Some of you with iPhone 3G who updated to iOS 4 and up have noticed how performances have been degraded. The most common symptom is how slow you iPhone 3G becomes. Apple recently said they are looking into it, and in the meanwhile, we provided you with a quick fix that works for many of you.

A frustrated iPhone 3G user asked Steve Jobs about it: Read More

“Slow iPhone 3G? Apple Will Release a Software Update Soon” is an article by the iPhone Download Blog sponsored by the iPhone Store. Feel free to leave a comment or discuss this topic in the forum. For the latest iPhone info, don’t forget to follow me on Twitter.

Apple claimed at its press conference Friday that virtually every competing smartphone faces the same antenna challenges as the iPhone 4, but three of its competitors – HTC, RIM and Nokia – have since stood up and challenged that claim.

Apple used as an example the RIM BlackBerry Bold 9700, saying that holding it a certain way will cause signal degradation just as with the iPhone 4, but RIM’s Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis were quoted by CrackBerry from the following statement:

Apple’s attempt to draw RIM into Apple’s self-made debacle is unacceptable. Apple’s claims about RIM products appear to be deliberate attempts to distort the public’s understanding of an antenna design issue and to deflect attention from Apple’s difficult situation. RIM is a global leader in antenna design and has been successfully designing industry-leading wireless data products with efficient and effective radio performance for over 20 years. During that time, RIM has avoided designs like the one Apple used in the iPhone 4 and instead has used innovative designs which reduce the risk for dropped calls, especially in areas of lower coverage. One thing is for certain, RIM’s customers don’t need to use a case for their BlackBerry smartphone to maintain proper connectivity. Apple clearly made certain design decisions and it should take responsibility for these decisions rather than trying to draw RIM and others into a situation that relates specifically to Apple.

Nokia jumped into the fray too, bragging that it was the pioneer of internal antenna technology, and claiming that it has this all figured out while Apple is just playing the blame game for its foolish design decisions. Here’s its statement.

Antenna design is a complex subject and has been a core competence at Nokia for decades, across hundreds of phone models. Nokia was the pioneer in internal antennas; the Nokia 8810, launched in 1998, was the first commercial phone with this feature.

Nokia has invested thousands of man hours in studying human behavior, including how people hold their phones for calls, music playing, web browsing and so on. As you would expect from a company focused on connecting people, we prioritize antenna performance over physical design if they are ever in conflict.

In general, antenna performance of a mobile device/phone may be affected with a tight grip, depending on how the device is held. That’s why Nokia designs our phones to ensure acceptable performance in all real life cases, for example when the phone is held in either hand. Nokia has invested thousands of man hours in studying how people hold their phones and allows for this in designs, for example by having antennas both at the top and bottom of the phone and by careful selection of materials and their use in the mechanical design.

Finally, HTC – whose Droid Eris was shown by Apple to have the worst signal problems of all during Steve Jobs’ presentation on Friday – decided against a lengthy statement and tried to let the numbers speak for themselves, telling Pocket-lint that only 0.016% of its Droid Eris buyers have called to complain about signal problems. Apple was saying with pride that 0.055% of its customers did the same about the iPhone 4.

Apple’s people surely must have anticipated that they would face a backlash from their competitors when they chose for their press conference the angle that other smartphone companies have the same problems they do, but Apple hasn’t fired back just yet. It may not; Apple’s best interest is to see this story die out in the press as soon as possible.

These Guys Know How to Play the PR Game Too

Many readers of tech news are entertained and fascinated by stories of corporate failure, especially within a company that has had such a long string of successes as of late.

Steve Jobs made that point himself during the hit-and-miss press conference, but it’s not an invalid one. It’s just like politics. A politician is stuck in an unpopular war or a sex scandal, and he or she hosts a press conference or makes a speech to try and change the narrative.

Whatever he or she is pitching has to be really juicy for that to succeed, though, because like the political media, tech blogs are financially incentivized to fuel the most devastating fire they can find.

HTC, RIM and Nokia knew it was in their interests to prevent Apple from having the last word, and they know that what Apple said and did last week wasn’t quite juicy enough to kill the original scandal once and for all.

