iPhone 3G S to be free in the UK, not so elsewhere

The 32 GB iPhone 3G S that will be released very soon will actually be provided for free to UK customers, except the monthly rate is quite high.
In fact, to get this deal, one will have to pay the operator O2 £73.41 (US$120) per month. With cheaper contracts, the phone costs up to £274.23.

In the U.S., the phones will cost $199 and $299 with a contract. In France, the cheapest contract is €39 per month but requires a two-year commitment.

But is the "free" iPhone actually worth it? If you just compare that with France's cheapest contract, it's obvious that the monthly rate is pretty much half (accounting for currency exchange). Extending two years, that could amount to much more savings than simply the free iPhone. For 24 months, if you save a mere $20 (you can actually save more...), then you save a cumulative $480. Now seeing as the price is actually about half, after accounting for the currency rates, I think it's reasonable to think you can save over $50 a month, which means you could be saving thousands with a cheaper contract.

Really, if you don't need all the stuff in the contract, just pay the money for the iPhone. It's not worth wasting thousands just to say you got a "free" iPhone that really cost you much more.

Did I mention that the iPhone OS 3 will be coming out in New York at about 1 PM today?

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iPhone OS 3 released at iTunes Store mistake, Real release later today

The iPhone OS 3 firmware was accidentally released yesterday in the iTunes Store, ahead of schedule. Or rather, the page was updated, but all the buyers got was a 0.4KB file.




(Click for better/larger image)

The error was detected yesterday and fixed, so that users attempting to go to that page are redirected. Unfortunately, many people have already purchased the "OS 3" and so Apple are probably trying to get back to the customers who paid by mistake.

Also, the real iPhone OS 3 firmware will be released today at around 1PM in New York (Eastern). You can stop pressing F5 now and wait 'til then for the firmware.

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iPhone 3GS at WWDC 09 will destroy Palm Pre, competitors

Today was the much anticipated WWDC of 2009 hosted by Apple, and their keynote was the longest one yet, clocking in at over 2 hours.
They announced a great many things, but one of the biggest announcements was the release of a new iPhone, just as rumored.



It was only this weekend that the Palm Pre started to sell, and now there's a new iPhone. I'm sure Palm can't be happy about that. This new iPhone is called the iPhone 3GS, and the S stands for Speed, and it really is quite fast. It also comes out with the announcement of the new iPhone OS 3 (If you want to see images + details on that, just scroll down).


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The new 3GS doesn't actually look all that much different from the old ones, but what's really changed is on the inside. Of course, speed is very much emphasized here, and Apple claims that it is more than 2 times faster for most tasks as compared with the iPhone 2.
There are two new available storage sizes, 16 GB for $199, and $32 GB for $299, with contracts of course.
Along with this are upgrade options to the iPhone 3G S, but still require some more time before they are available, due to AT&T's restrictions on it.
Tethering and MMS was also announced, and AT&T has said that they are going to be adding these features soon, with MMS coming later this summer.
More features include voice control as well as a new video camera. It offers autofocus, auto balance, 30 FPS and more. This is definitely a good hardware upgrade.

The release date for the iPhone 3G S has been set to June 19th, where it'll be available in the US. Then it'll be released in a total of 80 countries in the world in the following weeks.
The old 8 GB iPhone will be on sale for $99 after this.


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Before the release of this iPhone, they also announced their newest iPhone OS 3, which builds on much of the previous OS, and introduces lots of new features. Examples are shown in the following picture.




Also check out these cool new features.





There was also a much wanted feature introducing Find My iPhone which allows you to track your iPhone, send a message to it in case somebody finds it, and even in the worse case scenario, delete all the data on it.






Also, you can now buy movies and TV shows on your iPhone.



This new iPhone OS 3 will be available for free for all existing iPhone customers.

Though Palm had a pretty good start this weekend, they'll be facing tough competition from increasingly more sophisticated iPhones, and it looks as though the Palm Pre at this point probably isn't revolutionary enough to make people to switch, especially as iPhone buyers are usually loyal to Apple.
Overall, WWDC delivered on quite a bit, but without Steve Jobs there, it didn't seem like it was enough. Let's hope Steve Jobs can get well soon with lots of more exciting things to come.

