Apple iPhone 3G is a popular and magnificent phone, for its market breaking user interface and ease of use. But if you compare iPhone 3G with the other smartphones, you find many features are obvious omissions. Many people have come to expect iPhone 3G to be feature-laden, however Apple has omitted features that are common nowadays, either because the iPhone software is not as developed yet, or it is design decision to keep the phone’s ease of use appeal.

Apple has made clear that iPhone 3G new features will be rolled out via future firmware updates. New iPhone firmware release has become as anticipated as new Apple product launches, and the next update iPhone 2.1 software is expected in September.

We list below 19 missing features of iPhone 3G, features that we come to expect. Some are hardware specifics that are not possible via firmware upgrade, some are feature requests, some are features you can get now via third party applications, and some features are best left out of iPhone 3G.

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YouTube has added closed captioning feature, allowing video producers and uploaders to add captions and subtitles in over 120 languages. This feature also has the potential to allow YouTube to embed ads into videos.

If a video includes captions, viewers can activate them by clicking the caption button located on the bottom right of the video player. Clicking this button will allow viewers to choose which captions they want to see, especially for video with multiple captions. For now caption does not work with embedded YouTube video, you can only access captions when playing videos on YouTube website.

“You can add captions to one of your videos by uploading a closed caption file using the “Captions and Subtitles” menu on the editing page. To add several captions to a video, simply upload multiple files. If you want to include foreign subtitles in multiple languages, upload a separate file for each language.” - The YouTube Team

Some YouTube videos with captioning:

• BBC Wordwide
• MIT physics lecture
• Japanese animation Gonzodoga

View more information about captioning at YouTube Help Center.

The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) announced that Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, Sony’s Sir Howard Stringer and Ford’s Alan Mulally will deliver keynote addresses at the 2009 International CES, the world’s largest consumer technology tradeshow scheduled for January 8-11, 2009 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

“These exciting keynote speakers demonstrate that the 2009 International CES is the hub of activity in the consumer electronics, entertainment content, and automotive industries,” said CEA President and CEO Gary Shapiro. “Steve Ballmer and Sir Howard Stringer are driving forces behind the continued growth of the consumer technology industry. Alan Mulally is a true visionary spurring technology innovation in the automotive market. These leaders are changing the way technology is being incorporated into new markets, and CES attendees will all benefit from these keynotes unveiling the next generation of technology.”

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Solver for Excel, which was axed in Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, makes a come back as the original developer Frontline Systems has released it as a standalone app. Solver for Excel 2008 works with the latest version of Excel, is a Universal Binary app, runs on Mac OS X Leopard or Tiger, and is a free download.

When Microsoft released Office 2008 for Mac, it dropped the support of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) scripting language, along with it the popular Solver tool which depends on VBA. Microsoft has promised to bring VBA back to Mac version of Office, but there is no definite schedule. And Solver for Excel is now developed and released outside of Microsoft.

“It’s our way of re-introducing ourselves to the Mac community. This version of Solver is a Frontline Systems product and will be supported by us — but we owe a big THANK YOU to Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit for (i) asking us to do this and (ii) supporting our efforts intensively with AppleScript help, QA testing, and localization.” — Frontline Systems

Solver for Excel 2008 is available now for immediate download from Frontline Systems.

Google Suggest has graduated from Google Labs and is now available by default on the Google.com homepage. It is a search feature that suggests to you in real-time a list of popular query words when you start typing into the search box. Google Suggest, which debuts in 2004, has been incorporated into other Google products such as Google Toolbar, Firefox search box, Map search, YouTube, and now Google.com.

Google Suggest aims to help people search more efficiently and conveniently. At a loss for words for your search query? Google Suggest helps you formulate your queries string. In addition, Google Suggest helps to reduce spelling errors and save some typing keystrokes. Google Suggest is useful and convenient, we only hope Google Suggest can make it to Safari search box soon.

Head down to Google.com to see Google Suggest in action.

The largest US cable operator Comcast has announced that it will limit customers’ Internet broadband usage to 250GB per month per account starting October 01. This applies to all residential broadband.

Comcast mentioned that if customer exceeds the 250GB limit, Comcast will call the customer to warn about the “excessive use” and suggest the customer to upgrade to a more expensive commercial-grade plan. If customer does not upgrade and exceed the limit for a second time within six months, Comcast will terminate the account for a year.

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Bare Bones Software releases BBEdit 9 professional HTML and text editor with over a dozen new features and enhancements. Chief among the new features is the Projects feature, an enhanced version of its existing ‘File Group’ concept. Other additions include auto completion during typing, modeless find/replace windows, integration with MobileMe, Scratchpad for quick text edits and transforms, and preview of HTML documents in browsers under VMWare Fusion 2.0’s MS Windows instance.

The features set looks impressive and seems to be a worthwhile upgrade. Upgrade is at $30 and is free if you purchased BBEdit 8.5 to 8.7 on or after January 1, 2008. BBEdit 9 is at $125 for new user. A video highlighting the new features is available at BBEdit website.

Adium 1.3 is released, it is a major version upgrade which took seven months to develop. Among the changes are improvement to performance and memory usage, Facebook chat support, improved MSN chat support with personal messages, and a revamped Contact Inspector user interface (previously Get Info Window) with live contact search. Check out the list of new features and changes.

Download from Adium website or through Adium’s build-in updater if you have old version installed.

For those not in the know, Adium is a popular free multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) client for Mac. You can use it to chat with anyone from AOL, ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, MSN etc. It is based on the libpurple framework which is also used by the other popular IM program Pidgin for Linux/Windows.

Best Buy has announced that it will start selling Apple’s iPhone 3G on September 07 at its 970 full-size stores and 16 Best Buy Mobile stores. This coup makes Best Buy the first independent iPhone retailer outside of Apple and AT&T’s stores since its launch on July 11. AT&T, the exclusive U.S. carrier for the iPhone, sells it in more than 2,000 stores. Apple has 189 U.S. stores.

“We had a lot of work to do, obviously, to get in a position where Apple and AT&T would feel good about Best Buy Mobile carrying it, and that’s what we’ve done in the last 18 months,” said Shawn Score, president of Best Buy Mobile.

Best Buy also resells Apple’s Mac computers and iPod media players. It announced last week that it has completed a two-year conversion of its store to include upgraded cell-phone departments. Best Buy has also upgraded its computer systems for cell-phone activation and spent 250,000 hours training its employees.

Best Buy’s iPhone prices will be the same as Apple and AT&T stores: $199 for the 8 GB model and $299 for the 16 GB model. Customers must sign a two-year AT&T contract.

Via Associated Press.

Microsoft today issued updates for both Office 2004 for Mac and Office 2008 for Mac that addresses security vulnerabilities, and improves stability and performance. These updates are labeled as “critical” and Microsoft recommends them be installed “immediately”. Office for Mac users can update their software via Office Auto Update or from Microsoft Mactopia downloads site.

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac 12.1.2 Update addresses security vulnerabilities and improves performance and reliability for Word, Excel, and Entourage. Word gets significantly faster launch times, Excel gets performance improvements for working with large datasets, and Entourage has improved stability when using Microsoft Sync Services.

Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac 11.5.1 Update addresses security vulnerabilities, and fixes Word 2004 stability issue when opening documents containing numbered lists. Entourage 2004 gets the updated Japanese postal codes.

Microsoft’s update support pages provide additional information and detail these improvements.