That said, what do you want to bet that fatigue will kill the story in the end? Is there anything more Apple can say or do? Are any transformational developments possible in the near term? Do people even want to hear about this anymore? We’re very curious about the tech user zeitgeist right now, so let us know in the comments.

Are the search industry’s best days behind it?  The growth in the number of U.S. search queries is slowing down dramatically.  According to the latest numbers from comScore’s qSearch estimates, overall search volume growth slowed down to 7.6 percent in March, 2010 from 10.4 percent growth in February, 2010 and 33.1 percent growth in March, 2009.

Part of the reason for the slowdown is “partly due to challenging comps” which will continue through May, writes Barclays Capital Internet analyst Douglas Anmuth. But the slowdown may also be an indication that the search industry is maturing, and the next leg of growth may not kick in until people start searching on their mobile phones in a significant way (Steve Jobs says that won’t happen) or something else gives people a reason to search even more than they already do. There are only so many searches you can do in a day, and many people are already hitting their saturation point.

Here are the annual growth rates for select months going back a year, which really shows the drop-off:

March, 2009: 33.1%
June, 2009: 21.8%
September, 2009: 17.3%
December, 2009: 16.5%
January, 2010: 12.4%
February, 2010: 10.4%
March, 2010: 7.6%

Even though overall search growth is declining, Bing is still the fastest-growing search engine, with 51 percent growth in March, followed by Google with 10 percent growth. Both our outpacing the market. Yahoo, on the other hand, saw search volume decline 11 percent annually, although it did gain a tenth of a percent share since February. So its declines may be stabilizing.

The table below shows the market share for each of the five largest search engines in the U.S., along with their monthe-over-month and year-over-year changes. Google actually dropped 0.3 percent from February, 2010, while Bing and Yahoo together gained as much.

U.S. Core Search Share, March 2010 (Source: comScore qSearch)

Photo credit: Flickr/Robert Thomson

David Spinks is the Community Manager for Scribnia, where the world’s bloggers and columnists are reviewed by their readers. He also blogs at The Spinks Blog about business, careers and professional communities.

Attention young future professionals: If you’ve heard about this “networking” thing, and dabbled in some social media, it may be time to take your career building efforts to the next level.

Winter break is here, and that extra free time might best be used to solidify your social media presence and start marketing your most important brand: Yourself.

So you have a blog and you’re signed up for Twitter and LinkedIn. What’s next? Here are some ideas.

1. Find a Mentor

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It’s never too early to find a mentor. They can be extremely valuable for a young professional. They can provide everything from tips, to networking opportunities, to a friend that you can turn to with professional problems.

Is there a professional that you’ve been following for a while? If a mentorship isn’t developing naturally for you, here’s a good strategy.

a. Choose five professionals that you look up to.

b. Follow them on Twitter, read their blog and start to comment on all of their posts with as much value as you can gather.

c. Start to connect. Send them messages on Twitter and anywhere else you follow them. Just be yourself and be friendly.

d. If they’re close, ask them if they’d like to grab coffee or lunch. If they agree, continue to build on that relationship and you’ve got yourself a mentor. If they’re not close, send an e-mail. Explain your goals and ask them if they’d be interested in being your mentor.

Some mentors can be more helpful than others depending on the amount of time they have and how strong your relationship is with them. It may take time to build, but the winter break is a good time to plant some seeds.

2. Take Your Blog to the Next Level

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I started my blog over the winter break last year, and it’s been the single most valuable tool for my career. While I’m not in college anymore, I’m using this winter break to take my blog to next level by moving it from WordPress to a hosted WordPress blog, investing a little money into it, and reevaluating my goals.

Think about what you need to do to bring your blog to the next level. Perhaps you can optimize for SEO or redesign your blog for usability purposes. Maybe you should rethink the way you’re producing content and who you’re targeting.

A great way to make a name for yourself is to guest post at other blogs. I actually got my job after being recognized by a company who read a guest post I wrote for another blogger.

Most bloggers will welcome guest posts. If for some reason you can’t find one to write for, there are sites specifically dedicated to helping young professionals get their name out there.

The Next Great Generation is a new site that aims to give Gen Y a voice. They’re always looking for fresh new, and young voices to write for them.

