Iphone Updates

HBO and Apple today announced that customers can now purchase and download critically acclaimed HBO shows — including such Emmy Award-winning programs as The Sopranos, Sex and the City, Deadwood, and Rome — from iTunes. “We’re very excited to make these legendary HBO programs available on the iTunes Store,” said Henry McGee, president of HBO Video.

On Monday, June 9, a team of Apple executives led by CEO Steve Jobs will kick off the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) with a keynote address, Apple today announced. The keynote showcases two revolutionary development platforms: Mac OS X Leopard and OS X iPhone, the world’s most advanced mobile operating system.

Filed under: Software, Freeware, iTunes

There are a ton of Mac volume controllers out there. CoverSutra is one of the best that we have seen, however, if simplistic and free is what you like, then why not try iTunesVolume. Just as the name implies, you are able to control the volume of the iTunes application with this small app.

iTunesVolume definitely takes the Steve Jobs “one button is good enough for everything” approach. The slider controls everything — you can move it to control volume in iTunes or hold the button down to get a pop-up menu with extra options.

iTunesVolume is a free 2 MB download from the developer’s website.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Software, Cool tools, Graphic Design

My picture editor of choice, Pixelmator, has updated to version 1.2 (as with many other applications, it’s just in time for the Apple Design Awards deadline), which they’re calling Draftsman. Among the new features are the much-awaited addition of rules and some guides to the UI (with a flashy little indicator as the mouse passes by), as well as the ability to edit color balance and the color curves. There’s also a new Polygonal Lasso, and the Transform tool has been reworked “from scratch” to work faster and better.

Pixelmator continues to impress, and with every update, it’s becoming a more and more robust little photo editor. Just recently, they laid out “a flight plan” on the blog for what they’re up to for summer: the next release, 1.3, will be called Tempo, and focus on making the app just as fast as it is visually striking. And they make another bold claim as well: by the end of the summer, they’re aiming to be “completely bug-free.” Good luck with that.

But there’s no question that development is rolling along for Pixelmator. The app is available as a free trial over on their site, or a full version for $59. If you’re looking for an alternative to the ‘Shop, Pixelmator is a great way to go.

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Filed under: iPhone

In a singularly uninformative press release, SingTel, Singapore’s largest telecommunications company, has announced that it is bringing the iPhone to “Singapore, India, the Philippines and Australia later this year” through several subsidiary carrier brands: SingTel, Bharti Airtel, Globe and Optus.

The latter confirms our earlier post that Aussies won’t be limited to Vodafone for their iPhone needs. Unfortunately no dates or pricing have been announced; it seems safe to assume this will cover the forthcoming 3G iPhone. In any case, this is good news for some of our Asia / Pacific iPhone brethren.

Thanks Peter!

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Using .Mac sync in Mac OS X Leopard, you can synchronize most of your personal data — including contacts, bookmarks, iCal events, Dock items, Dashboard widgets and more — among the multiple Macs you use at work and home. In fact, .Mac Sync even lets you add your iPhone to the mix. Find out how by watching the latest Quick Tip of the Week.

Filed under: Audio, Software

Call me a curmudgeon if you must, but I am wary of any app that replicates a physical object with its UI. Isn’t a large part of the power of computing come from the fact that programmers can transcend the limitations of the real world and offer up better ways of doing things?

In this frame of mind I started looking at TapeDeck, a new $25 Leopard only recording app from SuperMegaUltraGroovy and Toastycode. As the name suggests it looks like a cassette recorder of old, but it does offer up some improvements. Each recording is saved on a new ‘tape’ automatically, so you never have to record over a previous file (TapeDeck records audio in the AAC format, so the files are small, but you can make them even smaller by lowering the recording quality). It also allows you to annotate your tapes and then search your recording library using that information, and you can send your audio to iTunes if you prefer to organize your files that way.

The real question is: does the UI help or hinder TapeDeck? I’ll have to spend more time using TapeDeck to fairly answer that, but at first blush this app is great fun to use (especially if you remember using tape recorders like these).

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Filed under: Odds and ends, .Mac

A clever Mac user helped police recover a stolen laptop using Back to My Mac’s screen-sharing feature.

After her apartment was burglarized, the victim received a call from a friend while she was at work (conveniently enough, at the Apple Store in Westchester, NY). The friend noticed her stolen computer was online. The victim then quickly used another Mac to connect to the stolen laptop.

