Author: John Herrman

With working conditions and security policy down Apple’s supply chain under serious fire, an Apple insider reached out to us. Apple’s blasé attitude toward its manufacturers’ labor practices, he says, is old news.

Our tipster was a member of the Newton team when Steve Jobs made his return to Apple in 1996, with mixed memories of the homecoming:

In an effort to bring the Newton group into the fold, we had a meeting at which Steve laid out his vision for the future of Apple.

“Apple will be the Nike of consumer electronics” was his mantra.

The Nike of consumer electronics. I mean sure, aspiring for Nike’s level of name recognition and synonymity with their industry is forgivable. But in 1996-1997, Nike’s name wasn’t just synonymous with shoes and sportwear; it was synonymous with shady work practices, after an extensive Life Magazine article about labor conditions in Pakistan led with a photo of a small boy surrounded by Nike merchandise. To aspire to be Nike that year was to aspire to be successful at all costs. :

I stood and asked if that included employing disadvantaged ‘slave’ labor in Asia? A well known problem for Nike at the time.

My question was ignored.

Regardless of the actual v.s. relative working conditions, a company cannot grow and produce margins like Apples without someone paying the price. That someone is always the one with least leverage.

Unfortunately, extreme secrecy can also protect bad practices as much as any legitimate trade secret.

This anecdote clearly comes from someone who’s got some serious issues with Apple, and Steve Jobs in particular, whom he calls “one of the most vindictive people I have ever met.” But if true, the implications are disturbing: It paints Apple, from the top, as a company—that’s been plagued with documented labor issues as of late—that isn’t just blissfully unaware of how companies down its supply chain meet their absurd demands for secrecy, including known labor problems, but as a company that ignored these concerns from the start. [Thanks, tipster!—Pic via LostInAFog]

Thinksound’s Rain and slightly bassier Thunder earphones are made out of wood. That’s their thing, but it’s not the best thing about them. The best thing about them is that they’re damn nice earbuds, for a reasonable price.

The Price

Though their MSRPs are significantly higher, at $100 and $75, respectively, you can find the Rains for $60 on Amazon, and the Thunders for about $45. In these photos, the Rains have the darker finish and black tips, while the Thunders have a cherry finish and white tips.

The Difference

To be honest, the only apparent difference between these two earbuds, aside from their slightly different shapes, is sound balance: The Rains are tuned for all-around listening, and the Thunders for heavier bass.

The Experience

The first thing you’ll notice about the Thinksounds is that, yes, they are made out of wood, and yes, that makes them beautiful. There’s nothing about the design or shape that’s particularly striking—if these were molded from shiny plastic, they could even look tacky—but the finish, either in Black Chocolate or Red Cherry stain, looks and feels great. A headphone body is one of the only reasonable applications for wood in the gadget world, and to both your eyes and your fingers, the Thinksound are a treat. But who cares what they think; what about your ear holes?

Not knowing that they used to be made from the living flesh of a tree, the Rains have a rich sound, if not a spectacular one. The low end is healthy to the point that I’d hesitate to recommend the even bassier Thunders, and the midrange is well represented and clear even at high volumes. The highest notes, which are crucial to conveying strong presence in music, can sound a bit soft at times, but unless you’ve just been listening to a set of high-end Etymotics, you’re not likely to notice. Which brings me to the core issue here: wood. How about that wood!

The Wood

I could hazard a guess that wood is the reason the Thinksounds’ sound soft at the high end, or that all the way down the equalizer, they sound warm, a favorite, and largely meaningless, word among audiophiles. I can credit wood with the near-total lack of cable noise (when the cord is jostled), and blame it for the earphones’ sound isolation, which is only OK. I can posit that funneling sound from the 9mm (and in the case of the Thunder, 10mm) drivers through wood instead of plastic would cause sound to reverberate differently. I could buy into Thinksound’s claims that building headphones out of renewable natural materials is better for the environment than building them out of something else.

But since I can’t actually test a plastic or metal version of the Rain or Thunder, and since I have absolutely no background in ecology or material science, I won’t. I’ll just say that, for the price, the Thinksound Rains hold their own against any other earphone, up to an including the Shure SE115s, and that for any price, you’re not going to find a set of earphones more attractive, or immediately distinctive.

