June 2007 Archives

Product (RED) is an amazing idea, but many of us don’t want a red iPod, a red Razr, or well, much of anything in red. There is one (RED) product, though, that’s exactly the same as the non-(RED) counterpart: an iTunes Gift Card.

Available in a $25 denomination, $2.50 of each iTunes (PRODUCT) RED Gift Card goes to the Global Fund to fight AIDS in Africa. Instead of paying for your iTunes music, movies and TV shows directly with a credit card, I urge you to buy and redeem these cards instead. Every little bit counts, and you give up nothing.

There’s also an added bonus for those of us outside the United States: if you buy these cards on your next trip stateside, you can open an account on the U.S. iTunes Store without a U.S. credit card. You’ll get cheaper prices and access to more music, movies and TV shows than in the iTunes Stores in other countries.

Rarely have we Europeans felt so much like outsiders in the excitement of an Apple product launch. Sure, Apple hardware often takes a few weeks longer to reach Europe, and some stuff—like movies and TV shows in the iTunes Store—are still not available almost two years after the U.S. launch. Before today, I haven’t really cared that much about this delay. But man, I’d really like to get my hands on an iPhone.

The iPhone is unlikely to be available here in Finland for quite some time. There are a couple of reasons for this: first, if Apple insists—like I think they’ll do—that all carriers offering the iPhone implement Visual Voicemail, small markets not served by the huge international carriers like Vodafone and T-Mobile are likely to miss out. Second, it is actually illegal in Finland to sell phones locked into carrier contracts. There is an exception to this law for 3G devices, but the iPhone isn’t a 3G phone. As things stand, there is no way for Apple to partner with a carrier to bring the current iPhone to this market.

Apple is promising an iPhone for the Asian market in 2008, and that device is more likely to be a 3G device. So, about a year from now, I can hopefully buy one. Meanwhile, I can only repeat to myself the great things I do with my Nokia phone that I couldn’t with an iPhone:

• I use it as a 2Mbps 3.5G modem for my MacBook Pro
• I use custom MP3 ringtones (although, ironically, my current one, iPhone Ringtone.mp3, probably does not count as an advantage over the iPhone)
• Whenever I have WiFi access, my phone can use that to make and receive calls. I get local rates everywhere, rather than paying through the nose for GSM roaming in Muscat, Oman.
• For unlimited 2Mbps data, I pay the equivalent of $15 a month. Calls are $.10 a minute.

No matter how much I lust after an iPhone, stuff on that list is pretty crucial to me. Reality bites.

Thanks for everyone who reported that the new Safari 3 Beta broke Pyro. Pyro 1.6, fresh off the compilers, seems to fix this issue. Visit the Pyro site for the download and list of changes.

Update: It seems there are still problems with running Pyro (and Campfire) with the Safari 3 beta, and the reasons are not obvious at this point. (We’re all at WWDC, which means debugging this is hard at the moment.) Our current recommendation is to stay with Safari 2 (or downgrade to it). Sorry about that.