Apple places new limits on iPhone sales

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Apple last week stopped accepting cash for iPhone purchases and reinstated a two-per-person sales limit in an effort to curb the black market for unlocked versions of the touch-screen handset.

The new policy began Thursday, Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris told the Associated Press. Before then, there was no cash restriction and the purchase limit was five per person. “Customer response to the iPhone has been off the charts, and limiting iPhone sales to two per customer helps us ensure that there are enough iPhones for people who are shopping for themselves or buying a gift,” Kerris said. “We’re requiring a credit or debit card for payment to discourage unauthorized resellers.” Since introducing iPhone on June 29th, Apple has sold over 1.4 million of the handsets, the company announced as part of its fiscal fourth quarter earnings last week. However, it estimated that approximately 250,000 of those iPhones were sold to buyers who intended to unlock them and then resell them for use on wireless networks other than AT&T. The new sales restrictions are the latest moves by Apple in its game of cat and mouse with iPhone hackers. Last month, it released iPhone software update 1.1.1, which rendered unlocked iPhones effectively useless.

The day the iPhone turned into a web surfin’ iPod

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If you want an iPhone, which is really a 6th generation iPod, but don’t want to use it as a phone or pay AT&T for the privilege of having an iPhone that works, DVD Jon has unleashed a way to make the non-phone iPhone a reality.

Want to use an iPhone in a country other than the US, or use it in the US without needing to be on a two-year contract with AT&T?

Thanks to new software from Jon Lech Johansen, famous as ‘DVD Jon’, the man that cracked the DVD’s copy protection, you can ‘crack’ the iPhone and ‘activate it’ – but you won’t get phone service from it when you activate it using DVD Jon’s method.

The software and brief instructions are available at Johansen’s blog called ‘So Sue Me’ , in the June 3rd post entitled ‘iPhone Independence Day’ and let you use the iPhone’s web surfing and email features using your Wi-Fi connection, listen to music, watch photos and videos and do everything but make phone calls and surf using an EDGE connection to the Internet.

Naturally, users trying to make phone calls find that it simply doesn’t work, as there is no connection to any cell phone networks without a proper SIM card, activation through AT&T and a valid contract.

Yet predictions that the iPhone would be ‘unlocked’ within one to two weeks are raging online, with the expectation that iPhone users will in theory be able to insert any SIM card from any GSM provider worldwide.

If hackers are successful, it could easily unleash a worldwide frenzy of grey importing as iPod and Apple fans around the world try to get their hands on a iPhone long before their official release in other countries.

But Apple is known to not look upon such activity favorably at all, with the likely outcome being that Apple attempts to block any hacks or cracks through an iTunes and iPhone software update.

This could cause updated iPhones to stop working in other countries, causing grief for overseas iPhone owners and more work for hackers who will need to find new ways to play the cat and mouse game of hack and repair with Apple.

As rumors swirl that an updated 3G iPhone will appear in Europe rather than the existing EDGE model, and with the reviews all generally quite positive, the issue of being able to only buy the iPhone in the US will soon be eliminated as the iPhone starts going on sale worldwide.
But even when that happens, the issue of being able to use an iPhone without needing to have a phone contract will still be officially impossible, even though DVD Jon proves it’s easy.

With the iPhone barely more than a week old, the story and saga of the iPhone’s future is still being written, and what the iPhone’s conditions of use will look like with future versions is unknown.

For now, what we do know is that the hackers are no doubt causing Apple to iMoan internally about their vaunted iPhone, as hackers react to consumer demand to make the iPhone operate the way they want it to – not entirely the way that Apple wants.

iTWire

Another iPhone feature — it crashes!

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When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in January, I wrote,

The other problem is that computers are inherently buggy. Macs crash, and it’s frustrating when they do. It’s even more frustrating, however, when your music player crashes, and if your phone or your TV crashes, you’ll probably want to tear your hair out. The iPhone is so complex — it’s got an accelerometer in it to detect when you flip it sideways, it’s got a proximity sensor to tell when it’s near your face, it’s got to understand myriad finger gestures — that crashing, or at least slowing down, the way an overworked computer sometimes does, might be a real possibility.

