It’s been a month since the iPhone 3G launched, and unlike the US and a few other countries, not every country — or every user — got unlimited data with their shiny new wonder toy. Some, like Canada and Sweden gave eleventh hour reprieves, but others remain bass akwards and incredibly stingy/gouging with their data rates to this day.
But regardless of your cap (or even if you have no cap), how much data are you using?
We already told you how to find your iPhone’s usage meter (even if Auntie TUAW rightly points out that it’s rough at best), and you can presumably check your bill for more exact numbers.
Me? Turns out VERY little. I’ve even turned off WiFi (which I have pretty much everywhere from home to work to friends’ houses) for long stretches, and I’ve still only managed to pull about 150MB, far short of the 6GB I really want to hit Rogers with. Then again, I haven’t watched almost any YouTube via 3G, or slammed on the streaming internet radio, so I guess I only really have myself to blame…
How about you? What’s your usage number? Is it more or less than you expected? And if you’re in one of the “countries of dread”, how worried are you about overage charges on that first bill?
Apple’s newly appointed vice president of Internet Services (iTunes, and now App Store and MobileMe), Eddy Cue wastes little time getting his name in the press (at least compared to how long it took Big Media and Apple to get the service in place!). Says Cue, via Apple PR:
“Movie fans in Australia and New Zealand can choose from a great selection of over 700 films for purchase and rent on the iTunes Store. iTunes provides an incredibly easy and fun way for people to discover and enjoy movies, and has quickly become the world’s most popular online movie store with customers renting and purchasing over 50,000 movies everyday.”
No word yet on whether these are 24 hour rentals like in the US, or 48 hours like in Canada and the UK, but presumably HD will remain Apple TV exclusive just like the existing regions. (And it’s not like Apple blessed us with a 720p display — or even 480p — in the iPhone 3G anyway… I’m just saying…)
Any Australians or New Zealanders out there eager to get their movie on? Let us know what you’re buying/renting first!
Before we say anything about the app, Simplify Media, go download it. Like right now. The first 100,000 iPhone users who download Simplify Media will receive it for free. After that, they’ll be charged a cool $3.99. Who doesn’t like a deal? Okay, good.
Simplify Media is an app that uses the desktop version on your Mac or PC to wirelessly stream your iTunes Library to your iPhone. So essentially the storage cap for music on your iPhone is essentially removed. Plus, it also works over EDGE and 3G and you have the option of listening to 30 of your friends’ iTunes Library as well. In other words, Simplify Media is oozing and dripping with potential.
Here’s to hoping you got a chance to be one of the first 100,000 users to download! As soon as we get things running, we at TiPb will let you know how well Simplify Media actually works!
ReadVia
So Dieter wrote up a review of Google Translate’s shiny new, iPhone optimized WebApp, and it intrigued me enough to check it out. Since I live in Montreal, French was the first language I decided to try out. Since I’m damaged and have issues that would make Lucy jack her price up to 50 cents, the very first thing I tried to translate was: “leave me alone.”
And what did Google Translate’s WebApp say “leave me alone” was in French? “leave me alone”. Oui-mais-wha?
Curious, I went from MobileSafari to desktop Safari, and what did translate.google.com tell me? “leave me alone”. German didn’t work either. Spanish and Dutch, however, did.
Kicker: “me dejen solo” from Spanish to French? You guessed it! “leave me alone”.
Well, if I ever get pounced on by our local language police, I can always try to tell them Google says “leave me alone” is perfectly acceptable French!
(For the record, Yahoo! Babel Fish actually offers a translation, if somewhat formally: “laissez-moi seul”)
Is this a known bug? I silent plea for help from an overworked Googler? A strange Babylonian plot? Or just one of many glitches in the system?
Have you run into any crazy Google mistranslations?
Box Office is back. Only it’s been rebranded as Now Playing. Only you can’t find Now Playing in the App Store. But you can find Box Office. In iTunes. But not on the iPhone. Sorta.
Confusing much? We’re right there with you. We figure the name change is messing with the search systems, which will hopefully sort themselves out shortly. In any event…
Rumors have swirled since Apple pulled Box Office a few weeks back, covering everything from the name “Box Office” itself creating trademark issues, to Rotten Tomatoes objecting to their data being scraped, to the “donate” button violating the SDK, to Steve Jobs hating the exact shade of gray used for the inner bevel of the 3rd line down. There doesn’t seem to be any hard info yet on what the real reason was, though developer Cyrus “Metasyntactic” Najmabadi pegs the long (re)turn around time squarely on Apple (via Ars Technica):
I’ve gotten confirmation that they’re working to restore my app on the store, and I got an apology for the length of time it took to respond to me. I’m very happy by this turn of events, and I’m glad that apple will be letting me stay in the store
Najmabadi also promises several more improvements when (and hopefully not if), version 1.3 is released.
