Even the most ardent Apple supporter would consider this ridiculous. When the iPhone, running Version 3.0, is connected to a Bluetooth speaker, like the neat little Sony Ericsson MBS-100 I'm playing with, there is no way to control the volume. The speaker lacks a volume control and Apple has chosen to not support controlling the volume with the A2DP Bluetooth Profile.

I guess that in one respect there is a volume control - the on and off switch - but to not be able to change the volume from the iPhone is a royal pain in the butt. Apple is working, as far as I can tell, within the A2DP specification (you can read it here) but are offering little other than the bare minimum.

Roll on iPhone 3.0.1

Now that iPhone 3.0 has been released I thought it would be pertinent to look at what's happening in carrier land and to play with a couple of the new features.

Carriers

In Australia we effectively have three major carriers; Telstra, Optus and the newly created VHA that's being formed through the merger of Three and Vodafone.

VHA
VHA has announced that the new iPhone 3G S will be sold through Three stores in Australia. This is significant locally as Three was never an official carrier for the iPhone 3G although they did offer a $300 rebate for any customers bringing a unlocked iPhone 3G to their network.

Vodafone has also announced that you can register interest in the iPhone 3G S here.

At this stage there's no announcement on whether tethering will cost extra but given that Three has actively encouraged the use of phones as modems I don't expect them to charge customers for the privilege.

Optus
Optus hasn't officially released pricing on their site but have sent a press release that states that tethering ("iPhone as a Modem" in Optus-speak) will cost extra. We're looking at $9.95 per month.

In my view, this is ridiculous. Many iPhone users on the Optus network don't use their entire data allowance now. Why they can't use this for tethering is a matter of some conjecture with managing their network capability through charging structures probably the most likely explanation. However, this is very easily overcome by downloading the appropriate profile from this site. The easiest thing to do is visit that address with Safari on your iPhone.

If you're interested in an iPhone 3G S through Optus you can register your interest here.

Telstra
Telstra has been conspicuously quiet on the iPhone 3.0 front. A look at their iPhone website reveals no new information - not even an acknowledgment that there's a new iPhone or an operating system update.

I wouldn't expect to offer different pricing for tethered traffic as they already charge an arm and leg for their service compared to the other local carriers.

Find My iPhone and MobileMe
The value of Apple's MobileMe service has been questionable - until now. The introduction of the "Find my iPhone" services adds significant value to MobileMe.

Firstly, if you lose your iPhone you can use MobileMe to locate the handset. Enabling the service on the iPhone is a little tricky to find (Go to Settings > Mail, Contacts and Calendars > MobileMe >Find my iPhone).

Then. visit www.me.com and go to Settings. Form there, it's an easy thing to locate your phone. If the phone isn't precisely locatable via its GPS receiver then it position relative to carrier transmission towers is provided.

You can also get the iPhone to display a message or make a sound - even when the phone is on silent.

If your phone is truly lost then you can remotely wipe its contents.

When Snow Leopard Server is released later this year, I'm hoping to see a corporatised version of this service for businesses that have deployed a fleet of iPhones.

The recent release of the new Kindle eBook reader has me thinking (yeah, it had to happen again!) about device convergence. In the olden days, people (well, nerds really) carried a PDA, mobile phone, computer and whatever other gadgets took their fancy (HP scientific calcular anybody?). Since those days in 80s and 90s we've seen a marked shift.

The IT industry tends to move between extreme position. Think about insourcing vs outsourcing, off the shelf vs bespoke development and so on. Depending on the economic climate and what consultants and analysts thought they could get away with everyone seemed to oscillate between some extreme view or another. One of the debates that we used to have was the argument between having a "best of breed" device vs a generalist. This of it as the jack of all trades. It wasn;t an "expert" in any one thing but it did many things competently.

Back in early 2007 Steve Jobs mesmerised the world with his reality distortion field when he announced the first iPhone. In effect, what hed described was a converged device that fused a computer, phone and PDA. What made the iPhone different was that Apple simply did the convergence better than anyone else.

I've not used a Kindle but it looks to be a great device. That said, I doubt I'd buy one as it's too big for me to carry in my normal kit.

The iPhone's biggest weakness, in my opinion, is with messaging. The lack of a unified inbox and search are serious deficiencies that desperately need to be addressed in the iPhone 3.0 software. And let's not get started on the lack of true push email. In that regard, the BlackBerry simply smashes the iPhone.

For web browsing, there's no doubt in my mind that a decent netbook would do the job. I have an Eee PC 900 series in the lounge room at home for just that purpose.

When one looks at the growth of mobile phone sales it's obvious that the fastest growing segment is the smartphone category. iPhones, BlackBerrys and Windows Mobile are no longer just for nerds. The technology has moved along such that smaller devices, while still requiring some compromises and changes in our behaviour, can do many of these tasks. They may not so them as well as we'd like but they do them either well enough or very well.

It's clear to me, and I suggest that sales figures strongly support this view, that while single function devices like the Kindle will continue to sell profitably but that they will only ever be niche devices. The vast majority of consumers will prefer to have a device that can do many things well rather than one or two things brilliantly.

The folks over at FileMaker have delivered one brilliant iPhone app. Bento for iPhone is an iPhone port of Bento - not some cut back imitation.

If you're looking for powerful information management on your iPhone then it's a no-brainer - buy Bento for iPhone. For $5.99, it can replace several other iPhone apps. Sure, there are a couple of rough edges but we're sure these will be sorted in the fullness of time.

My full review can be read over at Australian Macworld.

