News for Saturday, 14 July 2007

In Europe, changing rumors are spreading about the carriers which will team up with Apple for distributing the iPhone. If the iPhone will most likely be initially introduced in UK, France, Germany and Spain, negotiations to define the selected carriers are still running, or should we say were still running up to couple of days ago. If Téléfonica should be the winner in Spain and UK (under its subsidiary name O2), and T-Mobile in Germany, in France the situation was still unclear between Orange and SFR (Vodafone owning 46% of this french carrier).
However according to multiple independent sources, it seems that Apple and Orange settled down an agreement which should run for the French market, but could also later on be extended to other countries where Orange is among leading carriers. Apparently the most difficult part of the negotiations were related to defining the percentage of the subscription fee which will be assigned to Apple.
If one will have to wait for couple of months to determine if SFR will be massively affected, one should mention that SFR/Vodafone had the chance to qualify and could even extensively test the iPhone in real working environment.

Some readers have unfortunately experienced problems to launch Rosetta-dependent applications after having installed Quicktime 7.2.
The problem is in fact due to the beta version of Java 6 massively installed by users and developers, priori to Quicktime update.
To solve the problem with Rosetta, one simply needs to uninstall Java 6 and come back to the previous version Java 5.
All details are provided in the Apple forums.
An update for Quicktime or beta Java 6 should fix the issue in a near future.