Messenger, a variety of task and to-do lists, sophisticated note-takers and a voice-dialer. There are numerous versions of popular board, card and word games, like solitaire, mahjong, Scrabble and Sudoku. There are also eye-popping iPhone versions of popular video games, some controlled by the phone’s motion detectors, which allow you to move cars and characters by just tilting the phone.

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Canada-based technology giant Research in Motion (RIM) has made announcement about the launching of its new smartphone ‘Blackberry Bold’ in Austria with the intention to take on rival Apple’s iPhone 3G.Targeting business segment, the newly launched 3G-enabled phone comes packed with a half-VGA LCD display with 480×320 resolution, full QWERTY keyboard, powerful 624 MHz processor and 1GB internal storage memory.Moreover, it boasts excellent multimedia features pertaining to video and pictures and assures to offer up rich stereo type sound via double speakers or using earphones.According to Blackberry the phone integrates enterprise plus personal features that may be used during mealtime, evenings and weekends. Mr. Don Morrison, RIM chief operating officer stated, “The BlackBerry Bold is a breakthrough smartphone for both professional and personal use. We are very pleased to be working with A1 to provide Austrian customers with a superior mobile experience that further enhances the renowned functionality and usability of the industry leading BlackBerry solution.”Other astounding features of the phone includes 2 megapixel camera with video recording capability; built-in flash; Digital zoom; advanced media-player with 11 preset filters that includes lounge; jazz, hip-hop; integrated GPS; Bluetooth 2.0; e-mail access coupled with attachment viewing and support for hands-free headsets, stereo headsets, car kits and Bluetooth peripherals.The phone will be launched in United Kingdom through T-mobile by next month (September 2008).

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Buyers snap up quality-built, energy efficient smaller homes

Staff and Wire Report

Peter Moon’s family of six snuggles into bench seats for dinners together. Their house is 1,100 square feet, a bit smaller than two squash courts. “We really don’t need more space,” said Moon, a 46-year-old software designer. “I don’t mind being cozy.”

Moon said he and his wife dumped a much larger home in Boston three years ago to seek a simpler, greener life in Kirkland, Wash. Moon recently persuaded his parents to sell their 2,000-square-foot house on New York’s Long Island and retire to a small neighboring cottage.

“We’ve lived in bigger, older houses, but this is by far the most livable,” Moon said. “There’s no place to accumulate junk.”

The designers of the Moon family house, Ross Chapin and Jim Soules, think small in a way that is practically un-American. They build tract houses that are half the size of the average U.S. home and cost a lot more per square foot. What is surprising is how quickly they sell them. The men are building their fortunes with buyers willing to pay more for less. Customers, such as the Moons, say they prefer taking up less room and using less energy.

Chapin, an architect, and Soules, a developer, met by chance in 1996, when nearly everyone else in the housing market was thinking big. Now, as the surplus of unsold McMansions increases, other developers are starting to lean their way.

In the past decade, the two men have built about four dozen Craftsman-style cottages that range in size from 800- to 1,500-square-feet. The houses are squeezed into five boutique-sized tracts, all within a two-hour drive of Seattle. Some were melded into more spacious suburbs under zoning laws modified to ease density restrictions for small houses. Most were built around a grass commons shared by a dozen or so like-minded residents who boast of their tract’s smallish carbon footprint.

Some builders in the Volusia-Flagler market are following the trend of smaller houses, albeit without the steeper prices of Chapin’s and Soules’ bungalows.

“We generally used to build 3,000- to 4,000-square-foot homes until about a year ago, but most are now 1,200 to 1,300 square feet,” said Craig Olson, president of HeartBilt Homes in Orange City. “We’re trying to keep the payments down so it costs the same to buy or rent.”

Olson said his company is targeting the first-time homebuyers, with three-bedroom, two-bath houses starting at $107,400 on a buyer’s lot. That 1,178-square-foot house will have a 10-year structural warranty, knock-down ceilings, Energy Star appliances and energy-efficient features, such as double-pane windows, throughout.

