Pure Play

Wait for it, wait for it

UPDATE Friday 18/07, from the O2 forum thread referred to below

Some stock was made available yesterday for customers who had pre-ordered but not received a iPhone. Some more will be on the way soon

From O2 this evening:

IrelandIrelandThank you once again for your request to be updated with any new developments in relation to availability of Apple iPhone 3G. We have seen strong demand for the iPhone 3G since it went on sale on July 11th. We are working closely with Apple to ensure a regular flow of new stock into in the coming weeks. We are confident that everyone who wants an iPhone 3G in will be able to get one. However the stock we are receiving continues to be limited. 

Please take this opportunity to visit our O2 Customer Forum where we are maintaining a thread regarding new iPhone 3G availability.

Meanwhile I have "my people" scouring the capital (that's Dublin for my Cork viewers) to see if I can get an iPhone before the next batch hit us. Unlikely I suspect but worth a try :-)

keith

 

Is your Eircom DSL connection slow?

Mine is crawling - a 3Mb service just came in at 916kb using the Irish ISP speed test and was at 1.2Mb about 3 hours ago.

This is much slower than usual and is impacting on file downloads. Anyone else seeing a reduction in speeds. Could have been deteriorating over the last couple of days - this is the first time I have measured it.

UPDATE - a quick look at this boards.ie thread shows that there appears to be a major South-East issue with Eircom BB speeds over the last couple of days. It maybe an infrastructural issue that they are having although they are not being consistent in getting that out.

keith

Tuesday Push - Time Gentlemen please

While I am fortunate enough to not have to keep detailed track of my time on most projects I was working on something in March 2007 that required me to keep a timelog.

By coincidence I came across 1time - the subject of todays Tuesday Push.

It was an Irish online service and exactly what I needed at the time. Easy to use, free for a sole trader and it had a flexible reporting function. Was it perfect - not even close! But Derek Organ and his crew were responsive and eager for feedback.

The current version looks a lot more developed and continues with the free plan. It then extends upwards into an enterprise edition for €395 a month. And it integrates with basecamp :-)

BTW 1time is where myself and Vinny Glennon of useamap and justroutes fame first came across each other. Great to see micro enterprises working to foster new start-ups within their walls. I have never met either Derek or Vinny - have to remedy that sometime soon.

keith

Whatever you do, don't go to the Apple forums

Feeling a little bit peeved on the day when you fully expected your digital and mobile worlds to seemlessly blend?

Why not go to http://discussions.apple.com and vent off a little steam?

Well - because they are down. Along with major chunks of Apples hosted services and online systems.

Nope - they are back up, but with this notice.

I drilled a little deeper and any attempt to get into an individual thread brought up the top message again.

keith

My iPhone/MobileMe existance off to a bumpy start

iPhones are sold out in Kilkenny in both O2 and Carphonewarehouse. And online according to O2.

On the MobileMe side it is up. Sort of. Attempts to get into the calendar using Firefox were rebuffed with an error message and clicking on the help button did not bring up anything.

Switched to Safari and a little smoother. There is an import option on the contacts side which I used to bring in Palm contacts in Vcard format. However the calendar has no import option whatsoever.

So now (I suspect) I will have to open Outlook on the PC for the first time ever, get my Palm Calendar into that, sync and then what? Break the connection? And then just have the iPhone sync with the online service? Hope it can facilitate that.

UPDATE - MobileMe is very, very slow to use. And the VCard import has only brought over partial records - mobile numbers have disappeared. I need to find a drawing board!

UPDATE2 - Safari with just one tab (MobileMe) is sucking up 160k of memory. That is very heavy.

UPDATE3 - This is a joke - 12.45

keith

Glimpse of MobileMe loginyou b

rom UPDATE2 - having more fun this morning:

http://bohanna.typepad.com/pureplay/2008/07/my-iphonemobile.html

UPDATE: Got up this morning (06.30GMT) fully expecting to be able to log onto MobileMe. To discover that Apple's initial implementation of this service has been plagued with unknown issues:

Outage hobbles new Apple Web service
The MobileMe rollercoaster
Apple's MobileMe shaky, not synched

I came back to the computer and saw mentions of the new iTunes 7.7 so went to MobileMe to see if it was open.

And through a glitch in their system came across this screen - which leads back to the default holding page :-(

Soon I guess

keith

Xp Service Pack 3 out starting tomorrow?

Mary-Jo Foley's blog over on zdnet claims that the third (and last?) service pack for XP starts rolling down the Automatic Update funnel tomorrow (Thursday July 10th).

If true what does this mean?

• Anyone in a SOHO setting with an automatic download and install option is going to see their internet speed be hammered by a download likely to be in 100's of Mb. And your computer may not work the way it should afterwards!
• Network administrators need to be ready for the inevitable side effects of this installation - there will always be some incompatibilities when a service pack hits town.

Watch and wait on this one.

keith

3G iPhone, Friday 8am. Does this apply to Ireland?

Just in from the Apple marketing machine:

Anyone know for sure if O2 will have them in store Friday?

keith

I had no choice Your Honor

I had reckoned on putting off my iPhone lust satisfaction for a while given that my earnings maybe impacted by my sofabound condition.

However fate intervened. My daughter knocked over a glass of water yesterday and took out my Palm Treo 680. I dismantled the battery and took out the SIM card to leave it dry out overnight but it was in vain. A fruitless soft restart was followed by an equally pointless hard restart - both leaving the Palm freezing on startup.

The consequences of this?

• Switched to dumb Motorola V535 as my phone.
• Opened a 60 day trial .Mac account in preparation for MobileMe.
• Found a copy of my calendar on Google which I had synced in there a couple of weeks ago
• Have to figure out how to get my Palm contacts out of the Palm format and into .Mac
• Going to have to get iPhone with bloody O2 data limit next week as will not be able to wait around for cracking options to appear.

keith

Web Services and Data lock in

As a follow up to my last post at my dissatisfaction with Typepad I started the process of moving our personal blogs to another service.

Wordpress.com (to the horror of techies everywhere - yes the hosted service and not my own implementation) is the choice and I discover how long this is going to take. There are nearly 500 photos that have to be exported from the places that Typepad has stored them (at least 4 different locations for reasons that are not obvious to me) and then manually reinserted into the relevant posts.

The automated export/import works for text (and Wordpress takes the Typepad generated txt file and brings it in nicely) but not images.

At least I have the time ;-)

keith