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Bing overtakes Yahoo as new No.2 with 16% market share,new Bing-a-thon Campaign

According to recent statistics offered by StatCounter, Bing appears to have skyrocketed in market share to an incredible 16% in the US on Thursday June 4th, 2009.
This was just the day after Bing was officially released in the US along with a new TV commercial so it seems that it's really the hype that got Bing to this level. However, this kind of hype is exactly what Microsoft wants to achieve with Bing, and especially if they can keep this up with more advertising and other ways of generating hype.

It was on Thursday, the announcement of Bing that their old search engine Live Search also saw a spike up to 12%, but that was most likely because everyone wanted to try out Bing but didn't know where to go, so they wound up heading to the old Live Search.

If you head to GlobalStats Statcounter, you can see the latest daily statistics for the top search engines. The spike may be related to their ad campaign, but it may also have come as a result of the hype surrounding Bing. However, be careful when assessing that the "race is over", which I've noticed on multiple blogs/news sites. It is far from over yet, and if Microsoft cannot keep their customers coming back every time to Bing, then they'll just go to their old habits. We don't know yet whether Bing will true have the ability to intrigue customers and make them love it.

What we do know, is that Microsoft will not let Bing go down without a fight. Like I mentioned, they planned to spend $100 million with the release of Bing on advertising in various places. Today, we found out that they've decided to step up the advertising game with another set of ads to be released on Hulu and some TV shows.
A report by the New York Times says that their new ads will be in a "Bing-a-thon" format, and will be similar to a TV show, starring aJson Sudeikis, Olivia Munn and Fred Willard.

"The key will be whether we deliver a product and connect with people emotionally in the advertising. You have to do something a little bit more surprising. It's a very tall marketing challenge and a very tall product challenge."

That was a statement from Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president for the online services division of Microsoft. These ads will be integrated with TV shows and Hulu's shows, rather than standalone commercials like before.

It will surely be a challenge for Microsoft, but the innovations on Bing have paved the way for broader features on search engines and will eventually lead to a better overall experience for the users, as competitors and especially the market leader Google will have to respond to Bing's features.
Has Microsoft really shown that Bing will become the next No.2 Search Engine? That's something we can't say for sure yet, but perhaps we'll get a better picture of the situation after about 2 weeks, when the initial hype starts wearing off, and the tech crowd stops "trying it out" and decide whether they really like Bing or not.

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Activision asserts Brutal Legend rights, sues Double Fine

EA showcased and heavily promoted their new game Brutal Legends at E3 this year. This year's E3 has been arguably one of the best E3 displays for a long time, especially with all sorts of new innovations such as Microsoft's Xbox 360 no controller Project Natal motion sensing technology.

EA and Activision both had an impressive line up of games they would be offering, but Activion Blizzard has decided to take some decisive action against the EA and Double Fine deal of publishing Brutal Legends, a game that was had a $15 million investment from Activision Blizzard.

How did this happen? Well you may already know this, but Vivendi Games merged with Activision awhile ago but apparently Activision did not include Brutal Legend in their list of projects they would inherit. Double Fine thought this meant Activision no longer wanted Brutal Games, so they went looking for another developer, namely EA. Activision has previously threatened to sue if Double Fine didn't stop the publishing of Brutal Legends, and now that threat has become a reality.

The lawsuit claims that Double Fine missed a key deadline last year, and asked for another $7 million infusion. Then it claims that Activision was not compensated for their initial $15 million investment when Double Fine went to EA. Activision says that they never gave up their rights to the game, and was still in negotiations with Double Fine, but failed to reach an agreement.
In response, Double Fine President Tim Schafer stated,

"Hey, if Activision liked it, then they should have put a ring on it," "Oh great, now Beyonce is going to sue me too."

Later, EA also commented by comparing Activision to

"a husband abandoning his family and then suing after his wife meets a better looking guy."