You can also check out Brazen Careerist where your own posts can be featured, or you can write posts specifically for the Brazen community.

3. Review Your Social Media Profiles

Check all the social networks that you’ve joined. All your information should be up to date. Make sure your LinkedIn account shows your recent activity. Go through your connections and followers and be sure to reconnect with anyone you’ve been missing.

Some may advise that everything be consistent across your networks. Personally, I think different networks warrant a different presence. If you’re looking to make everything consistent though, winter break is a good time to do it.

4. Volunteer

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It’s time to get some experience under your belt. Find a local charity and offer to help out in any capacity you’re looking to build a career in. If your goals lie in social media, this is a great opportunity to build an online presence for a non-profit. You can do it part-time so it won’t take up your entire break, and it’s a great resume booster.

Most events and conferences are always looking for volunteers to help run the show. You probably won’t be working the whole time, which means you can spend the rest of it meeting new people.

5. Host or Attend a Tweetup

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When I moved to Philadelphia for a summer, I didn’t know many people there. I hosted a tweetup, and asked a couple of my friends and mentors in Philly to help me promote it. It was a great experience that allowed me to meet a lot of new professionals in the area.

Make sure you do it right though. It doesn’t have to cost you anything and it can be extremely valuable.

If you’re not up to hosting one, you should definitely try to attend some over your break. They’re a great way to network in an informal, fun setting.

More social media resources from Mashable:

- 5 Tips for Building Lasting Online Friendships
– Top 5 Must-Read Social Media Books
– Social Media Can Change The World Through Common Ground
– 5 Ways Social Media Is Changing Our Daily Lives
– How Social Media is Taking the News Local
– The Tao of Tweeting

Images courtesy of iStockphoto, Akirastock, Franck-Boston, CREATISTA

Digg CEO Jay Adelson told FOX Business tonight that ever since rolling out Digg Ads, the social link-sharing service has been making money and that profitability is right around the corner.

Although advertising continues to be the only seemingly reliable model for monetizing content-centric websites, Adelson reports that click-through rates are higher than expected. That being said, typical rates for online advertising are generally abysmal, so if Digg’s ads are working better than most, good for them, and let’s all study their model. Read – and watch – for the rest of the story on how Digg has grown and will continue to expand and monetize.

The FOX interviewer asked Adelson if micropayments were considered as a monetization option, “I think that micropayments is interesting,” he replied. “I think that if it works though – the level that it’s going to work is between somebody like Digg and the newspaper, as opposed to necessarly expecting that consumer to subscribe to some sort of micropayment system.”

This sort of talk would surely come as good news to Rupert Murdoch, who was referenced in the interview and has stated plans to charge search engines – and perhaps aggregators – that index and share snippets of the relevant, timely, and expensive content that traditional news outlets still struggle to integrate with modern Internet-enabled user behavior.

What about selling anonymized, aggregate user data? Adelson says he doesn’t want to sell that information unless users are generally cool with the idea. “I think that users are pretty sensitive now; they’re pretty savvy and they understand the idea that they have to be private.” But data on trends and user attention – data that would be highly valuable for old media to have and that might actually contribute to a better user experience – might be more in line with what Digg execs are willing and able to sell.

And what about the possibility of an IPO? Hold onto your hats, day traders. Adelson says that, while he feels he owes it to investors and employees to “go public at some point,” he’s waiting for two factors: A valuation he likes and the day that Digg needs “hundreds of millions of dollars for something.” In other words, we’re not shaking the quarters out of our piggy banks just yet.

So, what is coming next for Digg? It seems the company is planning to follow in Twitter’s footsteps and release international versions of the site. “About 40% of our traffic comes from international, but we have no other languages on Digg right now, so why not go there,” said Adelson.

Check out the whole interview below:

Watch the latest business video at FOXBusiness.com

From college stadiums to newsrooms to the NFL, the establishment continues to assess how to best deal with social media.

Now, Hollywood execs are moving in on Hollywood talent, imposing restrictions designed to prevent news from leaking out of celebrity Twitter and Facebook accounts.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, studios like Disney and DreamWorks are adding clauses to contracts that forbid talent from sharing confidential information or pre-empting a studio press release via social media sites.

