Tag Archives | Apple. iPhone

How Much are iPhone 3GS Owners Going to Pay For the Next iPhone?

Posted by Harry McCracken on May 11, 2010 at 1:46 pm

(Update: AT&T wrote to tell me that the eligibility date shifts MobileCrunch wrote about are nothing unusual.)

When the iPhone 3GS went on sale last June, AT&T told folks who’d bought subsidized iPhone 3Gs a year previously that they didn’t qualify to buy a 3GS at the full subsidy. Seemed reasonable enough to me. But after lots of vocal complaints from iPhone 3G owners who wanted to be iPhone 3GS early adopters, the company decided to let some of them buy the 3GS model on contract at the same price as new customers and those who had fulfilled earlier contracts.

When the next iPhone comes around–I don’t know anyone who’s predicting a release date later than this July–AT&T presumably wants to avoid the confusion, bad publicity, and need for backpedaling that accompanied the 3G release. And Greg Kumparak of MobileCrunch has an interesting post noting that some AT&T customers are seeing their upgrade eligibility dates moved to June 21st, as if AT&T is prepping to let them buy new iPhones at full discount from day one.

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Apple: "The iPhone Still Sells Better Internationally"

Posted by Harry McCracken on May 11, 2010 at 9:30 am

Apple has never been a company that felt obligated to provide responses to each and every press inquiry concerning Apple-related news. So it’s interesting to see that it gave the Loop’s Jim Dalrymple a statement concerning yesterday’s study that showed Android phones outselling iPhones in terms of units in the U.S.:

This is a very limited report on 150,000 US consumers responding to an online survey and does not account for the more than 85 million iPhone and iPod touch customers worldwide,” Apple spokesperson Natalie Harrison, told The Loop. “IDC figures show that iPhone has 16.1 percent of the smartphone market and growing, far outselling Android on a worldwide basis. We had a record quarter with iPhone sales growing by 131 percent and with our new iPhone OS 4.0 software coming this summer, we see no signs of the competition catching up anytime soon.”

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AT&T-iPhone: Five Year Exclusive Confirmed

Posted by Harry McCracken on May 10, 2010 at 3:28 pm

Sitting around waiting for a Verizon iPhone and checking the Web every five minutes to see if it’s here yet? You might want to chill. Engadget’s Nilay Patel is reporting about a 2008 legal document that confirms that Apple’s original 2007 agreement with AT&T involved five years of iPhone exclusivity. Contracts, of course, are fungible things. So it’s not inconceivable that we’ll see a Verizon iPhone of some sort before 2012.  But if it takes another couple of years–or more–before the iPhone lands on Verizon, now we know why…

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Helpful Infographic: Android Pricing vs. iPhone Pricing

Posted by Harry McCracken on May 10, 2010 at 2:29 pm

Here’s a further thought on the fact that Android phones are selling well in part because they’re often way cheaper than iPhones. When iPhone purveyor AT&T finally hopped on the Android bandwagon, its first handset was Motorola’s Backflip:

As of this moment, AT&T wants $99.99 for a Backflip on contract–which is ninety-nine cents more than the cost of a plain-jane iPhone 3G. But if the Backflip appeals to you, here’s a slightly better deal: Amazon has it for a penny. That’s 1/9900th the cost of the iPhone 3G. (Amazon, in case you didn’t know, doesn’t have penny iPhones–and neither does anyone else.)

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Shopping for an iPhoney

Posted by Harry McCracken on May 10, 2010 at 10:15 am

Back in December of 2008, I went to a sketchy sale and snapped photos of a bevy of cheesy iPod knockoffs. The slideshow I published went on to be one of Technologizer’s most popular stories to date. This weekend, I was in Santa Cruz, California. A similar sale was being advertised on TV about once every three minutes, with an urgent-sounding announcer who specifically mentioned half-price iPods. So I went.

