All Articles Tagged iPhone 3G

It’s official, folks, the iPhone 3G is replacing the original iPhone, aka the “iPhone 2G” (which makes the iPhone 1G the… Newton?). Company-owned AT&T store managers received the word today:

Stop selling and Pull all 2G 8GB (sku:69001) and 16GB (sku 69010) iPhones from the shelves and immediately return to AT&T Returns Facility in Fort Worth Texas

Have devices ready for pick up June 13th or Monday June 16th.

…Which means this past week wasn’t just a crazy dream after all, the iPhone 3G is really coming. What’s more interesting: we’re going to have a full month of NO iPhone sales. What’s most interesting: What do you suppose AT&T and Apple are going to do with these returned 1st-gen iPhones?

Heck – let’s have some fun. This is a Wait-a-Thon post. Any comment here gets you entered to win that $100 iTunes gift card. Here’s our guess: those long-lost, landfilled “E.T. The Extra Terrestrial” Atari Games create a sort of blackhole of bad user experiences. Throwing a bunch of iPhones in there would sort of balance that out, no?

What do you think they should do with them?

Thanks to Bla1ze for the tip!

There’s been some chatter here, and in the blogsphere in general, that the iPhone 3G isn’t a compelling enough upgrade for current iPhone users. 3G speed is nice, but not everyone has it in their area. GPS rocks, but Google cell and Skyhook WiFi triangulation is good enough for a lot of location services. And the flush headset jack? Already bought an adapter. So aside from some internals, like rejiggered sensor arrays, better speaker quality, and more radio-friendly plastic back, some just don’t feel like the iPhone 3G brought enough new stuff!

But what if it had? What if it had brought the mother of all firmware updates?

Steve Jobs takes back the stage at WWDC 2008, thanks Scott Forstall and everyone, says how wonderful the SDK looks, goes over all the new features coming to the platform with 2.0, and then reaches into his pocket and says: “But there’s one more thing…” And pulls out something just a little sleeker and blacker backed. “All those 2.0 features, all the enterprise and SDK goodness…” He holds it up and the light flashes against its more tapered sliver bezel. “Are coming EXCLUSIVELY to the new iPhone 3G!”

Boom.

Crazy? Sure. It probably would have broken the internet in half and set off a mountain of protests that would have made the $200 price drop nonsense seem like a molehill. Arguments and counter-arguments would have raged, Apple fanboys would have been split, Apple-haters would have pounced…

But it would have made the iPhone 3G a much more compelling upgrade, wouldn’t it?

Sure, maybe the iPhone 3G we got was somewhere between tweak and evolution on the typical Apple product roadmap, but –

“iPhone 2.0, Available Exclusively on 3G…”

– Would anyone seriously have preferred that?

There have been reports that the iPhone 3G was sporting a third sensor on the face of the phone. Well the details have come out and it’s a…second proximity sensor! Yep, no front-facing camera, just another feature we already had.

I assume you are a little disappointed in the news, but for what it’s worth, the second proximity sensor will provide better accuracy compared to the original iPhone’s one proximity sensor get up. It’s supposed to improve the iPhone’s face proximity detection and well 2 is better than 1 right?

The sensors have also found a new home moving from above the speaker in the original iPhone to the left of the speaker in the iPhone 3G. Also, the three sensors create a J shape as opposed to the single straight line of the original iPhone.

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We mentioned yesterday that the Canadian Government was poised to bring down the DMCA hammer on us humble citizens, handing the reins of power more overtly than ever to Big Media and Big Telco.

Not so, says the Government, listing off ways in which their new bill is mildly less offensive than it’s American progenitor, but I’m struck by what they don’t mention. Will cell phone unlocking, including iPhone 3G unlocking, be made illegal? And what about DVD ripping? Can I not take a movie I pay money for and put it into iTunes so I can watch it on my new iPhone 3G? And why, to balance the rights you’re stripping from Canadians, have you not long ago introduced a bill to prevent GSM monopolies in the telco industry from charging Canadians among the highest prices in the world for data?