I knew, when I chose Optus as my iPhone carrier last year that their 3G network wasn't as extensive as Telstra's NextG. I was prepared to live with it as the cost was so much cheaper that I could live with a lower service level. But it's now getting ridiculous.

I rarely get a 3G signal and when I do see one it rarely lasts more than a few seconds. I'm officially looking at ditching my Optus contract and changing carrier.

I wrote this story about the iPhone some months ago for the Mebourne PC User Group. I don't think too many people would argue that the Melbourne PC User Group is a fairly conservative group and that they're likely to not be swayed too much by a bunch of market hype. That's why I did some analysis on whether the iPhone lived up to the hype.

So, does the iPhone live up to the hype? At the end of the day, the iPhone is a well designed smartphone. However, hardware is only about 25% of the iPhone story. I think that the iPhone delivers the most nicely integrated software package on any smartphone thus far. The thing is, there's nothing the iPhone does that can't be done by any other phone. What it does do is make using a smartphone easy.

 iPhone

OK - so I've been a little slack with the blog and haven't posted in way too long. After studying and doing my recent exam on the early New Testament Church at Ridley, I had a massive backlog of stories to write for APC, Australian Macworld, PC Update and The Age. I;m nearly caught up so I have a moment or two for some blogging and social networking.

Over at Hydrapinion, I've just published a story on some free iPhone apps.

 freebies • iPhone apps

I picked up my iPhone 3G about a week after the Australian release and have, for the large part, been really happy with the phone. The one nagging software hassle has been with Safari that seems to be very unstable for me. I seem to be able to crash it at least a couple of times per day. In particular, it doesn't seem to like me trying to scroll and zoom a page until it's completely finished loading the page.

My main beef has been with my carrier. Optus is a wholly owned subsidiary of Singtel, which is owned by the government of Singapore. Optus' cellular network, it seems to me, is oversubscribed and there seems to be little likelihood that the network will be augmented to the required degree.

So, in order to test my theory I've contacted Optus and had my iPhone carrier unlocked. The support tech on the phone, john, was very helpful and after i'd supplied my phone number and IMEI he informed me that my phone would be unlocked within 10 working days and that i'd receive an SMS telling me when the process was complete. Given that I anticipate an overseas trip next year this will make life easier as I'll be able to use a local SIM card and save on international roaming costs.

It also means that I can do some testing with different Optus SIM cards to see if the iphone is being speed-limited to "protect" the Optus network.

 iPhone unlocking • Optus

I've held back on posting this for a few weeks as I always thought that Apple would resolve the iPhone's software problems. One of the most compelling iPhone features, for me, is Safari. Being able to read web sites while I'm out and about is a key element of the iPhone experience for me. However, Safari is broken.

Firstly, I'm still suffering some serious stability issues. As an example (and this is not a one-off scenario) I was reading a story at www.theage.com.au. Safari crashed three times. This happens to me several times per day. The sooner an alternate browser is developed and released the better although there's little chance of Apple allowing that.

Secondly, I think that Safari's design is seriously borked. Why doesn't it cache pages so that hitting the back button a few seconds after clicking a link doesn't require that the entire page is completely reloaded? Surely, it would have been easy (after all, we're told that the iPhone is running good ol' OS X) to have retained Safari's caching functions. This design flaw means that the amount of data being transferred to the iPhone via your carrier is being increased unnecessarily. The lack of caching also means that oft used images, like banner images that appear on every page in a single site, are re-downloaded every single time you move to a new page within a site. It's almost like Apple is programmatically increasing the amount of data we use for the benefit of the carriers.

I guess that I could do a factory reset of my iPhone to see if that resolves the Safari stability problems I'm seeing but a troll through various user forums suggests that I'm not Robinson Crusoe so there's no guarantee that a reset would fix things. Besides, I'm a busy person and the iPhone is meant to "just work". Isn't that the "Apple Way"?

So, Mr Apple - please fix Safari. Get it stable and sort out this dumb caching behaviour. Having to reload a page I was at just a few seconds ago over a slower connection is driving me bananas.

One more thing: Please let me access the iTunes Store over 3G. Limiting me to WiFi while I'm travelling is just cruel.

 iPhone • iPhone instability • iPhone Safari

Being a Melbournite I wasn't able to shoot over to Silicon Valley for the Google/ T-Mobile G1 smartphone announcement. I've had a quick scan of the coverage at ZDNet and note the following:

Firstly - I know these live blogs are written in a hurry but, frankly, this makes no sense to me.

I have to say it [Android phone] does look nice, but as people have said recently it is really a new feature phone (like the iPhone) and not a high powered mobile device like Windows Mobile and S60 devices.

When did "feature phone" become a category? Whatever he's smoking - I want some.

There's a laundry list of features including

• accelerometer
• MP3 player
• Google with Streetview
• Drag and drop in the OS
• No tethering
• No out-of-box Exchange
• No desktop application
• No central sync page (use with you data in the cloud only)
• No A2DP

I've not yet had a play but the spec sheet doesn't seem to be anything particularly special. I find it interesting that the carriers have so much power in the United States. Tethering (the ability to use a 3G phone as a modem with a computer) is missing. No other market so abuses customer choice and options.

In any case, I'm really looking forward to the G1. It seems to be the only potential competitor to the iPhone's innovative edge as Symbian and Windows Mobile have really been left in the dust.

It's interesting that the release of Chrome came such a short time before the G1 announcement. Sounds a lot like Safari for Windows and the iPhone to me.

 Android • Google • iPhone • Symbian • Windows Mobile