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The new Apple iPhone 3G was announced today (6/9/2009) at WWDC 2008 in San Francisco. The new price is only $199 (8gb) and $299 (16gb) due to carrier subsidies. It has tons of new features built into it, notably GPS and 3G (of course) and will definitely make inroads not only into the corporate market with the new MS Exchange functionality, but also into the more frugal consumer market. $199 makes this phone very competitive with the higher end blackberries and cheaper than most of the Microsoft Smartphones.

Most of the base features are the same, like the flash storage capacity, but Apple did take suggestions from the community and improve the design, such as making the headphone jack flush as to not require a special adaptor to use non-Apple headphones.

The 16GB model also has a white backed version as well as the new Black backed and the front of the phone is wholly unchanged…

Included accessories, everything is pretty much the same:

• iPhone 3G
• Stereo Headset with mic
• Dock Connector to USB Cable
• SB Power Adapter (A bit smaller now)
• Documentation
• Cleaning/polishing cloth
• SIM ejector tool (a paperclip!)

Look for the new iPhone to reach stores around July 11th. Hopefully supply will be able to hit the demand that I anticipate. I plan on getting ahold of one for myself.

Today, Steve Jobs announced at an Apple Event that the iPhone will, by summertime, get a full version update to 2.x… The 2.0 update will provide ActivSync Microsoft Exchange capabilities including full PUSH email, calendar and contact syncing… The new 2.0 will also provide the framework for the next level of iPhone/Touch apps. Click the image above to see more.

This is very exciting news and is going to usher in the next stage of smartphone domination by the Apple iPhone.

My next main hope is at the release date, Apple will release an 3G iPhone as well as additional improvements, perhaps even a slightly larger screened enhanced phone/PDA more geared towards Fanboy/Power Users that will be more multimedia oriented and perhaps even be able to stream video and interface with the movie element of iTunes, but I’m just dreaming here.

I still think a tablet type Mac that is small, very portable, priced competitively and powerful enough to provide a desktop level experience would be really cool. Then add a docking station that can hook it up to a mouse/monitor/keyboard. If I could have something like this that could be everything for me, I would get one in a heartbeat. PC, Cellphone, VoIP phone, PDA, mobile computing platform, etc.

The Axiotron Mac OSX unofficial Mac Tablet is good, but still a bit larger and more expensive than what I describe above.

Apple has filed patents for something of this sort (the docking station concept), perhaps someday it will leave the vaporware stage.

Then a U.S. Contractor needs to HIRE this guy for a huge sum of money, perfect this suit and mass produce it! If he could build this on his OWN in his own home, imagine if he was working with others with more sophisticated equipment!

Troy Hurtubise is a modern day genius. This suit, called the Trojan Suit, could protect our troops in the war and greatly reduce casualties and it would be VERY intimidating to the enemy as well.

Original Article

Troy Hurtubise’s Trojan Suit

He’s lost his family and his truck, but not his will to see Canadian soldiers wearing his armored suit.

Troy Hurtubise, 43, is travelling from North Bay to his hometown in Hamilton this week to make preparations for a three-day tour of Ontario war memorials. He plans to gather signatures on a petition pressing Ottawa to test the effectiveness of the Trojan suit he created in his home lab.

Hurtubise became an Internet sensation last winter when he introduced the suit and put it up for auction on eBay, drawing media attention worldwide.

The Trojan takes design inspiration from movies and video games and puts it into light armour that Hurtubise says is bulletproof. The suit offers 95 per cent head and body coverage, and also features such extras as a helmet ventilation system, arm-mounted pepper-spray, magnetic sidearm holsters, and even a crotch-mounted, pull-down clock.

When the suit failed to draw any substantial eBay bids, Hurtubise ran out of money and his family was evicted from their home. Hurtubise said his 16-year marriage crumbled under the stress. He sold his pickup and gave his wife the proceeds to start up in a new home, and now it’s just him and the suit.

He’s planning to visit three war memorials daily between Saturday and Monday, arriving at the cenotaph in Hamilton’s Gore Park at 9 a.m. Saturday, and wrapping up at the National War Memorial in Ottawa at 3 p.m. Monday.

He plans to walk “a soldier’s mile” to each memorial wearing the Trojan suit, then stop and salute.

At each stop over the three-day tour, he’ll be gathering signatures on a petition he hopes to present at the Parliament buildings also on Monday.

