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3G iPhone Expected in June
MaineCoasts writes "The Times Online reports that European sellers of the iPhone are braced for 'significant losses' on unsold inventories of first-generation iPhones which must be cleared away for the new 3G versions expected in June. The three European distributors of the iPhone 'sold 330,000 units to the end of December, but industry sources say that European sales of the iPhone were forecast to be between 500,000 and 600,000.'"
It would be cool if we could see:
3g
uncripled bluetooth so it pairs with a gps mouse
mms
copy/paste
camera with flash
flash support in browser
Until the phone is available unlocked it's worthless to me. I need to travel between the US and UK, and don't want to have to pay extortionate roaming fees when I already have sims for networks either side.
--- Commission free trading & free stock up to $500 - use http://share.robinhood.com/kelvinp6
You pay for your phones with sex? Oh, crazy Europeans.
What they really say is: "Damn, we shoudn't have been THAT greedy." or "Hm.. maybe our pricing model was too over the top?"
Crivens! I kicked meself in me own heid!
Not to be pessimistic, but I can only imagine that O2, T-Mobile and Orange are looking at their excess inventory, looking across at the US market with envious eyes, and are then beginning to try to figure out how they can conspire to handicap the EU market, just like US politicians have been paid to do over there.
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
The three UK retailers (Apple, 02 and Carphone Warehouse) have all dropped the price from £269 to £169 a few days ago. They claim this price is valid till the 1st of June. It's still stupidly priced - I can go into a shop, buy one for £169, go home, jailbreak it and that's it. If I follow what they want me to do and sign up for the semi-unrelated contract, I get screwed for £35/month and for some reason have to agree to being screwed monthly.
By comparison, my current phone contract which gave me a free HTC Tytn II is £15/month for free internet and £60+ worth of calls and texts.
Say no to the new pricing model - if you have to, buy an iPhone, but get another phone for free on a new contract and sell it to recoup the costs.
Nerd as I am I don't have any friends, girls and don't do phone calls. So the "services" I get for the monthly fee are more or less completely useless. Just give me the gadget!
I've been thinking about getting one and unlock it but I'm to lazy to read how it's done, but I've got the impression it's easy and you can do it yourself nowadays? But I don't think they are sold in Sweden yet so I still have to buy it from some other place and then someone have probably already unlocked it and try to earn some cash on it.
I'm from Canada, and perhaps it's a blessing that it isn't available in Canada yet
I purchased mine in the states and unlocked it to use with Rogers. I've done a bunch for friends too. Gets easier by the day (Thank iphone dev team!)
Anyways, my point is, It's probably cheaper if you buy one from somewhere else and unlock it and use it on your own terms. No pesky contracts, you pick the plan that you want (or keep your existing plan).
I've never used my cellphone so much before the iPhone. It just does so much. It's an amazing device.
Just my $0.02 CAD.
AirSpeak - http://itunes.com/apps/AirSpeak
I see your point. I mean, who really wants to pay a monthly fee for a phone? I think what you're looking for is the iPod Touch.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Don't you think that unlockability (without voiding warranties) is a major issue for European consumers? Swapping SIMs when traveling is something that seems taken for granted. Even my can-barely-turn-on-her-computer mother-in-law does it when she travels between England and Spain.
I suspect you've misunderstood the saying "I'll be fucked if I'd pay that much for an iPhone."
But I can already get a 16G iPhone now. What's the big deal?
This guy's the limit!
Not without GPS for me thanks.
I wonder, after we take into account the exchange ratio will it be a better deal for US customers to buy an imported iphone at the expected clearance prices? Unfortunately Apple almost certainly has contracts with distributors that prevent them from stepping on each others' territory like that, so they won't be sold directly to the US, but through 3rd parties who will tack on their own profit margin.
Still, since iPhone unlocking is so easy now, I'd consider buying one if it worked out to be cheap.
No, since it just cost slightly less and have much less functionallity. Also I would so much prefer the new Sony mp3-players, cowon d2, Sansa Clip/Fuze, over an iPod.
