Lets all just get one thing straight and try and keep it that way, please. The iPhone does not cost £900. It costs precisely £269 for the 8GB model and £329 for the new 16GB model. If you want to marry it up with your own £35/pm mobile contract with the operator of your choice then it is clearly something that you can do. But for heavens sake, let us all dispense once and for all with this nonsense about the iPhone costing £900 across its contract life. It would only do that if for your £35 you got nothing else. As it happens, with O2 what you do get is 600 mins and 500 texts per month, unlimited EDGE and WiFi courtesy of The Cloud and a rather novel Visual Voicemail. Examine O2′s current tariffs and you will see that there is nothing to compare with any other phone.

What you are buying into with the iPhone is an unsubsidised handset – but try and get one with the iPhone’s capabilities for anywhere near £269 and you will fail. But you will be asked to pay more than £400 for another brand with similar features. Remember, also, that the early adopters of the N95 and latterly the N95 8GB paid handsomely for their handsets when taking out contracts. Only when very many were sold did the price come down – and still they are only available free on high-value but comparably inferior contracts (unless mins and texts alone are your bag).

I have the pair – N95 and iPhone, and I can tell you that I much prefer the latter to use especially for browsing. It is a positive joy over the N95 which often has its native browser usurped for Opera Mini – that says it all. The difference between EDGE and 3G/HSDPA for web pages on these mobile handsets is indistinguishable. And when using WiFi (home or The Cloud) the iPhone trounces the N95 every time, it is just so much faster. Navigation with the iPhone is a snip – effortless and again easy. And I have yet to see anyone not be able to operate an iPhone on first holding, unlike the N95 which completely loses them. Don’t get me wrong. The N95 is a highly capable device and I have one for good reason.

But when comparing like for like between the N95 and the iPhone the latter does rather win out in so many ways, even with its [in places] lower spec. Considering it is a first generation device against the Nokia N95′s vintage Apple have to be applauded. That they have stirred up so much emotion that is still causing much wrenting of sackcloth and rubbing in of ashes among the naysayers is a testament to the impact that this immodest little device has had on the population at large. I hear it talked about in the street, on the train, in cafes and restaurants, in the office and peoples homes.

Object of desire? Possibly. Disruptor? Most definitely – and now let us sit back and see what the market responds with, all these months later. Nice one Apple, nice one.

3G – nope
MMS – nope
Decent camera – nope
Installable apps – (wait for it)

Leaving you with:

The highest-capacity music phone on the block (this week). 16Gb will be a tipping point for quite a few I would imagine… As I said on my last blog post, I’m looking forward to the next set of Canalys figures

Matt Radford’s last blog post..A quiet launch for the world’s highest-capacity music phone

“In my recent experience, there are plenty of coverage ‘holes’ outside the largest of urban centres — what *do* you call the process when moving from Three coverage to Orange and back again?”

Er…roaming handover? Intersystem handover? 3G-2G handover? Unfortunately, Three & Orange haven’t integrated to the point that data sessions hand over, hence why a connection will drop. In my personal experience of Vodafone’s much-Whatley’d coverage, same-operator 3G-2G handover is not the best either. Certainly not good enough to sustain a VPN connection anyway. But this is only an issue for business users who are mid-session on trains or in cars, really.

MNO’s don’t dimension networks for such niche cases, or they’d go broke. It’s a best-efforts thing.

“And what causes calls and data connections to drop or hang if not a problem with a ‘hand-over’?”

Latency, timeouts, cell congestion, interferance – take your pick! There’s a whole lot of the net to go wrong apart from the air interface. Delivering what a few years back would have been considered impossible speeds is now routine, so we tend to forget just how far we have come. and where we are now will seem like the 9k6 modem days once LTE (100MBps download, anyone?) starts to roll out around 2015.

/m

Joe Cooper’s last blog post..A Mini (Cooper) Adventure

Ben Smith’s last blog post..Confirmed: O2 have 16GB iPhone £329 [updated]

Lots of Appley love,
Vero

[Note: I'm not that much of a fan girl. I just like egging Whatley on because he knows deep inside, he was made for Mac.]

