In a not so strange twist of events, Motorola ended up suing its former employee, Michael Fenger who is currently working at Apple. Michael Fenger was a Motorola executive until March and his job description involved among other things knowing Motorola’s business practice and policies for the Europe, Middle East and Africa regions.
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Now I am not saying there’s not enough color into your 3G iPhone. On the contrary. The touchscreen has been updated to show better looking color effects than its predecessor. I am saying you might want to change its appearance. After all there are over 1 million owners that carry a black or white version of the 3G handset. Why not color yours differently.
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It’s our favorite carrier AT&T announcing again they are offering free WiFi access to iPhone users. They have been doing that through May if you remember. Now it was on, later it was off, then tomorrow back on. Lots of announcements and retractions from AT&T officials. It’s like crying wolf all the time.
Well AT&T is crying wolf again. They say that over 17,000 hot spot locations in the USA will offer free internet connectivity to iPhone users in the area. Including Starbucks.
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We’ve read numerous reports about various carriers going out of iPhones around the globe. Most of them come from the USA where lots of AT&T stores are waiting for new Apple shipments to arrive. Don’t be surprised if AT&T personnel will greet you this way:

Welcome to the new AT&T, we’re currently out of iPhones, how can I help you?

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We’re searching here and there for unlocked 3G iPhones options for you, while we are waiting for the Pwnage Tool 2.0 from iPhone Dev Team to be completed. Everyone is surprised how fast they managed to develop the software for unlocking and jailbreaking the new iPhone. Well bad news everyone. It appears there are some problems with the whole unlocking thing.
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Like everyone else you probably want an unlocked, possible jailbroken 3G iPhone don’t you? And for the subsidized price right? Well you can either wait for iPhone Dev Team’s Pwnage Tool 2.0 to be released to manually hack your iPhone or you can head to France and order a prepaid 3G iPhone. Sure the price isn’t that great but at least you won’t be tied to a 2 year agreement.
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The 3G iPhone was expected to sell well and it did. Despite activation problems and stock depletions lines were constant at AT&T and Apple stores. People bought 8GB models but they were happy to get a 16GB version if nothing else was available. The same thing happened abroad. While most news covered the US situation, other countries played by the same scenarios. In three days the 3G iPhone sold worldwide. Over 1 million handsets were sold and the App Store had about 10 million application downloads in the same period. So how much money did Apple make in the first three iPhone days?
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Replacing the .Mac with the new MobileMe was something people were anxiously waiting for. And the transition wasn’t smooth at all. As you can see in the Apple apology above, they recognize the MobileMe mess and categorize it as “a lot rockier than hoped”.
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Since the 3G iPhone was officially released on June 9th at the WWDC, people have been estimating what it costs to make, how much Apple will profit from each handset sold, how much AT&T is going to pay Apple for the subsidy. A new number regarding the bill of materials for the 3G iPhone has surfaced. It appears it costs just $174.33 to manufacture.

That means that Apple actually saved a little over $50 from what they used to pay for the former version. And all despite the inclusion of 3G and GPS chips. iSuppli, a reasearch company has reached to this conclusion. Excluding marketing and research, an iPhone costs $174.33 to make.

Lowering the bill of materials, Apple also managed to lower the retail price. Andrew Rassweller iSuppli principal analyst says:

iSuppli believes Apple aimed for a more cost-effective design for the 3G iPhone compared to the 2G, in order to lower the retail price, which will allow the company to seed adoption and to capture maximum market share now—while the company still has buzz and a perceived differentiation relative to its competitors.

Apple kept many of the initial parts and redesigned the main board. They have also included an unsoldered battery, easier and cheaper to replace. Apple has worked also on making the iPhone worldwide compatible. The Infineon chipset adds WCDMA support for countries like Japan or Korea.

Keeping all that in mind it seems that Apple is getting a 55% profit margin before marketing and software costs. And they just sold 1 million of these devices. I bet other manufacturers are biting their nails while hoping they’ll be able to create a similar best seller.

We thought the iPhone 3G will be unlocked, but within a week of its release and in Brazil, where it isn’t even available yet, that’s something we didn’t expect. Seems like Brazilian company, DesbloqueioBr, has managed to do away with the chains giving users a chance to have a go on other carriers and it has a video to prove it. Just a simple firmware alteration and a special SIM card add-on should do the trick, according to the company, albeit with a drop in connection quality. But don’t expect it to come cheap as DesbloqueioBr is thinking of snatching up to 375 of your greens before you go scotfree with your second-gen iPhone. Time to rev up your engines and push that firmware update out soon Apple!
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Greg Joswiak is Apple’s vice president of Hardware Product Marketing. He must be a smart man, to get to that position right? In an interview with him on launch day, some simple and common issues about the iPhone have been raised. One of the issues discussed was the copy paste function.

And since Greg Joswiak is a smart man we were expecting some smart answers from him. But here’s how iPhone’s copy paste function was explained. Or should I better say the missing iPhone function?

Apparently copy paste is either a really complicated feature either a very unimportant one. Mr. Joswiak said that this feature wasn’t a top priority with “other things to be more important”. Sure I mean why not? We’ll wait one more year for the next generation of iPhones, the CopyPaste 3G iPhone.

I imagine what really happened. Why the guys in R&D were working on the last feature to be added, the copy paste thing, someone rushed into the lab. Mr. Joswiak started kicking and screaming about how “Mr. Jobs is already on the stage bullshitting people about the MobileMe application and he really needs an iPhone device in his hand and a presentation behind him up and running. Just leave the copy paste function out! Now!”. These events took place evidently on the 9th of June of course.

