Much to my surprise, this afternoon it started behaving erratically – whenever I pressed the fast forward or rewind buttons, the iPod would keep skipping in the same direction until either the end or the start of the song was reached respectively. One annoying thing is that the skip steps are much bigger than on the previous Nano, and so it makes the process less accurate. Combined with this bug, it’s unusable. The only way to stop it is to pause, and resume playback, and since the steps are so large, it’s a hit-and-miss proposition.

Here is a short video showing the behavior.

You’ll notice the iTunes WiFi Store icon, and an O2-UK network symbol up top. If you look carefully, you’ll see that the E logo for EDGE is missing: we guess that 30% network coverage on O2 don’t quite stretch inside the Apple Store.

A bit further down, they mention this again:

O2 iPhone on the left, unlocked US iPhone on the right (running on T-Mobile’s UK network). Note that the O2 iPhone doesn’t show the EDGE logo, but the unlocked phone on T-Mobile does. You can probably guess at what we’re getting at here: O2’s EDGE coverage sucks.

In this particular side-by-side photo, T-Mobile’s coverage is marginally lower than O2’s, but they should both be capable of sending GPRS traffic. Another reason they get this wrong is that the waves icon ‘overwrites’ the E symbol while the iPhone is connected to a WiFi network, so you could still have GPRS/EDGE attachment in the background, so-to-speak. In my particular case, the iPhone is happily registered on Vodafone Spain, and is attached to GPRS (no EDGE here at all), showing the E while I’m not in range of WiFi.

The iPhone also does something very clever – when you open an application that requires a data connection, it will start a GPRS attach and session, while it asks you if you want to join any of the nearby WiFi networks (if any). In case you say no, the alternative data connection is already established, cutting down on extra waiting time before you start seeing content on your screen. This may seem stupid to Europeans, by default stuck with hugely expensive pay-as-you-go data (50 Euro cents per 250kB!!), but with the original AT&T voice + data plan, it does not really matter.

Unlocking your $400 iPhone is now possible, and so you’re no longer bound by an AT&T contract. In Europe, however, you may be able to unlock the phone just the same, but you will have to stay with the contract or pay the cancellation fee. Either way, operators stand to have better deal than AT&T.

First day with my shiny new iPhone, unlocked to work on Vodafone’s network – so far so good, pretty much loving it. Until I looked at the Bluetooth specs. Basically, this thing is only useful for mono headsets and carkits, and that’s it.

The iPhone has been certified under Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR, as can be seen in the BQB documents, but the PICS detail only handset and audio gateway profiles, with required signaling profiles such as RFCOMM, pretty much the bare minimum for a working Bluetooth hands-free system. What about the ton of other profiles, for example, A2DP, FTP, DUN…? Not included. The iPhone uses a CSR BlueCore4 Audioflash, which has 6MB of onboard FLASH memory, and could be upgraded provided that there is a host controller with access to the SPI port on the BC4. It seems that the iPhone uses Open Interface’s BLUEmagic 3.0 stack [PDF], which would imply an external host controller.

Now I’m starting to get confused – you usually choose a FLASH BlueCore if you intend to run software on it, be it CSR’s own stack, or a customized version of it. If you intend to use a host-based system, where the stack is handled by an external processor, you can buy way cheaper BlueCore ROM chips – and we’re talking between $1 and $3 a piece in savings. This may not seem much, but when multiplied it by Apple’s sales, you have a hefty sum. Below is a graphic that illustrates the differences between a host-based HCI system (left) and a standalone or ROM implementation (right):

The big question still is – why is Apple so Bluetooth-unfriendly? Did they have certification problems and rushed through the bare minimum specs to claim Bluetooth compatibility? This seems strange as the iPhone was certified by CETECOM, which probably is the most experienced lab on Bluetooth certification in the world. Same applies to MacBooks and Mac Pros, they feature a few more profiles like FTP, but not A2DP. Hoping for a firmware update to fix this mess, over and out.

1. Apple will offer a subscription-based model, where you pay a weekly or monthly fee, and can download as much as you want from their catalog. Right now, iTunes imposes the price they buy their music at, and it has been patently obvious that many labels were not at all happy with the $0.99 a song pricing scheme.
2. UMG will see their music pirated like no other label. If people cannot even get their music from a convenient and easy to use source, for a one-could-argue reasonable price, they will find ways to get it from other sources. There are alternatives to piracy, such as MP3Search.ru, which provide songs at $0.19 a piece, DRM-free, and they have a very extensive repertoire (albeit sometimes not as complete as iTunes’).

Will this prediction come true? It depends on how much it would hurt iTunes to lose Universal, and I think it would hurt a lot.

