The next gPhone has arrived, and surprisingly, it looks pretty nice. Although we were all very excited about China’s Sciphone (not really), the Kogan Agora and its upgraded twin, the Agora Pro, are probably a much better bet.

It looks rather like a Blackjack, but it fits all the capabilities of a G1 or iPhone into that thinner form factor. I’m a bit jealous, although I think I’ll much prefer the keyboard on my handset. It’s being sold for 300 and 400 Australian dollars for the Agora and Pro respectively, which translates to about $200 or $260 in American dollars.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

pFiled under: a href="http://www.tuaw.com/category/hardware/" rel="tag"Hardware/a, a href="http://www.tuaw.com/category/odds-and-ends/" rel="tag"Odds and ends/a, a href="http://www.tuaw.com/category/apple/" rel="tag"Apple/a/ppimg vspace="5" hspace="5" border="0" align="right" alt="" src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.tuaw.com/media/2008/12/prox-293482048.png" /Two Apple patent filings have piqued interest this week: One for a touch surface that detects where your finger is hovered above it, and another for a liquid-cooled laptop. /p pThe a href="http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2amp;Sect2=HITOFFamp;u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.htmlamp;r=3amp;p=1amp;f=Gamp;l=50amp;d=PG01amp;S1=Apple.AS.amp;OS=an/Appleamp;RS=AN/Apple"hover surface/a works by measuring light reflected off your finger at various wavelengths to figure out where it is over the surface. Apple uses a basic proximity sensor in the iPhone (so it knows when it's up against your ear), but this new technique would allow more precise recognition of objects hovered above a touch-sensitive surface. Unlike a graphics tablet, which requires a stylus, your finger or hand is likely the intended tool for this surface, as evidenced by the drawings. /p pSecond, the a href="http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/12/02/apple_looking_into_liquid_cooled_macbooks.html"liquid-cooled laptop/a, as with similarly-cooled Power Mac G5s from a few years ago, is designed to improve performance by reducing the temperature of the components of the computer. The patent describes wrapping a small heat pipe around various components in the computer that contains a liquid coolant. /p pLiquid-cooled G5s, though, were prone to leaks, which led to heavy damage and dismay for users of the systems. Apple entirely replaced many of the systems that leaked, rather than trying to repair them./p p[Via a href="http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/12/04/apple.hover.touchscreen/"Electronista/a and a href="http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/12/02/apple_looking_into_liquid_cooled_macbooks.html"AppleInsider/a.]/pp style="padding:5px;clear:both;"a href="http://www.tuaw.com"TUAW/aa href="http://www.tuaw.com/2008/12/04/patent-roundup-hover-touch-surfaces-liquid-cooled-laptops/"Patent Roundup: 'Hover' touch surfaces, liquid-cooled laptops/a originally appeared on a href="http://www.tuaw.com"The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)/a on Thu, 04 Dec 2008 12:54:00 EST. Please see our a href="http://www.weblogsinc.com/feed-terms/"terms for use of feeds/a.br style="clear:both;"/ph6 style="clear: both; padding: 8px 0 0 0; height: 2px; font-size: 1px; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;"/h6a href=http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/12/04/apple.hover.touchscreen/Read/anbsp;|nbsp;a href=http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/12/02/apple_looking_into_liquid_cooled_macbooks.htmlRead/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.tuaw.com/2008/12/04/patent-roundup-hover-touch-surfaces-liquid-cooled-laptops/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent link to this entry"Permalink/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.tuaw.com/forward/1391191/" title="Send this entry to a friend via email"Email this/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.tuaw.com/2008/12/04/patent-roundup-hover-touch-surfaces-liquid-cooled-laptops/#comments" title="View reader comments on this entry"Comments/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/ztPfKauj-vGCtGzRyM5QeHk9yrc/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/ztPfKauj-vGCtGzRyM5QeHk9yrc/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/tuaw?a=m3bDgntg"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/tuaw?i=m3bDgntg" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/tuaw?a=UA7b44Mr"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/tuaw?i=UA7b44Mr" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/weblogsinc/tuaw/~4/8SQZ-G6HdSg" height="1" width="1"/

