Hasta La Gadget!

Who owns the world’s 78 million iPhone and iPod touches? The US, mostly, according to a recent breakdown by Google-owned mobile advertising company, AdMob. Roughly half of those units sold reside in the US. The UK is in a distant second with eight percent, followed by France, Canada, and Germany.

According to the numbers, the United States actually has the slowest rate of growth. Japan leads that list, followed by Australia and China. The numbers are based on roughly 138 billion ad network impressions, rather than actual numbers of units shipped.

By federal law, wireless carriers must allow consumers to port their phone number when switching to a different carrier.

That doesn’t mean they have to make it easy.

I recently ordered an iPhone 3GS. Since my previous phone was a BlackBerry on Verizon’s network, I had to switch from Verizon to AT&T in the process. I found that, although both the Apple and AT&T Web sites let me order the phone online, and both offered the chance to port my existing number, neither site would actually let me do it.

An AT&T spokesperson confirmed that this is normal and expected. It turns out that if you originally registered the number in a different state than you live in now–which I did–instead of ordering online, you need to process it over the phone with an AT&T sales representative. You do this via what amounts to a literal procession of various AT&T engineers and support personnel, who “hand off” the transition from one person to the next like a wireless baton. A very slow one.

In fact, the entire procedure took several days, including call backs, setting up a temporary AT&T phone number in my current area code, waiting for the iPhone to arrive, and about an hour of total hold time with four separate support personnel as they switched the old account to the new area and disabled the new temporary number. Some notes on getting through this with your sanity intact after the jump.

It’s not quite selling like hotcakes, but the iPhone’s move to the Chinese market isn’t exactly a dud, either. The handset’s Chinese carrier, Unicom, reported this week that it has moved more than 100,000 units since Apple’s phone first went on sale in that country at the end of October–not bad, considering that initial reports from the country were looking pretty grim.

China is home to more than 700 million mobile subscribers–more than any other nation in the world. Unicom called the number a “great success,” but as PC World points out, it’s nothing compare to South Korea, a much smaller market where mobile users pre-order 60,000 devices.

The relationship between cellphones and music has almost always been a quirky one, producing bouts of the surreal punctuated by an occasional flourish of the sublime. Latest to join the melodic fray are Georg Essl from the University of Michigan and his “mobile phone ensemble.” Each of the participating students has designed a noise-making app for his or her iPhone, which is used in conjunction with the built-in accelerometer and touchscreen to make (hopefully beautiful) music. Though we may consider this a gimmick for now, Professor Essl is most enthusiastic about the future prospects of utilizing smartphones to make music with legitimate aspirations. The debut performance of this newfangled orchestra is on December 9, or you can check out a preview in the video after the break.

[Thanks, Ry]

Continue reading iPhone orchestra at the vanguard of smartphone music-making push

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Dear Apple and AT&T: I have had enough of this. Tell me, why don’t we have videochat on the iPhone, you assclowns? Whatever excuse you may have, I’m here to destroy it.

This morning, the latest Fring update brought videochat to the iPhone. It only works in one direction, from a computer to your iPhone. It uses Wi-Fi instead of the 3G connection, even while 3G is capable of supporting videoconferencing (in fact, it was one of its major selling points, back in the day of its introduction). The only reason for not having bi-directional chat is simple: The iPhone doesn’t have a front camera.

The main thing is that it works. A third-party has created a videoconferencing app for the iPhone that communicates with desktop computers, just using Apple’s standard iPhone programming toolbox. The question now is: If it’s that easy, why don’t we have a camera and iChat AV on the iPhone?

Could it be because AT&T is fearing that videoconferencing on the iPhone would bring their already overloaded 3G network to a total collapse? That’s a valid reason. But if that’s the case, just enable the videoconferencing under Wi-Fi, and be done with it.

Maybe the iPhone doesn’t have enough processing power to do bidirectional videochat? Nonsense. The processor in the iPhone is plenty fast to handle simultaneous H.264 encoding and decoding for videoconferencing applications. In fact, the iPhone 3GS’ PowerVR SGX processor has dedicated pipes to encode and decode H.264 in real time. And even Apple highlights the use of H.264 for videoconferencing applications in other 3G mobile devices, most of them a lot less capable than the iPhone.

Perhaps the VGA camera required to capture the video is too expensive or too big? That doesn’t make any sense either. Not only do other phones have these cameras, but the latest generation is so tiny and inexpensive that I wouldn’t be surprised if they gave one away integrated in every Corn Flakes box soon.

If there’s no technical reason for not having videoconference in the iPhone, then why oh why Apple doesn’t give us an iChat AV client and an iPhone that doesn’t require an stupid contraption to use it? After all, they were the first company to push videoconferencing across their whole product line, and they keep working on it actively. The latest generation of iChat AV—rolled out with Snow Leopard—has more efficient codecs than the previous version.

My only guess: They just want to milk the hell out of their user base. They know their game, these Cupertino boys and girls. They know they have the market by the balls. They know they can keep churning out marginal upgrades because, like Tim Cook said: “frankly, I think people are still just trying to catch up with the first iPhone 2 years ago.” And people will keep sinking dollars in the marginal upgrades like there’s no tomorrow, as shown by the iPhone 3GS.

Why release an iPhone with AV conferencing now when they can hold it for a little longer, as they wait for the rest of the market to catch up? Exactly: There’s no need. And that’s why we will have to wait. Wait until they smell that Google is about to release a phone that supports Gtalk with videoconferencing. Or until whenever they have it planned in their roadmap. Yes, that private roadmap that already has three or four generations of this thing ready to launch.

In other words: Prepare to wait, and keep sucking hard on the Apple Kool-aid, because this is not happening until they feel a real threat from someone else.