Overpriced iPhone App of the Week: Wolfram Alpha

The Wolfram Alpha iPhone App is so overpriced, its not even funny. It costs a whopping $50. I don’t even think the biggest Wolfram Alpha fans are willing to give up that kind of money, to get a “computational engine” that you can use for free by simply pointing Safari to their website.

The people at Wolfram Alpha are selling this as as a half-priced graphic calculator, with the added benefit that it uses the existing Wolfram Alpha “computational engine”. But even with that wonderful selling point I cant get over the fact that you can get the same thing free by going to their website. Really Wolfram, do you think that the public is so stupid that they will give up their had earned $50, so that they can use a service that they can get for free at the Wolfram website.

Wolfram Alpha rep Josh Dilworth had this to say in an email to Gizmodo:

"How many people will buy it? We're not sure, but looking at the other apps that are $50+, we think that we're of at least comparable in utility and functionality, if not more. And, part of what the company is also doing is making a statement about the non-trivial nature of WolframAlpha's capabilities, and how much the system has matured since launch."

Mr. Dilworth, I'm sure that the Wolfram Alpha app is as good as any $50+ app in the app store, but who is going to buy this app when they can get the exactly same thing in their browser.

Your free to go ahead and pay $50 for this app, but personally I’ll just go to their website. 

iPhone OS 3.1 for 3GS Now Jailbroken

The iPhone OS 3.1 has finally been jailbroken, and freed from the evil grips of Apple. The problem is that you need to have already Pwnd it at 3.0 or 3.0.1—you can't jailbreak 3.1 directly, but its a start.

FCC Investigating Apple for Rejection of Google Voice App

  The Federal Communication Commission is looking into Apple’s rejection of Google Voice, asking whether AT&T was involved, and why it was rejected.

The request is part of a broader-ranging inquiry by the commission on exclusive deals between cell phone carriers and handset manufacturers for hot phones. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said Thursday that the FCC wants to look into rural areas where customers can't buy the latest fancy phones because of such exclusive deals.

Unfortunately, Google Voice still may not be included in the iTunes App store, but it may pressure Apple into including more Apps.

China Gets iPhones Early, But Wi-Fi is Disabled

China Unicom will likely be selling an iPhone sooner than expected, but it will not have Wi-Fi capabilities.

The Government of China, which controls the 3 major cell phone networks in China said in the past that it objected to Wi-Fi in phones, perhaps because it's harder to sniff local packets than ones drifting through a wide-area network.

According to unconfirmed reports, China Unicom plans to sell a GSM based iPhone, but its licence is for something where Wi-Fi is blocked. As TradingMarkets.com puts it: "Apple has to cancel the Wi-Fi function without changing other components."

The good news is that, China has been waiting for the iPhone for a long time and they are finally getting it now. I just wonder how adept the Chinese jailbreakers will be at reactivating that Wi-Fi.

Stream Zune Songs to your iPhone

Gear Live has found a clever way to stream Zune Pass songs to your iPhone. Why would you do that. Zune Pass gives you an unlimited amount of songs for about $15/month. The issue is that they don't play natively on the iPhone.

You first need to set up Orb on a Windows based computer to transcode, on the fly, your already downloaded Zune songs. Then you can listen to all of your songs (not just 16GB or 32GB of them) wherever you have internet access. It works well on 3G and Wi-Fi but EDGE is too slow for full quality music. For a full guide on how to do it click here.

New iPhone SMS Vulnerability Found

I am quite surprised that over the years there have not been many holes discovered on the iPhone. In fact the last exploit that was patched happened over two years ago and now, thanks to OS X security expert Charlie Miller -- we're seeing yet another come to light. At the SysScan conference in Syngapore, Miller talked about a vulnerability, which would allow hackers to "run software code on the phone that is sent by SMS over a mobile operator's network in order to monitor the location of the phone using GPS, turn on the phone's microphone to eavesdrop on conversations, or make the phone join a distributed denial of service attack or a botnet." Miller is planning to further discuss the vulnerability at the Black Hat conference. Apple is hoping to have the hole patched by the end of the month.

iPhone 3GS’ Copy & Paste is not Really Incredible

Apple seems to think that the iPhone 3GS’ Copy & Paste feature is incredible. I’ll admit that it is intuitive but lets face it, this feature has come too late. About two full software revisions late we'd say. And listing the feature as an incredible feature is ridiculous, considering my Motorola phone from 1999 could do that.