centerimg border=0 title="Scosche reviveLITE" alt="Scosche reviveLITE" src="http://www.uberphones.com/photos/2008/12/scosche-charger.jpg" style="margin: 0 0 0 0;" //center br/pIs your iPhone scared of the dark? If you want a little light around your iPhone when it’s charging at night, then check out the Scosche reviveLITE, which is able to charge iPods and iPhones. The device is going for a href="http://www.scosche.com/products/sfID1/210/sfID2/326/sfID3/318/productID/1653" target="_blank"$40/a, and has an integrated nightlight, so you won’t have any trouble looking for your iPhone if you suddenly decide to go for a spot of midnight web browsing. /p pPermalink: a href="http://www.uberphones.com/2008/12/others/scosche_revivelite/"Scosche reviveLITE/a from a href="http://www.uberphones.com"Uberphones/a | a href="http://www.uberbargain.com/"Good deals/a | Hot: a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2008/11/blackberry_storm_review.html"BlackBerry Storm/a/p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/QUNYLk790vGlo2cDWTY90tzqy-I/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/QUNYLk790vGlo2cDWTY90tzqy-I/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

centerimg border=0 title="Motorola W530 Coming" alt="Motorola W530 Coming" src="http://www.uberphones.com/photos/2008/12/motorola_w530.jpg" style="margin: 0 0 0 0;" //center br/pMotorola’s W530 clamshell phone isn’t going to slay Apple’s iPhone anytime soon (or ever), but it’s aimed at the user who is looking for a simple phone, rather than a fancy feature-laden phone. The phone is reportedly being prepared for the Chinese market, though there is no mention when it will be available. Features of the W530 include:/p ul li1.3 megapixel camera/li li220 x 176 resolution internal display/li liFM radio module/li li20MB internal memory/li limicroSD card expansion/li liquad-band GSM/li liEDGE data transfer/li /ul pPermalink: a href="http://www.uberphones.com/2008/12/motorola/motorola_w530_coming/"Motorola W530 Coming/a from a href="http://www.uberphones.com"Uberphones/a | a href="http://www.uberbargain.com/"Good deals/a | Hot: a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2008/11/blackberry_storm_review.html"BlackBerry Storm/a/p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/3v_27f89Oik9dYNmHYk_5cZwlF4/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/3v_27f89Oik9dYNmHYk_5cZwlF4/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

An interview with a Dev team member has been released a hungarian website and I managed to find an english version of it.

Its not planetbeing or any other main ones but its still cool to get an insight of what these guys are doing cos they normally never do interviews.
Anyways, here is it,

First of all congrats for the job you did so far, but I think you already know that half of the world is supporting you!
Thanks! Me and my wife read your blog, and after you wrote about the Dev Team, we thought it would be a good idea to find you. Your blog is the first hungarian language blog or newsportal we communicate to directly.
Special thanks for that. Let’s start with who the members of the Dev Team (no names of course) are, and how you organize your work since you are living in different countries, continents.
Members of the Dev Team are software, electronics and cryptographics professionals from all over the world. The members of the team - or much more, the core - are from Hungary, France, Belgium, England, Russia, Israel, Ukraine and the USA. We work in a way, that we distribute our work files among us, and with team work, we put the ideas together. The average age is about 30 years old. Most of us don’t know each others name and never met each other.

How many are you?
Everyone has a full time job - and of course this has influence on the Dev Team’s work, but usually there are 15 active members working on the job at the same time.

How do you organize, where does the idea come from to hack the iPhone, and why did you set it up?
We are high tech enthusiasts and hackers… hackers in a good way. We like to crack things and see how they work. Most of us have worked with UNIX and OS X for a long time. Few of us knew the others from there, and other professionals have joined later, those whose work we appreciate a lot.

Do you get any threats or ”feedback” from Apple? Did you have any contact with the company?
Apple never made contact with us. We make sure we never break the law when we release a new software. PwnageTool and QuickPwn are very complicated, because these softwares remove the necessary parts from Apple’s firmware. We NEVER release pirated softwares.

