No one really knows what happened, but everyone knows that iOS 4 is terrible for exchange clients. Devices running iOS 4 can bog down the exchange server, completely stop syncing, sync sporadically… the list goes on. The “Apple-recommended” fix for this is listed in a Support Article. The article contains a link to an updated configuration profile for iOS 4 devices. Apple doesn’t explain exactly what the new configuration profile does but the rumor is that it just extends the amount of time it can ping the exchange server. Does that sound like a fix? No, not really.

None of my clients have seen reliable exchange syncing with iOS 4 and the updated configuration profile didn’t really fix anything… maybe it’s a little more stable… but it’s definitely not fixed. It looks like we’ll be waiting for an OS update before we actually see a real solution here. For anyone who’s using ActiveSync on the iPhone: stop yelling at your IT guy or gal, it’s not his or her fault.

The new Retina Display has a super-high resolution and pixel density that won’t be that obvious at first, but if you take out your original iPhone, iPhone 3G or even the 3GS, you’ll notice a difference right away… if you have good eyesight.

The camera now takes even better pictures and shoots 720p video. It also has a flash. Every picture we’ve taken seems to be much, much… much nicer than the iPhone 3G or the 3GS.

The processor is quicker and it has 512MB of RAM (double the 3G and 3GS).

Overall, the iPhone 4 will prove to be zippier and nicer in many aspects, but there are still a few features that we’re a little surprised about.

The whole phone is made of glass. Glass that will break. It’s supposed to be harder than sapphire crystal, but it’s definitely still breakable. You’ll want to pick up one of Apple’s Bumper cases or a full-fledged case for it. Repairing them won’t be cheap.

The reception has been somewhat of an issue, but it’s not replicable on every device. Basically, depending on how you hold the iPhone 4, you might be able to decrease your cell reception or even get to a no service situation… not good. I’ve not been able to replicate it on any of the demo phones at the Apple store, but there’s definitely enough phones having this problem to mention it.

There may be yellow spots on your iPhone screen, but we don’t see that as a reason to worry just yet. Supposedly, there’s an adhesive on the screen assembly that might not be fully evaporated before you take the phone out of the box. Just use the iPhone for a couple days and the spots will probably go away.

That’s nothing that will keep me or anyone else here at CTA from buying the device… but as a heads up, it may not be smooth… but it’ll definitely be worth it.

Either way, we’re hoping to see the iPhone take a turn towards complete shock and awe. We won’t be covering the liveblog this time through… sorry! Might we recommend MacRumors, TUAW, Gizmodo, Ars Technica or Engadget. Recently, Ars Technica’s liveblog has been outstanding. We’ll still be covering the news as we are available… so check back here for timely recaps of the morning’s events.

We’re actually excited about the partnership. We use Rotten Tomatoes all the time to check out what movies are worth seeing. We find ourselves agreeing with the ratings quite often and have begun to trust it for our movie-going experiences. We’re happy to see that Apple included the feature. It may even help them rent more movies. We hate the average iTunes reviewer in the iTunes Store… some we like. Most of them just want to complain about something stupid and don’t leave anything of substance… that’s why we exist. We try and do legitimately helpful reviews and very often work with the developer. We’ve even helped some developers improve their apps before our reviews went live. Like us, Rotten Tomatoes has a tendency to have more accurate reviews and ratings than anything we’ve found in the iTunes Store. Now that it’s integrated, that may change. Shoot. Apple, remove it, please?

Anyways, we welcome it to the iTunes Store and may your movie favorites be considered fresh and not rotten.

While Google’s new music services are still in development, it’s entirely probable that Mac and iPhone users will never see the fruits of the Simplify Media labor. Google has been expanding its knowledge in the world of applications and operating systems in preparation for their Chrome OS. Especially since the advent of Android, Google has been less and less interested in supporting other platforms and more interested in securing their place in the modern world.

They’re doing a great job with it. Maybe someday we’ll create a sister site dedicated to the Android platform… maybe not.

Either way, we’re not too stoked that Simplify Media’s innovation was snagged by Google and no longer available to the masses. We’ve kept close tabs on the company since it first came to the iPhone. We got to know some the employees pretty well over chat. Here’s hoping we get some benefit out of the deal.

