Well, after we covered the upcoming PS3 firmware update, v2.40, we hope you weren’t one of the unfortunate people who had problems with the new firmware, which Sony soon pulled. We’re hearing that it’s likely v2.41 will be released this week, which should be what v2.40 claimed to be.

Of course, many people won’t care about their PS3 this week, as they continue to try to get the O2 website to accept their iPhone 3G upgrade order, which has failed for many people.  Some people are claiming that it’s deliberate marketing ploy by Apple to keep stocks limited to add to the hype.

ShoZu have been busy people. First of all, they’ve announced ShoZu for iPhone, which should be available in the next few weeks, in line with the updated Apple iPhone 2.0 firmware, and the Apple App Store. ShoZu allows you to take photos, and then ShoZu will organisee uploading those pictures to your selected sites in the background. A very popular Symbian S60 app, and now available for the iPhone, supporting the same range of sites. As well as the traditional upload facilities, there are now facilities for downloading pictures from your friends, reading and commenting on your and your friends’ photos / posts, interaction with Facebook, and geotagging your photos for you. It even supports a variety of “Citizen Journalism Sites”, such as the BBC website, Scoopt, CNN and ITV.com.

ShoZu supports many sites, and the other big news is that they have recently added support for Ovi, the new Nokia sharing site. Interestingly, two months ago they only support 29 site; now they support 46, and looking through the list the majority of picture based sites we could think of were included. Although they support Twitter, they need to expand their range of text based sites (such as Plazes and Jaiku that add location information to the messages) to complete their support and claim to be able to support the majority of Web 2.0 sites.

Some content thanks to Jonathan at atmaspheric | endeavours, and Darla Mack at her website.

We’re nearly there, so we thought we’d provide some more details on the iPhone launch, courtesy (in the main) to berble.com. Firstly, it looks like O2 stores will open at 7:02am (in comparison to 6:02pm last year), to allow a greater amount of time throughout the day to process the credit checks and activate the phones instore for all those who want to walk out of the store on the first day. Secondly, for upgraders, your phone will be sent out to you in the post, and you will not need to go to the store at all. berble.com’s O2 contact also stated that upgraders will be provided with a “Jail Break Code” to allow the old iPhone to be used on any network. Finally, it looks like the 8GB iPhone 3G will cost £299.99 on PAYG, with the 16GB version costing £359.99. Although that sounds a lot for a phone, let’s remember people were paying £269 for the old version *with* a contract, so £299 without a contract is not that unreasonable.  Included in that price is 6 months WiFi and Internet access, and after those 6 months, a monthly topup of at least £10 will keep those features available.

Expect many many more people to be walking around with iPhones over the next few months.

Nokia has bought Plazes, a location based activity social networking site. It’s believed that Plazes will eventually become part of the Ovi strategy, and may even get absorbed into Nokia Maps (Nokia Maps is mainly developed by Nokia Location Service, which is the new name for Gate5, who are based in Berlin alongside Plazes’ development team). Plazes itself today is not very mobile friendly (no m.plazes.com, no mobile specific browser support, no windows mobile / symbian clients, although SMS is supported and there is an iPhone client due soon), so it will be interesting to see how quickly Nokia get those things changed. There is a Nokia Internet Tablet client, although we couldn’t even persuade it to login to plazes, let alone interact with the site.

Given Google’s Android phone OS is likely to be including a whole range of Location Based Services from day one when it ships later this year / early next year, if Nokia want to compete they will need to get a Symbian client created quickly, integrate the Plazes solution into their whole suite of online websites, and get new firmwares out for existing phones as well as their new phones (after all, if you can upgrade your current phone to support all the same features as a Google phone, the need to replace your Nokia with a non-Nokia phone will diminish, and keeping their current customers must be key to Nokia over the next few months as Google and Apple release “must have” phones).

berble.com have found a useful application, it allows you to copy files to and from your iPhone / iPod Touch on either a Windows or Mac OS X computer. This saves you carrying a USB flash drive as well, and even better, it’s free!

Head over to berble.com to read more, and then visit the manufacturer’s website here to download DiskAid.

berble.com have confirmed that there will be no laptop tethering for the iPhone, inline with our opinion last week. An O2 contact told them that connecting a laptop to the iPhone would be against the T&Cs for the unlimited data usage. They go on to mention that the contact also suggested the capability might not even be available within the iPhone to achieve this, even if it wasn’t against the T&Cs.

Read berble.com’s article here.

Anssi Vonjoki, Nokia’s VP of Mobile Markets, has stated that Nokia will launch a whole range of touchscreen phones in 2009, not just high end smartphones, but “from the very low segment to the highest one featuring this type of functionality.” We’re not sure that Nokia would want to redevelop both S60 and S40 to support touchscreen, so these phones are likely to bring S60 phones down to more consumers.

LG have had some success with their touchscreen phones, from the Viewty to the latest LG Secret, and of course there’s the iPhone.  Whether Nokia can achieve the consumer experience to the same level as Apple waits to be seen.

This little device was spotted at Computex, it’s an iPhone / iPod Touch / iPod mini projector that can project a picture that’s 15 to 27″ across, so the size of a typical TV.  It has an embedded stereo speaker system, and support a full 16.7 million colours via a 640*480 resolution projector.  Focus is manual though.  No word on UK availability though at this stage…

After Nokia extended their map coverage into 9 new countries, NavNGo have announced they are about to release maps for Argentina, Brasil and Colombia.  In combination with their 3D mapping, they are trying very hard to compete with the established players, and if they can get their iPhone application we covered before released soon, they could become even more popular.

