A new iPhone software update just hit iTunes. Version 2.0.2 is described as a bug fix release with little additional information. As usual, a version can be downloaded directly from Apple’s servers or through iTunes. And, as always, this update will de-pwn your iPhone, should you have previously pwned it for command-line shell access and third-party Cydia applications.

Posted on August 19th, 2008 by admin
Filed under: 3G iPhone | No Comments »

Rearranging the icons on the home screen of your iPhone is a part of the customization fun that Apple built in. However, if you rearranged your icons and want them back to factory specifications, it is as easy as a simple tap. Just navigate to Settings > General > Reset. Once there, select the “Reset Home Screen Layout” button. A dialog will pop-up asking for a confirmation.

Once you return to the home screen, you will notice that all the icons are placed just like they were when you first turned on your iPhone! Third-party applications’ icons will follow the default applications.

via http://www.tuaw.com/2008/08/17/iphone-101-restore-your-homescreen-icons/

Posted on August 18th, 2008 by admin
Filed under: 3G iPhone | No Comments »

.—

ehPhone.ca reader Stephen F found himself in a similar situation, here is his story:

I lined up on July 10, 2008 to get my iPhone 3G.  I joined the line (in 3rd place) at 10:30 PM.  It was a wonderful experience to get to know the people in line, but it was even more exciting to get my hands on my first iPhone.  To be honest, I hadn’t even seen a 1st gen iPhone in person until someone pulled theirs out in line.

The past month using my iPhone has been amazing.  It truly is a revolutionary device, and while the firmware is still a little glitchy, the iPhone absolutely changed the way I use a phone, and the way I use a computer!  I was checking my email more often on my iPhone than I was on my computer…and I much preferred the iPhone Facebook app’s interface to the web interface.

However, my relationship with this particular iPhone ended last night.  I had been up at a friend’s cottage the night before, and had been unable to find my iPhone during the day yesterday.  Assuming I had left it at the cottage, I drove up late last night.  I searched the cottage high and low, unable to find my phone.

Giving up looking shortly after midnight, I began driving home.  When I stopped the car to close the gate to the lane which leads to the cottage, my worst nightmare came true.  I saw my phone case on the ground.  My iPhone was still inside it.  When I removed the iPhone from the case, I could immediately tell it had been run over by a car.

I was devastated.  I drove home immediately and went to bed.

This morning, I surveyed the damage.  The phone was protected by a phone sock and a front and back BSE skin.  The screen is cracked, but not shattered, and one side of the phone/chrome bezel is slightly bent/warped.  It looks like the 3M skin material snapped spontaneously in a few places, but for the most part the phone is free of scuffs.  I haven’t plugged it in to see if it still works yet, but I’m not particularly hopeful.

On a more intriguing note, I thought you might be interested to know that it is a white iPhone, and that even after being run over by a car (perhaps multiple times), the white casing is not cracked!

I’m fairly convinced at this point that the cracked plastic many have been reporting is limited to a production run (or perhaps several).  I’m pretty impressed that the plastic isn’t cracked after being run over by a car.

What is the accidental damage replacement policy of Fido/Rogers?  I know Apple had an accidental replacement policy for the first iPhone; have they continued this policy with the iPhone 3G?

Here are some photos of the unfortunate event:

Here’s an update on how the replacement process has gone thus far.

1.   I called Fido.  The customer service rep asked what had happened to my phone.  I said the screen was cracked, and that it was most likely accidental damage, not covered under warranty.  She indicated that she would have to speak to one of the technical support staff, as this was a new issue for her (I guess not too many people have broken their iPhones yet!).  The customer service rep was very friendly and understanding, but unfortunately after spending 27 minutes speaking with CSR’s and on hold she indicated that for issues most likely not covered under warranty, Fido’s instructions are to have the customer contact Apple directly.

