Category: iphone

More Steve Jobs distortion?


iPhone party
Originally uploaded by nobihaya

The blogosphere at the moment is aghast at Apple’s announcement that it will only sell two iPhones per customer at Apple retail stores and purchases are limited to credit or debit cards. The assumed (and trumpeted) reason is to block the resellers and preserve, as much as possible, the $831 Apple is supposed to receive on each AT&T iPhone. Most of this money is apparently lost when and iPhone is unlocked and sold on by a reseller. It doesn’t ring through that Apple would turn down a sale. It is not like the iPhone is like the Xbox, where an expensive device is sold at a loss and the final revenue comes from games that are sold. Apple make profit on every iPhone that is sold. iSippli estimates the 8GB cost US$280.83 of total expense to produce and it currently retails for US$399. (The 4GB model is no longer available)

However, as my skeptic mind is prone, what if the reason given by Apple, while has an element of truth, isn’t the whole reason. My guess is Apple need to limit the sales and try and preserve as much of the AT&T sales as possible because they don’t have enough iPhones to last through the Holiday period to supply both the legit (arguable) AT&T sales and the resellers.

We’ll see.

No Surprises – A day in the Apple


are you a phoner or a podder?
Originally uploaded by nobihaya

Apple have introduced their new line of ‘pods. The high points are a red iPod shuffle (cool), a fatter but shorter iPod nano (smaller?), a stripped down iPhone that is now being called iPod touch with the iPod classic pulling up the rear.

What is interesting, but expected, is the deployment of iPods with WiFi capabilities, with some of the patents that were floating around this is no suprise, but now that it is is moving into the wild it will be very interesting to see what happens next.

As an addendum to the Apple announcement/release I have been running a WiFi enabled phone for 2 months, and war driving like crazy. I live is a fair sized city, Sydney, Australia, WiFi spots, free and paid are few and far between. San Fran may be a different beast in the geeky nerd world but the may be a hole in deployment possibilities on the WiFi front.

Apple / Nokia – Blood in the water


IMG00515.JPG
Originally uploaded by tnkgrl

“Comrades we sail into history”

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to look at a big event before it happened. It is very easy to look into the past and pick out when political or technological change occurred, it is much harder the other way around. However one of those nexus points of history is upon us.

Apple finally has a competitor that can compete with it, Nokia. Apple has all but dominated the mp3/mobile audio space since the launch of the iPod in 2001 (yes that long ago) but recently Steve Jobs and his skivvy wearing brethren had the temerity to move into the mobile phone space with the launch of the iPhone. Apple have been successful because the have made stylish music players never had any competition from the likes of Microsofts Zune or Creative MuVo.

Nokia, however, have been playing the stylish mobile device game even before Apple launched their iPod, they had the express-on covers for the Nokia 5110 that came out in 1998 (and my first mobile) and they knew it was just providing the technology but also the humanity, and they made a lot of money with the 5110 one of the most popular mobile phones ever.

So if you cast your net out on the internet today it should be no surprise that on the same day that there are rumours of Apple launching a wireless iPod and associated wireless iTunes, Nokia have launched their online music website.

Apple has dominated mobile music for a long time and seemed unassailable with the DRM lock in that allowed then to sign up the 5 major labels they did. However following Steve Jobs magic letter on DRM in February there is now a move away from DRM which lowers the barrier for entry for competitors into mobile music.

Nokia has tried and failed to enter different areas of the mobile space it didn’t belong, the N-Gage for example was a miscalculation, (however they have ported N-Gage games into the S60 platform so it wasn’t for nought). However they have maintained their dominance as they are never afraid to learn and adapt to the new models. As Nokia’s Executive VP & General Manager of Multimedia, Anssi Vanjoki ,said, said when images of a Nokia iPhone knock were released “If there is something good in the world then we copy with pride.” Nokia may not win the new mobile internet/music race but by jingo they will give Apple a run for their money if they don’t. Sit back and enjoy the ride.

Trivia night destroyer – wikipedia on the go

In 1951, or so the story goes, the Guinness book of records was conceived when Sir Hugh Beaver realised that there was no reference book available to answer the question which is the fastest game bird in Europe, the golden plover or the grouse?

