Apple App Store Celebrates One Year

Apple is celebrating the one year anniversary of the App Store for iPhone and iPod Touch. Along with all of the fanfare and featured apps came a lot of impressive statistics. Apple has left the competition in the dust, with 65,000 mobile applications released to date.

apple iphone appstore anniversary

Over 1.5 billion copies of these apps have been downloaded since the inception of the App Store one year ago. Apple CEO Steve Jobs remarked, "The App Store is like nothing the industry has ever seen before in both scale and quality."

How to Activate MMS on the Original iPhone (2G)

You may have been lead to believe that your original iPhone was so dated the radio couldn't handle MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) even if if Apple and AT&T wanted it to. The truth is out there, and it has arrived in the form of an app available now via Cydia.

apple iphone 2g mms

ActivateMMS2G is an application that promises to activate MMS capabilities on your original iPhone. The software will specifically NOT work with the iPhone 3G or the 3GS, which are slated to receive MMS support from AT&T later this summer.

Dev-Team Forced to Release iPhone 3GS Jailbreak

Now iPhone 3GS users have two jailbreaking solutions at their fingertips. Shortly after geohot (George Hotz) released his own jailbreak in the form of purplera1n, the Dev-Team released a new version of redsn0w for the iPhone 3GS.

As we previously reported here, geohot recommended that everyone with a 3GS follow specific steps to preserve their future ability to jailbreak. Turns out he wasn't content to wait for Dev-Team to release redsn0w for the 3GS.

Augmented Reality Comes to iPhone 3GS

Finally, the iPhone 3GS digital compass is getting a workout. Software developer acrossair has submitted the first augmented reality application to the Apple AppStore for approval. The app is called Nearest Tube, and will help Londoners plan routes and find the closest underground station. What's unique about this process is how the app delivers information.

Instead of a static map, Nearest Tube displays subway information in real-time, overlaid in 3D on top of live video of the user's surroundings. Holding the iPhone 3GS horizontal will show arrows pointing to different train stops, and tilting the device upwards will overlay signs in the direction of different stops. These signs look like a heads-up-display, and give more information about how far away the station is and what lines connect there.

iPhone OS 3.1 Features and Improvements

iPhone OS 3.1 beta versions have already been seeded to developers, meaning an update for the general public is imminent. Apple released iPhone OS version 2.1 only a month after 2.0 was made available last year.

apple iphone 3.1

The iPhone 3GS hit store shelves on June 19th running iPhone OS 3.0, and reports have indicated that millions of iPhone 3G and original iPhone owners have already upgraded their operating system. The new version includes 46 security fixes and new features such as copy and paste. So will it be worth upgrading again so soon?

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