How about that?

(Read on for the full text of the Canadian Government’s preemptive email blast)

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In sharp contrast to how the North Americans have started off, the Europeans (yup, including the UK) seem to be handling the whole iPhone 3G “second coming” with a lot more grace and — frankly — customer care. Witness Vodafone on the iPhone in Italy:

The 3G iPhone will be available to both contract customers, based on particularly simple price plans, and to pay-as-you-go users, and will include a wide range of data offerings. By choosing a contract price plan, such as iPhone Vodafone Facile, it will be possible, for example, to have an Apple phone at a particularly attractive price. People preferring a pre-pay plan for private users can buy the 8Gb iPhone for €499 or the 16GB model for €569.

Sure, the unsubsidized option sound expensive (around $750 for people on the left side of the pond) — but at least they’re giving it as an option! (AT&T, Rogers, look and learn!)

Meanwhile, Vodafone’s co-exclusive Italian iPhone 3G carrier, Telecom Italia and Apple have thus far announced the following:

Telecom Italia will be selling the 8GB and 16GB models of iPhone 3G to prepaid and contract customers. Telecom Italia will also be selling iPhone 3G with the “Tutto Compreso” [all included] package tailored to meet customers’ needs.

Hoo doggy. First we thought that we were definitely getting TomTom for the iPhone, giving us 3D, realtime navigation. Then we heard that the iPhone SDK explicitly prohibits just that sort of application. We weren’t worried, though, because TomTom told us we’d get it and we, you know, trusted them.

Whoops.

Turns out TomTom was, like many a GPS manufacturer, “Scared [expletive]-less” by the thought that the new iPhone would have 3G, so when a Reuters reporter asked them about it, they said “sure, we’ll make some software for it. It’ll be grand.” So writes Joel Johnson of BoingBoing Gadgets, adding that an anonymous source within TomTom let them know that there’s no internal development yet and no prototypes either.

Bummer? Bummer. Here’s our worst fear: that line in the SDK agreement is there specifically so that only one company can create turn-by-turn 3D GPS navigation: TeleNav. TeleNav is nice and all, but it costs somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 a month and they have agreements with AT&T that lock down the GPS on many handsets (we’re looking at you, Verizon BlackBerry!) so they can only access the GPS via TeleNav. We at least know that the GPS works in Google Maps, but will Apple really prohibit other companies from using it to make full GPS apps? Are they jonesing for some kickbacks revenue sharing now that they’re not getting that from AT&T anymore?

I should have put this into my post yesterday about the Top 5 Reasons I’m SO Upgrading to the iPhone 3G, but it didn’t completely sink in until just now that this was really an issue for some people. It was that off my radar — but I guess it shouldn’t have been, given this is the blogsphere.

DaringFireball did the math and figured that, even if the iPhone 3G costs some $200 less upfront than it’s 2G ancestor, due to AT&T charging $10 more per month for 3G data, and potentially $5 more for SMS, that works out to $240 or $360 more over the course of the mandatory 2 year (24 month) contract, and ends up making the overall TCO (Total Cost of Ownership/Operation) some $40 to $160 more for the iPhone 3G than the previous generation model.

But here’s the thing. TCO is only one buzz acronym. Another is ROI — Return on Investment. No cell phone at all is cheaper than the iPhone, but what functionality do you give up by not having a mobile device? Dial-up (analogous to 2.5/2.75G EDGE service) is cheaper than broadband (analogous to 3G HSPDA service), but what amount of productivity (not to mention patience!) do you lose to the slower speed? Cell/Wi-Fi “triangulation” is included in the old iPhone, and thus cheaper than the A-GPS in the iPhone 3G, but what features — including new App Store apps — will you lose out on by not having precise location services?

