UK iPhone

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.

The creators of VAT Mate have asked me to review their app, so I downloaded it from the App Store. Although they offered to give me a freebie, I decided to cough up the 59p myself, to make sure the review is completely unbiased

VAT Mate is billed as a UK VAT calculator, and it does do exactly what it says on the tin. On startup you are invited to choose the relevant VAT rate, either the 5% reduced rate, the 15% standard rate, or the 17,5% rate which will apply again in 2010 (the 15% rate is a temporary reduction).

After selecting the rate, you are presented with two blank fields, one for the VAT excluded amount, and one for the VAT included amount. You can enter amounts into either, and then press Calculate to find out the VAT amount. This allows both sellers to find out how much to add onto their selling price to account for the VAT, and buyers to find out how much VAT they are paying on the VAT-inclusive price.

The screen layout has been designed to allow all the fields and buttons to remain visible when the built-in keyboard comes up to allow entry, and the designers have ensured that the numeric keyboard is already selected. However, this keyboard also contains all of the punctuation marks, so only the top row of keys (the numeric keys) is really useful for the application: the other two rows are not relevant.

While I can understand that it was easier for the creators to just use the built-in keyboard when programming the application, it would have been much better to create a custom numeric keypad; this would also have allowed the keys to be put in the familiar numeric layout, which would speed entry.

It also might have been useful to include some guidance on when the 5% rate applies and exactly when the 17.5% rate comes back into effect.

Nevertheless this is a useful app for those who need to calculate VAT rates, and it does so much more easily than an ordinary calculator does. VAT Mate is available in the App Store.

A little while ago I blogged about the Tioti TV iPhone app that lets you set recordings on Sky+ from anywhere, using your iPhone. Since then, Sky have released their own iPhone app, which more or less lets you do the same thing, and it’s free.

However, I still think it’s worth coughing up a couple of quid for the Tioti app, because the Sky app is not as easy to use. It tries to replicate the electronic programme guide (EPG) that you get when you press the TV guide button on your Sky remote, but this does not take full advantage of the iPhone interface. While you can scroll the listings sideways by swiping, the only way to move up or down is with the buttons at the top of the screen: this may replicate the Sky remote operation, but on the iPhone it’s far more natural to scroll down by swiping, and this is what Tioti does. I prefer it.

The stark blue and white of the interface looks a bit low-tech, whereas the Tioti one includes station graphics, multiple font sizes etc. It’s also possible to customise Tioti so that it only shows the channels you want to see, whereas the Sky app shows them all. Most annoyingly, it doesn’t have an HD menu item, meaning all the HD channels are interspersed among all the others, and doesn’t have any way to favourite or mark shows: Tioti has “My TV” which shows you all the shows you are recording or have marked as favourite.

Another annoying thing about the Sky app is that it doesn’t download details until you select something, whereas Tioti downloads everything in the background, so there is no annoying pause before you can see anything.

As they say, in life, you get what you pay for. So if you want to step up to Tioti:

Get Tioti TV on your iPhone!

Apple have announced a sneak peek of the 3.0 upgrade to the iPhone operating system, which will be released in the summer. The big news is that copy and paste will finally make an appearance. The way it works is that you double-tap a word and a bubble comes up with options to cut or copy. The selection can be dragged to include adjacent words. Presumably the selection can then be pasted into any other application (unlike a Samsung touch-phone which I used recently, which only allows copy and paste in the same application: less than totally useful).

Another new feature is multi-media messaging: finally you will be able to send pictures etc by text message. Annoyingly this will only be available on 3G iPhones.

This would seem to mitigate against the rumour reported previously about a new iPhone. As Apple are able to radically upgrade iPhones by releasing new software, the need to upgrade the hardware is greatly reduced. The current hardware platform has everything that is available on the competition (3G, GPS) and so there is no obvious advantage to creating new hardware. So I now believe that there will be no new iPhone in the summer, and O2 are cutting prices to move as much hardware as possible before the contract goes to Orange.

According to this, O2 will shortly begin cutting prices to clear inventory of the 3G iPhone ahead of the launch of a new model in June or July, which would be fantastic. Even better is the news that Orange might be getting the iPhone too! Which would serve O2 right for their lousy service to iPhone owners in the UK.

So keep looking out for price cuts, maybe that will be confirmation of a new phone!

UPDATE: The release by Apple of the 3.0 iPhone system upgrade would seem to indicate there will be no new iPhone in the summer. But it’s still possible that Orange will get the iPhone distribution contract.

You may remember the hype that surrounded the launch by Google of the G-Phone, a supposed iPhone killer that pretty much failed to impress and had little impact. But Google has obviously not given up on their phone ambitions, and like Microsoft, they tend to improve incrementally on their initially poor offerings over time.

So say hello to Google Voice, an ambitious offering from Google that seems to integrate all of your phones into a single service that is controlled via the Web. You get one number from Google that you can forward to all of your other phones, use voicemail, listen in on voicemail as it’s being recorded (a clever touch) and the voicemail is transcribed and placed into an email-like mailbox accessible via the Web.

Other cool stuff is call screening (unknown or blocked-ID callers are asked for their name, which is then played back to you so you can decide whether to take the call) and aggressive number blocking (a caller receives the three-rising-tone “number not in service” message).

By putting a lot of the phone functionality on the Web, and abstracting your number from a particular device, Google Voice is a threat to all of the current players in the mobile phone industry, not just Apple. But if it works well, the iPhone should be able to find a niche as one of your phones, and of course the apps tend to keep people using an iPhone even if it’s not the greatest phone in the world!

UPDATE: David Pogue of the New York Times on Google Voice.