The new iPhone 3GS was announced yesterday at WWDC. The main changes are in the hardware. The differences are now:
32GB Option
3 Megapixel camera with autofocus
Video Recording capabilities with upload to Youtube function
Voice Control
Compass
The other new features coming to the iPhone such as:
Cut, Copy & Paste (about time!)
MMS and contact send/receive via SMS
Bluetooth transfer and A2DP support
Data tethering to your laptop (USB or Bluetooth)
Spotlight Search
Landscape keyboard across all apps
Voice Memos
will be available on the current iPhone 3G, the iPhone 2G and included oin the new 3GS. A free software upgrade to Version 3.0 of the firmware will be ready for download to the public June the 17th.
For the die-hard Apple fanboys, a Quicktime stream of the keynote speech given by Phil Schiller is now online.
January 3, 2009 at 02:33 · Filed under apple, mac, unix
I’m stuck with a whole bunch of problems getting code to compile and co-operate nicely on my new MacBookPro. I’m compiling my own PHP, but it defaults to compiling for the i386 (32bit) architecure, which then fails when Apache2 running in 64bit mode tries to use the 32bit DSO for PHP5. Compiling PHP5 as 64bit then fails linking against the i386 pgsql lib, and so on. I really need everything using the x86_64 architecture.
June 26, 2008 at 19:34 · Filed under apple, movies
Practically un-announced, Apple have made available a limited number of TV shows on the Australian iTunes Music Store.
While I commend the move, I have to question their pricing. The US store offers TV shows @ USD$1.99 per episode (with Some more expensive) The Australian Store offers the episodes @ AUD$2.99, which equates to approximately USD$2.85.
Why the difference? You can’t tell me Apple has set-up different infrastructure and have different hosting for Media in Australia. They are not paying to send the data over international links. So why the over 40% increase in pricing from the US?
I think the local media companies and licensers got greedy. It is as simple as that.
It’s not just the price that gets me down. The content is different. The continually stupid regionalisation of content has shown to be a road block to people GLOBALLY. For example:
DVDs (remember region coding at the end of the last decade?);
TV – why do shows still get screened outside the USA weeks or months later;
Movies;
or music.
Yes this is a global economy people. The ease of Torrent sites to circumvent this division of content drives the end user towards increased use of torrents. It is now apparently easier to get a season of your favourite show from the internet than wait for it to appear on TV; or on iTMS. The only people wising up to this are the Movies Studios whom now do simultaneous global releases, because they were losing too much money.
Until the pricing on the Apple store is the same, and Australia gets the same releases as the US at the same time (on TV or on iTMS) – people will continue to use torrent sites as their source of the latest TV shows from the USA. Plain and simple – “Listen up Media conglomerates!!”
Update: It looks like they did release a press release yesterday.
June is just around the corner and my current Vodafone contract runs out this month. Perfect timing.
The reason I was hoping for Vodafone is this: with a $79 cap, the $500 credit (currently) covers 3G data usage. You pay $1 per 5 minute block out of your cap. Its totally different how Telstra charge: $60 per month on top for data and $0.25 per MB.
Since I make about $100 of calls in a month, that’s $400 of included data in my cap; or 33 constant hours of 3G data. But wouldn’t it be nice if Vodafone shifted to an untimed/uncounted data plan for the iPhone. That is the ultimate Geek Nirvana.
Australia is a mixed bag at Broadband. In some ways we resemble the US, and in no way do we resemble the Japan style FTTN networks (yet). But the infrastructure is starting to be there. What sucks is that sometimes to get the 30 Mbps connections you have to pay quite a bit for it (AUD$90/bundled per month for 25GB, Bigpond Cable). Yes I’m only with Bigpond cable as no ADSL service exists in my area that comes close to that speed. Damn counted uploads and data shaping.
But at least unlike some countries, we do seem to have decent peering links to EU and the US. I have actually achieved 3 MBytes/sec (24Mbps) transfer on a regional transfer and about 1MBytes/sec (8Mbps) using international servers.
Why do I mention this? I just watched Walt Mossberg talk about the bad state of Broadband and the lack of integration of the online world with big TVs (watch below, 8 mins).
Lastly Australia gets, as no doubt does the rest of the world, a time lag factor of everything latest and greatest. No iPhone yet, no iTMS TV/Movie store, no local Amazon style service (some come close), up to 1 year delay on airing TV series (though it is improving recently); and so on.
The tyranny of distance, and small population on a great land mass, is at play.
Oh yes, and the iPhone rumour gets another bump – woot 3G iPhone in June, well in the US. No doubt another 6 months will pass before Australia gets it. Lets hope it is not locked to Telstra. I don’t want to have to pay for my 3G data on top of the expensive plan AND the phone. I want it bundled, and not a pitiful 5 Megabytes worth. I have a $500 cap on Vodafone for now, including all my 3G data usage at $1 per 5 mins (part of the $500 cap).
If the iPhone ends up locked to Telstra, I’ll be singing Elvis.
