On Wednesday the Apple AppStore reached the 100,000 app mark, it was announced, which is a huge milestone for the iProduct range.

The AppStore is undoubtedly the main stay of the iPhone market, that without it we question weather the iPhone would have been so popular. With 50 million of us downloading up to 10,000 apps a day, you can see how important the AppStore is to apple, and what this benchmark must mean to the other smartphone manufacturers.

Much of the AppStore’s current success has been contributed to the 3.0 firmware release which gave the developers up to 100 new features to experiment with like cut, copy, paste, compass, MMS, Bluetooth, and Push. With iTunes 9 Apple hopes to continue to give us new ways to easily search or wade through these apps with better search and discovery.

Now if only they could find a way to reduce the amount of useless, duplicated apps!

When the iPhone was launched there was really two competitors in the Smartphone market: Windows Mobile and Blackberry. Blackberry was aimed very much at email and the corporate market, whilst Microsoft’s Windows Mobile was for the techno savvy. Along came Apple with the iPhone and the App Store and iTunes and voila we have a mass market consumer product.

Apple decided to control the system as much as possible with single carrier agreements, a very closed development environment, allowing you only to load apps and music via the App Store and iTunes.

The ‘New Kid on the block’ is Android which is exactly the opposite. This has been adopted by T-Mobile, Sprint, and in a few days time Verizon Droid. The “I Don’t” advert for Droid highlights the restrictive features of the iPhone Platform.
Continue reading »

Is this evidence of Apple’s controversial Killswitch in action?

Please note this now appears to be a bug which is being fixed.

A recent app that I, like many others, bought on the AppStore with real money appears to have suddenly stopped working. A simple application called Night Stand, which is now copied by other app developers in true AppStore style, designed to simply display the time and alarm while dimming the screen. Not exactly a controversial app to say the least and has been available for some time! Now it seems that you can load the app but it simply won’t run.

This app has also been tested on a colleagues phone with the same results. This is not as a result of any updates as it was seen to work recently and, stranger still, the app has been pulled from the AppStore itself. As of this moment I have not yet been able to find any reason for it’s disappearance, but am more concerned about the fact that any app can seemingly be pulled from your device without warning or reason.

I paid good money for that app, all be it 59 pence but it is mine, or is it?

Apple have very quietly purchased an online mapping company, Placebase.

The news was only confirmed recently but speculation is now growing that this indicates a desire by Apple to reduce its reliance on Google services including of course Google maps.

The former Placebase CEO is now on-board with Apple in the ‘Geo Team as his Linked-In profile confirms.

There are clear commercial reasons why apple would want to bring a mapping company into their portfolio. iPhoto has geotagging support using Google Maps and the iPhone/iPod Touch of course both use Google Map data.

With mapping experience in the family we may possibly see more map enabled functionality in Apple but of course, buying a small online mapping company does not give you access to world-wide map data so Apple have some way to go before we will see ‘Maps by Apple’ in the copyright.

In the last week we have had a number of announcements from GPS companies regarding Turn by Turn navigation for the iPhone. Yesterday AT&T added their offering to the market available for “FREE” on the iTunes App Store. However it seems that Apple have allowed AT&T to break all the rules…

The AT&T Navigator application is free to download, but to use it you need to pay a monthly subscription of $9.99 directly to AT&T in your monthly billing. This is a double rule break. Firstly Apple states that all applications that require subscriptions or in-app purchases must be chargeable in the first place. Secondly AT&T are openly billing their clients outside the App Store (and assumable not passing Apple any commissions).

Now the question here is are Apple setting a president and does this mean that any developer can use the same principle to provide a subscription service? Or is it that the wireless carrier waves a big stick and demands one-off policy changes. Knowing Apple I would not think it is the latter, but I also doubt it is the former so what is really going on here?
Continue reading »

Last Friday saw the launch of the iPhone 3GS across the globe. We decided to take a plunge and go to London UK’s Apple Flagship store to get our shiny new iPhones, and also to document the day.

