iPhone News Updated

TweetDeck (for iPhone)

One of the most popular desktop Twitter clients now has a little brother. The free iPhone version of TweetDeck will no doubt be greeted with open arms by users of its older sibling, but I’m not convinced it’s the best iPhone Twitter client.

Though it looks great, it lacks some cool features found in TwitterFon and Twitterrific, which were designed from the ground up for Apple’s mobile phone. But I do like TweetDeck’s support for multiple accounts, as well as the clever, if gimmicky, shake-to-update feature.

Reading Feeds

The iPhone version of TweetDeck uses a page navigation scheme similar to what you find in the iPhone’s mobile Safari to replicate the column view of its desktop Adobe AIR–based software. You get large thumbnails for your following timeline, mentions, and direct messages. Tapping these enlarges the timeline view to full screen, and you can still swipe sideways to view your other columns.

The competing TwitterFon offers shake-to-refresh and multiple accounts, but only in a paid version. In TweekDeck, these features are free. When you shake the phone in TweetDeck, it vibrates once to tell you it felt the shake. This is not a big plus, however, as the app already updates your feed every time you view it, and there’s a Refresh icon.
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Another University Requires iPhone/iPod Touch.

Last month the University of Missouri listed an iPhone or an iPod Touch as one of the requirements for their journalism program. Today, that trend continues with the University of Florida ordering all of their Doctor of Pharmacy online students to have either an iPhone or an iPod Touch. This is good news for Apple, as U of Florida is considered to have one of the best online pharmacy schools in the country.

The interesting thing about this news is that, apparently, the possession of either an iPhone or iPod Touch actually seems to be a hard-and-fast requirement here. In U of Missouri’s journalism program the requirement was actually just listed as such to obtain a tax break for any of their students who wished to purchase one for the program. If they don’t issue a similar qualification, this could prove to be a very significant development for the smartphone market.

It’s truly astonishing how quickly these things are becoming ubiquitous. By 2013 we are expected to see over 1.1 billion smartphones on the market. That’s almost one smartphone for everyone in the Western world. It wasn’t very long ago that a smartphone was considered basically an expensive toy for people with a whole lot of money. Now forty million people have iPhones alone. Over 131 million smartphones have been sold to date.

The interesting thing to ponder is if, with the rapid advance of communication technology, will smartphones have time to become really ubiquitous? What if the Sixth Sense becomes commercially viable before 2013?

[Thanks: http://www.i4u.com]