2.   I called Apple.  Hold time under 10 minutes.  The representative was extremely nice and understanding, explaining that he loses his iPhone all the time, he’s just lucky enough for it still to be in one piece when he finds it.  Surprisingly, he also asked whether I was calling about a 1st gen or 3G iPhone!  He had me put the iPhone into restore mode by holding the home button while plugging in the USB cable to test if the internal components would be recognized in iTunes.  No such luck.  After a few tries, he indicated that it most likely was moisture damage, as opposed to the impact, that had disabled the phone. Either way, the damage would unfortunately not be covered under warranty.

3.   However, all was not lost.  He explained that Apple has a support plan in place to service iPhones that have expired warranties , or have been accidentally damaged and are not covered under warranty. He explained that the price to replace my iPhone would be $329 (for the 16GB model, $229 for the 8GB), and that I could make credit card payment right away, over the phone.  He explained that they also have an advance replacement warranty option which costs $29, in which case they would ship me a new iPhone and a shipping box to return my old one in.

Here’s a link to the support article:
http://www.apple.com/ca/support/iphone/service/faq/#warranty6

Suffice it to say that I was very pleased.  Fido had mentioned that the cost of the 16GB iPhone (full retail price)was $730.  Having Apple offer me a new phone for less than half of that price was very welcome
news.

Here’s some more pics:

—

If you are in a similar situation, let us know how things went for you. It’s nice to know Apple is looking out for us. They even gave me a free replacement when I had the cracking “>

Posted on August 15th, 2008 by admin
Filed under: 3G iPhone | No Comments »

Users have been reporting unusually bad reception and an abundance of dropped calls on their iPhone 3Gs, leading one analyst to suggest that the Infineon chipset may be defective. Now a source of BusinessWeek corroborates the story, saying that Apple is aware of the situation and that the problem is in fact related to the chipset.

According to this source, Apple is planning to fix the issue in existing phones through a software update rather than something more disruptive like a product recall. It is said that software residing on the chip that lets it function is creating a problem, which they will fix in the update.

Another source says that Infineon’s technology is still too new and hasn’t been properly tested in high volumes.

Posted on August 15th, 2008 by admin
Filed under: 3G iPhone | No Comments »

Piper Jaffray spent 25 hours observing sales at Apple stores around the US, and has concluded in a research note posted today that each store sells around 95 iPhone 3Gs every day. Based on this information, they estimate that sales of the device are set to increase forufold during their fiscal fourth quarter.

“Our 25 hours of counting iPhone sales in Apple retail stores throughout the country lead us to believe Apple is on pace to beat our previous estimate of 4.1 million iPhones for the September quarter,” analyst Gene Munster advised in the note.

From this information, he has changed his sales estimate for the fourth quarter to 4.47.

“We believe Apple will sell 1.78 million units at its U.S. retail stores, and 0.90 million phones at U.S. AT&T locations,” Munster wrote. “Our estimate assumes each of the 2,200 AT&T stores will sell an average of 5 phones per day from the July 11th launch through the end of the September quarter.”

However, it should be noted that they may shift their projections downward over time, as over the two-week span that the checks were made, sales began to slow down over the second week.

“We believe that our revision may be conservative and that Apple will meet our estimates,” he wrote. “The August 22nd launch in additional countries should provide another catalyst to sales.

via http://www.iphonealley.com/news/apple-selling-95-iphones-per-store-every-day?s=73db1872ec33dc45ca4ef0143b1eadc2

Posted on August 14th, 2008 by admin
Filed under: 3G iPhone | No Comments »

For the moment, the only e-books you can download through Stanza are those in the public domain and Creative Commons texts from Feedbooks. Even so, many a classic is in the public domain, making for a rather literary experience while on the go. 

And while this will probably never happen, it would seem to be rather easy to sync up the Stanza app with Amazon.com, allowing seamless e-book purchases and downloads. Amazon would sell a lot of e-books but they’d cut out their Kindle, which doesn’t seem like a plausible move on their part.

Posted on August 12th, 2008 by admin
Filed under: 3G iPhone | No Comments »

There is already a hearing-impaired plan from AT&T for the iPhone, but now that the iPhone 3G has been released, the plan got a bit of an overhaul, at least in the price department.

