Written on January 1, 2009 – 5:18 pm Zee, Internet Marketer, Design Connoisseur & Web App Devotee
Up until now, unlocking your iPhone 3G has not been an option, leaving many iPhone Ebay buyers frustrated expecting an unlock procedure ‘any time soon…’ - well that was months ago. Thanks to the iPhone Dev Team however, the time has finally arrived and as long as you’re willing to put some time into it - you can unlock your iPhone 3G now.
I say ‘time into it’ because you’ll need to ensure you have the latest firmware installed and you’ll need to jailbreak your iPhone to unlock it via the Cydia Installer.
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Written on August 22, 2008 – 11:53 am Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
If you’ve been in Russia lately, you’ve probably seen an iPhone or two. Most of them were jailbraked, as Russia was one of a few large countries - including China - that haven’t welcomed the iPhone officially yet. According to Reuters, the number of these unauthorized iPhones in Russia will be as high as 700,000 by the end of this year.
A flood of legal iPhones is expected to hit Russia soon as well, since our friend from Quintura writes that he largest Russian mobile phone operator Mobile TeleSystems (MTS) has agreed with Apple to distribute the shiny object starting from October.
MTS is a major mobile player, it had more than 87 million subscribers at the end of July 2008, 62 million of them are from Russia. 17 million people access Internet from mobile phones in Russia, making the country ranked 4th in mobile phone penetration.
That’s an interesting country for a manufacturer of a 3G phone, why did it take so long? According to industry experts the biggest hurdle in talks with Apple was that Russian operators were not willing to give Apple a part of the iPhone revenue, in exchange for the exclusive sales rights. With that problem ironed out, Russians can almost - surprisingly quick actually - buy the fancy Apple toy.
Written on July 11, 2008 – 5:54 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Your blogger waisted six hours of his life on a friggin’ phone today. The only Dutch operator that offers the iPhone 3G couldn’t handle (Dutch link) the data load the activation process required. The result? Every single iPhone had to be registered by calling up the T-Mobile headquarters. When you take in account that all the iPhone-selling stores had to do this, you won’t be surprised to hear that waiting times to get a hold of a T-Mobile HQ employee were as long as 80 minutes. That crisis resulted in a very bizarre daily schedule for me:
The line at T-Mobile store, hope you dig my yellow shoes
7 am: Getting up - jumping on my bicycle to go to Amsterdam’s largest T-Mobile Store in the Kalverstraat. 7.30 am: Arriving at the store, a forty-year old Apple fanboy hands me a coffee. There are around 30 people waiting. 8 am: Store manager hands out numbers, there are only 35 iPhones available. Just enough for the people who are already waiting. I have number 24. 9.30 am: Store opens: first lucky seven enter the store. 9.35 am: System crashes. From now on it takes around 90 minutes per customer. 11.00 am: Most of the people who were part of the first round have left the store. 28 people and I realize we’re here for quite a while. Especially as T-Mobile employees help out four friends who have just arrived. When customers tell the store manager this, he acts like he has no idea of what’s going on. 12.15 pm: The store manager now makes the same mistake and helps out a friend of his. He then disappears. 1.00 pm: Finally! There’s my number. Let’s buy that shiny object. 1.45 pm: I’m lucky since the guy who sells my iPhone manages to reach T-Mobile HQ pretty fast. It only took me thirty minutes to buy the phone. Pity that I had to wait for five hours and thirty minutes to do so.
O2 also suffered from technical glitches - causing waiting lines of 90 minutes. Mobile Computer interviewed visitors no. 2 and 3 at the London Regent Street Apple Store - who left early because the whole buying process took to long:
Update: there’s a new gadget around, called the iBrick.
Written on July 3, 2008 – 10:49 am Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Remember my ‘Wow!’ post about Nimbuzz last May? The Dutch mobile VoIP and IM start-up then launched a VoIP app that was compatible with more than 500 handsets which allowed free calling in 50 countries. I received a couple of comments on this lyric post, mostly from people who wondered why they should say other mobile VoIP clients like Fring and Truphone goodbye, and start using Nimbuzz. I figured that yesterday’s announcement about their second round of funding - $15 million from a round led by Naspers/MIH and Mangrove (known from Skype) - was a good excuse to dive a little deeper in that.
The Nimbuzz team relaxing
With 500k seed capital, a series A of $10 million in 2007, now another $15 million, 70 employees, and offices opening in Argentina and Brazil, there must be something special about Nimbuzz. Of course you could say they’re the prime example of a new bubble, but that would be a little too simple and cynical. So I’ve contacted Tobias Kemper from Nimbuzz to figure out what they offer that 129 other mobile VoIP start-ups don’t. Turns out it’s a rather technical story.
Kemper: “Fring is focused on 3G and Wifi, Truphone is trying to be more of an operator and isn’t free. And - as no one has understood this yet - we do buddy calling, we’re connecting existing communities. Fring also has buddy calling but nowhere near the seamless experience that we can offer, since we also work on GPRS and EDGE. Again, Fring does work on Edge, but not without credits such as SkypeOut.” Right.., so to sum it up: Nimbuzz has a broader reach as they support more mobile generations.
