iPhone on E-Bay

Thousands of iPhones are on eBay just hours after going on sale, despite a flawed registration process.

Apple iPhone takes America (and eBay) by storm

Apple have been left with quite a few disgruntled customers after the computerised registration process virtually came to a standstill, due to the high volume of customers all trying to register within a few hours of purchase.



The problem was made worse by a mix up with customers of Cingular, which was recently acquired by AT&T. It seems that Cingular customers who were transferred over the AT&T have been accidentally flagged as business customers – but only residential / individual customers are able to subscribe to iPhone plans. So customers affected have had to spend valuable time on hold to customer and technical services to resolve the problems.

Some new iPhone owners waited over 24 hours to register their iPhone through iTunes, and AT&T have stated that it could take up to 36 hours to activate some accounts – which is a kick in the teeth if you have waited for hours (and in many cases days!) outside an Apple or AT&T store to be first in line to use one.

It seems that many of the customers that waited in line for a handset weren’t actually buying for themselves as thousands of handsets have flooded eBay since Friday night. At the time of writing eBay.com currently have just less than 6,000 listings under iPhone, and eBay.co.uk have 47. Although it is unknown how well the USA iPhone will work in the UK as the iPhone is locked to AT&T, and of course there is the tricky registration process with AT&T.

Read more...

iPhone in Japan

Although I started out as somewhat of a skeptic about the iPhone, mainly in reaction to the blanket news coverage it has been receiving, reflecting on the situation I now consider that the iPhone has what it takes to be big in Japan; indeed to become the very first foreign mobile phone (Sony-Ericsson doesn’t countas foreign!) to be a success in Japan’s rather insular market. There are, however, a small number of additions and modifications that I propose Apple must make to the hardware, software, and design before they can consider selling it in Japan.

iPhone: Japan’s carriers
Looking at the market image of the three big mobile phone carriers, namely NTT DoCoMo, au by KDDI, and SoftBank, the most natural fit would be au, as according to many surveys they have the strongest image for being on the leading edge and for supporting music playback on their phones. However, if a bidding war starts, SoftBank may be prepared to lay the most cash on the table as they are most desparate for customers, and with Cameron Diaz and Bradd Pitt pushing an American image of talking on the phone for SoftBank, SoftBank’s president Masayoshi Son may see the iPhone as a natural extension of his brand. Therefore, I predict there will be a SoftBank iPhone on the shelves early next year.

iPhone: Japan needs 3G
It needs it in the US and in Europe too, so no more needs to be said about it. All Japanese carriers have stopped making new 2G models, so the iPhone must have 3G speeds to avoid being labeled as outdated.

iPhone: Japan needs a worse browser
Safari has been getting rave reviews in the USA, but the Japanese have been browsing for years in the walled garden of made-for-mobile web sites authored in C-HTML, Compact-HTML. There are too many existing services that are already designed for mobile phones for Apple to ignore, so they need to provide a downgraded browser that can support these sorts of sites without any fancy zooming or panning, just scrolling up and down.

iPhone: Japan needs emoji
Nearly three in four Japanese currently sprinkle some or all of their email with small colourful dingbat-like icons built into the phones from all of the major providers. The current methods of selecting these characters seriously needs a usability make-over that people look to Apple to implement, but without smilies, the average Japanese cell phone email would look naked and dull.

iPhone: Japan needs a retro keyboard
The biggest thing that the English-language iPhone seems to have got wrong is the keyboard. With Japanese, this style of keyboard will be even more problematic, and with many people as familiar, if not more familiar, with mobile-phone style keyboards as with traditional QWERTY ones, Apple should accept that as with the browser issues above, the older and more familiar methods of input need to be supported too. As with emoji above, I’m looking to Apple to sprinkle its magic pixie dust over the UI and the input prediction methods, but the underlying paradigm should be the standard 10-key method.

iPhone: Japan needs a strap hook
Almost everyone in Japan hangs some sort of mascot character on their phones, so without a mounting point for these straps, the iPhone will look very bare indeed. It’s just a very small thing, but it’s important and shows to potential consumers that Apple cares about Japan and Japanese sensibilities.

iPhone: Japan has it all already
A common theme running through various articles on the impending failure of the iPhone to penetrate the Japanese market is that all the features exist already in cell phones available in Japan today. While this point is indeed true and the raw feature set of the iPhone has little that is revoultionary, one need only look to Nintendo’s Wii and DS, which on paper are rather limited, or even in fact the iPod, which entered a Japanese market already crowded with offering from both domestic and overseas manufactures, yet still swempt them all away mostly on the strength of brand image and slickly integrated product. I believe the iPhone can help Apple make history repeat itself.

iPhone: Japan doesn’t need…
A recent survey showed that two requirements high in potential purchasers’ minds were One Seg digital terrestrial television and RFID-based electronic cash solutions. However, other surveys have shown that despite the fact that most new models support one or both of these features, the actual percentage of users accessing these features is rather limited. With YouTube support, One Seg television becomes less important, and many more people use traditional card-based electronic cash systems than use mobile phone-embedded FeliCa IC card chips.