Source

We’ll start the rumors here: It’s entirely possible that Apple will scratch the Game Center idea completely before they even release it. The initial idea was met with opposition, questions and anything but user support. Sure, some developers like the idea of social integration within their games, but that exists already with OpenFeint and Plus+… so it begs the question: why would Apple even care to step in as a player? We can’t think of a single good reason to put time and effort into Game Center… maybe some sort of combination with iAds? OpenFeint and Plus+ have been around for a while, they know what works and what doesn’t. Apple has no clue about social gaming. If anything, Apple should do what they do best: buy someone out. Better yet, get out of the social gaming industry. It’s definitely not their area of expertise.

Either way, we shouldn’t expect to see anything until “later this year.” We’re guessing a back-to-school release with new iPods.

If you haven’t heard by now, iPhone OS 4.0 Beta 4 came out late in the day on Tuesday. We still have spots available for our Beta test program. We’ll let you know about our experience with Beta 4 in the next couple days.

Portal, Peggle Deluxe, World of Goo — those are just some of the titles that we purchased a while back on one of the PCs in the house. They are guaranteed to work with a new feature called “Steam Play.” If you purchase it on one platform it will be free for you on any other platform as long as the game is compatible. We picked up the Indie pack of games, a great buy for $20… we also picked up Braid (a completely unique platformer).

Things haven’t been completely smooth with the software: we have noticed a few weird glitches with overlays, some strange browser-like errors, a few crashes and a game install error that had us restarting our machine and trying again. Not too shabby for Valve’s very first release on the Mac. Most of it, we’re guessing, is the fact that Valve’s moved everything over to a webkit-based system… one that probably hasn’t been tested rigorously. Either way, it’s not stopping us from playing our games — the games have been completely flawless. We’ve spent several hours playing Braid, Portal, World of Goo, and Galcon Fusion… none of the games have glitched at all.

Each Wednesday, Valve will be releasing new games into the Mac-compatible section. If you don’t see something you want right away, give it a few days… it just might show up. We can’t wait to get some of the other Valve software ported over: the Half-Life series, Team Fortress… gaming on the Mac just took a u-turn on the road to perdition.

If you do end up playing Portal, just remember that the cake is a lie.

This morning, I logged into my squareup.com account to find out that my card reader status is now set to “in the mail.” Awesome. What am I talking about? Here’s a quick little explanation… we’ll get into our list after the break.

Square is a portable credit card reader that will work with many mobile devices… most importantly: the iPhone, iPad and even the iPod touch. You can view and download the application by clicking the [iTunes Link]. Basically, it allows the everyday person to accept credit card payments on the go. If you’ve ever used PayPal, imagine the same experience using your credit card: it’s much more secure, right? Yep. Sell that couch securely with a credit card. Offer customer on-the-spot payments for your consulting work. Let your friend pay you back with plastic. It’s 2.75% for a swipe and 3.5% for a card number entered manually. Square also takes a 15 cent cut from each transaction on top of that fee. That’s a pretty good deal for wonderful mobility. The best part is this: it never stores customer information on the device… everyone can feel completely secure during the transaction thanks to the modern technologies of data encryption.

The whole process in itself is not currently rainbows and roses. We’ve done a lot of research. We’ve been reading through and discussing information with people on the forums and have gone over and over the Terms of Service. The ToS is probably the most down-to-earth ToS we’ve ever read… read it for yourself if you’re interested. Click the “Continue Reading” link to see the 10 things you need to know. It’s a list of the top ten questions (and answers) we’ve come across since we fell in love with Square.

Most of the issues we’re running into are largely related to the fact that this is a startup company that just went into mass production a couple of weeks ago. The other issue is the fact that they’re a new financial institute… it will take a while for them to really compete with other per-transaction offerings. Just so you know, Square hasn’t confirmed or offered us any information about any of the theorized statements we’ve written below.