Here is the blurb from it on Wikipedia…

In early 2007, Hurtubise made public his new protective suit which was designed to be worn by soldiers. Calling it the “Trojan”, Hurtubise describes it as the “first ballistic, full exoskeleton body suit of armour.” Weighing in at 40 lbs, he claims that the suit can withstand bullets from high powered weapons (including an elephant gun). Hurtubise claims that he has been unable to test the suit against live ammunition because no one is willing to shoot him in it.

The suit has many features including a solar powered air system, recording device, compartments for emergency morphine and salt, and a knife and gun holster. He estimates that the cost of each suit to be roughly $2,000 if mass produced. It has been called the Halo suit, after the fictional MJOLNIR battle armor the Master Chief character wears in the Xbox game.

In early February, after failing to receive any offers to buy the Trojan, Hurtubise - now bankrupt from the expense of creating the suit - was forced to put the prototype up for auction on eBay in the hopes that it would bring in enough money to sustain his family. Unfortunately for Hurtubise, the auction’s reserve bid was not met. There was a raffle for the suit on the Mission Trojan website, who’s goal is to raise money for further prototypes and testing of the Trojan Suit to demonstrate its abilities for military applications. The suit was won by Sara Markis of West Palm Beach, Florida.

Besides this suit, Troy also has invented other things that in conjunction with this could advance modern day war fighting and law enforcement to the next level.

1313 Paste

One of Hurtubise’s latest projects has been the creation of a new paste that he’s called 1313 and believes could be put to good military use. It is a mixture of all his previous concoctions applied to a kevlar fiber pad and then subjected to high pressure for the period of a day in a press. The result is a board or tile-like panel. The panel is placed in layers with other materials such as tiles. The resulting composite material can withstand a direct assault by shotgun slugs, rifle fire, and enough high explosive to demolish a car, yet is quite inexpensive to manufacture.

At an enthusiastic demonstration taped by Daily Planet, Troy displayed its capability to a Canadian military observer. In one of Troy’s demonstrations, the composite material was placed in cushions meant to be placed over the outside of a Humvee. In the tests, the material successfully blocked explosive charges greater than those of a rocket propelled grenade, although they were not shaped charges, and was able to block shot after shot on exactly the same point of impact by a sniper rifle (which is a feat no material in use by the U.S. nor any other military has matched in public demonstrations).

It is Troy’s desire to see military vehicles, currently in service in Afghanistan, equipped with such protection in order to stand up to a landmine explosion, which has already claimed the lives of Canadian soldiers serving there. That, along with his younger brother serving in the Canadian military, inspired the creation of 1313.

Over the last month or so that I’ve had the iPhone, I have enjoyed just the original base features included with it. But, being the geek that I am, I had to extend it further… Much further.

A week or so ago, I went ahead and decided to do my “first” hacking of the iPhone. I went to the JailBreakMe.com website and followed the simple instructions and the Installer.app which is basically a “one touch” utility to install 3rd party apps and Linux ports such as PICO and a terminal program.

I was a bit surprised to find a port of Apache 1.3.37 and PHP 5.2.3 in the repository, so I went ahead, installed them both and with a little configuration using PICO (after installing and logging in through SSH), got a functional webserver with PHP support.

I created a PHPINFO() page which shows the extensions that are activated by default, which are pretty much just the core PHP functions and started thinking what to do with it…

Of course I could use it for impromptu testing of code from anywhere, showing simple mockups offline to clients one-on-one, and other things like that, but it wasn’t enough for me…

I put the thoughts on the backburner for a few days, last night I figured I’d try something new.

Here goes…

Apache/PHP was working so I decided to go ahead and copy a full PHP site with full graphics and a PHPMail script on it.

To get this all over to the phone, I TARred up just the most necessary files, filtering out anything not directly referenced (limited amount of memory on the phone for this type of stuff).

Then I FTP’ed, using NCFTP installed from the Installer.App repository, into the machine that had the TAR, downloaded and unTARred it into Apache’s document folder (/Library/WebServer/Documents).

At that point, once all the files were in the correct place and so forth, I hit the website directly on the phone (http://127.0.0.1) and it came right up and was rather speedy. I then hit it from a workstation on the same WiFi network using the DHCP assigned IP and it came up perfectly.

Ok, so far so good, the website comes up just fine locally and remotely, lets take it a few steps further.