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Next-Gen iPhone Finder Found

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 29, 2010 at 2:38 pm

My pals (and former PCWorld/Macworld colleagues) Brian Chen and Kim Zetter have quite a scoop over at Wired.com: They’ve located the guy who says he found Apple’s next-generation iPhone prototype in a Redwood City, California bar. According to a statement issued by his lawyer, he’s a 21-year-old taking a break from school who teaches kids to swim, has volunteered at a Chinese orphanage, and helps raise money for medical care for orphans in Kenya. And he’s sorry he accepted a payment from Gizmodo in return for access to the phone.

From the moment this story hit, it was obviously inevitable that we’d learn who this guy was–sooner or later, one way or another. Kudos to Brian and Kim for (two of the best tech reporters I know) for breaking the story.

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Steve Jobs's Cogent Flash Takedown Needs a Response From Adobe

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 29, 2010 at 8:16 am

Why won’t Apple allow Flash on the iPhone and iPad? If you want to read all the reasons all in one place, check out this post. It’s by a guy who knows what he’s talking about: Steve Jobs.

The reasons, as he states them:

  • Flash is closed, and Web technologies should be open
  • Most of the video people really want to watch is available in iPhone/iPad-compatible HTML5 anyhow
  • With 50,000 games for the iPhone and iPad, who cares if they won’t play Flash games?
  • Flash is too unreliable and insecure
  • Flash for mobile devices has been delayed too often
  • Flash kills battery life
  • Flash was never designed for touch interfaces
  • Flash is an additional layer that lets developers create cross-platform apps, but at the expense of building apps that truly leverage the platforms they run on

It’s easy to poke holes in certain parts of Jobs’ arguments–for instance, he says that “iPhone, iPod and iPod users aren’t missing much video,” which will be news to anyone who’s traveled around the Web on an Apple mobile device and found more giant empty blocks than video players. And lots of people–me included–would rather have the opportunity to choose for themselves whether to use Flash and Flash content on their mobile gadgets. (It’s possible to opt for a Flash-free PC or Mac; hardly anyone does.)

Overall, though, Jobs’s piece is pretty cogent. I came away from it feeling that Apple’s stance on Flash is controlling–but not nefarious. It’s the latest in a long list of instances of Apple getting to the future a little ahead of everyone else, in ways that are problematic at first but work out okay in the long run.

I hope that Adobe responds. The company has some good bloggers, including Mike Chambers and John Nack. Unfortunately, though, the most prominent Adobe employee who blogs about Flash is an evangelist named Lee Brimelow who seems to specialize in being kinda childish. His blog is called The Flash Blog, and has included a rant that ended “Go screw yourself, Apple” and  another post which seems to criticize the iPad for not supporting Flash-based porn. I get why an Adobe staffer–especially one charged with being passionate about Flash–might be irate about all this. But Brimelow isn’t the guy to take on Steve Jobs directly.

Brimelow says that The Flash Blog isn’t the official Adobe Flash blog. Given his position with the company and the blog’s title–and the fact there isn’t an official Flash blog as far as I can tell–I understand why people might be confused.

There’s a case to be made for Flash on Apple platforms, and Adobe ought to make it–calmly, coherently, and soon. Even if it’s a lost cause. Which it is…

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Rhapsody's Offline Mode

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 26, 2010 at 3:32 am

Rhapsody’s new iPhone/iPod Touch version with offline listening is live in Apple’s App Store. I’ve been giving it a whirl, and the new features are pretty darn straightforward–and overall, they do a good job of filling in a major hole in the original iPhone edition of the music service. It’s the first music service for the iPhone that offers both streaming and downloading. (For U.S. users, at least–in Europe, Spotify has has both. And maybe Apple will see fit to unleash the wonderful unreleased LaLa app it now owns in some form someday.)

As before, whenever you’ve got a 3G or Wi-Fi connection you can search for albums and artists, pull up playlists (including ones you created on a PC or Mac), and stream an unlimited quantity of music from Rhapsody’s millions of tracks. But now your playlists have a Download button–tap it, and all the songs in that list get downloaded so you can listen to them when you don’t have an Internet connection (or have one that can be spotty, which is often the case when you’re driving).

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