Re-views.org | iPhone 3G reception woes unfixable? Maybe, maybe not.
Posted by Reviews in Electronics, Gadgets, iPhone on 08 14th, 2008
Support forum threads on Apple’s site and a number of ramblings across these great interwebs are starting to complain at great length about the iPhone 3G’s headlining new feature — 3G reception, that is — and pretty much every aspect of it: signal strength, call dropping, connecting to EDGE when 3G is present, the list goes on. Some smartypants analyst from financial firm Nomura thinks he has it all figured out, saying that the issues are “typical of an immature chipset and radio protocol stack” and suggesting that a firmware update pushed out to existing handsets is unlikely to ease the pain. We’ve been hearing that Cupertino could actually be working on just such an update at this very second, though, so this cat better get ready for the possibility that he could be eating his own words down the road. For what it’s worth, intermittent issues have been reported the world over, so this doesn’t seem to be anything to do with AT&T’s (or anyone else’s) infrastructure — and needless to say, not everyone is having issues to start. And for anyone whose iPhone 3G we just jinxed by writing this post… well, our bad.
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read comments (0)Re-views | iPhone 3G at one million sold and counting, App Store hits 10 million downloads.
Posted by Reviews in Electronics, Gadgets, iPhone on 07 14th, 2008
You hear of this new iPhone 3G thing? Doing pretty well, or so we hear. Apple says they sold one million of ‘em this weekend worldwide, compared to the 74 days it took them to hit one million with the last generation. So far the little bugger has invaded 21 countries, with France next on its hit list on July 17. Oh, and that App Store isn’t doing too bad for itself either, with 10 million downloads so far to iPhone 3Gs, updated iPhones and iPod touches. No breakdown yet on paid apps versus free apps, but Jared is free, and that’s all that matters. However, the saddest fact in all of this is that bunches of suckers enthusiastic fans are queued up at the Fifth Avenue Apple Store this morning in New York (pictured), showing either a level of devotion to this little plastic bauble, or of complete disregard for their jobs, which is altogether frightening.
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Re-views.org | iPhone 3G: guts, plants, and free SMS
Posted by Reviews in Electronics, Gadgets, iPhone on 07 14th, 2008
Craziest thing, Apple apparently launched some sort of device being loosely coined as a “cellular telephone” last Friday. The darned thing makes calls, keeps track of contacts, and even receives messages — all right from your pocket! Wild, sci-fi caliber stuff, that. We’re catching up on the latest iPhone 3G buzz, and here’s what we’ve got going on at the moment:
- Jonny Gladwell, better known as the first iPhone 3G owner in the world thanks to his perfect storm of location (New Zealand) and line position (first), has been outed as a plant for New Zealand’s Yellow Pages. Turns out the guy was hired by the directory service to see if he could “survive” the brutal multi-day sitting experience using nothing but — you guessed it — the Yellow Pages to get by. Ironic that you don’t need a friggin’ Yellow Pages when you have an iPhone, isn’t it? Hmm, Jonny?
- Portelligent has sacrificed an iPhone 3G to conduct perhaps the most thorough teardown thus far, finding some incremental improvements, largely to accomodate 3G and bring the design in line with the iPod touch, while carrying over a good deal of componentry that had no reason to be upgraded. Infineon and Toshiba had big wins here in the radio and flash memory departments, respectively.
- AIM acts as a conduit for sending text messages by allowing users to add phone numbers as “buddies.” The iPhone has an AIM client. See where we’re going with this? Yep, it’s a cheesy way to avoid shelling out for a text messaging plan, if you want to go to the trouble of using AIM in place of the native SMS app.
- The plot thickens in the yellow screen issue. As we’d mentioned yesterday, Apple claims the warmer color temperature seen in the iPhone 3G was a purposeful attempt to make things prettier and sharper — but now, Ars Technica reports that forcing an update in iTunes from the 3G’s shipping firmware of 5A345 to the ever-so-slightly newer 5A347 pushes things a little bit back toward the blue end of the spectrum. So what’s it gonna be, Apple?
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