UK iPhone

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!

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!