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“The iPhones with broken glass that we have analyzed to date show that in all cases, the glass cracked due to an external force that was applied to the iPhone,” Apple said in a statement cited by the BBC.

Apple’s
iPhone may be the darling of the mobile-phone industry right now, but some users in France aren’t singing its praises, claiming that the device explodes or cracks without warning.

The European Commission also issued a warning using its rapid-alert system, Rapex, which warns of dangerous consumer products.

As part of its investigation, Apple also looked into complaints of the iPhone battery overheating but again said it found no problems. “To date, there are no confirmed battery-overheating incidents for iPhone 3GS, and the number of reports we are investigating is in the single digits,” according to the statement.

(Credit:
Apple)

France’s trade minister declined to comment on a meeting with Apple about an investigation that the country’s consumer protection agency is conducting into the reports, according to Bloomberg.

Last Tuesday, in response to a European Commission investigation into accusations of overheating and exploding iPhones, Apple referred to its internal investigation, saying, “We are waiting to receive the iPhones from the customers.”

The investigation’s findings don’t mean much to France’s Frank Benoiton, a consumer who said his wife’s iPhone cracked, and it “was not dropped and experienced no unusual shock,” he told the Associated Press.

However, after conducting an internal investigation into the cause of the broken touch-screen glass, Apple denies that there is an underlying iPhone flaw. In fact, Apple said that in all cases it investigated, some kind of force was applied to the iPhone, causing the glass to break, according to a BBC report Friday.

The app is still a great tool for recording text notes, either typed or written (on a tablet PC). Plus, you can clip text and graphics from Web sites or e-mails (there’s a clipper tool that makes it easy). Finding what you’ve entered later is also easy, thanks to search that works as you type and good ways to narrow down your results by date (and eventually location) or by tag. That is, if you bother to use tags; if you don’t, you still have the service’s strong search tools.

Evernote is free now (it’s in private beta) and there will always be a free version, Libin said. Unlike the last version, the freebie accounts get the Web sync functionality. A future paid version (about $5 a month) will have higher (or no) limits on the number of notes a user can create, and priority access to the server-based image processing queue (for text recognition).

The Web version of Evernote syncs up with the desktop apps for free.

Pictures search: just start typing, and Evernote will find pictures that have that term in it.

Now this is a pitch I can relate to. I was talking to Phil Libin, the new CEO of Evernote, and he was selling me on the new Web-based version of the note-taking app his company makes. Libin was giving me the big picture: Evernote is “an extension of memory.” It’s an “external brain.” But, he says, his company realizes that most people don’t want to tag, categorize, annotate, or otherwise file their notes. They just want to jam information into a bin and be able to find it later. “I’m happy with the lazy slob market,” he said.

Evernote doesn’t have OneNote’s time-synced audio recording feature, nor does it offer speech-to-text transcription like ReQall. And contrary to what I speculated in my recent coverage of ReQall), it doesn’t look like a good to-do or reminder service. I’d bet you could hack at it and make it into one if you wanted to, but it doesn’t have the clarity of purpose or the reminder features of a to-do service like ReQall, RememberTheMilk, or iWantSandy.

The previous version of Evernote (which I used for about two years, before switching to OneNote), was very good at recording a “river of notes.” Whatever you typed into the Evernote desktop app you could then easily find again. There was also a Web service, but using it cost extra.

The new Evernote, version 3, is a free suite of tools that let you access one synchronized database of notes from a desktop (PC or
Mac), the Evernote Web site, directly off a USB stick, or from a mobile device. You can also dump data into it from e-mail. In other words, there are now more ways to dump your notes into the system, and more places from which you can get them out. (The product can’t yet use RSS feeds as input, but this may be added.)

I took some camera phone shots of whiteboards and it did a surprisingly good job of indexing the text. (See also: Scanr [review] and Qipit [review].)

Not in the PC version I tested yet, but possibly in the Mac client, is the capability to take any note and publish it on the Web, for easy sharing. However, Evernote is not a collaboration tool or a wiki; viewers can’t comment on or modify posted notes.