I decided to, from work today, to VPN using PPTP built into the iPhone into my DD-WRT router at home (It has a static IP) and then proceed to port forward port 80 from the external IP to the Internally assigned VPN IP of the iPhone. Then I proceed to add a DNS entry for it…

I also VPNed into the DD-WRT over EDGE and it worked just fine as well. Of course it was MUCH slower, but still worked fine.

It really was this easy to do something that I don’t think has ever been done before with a cellphone.

NOTE: Apache was setup to just start 1 httpd instance and I believe a max of 7, which slowed stuff down a lot with a graphical site, so I set it from 1 to 10.

If anyone has questions, feel free to leave a comment and I’ll reply as soon as I can.

I figured, since my Apple (AAPL) stock has done so well in the last few months, that I would go ahead and buy myself an iPhone. (Actually it is, according to my wife, my Birthday and Christmas present)

I stopped by the local AT&T Store and picked it up. They did the credit pre-approval in the store and had the number printed on my receipt for use at home once I started the activation. This helped prevent any delays that could have been caused by online credit checks, especially since I have a Credit Guard thing on my bureau accounts.

The activation was totally painless. The number porting was the only part that took a little while. I could call out on the iPhone, but it took about 2 hours for incoming to work. I guess that isn’t bad considering my previous service was through a small regional provider.

It was very easy to connect to WiFi both at home (Non-WEP Meraki Units) and at work (MID-Level CISCO AP w/ WEP). It seems to remember the APs really well and connects to them immediately without asking after the initial connection. WiFi is the only way to go if you plan on using it for major emailing and/or Web surfing, etc.

At home, I can’t get any AT&T Towers, but I roam through CellularOne and their EDGE Network is slower than a quadriplegic, blind, geriatric turtle with a full hip replacement. I was able to only get between 9-15k average. On AT&T’s network from work, I have received between 80-180k… Much more like true EDGE speeds. For these tests, I used the iPhone Network Test page. From what I’ve heard, AT&T recently bought the local CellularOne (Dobson) here in my region, so hopefully they’ll upgrade the old equipment when they go into the towers for initial maintenance.

Here is a brief feature rundown:

• The Interface is fast and beautiful
• Mail is sufficient for reading and replying
• Google Maps is excellent, even on only EDGE in “MAP” mode. On WiFi, it’s lightning fast
• YouTube is flawless and works best on WiFi, otherwise it scales the resolution and compresses it more on slow connections (although I have yet to connect through EDGE)
• The iPod option turns it into a killer iPod
• The iTunes store is great, previews start instantly, no buffering time on WiFi. Doesn’t work on EDGE.
• SMS worked well between my iPhone and my brother’s BlackBerry 7130 on AT&T
• Calendar is functional and provides all the basic options for setting up calendar items
• The camera is nothing amazing, but is better than virtually 99% of most other cell phone cameras (quality wise).
• The widgets (Stocks & Weather) are excellent and look just as good as their desktop counterparts.
• The Clock, Calculator & Notes are fine too.

Probably the most extensive test I did of Safari was to load up an ArcGIS Web Mapping page. I loaded it up, it all rendered correctly and even some of the mapping tools like the Information (I) tool worked although map navigation was impossible since it depends on a mouse.The Interface is very intuitive and it even passed my “Dad Test”. If he can figure it out, anyone can.

Battery life is excellent so far and seems to be lasting longer today than it did yesterday after it’s first full charge.

The only thing I wish there was more of were normal “ring-like” ringtones instead of silly duck and dog sounds. And the maximum speaker volume isn’t really loud enough for either the ringtones or the speakerphone, even after the 1.1.1 upgrade.

There really isn’t much more to tell. The iPhone, for me, has work as advertised. I haven’t had any trouble to speak of besides AT&T having some EDGE problems yesterday (10/8/7) and couldn’t get to it all day.

A new line of iPods were announced by Steve Jobs today among other new things. Here, I am just going to comment on the new “touch” version and the iPhone.

The new iPod Touch is everything I hoped it would be. I had a major gut feeling that WiFi + Safari would be worked into it and it was. iTunes Mobile is in it which doesn’t surprise me so much.

I am going to hold off ordering it for a few months in hopes (unlikely) that a version with a bit more memory will come out. Lots of people are complaining in forums at Macrumors, Gizmodo and other sites that the 8 & 16gb is TERRIBLE. It is when you compare it to the “classic” version which has 80 & 160gb HDDs. I don’t think it is that bad considering it is flash based rather than HDD based which should lend to a longer life if you aren’t the type to upgrade EVERY time a new one comes out. I consider my music collection relatively large and diverse and it is only 11gb, which would leave 4.change leftover for other things such as the occasional video or hack. The “negatives” of the touch are outweighed by the new capabilities it wields like WiFi and Safari as well as other apps and hack-ability.