The article doesn’t mention the technical details, but I reckon she activated screen sharing, and started Photo Booth (or another app that activates the laptop’s built-in iSight camera). After a while, the perps showed up, and the victim’s roommate recognized one of them as an acquaintance who had attended a party at their apartment some weeks before.

Armed with names and photos of the alleged thieves, police quickly arrested two men, who were in possession of most of the property stolen in the burglary.

If that isn’t worth her year’s subscription to .Mac, I don’t know what is.

(Update: The New York Times has a story with some more details. She used Photo Booth, too. Who called it, baby?)

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

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Filed under: iPhone

While the UK has been reporting a run on current-model iPhones recently, Gizmodo says that the shortage has reached across the pond to New York City. According to an anonymous staffer at the West 14th street Apple Store, “it’s been out of stock all week.” And to think, you were only worried about rice and flour.

If you check out the picture on Gizmodo, you’ll see a line of about 30 people who are waiting for an iPhone at the West 14th street store. These people will probably be very upset in a month or two.

[Via Cult of Mac]

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Filed under: Odds and ends, .Mac

A clever Mac user helped police recover a stolen laptop using Back to My Mac’s screen-sharing feature.

After her apartment was burglarized, the victim received a call from a friend while she was at work (conveniently enough, at the Apple Store in Westchester, NY). The friend noticed her stolen computer was online. The victim then quickly used another Mac to connect to the stolen laptop.

The article doesn’t mention the technical details, but I reckon she activated screen sharing, and started Photo Booth (or another app that activates the laptop’s built-in iSight camera). After a while, the perps showed up, and the victim’s roommate recognized one of them as an acquaintance who had attended a party at their apartment some weeks before.

Armed with names and photos of the alleged thieves, police quickly arrested two men, who were in possession of most of the property stolen in the burglary.

If that isn’t worth her year’s subscription to .Mac, I don’t know what is.

(Update: The New York Times has a story with some more details. She used Photo Booth, too. Who called it, baby?)

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

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Filed under: Audio, Multimedia, Software, Universal Binary

Back in the day before Ableton Live and Reason and all the other sequencer apps out there, desktop electronic producers made do with trackers: apps which allowed the budding Moby or Paul Oakenfold to sequence samples. They were basically software equivalents of legendary hardware sample sequencers like the Akai MPC. These usually had all of the usability of a 1957 Trabant and none of the good looks.

Renoise 1.9.1 sequences like an old-school tracker, but it’s got loads more features: plugin and MIDI instruments, effects chains, a halfway decent mixer, and even internal sample editing. Everything a growing music geek needs to make bleep-bleep music (and maybe more). It’s available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS 10.3.9+ as a Universal Binary.

At 49.99 euros (US$75.80 at today’s exchange rate) for a license, Renoise is a helluva lot cheaper than alternatives like Live or Reason, and the ability to use a single license for versions running on multiple platforms is nice. The only drawback is that the interface appears a little complex for users unfamiliar with the conventions of sample trackers. Also, the demo version times out and doesn’t allow rendering of your tracks out to .wav format.

I still have nightmares about using FastTracker on my old Pentium II back in the late ’90s, so I haven’t tried this one myself. If you have, drop me a line in the comments and let me know what you think.

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Filed under: iPod Family, Internet, iPhone

If you are a Web 2.0 fanatic (which, come on, who isn’t these days?) then you probably know about Muxtape. For those of you who aren’t religiously reading the latest Web application news at DownloadSquad, Muxtape is basically a way to share your personalized mp3 mixtape. Not only can you subscribe to the tape’s RSS via iTunes, but it turns out that you can also listen to Muxtapes on your iPhone!

Just navigate over to the Muxtape page of your choosing and select a song. Mobile Safari will then load the file and begin to play it like normal mp3 audio. How cool is that?

Thanks for the info, Craig!

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Filed under: Software

I’ll admit that when I first heard of the new utility from Elgebar Studios, Bokeh, my first thought was of Kenan Thompson’s SNL exclamation (”Bokay?”) and not the Japanese photography term (the control of out-of-focus areas) that presumably inspired the tool’s name. Bokeh is a $17 utility from one of the guys behind iPod-music-sharing conduit Misu, and it’s intended to do one thing: freeze your applications. No, really, it’s a good thing.