So: should you wood? Sure you should. [Thinksound]

They’re even prettier in real life than they look above


Balanced, clean, powerful sound, especially for the (street) price.


They’re good for the environment, despite the fact that they’re explicitly made from something that used to be alive, and now isn’t. This is a plus if you want it to be, and causes no compromise.


The Thunders are a bit too bassy, so unless you like your music thumpier than most, stick with the slightly more expensive Rains.

Ok ok ok, rewind a few weeks. Before WinPho 7 trundled into the daylight, the strongest evidence we had for a new product from Microsoft actually centered around something else: The long-rumored, utterly mysterious Project Pink. So, err, what happened?

With Windows Phone 7 Series as the star of the show, Mobile World Congress came and went without a single mention of Pink. Which is strange! Because leading up to the conference, most of the material, non-rumor evidence we had about Microsoft’s mobile plans centered around that very product, whatever it is. We had Twitter chatter from within Microsoft, from a client called “Danger.” We had FCC filings, the most tantalizing pieces of which are being withheld until just days after the CTIA conference in late March. We had recent reports that the Pink phones would have Nvidia’s Tegra, and run a Silverlight-based interface over a Windows CE6 base. And of course, we had the original Pink leak.

So, with Windows Phone 7 unveiled and described, where does that leave us? It leaves us with outstanding documentation, unexplained, not-insubstantial leaks, and perhaps most revealingly, the same “Danger”-sourced Twitter traffic from within Microsoft. See above, captured today.

Despite Windows Phone 7’s emphasis on social networking integration, it debuted with a glaringly obvious lack of Twitter support. In other words, all these tweets from inside Microsoft? They’re not coming from Windows Phone 7. Add to that the “Danger” branding (the Pink Project was rumored to be a followup to Danger’s Sidekick as far back as September, and you start to get the sense the Windows Phone 7 is only half the story. Pink is probably still coming, and probably not running Windows Phone 7, leaving one massive question: What the hell does it run? And will it be the only one?

It’s an exciting question, if just for how completely and utterly unanswered it is. So whatever you do, don’t take your eyes off Microsoft—I don’t think they’re done yet. [Twitter]

Verizon’s Mobile Remote is an app for Windows Mobile and Android (though for the time being, just the Imagio and Droid) which lets you control your FiOS box locally over Wi-Fi, and share photos from your smartphone. While Verizon’s promo video implies that it’s a makeshift solution—”if you can’t find your remote”—from the looks of the button interface, it’s a complete replacement, if you want it to be. Check the App Market or Windows Marketplace on either device to find the app, which is available now; more handsets are coming down the pike, but Verizon won’t say which ones. [Verizon]

Years of battling cancer have left film ubercritic Roger Ebert without a portion of his jaw, and consequentially, his voice. Esquire‘s superb profile outlined his efforts to regain a voice—his voice—but left us wondering: How will that work?

From Esquire:

Ebert is waiting for a Scottish company called CereProc to give him some of his former voice back. He found it on the Internet, where he spends a lot of his time. CereProc tailors text-to-speech software for voiceless customers so that they don’t all have to sound like Stephen Hawking… CereProc is mining Ebert’s TV tapes and DVD commentaries for those words, and the words it cannot find, it will piece together syllable by syllable. When CereProc finishes its work, Roger Ebert won’t sound exactly like Roger Ebert again, but he will sound more like him than Alex does.

CereProc is headquartered on the sixth floor of an imposingly ugly tower in Edinburgh, Scotland—I’d know, because it was in the five floors below that I spent most of my undergrad career at the University of Edinburgh, which owns the building. By all counts, it’s a small operation, and a relatively new one, started about five years ago.

But I checked into CereProc’s work online, and their sample voice sets speak for themselves, so to speak (sorry and sorry!): Obama sounds like a slightly more hesitant Obama; Arnie, whose verbal tics are his trademark, sounds like almost exactly like Arnie. (You can listen to both, and others, here and here.) Listening to what they can do with publicly available voice data sets is heartening, so the prospects for a man with such a broad catalog of vocal recordings, from radio broadcasts to his TV show to old podcasts, seem fantastic. He felt the same way when he discovered CereProc back in August:

I have my fingers crossed. I have launched an e-mail to Edinburgh with my appeal. I can see my own voice hosting online or telecast video essays. I am greatly cheered.

