Could BBC iPlayer be headed for the iPhone?

Could BBC iPlayer be headed for the iPhone?

iPlayer on the iPhone, image courtesy intomobile.com

There have some been some tantalising tidbits floating around the web for a while, raising the possibility that the BBC’s iPlayer could be extended to more platforms, possibly including the iPhone.

At the moment, the iPlayer catch-up tv service is available in two flavours:

  • download – only for Windows XP and Vista using Internet Explorer
  • streaming – for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux using Flash

A demo video appeared in July last year showing iPlayer on the iPhone, but it seems to only have been a mock-up. If we are going to get BBC shows on the iPhone, how will it happen?

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More bang for your buck on O2 iPhone tariffs

O2 obviously noticed Steve’s post on iPhone pricing because they’ve introduced new tariffs for new and existing users (woohoo!). Current and potential iPhone users are now being offered:

  • £35 – 600 mins, 500 texts
  • £45 – 1200 mins, 500 texts
  • £75 – 3000 mins, 500 texts

O2 iPhone tariffs page

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O2 and Carphone Warehouse still selling iPhones with old firmware

O2 and Carphone Warehouse still selling iPhones with old firmware

Nearly two weeks after the Macworld keynote which officially unveiled the 1.1.3 upgrade, O2 and the Carphone Warehouse’s stores are still selling iPhones with the older 1.1.2 firmware.

Of the four stores that I’ve tried in Swindon and Reading, all were selling iPhones that had not been upgraded. Of those, only one was planning to upgrade the iPhone – when they had time for it.

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iPhone pricing musings

It’s been interesting watching the reported sales figures for the Apple iPhone trickle out from the various networks across Europe. In each case, they’ve been healthy without really going as stratospheric as the device itself would seem to warrant. It seems to me that there are some serious price issues at work here that have hampered the iPhone’s progress.

I can think of three common scenarios:

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Why I seriously doubt Apple’s technical expertise sometimes…

Let’s get this straight, I respect Apple’s core software team tremendously. OS X and Leopard have some astonishingly smooth features, immaculately programmed. This post isn’t aimed at the guys behind the OS.

But around the core team, there are some idiots. I’ve expressed my frustration with some of the decisions made by the team behind Apple’s web page creation software several times over on All About Symbian. Making it easy for beginners to create web pages is a laudable aim, but implementing it in such a way that the user’s text is simply rendered as a huge image is crazy, inelegant and farcical. What a waste of bandwidth. And how is Google’s robot going to index these pages if there’s no text?

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