Bokeh allows you to put applications into suspended animation and free up additional processing power for your crunchiest tasks (3D rendering, Photoshop filters, etc.) when you need it most. You can select a single app for focus, or suspend applications one at a time. It’s not the sort of thing everyone would need but in a production environment where time is money, it might be worth the cash. You can download a Bokeh demo directly from the site.

Update: Ollie from Elgebar sent a quick note to clarify the benefits of Bokeh: When you select one app to focus on, Bokeh actually blurs the background and helps you isolate the task at hand. It’s also highly scriptable, so you could include an automatic ‘freezeout’ before starting a rendering pass or other CPU-intensive task.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Gaming, Rumors, Odds and ends, Apple, Mac mini

Peter Cohen over at Macworld continues his sideline analysis of Apple’s gaming chances with a post about how the brand new faster iMacs are indeed faster, but still not fast enough for gamers. And to a certain extent, he’s right — gaming on the Mac is like that old beat-up, “someday I’ll fix it up” convertible your father’s had in the garage covered with a tarp since you were a kid. Getting it out and putting a new engine in it might help it run better, but it’s still not going to turn it into a car that anyone wants to drive around.

But (and we talked about this extensively on the Talkcast a few weeks ago with Brian Akaka from Freeverse) it’s a step. A faster video card, even if it isn’t blazing, will run games better than before, and it’ll do a little to bring not only gaming customers but developers back to the Mac. Cohen is right — that old convertible needs an actual mechanic to take a look at it, and it needs the seats to be reupholstered, and sooner or later it’s going to need a new can of paint (not that, like your Dad’s actual convertible, these things aren’t ever going to happen — we continue to hear rumblings that Apple is aiming for gamers).

But something is something — the very fact that Apple is offering faster video cards is a sign that they’re interested. And, other than simple profiles of games on their website and cameos by game execs at keynotes, that’s more than we’ve had in a while.

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Filed under: Audio, iPod Family, Multimedia, iPhone

Peter Kirn over at Create Digital Music has posted a great round-up of all the tools people have put together to make music with the iPod Touch and iPhone.

The post touches on some of the more technical aspects of music app development on the iPhone and iPod Touch, and there’s a great list of links to cool apps you can download and mess around with.

Music apps are still in their infancy on the iPhone, but hopefully, as the SDK gets out there to more developers, we’ll begin to see more robust and feature-heavy apps.

Me? I want to see Ableton Live on the iPhone.

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Filed under: Software, Open Source, Beta Beat

If you’ve been cursing the big price tag and lack of VBA support in Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, OpenOffice.org is coming to your rescue. Last September, the OpenOffice.org dev team announced that they would be porting the suite to run natively on the Mac. Previous versions ran under the X11 environment, which not only hogged resources, but didn’t have the Aqua look and feel we all love.

OpenOffice.org 3.0 is still beta, but a quick test-drive of the application showed that it is almost ready for prime time. OOo is a full-featured office suite, complete with word processor (Writer), spreadsheet (Calc), presentation package (Impress), drawing app (Draw), as well as database tools (Base) that are sadly lacking in other office suites.

The feature set of OpenOffice.org 3 is impressive:

• Imports Microsoft Office binary (.doc, .ppt, .xls) and Office 2007/Office 2008 for Mac (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx) files
• A solver component for solving optimization problems, something lacking in Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac
• Spreadsheet workbook sharing
• Display of multiple Writer pages while editing
• MS Office-like comments in Writer
• Limited VBA macro support — which is still better than no support
• Extensibility with Mozilla Thunderbird and Lightning, Sun Wiki Publisher and Report Builder

The price of OpenOffice.org 3 is, as always, free! If you’re up to test-driving beta ware that may not necessarily be as stable or fast as your other office suite(s), click here to be transported to the beta site.

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Filed under: Tips and tricks, Internet, Graphic Design

This was included in WebKit builds beginning several years ago, apparently, but is something I recently stumbled upon. Historically, Safari has been pretty insistent on making sure web page form fields (like drop-down menus and buttons) retain the Aqua look-and-feel. Web designers, on the other hand, have gotten used to choosing colors and font sizes for those controls, so they fit in with their site’s design.

