Saturday, September 22, 2007
iPhone Carried Across Pond.★
Because things are so crazy hectic, all we've done on the MacTake are drafts for posts. That means we haven't actually posted anything, so I'm just going to post this overly pessimistic draft to try and pretend we've actually accomplished something here. Bear with us, university application stuff will be over soon.
The post below this one outlined the basics of the UK iPhone release, and we view them with mixed feelings here at the MacTake. We'll admit that the cost of the iPhone itself (£269) is on target, but we can't happily accept the cost of the contract for the phone (£35 per month entry level). To be fair, we always complain about the cost, it's just what we do.
An 18 month contract is far too long, especially since the features offered are definitely sub-standard. You get free access to all the 7500 Cloud wifi hotspots, but other than that you're limited to EDGE access instead of 3G. I don't want to pay £35 a month and only get EDGE access when I'm not near a cloud access point, as well as only getting 200 minutes a month.
When you go to pick up an iPhone in the UK (Assuming you even want to buy one), you'll have to fork up £269 for the phone, and then £630 for the contract. Altogether that's £899. The advanced technology is in the phone, the most advanced thing available in the contract is visual voicemail.
I have a feeling that phone unlocking shops will soon be handling iPhones on a daily basis.
The whining over, I'm happy to see that the iPhone made it across the pond at all. If the contract price drops, or even just includes more features, I'll pick an iPhone up. Till then, my RAZR is a lot smaller, a lot cheaper, and a lot easier to stick in my pocket. Plus all the assassins carried the exact model I have in the Bourne Ultimatum movie.
★ 0 Comments. | By Skippy, Saturday, September 22, 2007 8:57 AM
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
UK iPhone details★
To nobody's great surprise, Apple's press conference today was indeed about the UK iPhone release. First, just the plain facts:- The iPhone is to be released Nov. 9 in the UK
- It will cost £269 for the 8GB model
- It will be available on the O2 network, using EDGE (not 3G) for internet access
- 18-month contracts will be available, ranging for £35 - 55 per month
- It will be sold by Apple themselves, O2 and Carphone Warehouse
- Similar announcements are expected to occur shortly for the rest of Europe
We'll have a more in depth analysis of these facts tomorrow, along with our individual opinions. In the meantime, you can find more here.
Labels: alasdair, iPhone, news
★ 0 Comments. | By Alasdair Corbett, Tuesday, September 18, 2007 10:14 PM
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Apple press conference announced for September 18★
Apple has invited members of the British media to a press conference in the London Apple Store on the 18th of September (next Tuesday). All anyone knows about it is that the invites bore the words "mum is no longer the word".The rather cryptic phrase is generally being taken as an indication that Apple is ending its long silence on UK (and European) iPhone launch details. Nothing else seems to fit the bill of being very important, very secretive and justifying the hype.
We'll update more when the news appears.
With any luck, it'll get delayed to the day after, thus increasing the chances of Steve Jobs saying "arrr, mehearties!". We here at the MacTake deem this "unlikely, but awesome".
More details can be found here.
★ 0 Comments. | By Alasdair Corbett, Thursday, September 13, 2007 4:58 PM
Sunday, September 9, 2007
Apple loyal as ever to customers.★
Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Inc. published an open letter to iPhone users attempting to calm the disquiet that followed Apple's decision to drop the price of the 8GB iPhone by $200USD. Users who bought the iPhone before the price drop, will receive a $100 store credit - as long as they haven't already received any sort of rebate, etc.This sort of gesture is generally viewed as completely unnecessary by the rest of the industry (minus exceptions like Microsoft's loyalty to its 360 buyers), but really strikes an underestimated chord with consumers. Apple has done right by us, as its customers once again, and as always, demonstrated that loyalty is fostered only by example.
★ 0 Comments. | By Skippy, Sunday, September 9, 2007 6:20 PM
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
New iPods and iPhone price reduction★
This is just a brief post to mention that we're aware of the redesigned iPod line. These include a new Nano, a Classic version and an iPhone-esque Touch version. Follow the link or browse the newly-updated Apple Store for more details.There have also been some pricing reshuffles for the iPhone, which obviously only apply to the US.
We'll have more tomorrow after we've more thoroughly read and analysed the news. Just thought I'd let you know that we are keeping track of this sort of thing.
Oh, and a friend of mine has just coined the term "iPhod" for the Touch. Expect to read that a lot around here.
Labels: alasdair, iPhone, ipod, news
★ 0 Comments. | By Alasdair Corbett, Wednesday, September 5, 2007 9:59 PM
Monday, August 27, 2007
iPhone Updates + Unlockification★
It seems that Apple's latest update for the iPhone has made many of its users very happy indeed. Among this list of unspecified bug fixes was a wifi and camera patch. Apparently now the wifi reception range of the iPhone has greatly increased, and the camera no longer blurifies moving objects. (Source).Yes I love my crappy non-existent verbs use, don't you?
Also a team of dedicated do no gooders claim they have found the end to AT&T goodness on the iPhone. They reckon that they even managed to unlock the phone with a software driven service, no hardware meddling for them! (Site).
Now I think Apple is mighty unhappy about this, well actually I think Apple couldn't care less but AT&T are mighty unhappy about this, and they're directing their unhappiness at Apple. You know: why didn't you make the phone more unlockification proof? Geez Steve, we spent all this money ripping you and everyone else off and you didn't even make the phone like um, more magic!
Not that anyone at AT&T would have coined my new term (just yet). Unlockification is hereby taking its first few steps* out into the wild west of the intertubes.
