According to Fortune, AT&T’s going to further subsidize the iPhone down as much as $200, making the final retail price a scant $199 with two-year-contract. The rumor is that the $200 bonus will only be available in AT&T stores, not in Apple stores, so people buying and exporting or using it with T-Mobile will be paying the higher price. Current first-gen iPhone users probably won’t get this $200 subsidy when upgrading either, unless perhaps they renew for another 2 years. Fortune’s source also says that the phone will have GPS and be 2.5mm thinner, not thicker as previously indicated. And you’ll know when the new phone is coming—Apple will cut off shipments of the old phone in order to clear up inventory and give a subtle hint that you should wait before buying.

Original news from Gizmodo

Previously it was stated that the iPhone wouldn’t support tasks or apps running in the background, this was due to high battery and memory usage.
Some sources suspected that firmware build 5A258f does support apps running in the background.
However if we read the new SDK documentation well, this speculation gets rather quickly demolished.

When an application is inactive, it is executing but is not dispatching incoming events. This occurs when an overlay window pops up or when the device is locked.

Only one iPhone application can run at a time, and third-party applications never run in the background. This means that when users switch to another application, answer the phone, or check their email, the application they are using quits.

So far dreaming of a native chat or gps app :(

Maps offline must be one of the most viewed topics on my whole blog.
I’m happy that the developer has released an updated version, as this version actually resolves a problem a lot of users have.

When you save your map, and then reactivate it, sometimes it happens that the map app is not positioning you exactly above your saved map, so you could be anywhere in the whole world, but not on your saved map.

» Maps Offline v0.20

We already heared some rumors that the iPhone 3G will include a GPS chip, but for all of us who have the current version, there’s a cable almost ready.

The cable will make it possible to connect a Holux GPS to your iPhone via serial cable, imagine all the possibilities with your iPhone gps enabled :)

You can preorder it on this site.

A example of how it will work:
» Gps coming to iPhone soon ?

Now this is a very very interesting little app.

Imagine you’re going on a trip to a certain city, but you don’t want to cary a gps around, then this app is your friend.

It lets you save a map or a route for later viewing.
I know that some cities have town covered wi-fi, but a lot of cities don’t, and if you have a map of where you’re going … you can always find your way :)

How does it work?

You browse the map you’d like to save with the google maps iPhone app.
Then you start the app, and save the current sqlite file (in my case it is Westvlaanderen).

Now when you’re offline (not connected to wi-fi or gprs) you can still use that map or any other map you have saved.

The same goes for routes :)
» Save google maps with Maps Offline for later viewing

This isn’t the most recent news, but i wanted to post it just for reference.

In a few months the locoGPS will be received, so what’s so special about this GPS??

First of all, the locogps is not an application that you will need to install on your iPhone or iPod touch.

The locogps is actually a hardware dongle with wi-fi that has a webserver running on it.
To run the app, you will need to browse to a page with safari.

Personally i don’t think this will work very well as you will probably have too much delay for fast navigation, but as i haven’t received a testing unit yet, i can’t really be sure.

» Gps on the iPhone/ iPod with LocoGPS