Could BBC iPlayer be headed for the iPhone?
There have some been some tantalising tidbits floating around the web for a while, raising the possibility that the BBC’s iPlayer could be extended to more platforms, possibly including the iPhone.
At the moment, the iPlayer catch-up tv service is available in two flavours:
- download – only for Windows XP and Vista using Internet Explorer
- streaming – for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux using Flash
A demo video appeared in July last year showing iPlayer on the iPhone, but it seems to only have been a mock-up. If we are going to get BBC shows on the iPhone, how will it happen?
More bang for your buck on O2 iPhone tariffs
O2 obviously noticed Steve’s post on iPhone pricing because they’ve introduced new tariffs for new and existing users (woohoo!). Current and potential iPhone users are now being offered:
- £35 – 600 mins, 500 texts
- £45 – 1200 mins, 500 texts
- £75 – 3000 mins, 500 texts
O2 and Carphone Warehouse still selling iPhones with old firmware
Nearly two weeks after the Macworld keynote which officially unveiled the 1.1.3 upgrade, O2 and the Carphone Warehouse’s stores are still selling iPhones with the older 1.1.2 firmware.
Of the four stores that I’ve tried in Swindon and Reading, all were selling iPhones that had not been upgraded. Of those, only one was planning to upgrade the iPhone – when they had time for it.
iPhone pricing musings
It’s been interesting watching the reported sales figures for the Apple iPhone trickle out from the various networks across Europe. In each case, they’ve been healthy without really going as stratospheric as the device itself would seem to warrant. It seems to me that there are some serious price issues at work here that have hampered the iPhone’s progress.
I can think of three common scenarios:
1.1.3 points the way to the future of the iPhone
It’s a bit late in the day (a compressed blogosphere day, that is) but here’s my wrap up of the rest of 1.1.3’s enhancements. I’m not going to detail all the changes. As I said this isn’t going to be a copy and paste blog, and the changes are well detailed elsewhere. I want to pick out a few of the things that others may have skipped over, and what they mean for the iPhone in the future.
Upgraded Maps in Firmware 1.1.3 still needs some work
I’m going to outline my thoughts on the rest of the enhancements to the 1.1.3 release of the firmware in my next post, but for now I’d like to skip to the feature I was most excited about since the news was leaked – upgraded Google Maps with a pseudo-GPS function.
A New Look
The Maps interface has changed, adding:
- a movable “drop pin” function to mark your own locations
- the hybrid map view, where maps are overlaid on satellite images. Having the Hybrid view makes Maps far better in my opinion – it makes route-finding much easier when you can actually see the buildings and landscape
- your current locations now becomes the start location when you switch to Directions, rather than blanking both start and end location (which was a little bugbear of mine)
But the big news in this Maps upgrade is the Location feature.
Why I seriously doubt Apple’s technical expertise sometimes…
Let’s get this straight, I respect Apple’s core software team tremendously. OS X and Leopard have some astonishingly smooth features, immaculately programmed. This post isn’t aimed at the guys behind the OS.
But around the core team, there are some idiots. I’ve expressed my frustration with some of the decisions made by the team behind Apple’s web page creation software several times over on All About Symbian. Making it easy for beginners to create web pages is a laudable aim, but implementing it in such a way that the user’s text is simply rendered as a huge image is crazy, inelegant and farcical. What a waste of bandwidth. And how is Google’s robot going to index these pages if there’s no text?
Welcome to All About iPhone
Here we go then – buy a domain, whack up a WordPress install and Hey Presto, it’s a successful blog!
Well, not quite. Original content, good writing, and an enthusiasm for the subject make for a good read, and that’s what I’m aiming to provide.
This site is launching off the back of an article that I wrote for All About Symbian, dedicated to my current favourite shiny gadget. It isn’t going to be another copy and paste linkbait site with daily updates for the sake of it, but rather a site with a few posts a week, taking a (hopefully) more considered view. Steve Litchfield‘s also going to provide the occasional article, which I’m sure you’ll enjoy reading as much as I do.
So, I hope to see you after today’s Macworld announcements for my thoughts on where this takes the iPhone, and the rest of us, next.
Cheers
Matt