Bharara.

A former marketing executive at AT&T pled guilty to insider trading charges after providing sales data for the Apple iPhone and RIM's Blackberry to a so-called expert network, said U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara in a statement.

Alnoor Ebrahim, 57, of Alpharetta, Georgia, pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud and wire fraud. According to a press release, Mr. Ebrahim was paid more than $180,000 between 2008 and 2010 for providing nonpublic information on handset sales to investors. The charge carries a maximum sentence of five years.

The guilty plea comes after Mr. Bharara's office obtained a guilty verdict in the insider trading trial of Rajat Gupta, the former McKinsey & Co. chief executive charged with passing corporate secrets to now-imprisoned hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam.

Mr. Ebrahim's guilty plea marks the government's 63rd insider trading conviction since October 2009.

Updated to correct the number of insider trading convictions obtained by the government in recent years.

According to Carney, Credit Suisse is working letting its bankers use iPhones, Bank of America has begun phasing in the touch-screen smartphones and Wall Street law firm Skadden Arps lets its lawyers expense their iPhones. According to Carney, prospective hires at big banks used to wave their BlackBerries around to show that they would readily glom onto firm culture. Nowadays, though, there's no iPhone stigma.

Carney's report follows a Bloomberg story that said JP Morgan Chase and UBS may allow their employees to access corporate email via iPhone.

JP Morgan and UBS together have more than 280,000 employees. But what's at stake may be larger than that: The BlackBerry may soon be usurped as the standard-issue tool for people who need to be constantly sending and receiving emails. And that's on top of a recent analyst designation of the BlackBerry as "yesterday's phone," a stock price that's fallen 35 percent so far this year and a ban on the device by Saudi Arabia.

Is it possible Jamie Dimon simply got tired of playing Brickbreaker?

Shares of Research In Motion aren't taking the news well. They're down 2.7 percent at $43.82 in late morning trading.

By age 30, the average male iPhone user has had about 10 partners while female iPhone users have had 12. By contrast, BlackBerry users hover around 8 partners and Android users have a mere 6.

Wired also points out that this may be of some comfort to Apple fans in general after the magazine published an article in July that called iPad owners in particular "selfish elites."

We will probably have to just keep waiting for a survey of just how many iPhone owners were involved in creating a survey that indicates iPhone owners have more fun.

Yet despite the seemingly infinite possibilities, a surprising number of iPhone users choose to avoid applications altogether.

 “The iPhone is a communicator for phone, text and email,” said a 53-year-old self-proclaimed “spokesman for the baby boomer generation” who wished to remain anonymous.  “Even the Internet access is just nice to have, not a necessity.”

The sheer number of applications, apparently, can be daunting.  “There are too many apps to choose from,” the baby boomer said.  “It’s a real effort to look at them all and decide what I need.  Besides, many apps seem trivial and offer no value."

Lest you think this aversion is generational, listen to David Klatt, 21, a student who cannot get app-y.  “I end up using one for a day and then get very bored,” he said of non-information apps (i.e., games).  “For information apps, I find it almost just as easy to go to my Internet browser and Google movie times and theaters instead of using a specific app for movies.  The only apps I have are ones that I (a) use a lot, like Facebook, Twitter and Pandora, and (b) run better than if I use an Internet browser.”

Juliette Stanton, a 47-year-old iPhone user who just moved to New York from St. Maarten and was found browsing at the Tekserve store on 23rd Street recently, has yet to download a single app.  “Eventually, I probably will,” she said.  “Maybe some apps [I’ll use], the rest I’ll forget about.”

Ms. Stanton’s stance on the matter directly correlates with a recent study analyzing the download rate and use of iPhone applications conducted by Pinch Media this past February. Research showed that only about 30 percent of application purchases are actually used.  Most iPhone users, like Mr. Klatt, buy an app, use it for a day, and then forget about it.  In fact, only 20 percent of users make use of free applications the day after purchase, and a mere 1 percent use them after 90 days.

Nathan Manley, 30, who has had an iPhone since September, has multiple pages of apps, yet really only uses six or seven regularly.  “I like to download them, try them out, and then I don’t use them again," he said.

And Tekserve employee Anthony Regno, 27, is a longtime iPhone user with a multitude of apps (five pages worth, to be exact) … yet he rarely uses any.  “I mostly use the built-in Apple applications on the main page, so I don’t really use them at all.  Maybe once a month, if at all,”  Mr. Regno said. "People overindulge."