How much time do you spend on the crack, and other iPhone-related works?
We are working on it 24 hours a day. While one of us are working on it, others are sleeping, and we continually switch. IRC is running in the background all the time, even when we are working onour private jobs, so we have worked on the iPhone thousands of hours. I have to mention, that we spend a lot of money on special hardware and reverse engineering softwares, also from our own money.

Do you get any donation, do you make any profit out of the huge work you made anyway?
We finance everything with our own money. Most of the team has a good job that pays good money in the IT field. The Dev Team is our hobby and although it is very time consuming, yet it still is a hobby. We didn’t take money from anyone!

How many people cracked their iPhones with your program? Do you have any idea how much iPhone users freed their phones?
We have more than hundred thousand recurrent PwnageTool and QuickPwn users. It is hard to estimate how many exactly, but a lot.

Why it is so hard to unlock the iPhone 3G? What is the main difference between 2G and 3G that has prevented the unlock so far?
Apple and Infineon made a very serious work and made almost impossible to unlock the iPhone 3G. They learned from what we did with 2G and made the 3G much more safer.

How far are you from suceeding with the unlock?
This is secret of course.

How deep was the 2.2 baseband update? If you want to make a sim-unlock on this as well, do you have to start the job from scratch? So, if someone accidently updated the baseband, does he have to give up, or does he still have a chance to unlock his phone?
At the moment the exploits we used to run our codes on 2.1 and older basebands has been removed from 2.2. 2.2 closed the security breach we used to control the baseband as we wanted and at the moment 2.2 baseband is bad.

What do you mean ”bad”?
In 2.2 baseband there is no such an exploit we can use, so it is bad :-).

What do you think about the sofware and hardware of the iPhone 3G compared to other smartphones?
The iPhone OS is very advanced technology. It is years ahead of everything you can buy on the market at the moment. And yes, I am an Apple fan, but nobody can deny that iPhone is almost futuristic. T-Mobile’s G1 is the second best device after iPhone, but it is still behind 18 months at least I think.

Why do these two devices have advantage over others?
The iPhone OS is based on UNIX/Mach operating system, and both UNIX and Mach is a result of many years of developement. G1 is using Linux, which has a similar story. Fortunately nowadays mobile processors are powerful enough to use UNIX.

What kind of deficiency does the iPhone OS have, and in which direction would you develop it, if it depended on you?
It would need to be more open.

Why and for who do you do your work?
First of all for myself, for us, and for the people who prefer an unlocked phone. We bought a flat in Budapest with my wife, and the agent does not come to our home every week to check if we had painted the walls red, does he? The situation is similar with the IPhone and other devices we buy as well.

What do you do on week days?
We work and play. We have a very special Hungarian Vizsla (deerhound), he keeps us busy all the time.

Why did you choose a pineapple as your logo?
Apple/Pinapple, Pwn/Own, PwnApple (Pwning Apple)