That’s a good thing, as Kemper told me they’re not just focusing on techies and early adopters - even though these groups are the only ones who know what mobile VoIP is about. Hence their effort to support to reach that number of 500 compatible handsets. Kemper: “We even work in more countries than Truphone with our dial in solution and had it since inception, whereas Truphone only came out with it last month and it seemed to be all the rage.”
As an expansion of their accessibility promise, Nimbuzz will soon launch a “Communicator” widget (terrible name, Kemper agrees) that allows visitors of your site and social profile or readers of your emails to connect to your phone, even if they’re not on Nimbuzz.
So to answer the questions of commenters like Travis and Bram, if you’re happy with Fring and Truphone, stay there. Though you might want to switch when Nimbuzz becomes more popular. I think they will, as they sincerely seem to focus on people who don’t own an iPhone or fancy Nokia phone. Yet we have to remember that the group with less-developed phones might not be interested in this whole mobile VoIP thing, as it’s hard to grasp. Also, the accessibility-mission has a major downside, with makes Nimbuzz - ironically enough - less accessible: the size of their app is around 1 MB - which is way too large. So that aspect needs some work.
Nimbuzz is currently expanding to Latin America and Africa, following the footprint of their investor Naspers/MIH - who already owns a stake in Mxit, a popular South African GPRS and 3G-based IM service. According to Kemper, Nimbuzz is “actively talking with operators and social networks to intergrate our solution and offer our features.” Sounds like they’ve no problems finding destinations for that 15 million.
Written on June 12, 2008 – 8:04 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
According to the GSM Association, the EU’s mobile data market grew by 40 percent to 7 billion Euros in 2007- text messages not included. Operators invested more than 20 billion Euros in enhancing their mobile networks and services.
This has paid off, as in the year to April 2008, the number of 3G users in the EU doubled to 112 million, that’s 22.5 percent of all Europeans. And here comes one exciting conclusion: Europe has adopted 3G faster than any other region of the world. In North America, 18.4 percent of the people are using 3G, in the Asia-Pacific region the percentage is 3.7.
One of the reasons for this major increase is 3G adoption is competition from technologies like Wi-Fi, since it makes the prices drop. Tom Phillips, Chief Government & Regulatory Affairs Officer of the GSMA said in the press release that “this gives mobile users the convenience of being able to access email, the Internet and other multimedia services wherever they travel within Europe. We expect prices to continue to fall as operators further innovate around tariffs and more and more Europeans use these services as a part of their everyday lives.”
I wonder how big the influence of the upcoming iPhone 3G will be. That shiny object might boost the number of adopters even more.
Written on June 10, 2008 – 8:00 pm Joop Dorresteijn, Contributing editor
That is, if you like to be connected to the Internet all day, while enjoying the fastest connections in the world! Enter the hyper connected society, with an astounding 90 percent of the country connected with 3G and a nation wide coverage of a South Korean version of Wimax.
How and why did South Korea become an overlord in Internet speed? In short; the South Korean government introduced a number of policy instruments to stimulate technological learning, aimed to strengthen international competitiveness of the economy. The government launched a five-year plan to create a ubiquitous networked world in 1995, meaning that the country developed a stunning 1.5 billion dollar wireless network to stimulate the use of the Internet.
Today, South Korea is the most connected country on earth, but the funny thing is that we hardly hear anything about Korea’s web scene. This made us curious about what websites are popular over there, and if Korea has a web 2.0 scene. To find that out, we reviewed the three visited websites in Korea and we interviewed Chang W. Kim, Korean web 2.0 enthusiast and initiator of the Open Web Asia ‘08 conference.
Written on May 20, 2008 – 4:36 pm Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of The Next Web Conference
Gizmodo reports that the iPhone 3G will be in stores on June the 9th.
When the iPhone launched everybody was super enthusiastic about the device that is changing the mobile market (read this wired article on “How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry”).
Soon after the launch people started to notice the flaws of the iPhone. You can’t copy/paste, you couldn’t search through your contacts, keyboard misses feedback and it has a great browser but only supports the, way too slow, EDGE and GPRS protocols.
Now Apple announced that the long awaited 3G iPhone is coming to stores and will be available worldwide. This will open up a whole lot of new opportunities for apps on the iPhone.
I’m glad I’ll be going to the US after the release. Want me to bring one?
Written on January 1, 2009 – 5:18 pm
Up until now, unlocking your iPhone 3G has not been an option, leaving many iPhone Ebay buyers frustrated expecting an unlock procedure ‘any time soon…’ - well that was months ago. Thanks to the iPhone Dev Team however, the time has finally arrived and as long as you’re willing to put some time into it - you can unlock your iPhone 3G now.
Written on August 22, 2008 – 11:53 am
A flood of legal iPhones is expected to hit Russia soon as well, since our friend from Quintura 
Written on June 10, 2008 – 8:00 pm
Written on May 20, 2008 – 4:36 pm
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