Vero Pepperrell’s last blog post..Mobile World Congress: Where to find us

In my recent experience, there are plenty of coverage ‘holes’ outside the largest of urban centres — what *do* you call the process when moving from Three coverage to Orange and back again? And what causes calls and data connections to drop or hang if not a problem with a ‘hand-over’?

@Ben – I can believe part of the problem is the E65 struggling to handle the data. But almost all the sites I visit are largely text-only. While viewing sites with either the Nokia browser or Opera mini, I’ve really come to notice the >5 secs pause before anything seems to happen — and that’s after the 3 secs wait before it asks if I’d really like to use the only bloody connection available at the time…

Thanks for both your comments and helping me understand more about the complexities.
And I hope my relatively non-techy, normob attitude to a poor experience doesn’t annoy you too much.

HeavyLight’s last blog post..Study Says Mobile Churn is Approaching 40%

At the moment I’m still a bit take it or leave it on the iPhone. I love the beauty of it and I love the fact that they have forced the rest of the mobile industry to sit up and take note. But what can it do for me (especially at a cost of c. £900)? I’ve got a digital camera and an iPod already – so I don’t need my phone to fill in for those. So what else can it do for me but look pretty?

At the moment I can’t see the £900 vaule in it yet … maybe with the next version.

Opera’s browsers feel a bit quicker than the Nokia one on an identical connection.

Ps: I’ve got an E61i, and no matter what people say regarding its size, im in love with it!!

‘intermittent’ 3G coverage = best in the UK (and therefore the world, apart from Korea/Japan, given the population density & size of the UK). Until the tie-up with T-Mobile, when it will get about twice as big

‘Hopeless handoffs’ = it would be, as there is no data session handoff between GPRS and 3G between 3 and their 2G partner Orange.

The E65 is a 3G device (384kbps), the 3USB modem is HSDPA (3.6MBps). So in theory, your USB’d mate should be doing the bizzo nearly 10 times quicker…as you saw

The X-Series is not a technological enabler, it’s a tariff. 3UK have the largest 3G HSDPA network, by about a thousand sites I believe. When the 3G iPhone comes out, if it’s on O2′s 3G network you will have an experience on par with the launch of 3G 4 years ago. And we all know how well that went down, don’t we kids?

As someone recently said, Apple can add the missing camera quality, 3G and 3rd party apps. But can the others add the missing slick user interface, world class industrial design and most importantly, the practically bomb-proof OS which is being concurrently developed across several devices including the Mac? They might, but I’m not holding my breath.

See you next week!

My N73 with Opera Mobile v8.65 (hopefuly v9.5 very soon) is a beast which will store anything the internet has on my external memory card.

I do admit the styling of the iPhone is superb, its just a pity the content lets it down. A bit like a perfect 10 model with an IQ of 50.

gerrymoth’s last blog post..UPDATE: Gmail v1.5.0.1191

But in Manchester I found someone browsing on his laptop using a Three USB dongle (I believe, at theoretically twice the speed of my gorgeous E65) and setup a head-to-head comparison test.
I was horror struck to discover that he was able to display full web pages at least TEN TIMES faster than the shrunken or windowed version on my E65!
And obviously the whole XP user interface was massively superior to the fiddly and, at times, pathetic, Nokia/S60 software.

Maybe it’s all the under-used apps that are still lurking on my phone.
Perhaps I’ve screwed up some of the connection settings along the way.
I’ll try to set aside some time next week to wipe the E65 down to bare metal and only install the absolutely essential bits of software and do another connection speed test standing underneath a Three mast.

If there’s not a huge improvement then this Opinionated Normob (a pc tinkerer for over 20 years) will be taking a serious look at the 3G iPhone when it arrives later in the year.
It’s probably a good thing that Three decided to abandon the X-Series blog while I was away as I’d have been banned for my bad language…

HeavyLight’s last blog post..Study Says Mobile Churn is Approaching 40%