iDunzo.com

French Law Means Unlocked Apple iPhones

October 17th, 2007 by iDunzo

The price is unconfirmed, but Orange, the exclusive carrier of the iPhone in France, will have to offer an unlocked version of Apple’s device to comply with French law.

According to Orange’s French website, the company is obligated to sell an unlocked version of any handset which is also sold as part of a subscription package.

The International Herald Tribune reports on the law “passed in 1998 barring network operators from locking new devices to a network for more than six months”.

It’s unlikely that even Apple will be able to squirm out of this, so expect a libere iPhone sometime next year.

It looks like France could become the hub for GodPhone exports (expensive, $560 exports, but exports nonetheless.)

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Apple iPhone Delayed in Canada

October 14th, 2007 by iDunzo

In the U.S., the iPhone trademark is owned by Cisco. Apple chose to work out a deal with them and avoided legal torpedoes.

Apple did manage to get the trademark elsewhere, with filings in Singapore and Australia bearing fruit.

In Canada, however, the mark has long been owned by Comwave, a telecoms company in Ontario.

Apple tried and failed to register the name there—but Comwave, unlike Cisco, won’t play ball on sharing the name.

“The force they put into marketing would quickly make the brand Apple’s and not ours. Co-existence is not possible.”

-Yuval Barzakay – Comwave president

Source: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Yuval Barzakay added that it would effectively be hijacked by any such agreement:

What he’s saying, of course, is that is that everything has its price, but only if you want to buy it and he’s right.

Can you see Apple renaming the iPhone, or missing out on a market the size of California?

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Apple Looses Leopard on Manufacturers

October 10th, 2007 by iDunzo

After pushing back the release date six months, Apple has officially closed development of Leopard (OS X 10.5), according to AppleInsider, and is also putting the finishing touches on OS X 10.4.11 — what looks to be the final release of Tiger.

Manufactures are expected the receive the “Gold Master” version of the OS this week and Apple has also reportedly been seeding its support staff with initial training materials for the new OS in the form of “self-paced training modules.”

The materials cover some of the operating system’s most popular features and components, such as installation methods, Mail and BootCamp, according to AppleInsider sources.

As far as OS X 10.4.11, a MacNN report says the updates focus primarily on Dashboard, including a fix the the software’s underlying Webkit foundation and two existing issues with number-oriented widgets.

While Apple has yet to announce an official release date for Leopard, all signs have pointed to a public launch sometime during the last full business week of October, with some betting on October 26.

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TIFF Exploit Cracks Open iPhone and iPod Touch

October 10th, 2007 by iDunzo

Want to beta test a new iPhone and Apple iPod jailbreak?

You’d have to be crazy or rich to risk sacrificing your iPhone to this cause, but if you’re up for it, you can get in on the deal at channel #betatest on irc.toc2rta.com.

If those directions need further explanation, it’s a fair indication this is an experiment you should skip.

Engadget’s Ryan Block used the proposed mechanism in the wee hours of this morning and reports success.

The upgraded iPhone’s file system was unmasked last week, giving users read-write access to handsets running 1.1.1, but little in the way of usable beef.

The hack under testing, however, combines this with a second exploit based on a well-understood vulnerability in TIFF files, a popular graphics format.

It’ll be easy for Apple to crush this one in a future update, but it’s progress.

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Ugliest Product in Technology History

October 9th, 2007 by iDunzo

PCWorld have posted a top ten of “The Ugliest Products in Tech History“.

While the Zune might not really be the worst design ever, it somehow seems right to have the dung-colored box at number one, although maybe “number two” would have been more appropriate:

Somewhere along the way, though, Microsoft forgot to include the iPod’s sexy design, opting instead for a boxy plastic casing and a spectacularly unflattering brown color.

The other selections, however, are mixed.

Sure, Nintendo’s Virtual Boy deserves its place, and the Furby should have been euthanized long ago, but Motorola’s DynaTAC?

The $4,000 phone is a beautiful, sleek (and huge) icon. And how could any geek not love the stripped down honesty of the acoustic coupler modem?

You know the rules by now. Which is the real ugliest gadget ever?

I’ll start: The TiVo remote. It might work great, but it looks like a cheap dog toy. Answers in the comments.

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An iPhone For Hackers: The OpenMoko ‘LPhone’

July 12th, 2007 by iDunzo

You would have to be deaf to ignore the screaming about the Apple iPhone that’s been filling the air for the past few weeks.

It’s a slick piece of hardware, sure but the amount of vendor lock-in that you have to accept to use it has alienated many people.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, another company has been quietly gearing up to offer a completely different kind of phone.

That’s right, a mobile phone that’s as open to hardware and software hackery as the iPhone is closed.

It’s called the OpenMoko.

OpenMoko, a phone platform – devices and SDK, both – that is built on GNU / Linux software and is open all the way across the board.

The device is built from the ground up to be modified by its user base: Both the device itself and the software you load into it are fully documented. They want you to crack it open and have a good time with it and yes, you can even replace the battery unlike with the iPhone.

The device itself comes loaded with:

• a 640 x 480 touch screen
• 256MB of on-board flash memory
• WiFi
• a MicroSD card interface
• USB 1.1 connectivity
• integrated AGPS
• Bluetooth 2.0

And of course, there is quite a bit more to come with people hacking away at it. This phone has the potential to become any number of other things.

The basic, non-developer version of the phone is $300; the developer versions add another $150 to $200 on top of that depending on what versions you get – not a bad deal considering the thousands you’d normally have to spend to develop for any phone platform.

One of the key selling points for the iPhone is the user experience – how other phones or devices might do the same things, but they don’t do them quite like this, or all in one place.

In the same way, the OpenMoko is selling an experience, but one aimed at a totally different kind of audience – the hardware hacker and tech lover.

It’s akin to one of those electronics or chemistry hobby kits that you used to buy for the kids at Radio Shack – instead of building a transistor radio, though, you’re starting with a multifunction device which can be expanded out into any number of other things.

The question, though, is whether that’s a large enough market to be sustainable: They have to sell enough units to justify their manufacturing costs.

Also, how useful is the OpenMoko as a phone, especially in the United States? That part’s a big unknown until people actually take it out into the field.

The phone uses 2.5Ghz GSM, CSD and GPRS, so it’ll talk to most networks but many carriers get antsy when you try to bring in a phone they didn’t sell you and may charge you an activation fee.

And unless the OpenMoko is something the cell providers start selling in conjunction with their plans, layfolks are scarcely likely to even know about it.

Few people want to go through the hassle of dropping $300 for a phone they’ve never heard of with no guarantee it’ll even work on their network, for reasons that are wholly abstract.

Would I get one? If I hadn’t already just bought a phone, probably.

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