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The much anticipated iPhone 3G S is finally making its way to customers’ hands this morning. The doors at Apple and AT&T stores start opening at 7 a.m., but many have been in line much earlier, like previous iPhone releases. This time is a little different because the iPhone 3G S was available for pre-order before the launch date. Customers that pre-ordered their iPhone 3G S had the option to pick up their new “Jesus” phone at an AT&T or Apple store today or have it shipped directly to them with a beginning arrival date of June 19th. The stores were planning to have two lines: paid and paying.
Another difference this year is that Apple released the new OS 3.0 two days earlier than the iPhone 3G S launch. Last year, Apple released OS 2.0 on the same day as the iPhone 3G launch which caused wide span blackouts of the iTunes activation process. With every iPhone owner, OG and 3G, hammering the iTunes servers trying to upgrade to OS 2.0 and activate service, iTunes sadly failed miserably. Many customers, including myself, with their new 3G were not able to get it activated till much later in the day. I say thank you to Apple for learning from its previous mistakes.
How was your experience in the lines this year? Is this your first iPhone or have you waited before? Let us know your experience getting your new iPhone 3G S in the comments.
UPDATE: Reports are coming in from all over the US that the lines are moving really quickly. It’s great to see that Apple and AT&T got it right this year. If you are still in line, stay strong, it will all be worth it.
The iPhone Dev-Team has been working hard to bring us jailbreak software for the iPhone and iPod Touch and their latest versions of Pwnage Tool and QuickPwn are on the verge of being released. There are still a few bugs they are trying to work out before they release, but it should not take them that long. In the meantime, they may release a version that still has a bug that disables the YouTube app on devices that are not legally activated with AT&T, seeing that it will only affect iPhones that are unlocked.
Update 1 (Wednesday morning):
Only ultrasn0w is going to take til Friday to get pushed out. All of our other tools should be out pretty soon after the official Apple release.
If you apply our jailbreak when it comes out, you can install ultrasn0w anytime after that. You obviously won’t have cell service in the meantime, though.
This may in fact be directly applicable to the iPhone 3GS if it can be jailbroken, because it runs the same baseband version. Whether or not it can be jailbroken is a big question right now!
If you’re on Twitter, please give @Oranav a pat on the back. He could have revealed the crash he found to Apple and maybe gotten quite an incentive in return. Instead, he told us about it so that we could work it into an injection vector for the soft unlock.
Update 2 (Thursday morning):
We have two issues that we’ve been trying to resolve:
There are new 3.0 complications with YouTube.app if you’re on a hacktivated (unofficially activated) device
There’s a bug in Apple’s new version of asr that our custom IPSW’s are tickling and causing crashes on, on some devices. (For the nerdy or curious among us, the details of that bug were tweeted by planetbeing a month ago.)
As of Thursday morning we now have a workaround for #2. For #1, we’ll try our best to get it fixed but we may end up releasing a preliminary jailbreak in which YouTube doesn’t work for hacktivated devices, and then follow that up with a more complete jailbreak when we can.
Huge numbers of irate iPhone owners voiced their displeasure concerning the upgrade policy that alienated them from getting the advertised $199 and $299 price for the upcoming iPhone 3GS due to launch Friday. Users spread the word through Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, and various other social networks. AT&T has been a top trending topic on Twitter for the last couple weeks since Apple’s announcement of the iPhone 3GS at WWDC. AT&T has apparently heard the mass plea for a better solution to subsidized pricing.
While I’m glad to see them listening to their customers, I would like to see them take a different approach across the board with their upgrade policy, not just with the iPhone.
The following video also addresses some other concerns AT&T customers have.
An Update for Our Customers
Some customers have had questions about our plans and policies for iPhone 3G S, and we’d like to provide you with answers. We’d also like to announce a change to the date when some iPhone customers are eligible for our best upgrade pricing to iPhone 3G S.
Pricing
Importantly, we want our customers to better understand our wireless device upgrade program. Like most U.S. carriers, we offer a variety of phones that we sell below our actual cost when customers agree to sign service agreements. In general, the more a customer spends with us, the quicker they become eligible for a price break on a new device. For example, iPhone customers who spend more than $99 a month per line with us generally are eligible for an upgrade between 12 and 18 months into their contract.
We also currently offer early upgrade pricing only for iPhone 3G S and iPhone 3G.
All of that said, we’ve been listening to our customers. And since many of our iPhone 3G customers are early adopters and literally weeks shy of being upgrade eligible due to iPhone 3G S launching 11 months after iPhone 3G, we’re extending the window of upgrade eligibility for a limited time.
We’re now pleased to offer our iPhone 3G customers who are upgrade eligible in July, August or September 2009 our best upgrade pricing, beginning Thursday, June 18.