What’s really cool, though, is Evernote’s affinity for visual notes. The mobile app lets you snap camera phone pictures and send them directly to Evernote. Or you can drag pictures from your computer into the desktop app. On a Mac, there’s a fast way to grab snaps from your Webcam. Everything then gets synched up to the server, which then does text extraction on your photos, dumping the keywords into your search index so you can find things later. (Pro tip: When you take pictures of people you want to remember at a conference, be sure to get their name badges in the shot. Instant people find.)

I’m smitten by Evernote 3.0. It’s not just that it’s a good note-taking app. It’s not just the cool OCR for finding pictures of wine labels you’ve uploaded to it. It’s all that plus the excellent synchronization between platforms that does it for me. It really makes the system feel pervasive, and inviting.

It's a good note-recording app even if you don't use the visual tools.

The Web client has enough of the features from the desktop apps that using it is not punishment. But the really cool thing is that, no matter which app you use, including the mobile and the USB versions, all your notes are always there, and your ability to search for notes is, too. Everything stays in synch.

The mobile client I used (for Windows Smartphone) lets you access your Evernote database via a Web link, or directly enter text notes and upload voice and photo files. Configuring it for automatic uploads is not obvious but once set up it’s a pretty cool feature: you could use it to snap pictures of whiteboards, as I said, or business cards, or of wine labels you want to remember.

Speaking of the recognition engine, Libin told me it will eventually read barcodes as well as text. In the future it will be able to recognize the presence of people in a photo, and some day be able to identify who the people are. As he said, the longer your visual notes stay in Evernote, the more valuable they become, since the server’s image processing engine will go back and rescan pictures every time Evernote adds new recognition capabilities.

The Mac client of Evernote is prettier than the PC client, but according to Libin it doesn’t have the same categorizing features of the Windows client. But it has that slick tool for grabbing a picture from your Mac’s built-in camera. It’s a handy way to record receipts, business cards, and the like.

Amazon Web Services executives on Sunday described a forthcoming persistent storage feature, called EC2 Persistent Storage, which they say will make its hosted computing services more flexible and far more reliable.

“And the great thing is it that it is all done with using standard technologies such that you can use this with any kind of application, middleware or any infrastructure software, whether it is legacy or brand new,” he added.

Von Eiken says that persistent storage is a dramatically important feature that will lead many more companies and developers to hosted development platforms.

With a persistent storage service, data can remain linked to a specific computing instance. Significantly, people can take a snapshot of that data and store it on Amazon’s S3 storage service. That effectively acts as a way to create a back-up of their computing operation on the “cloud,” according to Amazon executives.

It’s just like an unformatted hard drive, Amazon.com Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels explained. The difference is that it’s in the “cloud” somewhere and you get to it through an API.

Thorsten vok Eiken at RightScale, who has been testing the service, talks about the implications of this feature and says his company is making tools to make it easier to use these services.

People can sign up for an early beta test program now before Amazon opens it up for a wider release later this year.

Amazon Web Services evangelist Jeff Barr also describes the service on his blog, saying it was one of the most requested features from developers.

“The snapshot is extremely powerful technology and allows for building highly fault-tolerant applications operating worldwide. Combine these snapshots with Availability Zones and Elastic IPs and you have all the tools to manage and migrate even the most complex of applications,” Vogels wrote on his blog.

“It’s going to be like agile software development: if you want to survive as an Internet/Web service you will have to compute in the cloud or your competitors will leave you in the dust by being able to deploy faster, better, and cheaper,” he said.

The service works with Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) hosted server offering. It allows developers to set aside a storage volume online, on which people save files in different file systems. This differs from what is available now with EC2 because once a compute instance is taken offline, the data associated with it goes away.

But the 25-year-old CEO acknowledges that the U.S. and Canadian governments have agreed to honor court decisions in each other’s countries.

