Netshare

iPhone News Roundup for 9/15/08

This is your daily fix of iPhone news in one place so you don't have to visit 60 sites to know what happened today in the iPhone world.

Apple Developing ARM Processors for iPhone

Wei-han Lien, the senior manager of Apple’s chip team, dished out the morsel on LinkedIn, saying he’s busy at work crafting an ARM processor for the next-generation iPhone.

Edit most document types with TextGuru

TextGuru is a new iPhone application that promising, useful -- and also really powerful! The application allows you to create and edit a ton of document types.

NetShare, banned from the AppStore

Looks like Apple has decided they will not be allowing any tethering applications in the AppStore. As such, NetShare will not be available in the iTunes AppStore. We are seeing a lot of similar reports from various developers who's applications were abruptly removed and banned from the AppStore without any violations of the terms of service. This is all unfortunate news for the iPhone platform end-users.

iFund Gets A Blog

Today we’re launching the iFund blog. The purpose is to share (and hear) perspectives around the iPhone and emerging open mobile ecosystem. We’ve been blown away by the amount of entrepreneurial activity in mobile since launching the iFund on March 6th. In 6 months, we’ve received over 2700 plans. To put it in context, that’s about 20x what we received in a similar period last year.

Become a citizen journalist with CBS EyeMobile

CBS wants you to take photos of events as they're happening, then use EyeMobile to upload your pics and report on what's happening. If the iPhone ever gets video capabilities, you'd most likely be able to use EyeMobile to upload your news videos as well. (Note to Apple: that video capture capability would have been nice in the 2.1 update.) CBS is now accepting video from other sources, like your camcorder or BlackBerry.

EyeMobile also lets you watch what other "citizen journalists" are posting. While the quality of reporting might be somewhat iffy, anything has to be better than the talking heads that the networks hire.

iPhone app growth outpacing iTunes' early days

As Roughly Drafted Magazine points out, what used to be the iTunes Music Store took two months to sell 25 million songs, and a full two years to sell 1 billion. Even if growth stopped today and remained flat for the next year, Jobs could very well still hit his prediction of a billion-dollar marketplace, and the App Store could give McDonalds a run for its money by hanging a "one billion sold!" sign much earlier than the iTunes Music Store did.

"Star Wars: Force Unleashed" for iPhone Now Available

THQ Wireless Inc has released Star Wars: Force Unleashed [App Store] to the App Store. The $9.99 game offers a companion game to the full version due for release on September 16th.

iPhone 3G works out of the box with AT&T Pay As You Go SIMs

It was my first time to truly confirm that the rumors were true: a completely virgin iPhone 3G works out of the box with AT&T Pay As You Go SIMs. After about two minutes, the iPhone acknowledged the SIM and threw up an AT&T logo. I made an outgoing phone call without any problems.

iPhoneModem: the 10 second iPhone tethering

It looks like someone finally did it. NetShare had tried but was banned from the App Store. NetShare was not very user friendly but they were the first iPhone tethering application out there.

Yesterday, iPhoneModem, an application for the iPhone that aims at making it really easy to use the iPhone’s Internet connection on your computer, was released in Cydia.

From iPhoneModem.com:

What is iPhoneModem

iPhoneModem is an application for the iPhone that aims at making it really easy to use the iPhone's Internet connection on your computer. iPhoneModem is available for installation jailbreaked devices using Cydia or Installer package managers.

How does it work

On the Mac, iPhoneModem creates a WiFi network to be able to connect to your iPhone and automatically configures the network settings to use a Socks Proxy. On the iPhone it acts as a "Socks Proxy" effectively sharing the Internet Connection.

Why isn't it on the AppStore

Because Apple has not yet (since July '08) responded to our "iPhone Developer Program" application and because it has already shown reluctancy to approve sharing the iPhones Internet connection. The reasons for not allowing sharing or "tethering" on the iPhone are probably related to current AT&T contractual limitations. These limitations are not global, meaning that there are other companies/providers which allow it, and we do not believe that Apple and AT&T will maintain this for much longer simply because it's clearly bad business.

How to Install

1. Jailbreak the iPhone (if you haven't already):

2. On the iPhone use "Cydia" or "Installer" to install iPhoneModem - it's filed on the Networking category. After installing a new App named "Modem" should be available on the iPhone.

If you cannot find it you can add our repository to Cydia. The URL is http://iphonemodem.com/cydia

How to Use it

If you have MacOS 10.5 (Leopard), first download and open iPhoneModem on the Mac, click "Connect" and then open "Modem" on the iPhone. Make sure that on the iPhone you are connected to a WiFi network named "iPhoneModem", created by the Mac application. That's it, you can start surfing the web.

If you are using Microsoft Windows, Linux or a previous version of MacOS, you'll have to manually create an WiFi network between the computer and the iPhone and configure Socks Proxy with the WiFi IP of the iPhone and port 1080.

So far, iPhoneModem only worls for Mac but they say they are working on a Windows version.