Recent Articles

Sure, those on the twisty-turny AT&T train have looked on at free iPhones in the UK and €1 iPhones in Germany with some lust in their wallets. We get that. But those of us in Canada gaze longingly at all of your clear plans and reasonable data rates with something akin to battered-consumer syndrome.

While confusion still looms over who is eligible and at what price for iPhone 3G upgrades, never mind how high the unsubsidized price will eventually soar, AT&T may have clarified what families have to look forward to:

Family Talk plans ARE available. Voice plans start at $39.99 a month (same as the regular one-line starting plan) and additional lines will be $9.99 a month. AT&T's expecting lots of Family Talk Plans this time around because of the $199 price point.

Makes sense. But howsabouta family data? $30 a pop still per phone?

Steve Jobs announced Apple would sell 10 million iPhones in 2008. Up until June, given waning sales, 3G expectations, and large-scale unavailability from Apple and carriers alike, it didn't look possible.

Here at TiPB we've covered the heck out of the Flash on the iPhone debacle. Will it, won't it, can it, should it, omgvidz!1 and privacy nightmares. But it just won't stop. Current case in point, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen was once again let near a live mic:

Woke up this morning and as per my usual modus operandi, checked mail on my iPhone and then went to read some feeds. That's when it happened, mobile.mac.com (the interceptive RSS reading feature on MobileSafari) came back with a server error.

Seems to be working for me again, but reports have since sprung up of others having trouble with web-bound services of .Mac (though email protocols seems fine).

So you might have heard that the iPhone 3G was going to retail for $199 from AT&T. I’ve already covered how it isn’t technically $199 for current iPhone users. And you heard Rene tell you that $199 is less than the notorious price DROP of the iPhone. Well TiPb has been wondering how Apple settled on dropping the price so dramatically.

And we settled on a story, kind of—more like a collection of reasons. We’ve analyzed the outcome back and forth, from reverse and from the beginning. And we think we have come to a conclusion (or at the very least, a conspiracy theory). In a purely speculative story, I’ll give you my opinion on how we reached $199.

Read on for Apple’s Path to $199

Hot on the heels of O2 in the UK offering FREE iPhones, and T-Mobile in Germany offering ONE Euro-buck iPhones, AT&T waddles up to the plate to remind these upstart old-worlders how a carrier is supposed to behave:

The company is treating the iPhone 3G pretty much just like any other phone in that people who are ineligible for upgrades have to pay the full, unsubsidized price for the phone. [...] AT&T hasn't specified what the unsubsidized price is.

Based on European conversions, however, let's expect that to push $700+

Boo! One of the most popular things to do with a 3G smartphone is to "tether" it, which is to attach it to your laptop and use it as a modem so you can get online anywhere your phone has service. Windows Mobile and Treos have multiple options for doing this -- some even via some sneaky software that works in a kind of "proxy mode" so you can avoid paying the extra costs associated with a full-on "Phone as Modem" plan (which usually runs in the neighborhood of $50 a month). Sadly, AT&T has let the official word out -- you won't be able to do this with the iPhone 3G:

Sure, O2 in the UK may be giving them away for free, but why quibble over a Euro-buck? That's what T-Mobile Germany is counting on as they announced that Apple's next generation iPhone 3G could be had for as little as €1 with a €69 a month contract. Want a 16GB model? Starts at €19.95 on a €89 monthly contract.

If you prefer more up front, less down the road, you can also pay your €169.5/€249.95 at the door and walk away with a tiny €29 contract.

Now why can't AT&T -- and closer to (my) home Rogers -- learn from the Europeans?!?

If the next great future of computing in the Cloud, as many pundits -- not to mention Google -- think, then the next great race is delivering that future via Rich Internet Applications. Right now, there are two major ways of doing this. The first involves using a proprietary, locked in technology (admittedly with increasing "openness") like Adobe's Air/Flex/Flash trifecta, or Microsoft's .Net/Silverlight double team. The second is with truly open standards such as HTML, CSS, and AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) like Google, Yahoo, and many others use.