UK iPhone

I was looking through Amazon the other day and stumbled across this super-cool Hello Kitty iPhone case. This would be an amazing gift for someone who loves Hello Kitty (and their iPhone!) Imagine pulling this out on the tube or bus; you’d get envious glances, that’s for sure! Also available in black:

HELLO KITTY Shiny Silver Vinyl Case for iPhone 3G, iPhone 3G S

O2 have confirmed that they will unlock customer’s iPhones at no charge at the end of their contract, thus freeing them to sign up with Orange or (next year) Vodafone for continued service on their iPhone.

So if you are suffering under an O2 contract and looking to get on a better network, but not keen on shelling out money to replace your perfectly-good iPhone, it’s good news. As the official Orange iPhone launch day is tomorrow, 10 November, you might want to start calling O2 customer service to find out how to get free…

This is double-plus ungood news if true: the BBC have discovered portions of Orange’s terms and conditions (T&C’s) relating to the iPhone that seem to rule out any “non-Orange” streaming. Presumably including Spotify, and possibly even Facebook messaging:

“Not to be used for other activities (eg using your handset as a modem, non-Orange internet based streaming services, voice or video over the internet, instant messaging, peer to peer file sharing, non-Orange internet based video). Should such use be detected notice may be given and Network protection controls applied to all services which Orange does not believe constitutes mobile browsing.”

It’s certainly true that Orange have a history of “locking down” their phones more than most, but whether Apple would allow them to prevent specific apps from running is another question entirely. It’s not clear how the “Network protection controls” would work; not sure how they could tell data requested by Spotify apart from data requested by Safari. Although perhaps they would just block Spotify’s servers?

In any event, this is a huge question mark over Orange’s iPhone offering, and I’m now thinking we should wait for further clarification, and if possible, actual proof that Orange iPhones work as they should, before taking the plunge with Orange.

So the release date for the iPhone on Orange, the first time you will be able to buy an iPhone in the UK that is not on O2, is the 10th of November. You can get it through the Orange store, Carphone Warehouse, Phones4U, and Apple stores.

The tariffs are for the most part very similar to O2’s, so unfortunately no price war. But I will just be glad to be shot of O2 and onto Orange’s far superior 3G network: the iPhone will finally work the way it should!

I was really pleased to see that the excellent Dropbox has released an app for the iPhone. I’ve been using Dropbox for ages, and it’s a brilliant solution to the problem of working on more than one device (eg home computer, work computer, laptop, iPhone). Dropbox automatically and seamlessly synchronises files that you put into your Dropbox directory across all devices. To use it, you just sign up for an account (free or paid) and then download the software and install it on all the machines you want to use it on. There are versions for Windows, Mac, Linux, and now your iPhone.

Each installation creates a Dropbox directory on that machine. Anything you put into that directory appears, virtually instantly, on your other machines. Synching happens in the background, automatically. Dropbox also saves your files onto its servers, and there is a web interface to manage those files directly. So even if you find yourself on a machine that you haven’t installed Dropbox to, you can still download your files via the web!

The free plan includes a very generous amount of online storage, which you can increase by upgrading to paid.

The iPhone app is of course free, but you’ll need an account to use it. You can sign up for a free account here.

The Palm Pre has just been launched in the UK. From US reports it’s a lovely phone (with admittedly poor battery life) and I would certainly consider trying it for awhile, to replace my ageing iPhone 1st gen, except for one thing:

It’s only available on O2.

The sheer hell of being an iPhone owner, tied to the crippling O2 network, has completely put me off O2. Even if the Pre is better than the iPhone, you will still be saddled with a network which actively works agains the phone experience. Dropped calls, poor reception, glacial data speeds… all this will be yours.

No thanks.

I’m waiting for Orange to tell me I can get an iPhone 3G through them.

According to the Telegraph, Orange has secured the rights to distribute the iPhone in the UK. O2 will not lose its contract, just its exclusivity.

Although the contract giving O2 exclusivity was rumoured to be expiring this September, this is the first official confirmation that this will be the case.

This is fantastic news for long-suffering iPhone owners in the UK, currently tied to a network with lousy coverage and painfully slow data speeds. As their contracts come up for renewal, they will be able to choose Orange, whose network is much better.

Ironically I switched from Orange to O2 when I bought my iPhone about a year and a half ago. Now that my contract is up, I’m looking forward to moving back!

UPDATE: Vodafone are getting the iPhone too, although not until next year. So it looks like UK iPhoners are going to be spoilt for choice. With both Voda and Orange having much better 3G networks than O2, the latter will probably say goodbye to its last iPhone subscriber in about two years time, when all those who got the 3GS recently come to the end of their unprecedented two-year contracts!

UPDATE: I signed up with Orange for notification of when I can get an iPhone from them, and they sent an email saying “Not long now.” Let’s hope that’s the truth…

Also I see in the news that O2 “haven’t decided” whether they will unlock iPhones if their customers want to go to Orange or Vodafone. Honestly, I can’t see this as being a big deal. If you upgraded to the 3GS then you are locked into a two-year contract anyway. If you didn’t, you probably want a new phone, especially if like me you have an 8Gb 1st-gen phone. I suppose for some people who are happy with their 3G, this could be bad news, but I can’t see how O2 would benefit from pissing people off even more.

