An iPhone 3G user has sued Apple alleging that the company offered the iOS 4 update to 3G owners knowing it would brick the phone. The suit is seeking class action status.

An exploit that allows the iPhone lock screen to be bypassed has been patched. The iOS 4.2 update fixes the hole making the iPhone secure again.

A sweet massage chair from Human Touch has been unveiled that can be controlled by an iPhone. The iPhone allows users to make their own custom massage programs and download programs that are pre-built to try.

Frash has now been ported to the iPhone 4. That means that once installed you can enjoy all the Flash games and video you want with the caveat that the Frash software is in alpha form right now.

Adobe has announced that 7 million users of the iPhone want Flash on their device. Adobe says the 7m users tried to download Flash for iPhone by December 2009.

I have often complained that the camera on the iPhone isn’t that great, but maybe it’s just that I can’t take pictures. A new photo exhibition has opened with photos all taken from the iPhone and only edited using software available on the iPhone and they look great.

Adobe says that Apple didn’t help with development, but hopes it will appreciate the effort Adobe put in. Adobe announced this week that it would be releasing a new version of Flash Pro later this year in beta form that will allow devs to export Flash code in a format that will run on the iPhone.

Adobe still wants to offer a Flash player for the iPhone, but it says it needs cooperation form Apple to do so. The developer solution is nothing more than a work around for now. Adobe says that it submitted seven apps to the App store as pre-release of Flash Pro software and all were accepted, which doesn’t mean much sometimes with Apple.

They might be trying to anticipate the resource-heavy of Flash so that it can run well on the iPhone and do many of the things users expect Flash to do.

In an interview with Bloomberg at the Davos, Switzerland event, Adobe chief Shantanu Narayen describes development as a complicated two-way process rather than maintaining the previous image of a one-sided effort that would depend on App Store approval before it could launch.

“It’s a hard technical challenge, and that’s part of the reason Apple and Adobe are collaborating,” he says. “The ball is in our court. The onus is on us to deliver.”

What hurdles Adobe has to overcome aren’t mentioned by the executive, though the company’s long porting process has underscored the difficulty involved. Narayen had said that he was “pleased with progress” as far back as June of last year — just three months after the iPhone SDK made native third-party apps an option on the touchscreen device.

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs has maintained since nearly a year ago that the real obstacle is the nature of Flash itself. While desktop Flash is too resource-heavy for the small processor and low memory of smartphones like the iPhone, Jobs has warned that Flash Lite is too feature-limited and doesn’t do many of the things users expect Flash to do — such as playing video on the web or showing complex animations on websites.

[via Apple Insider | image credit]

We’ve also learned that Flash for the iPhone will be a closed platform and that once Apple decides it’s go time, we will see a Flash player for the mobile phone very soon. This will mean that websites designed in Flash will be available for viewing on the iPhone. This has been one of the biggest complaint’s regarding what the device lacks.

However, since most mobile phones do not have very speedy processors, Flash may seriously bog down the iPhone’s performance. But, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how it handles with some of the more Flash-intensive sites out there.

[via iPhone Atlas]

During Adobe’s Q2 earnings call Monday, chief Shantanu Narayen said that Adobe had tackled some of the technical challenges to getting Flash to work on the iPhone:

We have a version that’s working on the emulation. This is still on the computer and you know, we have to continue to move it from a test environment onto the device and continue to make it work. So we are pleased with the internal progress that we’ve made to date.

The next hurdle will be convincing Apple’s boss, Steve Jobs, that this mobile version of Flash will be powerful enough for the iPhone, which hes been skeptical of in the past.

Even if Adobe aces Flash for the iPhone and makes it the most efficient version of its plugin ever, the business part of the process could hold things up for a while longer.

The iPhone has a huge future ahead of it, and all I can say is I sure hope Adobe is a part of that. Integrating Flash into the iPhone would be a revolution we have yet to see, but doing so would call for a much stronger business relationship with Adobe than Apple has with any of its other partners. The simplest way to go about it would be to incorporate Flash right into the Safari browser on the iPhone. Will this be done? Maybe, but for now we’ll settle for a 3G network and GPS.

[Via Alley Insider]

That is what the site looks like under iPhone firmware 1.1.4, a flat map with no Flash, and no variations. It is clearly very different from the screen shot of a normal desktop web browser, loading the site up, with full Flash support.

As you can see in this screen shot from a desktop, the map is a little fancier. It has color variations, and also hover effects and mouse over actions.

Lastly, this is how it looks on the iPhone 3G. Well, this is how it might look. Clearly the device shows a full version of the page in the browser, but this is almost certainly marketing material. Meaning screen rendering, and this could be an oversight by Apple. On the more exciting side, Apple could have thrown in Flash support and waited for someone to catch on to this little detail, you decide.

[Via iPhone Atlas]

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has previously criticised Adobe’s Flash offerings, claiming the full desktop version to slow and the specially-formatted mobile version not good enough for the iPhone. In response, Adobe examined the iPhone SDK to see whether they could code a unique version of their embedded Flash viewer for the handset; however, Apple’s third-party software rules scuppered any chance of that, as they do not allow for Safari plugins, only standalone apps.

As it stands, then, the only possibility for an official Adobe Flash solution with the current SDK is if Apple gives them special treatment and permits a version of their software to work with Mobile Safari. This new Firmware 2.0 plugin could be a sign of that, but it’s simply too early to say.

[Via iPhone’s latest Firmware 2.0 build has Safari plugin for YouTube - PHONE Magazine]