iPhone

Sometimes, genius can be erratic. Even when it's wearing a T-shirt and working in an Apple store.

Maria Avila had an old iPhone. It was time to give it some of that new 4.0 flavor. So she went to her local Apple store in Modesto, Calif., to have the iOS 4 software installed and came back with an installation she hadn't quite expected. Yes, a slide show of strange photos, 110 of them.

Thumbing through her new pictures, Avila told CBS13 in Stockton, Calif.: "I don't know these people."

Her upgraded iPhone seemed to have taken on a new personality. She couldn't send texts. The phone locked up. And then, having discovered the strange pictures, she found new information in her address book. As well as text messages.

"Someone named George is telling me I love you and we'll meet up in Costco," she told CBS13. Which must have not only been quite scary, but also made her wonder what on earth has happened to romance these days.

Turning her eyes upward to see whether she had not only had her phone upgraded, but perhaps also her whole persona, she looked to find her name and phone number at the top of her iPhone. Instead, she encountered the name and phone number of Marlene Hepner, a resident of Tracy, Calif.

So Avila called Hepner. And when she showed her the pictures that had suddenly appeared on her iPhone, Hepner was rather upset.… Read more

Instead of automatically sending your junk mail to the trash bin, send it over to the burrito artists at Chipotle. The casual food chain is now accepting your spam at nojunk@chipotlejunk.com and will donate $10,000 to The Lunch Box for every 500,000 junk mails it receives.

The campaign is an effort to bring higher-quality, healthier food with sustainable ingredients to school kids, but not to worry: Said food does not include Chipotle burritos, which contain 1,179 calories, according to Livestrong.com. Unfortunately, the call to action does not include sending Chipotle the other kind of SPAM.… Read more

Barely a week since the public got its hands on the iPhone 4, the first lawsuit over it has been filed.

Filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland on behalf of Kevin McCaffrey, Linda Wrinn, and others on Wednesday, the suit accuses Apple and AT&T of knowingly distributing a phone with a malfunctioning antenna. The plaintiffs are seeking class action status. The iPhone maker and its exclusive carrier partner in the U.S. are accused of a laundry list of infractions, including: general negligence, defect in design, manufacture, and assembly, breach of warranty, … Read more

I'm a big proponent of cloud-based music services for mobile devices. I struggle figuring out which 500 songs I want on my 8GB iPhone at any given time, and the problem gets worse as as I download more apps. So it's gratifying to see an explosion of mobile music services in the last six months. Start-ups and established companies alike seem to believe that the current model, where users transfer songs from a computer to their phone using a wired connection, is not long for this world. Instead, these companies are coming up with various ways to dispense … Read more

If you've been one of the many clamoring to see Firefox running on an iPhone, you may get your chance--of sorts.

Back in late May, Mozilla announced that it would be creating an iPhone version of its Firefox browser--though the solution is not a browser itself. On Wednesday, Mozilla submitted its Firefox Home iPhone app to Apple for testing--and, it hopes, for approval.

The free Firefox Home is more of a window to your Firefox browsing rather than a competing browser itself, … Read more

Let me start by saying that I bought my iPhone 3GS in October of last year and have no plans to upgrade to the iPhone 4. Luckily, while the new iPhone--antenna issues aside--has certainly been enhanced, the differences between the new model and my "old" 3GS aren't huge, especially now that I've installed iOS4. However, even if there was a big difference, I knew going in that I would largely be ignoring whatever next-generation model Apple put out because I'm not a serial upgrader.

But recently I've been thinking about how long a … Read more

Almost a week after the iPhone 4's launch, questions remain over why users experience signal loss when gripping the phone in a particular way.

Apple has called this a "non issue," despite users being able to repeatedly reproduce the problem. In the meantime, it's been suggested that it might be a problem that can be fixed with a software update. Others have said, and Apple has suggested, that users buy a case to prevent fingers from coming in direct contact with the antennas built into the metal band surrounding the iPhone 4.

Brian Klug and Anand Shimpi at tech blog Anandtech have conducted their own hands-on experiments comparing different smartphones and their reception when the antennas are covered. They sum up their findings this way: "At the end of the day, Apple should add an insulative coating to the stainless steel band, or subsidize bumper cases. It's that simple."

The bumper case is a rubber holder that just surrounds the exterior of the device, and that Apple started selling the same day as the iPhone 4 for $29. Apple has already said it's not giving the cases away for free. It's not clear why the company wouldn't do that, especially when the problem has been reproduced by many people, though it varies by place and person. … Read more

Early demand for the iPhone 4 that exceeded supply could put Apple at risk and is prompting frustrated customers to consider competing smartphones, according to a new report from iSuppli.

Though Apple and its partners racked up 600,000 preorders for the iPhone 4 in one day and sold 1.7 million units in just three days, iSuppli believes the early heavy demand has come at some cost to the company.

The huge wave of preorders on June 15 caused the ordering systems of Apple and AT&T to stall, shutting out some customers and forcing the companies to … Read more

The 404 Podcast will never charge for premium content because the words "premium" and "The 404" have never occurred in the same sentence before, and besides, we're no Hulu, who just announced Hulu Plus, a premium subscription service that offers all-you-can-eat helpings of your favorite primetime shows from ABC, NBC, Fox, and other cable channels for $9.99 a month. In addition, Hulu Plus will also stream full back catalogs of shows like Glee and Saturday Night Live.

The company also announced a Hulu Plus app that works with the Apple iPhone, iPad, and iPod … Read more