CereProc got that email, and answered his appeal. So!

The first step would be a desktop software system, which would dictate text in the same way that Mac OS does natively. While this would be a great bridge, but a mobile solution would really change things. CereProc’s software is licensable for just about anything, and has already been incorporated into an iPhone app, albeit for simple news dictation.

In other words, a voiced Ebert is something the he (and we!) can realistically look forward to. And by this, we too are greatly cheered. [CereProc, Esquire]

Both companies are dropping clues that Nokia and Intel are working on a new mobile chip—a move that could solve serious problems for both. Intel and Nokia’s love affair, it seems, is bigger than Meego.

The theory congealed after Monday’s announcement of Meego, an awkwardly named laboratory child of the Nokia’s Maemo mobile OS and Intel’s Moblin netbook/tablet platform, and runs thusly:

1. Intel and Nokia are now working together in some capacity, obviously
2. Nokia has been reticent to voice solidarity with Qualcomm as the chip provider for certain forthcoming hardware
3. SemiAccurate actually reported that Nokia and Intel are working on an Atom-based SoC called Penwell, which for various technical reasons (including extra room for extra components created by the 32nm manufacturing process) looks like its shaping up to be a system-on-a-chip, in the style of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon or Apple’s A4.
4. This would make sense for both companies, therefore, well, it would make sense for both of these companies.

Nokia’s current smartphone lineup hasn’t found a foothold in the US, and their netbook business is just learning to walk, so a partnership with Intel could help them develop high-end, unique hardware to power flagship handheld devices and new lines of netbooks, which, unlike last time around, might actually be worth their sky-high price tags. For Intel, well, Nokia is huge—the biggest cellphones manufacturer in the world—so having an in with them can’t be a bad thing.

It’s worth stressing that while a partnership here makes sense, it’s by no means vital: Intel would be fine without Nokia, and Nokia would be fine without Intel. But just think of the things they could do together! They are… mildly exciting, for some people! [Ars Technica]

Photographer Adam Vorhees has a new hobby he’d like to share with everybody! It involves dismantling everyday objects and spreading them apart into lovely dioramas. Everyday objects like miniature Etch a Sketches, semiautomatic handguns, rotary telephones, and plasticized dead frogs.

Disregarding the bizarre item choice, which looks like the inventory of backpack of the Last Child On Earth, circa alternative-history-post-nuclear-apocalyptic 1970, Vorhees’ work has just left me wanting for more. It’s not that there’s any shortage of photos of gadgets in various states of disassembly, it’s just that they could do with a little more technique. Beauty in death, and all that. [Adam Vorhees]

Apple’s corporate headquarters, PR megamachine and primary customer base are in the US. Their products, on the other hand, come directly from Chinese hardware manufacturers. Like Apple, they’re good at keeping secrets. Unlike Apple, they’re sometimes violent about it.

In writing an exposé on Apple’s supply chain, Reuters’ reporters fleshed out what we already know: There’s an immense pressure on companies under contract with Apple not to leak any information about forthcoming products; said companies have shady labor histories; working for one of these companies frankly sounds terrifying.

We touched on these problems when Foxconn was accused of driving an employee to suicide over an iPhone prototype leak last year, but at the time, our picture of Foxconn was patched together from a pile of second and third-hand reports, conflicting local news stories, and PR spin. To date, there hasn’t been a better illustration of the problem than this

Tipped by a worker outside the Longhua complex that a nearby Foxconn plant was manufacturing parts for Apple too, our correspondent hopped in a taxi for a visit to the facility in Guanlan, which makes products for a range of companies.

As he stood on the public road taking photos of the front gate and security checkpoint, a guard shouted. The reporter continued snapping photos before jumping into a waiting taxi. The guard blocked the vehicle and ordered the driver to stop, threatening to strip him of his taxi license.

