How about a little mystery to go with our latest carrier announcement. Earlier today, several sites noted that Spanish provider Movistar, a subsidiary of Telefonica, had changed its front page to announce that they’d signed a deal with Apple to bring the iPhone to Spain sometime this year.
Then, several hours later, that same page, including a broken link to a press release about the deal, vanished and was replaced by a standard homepage, with no mention of the iPhone. Some say as many as 25,000 people registered for further information before the page disappeared.
Spain is the largest remaining European country to not yet have an official iPhone deal, though Orange CFO Gervais Pellissier last month said that company was negotiating to bring the handset to the country. Perhaps Movistar’s deal was not as finalized as they had first thought, or perhaps Spain will be another country to reap the benefits of a non-exclusive deal.
iPod users have long gotten had to find tricky ways to get music off their iPod once it’s loaded on, turning to third-party programs like PodWorks and Senuti. While the latter former has had the ability to snatch your tunes from the slavering jaws of your iPhone since last fall, Senuti has lagged behind in this regard. Fortunately, the team behind the cleverly-named app (hint: redrum redrum!) have added iPhone- (and iPod touch-) compatibility to their latest beta version, 0.50.1.
You can grab Senuti for free, but donations are welcome if you find the program to be of use. I’ve been using Senuti for all my music-liberating needs for years, and have always found the program reliable and easy to use. Give it a try.
[via Lifehacker]
I like to think that over at 1 Infinite Loop there’s some giant room with a huge board in it—a big board if you will—showing all the countries in the world. In the middle of it all sits Steve Jobs in a comfy captain’s chair, calmly dictating who can announce their iPhone carrier deals: “Norway, Sweden, you are green….Hong Kong, Macau, go.”
That’s right: Hutchison Telecom, also known as wireless provider 3 (ah, ah, the letter three, my friend) has announced that they’ve signed up with Apple to distribute the iPhone in Hong Kong and Macau—two of three places they run 3G networks, the third being Israel. Hong Kong and Macau are both “special administrative regions” of the People’s Republic of China.
As of yet, the PRC does not have an iPhone deal in place, despite the fact that Apple had reputedly engaged in talks with China Mobile, the country’s largest mobile provider, earlier this year; those discussions allegedly broke off over negotiations about profit-sharing.
While this might make it easier for some Chinese citizens to acquire an iPhone, for now it means they’ll still need to SIM unlock them if they want to use them in mainland China.
You will no doubt be thrilled to hear about the latest developments in the mystical land of the iPhone SDK. The newest version, beta 6, hit the Apple Developer site today, concurrent with Apple’s release of 10.5.3. Good thing, too, since for unknown reasons, beta 6 of the SDK requires 10.5.3—it’s actually incompatible with any of the prior versions.
As to what beta 6 brings your average developer, Apple is its own usual close-mouthed self:
This release fixes many bugs and add support for the latest iPhone OS.
Developers get a slightly more detailed list of changes to the API, which probably doesn’t mean much to you or I. But we imagine there will probably be only a few more of these beta releases before the final version of the SDK hits next month.
Attention all iPhone developers, and would-be iPhone developers: registration for the second iPhoneDevCamp is now online. This three day not-for-profit gathering takes place August 1-3 at Adobe Systems in San Francisco. Over at the mothership, Jim Dalrymple has more on the conference, including input from one of its founders.
Join other iPhone developers as you work separately or in teams to create both native and web-based iPhone applications during the course of the get-together. You’ll be able to develop apps, port programs from Mac OS X, and optimize and test your creations, all while getting a chance to meet and interact with other iPhone development enthusiasts from around the globe.
The organizers behind the event point out that they’re positioned about a month after the release of the SDK and AppStore, and that they hope that Apple will be releasing the NDA about iPhone development by that point, hopefully allowing all attendees to work with the official software development kit.
Let’s kick off this post-Memorial Day week with another international carrier announcement for the iPhone. This time, it’s Sweden-based operator TeliaSonera who’s dropping the bomb. The company is poised to bring the iPhone to a number of Nordic and Baltic countries.
TeliaSonera today announced it has signed an agreement with Apple to bring the iPhone to Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia later this year.
