The calm before the storm
It's the Pocket Picks round-up
As we all know, this past week in mobile phones ended with Apple releasing the iPhone to a hysterical reception in the US. Our sister site Pocket Picks still managed to ferret out other handset happenings, however, before throwing in the towel and going iPhone gaga with the rest of the Net.
The week began soberly, with the good news that a Spanish mobile virus coder has been brought to justice after unleashing a plague upon the handsets of thousands of unsuspecting individuals.
A plague of another sort is the Google search engine: it revealed it's the UK and the US's most popular mobile web portal, claiming a significant 31 per cent share in the UK and a whopping 62 per cent in the US.
As part of the VoIP trend that is sweeping the industry just now, Yeigo made its presence known to us this week with a no-nonsense standalone service. Meanwhile, the daddy of the VoIP crowd, Skype, finally made good on its promise to appear on the Nokia N800 internet tablet, with news filtering through about a release in July.
If you're going to be running a VoIP package then you are going to need to be armed to the teeth with facts about what data plan to take advantage of, so Pocket Picks created a nifty run down of the best mobile data packages for UK readers.
Some phone makers attempted to make technological waves ahead of Apple's leviathan. NEC, for instance, revealed its new cheap to produce 8MP sensors for mobile phones. Samsung also unveiled a nifty advance with its 64GB drives, tailored for portable electronics such as mobile phones and iPods. But by Friday it was impossible to stand in the way of iPhone.
The first iPhone campers were spotted on Monday, and as the lines started to increase, we got wind of a service hiring out professional iPhone line squatters for those too busy to spend days standing about in Times Square waiting for a new phone to come out.
By mid week, the very first review of the iPhone was posted on the Wall Street Journal website, and was quickly followed by the New York Times posting its own mirthful video review on YouTube. Rumour-wise there were whisperings again that Vodafone had snared the exclusive UK rights to distribute the iPhone; we think until the media blitzkrieg surrounding the launch of the device in the US dies down it is unlikely that Apple will confirm a Euro partner.
By Thursday, even Playboy was getting in on the iPhone act, releasing a new free to download package of content for the device. (Insert your own bawdy multi-touch pun here.) And by Saturday morning UK-time, the iPhone was on the US streets, it had been taken to pieces by techies, and in a truly illustrative move even the PDF manual was being downloaded by those who'd missed out.
It will surely be years before we see such madness again. Click 'Track It!' to get seven days worth of Life After The iPhone Cometh news next week.