How quickly we’ve reached our 9th podcast! Amazing, simply amazing. Plenty of stuff to talk about in this podcast, and yet somehow we hit our time target. I should be injured from a "light-hearted" and "fun" game of "touch" football and Dieter should quit smoking for every podcast. Wish him success and support by sending us an email at podcast at phonedifferent dot com. Or call us and leave a message, that secretly pleases us more.
We had to up the bitrate again; something is different in how Leopard encodes MP3s or maybe GarageBand is exporting additional noise in Leopard or something — the 1411kbps AIFF file sounds great, the 48kbps/60kbps podcast sounds like garbage. Maybe we’re both just being more finicky about how the podcast sounds, but we’re getting some weird artifacts, both with LAME encoding and iTunes encoding. So, we’re letting this one out at a 80kbps bitrate. We’ve also been storing the art inside the individual MP3s; let us know if it shows up.
PC Magazine readers fingered the iPhone as the top cell phone in the PC Magazine “Trustworthy Tech” yearly bit.
“iPhone owners passionately love their devices. In its first year on the survey, the Apple iPhone scored a stunning 9.1 out of 10 from our readers, beating the ratings that every other phone, from every carrier, in nearly every category, has received in the three years we’ve been including cell phones. The iPhone’s 9.6 scores in music and video playback might have been expected, but its 8.2 for call quality (a score significantly better than average), another 8.2 for coverage, and an 8.0 for earpiece volume show that it’s not just the i our readers like. They love the phone, too.
“In the case of other devices, our readers seem to have settled into slightly cranky resignation. Almost all brands on nearly every carrier rated scores between 7.0 and 7.5 overall, with differentiations coming feature by feature. Check out our online charts for full details.”
Palm fared poorly, especially on Sprint and Verizon (700 series woes, I’d imagine), Windows Mobile does better on voice and PDA functions than BlackBerry but BlackBerry still has some insane satisfaction ratings — they manage to grab an 8.0 overall satisfaction rating on AT&T, for example.
Some highlights from the XLS files:
1.1 points higher than next best overall rating.
tops at text messaging
tops at picture messaging (and MMS isn’t even supported yet!)
1.9 points higher than next best web browsing
2.5 points higher than next best music player
2.5 points higher than next best video player
lowest rate of required repair among smartphones
There is a dark side to the excel file: a black spot, a mote in God’s eye with regards to the scores. When it comes to requiring technical support, the iPhone is merely average. It must be people asking IT for help on how to hack their iPhone.
I don’t know why AT&T dropped the EDGE requirement from the iPhone, but they did. If you want to save $20/month ($240/yr, $480/2 yrs) and skip the EDGE data and go wi-fi only, that’s now your option. Doing so removes your ability to use visual voicemail and your rights to 200 free messages, but you can add a different SMS plan once EDGE is dropped. If I was to drop EDGE, I’d probably drop AT&T too — I’d spend some of that money I’d be saving on breaking my contract and unlocking my iPhone.
“If the passenger with the iPhone would be kind enough to use it to check the weather at our alternate, calculate our fuel burn due to being rerouted around the storms, call the dispatcher to arrange our release, and then make a phone call to the nearest Air Traffic Control center to arrange our timely departure amongst the other aircraft carrying passengers with IPhones, then we will be more than happy to depart. Please ring your call button to advise the Flight Attendant and your fellow passengers when you deem it ready and responsible for this multi-million dollar aircraft and its passengers to safely leave”
The pilot commercial seems to irk no small amount of people, as they can’t tell if the commercial is legit or not. See here for more; here’s the original ad from Apple about Bryce and his delay.
The jailbreak for 1.1.2 is still for the technically inclined and maybe not for the average Joe. But for those of you that are technically inclined, it now works on all platforms: Intel Mac, PowerPC Mac, and Windows. If you’re running 1.1.2, you’ll have to downgrade to 1.1.1 and then jailbreak with jailbreakme.com and perform some steps before you upgrade back to a jailbroken 1.1.2, but it’s possible. You can find the update at conceited software.
Though neither O2 nor Carphone Warehouse have disclosed sales numbers beyond hundreds tens of thousands, O2 CEO Peter Erskine pronounced the iPhone their fastest-selling device ever. EVAR. On top of that, a full two-thirds of the iPhone customers came from other carriers, compared to 40% for AT&T in the U.S.
“As I sit here applying a new layer of Reynolds tin foil to my international hat of conspiracy, its been proven that Apple tracks iPhone usage and tracks IEMI numbers of all their iPhones worldwide. Hidden in the code of the “Stocks” and “Weather” widgets is a string that sends the IMEI of your phone to a specialized URL that Apple collects.”
You can’t get stocks or weather information if you attempt to hide your IMEI. Very interesting; there’s some discussion at slashdot.org as well.
Welcome, dear readers, to another exciting installment of Free Wallpaper Friday, where I pass out free images like candy from a parade float. And this week I’m loading you up with a double does of sugary sweet wallpapers with a Holiday theme. Enough to kill a diabetic.
If you were expecting turkeys and cornucopias, you’re in for disappointment. I prefer more of a Christmas theme because frankly Thanksgiving is rather boring, and I’m sure that, like me, you’d rather stare a colorful Christmas tree on your iPhone screen rather than a Butterball Turkey? Am I right or am I right? Right then.
These aren’t my best submissions, but there are a few good ones to choose from. I’m partial to the snowmen image myself. But I will be rolling out some really magnificent Holiday walls in weeks leading to up Christmas
Download them after the jump. Oh, and…you’re welcome.
“Kahn was also totally gaga about the iPhone and even predicted the coming launch of a smaller version of the iPhone, that he called the “nano”. The Fullpower CEO also said his company was working with most of the CE manufacturing using sensor which I assumes include also Apple!”
I can’t stress the point enough that this is just a rumor; idle speculation at its best. But as I’ve said in our podcast, I have a hard time believing that Apple won’t make an iPhone Nano at some point. They tend to make hardware in two tiers: one for pros and one for ordinary folks.
Iain Grant of Seaboard, a Canadian Market Analyst group, figures that the iPhone has caused precipitous price drops in Canadian data plans. That’s right — the iPhone isn’t out yet, and yet they finger it to be the cause. In June, 1GB worth of data would have cost in excess of $2300 Canadian per month. Then, a string of price cuts over several months occurs. Now the price for 1GB worth of data is $100 Canadian per month on Bell and Telus. Rogers doesn’t have a 1GB plan, but their 1/2 GB plan is now $80 Canadian per month. Like the MacWorld article says: “This price plunge is almost entirely attributable to the expectation that the iPhone is coming.” He also concludes that the delay of the iPhone in Canada is entirely attributable to Rogers’ unwillingness to make their data as cheap as possible, or as Grant puts it, “plans that aren’t ridiculous.”
The iPhone Blog merged with the Phone different site in May of 2008. Both sites were founded on a premise that comes one from one of Apple's old slogans: Think different. The iPhone Blog: for people who dare to phone different.
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