Eideard

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Consumers with Manhattan postal zip codes who attempted to purchase an iPhone through AT&T’s website today were told that the product was unavailable, according to a report on consumerist.com. Reuters received the same response when logging on with a New York zip code.

A representative of AT&T, the exclusive U.S. provider of the iPhone, said in an email that the company periodically modifies its promotions and distribution channels. “The iPhone is available in our New York retail stores and those of our partners.”

Sales representatives at Apple retail stores in Manhattan, reached by phone on Monday, said that the iPhone was available, and an Apple corporate spokesman was not immediately available for comment.

IPhone owners, who have some of the biggest appetites for mobile Internet use, in particular have criticized AT&T’s wireless network as being too slow.

Craig Mathias, a principal at wireless consulting firm Farpoint Group, said that all network carriers are struggling to cope with the rising popularity of wireless data services, which require more network capacity than standard voice calls.

He speculated that AT&T may be trying to ease congestion on its network in the wake of the holidays, when many consumers who received iPhones as gifts would start using the devices at the same time…

“We’re expecting our handsets now to do everything we do while in the office or at home,” said Mathias…

“If AT&T is seriously out of gas and can’t service any customers in that area, that is a major problem,” he said.

AT&T has been intellectually out of gas for years. Any apparent motion is caused by brain farts.

p.s. There’s a rumor AT&T has been battered by so many complaints, they will resume online sales this afternoon.

Like many of us, Mike Nourse is both irritated and entranced by iPhones — their ubiquity, their utility, their unique power to extinguish conversation. Unlike most of us, Mr. Nourse, a co-founder of the Chicago Art Department, is in a position to do something useful with his internal conflict. And so he has, introducing a five-week class called “iPhone Art” at his nonprofit arts education organization.

“I wanted everyone to shut up already about what their iPhone could do and show me what it actually does,” said Mr. Nourse, 37, a video artist and photographer who moved to Chicago in 1996.

Despite Mr. Nourse’s mixed feelings about Apple’s latest gold mine, he said the course was an obvious vehicle for the art department, an all-volunteer organization that describes itself as “dedicated to cultivating new voices, ideas and practices in contemporary art.”

“We’ve always been rooted in accessible art,” Mr. Nourse said. “The idea that people could create art with something in their pocket — that seemed like something we needed to tackle.”

The iPhone class has eight students. Each of them are responsible for producing a project, in any medium they choose, for a public exhibition titled “iPhone Therefore iArt…”

The course costs $50, but in keeping with the spirit of the Chicago Art Department’s pedagogical mission, anyone who completes the course and shows their work next month will have their tuition refunded.

Not anymore outré than showing someone with a computer how to blog, design, be creative with a medium they hadn’t heretofore considered.

Worthwhile.

Back at the beginning of the App Store
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Apple has sent a clear message to any developers who try to game its iTunes App Store. Software developer Molinker has been kicked out, along with more than 1,000 of its iPhone applications.

The Chinese developer had, according to some estimates, 1,000-plus applications in the store, most of which were copycat knockoffs of existing applications. When a friend of writers at the iPhoneography photography blog saw these rather poor applications consistently scoring 5-star reviews, they got suspicious.

Some investigation showed that Molinker’s applications were getting many top ratings and almost nothing in the 2-to-4-star range. In fact, the only other ratings were often 1-star, and likely the only truthful feedback on the apps’ pages.

This scam was so effective that the applications regularly rose to the tops of charts. One, called ColorMagic, even made it into the Staff Favorites section of the store…

After a week of typical Apple silence, iPhoneography wrote again, and received a reply direct from Schiller: “Yes, this developer’s apps have been removed from the App Store and their ratings no longer appear either.”

The scale of this purging is huge: 1,000 applications represents almost 1 percent of the entire App Store offering. This alone shows that Apple is happy to do whatever it takes to keep its house clean.

It also shows the power that Apple has over those that sell in its exclusive marketplace. Sure, Molinker was caught cheating, and punished, but Apple could pull the same trick on any developer, for any reason [I was waiting for the predictable paranoia to set in].

