Much has been made of the fact that your average user can't replace the iPhone's battery; Apple'll charge you $86 (including shipping) to get a new battery put into your handset. Plus, you'll have to get a loaner unit. One hopes the batteries last long enough that you won't be doing this very often, but the phones are still pretty new, so we haven't really found out yet.
However, if you're willing to take life-and-limb (at least, of your phone) into your own hands, the guys over at Gear Live have posted a video showing how you can replace your very own iPhone battery. This surgery procedure is, of course, performed at your own risk. Any time you open up a piece of sealed electronics like the iPhone, there's a chance of something going wrong, so you could end up paying a lot more than it would have cost you to just get the battery from Apple in the first place.
They've even provided the video in a format the iPhone can play, so you can watch the video while replacing your—hey, wait a minute!
[via Gizmodo]
Need to access the files on your iPhone or iPod touch? The fine folks at Ecamm Network have long had you covered with their excellent iPhone Drive. Version 1.3, released yesterday, adds a spiffy new feature, too: the ability to access Notes on the iPhone.
"Accessing iPhone notes has never been this easy," explains Ken Aspeslagh, Ecamm Network's iPhone specialist. "Simply double-click notes to open them. The same goes for iTunes and iPhoto data stored on the iPhone or iPod Touch."Easy peasy. There's a 7-day full-featured demo, and the full version will cost you a mere $10.
Many people expected Notes syncing to come with the upgrade to Leopard, but as of yet, Apple's shown no signs of adding this functionality. If you don't feel like emailing each and every note to yourself, then it seems like iPhone Drive is probably your best option.
Among the laundry list of complaints some users have made about the iPhone, one is that you can't use the iPhone as a modem for your laptop. While it's convenient to have this always-on connection to the Internet, sometimes you want to take advantage of it with a big screen and a full, real keyboard. I know it's one of the things I miss about my old Motorola E815.
But, with a little elbow grease and hackery, it is possible to share the iPhone's net connection with your laptop, a process called "tethering." The folks over at Lifehacker have put together a tutorial showing you how to accomplish this feat of derring-do. It's worth noting, however, that it'll require you to jailbreak your phone, so if you're not comfortable doing that, well, this probably isn't for you.
So said AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, speaking at a Churchill Club meeting in California.
"You'll have it next year," Stephenson said in response to a question about when the 3G iPhone would debut. He said he didn't know how much more the new version will cost than the existing model, which sells for $399. Apple Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs "will dictate what the price of the phone is," he said.Wow, Randall, way to spill the beans. I mean, hey, I'm glad to hear that a 3G iPhone is in the works for the near future—though I never doubted it would be—but haven't you heard what Steve Jobs does to people who steal his thunder?
Let's put it this way: remember what happened to Prometheus when he stole fire from the gods to bring it to mankind? Yeah, you ain't seen nothing yet.
Bonjour mes amis! Finally, the iPhone comes to another country where I can legitimately speak the language. I mean, I don't know German, and let's not even get started on those UK chaps. I mean, come on: speak American, will ya?
Anyway, the official launch of the iPhone in France is happening tonight, with 10 Orange stores staying open late to offer the device, starting at 6:30PM local time. The phone, as we know, will retail for €399, but we now have more news on what the phone plans will cost. They start at €49 per month for a two-year contract (signing up for one year will cost you €4.50 more a month): that includes four hours of talk time, 50 text messages, and 10 hours of access to Orange hot spots, as well as Visual Voicemail and "unlimited" data access (there are some restrictions, including a warning from Orange that they might cap data transfer at 500MB a month). There are three more plans, with the most expensive being €119 a month, which includes 16 hours of talk time, 1000 text messages, and 100 hours of Wi-Fi access. Those prices might seem a little bit on the high side for what you get, but remember that most European users don't pay for incoming calls, just outgoing.
But the real hubbub is about unlocked phones. According to Orange, buying an unlocked phone is an option, but it'll cost you: €649. Cheaper, certainly, then T-Mobile's option of €999, but still a premium. If you buy your phone and sign up for an Orange contract, they'll unlock it for you too, though it'll cost €100 if you do so in the first six months; after that, French law requires them to do it for free.
Orange CEO Didier Lombard was bullish on the prospects of the iPhone, saying earlier in the week that they were targeting sales of between 50,000 and 100,000 by the end of the year.
If you're a would-be German iPhone buyer, you may feel like you're stuck between a rock and a hard place: don't want to tether yourself to T-Mobile, but also don't feel like shelling out the €999 for an unlocked phone?
