iPhone in the UK and some iPhone rambling
Well mum’s no longer the word in the UK, the iPhone’s officially launched on O2. The event was this morning in London and there weren’t too many surprises. It’s launching on November 9th (ok, that’s a little wierd) and it’s going to be EDGE and not 3G. Interestingly, O2 is going to have free WiFi at 7000 hotspots around the country which will hopefully make up for their horrendously poor (30%) EDGE coverage, although, I honestly am not sure about that.
It seemed to me that Apple could not launch a 3G phone for Europe after giving the battery life reason for not launching it in the states. That would have caused riots here, if a price drop caused the furor that it did, a significant hardware difference would have caused the iPhoneacalypse. They’re showing the wireless iTunes music store, so that should be on our next iPhone update - that’s cool, I’d love to see how that works out. We’ll find out the scoop for the rest of Europe over this week, hopefully.
A lot of words have been bandied about on the iPhone release with European carriers and handset makers trying to spin the iPhone as a positive for them. Take this Reuter’s piece (care of df). Instead of meaningful thoughts, they come up with:
“The impact would not be meaningful largely because of the price… it looks like the product price is not subsidized,” said Nomura analyst Richard Windsor.
Just like in the States how price was the big factor. Oh, wait, no it wasn’t. But the piece does bring up good points in the adoption. I think 3G is something of an issue - it’s more widespread there and especially with the piss poor EDGE coverage in the UK, people are going to think hard about how often they’re going to actually be able to surf the real internet. Also, as Sean keeps pointing out - the SMS interface is good for low to medium SMS’ers - those of us who only need to talk to one person at a time. However, it’s inability to handle multiple recipients could be a show stopper for the Europeans who are much heavier texters than Americans.
Plus the world is awash in Apple backlash. Why just today I came across this piece on how Universal is putting their content up on SpiralFrog which seems to somehow have MP3’s that explicitly can not be played on iPods (and also seems to be down right now). Just like NBC’s move to Amazon. Both are moves to try and get out from under Apple’s thumb, both are moves that hurt the customers as I can not access Unbox on my Mac and can’t use SpiralFrog’s media on my iPhone (can I use it with iTunes?). Nice.
Well, it will certainly be interesting to see if Apple can match the American iPhone frenzy in Europe. What do you think?
September 18th, 2007 at 11:18 am
spiral frog, lets see….
no firefox support
no mac support
no ipod support
These guys are really gunning for success. who owns an ipod anyway?
September 18th, 2007 at 3:51 pm
Well, you can use their site with Firefox, so at least there’s that. But it requires XP or Vista. The article was just wrong about them playing on any MP3 player, they’re simply WMA files, so MP3 players that can play WMA’s will be able to play them. Duh. The article makes it sound like they explicitly disabled playing on iPods. Sigh.
Anyhow, that answers that, no iTunes for these files even on a windows box. Should be fine, as far as I know, no ones using iPods.