Over here you can buy a card with credits on it which you spend if you make phone calls, so it's easy to have a cellular phone which doesn't cost anything / month if you don't use it. Or you can get a real cheap subscription with free calls within the network and eventually other networks and/or landlines to.
If I could get the iPhone for 3000 sek as a gadget and then only pay for the phone calls I would actually make I would probably have gotten one by now.
updated software has fixed the MMS issues.
Very few phones have camera's with flash
I disable flash most of the time now anyways,
I will take 3g and either uncrippled bluetooth for a GPS dongle, or my favorite a car adaptor dock, with a GPS receiver built in. That way GPS runs off my car battery not killing the iphones battery. Copy paste, is a software/interface issue. figure it out and release it as a patch apple.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Hey man, leave him alone. He's got enough problems. I mean, he's Swedish after all. : p
This guy's the limit!
Well, to be frank, I'm surprised that iPhone took off in Europe at all.
Before iPhone, over here in Germany, there were literally no affordable data rates. Now there are. But still those which are affordable are useless on iPhone due to the all the limits set low.
Also, 3G despite being rolled out all over Europe, still used by only fraction of people. So it is not really any major attraction.
If Celcos want to move more iPhones they have to lower data rates considerably, so they will be accessible to majority of European market - youth, students and alike.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Are these the same "sources" that attempted to screw with Apple's stock price by inventing a "whisper number" of one million expected iPhone sales at release when numbers of expected sales were in the 150 to 350 thousand mark?
Fiat Homos et Pereat Theos
That is actually one of the main reasons I'll never buy one. I like having a real keyboard and can type without looking at all with my phone.
Says who? O2/T-Mobile, or Apple... Apple is the one demanding a cut of the carriers' revenue. Hence, no carrier subsidized iPhones.
What I find interesting is.. oh wow, only 50 posts in the first 90 minutes? Where are the fanboys now? Seven months ago, when I predicted with prefect accuracy that Apple would fail, you couldn't get them to STFU. They were gaa gaa over the iPhad, and now look... They are nowhere to be found. Fair weather fanboys as always. Those fanboys aren't real Mac fans. They don't care if Apple is delivering great products. They buy Apple as a status symbol.
Apple has failed. Apple failed for reasons I outlined months... almost a year ago. I predicted it before the phone even launched. Apple is selling a locked product that is defective by design. Worse, Apple is spitting in the face of the Mac developers who are truly the most hardcore mac fans out there. That's bad business.
They're currently trying hard to hang on to their walled-garden and discourage customers from using the real Internet (blocking ports, recompressing images, blocking 'unsafe' sites - including YouTube).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I'm an Apple-critical Mac user (love their designers, really dislike their business practices), and I don't own an iPhone for many of the reasons described in this thread. But the problems with the iPhone are eminently fixable, and I expect the iPhone to become a stronger product over the next couple of years. In Europe, it is a flop. But in the US, it is doing well, and the surprise success it is enjoying as a status symbol among the elite of less-developed nations (as awkward as that is, perhaps, for those of use who might have some qualms about those elites) who are inevitably buying locked phones and unlocking them to get them to work on local networks must be sending a strong signal to Apple. I don't know what the details of their contracts with AT&T, etc., is, but I suspect that they've retrieved a couple of their Rottweiler lawyers from attacking bloggers and supposed trademark and trade secret violators to look for ways to end their exclusivity deals ASAP.
I hope so, because I'm unlikely ever to use AT&T, and I travel overseas far too much not to swap SIMs. (I'm more likely to buy the Japan version of the iPhone than the US one, if push came to shove.)
You sure? My own Sony Ericsson K750i hasn't got a flash. It's got some naff white LEDs which light up, but they're on continuously - it's definitely not got a conventional, camera-style xenon flash tube.
Not that I care, of course - flash photography is the spawn of the devil. And is why I spend a bit too much on fancy, low-light lenses for my Canon dSLR...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
GPS isn't that useful in urban areas.