Bob Fitzsimmons, chief executive of Gallery Homes of DeLand, is using similar techniques in his company’s houses. Gallery’s smallest house is 1,129 square feet while still comprising three bedrooms and two baths. Like HeartBilt’s smallest model, Gallery’s house has a one-car garage. But all of Gallery’s models, like HeartBilt’s, include some upscale touches and Energy Star appliances.

Fitzsimmons said the decision to go smaller was “to make it affordable, number one.”

“The more you put into a house, the more you have to charge,” he said. “You have got to look at what people can afford, and build a product they can afford.”

Gallery’s smallest model — the company also has two other, larger floor plans — costs $105,900, not counting the lot.

Developers in Milwaukee, Boston, Indianapolis and elsewhere are looking to spread the idea of smaller houses, and for good reason. While falling home prices and sluggish sales have slashed new housing starts by a quarter in the past year, Chapin and Soules said they field a dozen calls a week asking, “When’s your next project?” They have one house left for sale, a two-bedroom, two-bath cottage of 1,000 square feet in Redmond, Wash., the home of Microsoft. At $599,950, it isn’t cheap. The median price last month for a single-family home in the neighborhood was $542,500. Residents of the tiny tracts say they don’t mind paying a premium for such touches are hardwood floors and custom cabinets because the two men develop more than just housing.

“We walk into each others’ houses and borrow sugar and do all the kinds of things you did in the 1950s,” said Pat Hundhausen, a retired special education teacher. Her Umatilla Hill development, like the others, is a throwback to the bungalow courtyard, a design that appeared in the 1920s, before traditional, single-family tract housing gave form to postwar suburbia. Hundhausen and her husband left Waukesha, Wis., their hometown of 40 years, after visiting friends a couple of years ago in Umatilla Hill. It took the couple less than a week to buy a nearby lot.

The small-home buyers are a mix of single professionals, young families and retired empty-nesters. While aspirants to the traditional American Dream seek ever bigger, more secluded homes, residents here say they prefer making do with less. Getting to know the neighbors is a bonus. Todd Staheli and his wife are raising two daughters in a 998-square-foot house surrounded by people they greet by name. “There are a lot of eyes on them as they ride their scooters and bikes,” says Mr. Staheli.

The houses are painted in Easter-egg pastels of salmon, yellow and avocado green, adding to the tract’s storybook feel. Residents tend thickets of poppies, lavender, catmint, roses and lilies. Their front-yard gardens are surrounded by a knee-high fence, leading out to a sidewalk and the grass commons. Single-car garages are built along an edge of the tracts, which are usually set back from a main street or connected by private road.

“It feels like you’re in this oasis when you walk home, even though you’re close to a major shopping center, a bus line and a college,” said Eileen McMackin, who lives at the Greenwood Avenue Cottages in Shoreline, Wash.

Chapin, the architect, uses clever design tricks to give the houses the illusion of more space. Corner windows add light and better views. Large skylights in the upstairs loft keep sloped ceilings from feeling cramped. Hollowed-out interior walls provide built-in bookshelves and cubbies for pictures and knickknacks. Every crawlspace is used for storage. He worked with Mr. Soules to give the houses their signature retro look.

