Did you upgrade to an iPhone? You did? I hope you’re getting enough signal, because there’s a well reported issue saying that if you hold the phone covering the lower left with your palm and allow your flesh to bridge a gap, you lose signal…

That’s not the news. Big as it is, that’s not it.What is news? The support that Steve Jobs gave for the problem:

“Just avoid holding it in that way”

Gee, thanks for the advice… Somehow I’m reminded of the joke:
Patient: “Doctor Doctor, it hurts when I press here, when I press here and when I press here…”
Doctor: “You’ve broken your finger…”

Now, start placing bets as to the official response from Apple. Will they sully the styling by giving out bumpers for the iPhone? Will they start recalling handsets to fix the problem? Or will they do nothing and expect people to like it or lump it?

My money’s on C…

UK broadcasting giant the BBC sent their reporters over to CES to see the latest and greatest in gadgetry. However, they ended up with more than they bargained for…

Firstly, they were given a demonstration on how indestructible a hard drive from iosafe was. It was set on fire, soaked, dropped and crushed by a digger, yet still allowed the data to be readable after a little extracting from the remains. Given the BBC’s own video and also reports elsewhere such as bit-tech.net, I’m pretty amazed it survived through all of that.

The Beeb’s second triumph was over another product billing itself as unbreakable: the XP3 2.0 from Sonim. They said that if anyone managed to break the phone at CES, they’d get one for free. Cue BBC reporter dunking it in a fish tank, then proceeding to introduce the screen to a fish tank for a few seconds. Amazingly, he broke it on camera, with the CEO standing right next to him. Props to Bob Plaschke for taking the bad news well, although in their favour, the phone probably got hammered by every technology journalist in the city, so the single failure is probably acceptable.

Wouldn’t mind getting one for those times I head home to the farm…

[BBC 1, 2 and bit-tech.net]

In all of it’s great genius, the BBC consumer affairs show Watchdog, presented by recently facelifted mean woman from that gameshow involving chains and insults, Anne Robinson, has decided to attack Sony because some PS3s are breaking out of warranty.

At the time of writing, the programme is airing on BBC 1, and Iain Lee will apparently be fronting the piece, which according to a letter by Sony, involves the Beeb sitting outside the front of Sony’s UK HQ in a van marked “PlayStation Repair Action Team” (or “PRAT” as the work experience kid would have said as he made the accronym work) giving “free” servicing of dead consoles because the “unjustly” Sony won’t.

Cue preemptive writing from Ray Maguire, with a nice 18 point letter showing the show’s mistakes, errors of judgment etc. Even I agree with the gist of the letter (despite it’s length), in that what Sony is doing with it’s fee-based out of warranty repair service is probably the best thing they can do given the circumstances.

I can only hope that the Beeb and Anne do a dismal job in their witchhunt. Indeed, I love the BBC, but I just don’t see the point in this sort of scaremongering.

Oh god. Mrs Robinson said “Game Over” as an attempt at humour. I’m more impressed by the guy who claims to cure cancer with his hands…

[Via gamesindustry.biz]

It’s been 48 hours since Apple at WWDC announced the iPhone 3G S, and people are already complaining. Aside from some people saying that it was all a bit of a letdown in terms of announcements, the large majority of whining comes from iPhone users on O2 that want to upgrade but have a problem.

The issue stems from the fact that when the 3G got released, O2 UK allowed for free upgrades to the new handset. This time, O2 are refusing it. People are unhappy as they don’t want to either be locked into the remaining months on their contract nor pay a large charge to get out of said contract. Granted, it’s a hefty phone bill anyway, but this does seem quite strange behaviour from the consumers.

in the UK, it is extremely rare for the phone provider to allow for a free upgrade before a contract is up (You know, what we call “Normal”). Usually this would be towards the last two months of a contract, but last time O2 were benevolent enough to allow this to be extended. This time, the change in the handset involved is only minor, and in a climate where O2 needs all the money it can get (the economy is “bad”, apparently), I can’t really see O2 actually doing anything wrong here.

I know with my own phone contract that I’m stuck with it for 18 months. I don’t expect the phone company I am with to allow me special dispensation to cut the contract short because I want it to. I paid my money, I made my choice. If I were running the phone company, I would have to be asking serious questions of myself and my staff if this were allowed to happen to everyone.

Seriously, grow up…