We don’t think that it would, but iPhone developers are a nervous bunch as it is, rubbing on rabbits’ feet and crossing their fingers as their creations make their way through a fickle and seemingly arbitrary approval process.

Customers who bought mediocre apps for a couple of bucks each can go ahead and try to get their money back from Molinker. Good luck!

“What we are seeing in the U.S. today in terms of smartphone penetration, 3G data, nobody else is seeing in the rest of the planet,” Ralph de la Vega, president and chief executive for mobility and consumer markets at AT&T, told analysts at a conference in New York. “The amount of growth and data that we are seeing in wireless data is unprecedented.”

AT&T is the exclusive United States carrier for the iPhone, whose owners are big users of network capacity as they surf the Web and download videos.

The company has been criticized by owners of the phone for delayed text and voice messages, sluggish download speeds and other network problems….

And it shouldn’t be a surprise to any long-term AT&T customers that AT&T would blame this on the customer.

[De la Vega] emphasized that the company would first focus on educating consumers about their data consumption in the hope that doing so would encourage them to cut back, even though they are paying for unlimited data use. [emphasis mine - ed.]

The company might consider a “pricing scheme that addresses the usage,” Mr. de la Vega said….

Still, [Mr. Chetan Sharma, an independent wireless analyst] said pricing plans based on use were only part of the answer to AT&T’s network congestion.

“They still have to improve things on the back end so they can deal with the issues of multiple users on the network at the same time,” he said.

Mr. de la Vega acknowledged the company’s difficulties in meeting the demands of its customers.

This may sound very familiar to those who, in the late ’90s, were on the “unlimited” dial-up plan. Then also, AT&T lacked the infrastructure to support the commitments it had made to customers.

Today’s AT&T lacks even the limited vision it still possessed back then to deal with customer dissatisfaction. Don’t expect much support from them.

People scared of flying can now press a button on their iPhone to help them deal with their panic.

Long-haul airline Virgin Atlantic Airways has launched an application, or app, for its Flying Without Fear course which boasts a success rate of over 98 percent…

The airline said in a statement that this app was designed to help people overcome fear, be it of the unfamiliar aircraft, the strange noises a plane makes, or of losing control.

“Our first iPhone app will bring the benefits of our successful Flying Without Fear course to millions of people around the world who are now using mobile technology to make their lives better,” Richard Branson, president of Virgin Atlantic, said in a statement.

“The app will put many travelers at ease and enable them to prepare for their first Virgin Atlantic flight.”

I wonder what happens if and when you set foot on a different airline?

Will a new gadget stick around? You can’t tell from its first act, but you might know by its second or third release. Or maybe its seventh. Consider two new follow-on performances in the wireless-phone industry: One broadens the appeal of Google’s Android software, while the other cements the irrelevance of Microsoft’s aging Windows Mobile platform.

The first item is Sprint’s HTC Hero, shipping Oct. 11 for $279.99 before a $100 mail-in rebate for new or renewing customers. It’s the first Android phone available here from a carrier besides T-Mobile. That alone is good news: Sprint’s data coverage vastly exceeds T-Mobile’s patchy service, and its prices beat T-Mobile’s, too…

The real star of the Hero, however, is not its hardware but its open-source software. Android…

The other, less impressive new phone development of the month is Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 6.5 — the company’s first big update to its mobile software since the iPhone arrived in 2007. You might think that two years would be enough time for Microsoft to respond to its new competitor, but you would be wrong.

As tested on an AT&T HTC Pure, one of a handful of devices with the new software…Windows Mobile 6.5 is a miserable mess. Slow, clumsy and ugly, it offers a few surface refinements of the iPhone and Android but little of their underlying elegance…

Windows Mobile 6.5’s new onscreen keyboard seems designed for a shrunken species of human, to judge from its tiny buttons. And its menus often reveals cramped dialogs unchanged from older versions of Windows Mobile that required using a stylus.

With all these issues, it can be difficult to see many people wanting a Windows Mobile phone now. But it’s even harder to imagine how long phone manufacturers will keep paying Microsoft for this software when Android is not just better but free.

