A number of envisionit media employees are iPhone users. We love the phone, but probably not as much as Stuart Hughes, who was recently commissioned $8 million by two businessmen in Australia to trick out their phones with more than 100 karats worth of diamonds.

Of course, this makes Hughes’s 2009 creation, a $3 million 3GS iPhone featuring a single 7.1-carat diamond sitting in for the home button, look on par with a Motorola Razr covered in cubic zirconia.

Speaking of fancy Razr phones, the Dolce & Gabbana gold V3i was released in 2005. Used and unlocked units now go for about $49 on eBay—pennies, really.

Vertu’s Signature Cobra phone, eight of which were manufactured in 2006, was panned for being ugly … and $310,000. You have to feel slightly bad for that poor cobra covered in 439 rubies, obviously too sparkly for any of us to handle.

Obviously, if you need a phone encrusted with diamonds, it’ll cost you, which is why the Amosu Diamond Edition BlackBerry Pearl is genius. Going for $88,000 in 2006, the diamonds on the phone are “recyclable,” meaning you can switch them over to a new phone when you need to upgrade.

For whatever reason, people don’t seem to care about outfitting Android phones with diamonds and other shiny jewels. (Exception: the Ulysse Nardin Chairman Diamond phone, retailing for $129,000.) But HTC’s concept phone Touch Diamond 3 is rumored to run Android, meaning a bit of potential dazzle for the cellular robot.

If ever anyone appreciated the internet, it’s Dan Sinker, publisher of the late Punk Planet magazine. Now a professor of Online Journalism at Columbia College Chicago, Sinker also runs CellStories.net, a “daily dose of awesome” viewable only on mobile web. In the midst of finalizing plans for his fall Mobile Journalism class—the only course of its kind in the country, at the moment—he shared his thoughts on the current mobile landscape.

envisionit media: You’ve said that one shouldn’t make an app unless it needs to be an app. When is an app applicable?

Dan Sinker: If all you’re doing is presenting information to a user—that does not need to be an app. You get more into the need for an app when you have to access things that are specific to the device. [Last year], if you were making a leading-edge mobile thing, you might have well made an app, versus a website, because the only thing that was getting onto the mobile web by a huge margin was the iPhone. But now that’s much less true.

At this point, Android is on this crazy tear, it’s 25 percent of US mobile web traffic now. The iPhone—all the i-Devices that count together—accounts for just over 50 percent. You’re talking about a good half of that now is Android, whereas, a year ago, it was less than 10 percent.

So, suddenly, if you’re making an app, you’re making a conscious decision to support Thing A, and not Thing B—or Thing C or D or E or F. The mobile ecosystem is gigantic. It’s ‘I’m supporting this thing,’ and you’d better have a pretty good argument for why, or you’d better have something somewhere else. There are plenty of good reasons to make an app, the main one being discoverability is much easier. That’s the reason the App store was successful to begin with, is that people think to look in an App store for something on their mobile phone. We don’t do that on our computer at all. You’re just going to type in the information [into Google] and get it.
read the full story...

Though a voided warranty, spiteful software, AT&T zombies, and the wrath of Steve Jobs are all potential consequences of jailbreaking an iPhone, it is, in fact, legal to do so, says the U.S. Copyright Office. But, while iPhones may be i-OK to hack, online passwords remain a concern.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have released a report stating that, thanks to the power of a modern graphics processing unit (or GPU) in the hands of a crooked hacker, 12-character passwords are now a virtual necessity.

“Well, that’s no good,” you may be thinking to yourself, “and what’s this terrible graphic machine that nerdy jerks might use to hack into my bank account?”

In a nutshell, a modern GPU is a microprocessor found in any graphics card meant to render graphics—go figure. Graphics rendering is known as a parallel application, meaning the GPU’s processor cores (the little lemmings that follow programming commands, up to 512 in a modern GPU) can work on different areas of a scene with little communication with other cores. Password hacking is, unfortunately, just the kind of problem a GPU can be programmed to tackle.

It’s a small surprise, then, that it can take less than two hours to crack an eight-character password using a GPU’s processing power, according to CNN. Though the process of cracking passwords is trial-and-error, adding additional characters to your password means the unit must make additional guesses. An 11-character password, at 1 trillion sequences of hardcore hacking per second, will take about 180 years to crack. Considering the average person’s lifespan, this should be a sufficient amount of time to keep your passwords safe. But adding one more character to your password means it will take some 17,134 years to decode (which also happens to be the number of years it will take a Twinkie to deteriorate).
read the full story...

The Apple iPhone’s inability to display Adobe’s flash technology has been a source of much controversy ever since the iPhone first conquered the market 3 years ago. While many have speculated either a software update to existing devices, or the introduction of Flash support to the next generation iPhone, few have considered that Apple would just not support Flash entirely moving into the future.

With the recent introduction of the iPad, Apple’s intentions of Flash support on their devices in the future is quite clear…there will be none. Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs, has recently been publically quoted, venting his frustration with both Adobe and Flash technology altogether. “Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy, he says. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash, he says. The world is moving to HTML5.”

Google has already made use of HTML5, most notably in their Google Voice software. What makes this so interesting is that Apple has famously prevented Google from including Voice as an application within their App Store. The answer from Google a few weeks ago was the launch of Google Voice coded in HTML5 that can be accessed through the iPhone’s Safari browser. With the recent success of that product, Google, this week, has now rolled out YouTube support that does not rely on Flash, again utilizing HTML5. iPhone users can now access YouTube via their Safari browser, rather than relying on the traditional YouTube App.

So what does this mean for the future? A world without Flash? Only time will tell, but at long last, it does look like there is at least some hope for those caught between the Apple vs. Adobe Flash debate.

Read more about this case below:

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/01/googles-dont-be-evil-mantra-is-bullshit-adobe-is-lazy-apples-steve-jobs/