iPhone News Updated

Consumer 10.0: Web service can help cut monthly cell phone bills

Dissatisfied wireless customers got their due last week.

After years of complaints about early-termination fees, the Federal Communications Commission finally showed signs of a serious inquiry into the charges. And the shortcomings of AT&T Wireless’ network, familiar to disgruntled iPhone users, drew wide attention for an ironic reason: Apple’s decision to stick with AT&T when it launches its eagerly awaited iPad mobile computer this spring.

But today’s column isn’t about dissatisfied wireless customers. It’s about the vast majority of the nation’s 276 million wireless subscribers who are at least modestly happy with a technology that has changed so many aspects of their day-to-day lives.

Happy, I’d venture, but for one thing: their monthly bills.

CTIA, an industry group that tracks that astounding number of subscribers, says they bring in an average of about $550 a year in revenue, or a total of $151 billion.

If you feel like you’re contributing a little too much to that pie, you may find help from a Texas start-up, Validas, and its Web site: www.MyValidas.com.

Validas has just 10 employees, and its online tool has an occasional rough edge. But it’s easy to see why it’s already finding a niche in evaluating bills for consumers, businesses, and even one of the major national carriers. Validas helps customers live up to its motto: “Fight back against your cell phone bill!”

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Ancient Frog on iPad – Developer Thoughts

For the many that surely missed it, on Wednesday Apple quietly announced a new member of the iPhone OS family, the iPad. And, while it runs existing iPhone applications just fine in a pixel-for-pixel or 2x-scaled mode, the device with its 9.7-inch screen has much more to offer in the way of screen real estate (over 5x the pixel count of the iPhone) and both CPU and GPU power. The iPad proposition gives iPhone developers much to ponder in the way of just how best to support it.

James Brown, author of the lovely, zen-like frog manipulation game Anicent Frog [App Store] has, himself, begun to ponder the situation and has shared his thoughts on what he feels makes the most sense in bringing Ancient Frog to the iPad, in a recent blog post.

I can make the current iPhone application recognise the iPad and behave more like a native application on that platform. What I’ve done here is run it at 768×1024, but allowing it to letterbox slightly to retain the original aspect ratio (luckily the ragged border gives me a neat way to bring the edges in a bit, as well as a bit of room to lose some pixels top and bottom). This already looks way better than the previous shot – lots of elements are still blurry, but things that appear at varying scales in the game are already at a higher resolution. This means the text, the daisy and the particle effects are all crisp, which makes the whole thing seem higher resolution

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