The correspondent got out and insisted he was within his rights as he was on the main road. The guard grabbed his arm. A second guard ran over, and with a crowd of Foxconn workers watching, they tried dragging him into the factory.

The reporter asked to be let go. When that didn’t happen, he jerked himself free and started walking off. The older guard kicked him in the leg, while the second threatened to hit him again if he moved. A few minutes later, a Foxconn security car came along but the reporter refused to board it. He called the police instead.

After the authorities arrived and mediated, the guards apologized and the matter was settled. The reporter left without filing a complaint, though the police gave him the option of doing so.

“You’re free to do what you want,” the policeman explained, “But this is Foxconn and they have a special status here. Please understand.”

So, let’s get this straight: If you, a reporter, take pictures of the outside of a Foxconn factory, you can dragged, kicked, threatened, and reminded of how ominously “special” Foxconn’s relationship with Apple makes them. (PS: Omigod, have you heard about the new iPad!?)

For Apple, this could mean two things: That they long ago entered into business with a company that’s predisposed to violent enforcement of security policy; or that their extreme demands for secrecy, and extreme value to Foxconn, have driven the company to become this way.

In neither situation can you call Apple the culprit. In both, though, they’re at the very least silently complicit. [Reuters via Business Insider]

Developers’ block: It’s a serious thing! It’s not easy to churn out app after app, somehow tricking the masses into giving you money for your decreasingly interesting widgets. Maybe—maybe—the Notepod+ can help.

Never mind that the iPad SDK includes a full-featured emulator, which would let you test your apps live and in motion, the Notepad+, which stretches the original Notepod’s concept to the full 189mm x 243mm necessary to simulate an iPad, is always there, even when your Mac Pro development machine isn’t. It doesn’t have an SDK, but it’s got plenty of white space, ok?

Got an idea for a new UI concept? Scribble it down! A splash screen? Sketch it up! A clever concept for a plainly derivative novelty product, which costs practically nothing to print but costs $20 anyway? Draw. It. Out. [TUAW via TheAwesomer via Geekygadgets]

There are some very good paid instant messaging apps for the App Store, and plenty of free options too. Meebo is the first that manages to be both, with almost no compromise.

Meebo was one of the first companies out of the gates with an instant message web app for the iPhone, so it’s weird that it took them this long to go native. But hey, whatever, they did, and it’s goddamn fantastic. Here’s the cream of the feature list:

• Multiprotocol support, including obvious choices like AIM, Google Talk, Facebook and MySpace, as well as an impressive list of smaller networks
• Push notifications, which automatically activate when you close the app without signing out.
• conversation logging, not just on your phone, but on Meebo’s servers, as associated with your Meebo account.
• “Now typing” notifications, away messages, message copying, landscape mode, swiping between chats—the kind of stuff that makes the experience rich, versus merely acceptable

Meebo’s aesthetic is subdued and unobtrusive, and gesture and navigation behaviors make sense throughout the app. Patchy EDGE connectivity didn’t seem to degrade my experience at all, push notifications worked like a charm, with roughly two seconds of delay versus a regular client.

In short, Meebo does everything I need from a chat client, does it well, and does it for free. My only hangups? There’s no Skype messaging support, and—though I haven’t—some iPhone 3G users are experiencing crashes during regular use. But! (And I can’t say this enough!) It’s free. Just give it a try. Even if you’ve already paid for a Trillian or a BeeJive, you might find something you like here. [Meebo]

I bet the Walkman would have trended, if Twitter was around then. I bet even Betamax would have burbled to the surface. Hell, I bet the first Walkman phone would have trended, back in 2005. So just do… anything. [SonyEricssonNA]

When Matt volunteered to apear on Canadian TV, he thought he was going to talk about Windows Phone 7—you know, explain the design philosophy, Microsoft’s market position, lay out the competitive landscape. And for a while, that’s what he did. Then things got weird.

Michael: Thanks, Matt. Our guest has been Matt Buchanan, Contributing Editor at Gizmodo.
Susan: I can see why you have a man crush on him.
Michael: He knows his stuff
Susan: He’s kind of cute
Michael: You think he’s cute do you?
Susan: I do.
Matt: I can still hear you.
Michael: Oh.
Michael: …
Susan: Michael?
Michael: …
Matt: I should go.
Michael: WAIT!
Susan: It’s too late, Michael. He’s gone.

