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What-ever. My much mocked phone is very, very good.

I just find it amusing how blind some people can be to the limitations of the iphone simply because its an APPLE iphone.- We have people at work who are zealous about it!

I MAY have snagged a 16gig 3g for free!! My mum has bought the i4 and has offered Bex her 16gig 3g, so we're taking it and Bex is getting my 8gig and I get the bigger capacity.
YAY!!

I'd LOVE an i4, but just can't justify the expense... several weddings, 30th birthdays, a holiday etc have to take precedence. At the end of the day, its just a phone (although, admittedly an AMAZINGLY good one).

I am the first to admit that it isn't perfect but it has so many good features (the screen being top of my list - it makes website graphics look surprising poor at times!) that I think the antenna issue is a storm in a tea cup. I have never had any problems.

Apple antenna page shows all smart phones having the same problem. It doesn't answer the potential dropped calls complaint but signal loss appears universal. I am off to try it with Lizzies 3G phone. I suspect that the complaint about dropped calls is mistakenly being blames on signal attenuation. Media are having fun with this one though.

Test results are in. The 3G dropped 1 bar and the 4 dropped 2. Still connected to make calls though.

Urgent information for any iPhone owner A PDF security exploit is in the wild and has been demonstrated by Jailbreak.com which can be used to unlock your iphone from the iTunes mandated apps etc. Be very careful when opening pdf's from websites becuase it could be exploited for more sinister purposes.

This is probably the biggest security hole I have ever seen on any platform - I hope it is not as bad as the zero day hole in Windows. Time will tell, although I suspect that Apple won't say much about their findings until a fix is available.

Cases within cases! It's one of the most industrial-looking phone cases I've seen in a while, certainly a world away from Chrissie's sleeping bag.

Director makes a feature length film on an iPhone that is pretty impressive and it only cost $133k. I wonder if we could see that on the Internet.

iPhone iOS 4.3 to enable a personal wifi hotspot? This is a great rumour, if that is the case then I could share my Internet connection from the phone to the iPad. That would be a great way to avoid the need for multiple 3G contracts.

Mr. Park's a pretty famous director, not sure if we'll ever get to see the film as things stand at present though!

It does highlight the 4th generation's rather nice 720p video recording capabilities. Nice publicity for Apple.

Have already seen rumours about the iPhone 5 that should be out this year... near field cardless payment technology and possible full HD movie capability were mooted. Still early days yet though.

I am liking the start of the iCloud beta. Although you can always re-download an app that you have purchased you need to be able to find it again and also remember that you have bought it in the first place. The 'app store' on your iPhone has now been udpated and you will find a handy 'Purchased' section under the update tab. This gives you a list of all the apps you have purchased and a list of apps that are not currently installed on your phone.

This is a nice idea that makes life easier = clever computing!

Also it is interesting that Apple's new strategy is to lock you into their ecosystem. Buy (literally) into the cloud and you will have access to your files on all your Apple 'devices' such as Apple TV, iMac, iPhone, iPod and iPad. BUT to make the most of it you first of all need to own all / some of the above. Since I have three out of five I don't think that I am complaining but you must admit it is a clever strategy. Now imagine if you ever want to leave. You might have spent a fortune on all your music, storage and apple devices so it becomes very, very difficult to abandon them therefore (hopefully for Apple) it will have continued success.

Another interesting thing is that Google is trying very hard to convince people that the cloud is the way forward but they don't have to eco-system available to make the customers life easy. On this basis you sort of get the impression that they will be second best rather than cloud market leaders.

The final point of interest (after lots of thinking) is the absence of an iPhone 5 announcement. This breaks with their previous 1 per year release. It is total conjecture to wonder why but it would be interesting to know. Previously it has been a breakneck development cycle so I wonder if they are pausing to concentrate on the whole eco-system (rather than obsess on one part of it) to ensure its life span is extended into the medium / long term. Apple now have four very successful products and the iCloud appears to be a way of extending their useful life into the next decade.

PS I was wrong about the iPhone 5 release date in June / July. It just goes to show you can never predict the future!

So far so good, but what happens when Apple say that iCloud is being discontinued, when they have a major hacker incident or when they go bust? I have seen this happen with online photo libraries. An e-mail goes out saying download all your files before -insert date - and then the website can't keep up with all the downloading. Crash. Files lost.

As a principle I would rather have responsibility for my own archive and then I can accept whatever goes wrong as having been under my control.

Another potential problem I see with, say, rare mucsic tracks is that iCloud and the copyright holder might fall out and some items could be withdrawn. Once I buy a CD I have a CD. End of story.

So I'm not totally sold on the idea, but the majority may well be. If so, then it will be the future.

The files are maintained on your mac as a permanent copy, they are just made available in the cloud to 'push' to all of your devices. If you already own the cd they can't take that away from you!

Think of the other benefit. Computer goes pop but you just buy a new mac, log into your account and re-download all your files back onto your local hard drive. Nothing lost, no external hard drives to fail etc.

I know what you mean about the security but that is largely out of our hands (other than basic prudence and internet-savvi), there are massively more sensitive computer data about us on the internet than our music collection. For example, the banks. I suspect that information about us are online even if you don't use their internet banking site. Does that stop you banking with them?!

Interesting questions Mike, in interesting times. I have no answers...

Wow. This is an amazing topic!