Risotto’s weblog

Because it seems like just everyone is making wild predictions about the next iPhone, let me share my very own insider story.

The next iPhone will not have a 3G radio, it will come with a pre-installed 4G IMS radio. 3G will be skipped in benefit of gaining an edge over fierce competitors. IMS is the forthcoming cell phone standard enhanced for multimedia support over IP networks. Apple is said to include a Wimax antenna along with the WiFi and WCDMA radio for cell phone communication. This information comes from a very credible source inside Apple whose identity, I can neither confirm nor publish of course.

Also, a high AT&T representative, that also requested to stay unnamed, is confirming, that AT&T will sell the next 4G iphone for just $1 with a 24 month contract, similar to many offerings in Europe. This comes just after some other source at AT&T leaked earlier, that the iPhone could be sold for just $199. Well, let me say this, that according to common wishful thinking, the latest report must be the most accurate.

The next iPhone is also expected to come in a new encasing. Reports say, that it could come in a 7.5mm thinner case compared to the original and that it would include a polished backplate, similar to a mirror, due to common request by female users of the original device. It’s also said to be available both in the original brick form factor, as well as in a more popular clamshell casing.

From unwiredview.com.

Neither Apple, AT&T nor the Pope were available for comment.

Appelinsider is announcing a 3g iPhone launch for June. While I think there will be an announcement about a 3g iPhone, I don’t think the 3g iPhone will be launched in June. First of all, the FCC filing did not show up yet. Apple has to file devices with new GSM radios with the FCC. This filing has not come up yet, which makes a launch in June very unlikely. I would say, if the 3g iPhone is announced in June, it might be available by the end of September or October, not any earlier.

I also think, that the 3g iPhone will either come out for Europe or the US first, though it won’t be available at the same time in both markets for launch. The reason for this is, that WCDMA 2100 (for the US) and the HSxPA standard (Europe) are not compatible. These standards use different radio bands, and while there are quad-band radio chips support both, they usually support high speed access only on one of the compatible bands.

I guess, the 3g iPhone could be launched in markets that have excellent 3g coverage first. Markets like Switzerland, Austria or Luxembourg might be the first to get the 3g iPhone. These markets are rather small, though in Switzerland’s case, they might be very profitable. Orange does not have an EDGE network in Switzerland and they won’t build one for the iPhone either, though it is likely that Orange will be Apple’s partner for the iPhone in Switzerland. After all, Orange did get the exclusive rights for France, and for the sake of simplicity and economies of scale, Orange would be a first-choice launch partner, for countries where the company is present. This would be consistent with the example of Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile), which got to launch the iPhone in Austria after they successfully launched the iPhone in Germany first. The 3g iPhone, not depending on EDGE anymore, might allow Orange to finally launch the iPhone in those markets as well.

Apple just recently announced the iPhone SDK including a roadmap for the next iPhone firmware functionality. Interestingly, Apple will be adopting ActiveSync for over-the-air synchronization with Exchange and compatible servers (Zimbra?). The firmware update will also include enterprise WPA2 and VPN support. The update is announced for June (read, the end of the month).

The new feature set will most likely make people wonder if there might be a hardware revision waiting as well. Everybody is talking about a 3G (HSxPA) version of the iPhone, and frankly, this would be great for a few geeks and early adopters.

My opinion though is, that Apple won’t change the hardware till late 2008 and will be waiting to introduce new hardware revisions ready for the holiday season. There might be an announcement for new hardware on WWDC, though I don’t expect the new iPhone to come out before the end of the year.

The iPhone can absolutely deliver the new features that have been announced for firmware revision 2.0 without a hardware upgrade. Push e-mail and synching technology does perfectly work over EDGE - it might as well work better over EDGE!

3G does consume a lot of power compared to EDGE and it doesn’t really deliver a positive impact on the application anyway. Furthermore, 3G availability is still very spotty across the world (and incompatible too, USA WCDMA 2100MHz vs. Europe&Asia 1900MHz). Also, bear in mind that 3G network deployments require a much denser network of cell towers and thus make it economically unfeasible to cover rural areas. If you’re a road warrior, you specifically want to be connected where everybody else isn’t. You don’t need great coverage in cities where you can find a WI-FI hotspot at every street corner and bandwidth is all over the place anyway. You want reliable coverage where everybody else would be disconnected.

The lower latency and higher bandwidth available with 3G is not mandatory for push e-mail. E-mail messages are relatively small and can be delivered over EDGE at least as well as over 3G. E-mail messages aren’t real time media streams.

EDGE’s added benefit over 3G is power consumption. Since push e-mail will require the radio to be always on, this is a very important thing to think about. The higher speeds available with 3G won’t justify the higher power consumption. You can see, this makes a lot of sense when you compare Apple to its competition. How come RIM, the biggest manufacturer of push e-mail devices yet, is still delivering most new devices without 3G? They probably recognized that 3G is just a power hog and does not at all deliver any benefits in a push e-mail and OTA synching scenarios.

Given these premises, it is most likely Apple will stick some more time to it’s EDGE powered iPhone. The market currently wants push e-mail, OTA synching, enterprise WI-FI and other features, that all do not require 3G at the moment. It is much more profitable to refine the iPhone’s software instead of launching a new product. The longer Apple sticks with the first generation iPhone, the bigger the profit margins will get. As long as the broad public doesn’t request technical features (i.e. the addition of 3G), but just asks for new applications and software implementable features, Apple will definitively be better off to serve the market with the current iPhone hardware.