According to this report, the long-awaited Spotify iPhone app that lets you listen to Spotify playlists offline has been approved by Apple. No sign of it in the App Store yet, but I’m betting this is going to be one of the most-downloaded apps once it is released!

Basically Spotify is a music-streaming service, only available in Europe, that streams music to your Mac or PC. The app itself is very smooth and intuitive and there is a lot of music available. The iPhone app not only lets you stream music to your iPhone (over Wifi and 3G), it also lets you save playlists that you have created on your desktop Spotify app, so that you can listen to them offline. Fantastic!

Spotify operates in two modes, a free service with ads, or a paid, ad-free service that costs £10 a month. The iPhone app, unsurprisingly, will only work with the paid service.

UPDATE: I finally managed to download the app, and after upgrading my Spotify account to Premium, have synchronised a few offline playlists, and am using listening to them on the Tube to work! Really works well, very smooth playback, well-designed app. Works well over wifi for streaming too, if you’re at home and quickly want to check out a piece of music or play something for a friend, it’s the work of seconds.

Over Edge or GPRS there is a longish delay before streaming starts, but after that it works surprisingly well. It may work better over 3G (I have a 1st-gen phone) but somehow knowing O2, I doubt it!

Tomorrow is the keynote address for Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC), a traditional platform for announcing new products. There has been a lot of talk about an iPhone-related announcement tomorrow. For example, the Financial Times believes that a lower-cost iPhone will be announced.

Others, such as Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, predict a new iPhone with a much faster processor, a better camera, and more memory. I have to say I find this more credible. My iPhone is starting to show its age: when it was launched, there was no app store, and all it needed to accomplish was its basic functionality. Now I find it is struggling to keep up with all the fast new apps around, and there is definitely a need for more space: I’m having to delete old apps to download new ones, and I don’t have even a third of my music library on there.

So a new and faster iPhone would be great. I would definitely upgrade if one was announced. Apple haven’t increased the speed of the iPhone since it was launched, the 3G iPhone added 3G and GPS functionality but other than that changed nothing. It’s high time Apple moved forward on the iPhone, and tomorrow could be the day.

Or not: one thing Apple are famous for is keeping people guessing. Check back tomorrow night for an update on what happened!

UPDATE: The new iPhone (iPhone 3G S – for speed!) will be a reality on 19 June! It features a faster processor, better camera with video, a compass (!) and improved battery life, but looks identical to the existing 3G (which will remain available for a much lower price). UK pricing is not yet available, but in the US the 16Gb version costs $199, and the 32Gb one $299.

The much-awaited Palm Pre smartphone will be released in the US today, and the consensus of the reviewers seems to be that it is the first credible challenger to the iPhone. This is hardly surprising: it is the creation of an ex-Apple executive, who has apparently poached a large team of Apple engineers to build the software.

David Pogue of the New York Times has given the Pre a very positive review: his only complaints are battery life, and the paucity of applications on Palm’s equivalent of the App Store. But the Pre does have some advantages over the iPhone: for one thing, the battery is removable and replaceable, and there are other improved features such as multi-tasking and a flash for the camera. If you prefer a real keyboard, the Pre has one, although it is apparently smaller than a BlackBerry’s: not sure if I would like that!

There is some controversy over the method that Palm have chosen to synchronise the music on the Pre with your iTunes library: the Pre apparently pretends to be an iPod! When you plug it in, it appears in iTunes as an iPod. No-one’s sure how Palm have done this, nor how Apple will react to this, but it does seem a bit of an odd approach. There is no reason why Palm could not have interfaced with iTunes more honestly: the iTunes library is very much an “open” one, and when, for example, you buy music from Amazon’s music store, the Amazon downloader has no trouble adding your music to your iTunes library. So why Palm felt they had to be so underhanded is not clear.

There is no release date confirmed for the UK, although it seems that Palm Pre users will also have to suffer the awfulness of O2: iPhone users in the UK already know how crap O2 are, and it’s a real shame that the best phones are being crippled by the worst network in the UK. The UK release will be complicated by the fact that the US Pre is a CDMA phone, a standard used only in the US (and being phased out even there in favour of GSM). Obviously here in the UK we use GSM like the rest of the world, so Palm would have to create a GSM version of the phone. They have done this before, Palm’s Treo phone came in both CDMA and GSM flavours, so it shouldn’t be a major issue, but obviously creating a version of the phone based on a different technology is more complicated than simply releasing the same version in a new country, as Apple did with the iPhone, which is based on GSM everywhere.

It’s certainly good to see other smartphones using the ideas that Apple pioneered, like the touch-screen interface and downloadable applications. The competition will hopefully act as a spur to Apple to make the new iPhone (which may be out on Monday!) even better.