But the question remains: Why bother wasting the time to search for apps if the most likely outcome is that they will go the way of Don Most—forgotten, but not quite gone?

“It's analogous to diners at a restaurant who take a handful of toothpaste-tasting mints before leaving the premises,” offered the baby boomer.  “They don't even like mints, but they’re free.”

Handy! Or, definitely handier than a little maroon booklet filled with restaurant reviews.

The video is a promotion for Zagat’s new mobile phone application, “nru” (pronounced “near you”), the restaurant guide’s first-ever free mobile application (an earlier iPhone app, “Zagat to Go,” costs $9.99). Phones with Google Android can use “nru” now; a new (and free) version of the app will be released for the iPhone 3G S this fall.

Created in partnership with travel site lastminute.com, “nru” offers free access to Zagat ratings and cost estimates for restaurants, clubs and other businesses in more than 75 cities, including New York. Basically, hold up your phone, find out what’s around. Simple and useful. But can Zagat, whose paperback, très ’90s guide is now 30 years old, compete in the mobile marketplace? Sites like Yelp—the free peer-review site—have compiled similar man-on-the-street information and been ahead of the curve on mobile technology (Yelp launched its iPhone app in July 2008, months before Zagat jumped on the iPhone craze), allowing anyone with a Web browser to access their copious number of citizen judgments. A Yelp representative told The Observer that an upcoming version of their iPhone application will have

Facebook Connect and Twitter integration, too. Zagat, still keeping it slightly old-school, currently has no plans for such social media features.

Is lagging behind the hyper-connected, Twittering world costing Zagat?

Ryan Charles, a product manager for Zagat’s Internet and wireless projects, said the Zagat app has “never left” the 10-most-downloaded iPhone apps in the travel-applications category since its launch in November, but wouldn’t give more detailed numbers on Web traffic or download stats. So it’s hard to tell exactly how successful Zagat has been, mobile-ly speaking, so far.

And in fact, Zagat might find “nru” and Zagat to Go gains an edge over other apps, thanks to the crafty “Zagat Recommends” section, which acts like a personal concierge service. The feature has a choose-your-own-adventure feel, asking the user a series of questions so he or she can find the right Zagat-rated restaurant based on whether it’s for a first date (intimate!) or to break up (crowds, please!), or if patrons “have a trust fund” or are those on the more frugal side of dining.

“The important scenarios help you make a dining decision in a much shorter time,” Mr. Charles said. “We give you sort of a quick answer rather than having to scroll through a bunch of reviews to get an idea of a restaurant.”

Plus, it kind of sounds like a game. Given that “Hero of Sparta” was number one in the App Store last we checked, this can only be a good thing for Zagat.

greagan@observer.com

“I’ll sit there and watch the phone ring and be like, ‘UGH! Why are they calling?’” said Ms. Morrison, “99 percent” of whose plans are made via text, email or “BBM” (that’s BlackBerry Messaging for all you Luddites out there). “People definitely get annoyed.”

Doug Murray, 29, of Bushwick, who teaches middle school in the Bronx, has a similar habit. “Most often it takes two or three calls before I’ll call someone back,” said Mr. Murray, who usually emails from his T-Mobile Smartphone whenever he’s in a WiFi hot spot. The casual “catch-up” call, he said, is a thing of the past: “Even on friends’ birthdays, I’ll just send them an email or a text. It sounds pretty lame, but it’s a habit I’ve fallen into.”

Whoever thought we’d miss the cell-phone jerks yapping away on Starbucks lines and crowded intersections from Soho to the Upper West Side? More and more they’ve been replaced by a new and even more off-putting breed of zombielike technophiles; heads slouched downward at their palms; eyes glued to miniature computer screens; thumbs rapidly tapping away on the same devices that would have been pressed up against their ears a year or two ago.

Gabbing is out. These days, it’s straight to voice mail. And even when callers repeatedly dial their closest friends, it’s often not a ring tone they get in return, but a text message—“hey. you call?”—or a 10-word email ending in a phrase like “Sent from my BlackBerry.”

Yes, New Yorkers have come to loathe the act of talking on the phone. Why bother, when they can just type on a tiny touchscreen? It’s so convenient, so effortless—not like having a real conversation in which you actually have to listen and focus and respond. And suddenly people are keeping as much distance between their phones and their mouths as possible.

