Taken With An iPhone

Apple have released an upgrade to the iPhone firmware. A number of problems have been reported by people using the original 2.0 firmware - crashing apps, choppy scrolling, keyboard delays - hopefully this update will fix these problems for those that are encountering them.

Personally I have had very few problems since updating my original iPhone to the 2.0 firmware. I have nothing close to some of the reports on the web but I will be happy to see an increase in the screen response time.

In case you haven’t seen or read enough reviews of the iPhone 3G here is another one. This time Ed Baig of USA Today gives his thoughts on Apple’s latest phone.

If you have a new iPhone 3G then your AT&T plan does not include text messages. You can add 200 text messages to your plan for $5 a month or you can follow the instructions in the video and send text messages for free.

According to the Daily Mail an iPhone nano will be released in time for the Christmas shopping period. The say the new iPhone will sell for up to £150 for pay-as-you-go customers. They quote an industry source as saying ‘This will be a big one,’.

‘However, a cut down version, with the candy bar shape of iPod nano music players, would be a huge hit as a Christmas gift.’

They think it will have a large display on the front and a touch wheel on the back.

There have been rumors of a smaller iPhone for some time, it will be interesting to see if this one turns out to be true.

It seems Apple has released an update to developers of the iPhone firmware. The improvements in firmware 2.1 are centered on the GPS functionality including speed and direction information.

There is also a rumor that the first beta of the push background notification for iPhone apps has been released to the wild. It will be interesting to see if it works better than the push email of MobileMe.

There has been a lot of news reports and blog posts concerning problems with Apple’s MobileMe service. Here are Walt Mossberg’s views on the service after a week of testing.

Overall he thinks it is a good idea but “….MobileMe has too many flaws to keep its promises.”

But in my tests, using two Macs, two Dell (DELL) computers and two iPhones, I ran into problem after problem. One big issue is that while changes made on the Web site or the iPhone are instantly pushed to the computers, changes made on computers are only synced every 15 minutes, at best. Apple has admitted that this is a problem, and says it is working on it.

His report finishes by saying that he thinks MobileMe “…could be a terrific service.” if Apple sorts out the problems. I think I will wait for that to happen before I give it a look.

MagicPad, from Proximi, is a text editor that is waiting for acceptance into the iPhone App Store. The reason the app is different from all the other note and text apps for the iPhone is that it features working cut & paste.

The function only works within the MagicPad app but at least we now know that it is possible to implement cut & paste on the iPhone. Hopefully the function will be available across all apps in the near future.

This is the third of Apple’s new TV adverts for the iPhone 3G, this one is called “Work Friendly”

There is a new way to check the availability of the iPhone 3G at your local Apple store from Top Muffin. Their iPhone Availability Tracker is updated every 15 minutes with data from the Apple website. That being said, they do advise you to call the store before heading out.

Today it shows that the iPhone 3G is available in approximately 45% of all Apple stores countrywide:

Stats:
8 GB Black 3G iPhones are available at 84 of 188 stores (45%)
16 GB White 3G iPhones are available at 101 of 188 stores (54%)
16 GB Black 3G iPhones are available at 75 of 188 stores (40%)

In my local stores, stock levels are almost nonexistent. The 8GB is out of stock and the 16GB is only available in 2 out of 5 stores.

During its Q2 report AT&T revealed that the iPhone 3G is selling nearly twice as fast as the original iPhone.

“In the days following our exclusive U.S. launch of this new device, powered by the nation’s fastest 3G wireless network, customer response has been everything we had anticipated and more.

No figures were released to support this claim but the long lines and the lack of stock would seem to support the claim.