New iPhone 3G back with door for replaceable battery?

Didn't a company tear down the iPhone 3G and note that the battery is not soldered in? How fast can some enterprising company create a new back for the iPhone 3G (just two screws to remove it?) that has a door so that batteries can be replaced? Anyone? You'd sell about 40 million by the end of next year. :-)

A pleasant iPhone purchase at Rogers in Canada, Friday July 11th, 2008 at 10am

I got up late-ish on Friday morning, checked out our company's position in the Apple App Store (yes, we were there on day one) and wandered down to my local Rogers store at 9:20am. It opened at 10am and I was 4th in line and they had a total of six phones...so I got one. Rogers activation systems promptly crashed for about seven hours so I didn't get activated on Rogers until about 5pm. However, being a local store they just took my number, put my name on the box and called me in when the activation systems were working. I was in shorts, sandals and a block away. I scratched my head all day wondering how bad their infrastructure must be to have stayed down for so long. Crashing I can understand...but staying down?

I took the phone home and iTunes did its thing to complete the activation...in a few seconds. I know the iTunes servers were choked earlier in the day, but with Rogers being down so long most of us Canadians never got to experience anything but the problems in the Rogers systems. The Rogers staff were very nice, friendly, helpful and understanding. A huge two-thumbs up to my local store's staff!

An interesting side note...my voice plan remained the same as my BlackBerry BUT the $60 BlackBerry plan was replaced with the $30 iPhone data plan. In other words...it's cheaper than my BB and my payback period is now 8 months given my device cost of $249 Cdn.

...Neil

iPhone will drive offline apps of all kinds

Our first offline client will be for the iPhone. However, given the engineering we're building into it this means we've done all the offline interfaces, which are generic for any other offline clients we might want to build. For example, BlackBerry clients, desktop clients, all offline. Stay tuned. :-)

I wish browsers could designate tabs as "applications"

I don't like that my Gmail/Gcal/Gdocs are tabs in just the same way that a website I'm checking out is. I'd like to be able to specify certain pages as "applications", which means they persist between browser sessions and that there are warnings if you try and close them. I use Safari. Just my two cents.

iPhone Feature: "Silent for XX minutes"

I live in Canada. I own many Macs. I don't have an iPhone, but I want one (they're not officially in Canada yet). I have a BlackBerry. What screws me up on a daily basis is when I go into a meeting and put my BB on "Quiet" and then forget to turn it back to "Normal". I regularly miss phone calls this way. My idea for an iPhone feature is that an owner be able to set their iPhone to be "Silent for XX minutes". This could be implemented as "Switch to XXXX mode for YY minutes, and then switch back". That'd be cool.