iPhone News Updated

Facebook’s iPhone update paves the way for apps

We still get a pitch about a new Facebook app now and again, but truth is, that ship sailed long ago. Most Facebook apps just don’t have the wow factor they once did when the platform was new. With the company’s latest iPhone app update, however, the wow could be coming back on a smaller scale.

In case you missed Thursday’s news, Apple finally got around to approving the third version of Facebook’s iPhone app. It’s a big step up from previous iterations, bringing in a number of features for which users had been clamoring.

One of the most interesting changes is how the app has been designed to feel very familiar to the iPhone user interface. For instance, no matter what you’re doing on the app, you can touch anywhere on the top of the screen to go back “home.” You can also save shortcuts to a friend’s profile or to one of the social network’s public-facing pages.

These saved items go up on 3×3 grid that can be rearranged and expanded, depending on how many pages and contacts users decide to add. This makes it much simpler to hop back and forth between certain parts of the site–that is, as long as you’ve planned ahead.

To go with those items are standard Facebook features, including a handful of its own first-party applications, such as events, photos, mail, and the all-important live text chat.

So is there room for third-party apps in this new ecosystem? Definitely, and much more so than would have been possible in previous versions.
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iPhone Explosions: The Inside Story

Today we got a mail from a Tier 2 iPhone support agent, who had this to say about iPhone safety:

I’m a Tier 2 iPhone agent for Apple. I’d like to add that roughly one to two calls out of every thousand that I take deal with the battery “overheating”.

Generally, this incident can be described as “uncomfortably warm”, and I have not ever received or heard of a coworker receiving a call about someone being injured by the iPhone, including people too stupid to stop using their phones after the screen is broken.

We have a team of engineers whose specific jobs are to investigate any issues that could be classified as “Safety Issues”. These Safety Issues are classified due to the injury of a person or a person’s property from use of one of our products. Chargers catching on fire, batteries blowing up, or CD trays flinging CD’s across the room and breaking your mother’s antique vase would all be classified as safety issues.

We get tens of thousands of calls, 99% iPhone related. Zero Safety Issues.

So let’s recap: According to this alleged Apple agent, one or two calls out of every thousand are about the iPhone overheating, but there have been zero iPhone-related incidents so far. Seems like the French iPhone “explosion” plague is just a stupid summer media craze fed by some stupid French people.

[Thanks: http://gizmodo.com]