Should Activision be able to keep their "rights"? It only seems natural that if Activision doesn't include the game in the projects they would inherit, that they mean to give up the game. On the other hand, if they really were negotiating, then perhaps Double Fine is at fault. However, I doubt this is the case, and it's more likely that Activision didn't care much about it until Double Fine was forced to find another publisher.

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Bing Debuts, TV commercial puts Bing as Savior of economy

Though Bing was announced last week and a preview of Microsoft's new search engine came out on Monday at www.bing.com, today was the actual official release of Bing, with all of its features.
Today, the preview note below the icon Bing was removed, and now the Bing service is a full fledged search engine.

These 2 weeks, Microsoft has stirred up quite a bit of interest, in a lot of areas such as the ZuneHD, the announced release of Windows 7, the release of Silverlight 3, and also their revolutionary Xbox 360 no controller, full body motion detecting system called Project Natal, and of course the Bing search engine. However, they plan to stir up even more interest by spending $80-100 million on advertising for their new search engine, or rather, their "decision engine".

"While everyone was searching, there was bailing. While everyone was lost in the links, there was collapsing. We don't need queries and keywords if they bring back questions and confusion. From this moment on, search overload is officially over."

That was an excerpt from the new television commercial they rolled out today, along with the official release of their Bing decision engine. Their ad wants to portray Bing as the solution to the search engine market's woes. What do you think of this idea? This kind of a model has been known to have some effects on people by putting in parallel with some horrible situation of which their product or idea is a cure. But one thing's for sure, Microsoft will need more than that in order to gain serious market share on Google. However, the amount of interest shown and their dedication of large sums of money to the ad campaigns may just put a dent in that market share held by Yahoo and Google.

Check out the commercial:



The battle will be very interesting, but at least there's good competition going on.

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Xbox 360 Groundbreaking no controller motion sensor revealed at E3

Project Natal is the latest new addition to the hoard of revelations by Microsoft at this year's E3 conference.
The Xbox 360 had a lot of news with its new features coming to Xbox Live and all its new games, but this Project Natal may rock the gaming world by defining an all new way of playing.
When the Wii came out, a huge selling point was the motion sensing controller. Now Microsoft's Xbox 360 will have motion sensing capability too. What's the difference? It doesn't need a controller.

Yes, that's right, this brand new revolutionary technology is extremely precise, powerful, and designed to function without you ever touching the controller. All you need to do is move in front of the camera, and it'll detect it. Not only that, did I mention it was extremely precise? More so than the Wiimote in fact, by far.

The technology involved here is absolutely tremendous. This camera can detect sound and 3D movement. That means it has the ability to determine depth of your movements, so you can move in a real "360 degrees" and it'll actually pick up your motion being 360 degrees and not just 180 degrees on a flat plane.
Microsoft demoed this technology at the E3 conference by showing off the game Richochet, and Paint Party. The motions used in playing these was simple but highly responsive when the camera picked it up.

With this new technology, there is no longer a need to even pick up a remote or controller. The camera picks up all your movement, so there's no need to press any buttons of hold anything. This is a one of a kind, Xbox 360 no controller motion sensing technology that may very well even go beyond the Xbox in terms of use and application. With many of Microsoft's offerings in other areas, gesture controls have become increasingly prevalent.

Then came a another demo, one that was absolutely captivating. A virtual character called "Milo", created by Lionhead Studios and Fable designer Peter Molyneux, interacted live with the user in conversation and movements. From the screen, it looked towards the user, and engaged in live conversation as if it were a human being. It also accepted hand-drawn messages scanned into the game in real time and processed.
This is the kind of AI technology that we could only dream of before.


Famed Steven Spielberg also went upstage to rave about the future of gaming and the impact this technology would have. He said "people are too intimidated to pick up game controllers." He's probably right too, and that's why this technology is definitely revolutionary and will define a whole new way of playing games.

Project Natal has most assuredly racked up some points for the Xbox 360, and Microsoft even says that it will be functional for all current-gen and past versions Xbox 360s and all future generations.

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