Hopefully everyone can now be happy: Safari 3 allows web designers to style form controls with CSS. The results are pictured: instead of a glossy, Aqua-like control, Safari displays a matte-finish control in the color and size of your choosing. You can even apply background images to form controls. If you don’t apply styles to your controls, then Safari retains the Aqua look.

This shouldn’t require any changes to code that’s already written for other browsers: Safari 3 should pick right up on the formatting, and display it as the designer intended. It does, however, open up WebKit-specific CSS to your form controls.

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Filed under: Internet, iPhone

It looks like the reports of AT&T offering free Wi-Fi at their hotspots were not unfounded. Above you can see a new ‘Included Feature’ that AT&T is bundling with all their iPhone plans. Along with long distance calling, visual voicemail, call forwarding, 3-way calling and Caller ID you now get ‘Access to AT&T Wi-Fi hotspots.’ Not too shabby at all.

[via iLounge]

Update: And like that it is gone! AT&T really needs to get their story straight on this one.

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Filed under: iTS, Education, Podcasts

Hot for Hindi? Up for learning Uyghur? Wild about Welsh? LifeClever tipped us off to the fact that there are 926 free language training podcasts currently available in the iTunes Store. A quick glance at the available podcasts shows that you can learn 39 languages from Arabic to Yiddish with the help of your iPod or iPhone.

To find this treasure trove of linguistic goodness, launch iTunes, pop into the iTunes Store, click on the Browse link, and navigate to Podcasts > Education > Language Courses.

What am I going to learn on my summer vacation? I’m waffling between Sexy Spanish and Latinum. This is a great way to get your kids to learn a language and keep them occupied during that long, hot road trip to Wally World this summer.

Thanks, Tipster Chanpory!

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Filed under: Software

Software Update is pretty awesome for Apple software, but have you ever wanted that functionality for the rest of your apps? 19-year-old developer Louka Desroziers created a nifty little menubar app called LogicielMac Update that checks for updates to the applications installed on your machine. There are options to automatically download the updates and install them. You can also create an ignored list of apps that you don’t want to update.

The app gets most of its information from LogicielMac (logiciel meaning “software,” and Mac meaning “best platform ever”), a Francophonic site similar to VersionTracker and MacUpdate. But fear not, English speakers, as LogicielMac Update is localized for English. (Update: Reader Mark noticed that his copy of Firefox was updated with a French-localized version … so take note, Anglophones! Thanks, Mark!)

The only improvement I could see is showing the difference between free updates and upgrades (that you must pay for in order to get). I always hate it when I download an upgrade without thinking, wiping out my perfectly good old copy that I paid for.

LogicielMac Update is donationware, so show Louka some love if you like what he’s made. The download is 1.2MB, and Leopard is recommended. If you’ve felt unsatisfied by other update managers, check it out.

Thanks, Michael G!

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Filed under: Software

Software Update is pretty awesome for Apple software, but have you ever wanted that functionality for the rest of your apps? 19-year-old developer Louka Desroziers created a nifty little menubar app called LogicielMac Update that checks for updates to the applications installed on your machine. There are options to automatically download the updates and install them. You can also create an ignored list of apps that you don’t want to update.

The app gets most of its information from LogicielMac (logiciel meaning “software,” and Mac meaning “best platform ever”), a Francophonic site similar to VersionTracker and MacUpdate. But fear not, English speakers, as LogicielMac Update is localized for English. (Update: Reader Mark noticed that his copy of Firefox was updated with a French-localized version … so take note, Anglophones! Thanks, Mark!)

The only improvement I could see is showing the difference between free updates and upgrades (that you must pay for in order to get). I always hate it when I download an upgrade without thinking, wiping out my perfectly good old copy that I paid for.

LogicielMac Update is donationware, so show Louka some love if you like what he’s made. The download is 1.2MB, and Leopard is recommended. If you’ve felt unsatisfied by other update managers, check it out.

Thanks, Michael G!

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Filed under: Software

Once upon a time, my house was alive. It would wake me up with an hour-long procedure of ramping up the lights and using a zen chime at increasing intervals. Once the hour was up, it would check to see if I had opened the bathroom door yet and, if not, scold me with increasing levels of profanity for sleeping too late. It would read me the weather and top headlines while I brushed my teeth. It would turn lights on and off as I moved through the house. It had everything but an omnipresent, glowing red eye.

