iPhone

Apple's new iPhone is giving the mobile phone industry a slap round the face.

But there's controversy everywhere for iPhone users, here in the UK and in the US, where the devices have been on sale for nearly three months.

The UK announcement was greeted with howls from the mainstream media, who accused Apple and telephony partner O2 of greed.

The machine itself costs £269, and you have to sign up for an 18-month contract at a minimum of £35 per month. Too much, reported some newspapers, but they failed to check their numbers.

The Apple/O2 deal includes a generous daily data, voice and text message allowances, which comes as extras under other mobile phone contracts. Compared with similar devices on similar plans, the UK iPhone contract is not the most expensive to be found - but it isn't cheap either.

It is definitely a premium product.

In the USA last week, the anguish was far greater. For weeks now, determined hackers have been trying to develop ways to open up the guts of the iPhone, and make it work with their own third-party software. One popular reason is that people want to use the music they have bought as a ringtone.

Another was to "unlock" the iPhone, which by default will only work with a SIM card from Apple's chosen partner (AT&T in the United States).

There's no stopped determined hackers, and over recent weeks they released all sorts of modifications and suggestions for iPhone users.

Some allowed the use of any song stored on the machine as a ringtone; others, more seriously, unlocked the device and made it usable with any SIM card from any supplier.

Then Apple issued a terse statement. Beware, it warned: if you have messed around with the inner workings of your iPhone in any way at all, the next software update might render the machine useless.

In other words: hack your iPhone if you like, but don't blame us if it ends up as an expensive touch-screen brick.

That threat raised a few hacker hackles.

And sure enough, last week another software update was released and reports appeared on the web from iPhone users whose machines had suddenly stopped working. Some of them hadn't even tried to use any hacks or unlock tricks, either.

Keen not to get left behind in the handheld computing market that it once dominated, Palm also made an announcement last week.

A consumer version of the hugely popular Treo smartphone, called the Centro, was unveiled at the low price of 100 dollars (about £50). Packing a lot of tech into a tiny space, it also has an iPhone-like touch screen and a very tiny keyboard. Is it the kind of gadget that can stand up to the better-looking, but much more expensive iPhone? Time will tell.

+ Crunching in the UK +
TechCrunch.com is the home of news about Silicon Valley. If there's a hot new dotcom startup somewhere, it will be reported there.

Now, after a hiatus of several months, the UK version of TechCrunch has arrived (uk.techcrunch.com), with industry veteran and former New Media Age editor Mike Butcher in charge.

If you want to be up-to-date with what's happening in the UK web business scene, TechCrunch UK is the place to look.

+ Fixing right up your street +
MySociety (www.mysociety.org) makes excellent web sites that help make our country better.

They made TheyWorkForYou.com, which makes Parliamentary proceedings that little bit more transparent.

Now they've made FixMyStreet.com, where you can report broken and busted things in your local area.

All you need do is type a message about what the problem is, point it out on a map, and throw in your postcode.

Your report gets sent to the right person in the right local authority, and hopefully what ever's wrong gets sorted out sooner. Now there's a clever idea.


+ Browsing around +
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