In August, the judge denied TorrentSpy’s appeal. The decision will conceivably enable the MPAA to gain access to users’ personal information in similar cases, say legal experts.

“The demise of TorrentSpy is a clear victory for the content industries and sends a clear message to operators of other illegal BitTorrent portals that they will not be allowed to operate in the United States without facing relentless litigation by copyright holders.” –statement from MPAA

Whether that is true, the film industry has racked up plenty of file-sharing victories. Besides TorrentSpy, the MPAA was blamed for driving LokiTorrent and SuprNova.org out of business. And more recently, the MPAA won important legal precedents in the TorrentSpy case.

TorrentSpy, once one of the most popular indexes of BitTorrent files, shut down on Monday following a two-year copyright battle with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). TorrentSpy, accused in a lawsuit of encouraging copyright infringement, finally crumpled under the legal costs.

But Fung points out that TorrentSpy was never able to argue the main copyright issues in court. The presiding judge found in favor of the film studios after ruling that TorrentSpy destroyed evidence. Fung says he is determined to take up the copyright issue to the end. Unlike TorrentSpy, he doesn’t care what it costs.

Fung said he’s been fighting the MPAA’s attempts to require him to turn over user logs on the grounds that his company is based in Canada, which has stricter privacy laws than the United States.

“TorrentSpy’s characterization of the site’s closure as a voluntary decision conveniently
ignores the fact that after two years of intense litigation by the major Hollywood studios, a
federal court found TorrentSpy liable for copyright infringement,” the MPAA said in the statement. “Late last year the court imposed the harshest sanction against the TorrentSpy defendants and ruled in favor of the studios because of TorrentSpy’s brazen, continuous, and systematic destruction of evidence and subversion of the judicial process. In short, the ruling meant that TorrentSpy would have to shut down their site sooner or later.”

“There is no reason for us not to see this through. We’ve come this far,” Fung told CNET News.com on Thursday. “TorrentSpy shutting down doesn’t mean a victory for the MPAA. The judge declared that TorrentSpy didn’t adhere to court procedures. That’s different than a judge deciding against the company after hearing their arguments.”

The courts have not yet ruled on whether search tools can be held liable for copyright infringement. Most relevant cases have been settled before going to trial, copyright experts said. It’s important to note that IsoHunt and TorrentSpy don’t store any unauthorized movie files on their sites but the search engines are often used to find pirated copies.

The movie industry has seen mixed results from suing individuals for file sharing but continues to clobber BitTorrent search engines.

This can’t come as good news to Gary Fung, chief executive of IsoHunt. His company was among a group of torrent-file search engines, which also included TorrentSpy, accused of copyright infringement in a 2006 lawsuit filed by the MPAA. With TorrentSpy gone, the MPAA can now set its sights on IsoHunt.

The MPAA’s case against IsoHunt is in the U.S. District Court of Central California in Los Angeles, which is perceived by many to be extremely friendly to copyright holders.

But Fung is up against an MPAA legal juggernaut that is playing on its home turf, is fresh off a series of court victories, and has plenty of money. The lobbying group for the six largest movie studios said in a statement on Thursday that it took issue with TorrentSpy’s suggestion earlier this week that it lost on a technicality.

“IsoHunt is located in Canada and has a slightly different set of circumstances than TorrentSpy,” said IsoHunt’s attorney, Ira Rothken, who also represented TorrentSpy. “IsoHunt is waiting for the (judge’s decision) on a motion for summary judgment. The company is looking forward to defending itself and being the first to go to trial in a search-engine case.”

“The demise of TorrentSpy is a clear victory for the content industries,” the MPAA said in its statement, “and sends a clear message to operators of other illegal BitTorrent portals that they will not be allowed to operate in the United States without facing relentless litigation by copyright holders.”

In June, TorrentSpy was ordered by a federal judge to provide the film studios with user information found in the company’s computer RAM. TorrentSpy filed an appeal and argued that data in a computer’s RAM was too temporary to be considered “stored information,” and that it was impractical for companies to produce such material as part of a civil suit.