Either way, Apple have responded by claiming there was a glitch in the original software regarding the signal bars, and that an update to come soon will make the signal bars more accurate and representative of the actual signal strength. To be honest it all seems a little suspect!

But all the blame can’t be put on Apple, as mobile reception can easily be boosted by carriers. For example, back when Chris Moyles was climbing kilimanjaro back in 2008 he reportedly called O2 to moan about his signal to his iPhone. O2 responded by ‘Boosting’ the signal, allowing him to have a flawless conversation with the BBC radio 1 team! Now, obviously O2 and other carriers can’t be expected to do this for every customer, but surely something should be said to the carriers as well as Apple? Scratch that, it seems AT&T are being sued too!

It started the night before, with an early night sleep followed by an early (5.00am) start. After a quick shower I jumped in the car and drove into my local town to stand outside the O2 shop in anticipation. I went prepared, with headphones and the complete ‘Inbetweeners’ box set downloaded from the night before. I got there at about 5.25am, to be greeted by a group of 7 people (6 male, 1 female) who had been there from as early as 4.00am!

As we stood and chatted for a while about the new phone, Apple/O2 marketing tactics and other things I felt part of a specialist (if not a little geeky) community – The elite and dedicated! A queue soon started to form, and by 6.00am there were about two dozen people behind me (I was 8th in line). Here’s a breakdown of the stats for my particular O2 shop;

people @4.00am – 1 (first arrival)
people @5.30am – 8
people @6.00am – 30ish
people @7.00am – 100ish
people @8.02am – 182 (official figure)

So, after making my way past the private security and into the O2 shop I looked at the handset for a few minutes and was then seated to go through the process. I soon got away and exited the O2 shop to be applauded by the ever-growing line of people (a lot of which I guess would be disappointed). One of the O2 guru’s said they had approximately 50 handsets in stock, which was a lot more than the anticipated 5 x 32GB and 10 x 16GB which they expected. Never the less over 2/3 of the line would go away empty handed.

I guess that’s it; pretty simple really. Yes, it was a major geeky thing to do, but I now get to enjoy another brilliant product from Apple as one of only a select few in my area and indeed the UK – now just got to find someone to try ‘FaceTime’ out with.

To keep track of what’s going on during the hour long keynote be sure to hit some of these links;

MacRumoursLive.com, Engadget, Live Gizmodo, iPhonealley.com and theAppleBlog.
Of cause if you use twitter you can also keep up to date by following ‘@macrumors’ or ‘@arsWWDC’, and I’m sure there will be some #WWDC based hashtags too!

So, the keynote kicks off at 9.00am hawaii time on June 7th 2010, but what about for those of us not sitting under a palm tree sipping on a coconut? (Can you tell I’m jelous?).

• 10:00AM – Pacific
• 11:00AM – Mountain
• 12:00PM – Central
• 01:00PM – Eastern
• 06:00PM – London
• 07:00PM – Paris
• 10.30 PM – Mumbai

All I need now is to get home from work, turn the heating up, sit back in nothing but my pants and enjoy all the marketing keywords that Job’s can throw at me! Oh and note to self – buy some coconut juice!

Depending on when you bought your iPhone will depend on the tariff that you will be paying. I was previously on the £35 per month contract, which gave me 600 minutes and 500 texts, and then used to pay an additional £7 per month for an extra 500 texts. This came to a total of £52 per month after the addition of insurance.

So, here is the punch line. I’m paying £2 less per month, with the same amount of minutes, data (edge / 3G) and unlimited texts! This is because O2 have brought out a new set of iPhone pay monthly tariffs for new customers. You can see how they stack up here. All I did was ring and tell O2 that I wanted to switch tariffs. There are no hidden charges, no contract renewals and the same billing date as previously.

A word of warning though, I had to go into settings > general > reset > reset network settings as I was getting sporadic data connections, but it’s all fine now! It’s a better deal all around, and you pay less than the old tariffs.

O2 said that they conveniently don’t have enough resources to call there iPhone customers and tell them of the new cheaper tariff changes. So, if you want to give this a go, or talk to an O2 iPhone customer support person just call 402 from your iPhone handset!

[poll id=5]

I’m going to use it for my final year dissertation project; Something along the lines of an educational interactive learning game developed using the iPhone platform (Basically a glorified iPhone application!!).

Due to this step-up in my educational performance and seriousness i’m going to add two new categories to the blog; Mac (for all my MacBook tutorials/issues/resolutions) and FYD (The one where I will talk about the progress of my Final Year Dissertation!

WHAY!

Anyway, the people at PC World told me that they had basically quote “…Stopped selling the 13″ model due to lack of stock country wide”. I asked why the lack of stock, when such product was in such high demand, to which I got a shrug of the shoulders.

Now, normally I would drop it at that point, but when walking out of the shop I couldn’t help but wonder why Apple would (assuming a little here) produce less of the 13″ model than the 15″ (more conventional) model, as they both contained exactly the same hardware (minus the screen, of cause).

Could it be to sell more of the higher models? No, because there is a 17″ powerhouse also on sale!
Could it be due to lack of 13″ screens? No, because both the 13″ and 15″ screens are produced on site at the same factory using the same resources.
Could it be to promote another product? Possibly, but this just seemed like bad marketing at a time of such high demand.

And then I stumbled across what I think is most likely the answer. The iPad. With its 9″ screen, it is very similar to the small notebook that Apple sell – with almost identical processing power, resolution and alike. My thoughts are that perhaps they have halted production on the 13″ model in preparation (i.e. to build demand even higher) for the iPad.

It all made sense, as the PC world sales person had said the regular shipment had ceased late February. Bingo!

HOLD THE iPHONE! – I got home and rang Apple, only to discover that they had plenty of 13″ models in stock – Could it be that my focus should be on PC World’s marketing, instead of Apple?

Damn you PC World, and please don’t file a law suit, Apple UK!

It appears that this app already exists, and is called iLoader. It cost’s £1.19 and is pretty awesome. There is also a lite version of the app, but I went strait in with the pro version.

You log into facebook, select the photos or videos, then select a folder to upload to (better than the automatic mobile upload folder that facebook creates) and then they all upload simultaneously, showing upload speed and completed percent.

Never spend hours uploading photo after photo using the facebook app again! It’s just helped me reach my second mobile uploads folder on Facebook!

I’m currently sitting in costa coffee, writing this on my phone. I searched for nearby coffee shops and costa came up as 0.0miles away, with a photo, contact details and reviews. Other categories include shops, resteraunts and pubs, and each has a large archive of places to go – the best selection of any vicinity based app I have used.

What’s more it has ‘monocal’ mode which takes advantage of augmented reality – it’s the best exaple of the software to date too!

What a wonderful little app! Best of all it’s free!