Getting back to reality we should really be in awe. I mean, no matter what flaws the iPhone obviously still has, Apple has sold a whole million of them by Sunday. Surely copy paste will come to us eventually.

In case you are the proud owner of one two three 3G iPhone then you might be really lucky. But not everyone qualifies for an iPhone upgrade from AT&T and that’s when Freeiphoneswap.com can help.
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Well the App Store is a genuine success. For every iPhone 3G phone, at least 10 applications have been downloaded. Some are free, some cost anywhere from under a dollar to the maximum $10. And there’s something for everyone inside.

The App Store started out with a little over 500 applications out of which about 125 were free of charge. Now they have more than 800 applications available with 200 of them being free of charge.

Although I said 1 iPhone for 10 applications or more, let’s not forget all iPod Touch owners out there which headed straight to the App Store after finishing their upgrade to firmware 2.0

The server is accessible from virtually anywhere and if sustained over 10 million downloads already, everything should be working according to plan. I guess those developers charging a dollar for their application are making a fortune too. Or more, a whole lot more.

Apple has been selling their so called amazing handset for three days. You’d never guess how many iPhones were sold! Well, yeah you would, I just told you. Apple sold 1 million 3G iPhones in 3 days which is remarkable. I guess other cell phone manufacturers are craving for that efficiency.
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Let the PR drum-rolls begin. Apple claimed that it has sold more than 1 million iPhone 3Gs in the first weekend after July 11 (the launch date). Available in 21 countries at this time, the phone runs the new iPhone 2.0 firmware and is priced at $199 for the 8 gig model, while the 16GB model costs $299.

What’s more, the iPhone App Store (bye bye, Handango) has had over 10 million applicatino downloads for both iPhone and iPod touch. With over 800 native applications (over 200 free), more than 90% are priced at less than $10.

Admit it, how many days have you been waiting in line? Did you happen to meet any annoying reporters making fun of technology just because they can? Are you going to get the iPhone this year? From AT&T? Are you in Europe fighting for your Apple handset?

We’ve seen AT&T’s and Apple’s policy regarding new stocks. You know, the get it today, sell it only tomorrow approach. That wasn’t enough. AT&T reported iPhone shortage in over 2,000 stores. Apple is counting on fast shipments to arrive soon to every store and they have even setup a help page for finding the closest store with handsets in stock.

What about the rest of the world? Well the same thing happened. Apple’s iPhone 3G was a big hit in Europe as well, with shortages occurring earlier than in the USA due to the time difference. I wonder how long this iPhone shopping spree is going to last… Apple’s marketing team deserves a huge paycheck for what’s happening around the iPhone worldwide!

It was about a year and a half ago that Apple’s original iPhone appeared on the scene and we did the Top Ten List of iPhone Killers. This time around, we pit the second-gen iPhone 3G against some of the best technology we have seen from other leaders in the mobile industry during the last six months. While all of them look drool-worthy in their own right, most of them lack one functionality that the original iPhone and iPhone 3G still boast about: multitouch. We will ignore this vital fact and continue on with the list for now, as most of the devices on the list have much more to offer in other areas compared to iPhone 3G. So without further ado, I present to you the top ten iPhone rivals that have surfaced over the past year, in no particular order.
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People are talking about a gPhone again. Like we don’t know this isn’t a phone we’re going to see this year. We’re less likely to see an Android powered smartphone this year at all, but that might still happen. As for the gPhone thing…

Today Larry Page and Sergei Brin, the founders of Google together with CEO Eric Schmidt made various statements suggesting a future gPhone.

Hollywood Reporter writer Dan Cox said regarding their statements:

The trio of Google execs also used the opportunity to talk about the inroads the company is making with its own branded mobile phone as a replacement for the iPhone.

That’s not enough at all to make us think that the gPhone is actually going to be launched soon. But if we add to these statements the rumor that San Francisco based Ammunition Design Group is designing the gPhone we might have something here.

Ammunition Design Group has worked on various devices like Palm, Hewlett-Packard, Dell Computer, Logitech and Sprint (the handset in the picture) so they know what they are doing. And in case it matters, the founder, Robert Brunner, was previously the director of Industrial Design at Apple Computer until 1997.

So are we going to be in for a surprise? An iPhone like gPhone? That should be some competition, with Google controlling the internet and the news flow. I wonder who would eventually win.

Apple and their 3G iPhone got lots of coverage these days. And in the days prior to the official release. And in the days prior to the WWDC. But let’s not forget it’s just a phone. No matter what it can do, ultimately it’s just a phone and we have more important stuff to care about in our lives.

But let’s have a little iPhone related fun. Eric Spillman which tries his best at being a reporter in a TV show, walked around an iPhone line just before the iPhone was launched and tried to deliver the same message. That the iPhone is just an overrated phone. Surprisingly he’s not that good with words (see above) and took the most unusual approach asking people in line what they would chose between a human or a gadget. No need to explain how he was treated for that.

So did you finally get your 3G iPhone yet? It’s Sunday already and there are those places where all iPhones have been sold while people were still waiting in line to get one.

Apple has been thinking of you and there’s a page on their official site to help you check for official iPhone availability. You can search by state and store of course with the only downside of this being that results are properly displayed only after 9PM.

Here’s what the Apple’s web page says:

The Apple Retail Store likely has your iPhone 3G in stock. You can check the most up-to-date availability right here. Shipments of iPhone 3G arrive most days, and availability is updated nightly.

That’s particularly useful as a bunch of AT&T stores already ran out of iPhones. You can at least check to see where you should get in line tomorrow. If you are in the USA. In other parts of the world you’ll just have to play it by ear.