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.

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.

O2 will, according to Smartplanet, be showcasing bikes which can recharge your mobile at the O2 wireless festival in Hyde Park from 3rd to 6th July. The bikes will vary from BMX, Chopper-style, and even racers, and will be available for people to recharge their own phones using their own power. The only downside is that the bikes will be at a fixed location, and so you won’t actually get to really ride the bike anywhere.

Both Smartplanet and UK Gadgeteer feel that, unless it’s hideously expensive, O2 should look at getting this released as a commercial product so we can all recharge our phones whilst cycling.  In our search to see if this has already been done, we did find one manufacturer of a bike based mobile phone recharging system, but their 2 UK resellers seemed hesistant to provide any details or pricing online.

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.

Here’s a roundup of a few additional points and information that have been released since the initial launch earlier this week.

Firstly, there are rumours that O2 are going to allow the iPhone 3G to be tethered to a laptop via Bluetooth, ie you can get access to the internet from the laptop via the iPhone. This is unconfirmed, and some people have indicated that the early iPhone 2.0 firmwares do not contain this functionality, so unless Apple pull something out of the hat at the last minute, this may not happen. Of course, many people argue that the iPhone has enough capability that you won’t want or need to use your laptop at all!

On the more positive, Unlimited WiFi will be available on the iPhone 3G at 9,500 hotspots covering both The Cloud and BT’s OpenZone network, which will be added in on 11th July, the iPhone launch date.

There’s no front facing camera, despite what a few people are claiming, so no 3G video calling.  Whether this was something that was dropped from the development to meet the timescales, or whether it was a purposeful decision (after all, how many of us make regular video calls, compared to voice calls…?) we’ll never know, but for now, there’s no capability.

There’s some questions over navigation apps, with some people claiming that companies like TomTom will not be able to release SatNav software because of a clause which prevents real-time navigation apps.  We believe that this clause relates to the use of the SDK to access the Google Maps data, which, of course, TomTom will not be using.  As such, we doubt this clause will prevent a wide raft of SatNav applications becoming available.

All in all, we suspect there will be a lot more news about the iPhone between now and a month’s time.

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.

It appears a recent Vista security update is causing problems with USB Mobile Broadband devices, including the 3 Modem Stick.  It appears that the update causes Vista PCs to power down the dongle, even though it’s connected and data is flowing.  Shane from SOS has come up with an interesting solution, which he has released on his blog.  Basically it’s a batch file which runs a directory listing of the disk section of the USB device every 5 minutes to ensure it’s kept active.  Hopefully, a proper fix will be released by Microsoft soon; given O2, Vodafone and 3 are all in talks with Vodafone, it hopefully won’t be too long.

Story courtesy of 3mobilebuzz.

Here’s the new HTC Touch Diamond. HTC have redesigned their TouchFlo interface, and hope that many users won’t even realise it’s Windows Mobile 6 underneath their interface. The specs are:

• Windows Mobile 6.1
• Triband GSM/GPRS/EDGE at 900/1800/1900 MHz
• Qualcomm 528 MHz CPU
• Bluetooth 2.0+EDR
• WiFi b/g
• eGPS
• FM Radio
• 128 MB RAM
• 256 MB ROM
• 4 GB flash
• 2.8″ VGA display(640×480)
• Front and rear cameras (rear 3.2 Megapixel)

O2 have confirmed they will be releasing the XDA Diamond. It’s also likely that the Touch Diamond will ship with TomTom Navigator 7, and a single downloadable City Map, with the ability to purchase further maps.

If you like the idea of a nice new interface, but already have a Windows Mobile device, or don’t want to buy a Touch Diamond, then head over to Pointui, who have produced their own interface for Windows Mobile, which may be a suitable candidate. Thanks to Mark at AutomatedHome for alerting us to this option.

T-Mobile now offers it’s USB Modem on PAYG for £99.99 with a £4 per day offering. It’s advertised as unlimited, but it’s Web’n'Walk Plus, which doesn’t offer all services (VOIP is not allowed on this tariff, for example), and compared to 3’s £10 for the whole month doesn’t sound such good value if you would use it more than twice a month. Also, we could not find out whether T-Mobile actually meant unlimited, or had a fair usage policy on this service.

So, O2, T-Mobile, 3, and Vodafone all openly promote good data deals (although some of them could do with keeping their web sites up to dates with their latest deals and T&Cs), Orange stand out as only promoting their pay monthly service, and not a PAYG service.

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…

On Friday O2 finally launched their competition to Vodafone and 3’s Mobile Broadband. For £20 a month you get a 3Gb allowance (with a handy text message at 2Gb warning you the allowance is running out). Over that, it’s 20p per MB. However, you do also get unlimited WiFi via The Cloud. One limitation - you must be an existing O2 customer, and it’s an 18 month contract. There’s a month-by-month option (a bit like PAYG) which is still £20 per month, but you’ll need to buy the USB modem at £120 first.

Unlike 3, the max speed on offer today is 1.8mbps, with O2’s 3.6mbps rolling out in June.

Certainly the unlimited WiFi deal is a bit of a differentiator, but compared to 3’s offer of half price broadband to existing customers; and with the trick of getting a 3 Skypephone on a 6 month contract just to become a customer, it’s not necessarily the cheapest way of getting online for everyone.

