O2 to allow iPhone 3G pre-registration; opening at 7:05am on July 11th
AppleInsider appears to back up its own previous report by citing ‘senior O2 retail sources‘ as saying that O2 will allow pre-registration of an iPhone 3G contract in-store from 4th July, enabling customers to simply pick up their handset on launch-day (11th July) having already undergone a credit check and account set-up process.
Those same sources also claim that O2 stores around the UK will be opening at 7:05am - a full three minutes after the original rumour of 7:02am - to service demand. Some commenters speculate the ‘05′ signifies the ‘2′ of ‘O2′ and the ‘3′ of ‘3G’ being added together. Regardless, those are likely to be an anxious three minutes for keen queuers.
Without a bit more detail on the sources it’s difficult to verify this information, and O2 are still keeping tight-lipped on their website. As soon as we know more, you’ll know more.
Amazon bringing MP3 store to UK
Picking up on a report in the Telegraph a few days ago (sorry!), it seems Amazon are making preparations to launch their Amazon MP3 Store in the UK, after previously launching in the US to generally favourable reviews.
In the States, the Amazon store competes head-to-head with iTunes and others and received plaudits for its competitive pricing and DRM-free library - at a time when iTunes was just dipping its feet into DRM-free (but to my memory, after Steve Jobs’ infamous open letter to the music industry).
According to the report, which is a little speculative and should really be taken with a pinch of salt, we may see the Amazon MP3 Store by the end of the year. It will be interesting to see how iTunes stacks up against one of the first genuine competitors to enter the market in some time.
iPhone 3G Pay As You Go pricing announced?
AppleInsider reports on O2’s apparent announcement of its much-anticipated Pay-As-You-Go pricing plans for the forthcoming iPhone 3G, although at the time of writing it seems details have disappeared from the network’s website.
According to the usually-very-reliable news site, the next-generation handset will retail without a monthly call plan and minimum contract for £299.99 for the 8GB model, and £359.99 for the 16GB model.
In keeping with the often-confusing array of ‘add-on’ deals for those who top-up regularly, Pay-As-You-Go iPhone customers will be able to take advantage of various bonus features including free minutes and texts, as well as unlimited data for an initial 6 month period before being required to top-up by an additional amount per month to maintain unlimited data usage.
Read the full details at AppleInsider, and hopefully O2 will reinstate this information on its site asap.
iPhone 3G activations to be offered prior to launch date by O2?
AppleInsider notes with only a small degree of skepticism claims from a ‘visitor to an O2 store’ that the network’s retail stores may start allowing prospective iPhone 3G customers to activate their Pay Monthly plans in advance of the July 11th launch, meaning they can just rock up on the day to obtain the handset and a rapid-fire activation having already been through the credit-check sign-up process.
The unconfirmed report backs up previous speculation that Apple is struggling to get its own retail stores in shape to process account activations in-store, and may instead be forced to offer the iPhone 3G as Pay As You Go-only at launch.
It should be noted that, with a few weeks left until launch, and not much more than an O2 statement and report from someone dropping in to a store to go on, these rumours should probably be taken with at least a few grains of salt. Nevertheless, this approach would take the pressure off O2 retail stores come launch day on July 11th, when they are also rumoured to be throwing the doors open at 7:02 in the morning to allow eager customers to get their hands on the new handset first.
The iPhone 3G rumour-mill is certainly gathering momentum - not long to wait now…
Mac OS X Snow Leopard new features uncovered
What with all the buzz around the iPhone post-WWDC, Mac OS X hasn’t been getting much love here on TWA lately. But now AppleInsider has posted some lesser-acknowledged features in Apple’s forthcoming revision to its current OS, and highlights how these will come into play for users of the next-next-next-generation operating system.
Of the features listed, I’m particularly interested in the expansion of multi-touch functionality across the OS. When Apple debuted the MacBook Air with enhanced touch-pad-based touch control, it felt like a baby-step in the right direction, rather than the giant building-to-building leap of the iPhone. By integrating the touch control frameworks into the OS in a way developers can easily access for their own apps, I’m tremendously excited by the potential for more gesture-based computing, something we’ve long been promised but somehow hasn’t been properly explored until now.