If you’re one of the many customers who will benefit from this change, please note that our upgrade eligibility tools will reflect this change on Thursday, June 18.
We invite you to come to our stores beginning Friday during normal store hours, although please be aware that customer demand may exceed supply in some of our stores. You may also preorder online on June 18 at www.att.com/iphone, and your iPhone 3G S will arrive in 7 – 14 days. Or you can purchase iPhone 3G S at Apple’s retail and online stores, as well as at other popular retailers.
If you’re one of the customers who benefits from this change, and you’ve already preordered from an AT&T store, we’ll adjust the price of the device when you pick it up. If you benefit from the change and you pre-ordered from AT&T online, we’ll send you an e-mail and issue you a credit.
If you pre-ordered an iPhone 3G S through Apple’s online store, your upgrade eligibility will be reassessed based on AT&T’s new upgrade policy for iPhone 3G owners. If you are eligible for the lower price, Apple will issue you a credit for the difference as applicable.
So, what if you still aren’t eligible for our best upgrade pricing and you still want iPhone 3G S now? You do have options:
You may qualify for the iPhone 3G S early upgrade price of $399 (16GB) or $499 (32GB).
You can pay full retail—and not have to sign a 2-year contract—at $599 (16GB) or $699 (32GB).
You can wait until you’re eligible for our best upgrade pricing. We invite you to check your upgrade eligibility by visiting www.att.com/iphone, calling *NEW# (*639#) on your AT&T device (we’ll send you a text with upgrade information), or visiting any of our over 2,200 stores.
If you want more details on our pricing and upgrade policy, check out our FAQs. And as always, you may visit one of our stores to talk with a representative.
In Summary
We’ve listened to our customers — and hope our response helps answer some of your questions and concerns.
We are incredibly proud to be the U.S. carrier for the new iPhone 3G S and will work around the clock to be ready on June 19 to serve customers who are interested in the fastest, most powerful iPhone yet.
Apple has just released the latest and greatest iPhone firmware upgrade 3.0 Connect your iPhone to iTunes and get your update on! If you are running a jailbroken iPhone I suggest restoring to a factory fresh 2.2.1 then perform the upgrade to 3.0, just to be safe. Keep in mind, if you are currently jailbroken, you will lose all of your jailbroken apps. If you do not want to lose all of your unofficial apps then I would wait for the official QuickPwn release for 3.0 before upgrading. If you are unlocked with Yellowsnow then I would also wait for the upcoming Ultrasnow release due Friday.
Major League Baseball has provided streaming video clips of game highlights in their At Bat iPhone app for some time now, but beginning tomorrow an update to the app will allow users to watch live baseball games on the iPhone over 3G and Wifi networks. This update will require the iPhone to be running the latest 3.0 firmware, which is due to release today.
As of tomorrow, only two games will be broadcast for the iPhone: Chicago Cubs-White Sox at 2:20 p.m. ET, and the Detroit Tigers-St. Louis Cardinals at 8:15 p.m. MLB will deliver 2 out-of-market games per day via the iPhone but has plans to include all the games they provide via MLB.tv in the near future. As stated, all broadcasts available will be out-of-market which means, if you live in the local market for the team you will not be able to watch it on your iPhone or iPod Touch. Nationally broadcast games on FOX and ESPN will also be excluded from the iPhone stream.
If you follow a lot of people on Twitter, it can be overwhelming to try and keep up with everyone. TweetDeck for PC and Mac desktop has functions to create filters for your tweets. If you have more than a couple hundred people you follow, most likely you don’t read each and every tweet. With TweetDeck you can create a filter for specific people that you absolutely want to see all the time. You can create a number of filters (columns) so that you can break down the people you follow into groups such as friends, business, development, funny, etc. I have been using a similar product, Seesmic, that has slight differences but functions in much the same way. Both TweetDeck and Seesmic also connect to your Facebook account so you can “totally social out”.
TweetDeck has announced that they will be releasing an iPhone app version of their product tonight at midnight EST. Whether it actually comes out on the App Store at that time is up to Apple and their approval department. Pete Cashmore with Mashable has reported that they have had a chance to demo the product and is quite impressed. They are reporting that the iPhone app also syncs with the desktop client so you have one seamless experience whether you are on your iPhone or computer. In my experience with the TweetDeck desktop client I find that it is a major memory hog; I wonder if they have been able to slim it down so that it doesn’t crash the iPhone all the time. A list of the apps features are:
- Column based friend groups (like TweetDeck desktop)
- TweetDeck desktop syncing (make a change on the iPhone and it’s reflected back on the PC)
- Facebooktoolbar like status updates
- Multiple account support
- Flicking to move between columns
- Shake to refresh
