We had always wondered if releasing a jailbroken application hindered a developer’s chances of having subsequent legal apps approved by Apple for the App Store, and now we have our answer. It seems releasing a jailbroken application has done fring no harm at all, as a fully legal and free version of its VoIP app is now available for the iPhone on the App Store.
Sadly, because of Apple’s strict restrictions on the iPhone SDK, the iPhone version of fring does not have access to the iPhone 3G’s 3G connectivity, meaning that for the time being anyway, this is strictly a wifi application.
The other concession is that it cannot run in the background, so you will need to load fring each time you want to make a VoIP call, unless you just want to leave it running all the time, which is unlikely for the average iPhone user. Even so, as an early release, fring have made the very best of the SDK in among Apple’s various restrictions.
Continue reading ‘fring brings VoIP calls to the iPhone (and this time with Apple’s blessing)’
It doesn’t come as much of a surprise, given the reaction that the handset tends to provoke in people, which is usually something along the lines of “ohmygodwhazzatIwantone”.
Winning the public vote against strong competition from all of the current-gen gaming consoles as well as a budget laptop and the obligatory set of oddly shaped iPhone speakers, the iPhone 3G’s win cements the device’s reputation as THE must have gadget for discerning tech lovers.
Interestingly, Stuff’s own editorial crew chose to ignore the zeitgeist and opt for the sub-£300 Asus Eee Pc, as their gadget of the year. The mag justified its choice making the entirely reasonable claim that the Asus Eee PC is the device that marks the beginning of the “laptop for everyone” era.
So seeing as devices focussed on mobility seem to be where it’s at, at the moment, we can sleep sound in the knowledge that for mobile bloggers like ourselves, our jobs are safe for the time being.
(Via Reuters)
Fancy a non-contract iPhone 3G? It’ll cost you? How much you ask? Well that’ll be £350 for the 8GB version or a full £400 for the 16GB model courtesy of O2. In all honesty, though neither option is cheap, it certainly beats the carrier free pricing fiasco that swept much of Europe shortly after the original iPhone was launched.
Of course, O2 is offering a full raft of Pay As You Go options to entice those unwilling to sign up to a monthly contract. Paying between £10 and £14 a month in call credit will net you 500 free minutes to any landline or O2 cellphone. If you spend between £15 and £29 you’ll get 1,000 minutes, while £30 or more provides unlimited calls (presumably on the same terms i.e. to landline numbers and O2 mobiles).
One of the big sweeteners is that PAYG customers will get unlimited Internet access, including 3G and O2 Wi-Fi, free, for the first year and then for the measly sum of £10 per month thereafter.
The main drawback of the whole package is that text messages don’t get a look in, costing their usual 10p each. Apparently the iPhone’s Visual Voicemail and on-the-fly call merging are also exempt from the PAYG plan, which is worth bearing in mind should you wish to avoid a nasty surprise.
The prepaid phones and plans will be available from both O2 and Apple Stores from September 16th so there is still time to get saving if you have managed to resist the lure of an iPhone on contract so far.
If like me you have been unfortunate enough to buy one of those MacBooks that suffers from a design defect causing the casing to crack, then this story will come as no surprise to you. Still that will probably be precious little recompense to early iPhone 3G adopters that they are experiencing similar hairline cracking problems.
According to AppleInsider, the hairline fractures are appearing most commonly on the plastic shell near the headphone jack, ringer switch, and volume controls. The cracks are apparently often multiple and sometimes deep enough to allow a peek hole view into the iPhone’s guts.
Continue reading ‘Does the iPhone 3G have a casing defect?’
Though they seem to be firmly behind us now (touch wood), regular readers will know that our iPhone 3G experience has not been without its woes. And by woes we mean, repeated crashing followed by ludicrously long back-up/restore times.