The heart of the issue, reports THR: “Until relatively recently, getting an ill-advised word out to the wider public required a TV camera or a gossip columnist; social media eliminates the middleman and enables an actor to broadcast to millions in an instant.”

Mind you, such confidentiality is already implied in many contracts, but apparently with news being leaked via social media accounts, execs feel that specific clauses are now required. But are they? Assuming they’ll be able to quiet people whose job it is to make headlines seems naive, especially when in most cases, the talent has all the leverage.

And even if Paula Abdul declaring she’s leaving American Idol or Chad Ochocinco telling fans about his team reaching a deal with their first round pick doesn’t allow their respective organizations to put the PR spin they’d like on stories, is it such a big deal? Such events give fans a sense of connection, which makes them more likely to watch TV shows or buy football tickets. After all, we tune in for the talent, not for the executives.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, LPETTET

GigaOm last night already predicted an announcement was forthcoming, but now it’s official: Skype has announced that the beta version of Skype for SIP has been certified as interoperable with Cisco’s Unified Communications 500 Series for Small Business. This will enable SMBs who manage their networking and communications needs with the Cisco solution to communicate more efficiently by directing their outbound calls to mobiles and landlines over Skype’s VoIP service. The integrated solution will also allow employees to receive inbound calls from Skype users (now over 480 million strong according to the release). Earlier this year, similar arrangements were struck by the eBay company with Shoretel and SIPfoundry’s sipXecs platform.

Earlier today, we informed you about Google Chrome Frame, a Google plug-in for Internet Explorer that “seamlessly brings Google Chrome’s open web technologies and speedy JavaScript engine to Internet Explorer.” It seemed logical, but we wondered what would motivate IE users to install it.

Google has a plan for that as well, it seems. Their ace in the hole? None other than Google Wave, the highly anticipated real-time communication platform that will launch to the public next week.

Today, on the Google Wave Developer Blog, the company essentially said this: if you want to use Google Wave, Install the Chrome Frame or drop Microsoft’s browser.

The reason is actually one the company alluded to when they first announced their new communication tool: IE6 doesn’t have JavaScript and HTML5 support to handle Google Wave. Apparently the team tried but is going to give up on providing support for the rival browser. In their words:

“Google Wave depends on strong JS and DOM rendering performance to provide a desktop-like experience in the browser. HTML5′s offline storage and web workers will enable us to add great features without having to compromise on performance. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer, still used by the majority of the Web’s users, has not kept up with such fairly recent developments in Web technology. Compared with other browsers, the JavaScript performance is many times slower and HTML5 support is still far behind. Likewise, the many different versions of IE still in use – each with its own set of CSS quirks and layout limitations – further complicates building rich Web applications.

In the past, the Google Wave team has spent countless hours solely on improving the experience of running Google Wave in Internet Explorer. We could continue in this fashion, but using Google Chrome Frame instead lets us invest all that engineering time in more features for all our users, without leaving Internet Explorer users behind.”

It looks like Google Wave is the reason that Google decided to launch the Chrome Frame. It makes sense for furthering adoption of Chrome while also keeping the Wave as feature-rich as possible. In short: Wave is Google’s newest weapon in the browser wars.

AOL, under new management and with a spinoff IPO on the horizon, continues to fill out its executive ranks.

The newest hire: former Yahoo exec Brad Garlinghouse will join AOL as President of Internet and Mobile Communications. Garlinghouse will report directly to CEO Tim Armstrong.

Garlinghouse will take control of AOL’s mail and instant messaging products. He’ll also head AOL’s Silicon Valley operations in Mountain View and serve as west coast lead for AOL Ventures. Bebo, acquired by AOL in early 2008, is now part of AOL Ventures.

Garlinghouse was most recently an advisor to Silver Lake Partners. Prior to that he spent nearly six years at Yahoo in a variety of executive roles. His last role at Yahoo was SVP Communications and Communities. His team grew Yahoo Mail to the no. 1 mail provider during his tenure, from no. 3 when he arrived at Yahoo.

AOL SVP David Liu was also strongly considered as a candidate for the position, we’ve heard from multiple sources.