The link to the Hungarian version of it:Appleblog

The english version was got from here: AllTechRelated

Five months after it opened its doors, the App Store finally hits five digits.br style=clear: both;/ a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:03c1f8d7e60abcc7e1b26e332e75673b:qv9IFzRVw8PLItuPHPXnaHipOdTn3ztRkYS95jiq24chOZsmFvINHl2gsoSLBmsaSLg6nNb2vad3'img border='0' title='Add to digg' alt='Add to digg' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/digg.gif'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:5fe0d791d1c6a4275f4723537f29166d:CgLOplO3y1%2BhKMyox9019EeD64MM20vHXEb0oKY7b8a7%2BPPT0XeBhLE98kah9w2Orumi0UpfPtkq'img border='0' title='Add to Reddit' alt='Add to Reddit' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/reddit.png'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:2719babba0ec310b9464a9b8bb59c44a:wMyPA0OlYwSSXQJ%2F%2Bzj6Haf8xjkNFtVU1iCeh4TmhDFQzXF5J23so4jByZ10vqW5mu%2B40JKhO%2Fpxjg%3D%3D'img border='0' title='Add to Slashdot' alt='Add to Slashdot' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/slashdot.png'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:4ac6f598d7ce3e5204a81948e49d5c10:c8Wssyqui%2FZBx9uMtWWyFvSSP2%2F3wSzf1pXoWSN2jpTsPpcbL%2FrBelhiR6lxjFXTUptvtHttQ2KI'img border='0' title='Email this Article' alt='Email this Article' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/emailthis.png'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:3a48e5ac8cea892926ce549f40b622ac:1yxb2ep5Z2FwQWIaIDm10yVhnDNA9WfGugZj7KYU%2BS2%2FusL3NXiicBb1fFSKWR5CN%2F%2B4gnOPdv6dRw%3D%3D'img border='0' title='Add to StumbleUpon' alt='Add to StumbleUpon' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/stumbleit.gif'//a br style=clear: both;/ a href=http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=f472e0f3e5af60667a8477649ba908a9p=1img alt= style=border: 0; border=0 src=http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=f472e0f3e5af60667a8477649ba908a9p=1//a img src=http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=f472e0f3e5af60667a8477649ba908a9 style=display: none; border=0 height=1 width=1 alt=/

via MacNN:

Voice Dialer (free) is a voice dialing application for the iPhone that allows users to search through their contact book using voice commands. Users press and hold the onscreen button, then speak a name and command such as "call." After a contact has been found, users can choose to call, e-mail or send a text message to the person. If an address is associated with the contact, a map of that locat...


More...

Hello everyone.

I know how frustrating it is going page to page, video to video, just to find out all the processes of Fully JailBreaking your iPodTouch/iPhone.

So, I've written up a Easy-to-follow, All-in-One, Step-by-Step Guide telling you exactly what you need to do.

PM me for the link ^_^
ENJOY!

[THIF]

Hey there. I'm brand new to how Macs work and can basically just navigate to a few programs and that's all. I have ben using PC forever and am tired with the relentless ignorance of the customer service of some PC companies (*cough* Dell *cough*). I had a problem with my iPhone so I went to the local Genius Bar and took about 1.5 mins to effortlessly recieve a new iPhone no questions asked. There is only one(1) thing causing hesitation about purchasing a Mac. I have read about how to run Windows on Mac through Parallels or BootCamp and am just wondering if games through windows will ever be as smooth as running it on a PC. I am having a hard time believing that it will run flawlessly on a Mac even through BootCamp and I do not want to lose my games that I play. This is my only issue, if this was no issue I would have a Mac already. So please let me know how well Windows can be run through a Mac. Note: This most likely will be just run for games and few PC only programs not constantly as for searching the web or the like. Thank you.

Anyone know if Citibank is releasing an app for the iPhone? I remember reading a while back that they were going to develop one but I haven't heard anything since. Anyone have any info?

centerimg title="$99 iPhones Coming To Wal-Mart?" style="MARGIN: 0px" alt="$99 iPhones Coming To Wal-Mart?" src="http://www.ubergizmo.com/photos/2008/12/99-iphone.jpg" border="0" //centerbr / pWhispers abound that Apple might reintroduce the 4GB iPhone at Wal-Mart, having it retail for a mere $99 with a 2-year contract. This is rather surprising considering Apple discontinued the 4GB model just a couple of months after rolling out the iPhone - is there something Cupertino knows that we don't? Could this be the beginning of the end for Windows Mobile smartphones, as Apple plans to occupy both the high-end and low-end range of the market? Only time will tell, and it will be interesting to see just how many people pick up a $99 iPhone, never mind that it doesn't even pack 3G connectivity and comes with a measly 4GB memory./p pPermalink: a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2008/12/99_iphones_coming_to_walmart.html"$99 iPhones Coming To Wal-Mart?/a from Ubergizmo (a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com"US/a, a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/fr"FR/a) | a href="http://www.uberbargain.com/"Good deals/a | Hot: a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2008/11/blackberry_storm_review.html"Storm Review/a/p pmap name="google_ad_map_081204090614" area shape="rect" href="http://imageads.googleadservices.com/pagead/imgclick/081204090614?pos=0" coords="1,2,367,28"/ area shape="rect" href="http://services.google.com/feedback/abg" coords="384,10,453,23"//map img usemap="#google_ad_map_081204090614" border="0" src="http://imageads.googleadservices.com/pagead/ads?format=468x30_aff_imgamp;client=ca-pub-7335032025195922amp;channel=9684588219amp;output=pngamp;cuid=081204090614amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ubergizmo.com%2F15%2Farchives%2F2008%2F12%2F99_iphones_coming_to_walmart.html"//p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/7K8by0GY-xSsntrByzG7g73vC2E/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/7K8by0GY-xSsntrByzG7g73vC2E/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=6jrH7p2A"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=8AmvsnLN"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?i=8AmvsnLN" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=dx6jIJgk"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=bM50Ni3S"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?i=bM50Ni3S" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=ebw0h8ti"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?i=ebw0h8ti" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ubergizmo/~4/FyqqtloNUW4" height="1" width="1"/