According to The Boy Genius Report however, if you have been experiencing similar problems, you need not fret quite so much as you were before. It seems that though there doesn’t seem to be any sure fire way to avoid crashing your unit beyond getting down on your knees and praying to Steve Jobs, if your device does crash, you can speed up the back-up/restore time significantly by simply selecting not to send the error report to Apple.
Fortunately we don’t seem to be experiencing the same crashing issues we were to begin with, but hopefully we won’t need to try this out. If we are unlucky however (and let’s face it, this post has pretty much guaranteed that our iPhone 3G is now jinxed) we will be sure to try this out to see if it makes a difference.
In the meantime, if any of you find yourselves having to back-up/restore your iPhone 3G, why not try this out and let us know if it makes a difference.
This could be a tough watch, especially if you are now a slave to Apple and coveting your shiny new iPhone 3G.
Blender manufacturer Blendtec have produced another of their strangely compelling “Will It Blend?” viral videos. There was only one possible candidate for the latest edition - host Tom Dickson fired up his Total Blender and turned that beautiful, beautiful phone into a handful of black powder.
Brace yoursleves..
According to that ever nefarious, ‘word round the campfire’, the iPhone 3G could be making its way to an Orange store near you before very long. The report comes from Electricpig which has heard from an undisclosed apparently very credible source that with O2’s exclusive iPhone contract coming to an end just before Christmas, Orange will be allowed to sell the iPhone on its network from October onward.
Now normally we would dismiss all rumours out of hand this late on a Friday afternoon, purely as a point of principle. But the fact that Orange already carries the iPhone in France, Austria, Belgium, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Jordan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Switzerland and Africa does tend to lend weight to the possibility.
There is also the notion that Jailbreaking iPhones has been most common in the UK, with Apple subsequently looking for ways to offer more choice in order to curb the public desire to take iPhones on jaunts to other networks the dirty way. Throw in O2’s less than stellar performance with the launch of the iPhone 3G and you are looking at a very tidy little package of rumours and speculation that could well add up to more than the sum of their parts.
So the only question remaining is, if the iPhone was available on both networks in the UK, which one would you choose?
Reports are filtering through the ether that several early iPhone 3G adopters are noticing a difference between their new device and the old iPhone, that they don’t really like. Apparently the iPhone 3G’s screen is warmer to the point that it has a sort of yellow tint.
People have been lodging plenty of complaints, though the borked iTunes registration debacle has probably kept many iPhone 3G users too busy to notice any difference in the screen on their new phone. Despite Apple having previously stated that both versions of the iPhone use exactly the same display, Apple’s Senior Director of Product Marketing, Bob Borchers, has since contacted Engadget to state that the screen on the new iPhone 3G is more yellow and that it is deliberate.
Continue reading ‘iPhone 3G users complain of yellow screen tint’
Huzzah! No more waiting, no more anticipating *breaks into embarrassing spontaneous song and dance outburst*.
The only obstacle we have to enjoying the new iPhone 3G now is that we only have one unit to toss round the office like three raving, cackling witches fighting over a single eyeball. Anyhow, we have managed to play nice for long enough to get a full-on tech-porn unboxing pictured and documented, which you can read in full by heading on over to our sister site Pocket Gamer.
A full review will follow here before long but in the meantime, we are going to sigh a contented sigh of relief that Stu’s endurance queueing session this morning yielded the fruit we so craved.
Our heroic iPhone 3G hunter Stuart Dredge is but moments away from spearing himself a shiny new device (not literally of course, that would make reviewing the new iPhone a bit tricky and would probably cause a bit of an unwanted spectacle in the store). At any rate his progress can be tracked over at his Twitter page. His last post about twenty minutes ago read:
Truck parked opposite playing Proper Metal. I am at the door now, but it’s still v slow inside.
Between insults from passers by, screaming toddlers, abrasive metal music and an extremely long wait, our Stuart is proving himself as a hero among us simple men today. Judging by the timeline on his Twitter account, he should be inside snaffling the goods now. Expect a victory post as soon as we have the coveted techie sweet meat.
