Thursday, October 18, 2007

A from the factory unlocked iPhone?

It appears that because of French law, the iPhone will go on sale in France in two version. One will be locked to Orange France and will be sold for €399, the other will be sold unlocked, presumably for a higher price. But despite the higher price this opens interesting opportunities, especially with the EU laws in place against restrictions on trade and commerce between E.U. member countries. For instance if I boughht an unlocked iPhone in France there is no legal way for Apple to put technical restrictions on my use of it in the UK, or other EU member countries. So no locking it to the French iTunes store, or restricting it to French language only. That isn't legal... interesting no?

Update: Just to clarify. Under French law the network must unlock a phone if requested to do so, free of charge, as soon as the customer has owned the phone for more than 6 month. So even the locked version won't stay locked for long.

An iPhone SDK coming soon...

It was if millions of voices suddenly cried out in pain, there was no SDK for the iPhone. Well there is now...

The rumours of an official API for the iPhone and the iPod touch in the face of the growing number of unoffical third party applications, Apple have announced an official SDK to be released in February 2008.

Can I be one of many to say... "Hurrah!" and "It's about bloody time!". I mean come on, what took them so long? Of course the wording of the announcement is a bit worrying, it's talking about digital signatures, possibly quite expensive digital signatures. If they're charging real money for those things then I know developers like me aren't going to get a look in, which is a bad. I guess we'll have to see how things go...

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

Smart clothing for Geeks

Remember the smart clothes pegs, intelligent spoons, thinking carpets, ubiquitous umbrella and the smart chopping board?

CREDIT: ThinkGeek
Ubiquitous computing gone mad?

It's not really how I thought smart clothing would start to trickle down into the consumer market, but ThinkGeek's new t-shirt (via CrunchGear) is an interesting foray into ubiquitous computing. I'm just not sure it's very useful...

Friday, October 05, 2007

Dynamode USB-SERIAL not working...

This is just a quick warning for people thinking of buying a Dynamode USB to Serial Convertor. This device uses an Ark Micro chipset, rather than the more common Prolific PL-2303. Unlike the PL-2303 chipset, which has OSX drivers, the Ark Micro chipset doesn't. So if you want a USB to Serial convertor to use with your Mac, don't buy this one...

Update: There is an experimental Linux driver, but that doesn't help me a lot at this point.