Make a wish and it comes true, eh? I wondered about the iPhone in last week's podcast and at midnight, Apple sent me an SMS message to tell me it was ready. More on that later. This week a look at theft of devices and one possible solution.

Undercover for the iPhone

Needless to say, there is still nothing from True and also nothing from Skyhook, although I will send them a link to the article with some other comments and questions.

First off in this part, Apple's financial results were released about 12 hours after the last podcast went out. I knew there was no point in me waiting and there were plenty of sources of information for the results if anyone was interested. Wrong there, wasn't I? The Post had nothing on that or on the billionth download of an iPhone app. I did put out a newsfeed item that linked to the Apple site, but it was not reported by several sources.

So, catch up time. . . .

In the middle of an economic recession, Apple again reported record results with revenue of $8.16 billion and a quarterly profit of $1.21 billion. Last year ion the same quarter, Apple had revenue of $7.51 billion and profit of $1.05 billion. Cupertino sold sold 2.22 million Macs in the quarter, a slight decline; and 11.01 million iPods which was a small increase, plus 3.79 million iPhones: growth of 123%. And that is reported elsewhere as bringing the iPhone to a 1.5% world market share.

There are lots of other boring bits of information on the Apple handout, but a couple of other snippets suggested that the company os on track with its current management team and that no netbook is coming soon. More on this with the rumours.

I picked up the test iPhone on Thursday morning and had a run through and a chat then left in a rather happy mood. It was suggested that as this is unlocked, I might want to play for a couple of weeks (or whatever) with the True SIM card, then swap to my DTAC number. As I am off to the UK next week I will be using the DTAC Sim with roaming, but I will have to be careful about too much online stuff. As luck would have it a UK site, called Cheap Flights has an article full of suggestions on how to keep things under control with an iPhone when abroad.

I just mentioned that I am off to England and it is for the first time in about 14 years I think. I am dreading it. I intend to be working a bit while there and that includes the podcast but as yet I am not sure about finding connections good enough to upload files. Bear with me on this.

The iPhone arrives at a perfect time as I am in the mood for apps and at least the next couple of weeks will se me looking at those which are aimed at Thailand or Thai users. I did add that Undercover to the iPhone and that now appears on the map, when I can find a GPS signal. As I mentioned in the article, this does not work inside.

This has caused some minor problems with one of the really useful apps I downloaded in the last few days, called WiFiFoFum (you may need to have been an English kid to get the joke there).

This is like one of those old hackers tools that used to abound and not only does it track wifi connections, which the iPhone and iPod touch can do anyway, but it finds a lot more detail including the valuable MAC number and the GPS location. That is if it can find a GPS signal. If it does, the wifi outputs it tracks can be logged and a log can be used. I am about to contact Skyhook to see if they will accept this data without the owners details. They do this in the US with people riding round in cars, but I need to ask first.

I would also urge anyone with wifi access -- at home or work -- to submit the details to Skyhook.

A nice touch from Apple this week as they have now brought in Live Chat support, something that did make a basic appearance when the service had its lurching launch last year. If you encounter an issue while using MobileMe and would like to address it immediately, simply go to MobileMe support. Have a look to see if it is already answered, and if not, start the Live Chat.

A lot of news sources missed the financial results, they missed the billion downloads, but made an awful lot of Apple authorising an app that seems to promote violence towards babies: Baby Shaker. The link I have is from Roughly Drafted who look at the process leading to the apology rather than the "horror stories" that much of the press dug up.

I think we need to realise that there is not one person authorising iPhone apps and, to borrow a phrase, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This is why some apps appear and some are rejected and also why some that pass the process later come to be withdrawn. It is not all Steve Jobs sitting in his office putting the stamp of approval on every one that appears.

One of the earliest that was later rejected was the gauche $999 picture of a ruby or some red gem that simply was a statement of wealth. Some of the applications that simulate the passing of wind were rejected initially, but there was some public pressure (no puns intended) and the doors had to be opened. [And I had to record that three times I was laughing so much.] I think anything like that is in bad taste, but that is me and if it were me, I would reject it.

A lot of people are also getting worked up about an apparent 1600 drop in Apple employees, which is as far as the story will go in most cases. There is, however, far more to it than most reporters will want and you have to read the figures correctly as Peter Kafka did, as well as the unnamed Mac Daily News person.