pFiled under: a href="http://www.tuaw.com/category/retail/" rel="tag"Retail/a, a href="http://www.tuaw.com/category/rumors/" rel="tag"Rumors/a, a href="http://www.tuaw.com/category/iphone/" rel="tag"iPhone/a/ppimg vspace="5" hspace="5" border="0" align="right" src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.tuaw.com/media/2008/12/walmart-458698456.jpg" alt="" /Your source for all iPhone-slash-Walmart news, BoyGeniusReport, has a whopper for you: a href="http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2008/12/04/apple-to-sell-a-99-4gb-iphone-at-walmart/"Walmart might offer the 4GB iPhone for $99/a when they start selling the handsets a href="http://www.tuaw.com/2008/11/19/walmart-will-sell-iphones-starting-dec-28/"after Christmas/a. /p pEven emthey're/em skeptical, though: Their tipster isn't one of their regulars, and so they can't say with any certainty that it will come to pass. /p pThe discount makes sense, in a way. Selling the low-end iPhone at a ridiculous price will turn it into the new Motorola RAZR. Apple would love everyone in the country to own one, I'm sure. It's not clear who will eat the discount, though -- Apple, ATamp;T, or Walmart -- but my guess is that it's mostly Apple. Apple has other revenue streams for the iPhone, such as the App Store and iTunes, and ATamp;T still has its spendy two-year contract. If this is what Apple needs to do to make this the ubiquitous handset to have, then it may be worth the cost to them. /p pOn the other hand, as many commenters at BGR have pointed out, with ubiquity comes rejection. Suddenly, the iPhone isn't the cool status symbol to have anymore. This doesn't bother me one bit, but to some people -- for whatever reason -- it's important to them. (I have special names for those people.) Nevertheless -- will it impact sales? How much is the "hip" coefficient driving purchases?/p pIn any event, consider this one of those situations where the Internet is writing checks that Walmart's butt might not be able to cash. But pretty sweet if it does./pp style="padding:5px;clear:both;"a href="http://www.tuaw.com"TUAW/aa href="http://www.tuaw.com/2008/12/04/bgr-walmart-to-sell-99-iphone/"BGR: Walmart to sell $99 iPhone?/a originally appeared on a href="http://www.tuaw.com"The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)/a on Thu, 04 Dec 2008 12:04:00 EST. Please see our a href="http://www.weblogsinc.com/feed-terms/"terms for use of feeds/a.br style="clear:both;"/ph6 style="clear: both; padding: 8px 0 0 0; height: 2px; font-size: 1px; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;"/h6a href=http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2008/12/04/apple-to-sell-a-99-4gb-iphone-at-walmart/Read/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.tuaw.com/2008/12/04/bgr-walmart-to-sell-99-iphone/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent link to this entry"Permalink/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.tuaw.com/forward/1391257/" title="Send this entry to a friend via email"Email this/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.tuaw.com/2008/12/04/bgr-walmart-to-sell-99-iphone/#comments" title="View reader comments on this entry"Comments/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/rpOc1qTMtNsNFhKlixwoeixnkTM/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/rpOc1qTMtNsNFhKlixwoeixnkTM/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/tuaw?a=Hn5MVAZU"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/tuaw?i=Hn5MVAZU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/tuaw?a=Ccn93mIQ"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/tuaw?i=Ccn93mIQ" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/weblogsinc/tuaw/~4/_I1Kh0Kb3mA" height="1" width="1"/

EMI Music is the first major label to line up multiple artists for the popular game Tap Tap on the iPhone. It's a move likely to be followed by the other three majors.