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Rookie Of The Year with a Vertical Solution in Hedge FundsMicrosoft recently announced 2008 award winners as part of Microsoft’s U.S. Field Partner Awards Program in the New York Metro Area, consisting of metropolitan New York City, Northern New Jersey, and Fairfield County, Connecticut. This program recognizes the extraordinary contributions of partners serving small, mid-market and enterprise commercial customers throughout the past fiscal year.“The success achieved by our partners demonstrates that they deliver effective applications and solutions to local customers,” said Craig Kampel, New York Metro Area general manager for Microsoft’s Small and Mid-market Solutions and Partners (SMS&P) group. “Microsoft recognizes these tremendous organizations by honoring their considerable successes and contributions.”For the fiscal year ending June 30, 2008, partners received recognition across the Dynamics and Platform product groups in numerous individual categories. Integrity Partners a Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains (GP) reseller and implementer has been recognized for their demonstrated excellence and success through innovative marketing and demand generation activities. Having seen their work result in numerous sales wins and a strong sales pipeline, Integrity Partners continues to spearhead the advancement of Microsoft Dynamics-GP as the ideal solution for companies that need more than a basic accounting software.Integrity Partners’ determined efforts to exceed their clients expectations has proven beneficial to their Hedge Fund clientele by providing them not only with a new accounting system to fit their needs, but also a true partner relationship. Learning each and every business model, streaming processes, and gaining deep visibility into decision-driving information. All proving to maximize operational efficiency.Monique Tatum Director of Marketing states” Our expertise within our vertical market has greatly assisted us in winning deals within the Hedge fund and financial management community. Many of our newer clients have similar business models and needs such as third party system integrations, manual processes that need automation, and other day to day operations that are draining productivity time. We present proven solutions that speak directly to their accounting needs. It has provided us with a deeper connection when working with Hedge Funds and Financial Industry clients.”About Integrity PartnersIntegrity Partners (integritymbs.com) is knowledgeable and renowned in the Microsoft Dynamics-GP community having successfully completed an ample amount Microsoft Dynamics-GP implementations within the Tri State Area. Integrity Partners manages a seamless transition for accounting solutions including pre-planning, expert installation, training, and professional technical support.

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NEW YORK — When Taiwan’s Asustek Computer Inc. brought out the Eee PC last year, it created a whole new category of tiny, cheap laptop computers. Despite its success, the computer had one confounding element: Its keyboard was really small — good for kids, maybe, but not for adults.Now, Asus has expanded its line with laptops that are just big enough for a full-size touch-typist, and at least one of the models hits a sweet spot, keeping weight and price low while providing great features and battery life. It compares well with laptops that are three or four times the price.I tested two models with 10-inch screens, the $550 Eee PC 1000H and the $700 Eee PC 1000. The first Eee PC models had 7-inch screens and went for $400, now down to $300.While these new models are substantially bigger and more like “real” laptops, they’re still terrifically portable, weighing in at 3 pounds. That’s the same weight as the vaunted MacBook Air, which Apple Inc. calls the thinnest laptop ever. While the Air has a bigger, 13-inch screen, the new Eee PCs blow the Air away in couple of other dimensions, beginning with price, since the Air starts at $1,799.Each of Asus’ “little PCs that could” also has a built-in slot for SD memory cards, commonly used in digital cameras, a monitor output jack and an Ethernet port. The Air requires add-on dongles for all of those functions. An Eee PC has three USB ports, while the Air has one. It’s the price of being thin.Like bigger laptops, the Eee PCs have built-in Webcams and microphones, for on-the-fly Internet videoconferencing. The Wi-Fi chip is the latest and greatest “draft-n” variety, for maximum speed. There’s also a Bluetooth chip for wireless peripherals like mice, or for transferring pictures from cell phones.The Eee PCs have really impressive battery life too, even if it will be tough to stretch it to Asus’ goal of whole-day computing and nearly 8 hours of working time. The 1000 model lasted 5 hours and 15 minutes while playing a movie with the speaker muted and the screen set to medium brightness.The cheaper 1000H lasted half an hour less, perhaps because it has a traditional, spinning hard drive, while the 1000 has a solid-state disk of flash memory, or an SSD. These SSDs are the latest thing for laptops, and they promise increased durability, but I hardly think they’re worth the price. The 1000’s 40-gigabyte hard drive is half the capacity of the 1000H’s, yet it accounts for the unit’s higher price. Still, if you want an SSD, the 1000 is a good deal. A Lenovo X300 with a 64-gigabyte SSD costs $2,268.The other difference between the models is that the less-expensive 1000H runs Windows XP, while the 1000 runs Linux, the free operating system that the original Eee PCs also used. It looks like Asus figured it had to keep the price of the 1000 below $700, and the best way to do that was to scratch the license fee to Microsoft Corp.The Linux version comes loaded with software that does all the basics, such Web surfing, e-mail, Skype, word processing, but to extend its capabilities with new software, you’ll need to mess with typing commands to the operating system. There’s a Linux version of my favorite free strategy game, “Battle for Wesnoth,” but I couldn’t figure out how to install it.The Linux PC also exhibited some sluggish behavior that I didn’t see on the XP version. Both models are among the very first products to use Intel’s new ant-sized Atom processor, specifically designed for this sort of application. Performance otherwise seemed snappy, but video editing and the latest 3-D games are probably outside the processor’s competence.Linux is appropriate for smaller Eee PCs that are mostly used for Web surfing, but for a 10-incher that’s almost as capable as a full-sized laptop, I think Windows is the better choice. You can install XP on the 1000 if you hook it up to an external CD drive. Users even report installing the more demanding Windows Vista with good results.Otherwise, the only thing to complain about these computers is the quality of the finish, and some of the design decisions. The glossy outside shell is easily scratched and shows every fingerprint. When opened, the unit looks cheap, and the touch pad feels unresponsive at times. The fan is surprisingly loud for such a small PC. There’s no slot for wireless broadband cards.For the price, these flaws are easily overlooked. These Eee PCs are a good choice for students, mobile professionals and anyone with normal-sized hands who uses a laptop outside the home.