Kafka had a look and it turns out that these are not 1600 real people. This is the difference between 15600 and 14,000 full-time equivalent employees, MDN actually went to the filing and the figure was not 15,600 but 15,900 and part of that supposed cut was after the new year holiday period when, indeed more people are taken on to help with the sales and more hours (making that equivalent figure) are worked.

One of those that did make that erroneous link was Adam Hartley in Tech Radar and his story also headlined in Huffington Post, but he is blaming CNET who trawled through the reports first.

Last Friday morning, here, the apps store reached one billion downloads. That took nine months and is a respectable revenue generator for Apple with the 35,000 apps available. Someone made a video that went on YouTube and I found it on MacDaily News. It is a little long, unless you are into watching numbers and the change occurs, unsurprisingly, almost at the end.

And the winner was a 13-year old from Connecticut, named Connor Mulcahey, and the app he downloaded was Bump Technologies' free contact information exchange app Bump. I did see one sour grapes comment on the forums moaning that the free app should not have qualified: how on earth does anyone start to separate free from paid apps?

We had some problems with websites this week.

It is birthday time in my house and I had promised a pair of sports shoes, although when the iPhone came out of my pocket I had to control the little green-eyed monster. We looked at the Adidas website first and a pair of shoes was selected. I went into a couple of the shops and none had the specific type; so later we also phoned another retailer and was told that they had either not yet come or already gone.

Another selection was made, but this time we phoned around first: same again. These shoes may be on the Thai pages of the website, but that means nothing here. The Adidas site is not too easy to navigate with so many graphics and the like, and there is apparently no way to contact the company unless you are a supplier, Press, or looking for a career.

We switched to Nike but that was even less user friendly. Almost every link takes you to a flash animation that has to load first, before you can find if you are heading in the right direction. I did find a search panel but "Shoes" was not good enough: No result was the answer.

I am also a little peeved by PayPal. Not a big deal, but we are dealing with international purchases online and the PayPal system is supposed to help with that. I know I had some PayPal cash in my account so I bought some music from a site called 7Digital, which is in the UK. Although I checked out using the PayPal method, I found later that day that the amount had been deducted from my credit card, which is issued in Thailand, so charges me in baht.

When I queried this with PayPal, they were really quick off the mark and I had a reply in under 24 hours:

1. If your target currency matches your PayPal balance, the money will be first taken from your balance.

   That was OK, I had $24 and the 5.99 pounds was well within that.

2. If not, the money will be taken from your credit card.

   Which is what I expect. So not problems there, but. . .

3. Your current PayPal balance is USD, and your target currency is Pounds in the transaction, so the money was charged from your credit card.

   Sigh. . . . And as I say, that will be in baht.

Rumours time and let's start with Snow Leopard as we have some information about that. For one thing, the Server version is rumoured to be making available secure corporate email and contacts for the iPhone, which will please some businesses and chip away just a bit more at the Windows server. This is covered by both AppleInsider and MacNN. While another AppleInsider item discusses the way Snow Leopard is expected to replace certain parts of QuickTime and also add screen recording; and still more from AppleInsider tells us that support for YouTube will be built in to the OS.

With the focus on Apps, Macsismum News among others, tells us that the WWDC has already been sold out, far earlier than usual. A lot of interest there.

Good intelligence often comes not from interviews (or even torture) but often snippets of data then joining the dots. TUAW report on a tiny bot of data that was found inside stats from Adium, the messenger software that many Mac owners use. There was a reference to a MacBookmini. Now as Mike Scramm reminds us a while back there was a reference to what was then an unknown device called a MacBook Air.

A couple of sites are reporting the imminence of a deal between Apple and Verizon, which is interesting in two ways. First AT&T want the iPhone relationship to continue. Secondly, the phone that is being mooted as heading towards Verizon is a mini version of the iPhone. That rumour again. But there is another interesting point here in that Verizon uses CDMA, like Hutch does here.

Later we read some opposite views. First, Marguerite Reardon asks which smartphone maker ISN'T Verizon talking to? While Roughly Drafted suggest that Apple are quite happy with the current arrangements and no CDMA phone is in the works.

Actually, I will reserve judgement on that last part as no one really knows what Apple is experimenting with, or how they will do things.