I am hoping that the iPod “touch” is as hackable as the iPhone, which I’m sure it will be. I am expecting to see some new applications come out for it such as a full email client, chat client, etc. Those programs would make it virtually a fully featured PDA, especially if someone can write or port an email client (like Evolution) that has an Exchange Connector for corporate email.

I am very excited about this product and hope it isn’t the last new item to be released before the holiday season.

On another note, I’m a bit disappointed at investors dumping Apple stock (AAPL) today on news that the iPhone was dropping $200 to a more “justifiable” $399 for the 8gb model and killing the 4gb version altogether, which should save a little in manufacturing costs as flash memory prices drop. I could easily see 16gb for the iPhone + 32gb for the iPod happening within the next year within the same price point. The more reasonable price will drive higher volumes for a device that is already the best selling “Smart Phone” in July 2007. I also have a strong feeling the exclusive AT&T relationship will end within or around the 1st anniversary of the release and Apple will openly support other carriers in driving proliferation of the iPhone.

Only time will tell…

The other day, while my wife was shopping at Walmart, I decided to make a little trip to the AT&T Store nearby.  They had a decent number of iPhone available on Launch Day, but I decided to wait until my current contract is up early next year.

It wasn’t too busy so I talked to the guy there at the store for a while about various smart phones, then I walked up to the huge fake iPhone display.

Sitting there was what looked like a normal sized iPhone display model sitting on the charging dock.  I asked the guy if it was real and he said “Of course”, So I picked it up and looked at it.  The screen was so clear and crisp that it looked fake. I tapped the weather button and up the weather came.

I’m not going to go into all the details that have been posted endless amounts of times on blogs.  Basically, the iPhone was the most beautiful handheld device I’ve ever used!  The interface was so fluid and simple that it took no instructional manual.  It is virtually 100% intuitive.

I wasted no time though getting into the phone part of it and called my buddy Mattbob.  He answered with a “Hello?” instead of his normal “Hey dude” since he didn’t recognize the number, and we talked for a few minutes.  I decided to then dial my brother, eDoug, and “merge” him into the call.  A couple “taps” later and we were all talking.  Doug had crappy service at work though so I dropped him out and went back to Mattbob.  Talked for a few minutes and was done.

I can’t say it would ever be that easy to do what I did on any other “Smart Phone”… I’ve owned Palm Treos and other Palm driven phones and it was never that simple.  Those others were clumsy without the stylus.

The touchscreen keyboard wasn’t too bad either, took a minute to get used to it, but it was ok once you did, it even corrected my last name which isn’t a common “Smith” or “Jones”.

Out of 10, I would give it a 9.2 … The only negative I noticed was the speed of the WiFi connection with trying to browse, but it may have been the stores connection.  Other than that, I really think it has some massive potential as they improve upon it and come out with new models down the road.

The coolest thing I can imagine Apple doing with it in the future is to create a “docking station” you can plug it into allowing you to have a full size monitor, mouse and keyboard.  The docking station could also offload some of the tasks to make it faster and/or provide more storage, etc.  This would basically allow you to have a PC in your pocket.

I’m looking forward to the first consumer reviews of the iPhone in the blogosphere this evening as people get home with their new phones. Lots of people are comparing it to phones that aren’t even in the same class saying how “bad” certain things are when they haven’t even used the iPhone.My only minor suggestions are.

1. Initially, don’t try and compare the iPhone to all the other existing phones out there. The iPhone is a completely unique device and should be “rated” on it’s own merits.
2. Before dismissing any specific feature, make sure that you haven’t overlooked anything.
3. READ THE MANUAL or use the online help to make sure you are doing everything “correctly”

Following these suggestions should ensure unnecessary posts about how bad this and that is and then people coming onto your blog saying “You need to do this thing first and then it’ll work…” type of comments. I just bought $4000 in Apple stock (AAPL) yesterday, so I’m hoping for a good return

(Obvious subliminal message: GO BUY AN iPHONE or 4!)

Looks like a cool phone, but I think Microsoft stuffed a little too much into it!  Although they will pay you $125 to take it off their hands. :)

Check out the specifications, courtesy of Amazon.com…

This is a bit old… From Jan, but quite funny.

But for real… Here is a closeup of it with a CBS reporter.