iPhone

One might be wondering why I have not been posting about the iPhone or the iPod Touch. Well, here’s the update.

I’m officially not interested in the iPod Touch anymore.

Am now officially hoping for the dev team to continue with their breaking in of the iPhone’s new firmware, and am actually hanging out in irc every night just to check on the progress. After all, who won’t be excited if their first visit to the iPhone-dev channel is the same night that the recent biggest iPhone hacking progresses happened.

Hell that night was exciting.

MacRyu loves the iPhone. We want one.

Over at the hardwarezone forums, someone by the nick of mrxhub1 is claiming that a local distributor is bringing in unlocked versions of the iPhone, and that these are local sets with local warranty. He also claims that all the iPhones are approved for sale in Singapore by Apple Singapore, and that they are currently undergoing checks by IDA for approval right now.

If you ask me, this whole thing reeks of rotten sashimi, as many of his claims are possibly nothing but pure bull. Let’s just take 2 simple points for example;

1. He claims that the first country in Asia where the iPhone has been released unlocked is Thailand. So far what we have heard is that the iPhone is sold in Thailand, but those are hacked, and not official stuff.

2. He’s selling the 4GB iPhone?! Why the heck will Singapore get a discontinued product?

Here’s a pdf file of the first page and second page of the thread.

You can view the whole thread at
http://forums.hardwarezone.com/showthread.php?t=1738691&page=1&pp=15.

While everyone is busy speculating about the rumours of the iPhone Nano or which carrier will carry the iPhone in Europe, back in home in Singapore there is one claim by an insider that the iPhone will be here by the end of this year, instead of 2008 as announced by Steve Jobs during MacWorld Expo 2007. Another claim verified the first claim, and added that Singtel is the forerunner for the race to be the iPhone’s carrier in Singapore and that a detailed proposal has already been submitted to Apple many months ago.

Singtel, being Singapore’s largest mobile carrier, is definitely likely to be the choice for the iPhone’s carrier in Singapore, and like AT&T, many of us just simply hate Singtel.

*Edited* Now apparently the focus has been shifted to Starhub, who have been said to be in talks with Apple already. Our take on this? God knows. Just bring us the damn phone already.

ViM3 has a blog post regarding the upcoming iPhone, stating that the final product will actually be sporting much more features than previously announced, including more than the earlier stated 4GB and 8GB flash memory in the 2 models. They claimed the following features;

-More Memory, substantially larger than what was announced at MacWorld
-User replaceable battery (great one if it really happens)
-Wifi to be Wireless N instead of Wireless G
-Modified version of iWork and iLife to be included
-iTunes Streaming via Bonjour
-Purchase from iTunes Store directly from iPhone
-Rebates with AT&T plans

Considering the information came from an unheard of blog (not to mention that it’s a free WordPress.com blog), it is probably quite untrustworthy. However, I’m pretty sure no one minds if the listed features do appear, killing all the previous criticism about the iPhone not being suitable for the workplace because it does not run any Office Productivity Apps.

You can read the original report here