GarageBand Running on the iPhone 4

Thanks to a new hack for running iPad apps on the iPhone, someone has been able to successfully run GarageBand on the iPhone 4. GarageBand is a relatively new addition to iOS that was introduced alongside the iPad 2.

Although the App Store's GarageBand is specifically designed for the iPad, it can also be hacked to run on a jailbroken iPhone.

Watch a demo video after the break!

As you can tell, the app seems to function pretty well once ported. The guy says he used OpenSSH to change the app's underlying metadata so that it would run on the iPhone.

There are some obvious scaling and interface issues, but this is still a cool experiment to check out. You can do this yourself through the magic of OpenSSH on a jailbroken iDevice, you just need the right information.

Apple will probably make GarageBand a universal app in the future. It's going to be really interesting to see how the iWork suite (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) work on the iPhone through this method.

What do you think of GarageBand running on the iPhone 4? Pretty cool, huh?

Apple, Google called to U.S. Senate hearing on mobile privacy

As the controversy over persistent location tracking in the iPhone and Google Android devices continues to surge, representatives from Apple and Google have been summoned to a Senate judiciary hearing on mobile technology privacy in May.
Democratic Senator Al Franken, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, will hold the hearing, titled "Protecting Mobile Privacy: Your Smartphones, Tablets, Cell Phones and Your Privacy," on May 10.

In addition to representatives from Apple and Google, confirmed witnesses at the hearing include officials from the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission; Ashkan Soltani, independent privacy researcher and consultant; and Justin Brookman, Director of the Center for Democracy and Technology's Project on Consumer Privacy.

"Recent advances in mobile technology have allowed Americans to stay connected like never before and put an astonishing number of resources at our fingertips," Franken said in a statement. "But the same technology that has given us smartphones, tablets, and cell phones has also allowed these devices to gather extremely sensitive information about users, including detailed records of their daily movements and location. This hearing is the first step in making certain that federal laws protecting consumers' privacy—particularly when it comes to mobile devices—keep pace with advances in technology."

After security researchers revealed last week that Apple's iOS 4 operating system stores a detailed log of user's locations, Franken and other government officials sent concerned letters to Apple.

Last week, two customers filed a class-action lawsuit against Apple, seeking refunds for their iPhones. The plaintiffs claimed they would never have bought the devices if they had known of the location tracking.

A report from The Wall Street Journal on Monday further ignited the issue when it revealed that location tracking appears to continue on the iPhone even when location services are disabled on the device.

South Korea, France, Germany and Italy have all reportedly initiated investigations into the practice.

iPhone location data plotted | Source: O'Reilly Radar

Also on Monday, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan called for a meeting with Apple and Google in a letter to the companies addressing concerns over the storing of user location data.

"I want to know whether consumers have been informed of what is being tracked and stored by Apple and Google and whether those tracking and storage features can be disabled," said Madigan. "It's important that these companies ensure that their users' private information is protected."

iPhone 5 Wedge Form Factor And 3.7″ Display Rumors Ramp Up, But There's This Imminent White iPhone 4 Release…..

Read Charles Moore's new column on the new possible shape of the iPhone 5 and the imminent release of a white iPhone 4s.

Hope everyone had a great Easter weekend. We're back in the harness, with new rumors afoot about the iPhone 5's revised form factor. Will it be made of carbon fiber? (extremely doubtful this time around), aluminum? (considerably more probable), or stick with the current glass back? (I'm guessing likely not).

thisismynext.com's Joshua Topolsky says that while current Internet chatter is suggesting the iPhone 5 will be little more than a speed bump (ie: A5 chip) and feature enhancement in the iPhone 4 form factor what he's been hearing from a variety of unnamed sources is that the iPhone 5 will have a more iPod touch or mini iPad 2 look, with a larger display screen of perhaps 3.7," retaining the present resolution, and occupying most of the device's front face with only a slim marginal bezel, but with a larger Home button also supporting gestures.