/. crowd - it now runs linux... (Damn Small Linux at the moment - more to come I'm sure - and still needs work on, oh, the radio and touchscreen)
The accuracy when you can't get 3 satellites is no better than using cell tower information.
And many times you can't even get that. Indoors of course, nothing at all.
In the country, it is better, but then, most of the time when I want directions for Google Maps I don't care if it positions me to a "mere" half a kilometre of precision (which is about as bad as it'll get - in city you can often get to within one or two hundred metres).
Battery drain and increased internal demands of GPS on the already space-tight iphone isn't worth that for my uses of it.
So. Basically, hell yeah I'll take what amounts to a UMPC - especially at a discount.
And for the
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
With respect to your critiques of the iPhone, you're comparing a device that is 4-6 times as much and weighs almost 4 times as much as the iPhone.
It's got a number of features that the iPhone doesn't... but i could say the UX is a toy compared to a regular mobile laptop, and that such a laptop is a toy compared to a desktop replacement, so really everyone should lug around a desktop replacement.
The iPhone easily slips into a pocket, and fills it's intended role well. I'm very happy to see the shock it's given the market. There are 4-5 iPhone-esq phones that should be available in the US in 2008, which will hopefully encourage more than incremental improvements from apple.
The UX is 5.9x3.75x1.5 inches and weighs 1.2 pounds. It's certainly tiny, but it's not something that would fit into most pockets. They're built different roles, and should be judged as such.
I am not an expert. If I am misled in something, please correct me.
The iPhones retarded lack of Adobe Flash and Sun Java support makes its web browsing experience, for me at least, abysmal.
What kind of sites are your browsing that require *Java* these days? If the bulk of your daily visits is to sites with scientific visualizations, I can buy this, but most of the web has been Java free since the applet craze of the late 90s passed.
At any rate, yes, if bulk of your web browsing requires Flash or Java, then, yes, the iPhone is certainly not how you should be doing it. There's a large enough chunk of the web that doesn't need it that the iPhone remains a great browsing tool for most people.
Until the iPhone can hold a candle to one of these [dynamism.com] running Xubuntu ( Ubuntu + Xfce ) , then I will just consider it a toy, with its one redeeming feature being multi-touch integrated with a great UI.
Also, it's a phone. And 1/3-1/2 the price.
Don't get me wrong -- I think the UX series are pretty cool, and I think they're also the right product for a lot of Slashdotters who don't like the iPhone because it's not the ultimate open palmtop computing environment they've always wanted.
However, it's not a phone. EVDO + SIP is close, but it's not really quite ready based on my tests anyway (and it's a TOS violation for some carriers).
The iPhone is a successful product for its target audience because it's a pretty good phone, plus an iPod, plus part of the small set of mobile phones that have web browsing experiences that don't suck. The extra computing stuff, closed as it may be, is reall icing on the cake.
Tweet, tweet.
The three European distributors of the iPhone 'sold 330,000 units to the end of December, but industry sources say that European sales of the iPhone were forecast to be between 500,000 and 600,000.'"
That's a really poor showing. The Nokia N95 sold more than a million units in the UK alone in 2007; that's a single model and a single country, and it didn't have anywhere near the hype surrounding the iPhone release:
http://www.intomobile.com/2007/11/28/brief-nokia-n95-sales-in-the-uk-top-1-million.html
I can't figure out why anybody would buy an iPhone: it's a clunky phone with clunky desktop integration. Adding 3G doesn't change that.
Well, I'm not a fan of the iPhone. But I don't see how you can say that Apple has failed with the iPhone. I don't think making millions of dollars selling a popular product is failure.
... and then they built the supercollider.
In some city centres surrounded by skyscrapers, possibly. My N95 can usually locate me to exactly the right street even in the centre of Nottingham. I don't often find the need to use it (I've got dedicated ones for on my motorbike and for hiking) but whenever I have wanted to use it, it's always been pretty accurate.
So what's that 2-3 styles of camera phones with flash? wow that is a so in demand feature. I bet it has a color screen too.
Cell phone camera's are dumb. The only good reason they have to exist would be for a video phone that no one uses.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.