EMI Music is the first major label to line up multiple artists for the popular game Tap Tap on the iPhone. It's a move likely to be followed by the other three majors.

EMI Music is the first major label to line up multiple artists for the popular game Tap Tap on the iPhone. It's a move likely to be followed by the other three majors.

A fairly new filing from Apple discusses the advantages of using proximity sensors more generously to aid its multi-touch technology on devices larger than the iPhone, which would allow certain functions to be invoked without the user having to physically touch the display.

pThe latest smartphone sales figures show how quickly the iPhone has caught on, as Apple is now number three in sales, and the iPhone OS passed Windows Mobile in market share during the third quarter of 2008. BlackBerry maker Research in Motion was the other big winner, while Nokia suffered./ppa href="http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081204-apple-rim-winners-in-shrinking-smartphone-market.html"Read More.../a/p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/yfUJR-eAG4CEWYIev1h-oFcHrpQ/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/yfUJR-eAG4CEWYIev1h-oFcHrpQ/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?a=7jDf5s3j"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?i=7jDf5s3j" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?a=nbQvsAM3"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?d=50" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?a=YsOC1jVY"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?d=41" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/arstechnica/BAaf/~4/eWNjYKsqURQ" height="1" width="1"/

pThe latest smartphone sales figures show how quickly the iPhone has caught on, as Apple is now number three in sales, and the iPhone OS passed Windows Mobile in market share during the third quarter of 2008. BlackBerry maker Research in Motion was the other big winner, while Nokia suffered./ppa href="http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081204-apple-rim-winners-in-shrinking-smartphone-market.html"Read More.../a/p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/yfUJR-eAG4CEWYIev1h-oFcHrpQ/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/yfUJR-eAG4CEWYIev1h-oFcHrpQ/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?a=7jDf5s3j"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?i=7jDf5s3j" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?a=nbQvsAM3"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?d=50" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?a=YsOC1jVY"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?d=41" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/arstechnica/BAaf/~4/eWNjYKsqURQ" height="1" width="1"/

pThe latest smartphone sales figures show how quickly the iPhone has caught on, as Apple is now number three in sales, and the iPhone OS passed Windows Mobile in market share during the third quarter of 2008. BlackBerry maker Research in Motion was the other big winner, while Nokia suffered./ppa href="http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081204-apple-rim-winners-in-shrinking-smartphone-market.html"Read More.../a/p

We've been wanting to get some extended face time with Apple's In-Ear Headphones (yes, that's the product name) ever since we spied them at the company's Fall "Let's Rock" event. Of course, they didn't exactly hit the scene on time, and we were starting to get suspicious. Tack on the rumor they wouldn't be compatible with iPhones, and we felt downright indignant. Imagine our surprise, then, at the discovery that they not only sound really, really good (warm lows and crisp highs, a distinct lack of that modern, pushy mid-range), but they do work with the iPhone (the 3G we've got here, at least). Regular playback is a charm, and we had no problem making and receiving calls with the buds and attached mic -- though strangely the remote doesn't seem operable on the phone, thus deflating our excitement ever-so-slightly. Regardless, the sound quality is pretty boss for the price (besting other, more expensive models we've checked out), and they're a huge step up from Apple's previous offerings. Check out some looks at the beauties in the gallery below.

Gallery: Apple In-Ear Headphones hands-on, ears-on, and impressions

Filed under: Portable Audio

Apple In-Ear Headphones hands-on, ears-on, and impressions originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Dec 2008 11:48:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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