Apple Iphone Fun Site

Sam Gustin says: Talk about bad reception.

Apple has been slapped with a lawsuit over service issues plaguing its new iPhone 3G.

Jessica Alena Smith, of Alabama, has sued Apple with breach of warranty and unjust enrichment, claiming that her new phone — what she refers to as “Defective iPhone 3G” — has much slower service than advertised.

Referring to the ubiquitous television ads touting the device, the lawsuit reads, “Defendant intended for customers to believe its statements and representations about the Defective iPhone 3Gs, and to trust that the device was ‘twice as fast at half the price.’”

Smith, who is seeking class-action status for the suit, also complains of spotty 3G reception and dropped calls, something other iPhone users have taken issue with. On Monday, Apple released a software fix intended to troubleshoot the problems, but it seems the fix may have caused new issues with the phone.

The suit asks Apple to fix or replace all defective iPhones and pay for lawyers’ fees.

Between the activation issues that hobbled Apple’s iPhone’s launch, the issues with its MobileMe Web services suite, and now the iPhone service problems, this is turning into a rocky summer for the company — no matter how many handsets it has sold, or how big its market capitalization becomes.
Read the rest of this entry »

As technology aficionados lined up around the world today to buy Apple’s iPhone 3G, Portfolio.com decided to find out how simple gadgets invented centuries ago stack up to the tricked-out electronic toys of the 21st century. We asked readers, which one is best?

Bells and whistles were by no means a predictor of success. Though 22 percent of the 214 voters selected the iPhone, the lowly pencil came in a close second with 19 percent of the vote. Sharing the third-place berth were two gadgets with very little in common: the always-beeping BlackBerry and the strong but silent Swiss Army knife. The top four gadgets left the others in the dust: G.P.S. attracted only 8 percent of voters and the Taser (coming to a New York police station near you) won a mere 7 percent. Perhaps as an indication that the iPhone’s older cousin, the iPod, is here to stay, the Walkman came in last, taking just 6 percent of the vote. It was tied with–wait for it–the abacus. But as the pencil’s success indicates, some gadgets never go out of style.

The Results:

iPhone……………… 22%
Pencil………………. 19%
BlackBerry………… 16%
Swiss Army Knife..16%
G.P.S……………………8%
Taser………………….  7%
Walkman…………….. 6%
Abacus……………….. 6%

-Caitlin Roman

Though we can’t definitively say this will end up being the priciest iPhone 3G this side of eBay, there’s a good chance it will be. Word has it that Vodafone will be offering up Apple’s latest 8GB handset for a mind-boggling Rs 31,000 ($712), or Rs 36,100 ($830) for the 16 gigger. Why so serious high? Because neither Vodafone nor Airtel will subsidize the phone, and to add insult to injury, there’s not even a 3G highway up and running in India. Grey market operators to capitalize in T-minus 3, 2, 1…

[Via Cellpassion]

http://www.engadget.com/2008/08/20/iphone-3g-starting-at-700-in-india-lines-to-be-nonexistent/

Hopes were high that 2.0.2 would decisively crush the reception woes some iPhone 3G owners have experienced since taking delivery of their cracking beauties; dropped calls, latching onto EDGE reception when 3G (also known as “the good stuff”) is available, and general signal strength wonkiness have all plagued a select group of handsets since launch, making for a decidedly MobileMe-like user experience. Some upgraders are actually reporting just the opposite, though — for these lucky few, 2.0.2 seems to be making reception somehow worse than it already was, and what’s more, there are intermittent reports cropping up of broken third-party apps, too. With the 1.x line of builds having chugged along with relatively little drama for a year, here’s our question: what the hell is going on? Why does 2.0, after two post-launch builds, still feel like a beta? MobileMe took the lion’s share of the fall for Apple having spread itself too thin through the launch-heavy summer months, but did some of that fire-drill mentality trickle over to the breadwinner, too? Sound off in comments with your experiences putting 2.0.2 through its paces so far!

[Via Mobility Site]

Update: Apparently Steve Jobs, who should have his face buried in a developer workstation somewhere in Cupertino slaving away on iPhone bug fixes, somehow found the time to slack off for half an hour and fire off an email to some guy who wrote him complaining about third-party apps that are crashing on startup. Jobs allegedly says that the issue is a “known iPhone bug” and that it’ll be fixed in the next update come September — but frankly, we wish he’d let his assistants attend to this sort of needless communication so he could get back to, you know, writing code and inventing phones. Thanks, Alexander!
Read the rest of this entry »

According to Appleinsider, the newest beta of iPhone firmware (2.1, beta 4) has been seeded to developers, but takes one crucial element off the table — push notification. If you’ll recall, the new feature will allow third-party developers to take advantage of Apple’s servers for real-time push of data to applications. Apparently, the feature has been cut from the most recent beta for “further development” with no indication of when it will be reinstated. Of course, this is a beta seed of the firmware — the actual release is slated for September — and it makes sense that Apple would be tweaking major additions like this before going live, especially considering its recent launch debacles.

wwdc-keynote