Here's a clever idea by German reseller Debitel: starting tomorrow, they'll offer a €600 incentive to buy the iPhone from them. That brings the price down to €399, the same as it'll cost you to pick up an iPhone along with a T-Mobile contract.
Personally, I wonder how they can afford to do this, but maybe they don't expect very many people to jump at the offer. Debitel's offering plans that start at €40 a month, €9 cheaper than T-Mobile's lowest competing plan. Of course, you'll have to do without Visual Voicemail, but all of the phone's other features ought to work fine.
Some of you may remember a blog posting I made earlier this year in which I explained that I had a RIM BlackBerry, compared it to my colleagues’ iPhones, and found the iPhone lacking in a few key areas. Well, last week I made the switch to an iPhone, for what it’s worth, and I have to say that I’m pretty impressed.
I’d been a BlackBerry 8700 user (through Cingular, then AT&T) for more than a year before the switch. It was my first smartphone, and I was totally hooked. I’d gotten quite adept at typing on the QWERTY keyboard, and had the system set up to check multiple e-mail accounts, surf the Web, Twitter and IM with friends, family and colleagues. I admit that a fair amount of what I used it for was superfluous, but in reality it kept me very well connected with the office. I found the battery life superlative — I could go days without bothering to recharge it. The downside was that the BlackBerry was bulky and awkward to carry, and didn’t sport integration with Apple’s iSync software, requiring the use of third-party software for contact and calendar synchronization (in my case, I relied on Mark/Space’s Missing Sync).
I noted in that weblog that while my colleagues’ iPhone batteries had all run dead during the day we went to an all-day outdoor concert, my BlackBerry was alive and well by the end of the show.
Alas, my hubris must have affected my karma, because within a few weeks of that event, my BlackBerry started developing some problems — random freezing, locking up and other issues that no amount of hardware resetting or software resetting would cure.
Continue reading "How I became an iPhone convert "
You know, ever since I complained about the lack of games on the iPhone, it seems like everyday has something new to entertain users who find themselves as bereft as I have. As if mere native games weren't enough, one intrepid group of coders has ported emulator ScummVM to the iPhone. If you're not familiar with ScummVM, it's an emulator that allows you to play several adventure games originally created by LucasArts back in the day ("the day," in this case referring to late 1980s through the 1990s). Titles such as Maniac Mansion, Curse of Monkey Island, and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis all rely on the Scumm engine.
And now you can play said games on your iPhone (or, presumably, iPod touch). Installing ScummVM will, of course, require that you jailbreak your phone and use Installer.app. The iPhone version of the emulator incorporates UI design specific to the multi-touch interface. More than a dozen games are fully compatible, with another few having partial compatibility. The emulator itself has some known issues, notably that the graphics don't take up the full screen, instead keeping their native resolution (which, sadly, is less than the iPhone's own resolution). In any case, if you're not satisfied with the NES emulator, perhaps this will be more up your alley.
Thanks to legal wranglings between rival German mobile operators Vodafone and T-Mobile, the iPhone is available as an unlocked option, albeit a rather expensive one. But just how is such unlocking accomplished? Word on the virtual street is that it all stems from iTunes, naturally. But here's the catch: the phone that you walk into the store and buy is no different from any other iPhone.
Instead, you spend the extra money (remember, these units command the princely sum of €999), and then, when you get home, you use iTunes to unlock your phone, just as you'd normally use iTunes to activate phone service. Since unlocking relies on the fact that Apple has whitelisted your phone's IMEI number (a unique identifier), there's a lag of 24 hours before unlocking can proceed. Also, given the whitelist method, you can't really trick T-Mobile into giving you an unlocked iPhone for the price of a normal iPhone, alas.
[via Gizmodo]
Apparently things move just a little bit faster in Europe than they do here in the US. Responding to yesterday's injunction (at the behest of rival provider Vodafone), mobile operator T-Mobile has announced that it will sell an unlocked version of the iPhone alongside its standard offerings. The catch? The unlocked version of the iPhone will cost €999 (~$1464).
Yowch. You may remember that when news was first announced that an unlocked version of the iPhone would be available in neighboring France the price estimates went as high as €999—seems there may have been some rationale for that.
High cost isn't the only thing that might hold some back; according to T-Mobile, the unlocked version of the phone will lack at least one feature that is reliant on the network, the revolutionary Visual Voicemail functionality. We're still expecting to see an unlocked version of the phone in France next week, but it will be interesting to see how the unlocked phones vary in other ways, if they do.
