iPhone v 1.1.3

Thomas Husson | January 06, 2008, 03:52 PM

Orange France officially announced to have sold more than 70,000 iPhones (launched Nov 29th) in France while o2's CEO recently expected to reach the 200,000 ceiling early January (launched Nov 9th). Both operators will meet the target they officially announced but there was no major "Christmas effect" (however, I don't think many other phones in the 400 euros price range reached this level) in comparison to initial sales in the US. The market conditions in Europe and in the US are quite different as explained in this report.

It remains an amazing phone. Other will follow and speculation will increase towards MacWorld to know if a brand new one will be announced. I have been using a 1.1.2 version for the last few months and I have been very satisfied with it.

I hope the 1.1.3 or 2.0 version (for some apps) will include:

- a better camera and and a video recorder
- the ability to send the same SMS to several people (quite strange it wasn't there from the beginning)
- the ability to attach a picture from the e-mail. To my knowledge you have to click on the pic and then to select "send via e-mail"
- the opportunity to define a default start page when browsing (you always start with your latest session). I personally use Netvibes to aggregate lots of RSS feeds and prefer to "start with it" or potentially with Liberation Espresso (the top news from Liberation's newspaper)
- more generally, the ability to change icons/apps so that you can personalize your home screen and obvioulsy add third party apps (I think official SDK toolkit is not announced before February) or even "favorites"
- a copy and paste functionality
- MMS (very strange to see that on its optimized iPhone portal, Orange is promoting its blog app which works...with MMS)
- the ringtone functionality: only Fun tones (RBT's name until operators agree on "Tona") are promoted on Orange's iPhone portal...
- obvioulsy 3G if it doesn't impact the battery life
- a GPS functionality with the same restriction (I have been surprised by the quality of the Google Maps app)

That's only a formal wishlist (I personally don't really care about ringtones) and I am sure we will be surprised again, as often with Apple.