To be continued…

UPDATE: Looks like they cut the end of the clip for some reason, from “man crush” to “I do.” Canadaaaa!!!

The first time Microsoft mentioned apps today, it was to mock Apple, and they completely nailed what’s wrong with the iPhone app metaphor. But apps define the smartphone experience, so what’s the plan for Windows Phone 7? It’s… coming together.

When the iPhone launched without apps, Microsoft countered with the most impressive, humiliating figures it could rake up: We have thousands of developers! Over ten thousand apps! Years of development! A thriving ecosystem! Then the iPhone got apps, and everyone else, from Google to BlackBerry to Palm, consolidated and organized their ecosystems. By the time Microsoft managed to do the same, it was too late—the Windows Mobile platform was dying. The ecosystem was rotten to the core, the core being a limping, tired, and deeply ugly relic of an operating system. Microsoft is right to leave this behind with Windows Phone 7, but they’ve got some serious catching up to do. So how do you close a two-year lead? Good question!

Microsoft is staying vague on their app strategy until the MIX conference next month, when they’ll lay out their plans in full. What they’ve done today is paint their app strategy in broad strokes, and drop some telling clues. The picture that’s emerging is of apps that mingle with the operating system, rather than sit inside of it; of an earnest attempt to forget (and make up for) years of lost time with WinMo 6.x; of a company that isn’t afraid to sacrifice sacred tenets of its prior strategy—and perhaps even multitasking—to make things work; of a platform with massive promise, but an incredibly steep climb ahead of it. Here’s what we know.

The Basics

Windows Phone 7 is a clean break. Barring some kind of emulator, Windows Mobile apps just won’t work. They’ll have to be developed anew, written with a new set of tools and leveraging a whole different set of APIs. As anyone who’s used Windows Mobile can attest, this is a good thing. Microsoft needed to cut this dead weight to survive.

To the user, Windows Phone 7 amounts to a series of hubs: one for music, one for people, etc. They’re like live widgets, previewing information from deeper inside the OS, and serving as application launchers. Third party apps won’t just integrate with the hubs, they may depend on them. Earlier today, Wilson interviewed Windows Phone head honcho Joe Belfiore, and here’s how he answered our question: “How do you integrate apps that you don’t design in house [into hubs and the OS in general]?”:

What we’re going to try to do is ensure the developers have a great set of tools that helps them fit right in. The main idea of the hubs is to bring things together in a way that users can go to a single place and find the stuff they’re looking for, and applications play a role in that. Applications can also add benefit that’s distinct from the hubs… In some cases [a hub is] guiding the users to the apps, in other cases it’s pulling data from the app or the app’s associated service

There is an app launcher menu in Windows Phone 7, which keeps a simple list of all the apps you’ve got installed, whether they’re integrated into a hub or not. But it’s clear that the app launcher grid—or as Microsoft called it, the “sameness”—is something Microsoft trying to avoid, and that the list is secondary. Apps are intended to launch from, and in some cases be a part of, the hubs.

The App Store

As for an app store, Windows Phone 7 will have the Marketplace, which is where you’ll be able to “easily discover and load the phone with certified applications and games,” according to Microsoft. You probably won’t be able to download from outside of it. Also not clear is how this’ll actually play out. A two-tiered download strategy that separates games from the rest of the apps is possible, as is a single, unified storefront.

In today’s demos you could spot a Marketplace menu item, though it was housed in the Zune hub. The only apps shown on the demo unit were music services, which is odd—they’re clearly keeping apps under wrap until MIX.

Multitasking (Or Maybe Not)

And finally, you can’t talk about smartphone without talking about multitasking. The iPhone doesn’t do it. Android does. Palm does. Windows Mobile did. This issue was at the center of virtually every comparison of smartphone OSes, and gave iPhone critics—including some Microsofties—endless snark fodder. So, obviously, Windows Phone 7 supports multitasking, right? Don’t be so sure. From Wilson’s interview with Belfiore, again:

Yeah, so the core operating system in Windows Phone 7 Series phones is a modern multitasking operating system which we use for a lots of things. If you play music, for example, the music will play back as you navigate around the experience and be smooth and glitch-free and all those sorts of things. If you’re using email, we have great support for push email, and that happens in the background.