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LAS VEGAS, Nevada (AFP) — Security specialists said Saturday that hackers are taking increasing aim at iPhones and Macintosh computers as the hot-selling Apple devices gain popularity worldwide.

Hackers have historically focused devious efforts on computers using Windows operating systems because the Microsoft software has more than 90 percent of the global market, promising evil-doers a wealth of targets.

Macintosh computers have been gaining market share and catching the interest of hackers, according to Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) security vulnerability analyst Cameron Hotchkies.

“There are more eyes looking over Apple products for vulnerabilities,” Hotchkies told AFP at a notorious annual DefCon gathering of hackers in Las Vegas.

“It has slowly been growing as a target people are more and more interested in.”

Hotchkies specializes in Apple software as part of a ZDI team devoted to scrutinizing programming holes and crafting “patches” to prevent hackers from exploiting weaknesses.

More than a thousand people crammed into his DefCon talk about hacking Apple software. He was peppered with technical questions at the close of the session.

“There are a lot more people getting into it and really getting their hands dirty,” said Hotchkies, who noted an obvious spike this year in the number of DefCon attendees toting Macintosh laptops.

“I’ve been seeing a lot of reverse engineering on the Apple platform.”

Part of the reason for increased popularity of Macintosh computers is that Apple has made the machines friendlier to running programs popular on Windows-based machines.

Hackers experienced with attacking Windows programs can apply some of their know-how to software modified to run on Macintosh computers.

Developers that re-craft Windows programs for Macintosh systems might not be adept at building security components on the latest Leopard operating system used in Apple machines.

“Windows developers take their code and make it work on Apple,” Hotchkies said. “They could take potential vulnerabilities with them or possibly create new ones because they are working on an entirely different platform.”

Apple’s Safari operating system is the basis for internet browsing using iPhones, which are basically handheld mini-computers with telephone, music, and video viewing capabilities.

It took about a month for someone to hack a first-generation iPhone after its release, but an iPhone 3G was cracked within hours of the start of sales in July.

The hack is crowned a “jail break” because it liberates iPhone models from the shackles of deals Apple has with telecom giants providing exclusive service to the devices in varying countries.

“It shows people are getting proficient at analyzing Apple software,” Hotchkies said.

“There are people looking at the iPhone. We pass vulnerabilities on to vendors, and when I communicate with Apple the first thing they ask is if we’ve tested it on the iPhone. They don’t want to be surprised.”

Apple engineers are also addressing “legacy issues,” protecting old software from new threats, according to Hotchkies.

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Google’s new translation web app keeps data usage low, meaning a lower international roaming data cost, while greatly lowering the pain of the language barrier when overseas.

Google has announced that “Google Translate” is now available for the iPhone as a web app, although not as a standalone application. 