Nowadays the Guinness book of records has been superseded by wikipedia and the answer to all question current and arcane, “TO THE WIKIPEDIA!” is a cry heard all to often when a polite conversation degrades in to a slagging match. For the record glass is not a very slowly moving liquid and you can’t see the Coriolis effect in a toilet bowl flush (also dropping sugar into a draining sink does not help determine rotation).

However till now to answer a questions of this type required a computer and an internet link. Which meant that in the rarefied environment of Pub Trivia it has thus far been limited to what was been carried around solely in the competitors heads. This is slowly been eroded away, first mobile phones arrived, so you could ring a friend near a computer to get and answer. Then phones became GPRS enabled allowing internet access which will work, but is expensive. These are slowly been replaced by wifi enabled phones, but then this is currently limited as there may be no access point available (the rule rather than the exception in my experience). Thus far, even though the technology exists and has for a while it is patchy, cumbersome or expensive.

So the solution is simple, instead of trying to get to wikipedia over expensive or patchy infrastructure, why not just bring it with you? An enterprising gentlemen, ttsiod, has written a program that allows him to access a local copy of wikipedia on his laptop. No matter where he goes in the world he always has access, albeit to a static version of the people encyclopedia.

Not many people know that you can download the entire contents of wikipedia, it’s current compressed size is 2.9 GB. After hacking around with few open tools ttsiod is able to browse and keyword search his local wikipedia. Admittedly his current implementation isn’t for the faint hearted. However, how long will it take to port to an even more portable device, like the iPhone (with 8 GB of space) or other smart phone, the N95 for example has a microSD slot and disks sizes already up into the 4GB space.

It will only be a matter of time before all that knowledge can be bubbled down and people will be able to carry the font of human knowledge in their pocket. At that point in time any office argument will be solved in seconds and all trivia night questions are a predictive text search away. Can you smell the future? Are you excited? Are you scared?

Update : Imagine no longer, 2 weeks later, the future is here.

iPhone working in Australia

The Sydney Morning Herald is today reporting that the iPhone has been hacked to work on the Telstra network. While this is not a full hack, it can only make calls. It cannot receive calls or send and receive SMS messages.

The hack was reported over the weekend by a user called ozbimmer over on the hackint0sh forum board, link. There was a video posted on YouTube demonstrating the hack, however it has since been pulled by the user.

The hack is not an easy one and it require the user to trick out a AT&T SIM card so that it registers with the Telstra network. Not a task that comes easy to most users but hopefully the first step towards and more user friendly hack.

It may seem strange that Australia is the place where this hack might originate from. However with no release date for the iPhone confirmed in Australia, though 2008 has been mentioned, and the fact that it took over four and a half years for the iTunes store to open it’s virtual doors in Australia I guess ozbimmer wasn’t willing to wait.

It is also some what ironic that Telstra was the network that was hacked, in Feburary of this year Telstra’s operating chief, Greg Winn, was reported in the media of not being impressed with the iPhone, his opinion was summed up with this statement :

“There’s an old saying – stick to your knitting – and Apple is not a mobile phone manufacturer, that’s not their knitting”

Apparently Telstra is the only mobile phone that is currently running the EDGE network, which the iPhone is designed to use and not the more advanced 3G network which Telstra’s competitors, Vodafone, Optus and 3 are already using.

As quoted by CNN

I found a comment I made over on Ed Felten‘s Freedom to Tinker blog about the recent iPhone release been quoted by CNN link. My orignal post has been edited a little bit but I guessing that they at least they there there was some merit in my original comment :

I think that the iPhone will be the game changer that it has been touted as, but it may not necessarily be the winner (Apple isn’t always successful, the newton any one?). If some company comes along with a device that matches the iPhone but doesn’t demand a contract lock in, they could charge ahead and gobble up all the people who are interested in the iPhone but are not Mac zealots enough to accept the current situation.

I don’t know if that now makes me an authority, but it is good to know that know that some one out there is paying attention.

Original Freedom to tinker article.