Technically, this does describe multitasking, but it’s multitasking in the strict, limited sense that the iPhone multitasks, which is to say, it’s really not. So, uh, what about 3rd party apps?

For third party applications, we’ll get into a lot more detail on this in MIX, but we have a few ways we going to make sure that 3rd parties can bring their value to the user even when the app is not running. Live tiles are an example. Data feeds in the hubs are another example.

If applications can run in the background, why would Microsoft need to “make sure” that they have ways of staying useful when they’re not running? Could it be that (!!!) Windows Phone 7 doesn’t multitask? Or that if it does, it’s highly managed? Yes. Yes it could.

The Big Questions

Microsoft hasn’t said a word about the next SDK, developers policies, or app limitations. We have no idea if apps will have to conform to a strict set of design rules, or if the SDK will encourage a consistent aesthetic, like the iPhone’s does.

And while it may be instructive to look back at the current App Marketplace for a glimpse at their developer strategy, it might not. It’s significant that Microsoft has been so vague about this so far. It implies that there’s something to announce beyond, “It’s going to be just like what we’re doing now.” (Speaking of what they’re doing now, those poor WinMo 6.x devs!They’ve just been thrown into the desert without food or water, basically. Though they should have seen it coming.)

And anyway, nobody doubts that Microsoft can put together a solid set of dev tools tools, or manage a developer program properly. The real questions about Windows Phone 7’s apps are existential: Who’s going to make them? How long until it’s worth it for developers to move to the platform? Can iPhone developers be drawn away from Apple’s ecosystem? Will game developers do their part to fulfill Microsoft’s new mobile Xbox dream? These are massive uncertainties now, when Windows Phone 7 is the brightest, shiniest platform in town—just imagine what the landscape will look like a year from now, and how much more time, money, and experience app devs will have invested in the iPhone and Android.

It took Android about a year to reach a remotely comparable level of development to the iPhone, and that’s being generous. With Windows Phone 7, you’ve got a series of phones that won’t even hit the market until late 2010, that won’t have a significant user base until months after that, and that’ll be competing with two or three much more mature app platforms, with existing user bases in the tens of millions. Even if Microsoft does everything right—liberal app policies, a generous developer revenue share, a powerful SDK, and smooth, wide phone rollout—Windows Phone 7 might not catch up with its competition until 2012.

2012.

Don’t rule out a gamechanging announcement at MIX next month, or underestimate how badly Microsoft wants to claw its way back to mobile relevancy. But Microsoft is rich, not magical—no matter how you cut it, and no matter how Microsoft fills in the blanks, this isn’t going to be easy.

With the announcement of Windows Phone 7, Microsoft’s made it clear that they’re finally—and truly—getting back into the game. They also brutally kneecapped their existing phone software, effectively taking Microsoft out of mobile for the next six months.

The last time a company broke so cleanly with their past like this, it was Palm, and the circumstances where similar: Palm OS was old and tired, and long overdue for a replacement. Palm as a company was perceived as lagging behind the rest of the players, and many had gone so far as to give up hope for anything interesting coming from them before a seemingly inevitable collapse. Then, they announced the Pre, discontinued their other phones, and clawed their way back into the running. They left their old OS out to die. They did it because they had to.

With Windows Phone 7, Microsoft has done the same thing, leapfrogging from a straining platform that bears a glaring resemblance to its earliest ancestors to the most exciting piece of mobile software the tech world has seen since the iPhone. Here’s the difference: Windows Mobile 6.5.x isn’t going away. When Palm preannounced the Pre, their Palm OS and Windows Mobile phones still existed, but there were only a few, and their phaseout was just over the horizon. Microsoft, on the other hand, is keeping Windows Phone 6.5.x alive for enterprise—we’ll see more than a few Windows Mobile 6.5.3 phones announced before Mobile World Congress is over. Some of these phones—the standard issue corporate gear, the slide-out QWERTY emailing machines—will live out their dreary lives in so many belt holsters, as if nothing was announced in Barcelona today. The rest—the touchscreen consumer hardware, the phones you’ll be able to pick up at your local Best Buy—have just been so brutally and thoroughly maimed, and rendered so spectacularly unbuyable, that Microsoft has effectively taken themselves out of the phone market until October—at the earliest.