Don’t care about the why and what, just want to get it? Hit up the App Store (iTunes link) and let us know how you like it!
Ever miss the good old days of buying an iPhone? Well, you can get one step closer if you’re an AT&T Premier member since you can now order the iPhone 3G online and wait for it to ship to you! The process takes 7-10 business days while a Direct Fulfillment Order made in the brick and mortar stores take around 2 weeks. Combining this method with the recent Best Buy Mobile news, it looks the iPhone 3G is going to be available to a lot more people now.
We at TiPb have always been wondering why the iPhone 3G was never made available through Apple’s and AT&T’s online outlets. Filling out an online form with the necessary information, waiting for the iPhone 3G to arrive in mail, and activating with a ‘last step’ on iTunes seems simple enough to us. But we guess Apple is in the business of the spectacular. Long lines FTW.
Read
Update: Daring Fireball points out that: “The 3G networking glitches may well be real, but it’s worth pointing out that Richard Windsor is the same jackass who issued a report a year ago about the supposedly faulty “film” on the iPhone touchscreen, when in fact there was no such film.”
So add that to the “grain of salt” heap…
Yesterday we asked you if you were having any iPhone 3G network connection problems, and while some of you were fine, many of you were suffering. Well, MacRumors has jumped on the story, providing an interesting perspective (via MSNBC — and yes, the MS stands for Microsoft) on what might be going wrong:
The report said the most likely cause of the 3G problems is defective adjustments between the antenna and an amplifier that captures very weak signals from the antenna.
Hardware would be bad news for Apple and for chipset supplier Infineon whose 3G chipset is now getting a real-world pounding beyond anything they could have given it in the lab. It’s also bad news, of course, for users who’ll be considerably more inconvenienced even if some type of fix is eventually offered. However, Business Week has others sources sticking with the software angle for now:
Apple programmed the Infineon chip to demand a more powerful 3G signal than the iPhone really requires. So if too many people try to make a call or go on the Internet in a given area, some of the devices will decide there’s insufficient power and switch to the slower network.
They go on to say Apple and Infineon are already testing a firmware fix that should be rolled up into a larger update sometime in September (sounds like 2.1 to us). But here’s the question, can 2.1 patches fix flaky chipsets? Can good software overcome bad hardware?
“Hello, Apple? HSBC here. World’s largest company, maybe you’ve heard of us? Good, yeah, we’d like to place an order for the iPhone… How many? How about 200,000 for starters, b’okay?”
Sure, maybe the call won’t go exactly like that, but ZDNet Australia (via MacRumors) is claiming the call may just be coming. Says HSBC’s Australia and New Zealand chief information officer, Brenton Hush:
We are actually reviewing iPhones from a HSBC Group perspective … and when I say that, I mean globally.”
Will the Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corp. really quit the Crackberry for a container truck (or ten) of Cupertino’s finest? Only time will tell, but one thing’s for certain: if RIM honcho Mike Lazaridis was feeling pressure from the iPhone 3G before, this type of rumor must certainly be turning it up a couple gravitational field levels…
Sorry, TiPb lovers in the UK. Actually, sorry TiPb lovers everywhere except the US, Canada, and India: you can’t really follow us on Twitter anymore — at least via SMS. See, Twitter can’t pay those international SMS fees anymore:
In a statement, the company said that when you send one message to Twitter and they send it to ten followers, the users haven’t been charged ten times – and Twitter picked up the costs.
The good news is that Twitter does intend on restoring service with new, country-specific short codes that don’t cost quite as much. In the meantime, best head on over to the App Store and download your favorite Twitter App. Oh, and stick to using it over WiFi, we can’t be held responsible for your data charges for the 2000 (but not 2001) people you’re following. Yeah, as much as we love to complain about AT&T, unlimited data is nice.
Digital Daily brings BOOM!ing word that Apple’s market cap has just exceeded Google’s, at $159.37 vs. $157.56.
Good on Steve Jobs and Apple. And kudos to Valleywag for saying, way back in 2007 that this would happen because “Apple knows how to design not just gadgets, but the businesses that go around them.”
We here at TiPb have been marveling at Apple’s unique 360 degree spherical integration for a while now as well.
We, like pretty much everyone else in the blogosphere, probably can’t help but wonder how Michael “I’d shut down Apple and give the money back to its shareholders” Dell is doing lately? But is all this market cap stuff really anything more than a seriously juicy headline? Any savvy investors reading, please enlighten me on how much more or faster this news, never mind the ever fickle and capricious dice-game that is the current market, will restore our childlike sense of wonder?