A bunch of MacHeads jumped on me for that, claiming that Macs never crash and that Apple’s phone would be similarly solid. This was absurd; the Mac OS is very forgiving, and you’ve got to do a lot of crazy things to it to bring it down, but it certainly can crash. (For examples, see here and here.) And iPods — if you’ve never crashed your iPod, you’ve never used your iPod; who of us isn’t familiar with the Menu + Select button method of reseting an unresponsive Pod?

Well, the iPhone crashes too. My first brush with iPhone death occurred Friday night, shortly after activation. I called the phone from another number to see if its activation had taken — and when the iPhone began to ring, I hung up on the calling phone. But the iPhone didn’t stop ringing. For 10, 15, 20 seconds it continued, ignoring my tapping on the on-screen and physical buttons. Remembering the way to force a PC to turn off, I held down the iPhone’s Sleep button — and after about about 10 seconds, it gave me the shut-down screen.

On Saturday afternoon, I managed an even wilder crash while I was trying to get the phone to connect with a Wi-Fi router that has always been a bit picky. After connecting and disconnecting from the network a few times, I loaded up a Wikipedia page. Halfway through the loading, the phone froze. And now even holding down the Sleep button did nothing.

The third screen of Apple’s iPhone Troubleshooting Assistant came to my rescue. It turns out that you restart a frozen iPhone in much the same way you revive a chilled iPod — “press and hold the Sleep/Wake button and the Home button at the same time until you see the Apple logo.”

The MacHeads are going to tell me that all smart phones crash. Well, sure they do. My Windows phone goes down about once a month, and sometimes the only way to get it back up is to pop out the battery for a bit. Not a pretty thing. And Apple, of course, has never promised a crash-free phone — that it set up a page to help people combat “frozen iPhone and common issues” suggests as much. Indeed, the iPhone even reports its crashes to Apple — when you sync back up after a crash (even if just a single app, and not the whole phone, has gone down), iTunes asks if you’re OK with sending a log to Apple. (Daring Fireball has posted a crash log; scroll to the bottom here.)

Are two crashes in a weekend a bad sign? I should say that neither freeze bothered me too much; each occurred during non-critical tasks — I wasn’t talking on the phone or listening to music — so I found them more curious than frustrating. Plus the iPhone starts up again in about 20 seconds, much quicker than a Mac or PC. Still, I can’t fathom why a missed call caused my phone to fall apart. Is occasional crashing just the cost of being amazing? I hope not. But in case, just remember: Sleep + Home.

Source

IPhone activation headaches still trouble users

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AT&T, Apple won’t say how many users have had problems, but some have been waiting nearly 60 hours.

It took Iain Gillott 47 hours to activate his iPhone after waiting in the Texas heat Friday afternoon to buy one.

He has been an AT&T Inc./Cingular Wireless customer for 12 years, so he never dreamed there would be any trouble setting up service. But after a day of trying, he learned that his family rate plan wouldn’t accommodate an additional line, and once that problem was solved, he learned AT&T sent Apple Inc. a message to activate, but the Apple servers had timed out.

So, basically, both the maker and the carrier for the iPhone screwed up, from Gillott’s point of view. “When the next big device comes out, I’m not rushing out to buy one,” Gillott said in an interview. Both AT&T and Apple “had the opportunity to set a benchmark for customer service but haven’t solved any problems at all. They’ve done nothing apart from pissing off a lot of people.”

Gillott, a market analyst for wireless products and services at IGR Inc. in Austin, waited 47 hours for service, but that might not be the longest to wait, according to Apple’s support blog, where one person known as “SVDaily” waited more than 59 hours and still did not have service today.

Apple and AT&T officials have not responded to requests asking how many iPhone customers faced long waits for activation or what has caused the problems. One Apple official yesterday told the Associated Press that a small percentage of iPhone customers had an activation problem, while AT&T said overloaded servers were to blame and that adjustments were in the works.

An online poll at Engadget.com started on Sunday morning recorded by midday today more than 5,300 users who said they were “still dead in the water” and upset about activation delays, while another 1,600 said they were indeed activated after facing problems. Another 6,800 reported that their activations went smoothly, nearly half the survey group.