Yes, Everything Is Different Now: Microsoft is ready to barge back into consumer smartphones, and they’re not fucking around. But before they can, they need to purge, and that’s exactly what they’re doing. Microsoft just went on sabbatical from the category they helped invent. They better hope it pays off.

At least two of them sure seem to think so! Jailbreak scenesters Sherif Hashim and iH8sn0w are both reporting bannings—by Apple ID, strangely—following their latest hacks. Is Apple attacking jailbreak from the bottom up? Maybe.

Both Sherif Hashim and iH8sn0w were behind the discovery of recent iPhone exploits, and both are currently receiving a “This Apple ID has been banned for security purposes” notification whenever they try to log into the (actual) App Store to download an app. But. But! While Sherif’s exploit was publicly documented, IH8sn0w’s was shared only with the Dev Team. So: Is Apple somehow detecting certain exploits and banning automatically? Unlikely. Are the keeping an ear to the ground and banning active jailbreak scene hackers? Possibly, but that would be petty, and it wouldn’t really stop them from doing their work. Is something incidental happening here? Probably.

The content of the error message is telling: It’s the same dialog that pops up in OS X apps that use your Apple ID when said ID has been locked out due to a suspicious number of failed login attempts. My guess, though it’s firmly a guess, is that some behavior or glitch associated with the hacks these people are attempting triggers some kind of heuristic response from Apple’s servers, not explicitly because a phone is hacked or owned by hackers, but because something’s just off.

Then again, this could go the other way, and signal a future in which jailbreakers—not just hackers—risk blacklisting their Apple IDs should they crack their phones. That’d be a terrible PR move on Apple’s part, but it could be one of the easiest ways to quell the massive rise of piracy outside the App store. This would be kind of terrible! But I wouldn’t rule it out. [Redmond Pie via BGR]

BUG 2.0, the second version of Bug Labs’ Lego set for hardware hobbyists, is here, and it’s two things the first one wasn’t: blazing fast—and powerful as a Droid, to be specific—and ready for Android.

The newest version of the BUGBase, the brain and nerve center of any and all BUG-based Frankengadgets, has been upgraded to TI’s OMAP 3 platform, bringing the base up to speed, in terms of processing power, with the likes of the Droid and Palm Pre. Now that the BUGBase has the power of a high-end smartphone, it’s only appropriate that it’d support Android, which it does, and which gives any BUG device the potential, if not immediate access, to tap into the endless potential of the App Market.

There’s no release date or price on the new BUGbase yet, but the transition should be seamless—though it’ll replace your old BUGbase complete, any other BUG modules, be they touch displays, WI-Fi radios, GPS receivers or speakers, will work straight away. [Bug Labs via Crunchgear]

In this week’s romantical app roundup: Google, Buzzed! Phone trees, sheared! The Olympics, demystified! Doom II, taken down a notch! Your person, flailed around! Your visage, cartoonified! Sesame Street, Picasso’d! And more…

To view this post as a single page, click here.

Google Buzz: To be a geek is to enthusiastically try every weird little project that Google decides to undertake, as soon as possible, risking bugs, frustration, and even bodily harm. And since you will Buzz, if even for a few confused seconds, you may as well do it on your iPhone—it’s a far sight more attractive and organized than the desktop app, and at least for me, makes the whole concept more approachable.

Technically, this is a web app; feature for feature, it’s comparable to a native app, but the slowness of a web interface is immediately apparent. Free.

Fonolo: Fonolo’s deep directory of company support lines and shortcuts it invaluable, leading you to—or near to—the specific human being you want to talk to at whatever company you’re calling. It’s always been accessible via the web, but the new iPhone app, though a bit buggy, will parachute-crash you into most phone trees faster than you can climb. Free.