There will always be cheaper. You can probably pick up a great deal on a 486 running Windows 3.1 if you look hard enough. But cheaper is not always better. If it was, that Internet University that keeps spamming everyone would look better on a CV than Harvard, Starbucks would have gone broke long ago, and a Yaris would smoke the Reventon on a straight away!

In the end, you typically get what you pay for, and new usually costs more than old (until newer comes along and continues the cycle). AT&T (and other carriers) are no doubt subsidizing the heck out of the iPhone 3G, and are making that money back via the service plans. That’s their business. Our business is deciding whether the handset that comes with that service is worth what they’re asking for it.

$40 over 2 years for an iPhone 3G? For that investment you get a 3G speed and A-GPS location services (not to mention a flush headphone jack!) return.

TCO be d@mned, that’s a pretty compelling ROI.

Although Rogers Wireless, the GSM monopoly and hence both de facto and exclusive iPhone 3G carrier in Canada has yet to announce rate plans for Apple’s second generation data monster, they have let slip the following in their PR:

Starting July 11, iPhone 3G will sell for $199 for the 8Gb model and $299 for the 16Gb model, on a three-year plan.

That’s right, 3 (three!) big years for the contract as opposed to 2 years in the US, or 18 months and even Pay-as-You-Go in Europe. Who said we were the new world?

We’ve already discussed some of the challenges that previously faced the iPhone in Canada, now we have confirmed release date, confirmed handset price, and all that remains is confirmation on what have been, until now, globally ridiculous data rates.

Come one Rogers. You’ve come this far. Don’t spoil it now with something silly like $100 a month for 1GB. Give us the 3G Unlimited for $30, just like the US.

I’d have more faith, but it’s not like the Canadian government has anything remotely resembling consumer interests at heart, not with their new DMCA — set for introduction today — which includes provisions “Making it illegal to unlock cellphones or copy music from protected CDs to iPods.”

Thanks Antonic for the tip!

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Well now, we told you that TomTom is bringing full-on, real GPS driving to the iPhone, but apparently they’re going to be the exception that makes the rule. Engadget has dug into the developer agreement for the iPhone SDK and came across this little nugget related to what developers can and cannot do with the Location services:

Applications may not be designed or marketed for real time route guidance; automatic or autonomous control of vehicles or aircraft, or other mechanical devices; dispatch or fleet management; or emergency or life-saving purposes.

…While we’re (reticently) on board with the requirement that you can’t make an app that will drive your car for you, the rest seems pretty egregious. No control of ‘mechanical devices?’ Sounds like that sweet iPhone-driven Lego Robot is verboten. No ‘fleet management?’ Sorry UPS, no iPhone for you. The big one, of course, is no ‘route guidance.’ Pish posh, we say, TomTom said they’re coming and we’re guessing they weren’t lying. We have previously said here we were slightly worried that Apple would be overly-stringent about what apps they would let into the App Store — here’s to hoping that rules like these don’t get strictly enforced.

Now that the iPhone 3G has been officially announced and the details have been released, we are holding the first ever: TiPb vs TiPb. In the two articles we will detail reasons why we SHOULD upgrade and why we SHOULDN’T upgrade to the iPhone 3G. No hard feelings, No blood spilled, just good old fashioned point-by-point debate.

My first computer was an Apple II. Sure, I flirted with DOS (KDS 7860!), then had a fling with an Amiga before falling in with Windows 3.1 through Vista (now tucked safely away in a VM). But even in the Dark Days, I had a Mac Performa for a while, and now for the last year, I’m back on Mac full time. I say this to show that I don’t believe in being loyal to company that just sees me as cash. I believe in a company being loyal to me if they want my cash. They have to earn it. And the moment another company, platform, car manufacturer, game system developer, or cola maker does a better, more innovative job earning my cash — they get it.

So, for me, just because Apple released a new iPhone didn’t mean they “had me at 3G”. If they wanted my cash (and my enslavement to a carrier — more on that later), they had to wow me.

And wow me they did.

Read on the top 5 reasons you SO need to upgrade!

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