This sociological shift prompted the following inquiry on a Yahoo! Q&A forum on Nov. 23: “Why don’t people answer their cell phone[s] anymore?”

“I HATE talking on the phone,” wrote one New Yorker (presumably from his phone), within 30 seconds of receiving a reporter’s email asking the same question. “People call me and I text them back.”

“I don’t have a B-Ber or an iPhone and yet I seldom talk on the phone AT ALL,” another, Maureen Flynn, a 26-year-old corporate philanthropy consultant who lives in Queens, chimed in moments later. “I T9 like a champ!” she said of the letter-predicting technology used for quick and easy text-messaging.

STATISTICS CONFIRM that cell phones are getting more love from their owners’ thumbs than their lips. During the first six months of 2008, mobile users in the U.S. sent or received almost 385 billion text messages versus the 295 billion calls that were made from or received on cell phones, according to data from the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association, a trade organization that tracks wireless trends. It was the first time ever that text messages surpassed calls, said Bob Roche, the association’s vice president for research. Emailing and instant messaging from cell phones is also on the rise. In September of this year, 34 million Americans accessed email on their phones, versus 23 million in September of 2007, said Jaimee Steele, a spokeswoman for the digital media research firm ComScore. Likewise, 22 million people IM-ed from their phones this September versus 15 million during the same month a year earlier, according to ComScore’s data.

It seems like the fancier these smart phones become, the less they actually resemble, well … phones.

“We say every day that these are no longer just phones, they’re ‘personal communication devices,’” said David Samberg, a spokesman for Verizon Wireless, which just rolled out its latest BlackBerry, a touchscreen model called the Storm that has received poor reviews thus far. “They’re minicomputers.”

And that is precisely why they appeal to people like 27-year-old Katia Bachko, an assistant editor at the Columbia Journalism Review currently between apartments, who in July made the big leap and bought an iPhone.

Ms. Bachko said the little gizmo has kicked her phone call “avoidance disorder” into high gear. Just ask the friend she saw the other day with whom she hasn’t had more than a “two-sentence” phone conversation in the past three years. Or the guy she recently dated for five months, with whom she spoke on the phone a total of (no joke) one time.

“When I look at my cell phone, I don’t look at it as a way of talking to people,” said Ms. Bachko, speaking from her landline in the CJR offices. “This is just the thing I use for text messaging or to check email.”

Ms. Flynn, the philanthropy consultant, lamented the change.

“When I was in high school it was such a big deal to get my own line and talk for hours upon hours about nothing and everything all at once,” she wrote, “and now I don’t even want to call and ask my friends what bar they’re at because it takes too much effort. Sigh.”

Why don’t people want to talk anymore?

Dalton Conley, chair of the sociology department at N.Y.U., suggested it’s because smart phones enable both our laziness and our A.D.D.

“Texting you can do while you’re doing something else. A verbal conversation requires a lot more focus,” said Professor Conley, whose book Elsewhere, USA, about technology’s impact on daily life, will be out from Pantheon on Jan. 13. “People were doodling in meetings long before there were text messages.”

Of course, that’s not necessarily a good thing.

“The debate is, does this constant texting of short, Twitter-like messages then facilitate in-depth conversation, or does it supplant it?” Professor Conley said. “I think it supplants it. It reduces people’s commitments. It’s easy to just text someone to cancel plans and not have to face hearing their disappointment or frustration.”

That’s why Nicole Ferejohn, a 27-year-old who works on Wall Street and lives in Carroll Gardens, is wary of her brand-new Storm.

One night a few weeks ago, Ms. Ferejohn was hanging out with a group of friends when she realized, after numerous requests for her “BBM name,” that she was the only person of the bunch who didn’t have one. She caved into the pressure and ordered a BlackBerry the following morning.

“I felt like I needed to have it because I didn’t want to be left out, but the fact of the matter is, I’ve held out this long because I don’t want to become one of those people who freaks out if they accidentally leave their phone at home. It makes it too easy, and you lose that effort you have to make with people,” said Ms. Ferejohn, who was drowning her anxieties in a pint of India pale ale at a dimly lit East Village pub one evening a few days before her BlackBerry came in the mail. She took a sip and frowned. “I don’t want this to become the only way we communicate. That would be so sad!”

jpompeo@observer.com

There is a free Lite Edition of 2 Across available in the App Store, an exclusive shop on the iPhone where users can download applications, but the full version costs $5.99 and has been on sale since July. Apple gives its freelance developers 70 percent of the revenue from each download, and Ms. Block has been able to double her income as a graduate student, making as much as $2,000 a day.