It’s also nice to see a genuine effort to slim down the physical space the OS occupies on a hard drive. Windows has long been the butt of ‘bloatware’ gags, and Microsoft Office even more so, but I have to say in recent years Apple’s own apps have followed the trend for coming in bigger and heavier with every new release. Whilst in theory the exponential increase in storage space available to most users should make this less of a problem, nevertheless my MacBook Pro’s capacious 120Gb hard drive is pretty much full with all those weighty pro apps - although of course a Parallels partition to the tune of 30Gb and a whole bunch of video content doesn’t help either…
Probably my most-looking-forward-to feature, though, has to be the tight Exchange integration coming in Snow Leopard. When Apple first announced licensing ActiveSync for use in the iPhone, the first question that popped into my head was ‘does this mean we can have it on the Mac, too?’ - for, much as it pains me to say so, Exchange is by far and away the most common enterprise set-up in a work environment, and a lack of full integration is one of the biggest barriers to enterprise taking up the Mac platform (that and cost, in my experience).
I’ve happily been running a MBP through work, sitting on a number of shared Windows drives accessed through SMB (still not nearly as tight and quick as I’d like, but perfectly workable) and consigned to Microsoft Office for getting at my Exchange email, calendars and shared folders. Since even Entourage doesn’t fully talk to Exchange, but rather seems to use a number of voodoo-like workarounds to share info with the server, I can’t wait to fire up Mail (finally!) for my email and iCal for my calendar and happily leave Entourage in its dock.
So what about other users? Are you planning to upgrade to Snow Leopard when it comes out? If so, will you expect to pay another £79 for the privilege, or should this one be on Apple? Fire off in the comments.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak interviewed on BBC
The Unofficial Apple Weblog points out a fun 10-minute interview with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, talking all things early-hi-tech. As TUAW notes it’s probably nothing you haven’t read somewhere before if you’re an Apple afficionado, but for those new to the company who want an insight into those early exploratory (and occasionally mercenary) days of widespread personal computing, ‘Woz’ is a great speaker on the subject.
Pay-as-you-go may be only option in Apple retail stores
AppleInsider and Macworld UK both pick up on reports that Apple may be forced to sell the new iPhone 3G in-store on a pay-as-you-go only basis, due to the retail chain’s stores and staff not currently being able to process in-store activations for a credit contract associated with Pay Monthly schemes.
The problem stems from the fact that the previous iteration of the iPhone could be activated at home via iTunes, meaning no credit-check was required at the point of sale. Of course this meant some unhappy customers who got their shiny toy home only to find that they were refused a contract - in the UK, O2 countered this by making certain customers put down a £100 deposit at the point of activation, reimbursed after 3 months of perfect bill-paying. It also meant that the handsets left the store with no guarantee of being legally activated, leaving open the possibility (nay, probability?!) they would be unlocked and either used on another carrier, or sold on to customers not wishing to contract for min. 18 months or even in countries where the handset was not yet supported.
To combat both, Apple has changes its policy (seemingly worldwide) to insist that customers MUST activate in-store, at the point of sale. However as noted above, in something of an oversight, Apple stores are not yet prepped for this process.
The upshot is that if the iPhone 3G went on sale tomorrow, Apple couldn’t offer in-store activation, and would instead have to offer the phone for purchase outright, at an expected retail price of around £350. O2 and Carphone Warehouse, official partners in the UK, are of course fully kitted out to process activations and so will be offering the iPhone 3G on the Pay Monthly tariffs previously announced.
According to an O2 statement, Apple and O2 are working together to make Apple’s retail stores activation-ready as soon as possible - but whether that will be before July 11th remains to be seen.
b.tween 08 Mac invasion
Forgive this mini-post it’s inherent brevity, but I had to share an observation from the floor of this year’s b.tween digital media festival being held in Manchester - an observation I also made at the Thinking Digital conference in Gateshead a few weeks back.