Why not an even four-inch screen? The reasoning is that with 3.7″ diagonal and the current resolution, pixel density – the key to Apple's Retina Display bragging rights, would drop from 326 ppi only down to 312 ppi — still comfortably above the somewhat arbitrary Retina Display technology threshold of 300 ppi. However, with a four-inch screen, pixel density with the same resolution would go down to 288 ppi.

Even with a 3.7″ screen, rendering would be somewhat less sharp than it is with the iPhone 4′s display. A good analogy is the G3 iBook and Pismo PowerBook laptops I was running back to back several years ago. Both machines had 1064 x 768 resolution displays, but the Pismo's was 14.1″ while the iBook display was 12.1″ in physical dimension, which made its rendering significantly sharper and crisper than with the larger PowerBook's screen.

Other rumors include an iPhone5 with a larger display and a wedge or teardrop shape thinner than the iPhone 4 and reminiscent of the generation 2 MacBook Air.

However, here's the thing once again; a redesign that radical for release this coming summer or even fall would not set well with a whole lot of folks who've just bought Verizon CDMA iPhone 4s and white iPhone 4s (expected to start selling by the end of the week — possibly as early as Wednesday April 27), who are going to be unhappy campers. A degree of this dynamic is inevitable with the release of any new product upgrade. Think of the folks who had just bought MacBook Airs last September. It happened to me when I bought an aluminum unibody MacBook three months before Apple morphed that model into the 13″ MacBook Pro with FireWire and SD Card support. However, in this instance, a radical iPhone 5 revamp release sometime in the June – September time window would be really hot on the heels of the white iPhone 4 release.

Not that I'm certain Apple won't do it anyway, but why would they go to the considerable trouble of ramping up white iPhone 4 production and channel distribution only to replace it with a new model in just a couple or three months' time? Doing so just to wring a few more sales out of a lame duck iPhone 4 seems pretty cynical, and Apple is usually a classier act than that. Which is another reason why I think an iPhone "4S" upgrade with an A5 processor and perhaps an 8 megapixel camera seems more likely in the near term, with the iPhone 5 release held off until late fall or even 2012.

On Monday, Chris Chang of the Chinese Apple-oriented site M.I.C. Gadget posted an image of a white iPhone with a larger display than depictions of the white iPhone 4 have shown, which he says my be someone's mockup…. or…."prototype iPhone with an A5 processor that game developers are using to prepare their iPhone 5 apps." Interesting, but nothing conclusive there. Still mostly rumors and conjecture, but the white iPhone 4 at least should be reality by the end of the week.

A5 iPhone 5 prototype released in earnest, but you can't have one (yet)

Here's a bizarre move which will only up the ante when it comes to the up-in-the-air release date of the iPhone 5: Apple is already circulating an A5-equipped iPhone 5 prototype in an iPhone 4 body to trusted app developers for the sake of ensuring said apps are able to take full advantage of the more powerful A5 architecture by the time the iPhone 5 launches. It all makes one wonder just how near or far away the iPhone 5 really is, and whether the developer model being circulated is merely retaining the iPhone 4 body type in order to keep the appearance of the iPhone 5 a secret, or whether the iPhone 5 will in fact look just like the iPhone 4 from the outside after all. Either way, one thing's for sure: you can't have one. Yet.

The kicker, of course, is that Apple is being awfully trusting of third parties, considering that last year an iPhone 4 prototype ended up being sold to the highest bidder and paraded around on the internet as a trophy. Apple's hopes of keeping the original iPhone 4 design a secret were dashed, houses were raided, and the expectation was that the already secretive and paranoid Apple would become even more so after the incident, heading into the iPhone 5 release. And yet here's Apple distributing a quasi-next generation iPhone before its unveiling. It's assumable that at least one of the prototypes will be lost, stolen, photographed, or otherwise before it's all said and done. And while it may look just like an iPhone 4 from the outside, there have to be details inside which, if torn apart, would reveal more information than Apple wants – or maybe not.

