World of Apple

Orange is hiring actors to stand outside of Polish stores to intensify the hype of the release of the iPhone in Poland. From the Reuters article:

“We have these fake queues at front of 20 stores around the country to drum up interest in the iPhone,” a spokesman said.

Apple sold about one million of the new iPhone models in the United States around the July launch weekend, but buyers in Poland may be reluctant to pay hefty monthly charges.

There were no queues at T-Mobile’s (DTEGn.DE: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) Era stores, which will also due to launch the iPhone on Friday.

Fake lines (or any lines) have not formed in front of local T-Mobile stores. Good luck to those who are looking forward to buying an iPhone in their home country!

The USA Today is reporting that the latest iPhone firmware which was released yesterday aims to fix issues related to 3G signal strength.

The newspaper cites reported from iPhones users who state that they are experiencing issues with calls being dropped. The newspaper goes onto speculate that this could be an hardware issue with the Infineon chip used within the iPhone; a possibility that Infineon itself has stated as unlikely.

The article explains that the iPhone 2.0.2 update released yesterday aims to fix the reported issues by addressing how quickly the iPhone 3G will drop a weak 3G signal and begin using a stronger EDGE signal. Often resulting in dropped calls and frustrated users.

Apple spokeswoman Jennifer Bowcock said on Tuesday, “The software update improves communication with 3G networks.”

In an email to a customer purported to be from Steve Jobs it has been acknowledged that an issue exists where third-party applications repeatedly crash on iPhones.

Many report the iPhone 2.0 firmware suddenly failing to load non-default apps regardless of their nature, briefly loading them before abruptly jumping back to the home screen.

The bug occurs both with freshly downloaded software and with updates, but is reported as never having a definite fix; although some report successfully deleting and re-downloading apps to regain access, others find the solution either having no effect or gradually decaying over time to where the apps again fail to run. Restoring the iPhone also seldom works.

Jobs replied with a one-line answer:

“This is a known iPhone bug that is being fixed in the next software update in September.”

Apple has released the latest minor firmware update for the iPhone and iPod touch.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster stated in a note to clients Wednesday that he has increased his estimate of the number of iPhones he expects Apple to sell worldwide in its 4th quarter, from 4.1 million to 4.47 million.

In contrast, Apple sold only 1.12 million iPhones in the same quarter of 2007.

“Our 25 hours of counting iPhone sales in Apple retail stores throughout the country lead us to believe Apple is on pace to beat our previous estimate of 4.1 million iPhones for the September quarter,” analyst Gene Munster wrote.

The analyst is estimating that Apple sells an average of 95 iPhone 3Gs per day at each of its 188 U.S. retail stores.

“We believe Apple will sell 1.78 million units at its U.S. retail stores, and 0.90 million phones at U.S. AT&T locations”, Munster wrote. “Our estimate assumes each of the 2,200 AT&T stores will sell an average of 5 phones per day from the July 11th launch through the end of the September quarter”.

Munster’s team checked U.S. Apple stores for two weeks and in that period noted a 10-percent decrease in sales during the second week. For this reason Munster’s model accounts for the ever decreasing sales of the iPhone 3G.

On that basis Munster’s fourth quarter estimate assumes Apple retail stores will average 31 iPhone sales per day for the remaining 51 days in the quarter.

“We believe that our revision may be conservative and that Apple will meet our estimates,” he wrote. “The August 22nd launch in additional countries should provide another catalyst to sales.”

ZDNet Australia is reporting that large banking corporation HSBC is planning to ditch its current fleet of Blackberrys and switch it staff over to the iPhone. The bank has around 330,000 members of staff worldwide which could equate to over 200,000 iPhone orders.

“We are actually reviewing iPhones from a HSBC Group perspective … and when I say that, I mean globally,” HSBC’s Australia and New Zealand chief information officer Brenton Hush told ZDNet Australia.

“You know, it’s a big decision, especially when you have an existing fleet out there,” he said. “But it’s definitely something we are considering from a HSBC Group perspective.”

“I think [the iPhone] would change some underlying infrastructure considerations from an enterprise perspective,” he said .”But [Apple] have been pretty smart with the design.”

ZDNet adds that HSBC has a $6 billion annual technology budget and a team of technical support staff of over 30,000.

Best Buy has today announced that it will sell the iPhone 3G across the USA starting on September 7th.

The announcement means that the iPhone 3G will be available to buy from over 970 stores across the country.

“We had a lot of work to do, obviously, to get in a position where Apple and AT&T would feel good about Best Buy Mobile carrying it, and that’s what we’ve done in the last 18 months,” said Shawn Score, president of Best Buy Mobile.

Email to customers from SingTel

In the email to customers SingTel vice president of consumer marketing Wong Soon Nam wrote “Thanks for your patience; we will bring in both the 8GB and 16GB versions with your choice of black or white”, adding “At this stage we have not announced pricing. I will share it with you very shortly”.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal Apple CEO, Steve Jobs has revealed some facts and figures about the App Store which has now been live for one month.

According to Jobs more than 60 million applications have been downloaded for the iPhone and iPod touch, roughly 2 million per day. Revenue from those 60 million applications was $30 million, 70% went to developers, 30% was kept by Apple.

According to the Wall Street Journal if Apple continues at its current sales pace then the company stands to take in at least $360 million over the year in revenue.

“This thing’s going to crest a half a billion, soon,” Jobs said. “Who knows, maybe it will be a $1 billion marketplace at some point in time.”

“I’ve never seen anything like this in my career for software,” he added.

Jobs also commented on stories last week that Apple had built an internal “kill-switch” into the iPhone which could allow the company to remotely disable applications.

“Hopefully we never have to pull that lever, but we would be irresponsible not to have a lever like that to pull,” he said.

During last months financial conference call Apple announced that the iPhone 3G would debut in additional countries on August 22nd but gave no further details.

Today a slew of carriers began announcing that they’d be offering the iPhone 3G.

So far the following twenty countries have had official announcements:

• Argentina (America Movil)
• Chile (Claro/America Movil, Movistar/Telefonica)
• Colombia (America Movil)
• Czech Republic (Telefonica O2)
• Ecuador (America Movil)
• El Salvador (America Movil)
• Estonia (TeliaSonera, EMT)
• Guatemala (America Movil)
• Honduras (America Movil)
• Hungary (T-Mobile)
• India (Bharti Airtel, Vodafone)
• Latvia (TeliaSonera)
• Lithuania (TeliaSonera)
• Paraguay (America Movil)
• Peru (America Movil)
• Philippines (Globe Telecom)
• Poland (Orange, Era)
• Romania (Orange)
• Slovakia (T-Mobile, Orange)
• Uruguay (America Movil)

Sources: setteB.it and VentureBeat.