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An Unlocked iPhone? I’d Travel Halfway Around the World for One

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 27, 2008 at 6:32 pm

“iPhone 3G puchased at the Apple Online Store can be activated with any wireless carrier. Simply insert the SIM from your current phone into iPhone 3G and connect to iTunes 8 to complete activation.”

It’s been slightly melodramatic to say that reading those words left me giddy. I hate phone contracts and phones locked to a particular carrier–hate ’em, hate ’em, hate ’em, on both practical grounds and principle–and would much rather pay full price for a phone then get locked into a contract. If unlocked iPhone 3Gs had been available when I bought mine back on day one, I’d never have committed to a contract to get a price break. (Were I a civilian, I might not have bought an iPhone 3G at all until contract-free ones became available–AT&T is supposedly going to offer them at some point–but it’s impossible to write about personal technology today without one.)

The good news is that the unlocked iPhone is here. The bad news? It’s only really here if “here” is Hong Kong. The text I quoted above comes from the Hong Kong version of Apple’s online store, where locals can now buy the unlocked, contract-free version of the phone.

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Last Call for the iPhone Satisfaction Survey

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 27, 2008 at 4:44 pm

[UPDATE: The survey is now closed. Thanks to the 2150+ people who participated–here are our results, and here are more comments from respondents.]

I’m pleased to report that nearly 2,000 folks have responded to our iPhone Satisfaction Survey. We’ll close the survey Sunday morning, but as of the time I’m writing this, there’s still time to participate. If you own an iPhone 3G or original iPhone and would like to do so, please head here to take the survey. Thanks! We’ll publish an extensive report on our findings next week.

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Google Celebrates Its Birthday! Finally!

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 27, 2008 at 9:25 am

I’m not sure why I’m taking this so seriously, but I’m relieved to see that Google has finally dressed up its home page with a special logo to mark its tenth anniversary. This one’s kinda clever, since it’s based on the original, fatter, cruder version of the Googe logo:

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..as used on the site back in 1998:

The return of the old logo, with exclamation point, reminds me of a fact that’s so obvious it’s easy to forget: Google gave its company a name that was almost explicitly inspired by Yahoo, which had an exclamation point first and retains it to this day. I’m not sure when Google lost its one, but it was presumably whacked in part to make sure that Google and its branding didn’t come off as an imitation of Yahoo.

Here’s a brief post at the Google blog on the celebratory logo. And here’s a gallery of special Google logos from over the years.

Still mysterious: Whether there’s any particular reason why the logo popped up now. (Most of the rest of the Google-watching Web celebrated the company’s birthday early in September.)

[UPDATE: Search Engine Roundtable explains everything–historically, Google has marked its birthday on either September 7th or September 27th; it all depends on when people feel like having cake…)

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Operation Foxbook: Livin’ Small With the HP Mini-Note

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 26, 2008 at 7:21 pm

Operation Foxbook–my experiment of dumping my MacBook Pro and desktop apps for an HP Mini-Note netbook and Web-based apps within Firefox–continues apace. And the hardware side of things is turning out to have as big an impact on the experience as the software aspect.

The MacBook Pro I use most of the time is relatively thin and light given how powerful it is, but it’s no subnotebook. And it’s the largest, heaviest machine I’ve carried in years. I used to be addicted to subnotebooks like the Fujitsu Lifebook B112 and Fujitsu P-1000, but in 2004 I had an epiphany and bought my first Mac in years–the 12-inch PowerBook, which was a bit larger and heavier. Then I replaced that with the even larger, heavier 13-inch MacBook. And when I started Technologizer, I decided I wanted more screen space and resolution, and bought the MacBook Pro.

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Zune Service Going Down, New Features Ahead?

Posted by Ed Oswald on September 26, 2008 at 6:12 pm

If you’re a Zune user and have any music you want to buy, better grab it over the weekend. A short mail sent by the Zune team to Zune users appeared just moments ago in my inbox:

The Zune service will be down for scheduled maintenance on Monday, September 29, 2008 from 12:01am Pacific Time, for up to 48 hours. During the downtime, Zune Social, the forums on Zune.net, and all of Zune Marketplace will be offline.

I’ve been busy looking around for some type of explanation as to why a two-day downtime would be needed. Zune team blogger Cesar Menedez is unusually silent as to a reason why Microsoft is deciding to do this, and the cadre of Zune enthusiast blogs don’t seem to be offering much either.

Don’t be surprised if this is just truly scheduled maintenance–after all, a few have complained of persistent bugs within the Zune service that have been there since the beginning. Microsoft may be taking the opportunity to address these issues. But there’s always the possibility that the Zune team will spring something on us.

So here’s what I’m hearing. Reliable sources are telling me that the “48 hour” figure really is more of a buffer in case something goes wrong, and in all likelihood the downtime would last less than a day. When it comes back, the end user is not going to notice any changes, but this is for a reason.

The changes appear to be all in the Zune service’s back end, save for a few bug fixes. Several of the sources described the back end changes to be “significant,” with some hinting that the update may have something to do with a future feature regarding video.

For whatever reason–likely because this is something Apple isn’t doing — I’m hitting a roadblock in getting more details on exactly what this feature may be. Apparently it’s out there and has been speculated on, so we’re busy searching as you read this for clues as to what it may be.

More on this story through the weekend as we learn more.

[UPDATE: We may have found the connection between the Xbox Live and Zune downtime that are happening concurrently. CNET’s Ina Fried talked with Zune chie Joe Belfiore two weeks ago. At the time, he said the capability to transfer videos from the Zune to the Xbox and vice versa wasn’t available now, but “we’re not really that far off technologically from being able to offer that feature.” It’s possible that this could be the new feature being talked about.