I don’t think anyone has a mandate to help Microsoft sort their countless internal problems. I know from a few friends who were recruited by Microsoft – their reason for turning down the offer was always the same. They were expected to be so happy about working for the Prince that they should be willing to accept a Pauper’s paycheck.

Of course that’s an exaggeration. But, whether you’re in Redmond or Mountainview [or Cupertino], the characterization of Microsoft as cheapskates is as consistent as the pundits who whine about Google employees being overpaid and coddled.

You only need the 1st 4 minutes of the video – but, it’s cool!

ATMs have done their part to keep us off long teller lines since the first one was installed in the U.K. circa 1967. Now we stand on ATM lines instead. An…upgrade to USAA bank’s iPhone app could cut those off, too; the app will allow bankers to deposit checks from their iPhone by sending two images of the check (one front and one back)…

The service will only be open to about 60 percent of USAA customers…To qualify, a customer must be eligible for credit and have insurance through USAA-–both measures taken to reduce the risk of fraud.

If you’re still a little unsettled, it may also help to know mobile depositing can use the same character scanning processes as an in-bank teller to check routing and account information.

This ties into their already existing software that lets folks deposit checks from home using a scanner.

Absolutely cool.

Thanks, Helen

On Web sites devoted to the e-book reader, including Blog Kindle and Amazon’s own Kindle Community board, many customers have been in a snit over Amazon’s policy on stolen Kindles.

Samuel Borgese, for instance, is still irate about the response from Amazon when he recently lost his Kindle. After leaving it on a plane, he canceled his account so that nobody could charge books to his credit card. Then he asked Amazon to put the serial number of his wayward device on a kind of do-not-register list that would render it inoperable — to “brick it” in tech speak.

Amazon’s policy is that it will help locate a missing Kindle only if the company is contacted by a police officer bearing a subpoena. Mr. Borgese, who lives in Manhattan, questions whether hunting down a $300 e-book reader would rank as a priority for the New York Police Department…

Drew Herdener, an Amazon spokesman, said only that the company acted in accordance with the law and cooperated with law enforcement officials. “Beyond that, we aren’t going to speculate on hypotheticals,” he wrote in an e-mail message…

Whatever the reasoning, Amazon’s policy is hardly unique.

Sirius XM Radio also says it needs to see a subpoena from a police officer before it will deactivate or hand over information about missing radios. Patrick Reilly, a company spokesman, said the goal was “to protect the original subscriber who has lost the radio, but also not to incriminate someone who legitimately comes in possession of a radio…”

The approach of American tech companies is not shared by some of their counterparts abroad, which seem more willing to intervene.

In England, for example, the major cellphone players keep a centralized black list for mobile phone serial numbers, allowing consumers to flag lost or stolen phones so they cannot be re-registered.

There is nothing like that in the United States. John Walls, a spokesman for the CTIA, the wireless industry’s trade group, says that is because carriers here subsidize the cost of new phones, and as a result phones are so inexpensive here that theft is not a significant problem.

Yes. Mr. Walls is a obvious flunky.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Apple boss Steve Jobs has made his first public appearance, after almost a year away from the limelight, at a product launch in San Francisco.

He last appeared on stage for the company in October 2008, since when he has been absent because of ill health.

The notoriously private head of Apple won a standing ovation as he walked on stage, after which he gave details about his recent operation.

“As some of you may know, about five months ago I had a liver transplant,” he told the crowd.

“So I now have the liver of a mid-20s person who died in a car crash and was generous enough to donate their organs.”

Mr Jobs then urged the audience to all become organ donors.

But it was not long before he got down to business…

He used the event to show off a new 64GB iPod Touch and an iPod Nano featuring a video camera, pedometer and FM radio.

Mr Jobs said the firm had sold around 100m of the Nano devices, claiming that it was “the most popular music player in the world”.

Mr Jobs said the firm had sold over 30 million iPhone handsets and attributed its success to the App Store which, he said, now has more than 75,000 applications which owners can download to their phone. So far, he said, there had been 1.8bn apps downloaded.

Worth a footnote in the history of this digital world so many of us utilize, live in to some extent. Some more, some less.