“I didn’t really know what I was doing,” Ms. Block told The Observer over the phone. “I just made this application for me so I could take the puzzles with me. But I was really surprised by how many people were downloading it.”

The iPhone platform has become a creative (and sometimes lucrative) playground for developers. Since Apple released the device in June of last year, everyone from Facebook to tiny start-ups and tech freelancers have been developing new applications to take Web sites, services and games on the go. At Apple’s press event last week, CEO Steve Jobs said that users have downloaded more than 100 million applications onto their iPhones. New York seems to be the perfect incubator for application ideas. New Yorkers wait in line a lot (whether for security checkups or Jamba Juice); get bored on the subway; and are simply out of their homes a lot, away from their primary computers. There are endless possibilities for developers to tap into our particularly busy lifestyles.

Daniel Budiac, a Web developer who lives and works in the East Village, created a Web-based application so he and his fiancé could keep track of when his dog, a 4-year-old puggle named Beta, went to the bathroom. They answer two questions, “Did she pee?” and “Did she poo?” and then finish the entry by pressing the “Good girl!” button. A note appears on both of their iPhone screens letting them know when and what Beta did on her last walk, and also posts the updates to the short-form blogging platform Twitter so that they’re both aware of her … bowel movements.

Mr. Budiac told The Observer that the application took an hour to create.

DESIGNING FREE, one-off Web-based applications like Mr. Budiac’s Walk a Dog are usually cakewalks for developers. They just need to make a special Web site designed and scaled for the iPhone, which can then be accessed through Safari, and voilà! But applications like Ms. Block’s 2 Across, which must be downloaded onto the device, are slightly more complicated. Apple is confounding developers further by gagging them from sharing details about their code, which is comparable to a bunch of cooks working on similar recipes for tomato sauce, but not being allowed to discuss their ingredients.

Here’s what happens: Before developers can download the SDK, they have to agree to the terms of a restrictive nondisclosure agreement (NDA), which legally bans them from sharing programming tips, discussing code or asking questions of one another in forums, on blogs or over e-mail.

“There’s a lot of new information to process all at once,” Ms. Block explained over the phone. “You think, you know, how can I make it do this? And if you can’t find it immediately in [Apple’s] documentation, there was nowhere to go. It was impossible to figure it out.”

When Apple released the iPhone, developers were immediately inspired by the new platform. But Apple initially decided to close the platform—they could write applications that would run on the iPhone Web browser, but not applications that could be downloaded onto the device itself. This meant that iPhone users without Internet access—on the subway, say—would not have continuous access to applications.

On March 6 of this year, after an uproar from developers, Apple CEO Steve Jobs stood in the company’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters and announced that the company would open the iPhone to developers and release the SDK. In his signature black turtleneck and baggy jeans, he warned that there would be some restrictions to what Apple would allow into their new App Store (no porn or “malicious” applications) but noted that “we have exactly the same interest as the vast majority of our developers,” he said, “which is to get a ton of apps out there for the iPhone.”

Developers were required to accept the terms of the NDA before they could download the software needed to create applications. NDAs are typically issued in software development when products are in the early stages, to fend off media speculation and competitor copycats. Developers expected to be free of the NDA once Apple released their new version of the iPhone, with the App Store installed, in July. But infamously tight-lipped Apple has kept the restrictions in place and hasn’t explained why.

After several e-mails to Apple, a representative called The Observer and said the company has no comment. “We don’t discuss the NDA,” he said.

But developers certainly are. “Fucking NDA” has become a battle cry on Twitter.

Justin Williams, 25, a developer for Second Gear, created FuckingNDA.com in late July to display his comrades’ frustration with Apple.

The site feeds in Twitter and del.icio.us links that include the phrase “fucking NDA.” Here are just a few of the site’s acerbic “tweets”:

“mdhughes: Sigh. Fucking NDA, no code samples showing use of [REDACTED], and minimal documentation. Thanks, Apple.”

“lieven: Anyone know how to resize an image on [REDACTED] without losing EXIF data? FUCKING NDA!”

“HelgeG: apple, lift the fucking NDA already”

“It hinders me from actually wanting to jump into the iPhone thing full throttle,” Mr. Williams said. “People keep saying, ‘I’m hitting this wall, has anyone ever done this?’ There’s no legit ways for us to fix the problem and ask around for help. I can spend a day working out a problem, and you don’t want to be reinventing the wheel every day, trying to solve it.”