And it was grand, until a series of events (that I can now look back at and laugh) resulted in the PC it was all running on devouring itself and the connected backup drive. Now, in addition to an offsite backup system, I’ve got a lot of switches, sensors, motion detectors and the like and haven’t had the heart to build the system again. But here I am with an extra Mini, and Perceptive Automation just released a new version of Indigo. My inner geek is just itching to restore my home to its former blinking, talking, almost-sentient glory.

Continue reading Indigo 3.0, increased geekiness for your home

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Filed under: Software

Once upon a time, my house was alive. It would wake me up with an hour-long procedure of ramping up the lights and using a zen chime at increasing intervals. Once the hour was up, it would check to see if I had opened the bathroom door yet and, if not, scold me with increasing levels of profanity for sleeping too late. It would read me the weather and top headlines while I brushed my teeth. It would turn lights on and off as I moved through the house. It had everything but an omnipresent, glowing red eye.

And it was grand, until a series of events (that I can now look back at and laugh) resulted in the PC it was all running on devouring itself and the connected backup drive. Now, in addition to an offsite backup system, I’ve got a lot of switches, sensors, motion detectors and the like and haven’t had the heart to build the system again. But here I am with an extra Mini, and Perceptive Automation just released a new version of Indigo. My inner geek is just itching to restore my home to its former blinking, talking, almost-sentient glory.

Continue reading Indigo 3.0, increased geekiness for your home

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Filed under: Accessories, Analysis / Opinion, Hardware, Peripherals, Mac 101

More Mac 101, our series of basic tips for new and returning Mac users. Since most Mac models don’t offer extra drive bays, external hard disks are the way to go for adding vast storage capacity to your computer. External HDs are great for storing large projects, moving huge amounts of data from place to place, or backing up via Time Machine.

Hard disks are a commodity product nowadays: the market is flooded with a cornucopia of options, most of them cheap and easy to install. So which is right for you?

The trick is this: find out who makes the actual hard drive inside the external enclosure (that is, inside the nicely-designed plastic or metal box that sits on or under your desk).

It’s what’s inside that counts, and we’ll explore after the jump.

Continue reading Mac 101: External HDs

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“You can’t imagine how satisfying it is to know that if your hard drive dies, you will lose no more than one hour of work,” relates David Pogue (nytimes.com) in his review of Time Capsule. “The Time Machine automatic backup feature of the latest Mac OS X version backs up your Macs onto the Time Capsule, automatically, constantly, completely and wirelessly. And in my book, automatic, constant, complete backups are the only kind that really count.”

Using his 24-inch iMac, Jean-Pierre Hébert, the 68-year-old artist-in-residence at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara, California, creates “algorithmic art” in a variety of media—from sand to copper to tree bark. “Mac OS X is a very good environment for me to work in,” he says. “It offers the best of all possible worlds.”

The first online science and nature film series, TERRA lets us enjoy the compelling documentaries produced by the grad students in the Science and Natural History Film Program at Montana State University. Through multiple seasons of programming, TERRA introduces us to the nature of our world.

“If your mom or dad has a Mac, help them safeguard their digital heirlooms with Apple’s Time Capsule,” implores Eric M. Strauss (abcnews.com). “Time Capsule combines simple setup and a speedy wireless network with automatic backup in a tidy box. Plus, recovering Aunt Chippie’s first black-jack victory photo after your mom’s hard drive crashes will certainly make it all worth the cost.”

If you’ve developed a great application using the iPhone SDK, a new web application for iPhone, or new software for Mac OS X Leopard, you could be honored with an Apple Design Award. This year, Apple offers awards in seven categories. But, hurry, the application deadline ends next Monday — on May 12.

Filed under: Mac 101

Recently we here at TUAW were asked about navigating dialog boxes and applications with the keyboard. It is really easy to use the tab key to select different parts of the window and different buttons in a dialog box, if you know how to enable this behavior.

Open System Preferences > Mouse and Keyboard, and click the “Keyboard Shortcuts” tab. You are presented with two options at the bottom of the window (in the “Full keyboard access” section): Text boxes and lists only or All controls. By default, “Text boxes and lists” should be selected, but if you want to be able to select other buttons in a window with the tab key then you need to select the “All controls” option.

Now when you encounter a dialog box (or window), just press the tab key to switch between the various buttons on the screen. If you would like to go to a previous button, use shift + tab. When you’ve got the button you want highlighted, press the enter key or space bar. It’s as easy as that!