Conclusion
Next year we will see a SoftBank Apple iPhone which while it may not replicate the roaring success of the iPhone in the USA or of the iPod in Japan, it will make a definite impact and change the face of the Japanese cell phone market. Up until now there has been perhaps just too cosy a relationship between the carriers and the manufacturers which while not stifling innovation, excluding physical design issues it has not encouraged manufacturers to be bold or different. Even if the iPhone itself never manages to gain a significant market share, its mere presence on the Japanese market can only benefit consumers.

Read more...

Find Cell Phone Number

Find Cell Phone Number - Click the Link Above to read more

Have you ever noticed how it can be impossible to find something when you most need it? Phone numbers are no different. this is why free cell phone number search services are so popular right now. But there is an art to using them, which is what I will be covering on this article.

The fact is, that it's not very straightforward to do a free cell phone number search. There are a number of reasons for this, but the main one is that all cellphone numbers are unlisted! As you can imagine, this makes it a lot harder to find a cellphone number then a regular residential number.

Luckily, there are a number of volunteer maintained cell phone number directories. These websites work on the basis of requesting the visitors type in their cellphone numbers so that other people can do a free cell phone number search later. While this is a good idea, the fact is that very few cellphone numbers exist on the sites, because they are fairly new, and most people have not visited these sites yet.

There is a way to do a free cell phone number search for numbers which are not listed in these directories, using search engines you already familiar with like Google. Believe it or not, many people actually publish their cellphone number on the Internet without realising it! There are a number waiters can happen, for instance, sometimes people list a classified ad in a newspaper. What they don't realise, is that this newspaper will be published on the Internet as well as on paper.

Another way that people can publish their information on the Internet he's when they register for discussion groups or message boards. They usually fill in personal contact details, which are then published on the website.

So all you need to do, is type details from the person you're looking for into Google and see what comes up. Now before you get your hopes up high, most of the time you won't get any result is doing a free cell phone number search this way. But at times, you will find everything you need just by doing this.

When all else fails, your best bet is to use one of the cheap reverse phone number search and unlisted cell phone number directories. These are websites which collect together information from a large collection of sources, to provide you with details about people and their phone numbers. They lists cell phone numbers and unlisted phone numbers, as well is a lot of information about the people who own these phones.

While it is true that this is not strictly a free cell phone number search, you're much more likely to find the information you are looking for on one of these sites. You can find out more about them by following the links below.

Well, that's the big picture. I go into more detail about the specifics on my site, so if you want to know more click on that link. Happy searching!

Read more...

iPhone is Wap killer

iPhone is more than just a breakthrough mobile phone device. It is a strategy that may expand Apple's sphere of influence, from web browsing to social networking and even possibly search.

The iPhone is here. The blogosphere is echoing with both great praise and cries of problems. The hype was both met and a bit too much. Overall, it seems that both media and users are underwhelmed with the iPhone as the phone. And people are not overly excited about yet another iPod, because we've had plenty of those over the last few years. Yet, iPhone is important and possibly game changing - because it could be the first mobile device to truly bring a rich web experience to a mobile device. With iPhone and the latest release of Safari for Windows, Apple has openly jumped into the browser wars. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, iPhone could be Apple's foray into the world of social networking. Let's take a deeper look along each of these axes.

Is iPhone a WAP killer?
Until iPhone showed up on the scene, the web experience on Mobile devices was drastically different compared to PC access. For mobile, Web Sites and Services reduced the amount of the information on each page and displayed it using Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) and Wireless Markup Language (WML). Even the Blackberry, known for its exceptional innovation in the wireless space, had to do a lot of heavy lifting to squeeze the Web into a small screen.

The worst part about the WAP solution was that each web site needed to present its results using a different format, if it wanted to be browseable from a wireless device. Doing double work for content owners is both time-consuming and error prone, so only large companies invested in doing this. Which means that the long tail of the Internet was, for the most part, inaccessible from wireless devices.

Apple took an entirely different approach and focused on making web sites work on the iPhone, as is. Since iPhone runs OS X Safari, for designers it is only a matter of figuring out how to make web pages fit onto a small screen. Naturally, there are already several technologies that exist to help people browse when the content does not fit onto a screen - scrolling, paging and zooming. So Apple combined its innovative multi-touch technology with some old ideas, to deliver a complete browsing experience to the iPhone users. How well it will work remains to be seen. Particularly, will people be able to master multi-touch and will they like the experience of looking at pieces of a web page? If the answer is yes, then the iPhone will break the Web out of the WAP prison.



Can Safari Succeed in the Browser Wars?
Apple carefully aligned the launch of iPhone with the launch of Safari on Windows. There is no way this is a coincidence. Why does Apple want to jump into the browser wars? The answer is that anybody who has a shot wants to be part of this war; and with the iPhone, Apple actually does have a shot.

