iPhone News

Orange has just pumped out a press release today detailing its plans to distribute the iPhone. They will be providing the iPhone in such countries as the Dominican Republic, Austria, and Switzerland. They are also bringing the device to several African markets. The press release is brief, and lists only the countries that Orange will provide the iPhone in.

Orange today announced a new agreement with Apple to bring the iPhone to Orange customers in Austria, Belgium, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Jordan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Switzerland and Orange??™s African markets later this year. -From Press Release

The free WiFi at AT&T hotspots for the iPhone has been an interesting and on going saga. It has been confusing, with AT&T allowing free WiFi access, then just as fast, taking it away. Either way, it is back now, and more than that, it is official. Hopefully this time it is here to stay.

It seems that now, the access to the WiFi is included with iPhone plans. That is about as official as it can get and it is most likely you will not see AT&T disable it again. It is still not known if AT&T will deploy extra security measures, as anyone with a little know how can get free WiFi on there laptop using this offering.

The service is available at all of the 17,000 AT&T hot spots in the U.S. To use the service, all you have to do is connect to the hot spot using your iPhone. You will be presented with a screen that will ask you for your phone number. The number must be linked to a valid AT&T account, that has an iPhone active on it. This means that people with a jailbroken iPhone can not use the service. That is unless of course they have a buddy with an iPhone on AT&T.

Vodafone announced it has signed an agreement with Apple to sell the iPhone in ten of its markets around the world. Later this year, Vodafone customers in Australia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, India, New Zealand, Portugal, South Africa and Turkey will be able to purchase the iPhone for use on the Vodafone network.

No details have been released for launch dates but for the countries mentioned there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Sun Microsystems continues to pursue Apple who get Java applications running on the iPhone, while another party is aiming at the same goal.

???We have expressed our intent to do this and our desire, really, to work with Apple to build a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) for the iPhone and we are sort of moving forward with that??? said Sun vice president Eric Klein last week.

Apple has not yet responded publicly into having Java on its popular device. Analysts are questioning if Apple??™s iPhone SDK agreement would permit getting Java into the iPhone.

Sun is also reported to be working with Innaworks in hopes of bringing Java applications to iPhone.

???They are actually working on a solution that allows developers to compile Java Micro Edition (Java ME) applications into native iPhone applications??? said Klein explaining that companies could submit these applications for inclusion in App Store.

Innaworks are planning to show their solution at the JavaOne conference to be held in San Francisco next week, Klein said. According to the company’s press statement, Innaworks’ product, alcheMo for the iPhone is initially aimed at games publishers. Still in beta, alcheMo for iPhone was designed to use for the iPhone in porting Java ME mobile games to the iPod touch and iPhone without any manual adjustments. AlcheMo features an optimizing translator that converts Java applications code to the equivalent source code for the iPhone.

Since Sun wants to put the JVM on the iPhone via iPhone SDK, Apple and Sun need to discuss the clauses in the SDK license agreement.

???There is no question one of our goals from the Java platform perspective is to allow our developers to get to as many phones as possible, and obviously, the iPhone has turned out to be a very successful platform, and we want to be on it??? said Klein stressing about Sun??™s excitement on its plans. Meanwhile, Apple remains silent on the issue.

Google released an updated interface of its services for iPhone and iPod Touch. Now everything is accessible in an integrated environment: Google Calendar, Google Docs, Reader, Google Notebook, Google News and Blogger.

They also implemented search query suggestions, and email auto complete. In addition you can access Google mobile in several languages now.

When iPhone stepped on the european market six months ago, Apple expected to be the same hit as in USA. But today’s weak sellings in Europe are obvious. Reasons to this are its high price and the strong competition from Nokia and other companies. “European sellings are much lower than expected” claims Nomura Securities’ expert Richard Windsor.

Apple signed exclusive deals in Europe so that only one wireless operator has the rights to distribute iPhone in their country. So far the company has contracts with the british O2, french Orange and german T-Mobile. Strategy Analytics, ?° consulting company from Newton, Massachusetts, figure that these three operators together sold about 350,000 iPhones in the last trimester of last year instead of the expected 500,000. Sellings of the first three months of 2008 are reduced to 300,000.

Apple plan to sell 3 million of the upcoming iPhone 3G during summer months. Manufacturing of the multimedia device will be given again to the Taiwan company Foxconn Electronics was announced by DigiTimes.

Steve Jobs’ company have already gave orders to the taiwans to start the tests of the working in network of 3th generation device until end of May. Sales have to begin in June.

Generally 24-25 million purchases of iPhone 3G are expected claim Apple Insider. Official announcement will be held on the technological conference WWDC 2008 in June.

iPhone was announced officially today in Canada.

More information coming soon.

Apple Inc. announced that they are taking legal actions against 11 online sellers in Great Britain. The claim of Apple is about unauthorized distribution of iPhone at a lower cost than the fixed price for the county. The computer giant claims that several sellers distribute their mobile phone at ??15 cheaper.

Legal claims are submitted in London from the law company Bird & Bird and they want an immediate stoppage of any unathorized distribution of iPhone.

#1 Fring 0.978 for iPhone

http://fring.com/iphone.xml
Chat with Skype, MSN, Google Talk, ICQ, Twitter, Yahoo! and AIM

#2 BossPrefs

http://code.google.com/p/bossprefs/
The app expands on services by adding some more options (turn wifi/bluetooth on/off etc.) and focusing on being a complete preferences replacement.

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