iPhone 3G unlocked

According to http://www.dataquest.ch/iphone.html, the iPhone will be sold with or without a subscription in Switzerland.

That's good news. My guess is that Apple did not have a choice than to offer the iPhone unlocked in many countries as otherwise the carriers wouldn't take it.

So the wait is over soon.

The 3G iPhone is here

Apple at WWDC 2008 now announced the widely expected 3G version of the iPhone.
Now everyone says "hurray". Well not really. There are essential things still wrong.

- 3G support is nice but its lacking the Video Call feature.
- It's apparently still locked to operators so you can't travel to another country and put a prepaid SIM in (to be verified shortly).

At least they got the price right this time. And added GPS is nice too. So its a trade off. For me, locking myself to one operator is a no go. I'm operating with lots of SIM cards all the time so I can't use just one. It would ruin all my travel budgets.

Relief

Apple starts giving out SDK keys. After 3 months of waiting, finally there's movement.
I have not got mine yet though but I was allowed to pay for it.

WWDC 2008 Speculations

WWDC is coming up. Everyone expects a 3G iPhone to come up and so far this seems to be a very realistic guess (but with Apple you can never be sure). Some people try to abuse this hype by publishing non existing future products for a not yet existing 3G iPhone. Another funny speculation is  a 3G iPhone with 42Mbps download speed. As nice as so much speed sounds, it's useless for such a device. First: no network supports it today. Second: the CPU can't cope with so much speed (and if it would it would zap the battery in 10 minutes). Third: where you want to put so much data away?  Thats 5.2MBytes per second. You want full HD resolution on your iPhone?Well your screen can't cope with that. And it takes exactly  50 seconds to fill up your 16GB of storage. And I still need to see that fast and affordable flash chips. But I'm sure this one will make it to many newspapers as it sounds so nice. So speculations over speculations and Apple masters it again to make everyone very eager to see what's now the real truth behind why I still have to wait for my SDK developer key. Hopefully they don't just come up with a new MacPro II. Well why not as long as there is "one more thing....".

See you at WWDC.

There's hope for europe

Given Apple Insider says some europeans got their iPhone SDK keys now
(see http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/05/05/phone_sdk_goes_international_t_mobile_on_3g_iphone_in_austria.html)

it seems to be there's hope for the iPhone cracks out there in the 60% hacked market share land.
However the odds are not much better. Having enrolled in the very first hours of the iPhone SDK being available to download (yeah you where able to download 2GB files but you wheren't able to run applications on your 999 € phone with it...), I'm still locked in "You will receive notification of your enrollment status. Enrollment ID: ....". Apparently it is being used to promote WWDC 2008 as everyone hopes to see the 3G version there. Its pure speculation if the 3G version of a iPhone will be announced at WWDC 2008 but it's pretty realistic timing for a 3G version. Could also hold up Apple to release the SDK to a larger public because it could lead to "hints" apple doesn't want to give (but as the US developers are already good in leaking such information, who cares. Everyone knows anyhow, even before its released :-O).

So. time for me to print my t-shirts and check out flights to San Francisco. And to check out who to meet from Apple. Unfortunately there's no company directory so its VERY hard to find the right people. But let's not give up. Apple has been a great company in the past and I'm sure it want to be a great company in the future.

iPhone SDK take 2

Now Apple has posted a new verison of the SDK. So you could think things do improve.
You are wrong. You can't even compile code anymore without having a key.


So nice of Apple locking us out even more. So we can stare once more to the screen saying:

You will receive notification of your enrollment status. Enrollment
ID: YD8P2E58P9


Bummer. I'm sure Bugreport #5827950 #5787381 will has been be closed soon under the category "non americans are potential terrorists. They could invade our iPhones". as duplicate. So no more tracking of the issue *sight*

Apple price politics

Apple no longer charges on a world wide price. Europeans are by far more charged for the same items as Americans.

Today I compared prices of the iPod touch. And they are wooping 51% to 76% more expensive
in Switzerland compared to the US price. Of course you should remove the 7.6% swiss VAT from this and what it would cost to ship it. But at 60% higher prices, it's a public offense to the loyal swiss market.

Hopefully people will react accordingly.


PS: part of the price increase might be caused by the swiss agency of author rights (Suisa) which pushed through a cost on a MP3 player. Its legal to download MP3's. So its legal to have them on your iPod but you are punished by a increased buying price. Its even that odd that its per Megabyte and its different if its flash or HD. A odd story by itself. But I leave it to the judges to use common sense to fix this one day.

When comparing to UK or germany prices, they where stilll 10-25% higher than in USA for the iPod touch. So its not THAT bad but still bad.