Apologies and news round-up
First of all apologies for being slack on the posting in the last week - I’ve been knee-deep in mud at the V Festival, where anecdotally I’d like to point out I managed to squeeze 4 full days of battery life on my iPhone 3G, albeit through judicious switching-off of 3G, wifi, and a bunch of other things, including the phone itself in the latter couple of days apart from when trying to track friends. Anyhow, I digress.
There’s been a few bits and pieces to catch up on for UK Apple followers, so in no particular order:
iPhone/iPod touch 2.0.2 update available in iTunes
The headline does what is says on the tin. Fire up iTunes, plug in your iPhone or iPod touch of choice, and enjoy bug fixes, plus a possible fix for an apparent problem with calls cutting out on the iPhone 3G.
MobileMe trials extended again from an apologetic Apple
Apologies clearly being the theme for this post, Apple has sent grovelling emails to a host of MobileMe subscribers keeping them on-board with updates on what they’re doing to iron out the bugs in the service. They’re also chucking in another extra 60 days free of charge for early adopters.
Tate Liverpool offers something extra for iPhone & iPod touch users
If you’re heading to the Tate Liverpool to check out the Gustav Klimt exhibition, our friends over at The Unoffical Apple Weblog noticed you can get your art on with added iPhone/iPod touch grooviness as you walk around with a guided tour pushed out over the gallery’s wifi network. If you prefer to have some advanced notice of what your tour will sound like, you can pick it up as a podcast to preload onto your device, and if you’re not yet in the Apple touchscreen club, you can even hire an iPod touch at the venue to take round with you. Sweet.
Real-world iPhone 3G experiences - good or bad?
A post by Ian Hendry over on ZDNet got me thinking about just how well the iPhone 3G delivers against the hype and promise of the past few months.
Shortly after picking up my own iPhone 3G I wrote up some very initial responses, and to be honest I still stand by most of these. The biggest disappointment to arise since then was the bugginess of the OS software, something I had been utterly unprepared-for given the relative solidarity of the original iPhone OS experience. MobileSafari was much more prone to freezing up, third party apps would bail out before even reaching their title screen and dump me back on the home screen, and the GPS I’d loved so much proved to be quite inconsistent, even when tried from the same spot several times in a row.
Thankfully a 2.0.1 maintenance update to the iPhone firmware (available for all users of iPhones and iPod touches on 2.0 software) seems to have ironed out some of these, and general reliability seems improved. So my remaining niggles - battery life probably chief among them - are entirely possible to live with, and as so often with Apple products, I find that the overall experience is so enjoyable I’m actually much more forgiving of the shortcomings than I perhaps should be.
What’s interesting about Ian’s post is that the bulk of his comment is really saying how access to a data connection is the real problem, not the iPhone itself. Essentially the summary is ‘I’d love to show this thing off in the Lake District but I can’t because the signal’s pants’, and I agree - surely these are the times you really want to know where the nearest pub is, what the weather’s going to do etc, as opposed to sitting in your back garden challenging the GPS to spot you again (speaking from experience). So perhaps it’s not where the iPhone doesn’t work, but where mobile networks’ limitations are, and what they could be doing about it.
Anyway, off to press that little ‘locate me’ button one more time, just to see…
iPhone 3G: launch reports
Well, that phone you’ve heard something about recently finally went on general sale today.
At 8:02am I arrived at the O2 store in the Bullring to be greeted by a queue of about 30 people, all in jovial spirits if a little embarrassed to be queuing for a new mobile phone.
By 9:30am, I’d given up on the O2 store since the queue had moved down by about 3 people, and they were already sold out of 16GB models (as, it seemed, had everywhere). Apparently O2’s own customer credit check and account system had buckled under the sheer volume of new requests within minutes of the 8:02 opening, and had ground to a halt that showed no sign of un-halting anytime soon.
Mooching past the Apple retail store in the Bullring, there was a healthy queue of new iPhone customers being cajoled by friendly Apple staff - but since they couldn’t offer upgrades to existing users, and anyway I had like a job to go to and everything, I had to walk on.
However, on passing the local Carphone Warehouse, where there was no queue evident (apparently there had been a queue when they opened but the staff had managed to deal with most of the demand within an hour), I dropped in - and five minutes later the staff had all the details they needed from me to process the request. Apparently for new customers CW had almost instantly reverted to its own credit check system to short-cut around O2’s crumbling servers, but sadly for upgrade customers there was no way around the network’s system, so instead I had my 8GB handset put aside to pick up later once the check had gone through.
An hour or so later I got the call and took an early lunch to go pick the thing up. Again the staff were incredibly helpful, fast, efficient, and am now the proud owner of an iPhone 3G (with next-to-no 3G coverage where I work - ut oh…!!!).
How did you get on - manage to bag one? Even better, manage to bag the gold dust-like 16GB model? Sound off in the comments!
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.