The Liquid Submersion Indicator is very accurate in determining whether liquid has entered the iPhone or iPod. The indicator will turn red or pink when the device has been exposed to enough moisture to cause irreparable damage to the device.

You can tell if the Liquid Submersion Indicator has been triggered by looking directly down into the headphone jack. Either use a lighted magnifying glass, or angle the iPhone or iPod so light shines down the headphone jack. At the base of the headphone jack, you should see what is normally a white dot. Half of the dot becomes red (or a pinkish color) when the device has been submerged in liquid. iPhone 3G models also have an Liquid Submersion Indicator located on the bottom of the connector housing, just under the 30-Pin dock connector. To view the indicator, use a lighted magnifying glass and hold the iPhone 3G so that you can view the bottom, center of the dock connector housing.  A full red dot will appear if the indicator has been triggered.

EXPARTE STAFFING, one of New York’s most innovative legal staffing firms, unveiled BILLBULL this week, a powerful new timekeeping program that allows professionals to maintain multiple timesheets in a convenient and easy way.

BILLBULL is available exclusively through iTunes for $3.99. Users purchase the program in the same way as music downloads, and then synch it with the iPhone.

Once downloaded, you can immediately keep track of your time using your existing contact list on the phone or add new client information. When you’re ready to use the app BILLBULL presents a list of clients to choose from, each of which have the option of selecting specific tasks. Once the start button is clicked, BILLBULL begins to time the specific work done for each client.

“Exparte Staffing was one of the first agencies to go paperless for timekeeping,” says Alon Karpman, founder and president of Exparte. “All of our employees clock in and out online. This experience has given us insight on how to develop timekeeping software that professionals can use day to day.”
Users can also add notes to each field if necessary, or even manually log hours. BILLBULL keeps timesheet management concise and organized, and once completed the timesheet can be e-mailed to company or personal accounts.

With 3G, a digital compass, GPS, and Wi-Fi also coming along for the ride, the phone is being marketed first and foremost as a social networking device which is constantly aware of where it is and what’s happening with its owner’s friends. The home screen appropriately has a new interface with widgets that supply an at-a-glance view of contacts from Facebook and other services.

It also includes a full HTML web browser with Adobe Flash, cut-and-paste text, video recording, and options for a removable battery and storage that are either already in place or missing from certain rivals, Nokia says. Apple’s patents nonetheless prevent it from using multi-touch.

I guess it was really just a matter of time until it happened, but thanks to PlanetBeing, an industrious member of the iPhone Dev Team, Linux is running on an iPhone. The port is of the Linux 2.6 kernel and can run on first and second generation iPhones as well as the first generation iPod touch. PlanetBeing details his Linux port on his blog, making sure to note that the Linux project is separate from the iPhone Dev Team project.

Currently the Linux port is fairly incomplete. The framebuffer driver, serial driver, serial over USB driver, and drivers for interrupts and other miscellaneous components have been successfully ported over. Read-only support for the NAND memory is coming along also, but there are a number of components still not running, including write-support for NAND memory, baseband chip support, and support for many iPhone features such as the touch screen, accelerometer, sound, and wireless networking.

Currently the port is possible through the iPhone attached to a computer with USB keyboard so it isn’t a fully portable Linux port yet. Hopefully future updates will find a way to use a touch pad keyboard. But even in an incomplete state, it is very promising to see a version of Linux running on iPhone, and an indication that a more complete port will be coming in the future.

Users of iTunes can see what the top ten paid and free apps were for the five months that the App Store has been open. There are also further break downs for games, entertainment, utilities, social networking and music apps.

It’s a nice list to have because it captures a larger picture of what was popular this year. It doesn’t however give exact rankings or a sense of how much more popular one top-ten app was compared to another. And I’m not quite sure if this is all sales driven or if Apple also is putting in some of its favorite apps

Apple’s legal effort to remove the source code and related Web pages that could create iTunes-like software from the Internet appears to have failed.

The company succeeded last month in removing information about the project from the public BluWiki.com site by claiming that the posted code violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Is it Me? Or does the Itouch drop its internet connection every 5 minutes for everyone?