1. iPad versus iPhone users

iPad users were able to sign up for Square accounts nearly a month ago now. Some people expressed frustration with the iPad release instead of the iPhone release. We’d bet that Square released the iPad version first because it would be easier to roll out on a new, semi-unpopulated device than one that has millions of users. From what we’ve heard, they allowed iPad users to sign up for a couple weeks before they even went into mass production. This led customers into thinking they’d be swiping cards sooner rather than later. It’s been over a month since we signed up and our reader status just changed to shipped… but we can see why they did it: they wanted the publicity. It’s the publicity that has them scrambling 24/7 to get the card readers to the right people; without it, they wouldn’t be where they are. For the iPhone and the other devices coming soon, it might be a while before you get your card reader but they’ll catch up eventually. It is our belief that they’re sending out the card readers to people in the order that they signed up. There’s no randomness to it: we bought an iPad so we could sign up for Square (that wasn’t the only reason). In theory, we’ll have our card reader before anyone of the iPhone customers get theirs.

2. The reader wait

Tagging along to the order of distribution: you can’t actually use the app until you have a card reader and activation code. That’s not 100% truthful… you could still use it for cash but who really wants that? Almost all the features that people are wondering about magically appear in the app and on the website once you activate a card reader. Square has never given us — or anyone — a shipping estimate, so it could be quite sometime before the iPhone users get their readers. That frustrated a lot of people. So what? You’re getting a free card reader and a free iPhone app to have a better-than-PayPal mobile credit card processor… be patient.

3. Sign up questions

It’s been a while since we actually signed up so we don’t know what changed here exactly… but the company does require your social security number for verification purposes. It does not appear that Square actually does a credit check at the get go, but reading through their Terms of Service, it looks like you may need to undergo a credit check (soft pull for those of you who are wondering) to increase account limits. This leads us to believe that Square actually stores your SSN on file and would be able to reference it when necessary. Many people have expressed concern with that, but the company is so overwhelmed by the spotlight that we doubt you’ll have any issues. If we dive a little deeper, Square blatantly says that they access our account data anonymously so they can provide us with better service: just like every other company. Some people are a little too protective of their information. Some aren’t protective enough. Either way, I don’t think that Square is something we really need to worry about.

4. Transaction Limits and Account Reservations

There are no transaction minimums, but we’ve read a lot information that points to a maximum limit to the transactions. Some people are sitting at $200 maximum transaction amount and others have had Square increase the amount for them. It appears — at least during the Beta period — they were increasing the amount on a case-by-case basis. The latest information we’ve read expresses a $100 limit per transaction and a limit of 7 transactions per week. We can’t find a specific “this is the amount you’re limited to at the start of your Square account.” Several customers have contacted support to try to increase the limits on their account: they received a canned response (most likely due the influx of support requests in the last few days). We expect that once things are operating smoothly, we’ll see transactions limits increased service-wide and a streamlined way to ask for further increases on an account. We also want to mention the possibility of Account Reservations. If Square determines that you’re refunding an exorbitant amount of money, they may force your account into a 14 day reservation. That means that you could potentially have to wait 14 days instead of the standard daily transfer for your money. We’re guessing that this is in extreme cases… who wants to refund a lot of money anyways?

5. Multiple Accounts and Card Readers

Everything we’ve read so far says that the card reader process is completely automated: every time you install Square on a new device and sign into your account, they’ll send you another card reader for that device. We expect that you’ll be able to request additional card readers via their support at some point in the future, but we couldn’t say that for sure. We also know that you can set up multiple accounts for a single device… we’re just unsure of the detailed process. Some users have reported that you can just sign in and out of accounts on the app: that’s not an elegant solution but it would definitely be the most secure option. If you’d like multiple accounts you can always contact support and request another account activation code. Use one account for your personal finances and another account for your business transactions: pretty simple. As we have mentioned before, the support team is definitely overwhelmed but will get to each inquiry in due time.

6. APIs are coming

Even though the current Terms of Service prevents anyone from using unauthorized software or hacks with the current version of Square, we’ve been hearing that they will eventually release an API for other developers to do more with the service. I honestly think that means that they’re going to stick with the face-to-face transaction concept that many people have questioned. A lot of the feedback has been feature enhancement like a full-fledged POS, online processing and inventory management… but that’s not Square. It’s not exactly meant for businesses even though you could use it that way. It’s meant for the average joe who wants a great way to process credit cards. If a developer wanted to step up and use the not-yet-developed APIs to create a full-fledged POS, more power to them, but that’s not something we should be expecting from Square any time soon.

