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Posted Thursday, 10 July 2008
The first reviews of the iPhone 3G are coming in, and they are less than glowing. Two of the reviewers are iPhone users who have been using new 3G models provided by Apple for a while.
Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal likes the iTunes App store and 3G bandwidth, but he did not like the shorter battery life. During one day of testing, his iPhone ran out of power.
Mossberg also notes that the AT&T’s new data plan pricing means that the iPhone 3G is more expensive than its predecessor. His article called Newer, Faster, Cheaper iPhone 3G has a video review, and a good amount of detail.
David Pogue of the New York Times has his review in an article called For iPhone, the ‘New’ is Relative. Pogue seems to agree with Mossberg that current iPhone owners shouldn’t rush to the store for a new iPhone.
There’s still no voice dialing, video recording, copy-and-paste, memory-card slot, Bluetooth stereo audio or phone-to-phone photo sending (MMS).
Upgrading to the iPhone 2.0 firmware will provide access to official applications, along with many of the software tweaks in the 3G model like Microsoft Exchange support. The firmware won’t make an old iPhone use 3G frequencies or upgrade an old unit’s psuedo-GPS, however.
I’m less interested in getting an iPhone now, and more interested in looking at an iPod Touch, the WiFi-only cousin of the iPhone. The Touch won’t make phone calls, but I can buy an old unit and add the iPhone 2.0 firmware for $10, or just buy a new model.
Want to see the insides of an iPhone 3G? iFixIt from New Zealand has posted plenty of pictures. At least the battery is no longer soldered onto the board connections!
Image courtesy of dotmotion through a Creative Commons license.
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Posted Sunday, 29 June 2008
Nokia is buying the 52% of Symbian that it didn’t own, and spinning off the mobile software company into a new entity called the Symbian Foundation. Sony Ericcson, Motorola and NTT DoCoMo are the other partners in a long-needed effort to reunite the various forks of the world’s most popular mobile phone operating system. AT&T, LG, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments. and Vodafone have commited themselves to the new effort. Samsung is also expected to join the foundation. See this article from the Associated Press for more information.
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Posted Saturday, 14 June 2008
The new iPhone 3G cannot be activated using iTunes. Consumers must visit an authorized retailer to activate the phone.
In the USA, that means a trip to the Apple Store or an AT&T store, and not to a gray market retailer or an eBay seller.
The jailbreakers will find ways around this new rule, I’m sure.
Of course, Apple hasn’t announced what will happen if an iPhone 3G isn’t activated within 30 days of sale. The serial number is already on a bar code on the package, so Apple would know when and where each iPhone is sold.
There is a loophole for enterprise customers: corporate accounts can activate iPhones without a trip to a retailer. Every mobile telecom carrier offers similar privileges to their large corporate customers.
Engadget has more details.
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Posted Friday, 13 June 2008
After Monday’s iPhone 3G announcement, the blogosphere is full of opinions. Engadget has a good overview of the new iPhone here. Andrew Dobrow checked the AT&T coverage map for the New York City area and claimed that the 3G coverage was poor. It looks fine to me, as long as you don’t live in central New Jersey. Our 3G coverage on Oahu looks excellent by comparison.
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AT&T 3G coverage for the metroplex
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AT&T 3G coverage for the island of Oahu
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Posted Wednesday, 28 May 2008
Paul Ohm, a law professor at the University of Colorado, is arguing that ISP content filtering is a violation of the Federal Wiretap Statute. That’s a five-year felony sentence for the ISP, and perhaps for any ISP network administrators who actually set up and performed the monitoring, because the statute personal and corporate responsibility.
This seems like a steep price to pay for monitoring traffic, throttling P2P apps and serving up highly targeted advertisements on web pages, but AT&T, Charter and Comcast seem willing to take the risk. Perhaps they are betting on amnesty from President McCain.
Verizon hasn’t implemented content filtering because of the legal issues. Read this article on Wired for more information.
Will video kill broadband?
According to another Wired article, ISPs and telecoms are growing more concerned about IPTV - television over the internet - as a potential showstopper. Content filtering a la Charter and Comcast is a good example of bad blocking by ISPs. Demand for Internet video keeps rising while bandwidth growth hasn’t kept pace.
If ISPs do get to use deep packet inspection (DPI) to insert their own ads in web pages, Google and other web advertisers may retaliate by using SSL to encrypt their web pages. That prevents content filtering, but the cost in the server farm may be worth the effort for Google.
The rank-and-file residential user may not like a slower, encrypted search engine, however. Jakob Nielsen pointed out in this BBC article that Internet users are becoming more aware of latency and search accuracy. Users want faster, more relevant search results so they can go straight to a web page without visiting the target site’s home page first. Users have alredy learned to ignore banner ads, according to Nielsen’s discussion in this 20 June 2007 Wall Street Journal article. Content filtering won’t help matters.
Image courtesy of bryankennedy through a Creative Commons license.
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