Some content courtesy of SMS Text News.

As from today, the iPhone should be £100 cheaper, ie it now costs £169 plus a contract. This should apply to both Carphone Warehouse and to O2 shops. Although stocks have been limited over the last few weeks, this seems to support those theories that stocks are being finally cleared out for the 3G iPhone to appear in June…

For those who have bought an iPhone in the last 30 days from a Carphone Warehouse store, even better news; “Launched 10 years ago and already responsible for customers receiving millions of pounds, the Ultimate Price Promise means The Carphone Warehouse will automatically give vouchers to the value of £100 to anyone who has purchased an iPhone from the store in the last 30 days.”

O2 has updated the iPhone tariff (to bring them into line with the similar changes they have made to their standard tariffs). The main changes are:

• If you pay £35/month, inclusive calls change from 200mins to 600mins, and texts from 200 to 500.
• If you pay £45/month, inclusive calls change from 600mins to 1200mins, and texts stay at 500.
• If you pay £55/month, you should get moved to the £45/month tariff (which offers better value), although…
• A new £75/month tariff will be launched, which gives 3000mins and 500 texts.

These new tariffs will become available for new customers on Friday, and all existing customers will be moved over during February / March (so don’t go out using all these extra minutes / texts until you are sure you have been moved onto the new rates).

According to the recent Net Applications browser statistics, 0.09% of web usage is via Apple’s iPhone, Windows Mobile managed 0.06%, yet all Symbian Series60 devices only managed 0.01%. What’s interesting is that whilst Apple have shipped over 1 million iPhones this year, Nokia have shipped over 1 million N95s alone, but the iPhone is well ahead of all Symbian S60 devices, not just the N95.

This, I believe, is simply down to the contract - all iPhones sell with an unlimited data contract, in essence encouraging people to use their device online. Although Nokia Symbian and Windows Mobile devices have shipped with data support for many years, many network operators charge so much for data that it’s no surprise people are not using them online (or maybe only via WiFi).

Let’s hope 2008 sees more people buying unlimited data plans to other mobile phones, and we see the network operators, like O2 have done for their iPhone exclusive tariff, actually dropping fair usage limits, and making the plans truely unlimited.

What’s also amazing is that the iPhone has achieved this high level of internet usage with only GPRS/EDGE network speeds - when we see the 3G iPhone next year I suspect there will be even more pressure on the network operators to offer similar tariffs to non-iPhone customers, if only to prevent customers leaving to get the iPhone.

One of our readers spotted an offer in his local O2 store this morning. Buy an iPhone, and get a set of JBL speakers half price. We’re currently awaiting more details on exactly what’s involved in the offer, and confirmation as to whether this is a local initiative, or countrywide, but in the meantime it certainly indicates that discounts and/or deals on iPhones are starting to appear, even if, at the moment, they don’t involve reducing the purchase price.

Update: Although O2 have confirmed this is now a nationwide offer, it’s a deal for half price JBL On-Tour speakers when you buy an iPod Touch.

For those in or near London, the Oyster scheme is being expanded further. As well as using the contactless smartcard to pay for your travel, the scheme has already been adopted by a number of newsagents, allowing you to buy low value items on the same card. Now, Nokia, O2, and Transport for London are planning to release a mobile phone with a built in Oyster smartcard chip, allowing the device itself to act similar to an actual Oyster card. The difference will be that the purchase amount will then be added to the user’s mobile phone bill.

Although this is a new development for the UK, The Guardian report that 50% of phones in Japan are already equipped with this sort of technology.

The trials of this device (a Nokia 6131) were announced this morning, with the trials starting today for the 500 lucky travellers.  These travellers are getting the new phone with credit on their mobile phone account, credit on their new Oyster chip in the mobile phone, and some credit from Barclaycard, who are also partners in the trial.  The trials run for 6 months, so will finish at the end of May 2008.

Thanks to The Guardian (and others), and especially Ken at UK Mobile Report, who attended the launch event this morning.  Also, thanks to Nokia.

Here’s a handy tip from the MacRumors forum - if you want to display restaurants within the Maps application on the iPhone follow this simple guide…

Go to the Search bar (click the bottom left button if it’s not showing), type “Starbucks” or “McDonalds”. Even some of the more British ones like “Beefeater” work, but not names of individual restaurants (you’re likely to end up at some odd place in the US if you try). On the other hand, some generic ones work; “Pizza” works, and lists all the Domino’s pizza s in the area, although apparently not Pizza Hut’s. Even “Kebab” works! Other phrases like “Italian restaurant” should work too.

After doing that if you hit “List” instead of the copyright screen you get a list of the restaurants.

If you want to show a route to your chosen restaurant, hit the relevant red marker, and then on the blue ‘>’ sign, which will offer you “Directions To Here”; once you enter a “Directions From Here” location, you can see the route there too!

Hopefully this hint will help you show off the power of your iPhone after you collect it from your nearest O2 / Apple / Carphone Warehouse store tomorrow evening.

Thanks to TonyHoyle and others from the Macrumors forums for this information.

We all know about the new N95 8Gb, which Vodafone has an exclusive on until Christmas 2007 (we’re hearing the phone will be available on 3 and Orange from the New Year - no news on the other networks yet). However, today O2 Shops got their stocks of the N95 8Gb, which is all well and good, except one little detail…

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