7. You are your business

If you decide to open an account with Square for a business, the person who does that must actually be able to legally act for that company. We haven’t seen specific company versus personal use information. That’s all information that could magically appear after we activate our account. The terms of service seem to suggest that there isn’t much of a difference between the accounts. Our best guess points us to the next topic.

8. Taxes and non-profits

There have been a lot of questions about taxes and the ability for a non-profit to use the service to accept credit cards. We haven’t seen any information about discounted rates for organizations but we do know that non-profit support is there and ready to go. As mentioned previously, once you’ve activated your account more features will appear in your profile. Non-profits can input their information into the Tax and Reporting section of the website after they’ve activated the account. We’re assuming that you may be able to enter your EIN or sales tax license number in that section to define yourself as a business… but we haven’t seen it yet, so we don’t know. Remember, you are your business or organization and must be able to legally act for that business in order to create a Square account.

9. Typical legal jargon

No warranty, yada yada, reasonable action to prevent your information from being accessed by unauthorized persons, yada yada, indemnity, yada yada… seriously, if you haven’t seen this kind of stuff before you live under a rock.

10. International users

Yes, it will be available internationally. They’re working on it and starting with a US rollout. Once that’s done and smooth, we’ll see things expand to our friends in different countries. This has been a hot topic on their Twitter account. It’ll come, just be patient.

That’s the biggest thing that’s frustrating us at the moment. We’ve lived on the forums this afternoon reading through everyone’s concerns about the concept, the software, the hardware and the one thing we realized: people suck. The company is giving us free credit card readers, free software and charging us less than a lot of the other per-transaction options out there. It’s surprising that we read gripe after gripe of people who didn’t do a single ounce of research on the forums and more gripes from people who tried but didn’t get anywhere. That’s why we created this post. Hopefully it will answer a lot of questions that you might have about Square. We’ll continue to write information about the process as we get it… our card reader is in the mail so we’ll hopefully have more for you in the very near future. Until then, sit back, relax, have a couple beers and let the hate meter drop down a few ticks. This company is great and needs a little time to catch up and become awesome. Let them do that.

Feel free to read through their FAQs… if there’s a question you have that isn’t list here, it’s probably there. Please follow @Square on Twitter to get some helpful information about their progress. If there’s still a question you’d like answered, feel free to leave it in the comments. We’ll try our best to find an answer and get back to you.

We’re really enjoying the new beta and have had great success with it thus far. Here are a few of the new features that other sites have mentioned: iPod playback controls now show up in the multitasking interface, you can close out of multiple apps at once from the multitasking interface, and the obvious fix of the Wi-Fi and Camera Roll issues.

We’ve run into a few quirks with some of our third-party applications but we’re sure that they’ll be fixed once we can actually get ahold of 4.0-compatible applications from the developers. We can’t wait to use some of our apps with the background APIs that Apple opened up in the beta. Other than that, there’s nothing blatantly obvious about the new beta. If you are a developer and have access to Game Center, feel free to add me as a friend… even though there aren’t any games to play it’s fun to pretend. My alias is “joshcarr.”

For those of you interested in signing up for our CTA Beta program, now seems like the perfect time. We can’t wait to introduce you to some of the new things we have brewing here at CTA. Click the Beta tab in the menu bar to sign up.

If you’re not familiar with our term “iPhad touch” it’s the obvious combination of iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. Fair warning: despite Steve Jobs’ best attempt to rid the internet of Flash, many independently hosted videos still use it. Some of these videos may not work on your iPhad touch.

In this edition of the iPhad touch Video Wrap Up we’ll see some morons microwaving their iPad, more morons using it as a skateboard, a genius who installed his iPad into a kitchen cabinet, an edited version of the iPhone 4.0 OS keynote and finally: Ellen’s semi-humorous (not really) iPhone commercial parody that had Apple asking her for an apology. Click the “Continue Reading” button below to see all of the videos.