For the record I recently acquired a Nokia N95 (unfortunately I had to buy it, I did try and drop a few hints around the internet and hoping that Santy or Nokia would hear it, but alas no). I’m still getting a feel for it but there is huge power here already but not as sexy as the iPhone. Nokia have a history of stylish design in the past and they may be able to churn out a iPhone killer.

From Darla Mack Blog :

This is not a paid endorsement from Nokia, however I am interested in any future devices you might produce, give me a call.

To Apple I still can’t wait to get an iPhone in my hand so all is not lost yet, also give me a call.

And finally to CNN I am a noisy windbag that pretty much has an opinion on any thing so feel free to quote me again in the future, you know where I am.

Wireless Apple – Jobs game plan becomes clearer

One of my original posts on this blog was to call Steve Jobs a big fat liar, which I admitted at the time might have been a bit to harsh. However I wasn’t convinced that he had listed all his concerns with DRM and the Apple implementation, Fairplay, in his famous “Thought on Music” letter in February 2007. At first I thought that it was some thing fundamentally wrong with the current released version of Fairplay that Apple engineers knew but had yet to make it into the wild.

However AppleInsider today have a write up about a patent they found filed by Apple in September 2006. detailing a technique for one mobile device communicating with another.

“The mobile devices can then wirelessly transmit data from one mobile device to the other”

The natural extension of this is have iPod and iPhone swapping and sharing information seemlessly. Sounds pretty good (remember back in September 2006 Apple had yet to announce the iPhone)



iphone meet photo ipod, originally uploaded by b. andy andy andy d..

This, I believe, is one of the reasons Steve Jobs wanted iTunes to move away from been forced supplying and maintain DRM files. So far they have been able (barely?) to keep the DRM model working, as long as a computer must to use to download music to the iPod. However if Apple want to put add in the functionality as detailed in the patent, one mobile device pretty much transmitting data ad-hoc to another mobile device, supporting the current DRM gets problematic fast. First they would have to spend time getting it to work, getting two client devices to maintain DRM would be more complicated than the current host/client situation that is used. Then, more than likely, it would be cracked which won’t be as easy to fix as updating iTunes is, which would make Apple look bad. The solution make sure that Apple start moving away before the iPhone is released, Jobs letter on music was one month after the iPhone was announced.

So while Steve Jobs as always is less than honest about his intentions as listed in his letter, this is probably another example of how he is way a head of the game and on the way to making pant loads of even more money.

Mobile Internet – The future


Nokia n95
Originally uploaded by KhE 龙.

Nokia recently released their new mobile, the N95 , which seems to me to be the first in a new wave of mobile devices that will change how we view and use internet. While the phone and the camera is old news (however at 5 megapixels thats not to be sniffed at) it was the addition of GPS and WiFi that got me really thinking, particularly what is going to happen once your computer is mobile, can always access the internet, it always know exactly where it is and is placed in the hands of the masses and no longer the domain of the geeks.

My personal feeling is that mobile internet is the next big thing. I recently traveled around Australia with a WiFi enable PDA and I was surprised by the amount of wireless nodes nearly every where I went. In some places I was able to get free internet access and access content from there.

However one of the biggest stumbling blocks that has yet to be wholly addressed is that screens on mobile devices are going to be small, even with new offerings like the iPhone due at the end of the month toting that the whole front of the phone is the screen. Personally I have found navigating the web as it currently stand clunky. However it internet won’t remain as it is currently, it will change to more effectively fit into this new format.

After I arrived back from my trip with new found wisdom on mobile internet I was surprised to find much blood in the water, both good and bad. First it turns out the the patent trolls are here already and there is a crowd called geomas that is suing verizon claiming to own location based search. They contend that the own the concept of returning search result based on the location of the search. Secondly yahoo have announced a location aware flickr app for mobile devices called Zurfer. It enables to to upload images to flickr taken with a internet enabled, GPS fitted phone and allows people to browse other images taken in the same area. I personally think that this will be huge.

People every now and again talk about a time before PC’s, before e-mail, before google, before youtube, well this is the beginning of mobile internet see you on the other side.