Appletell

It seems o2 are blaming Apple for a shortage of UK iPhone 3G stock. In an e-mail response to an inquiring customer, Steve Shurrock, sales director of o2 had the following to say,

“We have been working continuously with them [Apple] to get as much stock for the UK as possible. Unfortunately, they have only been able to supply a small proportion of the number of phones we asked for, because they are launching simultaneously in 22 countries.”

Shurrock goes onto say that he is confident that the volume of iPhones will increase over time and become sufficient for customer demand.

More after the break.

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I was awoken this morning by a text message from o2, which read, “iPhone 3G is here. The iPhone you have been waiting to early upgrade to. Order from 8am today.”

Yup! If you’re an o2 customer/wannabe customer, you can now pre-order the iPhone 3G at o2’s website! o2 say that pre-orders are on a first-come, first-served basis, and if you order sooner, there’s a bigger chance it will arrive on July the 11th via courier!

If you’re going through the upgrade route, you will need to visit the o2 iPhone upgrade page where you will be asked to type in your iPhone mobile number. You will then receive a text message with an upgrade code, which you must then enter before the upgrade process can continue.

The website is acting extremely erratically (at time of writing), whether this is due to traffic or o2 not getting their web page up in time is unknown. The upgrade site currently throws me between being able to order the phone and a maintenance page (8 a.m., ey’ o2?).

No word on how new customers are getting on, but I have a feeling they might not be having as much trouble. I haven’t as yet been able to pre-order my 3G iPhone. Come on o2, fix your website!

Happy iPhone 3G pre-ordering UK o2 customers.

By analyzing the metadata in uploaded pictures, Flickr is able to see which cameras their users are taking pictures with.  When it comes to the camera phone market, the iPhone now tops that list.  What does this mean?  Is the iPhone that popular or does its software just make it easier to get the pictures on your computer than most other phones?  If you ask me, it’s the latter.  With the iPhone also being an iPod, people have to sync it a lot more than normal phones, which makes it more common to also take the photos off and put them on your computer and to the web.  Another reason the iPhone may top this list is because of third party apps available through Installer.app that allow users to easily upload pictures to Flickr right from the phone itself.  Finally, people are able to email photos directly to Flickr from the device.

However, although the iPhone does make it easier to upload the photos in the first place, I think it also gives users more of a reason to.  Despite having such few megapixels and failing in low light situations, the iPhone camera takes much better pictures than I’ve ever taken with any other phone.  When held still, it takes pretty crisp photos with nice color.  The only thing that would make the camera better, besides more megapixels of course, would be more features.  A zoom would be nice, especially if Apple added some off those quirky Photo Booth effects.  What do you think?

What are your top feature for camera improvement in the 3G iPhone?

We’ve heard numerous rumours about a 3G iPhone, not just here at Appletell, but all over the blogosphere. Turns out none of those rumours are true, or we haven’t seen an outcome yet. But does 3G really matter? Is it the turning point between you buying one or not? Sandy Gomo, Director of Product Management for Pantech Wireless, seems to have a simple explanation for it. Basically, can give you download speeds faster which would be must needed for the iPhone Apps. A 3G iPhone would run about 600-1400 kbps, while a EDGE iPhone would run about five to six times slower. So for things like streaming video, surfing the web and downloading music would be much faster.

“With 3G networks, the potential for advanced mobile phone functionality is enormous. At its core, 3G is full of possibilities.” - Sandy Gomo, Director of Product Management for Pantech Wireless tells Erik Price

So why hasn’t Apple used 3G on the iPhone yet? Must be coming soon… why not, would only bring up sales.

Are you waiting for a 3G iPhone?

Via [Mac Life]

Orange France, the authorized carrier of the iPhone in France, just confirmed that roughly 14% of all the iPhones sold in France are unlocked. These other iPhones were either not used for the iPhone aspect or used on other networks. Orange didn’t say exactly that 14% of the iPhones users were on their network, but they pointed out that 86% of the iPhones are sold with their pricing plan, while the rest were sold without a contract with the network. They also pointed out that they hit the 90 000 mark of iPhones sold. 90 000 doesn’t honestly sound like quite alot, but the British carrier of the iPhones says that the device is their “fastest selling device.” They did however hesitate to say how many they did sell.

Do you think Apple is on track for their goal of 9 million iPhones for this year?

Via [Pocket-Lint]

When the iPhone launched in the summer of 2006 the web browser, Safari, lacked one key element of the web, Flash. YouTube had to convert a whole load of videos to H.264 so users could watch the videos. Along with videos, your iPhone is missing a lot of wonderful things that you could have been viewing on your iPhone’s web browser for almost eight months. Gearlive was correct when they told us that the 1.1.3 firmware would be coming out any day with those “jiggly” icons, and now the are confident that is is on its way. “Flash has not yet made it to the iPhone solely due to business negotiations,” Andru Edwards. Another reason why Flash may not have made its way onto this device is battery and CPU issues. Currently, there are 2 ways to develop web apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch, using HTML/CSS/Javascript web standards, and using Cocoa. This 3rd way would open more oppurnities for developers to create web apps on the iPhone, but will take up a lot of battery power. This can be done from a iPhone firmware update, as Apple has previously done this with the iPod Touch upgrade, so don’t worry about waiting to buy a new phone.

Via [Gearlive]

Since the iPhone launched we’ve seen a Lego iPhone an, iPhone Pocket Scale, several upgrades and some pretty other crazy things. Now Ad Infuse is launching an ad serving platform for the Apple iPhone.

The San Francisco based company’s ad severs are able to recongnize when an iPhone is viewing the content and show the user content formatted for the device. . The iPhone currently has a U.S smart phone market share of 28% and 6.5% worldwide. Nokia has 52.9% worldwide and RIM has a mere 11.4% worldwide marketshare. Unlike the iPhone dog costume or iPhone BBQ Apron, this is a great idea to make the web browsing experience on the iPhone even better

Via [InformationWeek]

Recently we mentioned a service called Singtones that allows you to actually record your signing as a Ringtone. They then make sure your voice is both in tune and in time with the original song and send you your Ringtone.

Well thanks to Rob from Singtones every Appletell reader can now get their very own ‘singtone’ aboslutely free when you enter the promo code: 704955 when you’ve chosen a song to sing. I’m testing this out right now actually. Too bad I sing about as good as Yoko Ono on an off-day. You can give it a shot, and get your very own for free.

Update: The URL we provided previously does not work with the promo code, sorry for that mix up. It has been changed now, so try that promo one more time for your free Singtone!

Site [Singtones]

There’s just over 16 hours to go until our iPhone giveaway closes and a winner is announced. Make sure you get your comment in ASAP, and don’t forget to tell family/friends to enter quickly as well if they haven’t already.

All you have to do to have a chance to win is:

1) Subscribe to our RSS feed, or via Email. You can do so by going to the main page, and looking in the right sidebar, there you will be able to subscribe via RSS or Email.

2) Leave a comment on this post detailing why you deserve an iPhone

Get your entry in before 6pm PDT and you could win your very own iPhone.