So my advice would be that if you are using this unlockification service: change your name, dye your hair, cut your hair, get a tan / lose your tan, leave the country, and stay far away from Cupertino, before Steve Jobs co-releases with AT&T, the iKill.
All humor aside, its an interesting achievement and if I was standing next to the guys who did it, I'd hi-five them for sure.
* Official first few steps anyway...
Note:
This post lives in 132 Diminishing-Ability Drive, Spelling-Mistake Land.
★ 0 Comments. | By Skippy, Monday, August 27, 2007 10:07 AM
Friday, August 17, 2007
Class-action suit filed over iPhone batteries★
I rarely post here but since I do have the ability to do so, I thought I would bring this little nugget of information to your attention.As you may well know, iPhones, like iPods, do not have user serviceable batteries and thus must be sent off to Apple in order to have batteries replaced should they fail. This fact was not made obvious, or available before purchase, to consumers who managed to nab an iPhone on the day they were released.
A lawsuit, apparently the second of two so far, has been levelled against Apple for failing to inform consumers of this potential expense, on the basis that the iPhone battery will die completely after 300 charges, forcing users to replace it, and pay Apple $86, once a year.
According to official documentation and Apple's response to the first class-action suit, the iPhone battery should last between 300 and 400 charges at full capacity before slowly diminishing. This is pretty much what batteries do.
However, without getting into the legal details and the responses, one thing about this struck me as very odd. Let's do some maths.
iPhone release date: 29 June 2007
Current date*: 17 August 2007
Number of days the iPhone has been available: 50
50 * 24 = 1200 hours since release
Minimum battery capacity on iPhone: 6 hours (while web browsing)
Charges after which the iPhone battery will allegedly fail: 300
300 * 6 = 1800 hours usage time needed
So to summarise, the plaintiffs here would need to have been browsing the web for 1800 hours since the iPhones launch. 1200 hours ago. And that's not even counting the time it would take to charge, or the problems with the case filed in July.
The only possible conclusion here is that these people have been using their iPhones while travelling at a significant fraction of the speed of light. As far as we at the MacTake are aware, this is not a documented feature of the iPhone but it's possible that these people were beta-testing new firmware that adds travel functionality at relativistic speeds. If this is indeed the case we're sure that Apple will have worked out the problems that this causes with the battery by the time they release the "iWarp" app.
You can read more here.
*used for simplicity, since I don't know when the suit was filed
Labels: alasdair, iPhone, news
★ 0 Comments. | By Alasdair Corbett, Friday, August 17, 2007 7:08 PM
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Safari Update and YouTube on iPhone★
Apple has released a security update for Safari 3 Beta. Worth downloading if you ask me, but bear in mind you'll need to restart. Get this by clicking on the Apple menu, and then Software Update...Also, looks like there will be YouTube content on the iPhone. Don't quite know how it's going to work considering the internet speed, but we'll have to wait and see!
Check out www.apple.com/startpage for information on that.
★ 0 Comments. | By Skippy, Saturday, June 23, 2007 9:38 PM
Saturday, May 19, 2007
It all started with an email...★
Since Skippy's off studying for his Biology exam (good luck with that, by the way, though another biology-studying friend of mine tells me that he could simply send a cardboard cut-out in his place and comfortably get a B), I shall be blogging about this little oddity.If any of you regularly read Engadget you may have spotted this story (since edited) a few days ago. It concerned delays of several months in the release of both OS X Leopard and the iPhone, information which was leaked to Engadget (and subsequently other websites) by a trusted source within the company, who was able to forward them a memo sent on Apple's own internal email system.
Less than two hours later, a retraction was sent around to Apple employees which claimed that the previous memo was entirely false and that both products were well on the way to meeting their already announced launch date. This email also found its way out into the big wide world but in the meantime, Engadget had already posted the juicy and seemingly reliable story.
Even as Engadget, a trustworthy site who made an understandable error, rushed to edit the previous post and later issue a separate one explaining in full what had happened, the rumours made their way around the internet, as so often happens. Other than adding fuel to fanboy flames on all sides, this simple little non-fact was enough to cause Apple shares to fall by $4 billion (source).
Of course, once the truth was revealed, the stock rapidly recovered but both Engadget and Apple have taken hits to their credibility over this whole episode. While leaks in organisations the size and prominence of Apple are to be expected, the last few days at Apple HQ have no doubt been spent trying to find out exactly who got into their internal email system and how they did it. As for why? Perhaps it was a disgruntled former employee or an equally disgruntled soon-to-be-former employee. We may never know and Apple, having hopefully put the story to rest, will be in no hurry to stir it up again.
More if it appears over the next couple of days and for those of you who don't read Engadget, I highly recommend that you start. Other than this blip, it's an excellent site with experienced and dedicated journalists who know what they're talking about.
Labels: iPhone, OS X Leopard, rumours
★ 0 Comments. | By Alasdair Corbett, Saturday, May 19, 2007 5:28 PM
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
New iPhone Teaser Ad★
Apple have released a new iPhone teaser ad, featuring clips from a selection of films in which someone is holding a telephone and saying the equivalent of 'Hello'.
You can check this ad out at:
http://www.apple.com/iphone/hello/
Interesting to note that the word iPhone isn't anywhere in the ad, and the phone still seems to be set to come out in June. We do get a nice view of the iPhone's back though.
Note as well that Apple doesn't seem to have made any progress with their FCC approval yet, but I'm sure its in the works.
★ 0 Comments. | By Skippy, Tuesday, February 27, 2007 6:41 PM