For more tips and tricks like these, visit the Mac 101 section on TUAW.

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Filed under: Gaming, Software, Education, Freeware

For (let’s say) “phans” of Crayon Physics, Phun 3.5 is a similar kind of physics simulator created by Emil Ernerfeldt for his thesis at Umeå University, Sweden. Not only is it Swedish, but it’s just been released for the Mac.

Sure, it’s rough-around-the-edges, and it follows pretty much none of the Mac’s interface or key-combination conventions, but it’s sure a fun (with an F) toy. Phun is Universal Binary, and freeware.

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If you’re browsing the web on a public computer, the last thing you want to do is leave personal information about yourself behind for others to discover. Of course, if you use Safari, you have a number of ways to safeguard your privacy while browsing publicly. Read about them in this week’s Pro Tip of the Week.

“A slate of under-the-hood improvements have facilitated a performance spike in the standard models that makes them an especially good value for people looking to upgrade,” reports Roman Loyola (macworld.com) in his recent review of the new iMac. “The 2.8GHz iMac, in all its 24-inch glory, is a stunning machine and is bound to make an impression in your home or office,” Loyola concludes.

Nik Software today announced that its eagerly awaited Viveza plug-in for Aperture 2.1 is available for immediate download. Powered by U Point technology, the Viveza plug-in lets photographers make localized enhancements to brightness, contrast, or color without ever having to leave Aperture. “With the power and popularity of Aperture, we want our customers to decide how and where they edit their digital photos,” said Michael J. Slater president and CEO of Nik Software.

Filed under: iPhone

I’m often impressed by the photos I get out of my little iPhone. It’s not a pro-level DSLR for sure, but for quick, off-the-cuff snapshots, it does a very good job.

I’m not alone in my belief. Computerworld’s analysis of current Flickr Data shows that the iPhone is their most popular camera phone. Part of that is the novelty of the iPhone, undoubtedly. Owners continue to relish any excuse to whip them out.

The other is ease of posting a photo to Flickr. Once you’ve added your special Flickr email address to your contact list, sharing a photo is a snap. Tap it once, tap “Email photo,” enter the first few letters of your Flickr email address and hit Send. Done.

While we’re on the subject, I’ll offer my tip for taking decent iPhone photos. Unlike nearly every other camera ever made, the iPhone exposes an image when the “shutter button” is released, not depressed. With that in mind, here’s the three step process I follow

1. Press and hold the “shutter button”
2. Compose the shot
3. Release

The tendency is to compose the shot and then tap the button, often resulting in blur. Try this method and watch the results.

[Via Ars Technica]

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Filed under: Software

VMware has just announced VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta 1, the first beta of the second iteration of their very successful virtualization product for the Mac. As you’ll recall Fusion allows you to run a host of OSes on your Intel Mac including, but not limited to, many flavors of Windows.

The above video gives you a tour of Fusion 2.0 Beta 1’s top new features, including:

• Multiple monitor support (up to 10 displays!)
• Improved networking and printing
• Support for DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 2 (this is experimental, and it might not work on your Mac)
• A refined UI for settings and VM management

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The beta is available now, and best of all the upgrade to version 2.0, when it comes out of beta, will be free to all Fusion users. You can register for the beta program and download the hefty 300 MB installer here.

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Filed under: iPhone

RBC analyst Mark Abramsky says that the iPhone will exceed its projected goal of 10 million devices sold in 2008 — possibly by selling upwards of 14 million. How is Apple going to get these sales figures? Well, Abramsky suggests that AT&T could subsidize the iPhone by up to $200 for the 8GB model. This would mean the 8GB iPhone could sell for as little as $199 (previously rumored here); and possibly increase sales by 50 to 100 percent. According to Abramsky, this would mean Apple would have to drop revenue sharing with AT&T.

Mr. Abramsky also believes that Apple will start to sell unlocked iPhones (or iPhones without a specific carrier) without a premium over the AT&T iPhones. He suggest that unlocked iPhones could increase the adoption rate by two to three times for Apple’s phone.

All of Abramsky’s conjecture hinges on Apple and AT&T agreeing to end their 5 year exclusivity agreement early. We here at TUAW see no real reason for either company to agree to that, at least not in the States.

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