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iPhone upgrade excitement

So, for those of you who don’t know – in which case, may I say what a nice rock that is you’ve been living under – last Friday Apple released the third iteration of the iPhone (which is either called the “iPhone 3G S” or the “iPhone 3GS”, depending on when and where you look). The differences from its predecessor – faster, more memory, far better camera, compass – make it an attractive option to 3G owners (especially the weaker-willed of them); to those who stuck with their original iPhones, it’s a fantastic upgrade. I am one of these people.

For existing iPhone 3G owners though, there’s a snag stemming from the fact that the original iPhone – unlike just about every other mainstream mobile from the last few years – was not subsidised by the network carrying it: in the case of the UK, this was O2. The way this works for most phones is that the network pays a large portion of the phone’s cost, in return for the customer signing up to an n-month contract with them. As the Macalope puts it, it’s a loan with the repayments baked into the cost of the service contract. As a result, when the iPhone 3G came out last year, existing iPhone owners had no outstanding loan payments to make, so O2 quite rightly allowed them an early upgrade. This time around, iPhone 3G owners, who had bought their handsets at the lower “loan price”, were somewhat put out to hear that they would either have to wait out their contract (tedious), buy out their contract (expensive, at a minimum of £35/month × 6 months == £210), or buy the new phone on a Pay and Go deal (seriously expensive, at a starting price of £440.40 for the 16GB model). Cue enraged rants, online petitions, threats of defection to other networks and other general foot-stamping.

In response to (or possibly anticipation of) these complaints, O2 have put up an Upgrade FAQs page on their site, addressing the concerns of the irate iPhone owners and explaining why they won’t offer the same terms that they did when upgrading last time. This page, however, did not answer my most pressing question: what are the upgrade terms for upgrading from the original 2G iPhone to the 3GS? There is plenty of spiel about how “the original 2G iPhone was unique as customers bought the device outright” and “contract terms of iPhone 3G are […] the same as for every other handset we sell”, but nothing about upgrade terms from original iPhones. So I popped into the nearest O2 store and asked them directly.

My answer? Exactly the same as if I were upgrading from an iPhone 3G. I would have to wait out or buy out the remaining months of my contract, or pay through the nose to buy the phone outright.

Not entirely trusting this (or perhaps not wanting to), I headed over to Cambridge’s local Apple store and asked them the same question. Same answer.

In short, O2 are not offering early upgrades to 3G owners, for which they give perfectly valid reasons. They are also not offering early upgrades to original iPhone owners either, for which the originally stated reasons no longer apply. The only reason I can think of that applies is “because we can; because you signed a contract, and we know you’ll probably be staying with us anyway”. I honestly can’t see how this makes economic sense from O2’s perspective: there are no loan payments to recoup, and original iPhone owners will have an absolute maximum of seven months left on their contracts (I don’t believe there was a 24-month contract available for the 3G). Given that they are turning up asking to sign up for up to two years, turning them away and pissing them off in one smooth motion seems to be a very bad plan.

For some reason, I have to say I’m feeling remarkably sanguine about the whole affair. Sure, I’d love to have a beautiful new iPhone at a price that isn’t batshit insane, and I’d love to have it right now, but I wouldn’t have signed up to my original 18-month contract if I wasn’t willing to serve out an 18-month contract. So I’m not incensed at the prospect of waiting until September or October to get a faster, shinier phone with faster, shinier internet access, a faster, shinier camera and a compass which, while not noted for being fast, certainly looks pretty shiny. I’m just a little disappointed that O2 haven’t thought to – or have decided not to – extend the same courtesy to original iPhone owners this time around that they did before. There’s a possibility that this will change at some point between now and September, and that I’ll be able to upgrade, but I’m not holding my breath.

Invisible Adium!

My IM client of choice (pretty much ever since I first bought a Mac) has been the excellent Adium. It gives me access to all my accounts, it gives me a shiny-shiny Mac-like interface with more keyboard shortcuts than I can shake a large keyboard-shortcut-shaking stick at, and it has improved greatly with every release, of which there have been many.

What it hasn’t offered me, at least until now, has been the ability to sign on in invisible mode. When you quit, Adium remembers the status of each of your accounts, and returns to that status when you next launch the program. Very useful, unless you want to sign on invisibly without everyone on your contact list seeing you online for a joyous but fleeting second.

There are several solutions to this problem, some more pleasant than others. There are solutions involving writing AppleScripts, there are solutions involving setting yourself into invisible mode before you sign off (although, as Ryan Tomayko points out in an otherwise unrelated article, The Thing About Git, solutions which involve the words “you should have” are dangerous things). None of these were good enough for me.

Today, after a bit of poking around on the Adium bug tracker, I found the solution I needed: if you hold down the Shift key when you launch Adium, it starts itself up but doesn’t connect any of your accounts. You are then free to select invisibility at your leisure.

On Authentication

I have a confession to make: I don’t like passwords.

To clarify that statement, I don’t like seeing passwords. A row of asterisks is fine: perfectly happy with that. A row of little black circles is even better: after all, it’s prettier. But looking at a monitor, sheet of paper or Post-It note and seeing a password staring back at me sends a little shiver running down my spine. Some cultures are reputed to believe that taking a photograph of someone steals a little piece of their soul; I tend to think much the same about writing down someone’s password. “Keep it secret”, as they say; “keep it safe”.

This, of course, is pretty much the standard geek attitude to passwords: they are to be guarded with one’s life. Offer a geek a Mars bar for their password, and they’ll offer you an angry stream of verbal abuse. Or possibly a lecture on social engineering and user account security. Knowing most geeks, it’ll probably be somewhere between the two.

All of this leads up to a discussion of two things: the OAuth protocol which aims, amongst other laudable goals, to help safeguard users’ passwords, and the distinctly unnerving trend which Jeremy Keith has christened the password anti-pattern, which really doesn’t.

Read on…

Moving

This weekend, I have been clearing out the house that Jo and I have been sharing this past year. As soon as is feasible, I plan to find a flat somewhere in or around Cambridge and shift all of my worldly possessions into it.

This week, Ben Ward has been clearing out the London flat that he has been sharing with David Singleton this past year. Tomorrow, he plans to emigrate to San Francisco and work for Yahoo! Brickhouse.

I wish us both the best of luck. It’s going to be interesting.

First Time

Well, things have been more than a little insane of late: I’ve gone from a fixed-term contract to full-term employment (with Hyperspheric), moved house (with Jo, giving me an opportunity to use XFN’s co-resident attribute) and engaged in a survival exercise whereby I had to cope for two weeks with neither fridge nor delicious internets (the latter of which has been solved by Be who, by and large, have been excellent).

The majority of the insanity, however, is now mercifully behind me (with the exception of my brand new copy of Bioshock, which seems to feature insanity fairly prominently), so it’s now time to look forward to the future. And to a new experience.

It’s quite a popular topic of conversation: those lucky people who have done it before talk about how fantastic it is, and many of those who have not yet had the pleasure think about what it would be like. Those in this latter category, such as myself, wonder who it’s going to be with, whether we’re going to be any good at it, and of course there’s the worry that it’s going to be over almost before it starts.

Not to mention all the fun that’s going to happen between sessions.

I’m talking, of course, about BarCamp Brighton, at which I lose my BarCamp virginity. As the aspects of last year’s South by Southwest which I remember most fondly were the sense of community and the bouncing around of thoughts and ideas, this looks to be precisely that, without the registration fee or the 12-hour journey time. For those of you who will be attending, I look forward eagerly to seeing you there.

Oh, and I’ve ordered myself a shiny new MacBook: after all, I hear these things can be much more fun if you bring the right toys along.