The observation is this: that of the many, many laptops snuggling on delegates’ knees during the run of presentations, the vast majority are Macs. Not just half - I mean really, the vast majority. The number of PC laptops are countable on one hand at times.
What’s the deal? Is the technorati of UK digital media industry more inclined to Apple’s platform? A room full of evangelists smugly parading their wares as some kind of status symbol? I was reassured that all was well with the world when one presenter, a self-confessed ‘Mac illiterate’, tried to open a link from a PowerPoint only for Safari to implode on itself in a blaze of glory. Remember, they’re still just computers, and they still go wrong. (Just not as often…!)
Is the UK the cheapest place to own an iPhone?
Apple has taken a lot of stick over the years for apparently high pricing, particularly in the UK, where products can feel disproportionately expensive when compared to a flat exchange-rate based comparison with their US counterparts. Apple has historically responded by pointing out the additional associated costs with retailing in the UK, most notably the addition of VAT to the published sale price (remember many US states add on sales tax at the point of sale, unlike in the UK where VAT will already be displayed with the RRP).
When the original iPhone came out, it seemed the UK was destined to be second-best once again when it came to pricing. But with the announcement of the iPhone 3G, and with it Apple’s decision to concede to the mobile operators and allow subsidized pricing, long a staple of the UK mobile market, things appear to have changed. Based on the limited information currently available about international operator’s tariffs (many are yet to publish exact details), it appears the UK stacks up very well against a couple of the biggest equivalents, Germany and the US.
At £99 for the basic 8Gb model on the cheapest tariff (£30 per month) over a minimum 18 month term, that works out as a total cost of ownership of just £639 - assuming of course you never incur additional charges for blowing through the admittedly miserly 75 minutes and 125 texts bundled in here.
Even adding an extra £5 a month to the tariff and still paying the £99 up front, your total cost of ownership (TCO) is still only £729, and that tariff bags you a much more realistic 600 minutes and 500 texts. At £45 per month, the phone won’t cost you a dime, and over the lifetime of the contract you’ll spend £810, enjoying 1200 minutes and 500 texts for your troubles.
In Germany on T-Mobile’s tariffs, on the lowest tariff (’Complete S’) you’ll spend approx. £135 to own the phone, and over the 24-month minimum term rack up a TCO of £687. This doesn’t compare too badly with O2, until you see that on this tariff you’ll get just 50 minutes, no inclusive texts, and a 500MB cap on data. In fact to even come close to the bundled minutes and texts O2 offers, you’ll need to take out the Complete XL package, at an equivalent £71 per month, paying a princely 79p for the phone, and racking up a TCO of £1,705 - with 1,000 minutes and 300 texts to play with, plus unlimited data.
In the States it seems there’s still a lot of confusion over tariffs, as AT&T is moving people onto more standard tariffs across its range. From what I could gather, the basic phone price on the cheapest voice + data plans works out at $199 or £102 for the phone up-front, and approx. £31 per month for 450 minutes and 200 texts. Again, you’ll take out a 24-month term, meaning the TCO is a corking £846.
Of course these numbers are skewed by the 18/24-month element of TCO, but even so, it strikes me that for once the UK’s deal is one of the best in the world, even including the States. We’ll continue to keep an eye out as more carriers reveal their tariffs.
Bryan Appleyard: Barack Obama the MacBook Pro?
Those following these humble early days on TWA will probably already detect that amongst my travels on the web, I frequent the BBC’s many and various blogs quite regularly. Imagine my surprise, then, when browsing Justin Webb’s (excellent, by the way) ramblings about all things stateside, I should come across this witty and insightful appraisal of US presidential candidate Barack Obama - the Apple Mac of US politics.
Apparently, Hillary is a Windows laptop - and when you see Bryan’s excellent justifications for this argument, you’ll probably chuckle as much as I did.