Articles by Mike Overbo

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.

Okay, now this is a bit disturbing: XianLi of Hackint0sh.org proved that Apple tracks all stock and weather updates via your iPhone’s IMEI. I have no idea why it would be necessary to track my weather habits, let alone the stocks I’m tracking.

“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.

figure 1: Industry heavyweight Philippe Kahn

Philippe Kahn, founder of Borland, inventor of the camera-phone and a bunch of other stuff, recently predicted the arrival of an iPhone Nano in an interview with Uberpulse during the 6sight conference.

“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.”

figure 1: John Carmack of Id Software

Gamedaily.com recently interviewed John Carmack about a good many things. One of the things that they ended up chatting about was iPhone games, or as one could say, lack thereof. It turns out that Carmack has an iPhone, and would love to write some games for it. Carmack talked to Steve Jobs about it at WWDC, and had followup meetings, and he’s pretty frustrated with the current situation. It’s a great read into one of the brilliant minds of gaming — even if DOOM is a parody of itself nowadays, he’s still one of the pre-eminent names of gaming.

“We’ve certainly been looking at it but Steve Jobs and I have not been seeing really eye to eye on a lot of important issues. We were in a fairly heated argument at the last WWDC [Worldwide Developers Conf.] and we’ve had a few follow-ups. I have an iPhone right now and it’s a platform I would enjoy developing for but Apple is not taking progressive steps in regards to [gaming]. Their strategy seems to be working just fine from a business standpoint, so I’m not going to second guess them and tell them they’re being fools or idiots for not focusing on this.

“The honest truth right now is that Apple’s not exactly hugely supportive of this. When they finally allowed games to be put on the iPod… in many ways it’s one of the worst environments to develop games for. You have to work on an emulator… just all these horrible decisions. I expressed my fears directly to Steve Jobs that some of these mistakes might be carried over to the iPhone, so they’re at least aware of all of them, but they’re not giving any spectacular signs that it’s going to be a big deal for them in the next year.”

February just can’t come soon enough. There are a lot of mobile games that I’d like to be playing, a lot of interesting options available with the iPhone and iPod touch, the sensors, the touchscreen… I just can’t wait. I think a lot of the big name companies will hop over to the iPhone pretty quickly. Even if they don’t like how they have to work, they’ll still be writing games for the iPhone.

Here for your enjoyment is a Saturday Night Live sketch that spoofs Apple’s current iPhone ads. The ad apparently went unaired, perhaps because NBC’s lawyers wouldn’t let them air a sketch that condones punching cops and the use of meth to stay sane. That’s what makes it humor, I suppose. That or they ran out of time.

Here’s a sketch from Mad TV that parodies Feist’s 1234 song and it’s newfound connection to Apple iPods.

figure 1: Bronfman doing the evil fingers thing

Edgar Bronfman (ridiculed previously) actually had some positive things to say about iTunes recently, totally unbidden. He said that the music industry execs “used to fool themselves” and their dismissal of online markets put them “at war with consumers.” I don’t ever take it as a good sign when they refer to possible customers as consumers. But, my guess is that now that Warner is building their new online store, they’ve realized that it’s not as easy as it looks. So here’s my premonition: Warner is probably ripping off the iTunes look and feel left and right with their new music store. That, or they figured it was too hard and they’re scrapping the thing, opting instead to dive wholeheartedly into the iTunes scheme.

Why, that would be the saddest thing in the whole wide world. C’mon folks, he says his XDA is better than the iPhone, and that Windows Mobile will surpass the iPhone’s interface with the next release. Judging from all the typos and missed capitals, he even slipped it past his editor. C’mon, he just wants you to comment.

figure 1: Gene Munster. Gene, I didn’t mean to treat you bad.

The Google mobile phone operating system known as Android has been getting a lot of press lately, and one of the more interesting angles I’ve seen in the past few days is that Android isn’t meant to compete with the Apple iPhone. Gene Munster, an oft-quoted analyst at Piper Jaffray with plenty to say about the iPhone, thinks that the iPhone is aimed at a much higher market than any phones built with Google’s Android.

“We believe Google is working with, not against, Apple in the mobile world.”

They do share a key executive, Eric Schmidt, who sits on the board at Apple and is chief executive at Google. It’s unlikely that the two companies would allow a massive conflict of interest like that. I (unfairly?) made fun of Gene Munster in the past for posting wildly optimistic sales estimates of the iPhone, but he’s probably right about this one. Google’s use of webkit as the browser on Android reinforces Apple, and by the time Android phones are actually released, iPhones will be even farther ahead in terms of features — Android doesn’t even support wi-fi or bluetooth yet. It could easily be that Apple is trying to grab the high-end customers and Android is aiming for everyone else.

It can tough to position a software product with the masses when it doesn’t cost anything. In a lot of people’s minds, this is true: no cost = worthless. But it’s that same quality makes it attractive to handset makers, it allows them to push prices down. Multiple handset makers shipping multiple phones with one operating system (like Windows Mobile) tend to push prices down, since those handset makers compete with each other. If those same handset makers can shop a Google phone to carriers at less cost than they could make a Windows Mobile phone, it becomes attractive to them. It becomes attractive to carriers, since they don’t have to do as much work to brand all of those featurephones with weird RTOS operating systems, they just have to brand Android once, and they don’t have to share their intellectual property with anyone.

If you’re running iTunes 7.5 with an iPhone running 1.1.2, making custom ringtones is drop-dead simple again. All you need to do is download a new copy of MakeiPhoneRingtone and you’re pretty much back in business. The only catch is that you need to edit your AAC files to 40 seconds or less. For that, the makers of the freeware app MakeiPhoneRingtone hope you pick Fission, their not-as-free audio editor. Maybe this is the carrot I was talking about yesterday to get people to think about upgrading to 1.1.2.