News

There's been a lot of talk recently about how this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) yielded little to be excited about. For the most part, the iPhone field at CES didn't effort to depart from this norm. However, there were a couple iPhone related tidbits worth talking about. One of which was Delphi's experimental iPhone software which allowed an iPhone to control a car. And yes, that's not a typo, it's not the car controlling the iPhone - the iPhone is controlling the car.

The software communicates with the car via Bluetooth and can be used, impressively, from up to a mile away. Though purely a proof-of-concept at this stage, the software already offers an exciting feature set.

Through the software, the iPhone can handle diagnostic checks such as tire pressure and fluid checks such as gas

Polar Bear Farm Software has recently released a somewhat groundbreaking piece of third-party software for the Apple iPhone called PBF ShowTime. ShowTime's claim to fame is that it brings video capture/recording to the iPhone - a feature not natively found on the iPhone (at least not as of firmware 1.1.2). Though other experimental applications that record video on the iPhone have been released, none have been as well-formed or fully featured as ShowTime.

That's not to say that ShowTime doesn't have it's issues. It certainly does. First, a look at what ShowTime can do:

Though seemingly simple, that's nothing to squawk at. This simple feature list is, as mentioned, more than we've seen from other attempts. Take a look at the following video to see ShowTime in action

Newly available via Installer/AppTapp is iSMS, a native text messaging client replacement for the iPhone. iSMS - also called weiSMS, is partially based on WeSMS, a Chinese SMS application, and provides a list of features/enhancemens not found in the standard iPhone SMS application. These lacking features have been high on iPhone owners' lists of gripes with the iPhone.

Though very much a beta, officially only a "preview release", iSMS provides many functions not available when sending text messages on the iPhone through the included interface. The two most prominent of these added features are the ability to send a text message to multiple recipients (or bulk SMS) and the ability to forward received text messages.

The list of major SMS features not normally available on the iPhone which iSMS adds includes the following:

Shares of Apple (AAPL) have reached a milestone for the year, with shares opening trading over $200 today. Although shares of the Cupertino based computer giant have crested past the $200 mark in both of the last two days, end of day trading has seen share prices retreat back below the $200 mark before closing.

Shares have risen over 60 percent since the introduction of the wildly popular iPhone at the end of June of this year. Sales of the iPhone, combined with the continuing growth of Apple's market share in the PC sales arena, have catapulted the share price of Apple's stock.

Perhaps most importantly, analyst firms remain almost unanimously optimistic about Apple's continuing growth. Almost all of the analyst firms on the street have target prices above $200, with Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster leading the

Efiko Software has just announced version 2.0 of their very popular iPhone ringtone creation and installation software, called iPhoneRingToneMaker. Though there are several methods and software packages iPhone owners can use to get free ringtones on their Apple iPhones, iPhoneRingToneMaker (along with iToner) is on a short list of these solutions which will allow users to make a ringtone from existing music on their computers, are easy to use, and are well supported by their creators.

Of course, all of this easy-to-use goodness comes at a price, albeit an extremely modest one. Purchasing ringtones through iTunes costs basically $0.99, should you buy