Prior to the 3G, the plan cost $40 a month. It included unlimited SMS and data transfer, and visual voicemail though phone calls were $.40/minute. 

For the 3G, the plan has merely been raised $10–just like all of the other iPhone 3G plans. Not too bad when you get down to it, but for some the $10 difference can mean a lot. 

Posted on August 4th, 2008 by admin
Filed under: iPhone Plan, 3G iPhone | No Comments »

We can all expect another feature to hit the iPhone 3G soon–speech recognition.

Now as exciting as that sounds, don’t get too excited yet. This is not speech recognition in the normal sense of the term. No, you can’t say “Mom” and the iPhone will automatically dial your mother’s number. Not going to happen. And the reason why is AT&T is developing the feature to run as a web feature. So when you speak, the data is sent to a remote server, then comes back to perform an action on your handset.

The service, called Speech Mashups, is web-based, so iPhone first gen users will probably be out of luck if stuck with using the EDGE network.

And even though voice dialing won’t work with this brand of speech recognition, it will work for a few other nifty things. There’s a video online showing a man dictating a city and type of business in YellowPages and how Speech Mashups does all of the footwork for you. Pretty cool, but voice dialing would be even nicer!

via http://www.iphonebuzz.com/speech-recognition-coming-to-the-iphone-233285.php

Posted on July 24th, 2008 by admin
Filed under: iPhone News, 3G iPhone | No Comments »

Just spotted this one via a post over at Gear Diary, and watched a video demo of this new iPhone ringtone making application called iRinger.

iRinger looks like a very good free option for ringtone creation - offering a very easy to use interface and a good, complete set of features - even down to letting you choose to export a newly created ringtone direct to iTunes or using SSH to directly transfer it to the iPhone.

This one is a Windows only application for now, so I’ve not given it a try as yet (too lazy just now to get iTunes setup on Fusion) - but it looks awfully good in the demo.  Here’s some of the highlights of its feature list:

• Three Steps: Import, Preview then Export. Done.
• Convert virtually any audio format into an iPhone ringtone
• Extracts audio out of video
• Choose which section of the audio you want to hear
• Adjust ringtone length, volume, fade in, fade out and loop gap
• Export to iPhone ringtone format and import right into iTunes
• Export to iPhone using SCP/SFTP and skip using iTunes
• Use audio effects: Delay, Flanger, Boost, Reverse, etc.

For more on iRinger, see its home page, or check out the demo video HERE …

via http://justanotheriphoneblog.com/wordpress/2008/07/20/iringer-free-full-featured-iphone-ringtone-maker/#more-4017

Posted on July 21st, 2008 by admin
Filed under: iPhone Ringtone, iphone applications, 3G iPhone | No Comments »

some information regarding how much the new iPhone 3G really cost Apple. Based on their calculation, Apple seems to be making roughly fifty fuve percent profit margin. While iSuppli did not count into research and development cost, the number is quite interesting.

Stripping off the new iPhone 3G for component lists and price them individually, iSuppli determined that a 8GB iPhone 3G costs $173.33 to build. AT&T is rumored to be paying Apple $300 subsidy on each iPhone 3G sales, that put the iPhone 3G total prices to $499 for the 8GB version and translate to the fifty five percent margin stated above.

“iSuppli believes Apple aimed for a more cost-effective design for the 3G iPhone compared to the 2G, in order to lower the retail price - which will allow the company to seed adoption and to capture maximum market share now - while the company still has buzz and a perceived differentiation relative to its competitors.”

If this number hold any truth, Apple’s one million iPhone 3G sold during the weekend should put its quarterly earning higher than before.

via http://www.iphonebuzz.com/iphone-3g-costs-173-to-build-giving-apple-an-estimated-55-percent-profit-margin-163019.php

Posted on July 17th, 2008 by admin
Filed under: iPhone News, 3G iPhone | No Comments »