Navigon: Navigon is easily one of the best of the pricier breed of iPhone nav apps, and it’s just gotten, and significantly richer. Just, generally not at the same time:

Not only has Navigon added a bunch of new features to its iPhone app, the price is $20 cheaper-although if you want Traffic Live and 3D maps, it still adds up to $100. Nonetheless, it sounds worth it.
The update has a few nifty angles-there’s the connection to your Facebook or Twitter accounts for updating friends on your current position, destination and time you’re due to arrive; the aforementioned Panorama View 3D views (which use NASA height and terrain data) and personalized route delivery, called MyRoutes… it’ll cost $100 if you want the full service for your iPhone or iPod Touch, with the actual price of the MobileNavigator app being lowered by $20 to $69.99. The Traffic Live has also been discounted slightly, from $24.99 to $19.99 (only available until the 15th of February), and the Panorama View 3D will cost $9.99. Those who bought the app before will get the update for free, according to Navigon.

NBC Olympics: An all-in-one, total listing/brochure/coverage app for the Olympics, that’s wonderfully, gloriously free:

NBC’s free Olympics app also has a social component, ideal for trash-talking Norwegian lugers.
There are also updated medal counts, video (US-only), and sport-by-sport forecasts. The focus is predominantly on American competitors, so apologies in advance to international readers. Otherwise, though, if you’re an Olympics junkie or nationalist smack-talker, it’s definitely worth a download.

The level of polish and depth here is what you expect from the kind of paid apps you usually see associated with a specific sports league, and it’s tough to overstate the usefulness of have a simple, searchable reference for all the variations of sliding across ice that comprise the Winter Olympics.

Doom II: Mark’s down on this app, and I can understand if the concept of a Doom RPG doesn’t get your blood boiling. That said, hear me out: The lowered pace of the game, as opposed to a traditional FPS, actually makes the experience less frantic, and less frustrating. Basically, if you enjoyed the Wolfenstein RPG at all, you’ll probably like this one too.

Sky Siege: A 3D augmented reality game that fits the mold of most of the first generation of iPhone AR games, as far as gameplay goes: hold your phone up, move to aim, tap to shoot. The blimps, helicopters and planes are all around you, so you will look like an idiot playing this, but what the hell, you’ll be a smiling idiot.

With surprisingly good graphics and animations, Sky Siege is more convincing than the other FPS simulators you may have seen, which makes gameplay both more frenetic and immersive. My only gripe is that $3 feels a little pricey for what amounts to a protracted party trick. 3GS only.

Elmo’s Monster Maker: Build a Sesame Street puppet monster (nearly) from scratch, and play with him. The real value here is in the graphics and animations, which are extremely smooth, and which make the Frankensteinian moment of life magical enough to cause me, a full-grown human being, to make gleeful gurgling sounds at my iPhone.

If your child doesn’t enjoy dancing Elmo, your child is broken. $4.

Meebo: This one’s not here yet, but just in case you were planning on running out and dropping five or ten dollars on a messaging app, hold on—Meebo is coming, and it looks wonderful. Vital features like multi-protocol support and push notifications are there, though that’s nothing revolutionary. Where Meebo wins, according to Techcrunch, is with speed: it’s blazingly fast, simple to navigate and completely, utterly free.

GorillaCam: This app again! Joby’s been content to give away GorillaCam for free in exchange for branding, which we cautiously accepted as an excuse for a few shortcomings. For the most part, GorillaCam 1.1 fills the gaps, adding digital zoom, touch to focus (for the 3GS), antishake (which actually works fairly well) and selectable image sizes. Paid apps like Snapture and Camerabag are going to have to step it up, or price it down.

ToonPaint: When you first use ToonPaint, it feels like you’re using an adjustable photo filter, and not much more. Then, you start painting. I’ll let the video explain this one.

As someone who can’t draw an even circle, let alone a convincing portrait, I can vouch for this one. Brutally unartistic people: Remember how you felt when you used to trace cartoons as a kid? This is like that, again, on your iPhone. $2.

This list is in no way definitive. If you’ve spotted a great app that hit the store this week, give us a heads up or, better yet, your firsthand impressions in the comments. And for even more apps: see our previous weekly roundups here, and check out our Favorite iPhone Apps Directory. Have a great weekend, everybody!