The iPhone case is even more interesting, as the device has not been released yet, but Apple has already reported an increase in battery life with respect to the initial quoted value. The iPhone will have 8 hours of talk time, and some 250 hours of standby time, with 5 hours of video and 24 hours of audio playback. Apple’s stock has jumped $3 since the announcement, something that will make losers in the fake email crash happy.

Let’s try to make a simple breakdown of power consumptions, and see if manufacturers are being overly optimistic.

WiFi

One of the biggest power drains, as there is no built-in power management into the WiFi protocol, contrary to GSM and 3G. When transmitting over GSM, a phone makes calculations from data received from the network and its own measurements in order to adjust RF power to the minimum required to reach the cell’s base station. Thus, in areas of good coverage, a phone can be consuming far less power than in rural areas with more spotty coverage. While on a 3G network, the rate of adjustment is even higher. WiFi chipsets in mobile phones have basically two settings, “high” and “low”. Most times, unless you are sitting right next to the access point, and without any major interference, the setting the phone will use is “high”.

Assuming that the WiFi chipset used by the Nokia N95 and the iPhone use little power, for example, by fitting the Nanoradio solution, the power consumption would stand at 130mA in transmit mode, 53mA in receive mode, and 50uA in standby mode. Assuming we are receiving 80% of the time, for example, by browsing the web, the average consumption would stand at around 68mAh. The N95’s battery would last 13 hours, if it had to power the WiFi chipset alone.

GPS

Even though GPS technology has advanced a lot since the early days, GPS chipsets can draw upwards of 80mA. Special trickle-power configurations (which also impact performance) can reduce this to 50mA or so. Thus, the N95’s battery could power the GPS for around 19 hours.

Processor

The Nokia N95 features an ARM11-based Texas Instruments OMAP2420 running at 330MHz, featuring 2D/3D video acceleration on top of whopping performance. What does this mean in electrical power terms? Even though this processor features SmartReflex technology, which reduces static leak currents (a good technical overview is available here [pdf]), the net current drawn is around 30mA. The N95 battery could power the main processor for around 32 hours.

Display

The display on the N95 is very good, beautiful, 16M colors, 240×320 pixel resolution. It is also power hungry, taking around 30mA, thus, the battery could also power the display for around 32 hours.

Phone

Assuming that you talk 5% of the time on the phone, the average power consumption by the phone subsytem alone would stand around 20mA, resulting in a battery life of 47 hours.

Adding things up

So far, we have seen how much the battery could keep running each individual system on the phone, but adding things up, we have a power consumption of about 100mA (taking into account that we are not using everything at once, I halved the figures). This results in around 9.5 hours of operation, more or less an average day. This ties in with most users’ experiences, as shown in many reviews done so far on the N95.

The iPhone, being much thinner, wider and taller than the N95, probably won’t have that much larger battery capacity – why does Apple give the figures they do, I can only blame on the marketing department. This is not as uncommon as it seems, R&D provides a set of carefully calculated and actually measured results, then the marketing guys take them and multiply them by two. Anyone who has used a modern, high-end phone or PDA, will attest to the fact that quoted battery life figures differ from reality by far. I don’t know of many companies that can raise their stock $3 by simply increasing the value of the battery life in one of their products – this shows how much hype there is around the iPhone (of which I’ll most definitely get one…they are soooo sexy!).

The main argument to support his analysis is that since network operators have to like the phone, then Apple has to do a good job convincing them. Remember the ROKR? It was rather a failure due to the fact it could only be loaded with iTunes music over cable, and thus mobile operators were left out of attractive data chargers levied when buying music directly from the phone. There was even speculation that Apple allowed it to launch on purpose, to protect their audio player market.
Where Bill goes wrong in my opinion is that the handset market is heavily controlled in the US, but not in Europe – go to any shop in the latter and you will have a very large variety of handsets to buy unsubsidized. Why? Because a lot of people value the ability to switch operators as they see fit, without having to enter into contracts involving their soul. In the US, there isn’t a culture of operator hopping, but rather of staying with one just to get a phone $50 or $100 cheaper.

One thing I have never understood is why people get themselves tied into a two year contract for a $50 saving. If they worked out how much they could save by moving operators taking advantage of special offers, they may think twice.

There is a very large number of paths Apple could follow, first, they have a nice distribution network with excellent shops placed in key areas, second, they have a large and loyal crowd of followers, who would probably not mind paying an unsubsidized device, and third, there are already a number of MVNOs and fixed-line operators that are willing to take a bite from the large networks. As for the subsidy, I wonder…are iPods subsidized by anyone? Apple costumers are used to pay for quality, and in my view, the iPhone will be no different.