This means that you’ll need to be online to use the translation capabilities, but testing of the app has shown around 200-400 translations per 1mb of data, giving you pretty good value for the highly inflated cost of international data roaming. 

The iPhone web app is thanks to Google software engineer, Allen Hutchison. He’d been planning a trip to Austria and Italy and looked for portable language dictionaries, as well as trying the standard Google Translate page on the iPhone. 

Realising that “the web page didn’t work that well on the iPhone”, Hutchison team up with his fellow engineer David Singleton to “build an iPhone interface for Google Translate.”

As Hutchison notes in his blog entry, “Google Translate for iPhone is optimized for speed, supports all of the existing Google Translate language pairs, and uses a client-side data-store on your iPhone to hang on to your past translations so you always have them at hand, even if you can’t use the local data network.” 

He continued: “We wrote this using the AJAX Language API, so every time the Google Translate team updates the languages they support, the languages will automatically be added here.”

One issue he discovered when he went on his trip was that while the service did work, his pronunciation wasn’t too good, meaning that at times he needed to hold the iPhone up to people so they could read the translation for themselves. 

That led to some commenters in his blog suggesting future versions could speak the words on the screen instead through the iPhone’s speaker, although my simple suggestion would be for Google to provide a phonetic pronunciation guide on screen for different words, something that would be a useful addition to any future text-to-speech capability. 

But what about data costs? After all, as noted above, international data costs are ridiculously astronomical. 

It’s a mind bogglingly stupid situation, but until carriers stop being so greedy and realise globalisation is meant to bring costs of voice and data roaming, too (despite efforts from companies like 3 Mobile and Vodafone), costs will remain way higher than what you’ll pay in your home country where translation services aren’t normally required. 

Well, Hutchison says that he could “get between 200 and 400 translations in 1MB of data download” and that as Google didn’t charge for the service, the only fees would be what your international telcos charged you through your carrier for global roaming. 

 Warning that users should check what those rates are, Hutchison said that for his plan, he found that he “could translate 400 phrases for less than [US] $10 when roaming internationally.”

Getting back to blog comments for a moment, some of the bloggers had other suggestions. One was to allow users to easily choose which view they wanted to see – the standard web view, or the iPhone view. 

It’s true that it can be incredibly annoying to get a customised iPhone view of a site, when part of the iPhone’s appeal is that it can display web pages as seen on a regular computer. 

Of course iPhone customised versions are great, but users should be able to choose which they prefer, simply and easily. No doubt this can be fixed easily enough, should Hutchison decide to add a link to make the change. 

Another suggestion from me is to remember to cater for other mobile devices, not just the iPhone. Yes, Google does this already for different devices, but a generic mobile interface (if not several specific mobile interfaces) should be created alongside the iPhone version – why should iPhone users get all the customised web page action?

While remembering, of course, to always make it easy to see the page as per a desktop computer if desired. 

Right now, there are two ways to check out the new Google Translate for iPhone. The first is to type “translate.google.com” into your iPhone’s (or iPod Touch) Safari web browser. 

The other way is to visit www.google.com on either device, choose the ‘More’ tab and choose translate from there, although the first way is easier. 

Hutchison then ends by hoping users will try it if they’re travelling “this summer” (forgetting that Southern Hemisphere people are in winter and like to travel, too) and that you might find it useful, even if you’re travelling to Beijing for the 2008 Summer Olympics.

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After a fourteen-month wait, the iPhone is finally coming to Vermont.”But isn’t Vermont a part of the US?” you ask. Well yes, but AT&T — the iPhone’s exclusive carrier in the US — has no wireless coverage in the Green Mountain State, so the iPhone has never officially been made available. Some enterprising Vermonters have set up blogs and even gone underground with their jailbroken iPhones, but that’s all about to change.Earlier this week, Vermont’s WCAX TV reported that area providers Verizon and Unicel have merged, and AT&T will be awarded overlapping service areas to prevent a wireless monopoly in Vermont.The wait is almost over, Vermonters! Now you can enjoy standing in long lines like the rest of us.

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