Maybe, looking forward towards the end of the year, Apple could be delivering a 3G iPhone introducing new application scenarios. Currently, there are still no widely adopted usage patterns that would require 3G. Your local geek might say, of course there are applications scenarios that require 3G, though listening to streaming web radio and video on the go is not something that the broad public is yet looking for.

The market that requires 3G on the move, has just not been invented yet.

UPDATE: The new beta firmware seems to work with the latest version of Zimbra 5.0, when using a Zimbra Network Edition account with ActiveSync support enabled.

Update: As you may know, widespread unlocking methods are available now to unlock an iPhone from it’s SIM lock. 

As I just read on the new AT&T FAQ for the Apple iPhone it looks like it won’t work in Europe yet. From the FAQ (notice the typo? ):

Q. I’m an existing customer. Can I swap out my current SIM card and start right away?A. No. iPhone must be activated befroe it can be used. iPhone includes a pre-installed SIM card for your convenience.       

So, it’s official now. The iPhone will have a pre-installed SIM card. Simply put, SIM cards are used by GSM providers to identify a user on the network. The SIM card usually associates the phone number to the device. The SIM card itself is associated to a user’s contract and is thus bound to a specific carrier.Phones with SIM card slots allow to change the number as well as the carrier by simply swapping the SIM card. Some phones, usually subsidized by the carrier, won’t allow you to insert the SIM card from a competing carrier and are thus called SIM-locked. This effectively forces the use of a phone on a very specific carrier. Subsidized phones can usually be unlocked after a certain period of time (like the minimum contract period) or by paying a fee, which allows to use the phone on a new network, should a user decide to do so. SIM-locking is bad, but at least it won’t degrade the phone to a paper weight, should you decide to change your carrier.Even worse than SIM-locking though, when a carrier like AT&T chooses to pre-install the SIM card, the phone will most likely be SIM-locked and the SIM card may not be swappable at all! This means that people won’t be able to buy an iPhone and simply swap the SIM card to use the phone on other networks or even use it with a local carrier in Europe. To bad, because it looks like we will have to wait another 4-6 months until we will get the iPhone on the old continent. Also, who knows if Apple will again choose to stick to an exclusive carrier like Vodafone. If so, they will probably have a hard time selling the phone over here, even though the demand would be pretty high. In Europe cell phones are even more regarded as a status symbol than in the U.S., but people in Europe are quite reluctant in changing their carrier, so if the phone is not available to be bought in retail without SIM-lock, sales will definitely be much lower than the actually could be. Sticking to one carrier not only limits the availability to a few countries (there is almost no carrier omnipresent in every EU country, not even Vodafone) but will also exclude lots of customers from other carriers even when an iPhone exclusive carrier is available in a specific coutnry.Since Apple seems to have a hard time to find a suitable carrier anyway (reports are, Apple’s demands for distributing the phone in Europe are too “arrogant” anyway), I really can only hope Apple fails to sign an exclusive contract with any European carriers. This would at least allow the customers to buy the phone - unsubsidized - for a higher price, but give them the flexibility of choice when it comes to the carrier.I really hope Apple will listen to the EU consumer as well and won’t be doing such mistakes over here!

This is the desktop of one of my respected friends. I wont disclose whose desktop this is, but take a look at the massive density of those icons. It’s not just one layer of files, there are multiple! And yeah, my buddy knows the notion of folders. As you can see, there are even a few on the desktop! Can you beat *that*?

UPDATE: This notebook died in a tragic accident. It fell almost 3 storys from a coffee bar at LAX. It still worked after the accident but it succumbed to its injuries a few days later. May it rest in peace!

Remember 1992 when most likely you were using DOS and Windows 3.11? Turns out I was using the wrong OS back then. I just found this presentation of NextStep R3 which was released in 1992. It’s really mind blowing how advanced that OS already was. Many of the concepts shown are still used in modern OSes like Mac OS X or new versions of Windows. Well, of course Mac OS X evolved from NextStep but it’s really remarkable to see how many features only came to life when Mac OS X was introduced 10 years later. It looks like it really took 10 years for the world (or Apple?) to recorgnize the potential of NextStep! Just to name a few things shown in 1992 which can be found in current versions of Mac OS X and are now really popular: the dock, services, mail, the finder

Yeah, what’s in this time? Hope they are going to announce new prices for displays!

@13:05 CET: http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore

UPDATE: I really thought something major was going on. I mean, why would Apple need to shut down all their online stores? Well, it looks like they did it to introduce a few new colors for their iPod Shuffle. How lame… I really hoped for new displays.

BTW, does anyone know why Apple shuts down their store each and every time they update some products? It really makes no sense to me…

I have just added the ETH cafeterias to the list. Please note, that not all cafeterias can be parsed correctly. I try to get the right data but can’t guarantee that. If you know of other cafeterias around the ETH or UZH please send me links to pages with their daily menus. I will try to include them to the list.

Download widget

There’s a new version of the widget available. It’s now possible to select any cafeteria at the University of Zurich. More features to come!

Download widget

Today I’ve been experimenting with Apple’s new DashCode tool and have created a small (and probably very buggy) widget. The widget queries a web service I have wrote to get each day’s menu of my university’s cafeteria. Anyway, it works and it might be a simple but nice gadget for people studying and working at the Department of Informatics. So I decided to share the result. You can download the widget here. Improvements, remarks or any other kind of feedback is very welcome.

Download widget