I’m sure you’ve heard that T-Mobile are giving iPhones to some customers in the UK. As with the unlocked iPhones available on Play.com, these are grey market imports that are not locked to any network. T-Mobile customers will apparently be offered an iPhone 3G if they spend £75+ per month and threaten to leave.

Initially, this will only affect a small number of high spending customers. And, it has to be seen in context of T-Mobile trying to maintain subscriber numbers – in order to make themselves more attractive if the network is sold.

But for the first time, you can now get an officially-supported iPhone in the UK on a network other than O2. Are we about to see iPhones available on other networks as well?

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It’s time for a round-up of info I’ve gleaned from recent posts on Twitter. O2 have an official presence on Twitter, and recently asked for suggestions for iPhone apps. Giving away some apps specific to their network would be a good move for the carrier – they could add some real value to the iPhone customer experience.

Some of the most requested included:

• Integration with Bluebook
  Bluebook is a great free service from O2, storing all you texts, picture messages and contacts, but iPhones cannot use the service yet. A workaround is to install Synthesis SyncML, which at least enables you to sync contacts. But why you’d use this over Google Mobile sync, I’m not sure (unless you’re Google-phobic).

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Back in March, I read about Torrent Droid. This was the winner of a competition to develop an application for Android phones, the application being “A simple app to scan UPCs [barcodes] and match them with torrent files.”

Think about that for a second. This app uses the phone’s camera to capture a barcode, matches that with torrents from major trackers, then uploads the torrent file to the user’s server. So you’re strolling around, see a DVD, scan the barcode, and by the time you get home, you have a copy ready for watching. It’s pirate magic!

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No, no, not another post referencing the iPhone’s AppStore – and in any case, Nokia for one can’t be accused of going all me too on that front, since every Nokia smartphone since 2005 has had a ‘Download!’ on-device store (just not a very successful one) – what I’d like to focus on here are the innovations in the iPhone’s form factor and how Nokia and others are responding.

Cast your mind back, if you will, to the momentus MacWorld keynote at the start of 2007 in which Steve Jobs announced the iPhone to the world. The three main points which stuck in my mind about Apple’s new creation were:

1. The way in which the ‘too much plastic’ problem was overcome. Now, full-screen PDAs had been with us for years, and some Windows Mobile smartphones were just that – full-screen PDAs with a phone tacked on. But Apple brought us a full-screen, purpose-built phone that aimed to compete with the ‘plastic-ridden’ qwerty-keyboarded smartphones at their own game, but without a physical keyboard.
2. Finger touch was now OK. After years of everyone saying ‘Don’t touch your screen, you’ll get it dirty/greasy’, it’s now not only OK, but indeed the only way to interact with your device. Radical.
3. The iPhone interface, seamless from top to bottom, doing away with menus and finger-friendly throughout. Purpose-built, you might say, even though in reality it sits on top of a version of Mac OS X.

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