In contrast, within hours of Apple’s iPhone 3G launch yesterday, TomTom confirmed that they have their SatNav software working on the iPhone 3G, and plan to release it soon (although they have yet to announce an actual date).

Finally, here’s an interesting picture…

This appears to be (if it’s not fake) an iPhone running Navigon’s software, so it looks likely that all the major players are planning on iPhone solutions this year.

Navigon picture courtesy of Navigadget.

Tonight Apple launched the iPhone 3G as expected. The device has a number of improvements over the previous iPhone…

• 3G Data support
• Available in 8Gb (Black) and 16Gb (White) versions
• The back of the device is now black plastic
• Improved audio
• Headphone socket now flush with the device
• Built in GPS with Location Based Services (eg news specific to your location)

Alongside this, Apple have released more details on the type of applications that will be available via the App Store, and even some key new features coming in the new iPhone 2.0 software (which will be available to existing iPhone users and iPod Touch users for a small fee). One of the key new features is the Mobile Me service (which replaces .Mac); this offers a nice integration between the iPhone, your PC and your Mac. For example; read an email on your iPhone, and it will get marked as read on your other devices; that’s the sort of integration we’d like to see more people promoting (of course, it can be done today with other services, but how many of them promote such a tight integration facility?).

Much more detail can be at Apple, and it will be available in the UK on July 11th.

Well, it’s been discussed and rumoured for some while, but Broadcom have confirmed the new 3G iPhone will have a GPS chipset within it. This is, apparently, to comply with the 911 emergency rules in the US; that is, the ability to be able to locate the device and provide that information to the emergency services whenever an emergency call is made. Given all the other hints, it’s looking likely that this will be accessible to the end user.

More information here.

We first covered the LG Secret after it’s launch, and have been using one ever since. However, if you want your own Secret, it’s now available;

• on Vodafone, and if you spend more than £35 per month (for 18 months; or £40 per month for a 12 month contract), you should find the phone is free too.
• on O2, spending £35 per month for 18 months, £30 for 24 months, or £40 for 12 months will get the phone for free.
• on Orange, although you won’t get the phone for free on any tariff.

We’ve been generally impressed with the phone, although it’s not in the same league as an N95 or an iPhone. We understand it should be available on 3 and T-Mobile soon, although neither are listing the phone on their websites today.

According to this article on the BBC website, sales of smartphones will outstrip laptops in the next 12 to 18 months. With Symbian recently reporting that more than 200 million Symbian smartphones have been manufactured and shipped (the actual figure is at least 206 million), and Nokia predicting it will sell over 35 million GPS enabled handsets in the coming year, it’s all go for smartphones.  It will also be interesting to see how the other manufacturers react; there’s already strong indications the new 3G iPhone will ship with a built in GPS, or at least GPS support.

BBC Link via SMS Text News.

It’s not clear whether XSKN have photoshop’ed this, or whether it’s genuine, but it appears that they have released details of their new 3G iPhone case in advance of Apple announcing the device that goes within the case.  It seems to fit another rumours and stories, and if accurate, the most interesting points are that it shows the new device with a much more pronounced curved back, space for a front mounted camera (for video calling), and a better positioned headphone socket.

Story and picture courtesy of Engadget.

Well, no big surprise, but more and more companies are confirming the 3G iPhone is coming in the next few months. Various telecom operators are stating they will be announcing the next generation of iPhone in the coming weeks. It also appears that Apple may be launching an Internet Tablet type device in June too. Apart from having a more powerful processor, the rumours are suggesting a 720×480 screen size, in a slightly larger form factor than the current iPhone.

Here’s an interesting snippet of information. Google have released an updated version of their iPhone version of their Google Reader, and it’s been noted that any device can access the URL, which is http://www.google.com/reader/i/. This version works well on both Symbian S60 smartphones, as well as the Nokia Internet Tablets, both of which seem to benefit from the additional effort Google has put into the user interface. It offers a better interface over the traditional mobile version by offering you easier access to each post. If you are a regular Google Reader user, and have never got on with the mobile version, then give this version a go…

According to Engadget, who have apparently seen an internal O2 memo, the iPhone 8Gb, which was recently made £100 cheaper, has now gone End of Life, and will not be stocked anymore. Whether this is simply a move by Apple towards higher capacity devices like the 16Gb version, or whether it’s in anticipation of the oft-rumoured 3G iPhone no one is quite sure, although we’re likely to find out in June…

An enterprising individual is looking to create a cheap GPS addon for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and is even looking at providing an Open Source software solution for accessing the GPS data. To be able to produce the GPS addon boards, he needs a minimum order quantity of 1000 modules, and he’s currently half way there. Head over to his blog to see more and vote if you are interested in purchasing one (or more).

Story courtesy of Pocket GPS World.

Although you’ll need a jailbroken iPhone (until we get the formal SDK and new firmware), fring is now available for the iPhone, bringing support for VOIP calls (Skype), and IM (MSN Messenger, ICQ, GTalk, AIM, and Yahoo!). More details, including how to setup the pre-release version, are available from fring.

Along with all the general rumours over the release date of the 3G iPhone, it appears some websites are claiming that the new 3G iPhone will contain a GPS Broadcom chip, providing built in GPS functionality. We’ve no idea if this is true or not, but hopefully we’ll find out in the next few months…