The current state of browsers is in a flux. Microsoft's Internet Explorer is receding, but not as quickly as some thought. Firefox is gaining, but again not as quickly. Apple sees an opportunity - because neither opponent is playing the perfect game. If iPhone becomes popular, Apple possibly has a decent chance of success in the browser wars, because people like to use the same application everywhere. Today's Safari is a no bells and whistles, quick and robust web browser. It has less features than Firefox, but it also has a lot of die hard fans in the Mac community.

You can get more details about the current state of the browser war battlefield from our reviews. We profiled Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7.0 when both came out. We also wrote two posts about the browser wars: Web Browser Faceoff and Why Browser Wars Will Heat up in 2007. The first post hit a nerve with Safari fans, because we described it as less modern than other browsers. The second post was focused on the economics of the war; and is very applicable to Apple's jump into this market. Winning the browser wars equals winning control over Web eyeballs and the precious search box. Apple knows this very well and is likely to have more tricks up its sleeve, like a new version of Safari.

Can iPhone jumpstart Apple in Social Networking?
Apple has not been very active in the social networking space so far. Sure it is a consumer electronics company, but still - a social network would be very complementary. Well, with iPhone hitting the streets, Apple might have pulled itself into this lucrative market with the speed of light. What better social network can you wish for than a phone book? Family, friends and business contacts all end up in our phones. Apple is very likely to tap into this huge network of subscribers. Because we take our mobile phones with us everywhere - and certainly this will be the case with the feature-packed iPhone - Apple has a chance at pulling off some serious upsets in the social networking space.

The fact that Apple is going to have control of the native iPhone applications for phone and chat will give it big leverage. As people interact with each other, the software can learn a lot about user behavior and build a social system that leverages this behavior. A simple example is a filter that is currently missing in Facebook. Currently in Facebook all updates from my contacts are treated equally. Anytime anyone does anything, I get informed. This is already annoying to many users. With the iPhone, Apple can quickly gather data about how much interaction we have with each other - and so build a heuristic for filtering information based on that.
Conclusion

iPhone is more than just a breakthrough mobile phone device. It is a strategy that may expand Apple's sphere of influence, from web browsing to social networking and even possibly search. If iPhone users embrace the multi-touch interface for browsing the web, then WAP will become obsolete. If Safari on iPhone and Windows manages to win peoples hearts, then Apple might gain a position in the browser market - perhaps as strong as Firefox. Incidentally, for now this plays in Google's favor, as Google is friendly with both Firefox and Apple. And if Apple starts building a social network around the iPhone, then MySpace and Facebook will have to start paying attention.

All of these things are of course 'big ifs'. But we have no reason to doubt either the seriousness or ability of Apple. Since Steve's job return in 1997, the company has not disappointed. So are all and any of these possible? Definitively - and very likely too. Apple is playing this game to win and to win big. Lets see what happens next and in the mean time, please share your thoughts on what part iPhone will play in Apple's business strategy.

Read more...

Available in 16Gb

iPhone is a revolutionary new mobile phone that allows you to make a call by simply tapping a name or number in your address book, a favorites list, or a call log. It also automatically syncs all your contacts from a Windows PC, Mac, or Internet service. And it lets you select and listen to voicemail messages in whatever order you want — just like email. iPhone is available in an 8GB model for $399 and a new 16GB model for $499.

Read more...

Inside the Box

Source from engadget.com

Read more...

An Introduction

This Blog dedicated to bring you right here all about iPhone. From the Software, Modding, Accessories and all you can do with your iPhone.

Introduction
Capping literally Years of speculation on perhaps the most intensely followed unconfirmed product in Apple's history -- and that's saying a lot -- the iPhone has been announced today. Yeah, we said it: "iPhone," the name the entire free world had all but unanimously christened it from the time it'd been nothing more than a twinkle in Stevie J's eye. Sweet, glorious specs of the 11.6 millimeter device (that's frickin' thin, by the way) include a 3.5-inch 480 x 320 touchscreen display with multi-touch support and a proximity sensor to turn off the screen when it's close to your face, 2 megapixel cam, 4GB or 8 GB of storage, Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR and A2DP, WiFi that automatically engages when in range, and quad-band GSM radio with EDGE.

Perhaps most amazingly, though, it somehow runs OS X with support for Widgets, Google Maps, and Safari, and iTunes (of course) with CoverFlow out of the gate. A partnership with Yahoo will allow all iPhone customers to hook up with free push IMAP email. Apple quotes 5 hours of battery life for talk or video, with a full 16 hours in music mode -- no word on standby time yet. In a twisted way, this is one rumor mill we're almost sad to see grind to a halt; after all, when is the next time we're going to have an opportunity to run this picture? The 4GB iPhone will go out the door in the US as a Cingular exclusive for $499 on a two-year contract, 8GB for $599. Ships Stateside in June, Europe in fourth quarter, Asia in 2008.

iPhone Picture

Read more...