The queues in the Apple Store were mad. Hundreds of patient users waiting to part with hard earned cash for a new iPhone 3GS. In true Disney style Apple managed to snake the queues round to cram as many people into the store as possible. Then with military precession they were moved from staging point to staging point before finally getting to the sales guy, and getting the new iPhone.

We also took a trip to the Oxford Street Carphone Warehouse where things where a bit quieter, CPW were only selling the iPhones on 18 month O2 Contracts.

The video covers us tramping round London to find some iPhones, and also shows the quality of the new video camera in the phone. This video was taken in my car whilst in a HR iPhone mount (review to follow shortly…)

Our video follows:
Continue reading »

Wasn’t all plain sailing.  Original plan was to grab a couple of PAYG’s from CPW in Oxford Street as they were opening at 7.30am.  Then we could whizz round the corner to film outside the Apple Store,

But when CPW opened we discovered that they were not selling PAYG’s.  So quick change of plan saw one contract 3G S bought at CPW, and then we nipped round the corner and joined the queue at Apple.  The queue was out the door and round the corner by now (8am) but moved quickly.  In lesss than 30mins we were in posession of a PAYG 3G S and had a free coffee courtesy of Apple.

However, Apple transferred my existing 3G PAYG SIM to the new phone and claimed this was what they had to do?  Only when I got home did I discover that this meant no addittional 12mths Web & WiFi!  No mention of this in the store and no new SIM provided with my 3G S because of this.

A call to O2 reveals you only get that if you use the new SIM.  So why didn’t Apple tell me?  So now O2 are sending me the new SIM and I can the transfer my old number.  There are already a number of Twitter posts from users who have had similar issues at O2 stores.  Is this a policy or is someone taking advantage of a nice PAYG SIM that has 12mths free data?

I may use the new SIM in the old 3G and buy the £10/mth web bolt on when my current Web & WiFi package expires in September.  I topped up £10 when I bought the 3G last year and still have £3 left, not a big phone user hence why I wanted a PAYG with free data and not a nasty contract!

After the excitement of the iPhone OS 3.0 upgrade coming out yesterday I decided to upgrade my iPod Touch. After connecting to iTunes I was met with a screen telling me I needed to pay for the upgrade.

Woah hold on are iPod Touch users second class Apple citizens? This was something that Apple had kept very quiet in the run up to the launch of the new OS, but I suppose alarm bells should have rung when there was no beta software for the iPod Touch.

The upgrade costs $9.99 on the US AppStore or £5.99 on the UK one.

Well we have been waiting for this moment for a while now, but the Apple iPhone OS 3.0 has just arrived for download. Use iTunes to upload it.

Apple retail stores are preparing to launch the iPhone 3G S this Friday.  Looking at the UK flagship store and the San Francisco store all training sessions have been cancelled for the day except a special in SF.  The stores are preparing to open early 8am in London and 7am in San Francisco.

Apple claim you can book a personal shopping appointment for June the 19th and skip the line to buy an iPhone, but if you click on the link you will find that all the Friday appointments have been taken.  Some of the smaller stores still have time slots, but the question is will there be enough stock to go round?

Phone 3G S.
Available June 19th, 8:00 am

Book an iPhone Personal Shopping appointment for June 19th and come right to the front of the line when you arrive at the Apple Retail Store

We have examined the cost of ownership of the new iPhones, but will this be enough to make all the techies out there rush out to get a new iPhone when they still have 7 months left on the existing contract?  Well Apple, O2 and the CarPhone Warehouse in the  UK seem to think so and have all made preparations for floods of customers wanting the new iPhone 3G S.

Of course the team at Wired4iPhone are eager to be amongst the first to get their hands on a bright shiny new iPhone 3G S and we will be in London in the Carphone Warehouse, O2 and Apple Stores filming (and hopefully picking our new iPhones up).