Then again, Apple is already doing this, going from iPod<–>AppleTV, so maybe this might not be it. But it’s probably as good of a lead as we have at the moment.]

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Own an iPhone? Please Take Our Survey

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 26, 2008 at 9:20 am

[UPDATE: The survey is now closed. Thanks to the 2150+ people who participated–here are the results and here are more comments from respondents.]

Since the original iPhone was released fifteen months ago, it’s been– by almost any measure–the single tech product that’s generated more news and controversy than any other. And things have only heated up with the debut of the second-generation model, the iPhone 3G.

As with any tech product, the ultimate bottom line on the iPhone is whether the folks who have plunked down money for one are happy with their purchase. Enter Technologizer’s iPhone Satisfaction Survey. We’re going to collect data from a bunch of iPhone users (both the original model and the 3G) on what they like, what they don’t like, what they’re doing with the phone, and what they’d like to see future iPhones do. We have no idea what the data will reveal, but we know it’ll be really, really interesting. And once we’ve crunched the results, we’ll report back in an article.

If you’ve got an iPhone, please help by participating in the survey–it should take about fifteen minutes of your time. Please let other iPhone users know about it, too; the more responses the better.

[UPDATE: I’m closing the survey Sunday morning–if you’re thinking about taking it, please do so now. And thanks!]

Click here to begin the IPhone Satisfaction Survey.

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Apple Adds an Asterisk to iPhone Ad

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 25, 2008 at 4:52 pm

Back on August 11th, I wrote about Apple’s slogan for the iPhone 3G–“Twice as fast. Half the price.”–and said that “Twice as fast sometimes, but don’t count on it” might be a more accurate slogan. Looks like Apple has come as close as it ever will to conceding the point.

I was just just browsing around Apple.com for a post I’m working on, and noticed that the iPhone section still has the “Twice as fast. Half the price.” tagline. But at some point after my earlier post, Apple appended an asterisk:

The asterisk points to some fine print (really fine, at least on the HP Mini-Note I’m using at the moment), which was there before in some form, but unasterisked:

* Comparisons between iPhone 3G (8GB) and first-generation iPhone (8GB) running on EDGE. Actual speeds vary by site conditions. Requires new two-year AT&T rate plan, sold separately to qualified customers. Visit www.wireless.att.com for eligibility information.

Apple isn’t much on asterisks–actually, I can’t think of a case where it’s used one before. (When it built a “Get a Mac” TV spot around a PC World reference, we had to approve the usage of its mention of our story, and Apple really didn’t want to insert any on-screen disclaimers.) For better or worse, it likes to keep its marketing materials like the bottom of a MacBook or the backside of an iPhone: as clean as possible. And even if you never read the fine print, the asterisk tells you that “Twice as fast. Half the price.” isn’t true in all instances, which makes the slogan way less compelling and therefore less Apple-ish.

But bold claims on behalf of the iPhone without any clarifying footnotes got Apple into trouble in the UK recently, and perhaps it’s decided to be more cautious from now on. I hope so–footnotes may be ugly, but they provide an important consumer service when they’re affixed to words that need additional explanation. Which “Twice as fast. Half the price” certainly does…

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T-Mobile Relents, G1 Bandwidth Caps No More

Posted by Ed Oswald on September 25, 2008 at 11:31 am

Well, that was quick. Not much more than a day after it first disclosed a 1GB bandwidth cap for users of the G1 Android phone, T-Mobile USA did an about-face and has decided to not enforce any kind of restriction after all.

In a response to questions by the New York Times’ Saul Hansell, T-Mobile said Wednesday night that it had decided to remove the cap. Courtesy of the Bits blog, here is a portion of their statement:

We removed the 1GB soft limit from our policy statement, and we are confident that T-Mobile G1 customers will enjoy the high speed of data access over our 3G network. The specific terms for our new data plans are still being reviewed and once they are final we will be certain to share this broadly with current customers and potential new customers.

Like I had said in our initial post on the subject, T-Mobile does have a right to ensure that all users get a satisfactory level of service, which the carrier argued as well. But at the same time, bandwidth caps have been almost universally criticized, and would have done more harm to T-Mobile than good.

The removal of the cap isn’t the end of the road, however. T-Mobile is looking into other ways to protect its network from high-bandwidth users, it said.

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Operation Foxbook: Life Inside the Browser, So Far

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 25, 2008 at 11:18 am

I’m typing this in Firefox on an HP Mini-Note netbook. In fact, I’m doing everything in Firefox on the Mini-Note at the moment, because I’m engaged in the experiment I call Operation Foxbook, in which I spend a few days trying to go cold turkey on desktop applications and my fancy MacBook in favor of working in a manner that’s as close to purely Web-based as possible.

How’s it going so far? Not bad, but not entirely free of bumps. A few notes on the Web-based applications I’ve been using:

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Google, Apple, and the War for Developers

Posted by David A. Sampayo on September 25, 2008 at 10:35 am

On Tuesday morning, months of anticipation, speculation, software controversy, and hardware rumors came to a head as T-Mobile executives and Google’s top brass unveiled the G1, the first “Googlephone.” As reporters and bloggers got their hands on the detailed specifications about the device, the software, and the terms of service, hundreds of inevitable comparisons were drawn between the iPhone and this fledgling product. But the differences between the two platforms go far beyond simple differences in specs.

Google is pursuing a decidedly different market strategy with Android. The brilliance of Apple’s iPhone strategy–besides the fact that the phone itself is so compelling–was in the sequence of announcements. You can bet your last share of Lehman stock that Steve Jobs had the App Store and iPhone SDK planned from the start, but did not release them initially on purpose. Apple first announced the iPhone in January of 2007, wowed the tech community, built up six months of hot anticipation, and released it in June of the same year. Its market share immediately exploded, well beyond initial predictions, grabbing percentage points in the double digits within months.

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