Another seven countries brings our speculative total to somewhere between 48 and 62 countries—the large amount of variation is due to the fact that Orange and América Móvil have not given fully detailed country lists. Regardless, that’s quite a ramp up from last year’s four. And somehow I imagine that we haven’t heard the last of the carrier announcement bonanza.
You’ll have to pardon the AT&T executives—they’re just too damn excited about this new version of the iPhone they’ve heard so much about. CFO spoke at the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit yesterday, and had this to say about the presumably forthcoming new iPhone model:
Lindner said AT&T has yet to determine pricing for a hotly anticipated new version of Apple Inc’s media-playing iPhone. “There’s not been a product announcement. There hasn’t been any pricing decision made. That’s yet to come,” he said. […] Lindner said he has seen a picture of the next iPhone, but not the actual device.
*Boggle*: what part of “secret product launches” does this guy not get? Over at the mothership, the good Philip Michaels recently opined on the joys of working with AT&T, so let’s just add this one to the wireless provider’s tab. You know, it occurs to me that maybe the reason Apple hasn’t sued the pin-striped trousers off of clone-maker Psystar is because they’re currently dedicating all their lawyers to figuring out how to get the hell out of this exclusive AT&T contract.
Lindner did at least have some interesting non-taboo things to say about the iPhone.
Lindner said AT&T has more than 2.5 million iPhone customers, with the average subscriber spending nearly $100 a month on services after shelling out as much as $500 for the phone itself.
Huh. I’m not sure if that subscriber figure is current, but it is surprisingly close to AT&T’s year-end figures for 2007, at which point they said they had 2 million iPhone subscribers (which, as you may recall, tipped off the mystery of the missing iPhones).
Meanwhile, Apple sold about 1.7 million iPhones in the second quarter—if only 500,000 of those were activated on AT&T, then the unlocking rates are pretty high. AT&T didn’t break out iPhone subscribers in its recent quarterly results.
On the other hand, maybe Lindner was just using the most recently available public figures and I’m just rumormongering. Hey, it’s Friday before a long weekend: what’re you going to do?
It’s beginning to look a lot like…Soviet Russia. According to some of Engadget’s informants, a line has formed at the 24/7 Fifth Avenue Apple Store in New York City. The purpose of the line? Nobody quite seems sure.
Apple reps apparently say that they’re controlling the crowd of iPhone purchasers, while some people in the line appear to be under the impression that they’ve lined up for the as-of-yet-nonexistent 3G iPhone. Reputedly, yet another group of people says that they just like joining lines.
Okay, I’ve spent my fair share of time in lines for all sorts of things—but always with a purpose, be it the iPhone, or The Phantom Menace. Never have I joined a line just for the hell of it. Maybe on my next vacation.
And now for another in the long line of tacit confirmations about the imminent arrival of the 3G iPhone. AT&T announced earlier this week that they will “complete” the rollout of their 3G network by the end of June.
The “completion” that AT&Tis bragging about, however, appears to specifically refer to network capabilities, not geographical coverage. At present, the 3G service is available in 275 markets in the US, with that number projected to hit 350 by the end of the year.
AT&T is in the process of rolling out HSUPA (High Speed Uplink Packet Access) to the last few markets that already have HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) service. HSUPA boosts upload speeds to between 500 and 800 Kbps, compared to the HSDPA speeds of 1.4 Mbps.
Still, this step does bode well for a 3G iPhone coming out of the gate in June. One of the problems Steve Jobs cited at the introduction of the original iPhone was the lack of solid 3G coverage in the US; with that problem now largely remedied, another piece of the puzzle is in place.
[via Macworld]
We can’t imagine parting with our iPhone just yet—not until the mythical 3G version comes out, anyway—but it seems that some of the refurbished iPhones that Apple is selling are making their way out to the public with a little extra something: data from their previous owners. A detective from the Oregon State Police was able to extract data from a refurbished iPhone. It appears that though you can wipe your iPhone from inside iTunes, it doesn’t do quite the thorough job that you might want.
So, if you are planning getting rid of your iPhone, Rich Mogull of TidBITS (and a Macworld contributor) has a suggestion about how to thoroughly clean your data off the iPhone, using nothing more than iTunes. Rich’s method essentially relies on overwriting the existing data by repeatedly syncing media files to the iPhone. It may not be quite as complete as some of the low-level formatting options available to other disks, but it’s probably better than just using the default that iTunes offers.
[via Gizmodo]