In fact the term "iPhone 5″ is something that we outsiders have made up to describe what we suspect Apple's fifth generation iPhone will be, without any knowledge of what the product will be or even whether it will carry that name. The fifth generation iPhone could be a complete external overhaul from the iPhone 4, or it could in fact be the developer prototype being circulated. Either way the move raises more questions than it answers. All it tells us for sure is that the next iPhone will have an A5 processor in it. But then again, on the heels of the A5 iPad 2, that was one of the few iPhone 5 details which was already assumable. Here's more on the iPhone 5.

GarageBand Running on the iPhone 4

Thanks to a new hack for running iPad apps on the iPhone, someone has been able to successfully run GarageBand on the iPhone 4. GarageBand is a relatively new addition to iOS that was introduced alongside the iPad 2.

Although the App Store's GarageBand is specifically designed for the iPad, it can also be hacked to run on a jailbroken iPhone.

Watch a demo video after the break!

As you can tell, the app seems to function pretty well once ported. The guy says he used OpenSSH to change the app's underlying metadata so that it would run on the iPhone.

There are some obvious scaling and interface issues, but this is still a cool experiment to check out. You can do this yourself through the magic of OpenSSH on a jailbroken iDevice, you just need the right information.

Apple will probably make GarageBand a universal app in the future. It's going to be really interesting to see how the iWork suite (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) work on the iPhone through this method.

What do you think of GarageBand running on the iPhone 4? Pretty cool, huh?

iPhone 5 is CMDA + GSM world phone

Well, we've known this one for while but now it's sort of official. Barrons reports that in Verizon's earnings call today, Verizon Chief Financial Officer Fran Shammo said Apple's next-generation iPhone will be a world phone. A world phone of course is a phone capable of connecting to both CDMA and GSM networks worldwide. You may remember that Shammo was the Verizon executive who spilled the beans on the upcoming Verizon-capable iPad 2.
Both the Verizon iPhone 4 and the CDMA iPad 2 carry the Qualcomm Gobi chip, which we previously detailed, and this chip is capable of connecting to both CDMA and GSM networks. Apple is rumored to start iPhone 5 production as early as July and is tracking a September release. Apple typically holds an early-September event so we'll probably see the world phone there. The iPhone5 is rumored to look similar to the iPhone 4 and will sport an A5 dual-core processor.

The iPhone 5 release date is probably written in stone by now, as Apple has scheduled its annual WWDC.

CES 2011 had barely come to an end when a massive amount of iPhone 5 rumors appeared last month. While the exact iPhone 5 release date has yet to leak out, it looks like Apple has scheduled a "Corporate Meeting" for June 5 through 9 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. AppleInsider believes that the corporate meeting is Apple's annual Worldwide Developer Conference, but points out that one can never be too sure when it comes to Apple.

Apple unveiled the iPhone 4 on the opening day of WWDC 2010 though, which was held June 7 through 11. On January 31 last year, Steve Jobs described the iPhone 4 as an A+ update, followed by a prototype of the device being found in a bar on March 18. A leak on April 9 suggested that it would offer FaceTime and LED flash. The screen technology, processor and RAM were leaked on May 17. And then finally, Steve Jobs went on stage in Moscone Center to unveil it on June 7. Apple could potentially launch the iPhone 5 on June 5 this year.

The hottest iPhone 5 rumors to date have been related to the chipset, form factor, connectivity options as well as what iOS 5 will offer. We guess it's safe to assume that a prototype of the device will not be lost in a bar. However, while Steve Jobs described the iPhone 4 as an A+ upgrade last year, he has yet to give any description of the iPhone 5. Given the fact that he's currently on a medical leave, though keeping an eye on the decision-making, the only thing we know for certain is that he has promised exciting things for 2011.

So, what is Steve Jobs' definition of exciting things? Well, Flash and traditional input methods can be ruled out, that's for sure. In other words, you'll not see Apple release a QWERTY phone with Flash 10.1 support for mobile professionals in June. If Apple's COO Tim Cook dropped a hint about what the iPhone5 will offer during a recent earnings call, however, it means we should expect a device that goes far in catering to the masses. Will the iPhone 5 simply aim to redefine the mass-market device as part of an iCoin effort? Only time will tell.