Mr. Williams said he has seen developers discuss coding secrets through Apple’s online developer forums. “I don’t think they’re necessarily spending a lot of time policing this,” he said. “But you don’t want to be the guy they make an example of.”

THIS SUMMER, Julio Barros, a 44-year-old freelance developer who lives in the East Village, organized the New York iPhone Software Developers Meetup through social networking site Meetup.com. He said all the developers have been careful about what they say at the meetings and mostly use it for networking.

He said the developer community is used to being able to ask each other for help in public online forums, and having restrictions makes them feel stifled. “It’s just working alone in the dark a lot. It can truly hamper development.”

“I wish [Apple] would come out and just explain why this is like this,” said FuckingNDA’s Mr. Williams. “A lot more developers would at least understand if maybe it was for trademarking or to patent things. But the fact that they are just staying silent about it doesn’t help.”

Some developers haven’t had much trouble with the NDA and think the community is just overreacting. Joshua Keay, a software developer for Magnetism Studios, said the NDA “hasn’t been a problem for us whatsoever.” They created a few applications for the iPhone, including CityTransit, a downloadable guide to the city’s subway system, and the TileSudoku game.

“Frankly, people like to get all worked up,” Mr. Keay said. “I think Apple is by and large pretty good about the craft and just want greater quality control. People just like to sound off about anything and the Internet, on Twitter, is an easy place to do it.”

Buzz Andersen, a former engineer for Apple who now works as a freelance developer in the Lower East Side, said Apple probably isn’t being malicious against developers—they’re just ignorant. “People in the developer community, they kind of take it for granted that something like this is obvious to Apple,” he explained. “They just don’t really think to communicate with developers or outside people when it would actually be a good thing to defuse a lot of tension. I can honestly believe they would’ve never expected this kind of furor. I could imagine them saying, ‘Well, they’re all competitors competing with each other, so whatever.’

“The good thing about Apple, though,” Mr. Andersen added, “is once something like this really starts to become a problem, they are generally really quick to rectify it. It’s just that sometimes it has to reach a sort of fever pitch in media coverage. Since it’s so secret, the public is not always even aware of what developers can and can’t do with the SDK. So developers can get into this weird situation where reviews on the App Store, people will say, ‘This app would great if only it had this; why doesn’t it do this?’ But it’s weird,” Mr. Andersen said. “They can’t explain the finer reasons and boundaries of something.” Perhaps they just need to respond: “Fucking NDA.”

The release proudly boasts that readers can have "offline reading capabilities, a photo browser with links to the related articles and personalization options for the iPhone and iPod touch models. Available for free at the iPhone Apple Store, the NYTimes iPhone application allows users to take advantage of the advanced capabilities of the iPhone and iPod touch user interface."

It looks like The Times-Apple corporate relationship is only getting closer by the minute. This summer, The Times is switching from the Eudora e-mail system to Microsoft Outlook, which, in the new generation of iPhones, makes the phones capable of running corporate e-mail. And! Every few weeks or so, the Times home page gives up a large amount of real estate to those cute Apple ads.

We noticed back in January when that ad appeared and was told that they'd appear only once a month. Then we noticed it appeared two weeks in a row in March. A spokeswoman told us then: ""While that remains the rule, there is some flexibility regarding timing as this is a test and learn situation."

The new iPhone lets callers surf the net, access iTunes, and do other fun Internet stuff. In political terms, it may also be the gadget the pushes the issue of city- or region-wide access to wifi technology.

If my understanding is correct, the Apple iPhone will work wherever there's cell phone reception, but it really designed to get up to full revs when it's in wifi range.

The Economic Development Corporation is still conducting a feasibility study about whether or not to build a wifi system for the city, something that is already in place in Philadelphia, San Francisco and Albany.

New York City is currently moving to create a wifi system, but it would for use only by the fire and police department.

As internet activist Andrew Raisej likes to say, "We're leading in Broadway, but not with broadband."

In other net news, Hillary Clinton released a statement reaffirming her dedication to Net Neutrality.

In an aptly timed statement, she said, "It is clear that we must continue to build on the innovations brought forth by the Internet. This means ensuring more affordable broadband access and ensuring that there continues to be open, unimpaired and unencumbered Internet access for both its users and content providers."

-- Azi Paybarah