We still see a significant difference between iPhone and iPod touch users upgrades, which isn’t surprising given the $5 upgrade requirement for the iPod touch.  91% of iPhone requests are 3.0 or 3.1, compared to only 35% of iPod touch requests

via AdMob Metrics blog.

via 9to5 Mac

I’m just imagining flicking all sorts of things around the office: memo to Boss – BAM!; file to printer – BAM!; etc etc – BAM!

with QuadCamera

Notable about the video, and others, is the emphasis on the corporeal identity – face recognition, real-time video of people – seems to continue the anchorage of online identities to literal pictorial and video evidence. Facebook is a good example of this.

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Elsewhere in AR TwittARound “shows live tweets around your location on the horizon“. I found his summary of technologies used illuminating:

The whole application is developed in Webkit (UIWebView / Safari Mobile). A native Cocoa wrapper delegates location, compass and accelerometer to Javascript in the UIWebView. The 3D scene is based on Safari Mobiles brilliant 3D CSS transforms. The Ajax part is done with jQuery. After writing some native iPhone apps this Webkit approach seems to be ideal for rapid development of applications independent of the iPhone UI.

This setup is related to the non-availability of public APIs for live video on the iPhone, meaning developers can’t publish via the app store:

But here is the rub: we are currently unable to publish these apps on the app store because the iPhone SDK lacks public APIs for manipulating live video.

In early July, a number of developers and academics write the above in their Open Letter to Apple: Let us Augment Reality with the iPhone!. It will be interesting to see what Apple’s plans are in this space.

The Motorola has a pretty ordinary web experience, so it’s not the strongest contender the regular mobile device world could have offered up in this unintentional side-by-side, but the improvements apparent in the screenshots probably have pretty wide application across smartphones.

The iPhone layout is consistent and logical, it’s seems easier to know where you are, what actions are available and what information is available. The Motorola squanders alot of screenspace on browser info and soft key labels and there appears to scrolling for all but the most basic of screens.

The difference in the readability of text is remarkable, and the form buttons look like buttons, and so benefit from people not having to learn a visual language different to large-screen web conventions.

And at a glance you’d surmise that the above would mean the propensity for errors – be it entering your password, or adding a transaction, or navigating to the page you need – would be lower for the iPhone. If you were thinking about where to devote your energies in mobile web platforms, getting a sense of the difference in experiences is really useful alongside knowing your audience and what they like.

Wesabe Mobile

But, concept products never killed anybody

Perhaps. But they can sure lead designers astray. Concept products grant designers a break from constraints, economics and, ultimately, reality. The internets are full of concept phones, for example, that bend and morph, change functionalities and appearances, weigh nothing but defy breakage, project ethereal 3D images, seem to communicate at the speed of light and laugh at material science limitations of ‘ordinary’ phones:

Why Apple doesn’t do “Concept Products”

The Alley Insider lists a number of reasons why the content and the iPhone hardware will limit the threat to the Kindle, like battery life, screen size, and the availability of books.

But the iPhone could still steal a whole lot of people’s reading time that the Kindle would like to have, like reading newspapers, blogs, and other ‘short forms’, which comprise most of my reading habits nowadays. Then the kindle is relegated to new books only. Not nothing, but less than what Amazon imagined surely.

GigaOm: The Rise of the Superphone

The shorts blew me away.