All that stuff that Hutch and CAT use comes from Huawei in China and a few weeks ago we looked at the sudden panic in the UK when they realised lots of critical equipment there was from Huawei and there were fears there might be some form of back door. Now Chris Williams in the Register is reporting that the former Home Secretary [interior Minister], David Blunkett is pushing for an enquiry. Shutting the back door after the wrong course was taken?

File this next one under points of interest: It was reported in the Telegraph online, that one of the best cures for a hangover is a bacon sandwich. It is apparently all connected with proteins and amino acids and the way these react with sugars in the blood. Actually the good smell is enough to start the cure. I used to know a late night cafe in Leeds, behind the town hall that sold excellent examples until the small hours.

The Daily Telegraph is a crusty newspaper that is beloved of retired colonels and the like. I used to work with one lady in a hotel in Frinton who read the Telegraph -- and Frinton still closes the railway level crossing gates to keep the hoi polloi out. Only Dorothy was always three days later. She delighted in the story that she did not know that WW2 had broken out until 4 September.

I also see in the Nation this week that elephants are to be embedded with microchips which will alert authorities as soon as they step out of their designated areas; or are led out. Too many end up in the streets of Bangkok helping their handlers beg and tugging at the heart strings of tourists. They become a menace because of their size -- not that the elephants are at fault.

I remember riding my motorcycle down a road in Bangkok near Victory Monument and being aware that the road had sort of been blanked out. Where there should have been things, there was nothing. I did slow down in case and it was just as well as I was approaching an elephant's unlit nether quarters.

OK, here is a use for Twitter. Someone local posted on Twitter on Saturday evening about a job, so I hit the link and found the details. It is for a Thai software Engineer, for Google, and the position is based in Shanghai.

Just following up a point I made last week (and relevant to this week's main item), I did a check on Versiontracker and searched using the simple keyword, BACKUP. That came up with 185 results: 8 or more pages of software that should help. And in the worst case scenario, clicking on a file and moving it to an external disk will copy it too, but to make sure, hold down the Option and Shift keys as you drag it across.

We also mentioned last week (and the week before come to that) the group Nine Inch Nails. In Podcast 195 we discussed the iPhone app which does a great job; and this week we see that others are beginning to notice that there is new technology about.

We read that Linkin Park, and Warner Bros. Records have signed an agreement with a company called Artificial Life to produce applications for the iPhone and iPod touch.

We read that Nokia have problems on several fronts and are cutting jobs and trimming online services. I also heard on a BBC podcast that Nokia's download service -- another one that was going to challenge iTunes -- has so few customers, that it may also die.

A lot of my students have really got to grips with Ubuntu with a couple moving entirely over to the platform. They were able to argue convincingly for it being a strong platform in a series of papers they prepared in my class, but conceded that it was not really up to a small business environment for a number of reasons.

Now Renai LeMay on CNET news has written about the latest version, which is 9.0.4 and he claims that he is beginning to prefer this to Windows 7 and Mac OS X. He cites use of multiple applications and an improved interface as a couple of reasons for his preference in a well written article. He also suggests it could be a threat to OS X. Perhaps, but I am afraid that it may suffer from what used to be a criticism of Macs: too few applications.

In Windows 7 it is rumoured that Redmond is finally to retire one of the biggest virus spreaders: Autorun. Plug it in and install the virus.

While we have Windows in mind, I read in the NY Times online last week that quarterly revenue fell there for the first time. Wait a moment, didn't Ballmer say that Apple was finished and MS growing? That must be his distorting mirror at work again. Revenue fell 6 percent, to $13.65 billion; while we mentioned earlier that Apple's revenue was $8.16 billion. Still a long way behind of course, but Apple is not a software company and its market share is about 10% while Redmond has about 85% now. Those figures suggest that Apple is getting a lot more bang for its bucks.

In the fallout from the recession including its receding profits and job cuts, Microsoft has taken decisive action in its ruthless desire to curb unnecessary expenses. They have cancelled the company picnic. That will do a lot for morale.

And as a final note, all the images with the podcast page this time are either screen shots or photos from the iPhone which produces images at a resolution of 1600 x 1200. With one of the images here, I exported as a TIFF and produced a file of 10.6 MB which was about 21" x 16". A little less vibrant than those from my Nikon SLR, but interesting.

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