Every day we receive lots of emails from people who have bought either a new iPhone 3GS or 3G, or have bought an original iPhone via Trademe or eBay, and they are confused as to which networks they can use it on or whether it’s unlocked or can do this-or-that. We’re not surprised, it’s certainly not easy trying to get your head around it all, particularly if you’ve only just started looking and are trying to size the lay of the land. To help you understand the differences between each of the three models, how they work with each of the main three networks here in New Zealand and to help you pick the phone that’s right for you, we’ve put together a handy comparison guide. Hit the ‘Read More’ link to view the guide on-screen or to download a printable PDF.

Click the image below to open a full-sized copy of the guide:

– Download PDF copy of comparison guide

Computerworld have posted an interesting opinion piece about the apparent issue that owners of pre-3GS iPhones are experiencing following the update to OS 3.1. In case you haven’t heard, 3.1 apparently breaks the ability for the iPod Touch as well as 2G and 3G iPhones to connect to corporate Microsoft Exchange servers, leaving the 3GS the only viable model for enterprise in the range. Computerworld predict a pretty grim picture for Apple’s place in the hearts of minds of corporate players, predicting that “Apple has set back its enterprise cause several years, if not permanently.”

Hit the link to read on (via Computerworld).

Have you been hit by this bug? Let us know in the comments.

This mornings Apple event is done and dusted, and while we’ll provide a wrap-up of the announcements later this morning, the juicy bits for iPhone owners are that iTunes 9 and iPhone OS 3.1 are now live and ready for your consumption! Here’s a quick overview of what’s new in each.

iTunes 9

- iTunes LP. Clearly trying to stimulate sales of whole albums rather than the current trend of buyers picking and choosing select tracks, Apple have added some pretty interesting new features that come packed with select albums. Animated lyrics, liner notes, videos and photos of the band, full-screen art – it all sounds very promising.

- Home Sharing. Apple have dramatically improved the library sharing function of iTunes. In the past, you could see and play tracks from other libraries over your LAN, but now you can authorise upto five computers on your home network to actually import tracks from one library to another, plus purchase syncing – buy a track on one computer and it instantly appears on the others. Great stuff!

- Genius Mixes. Building on the functionality of the genius playlists introduced in the last major iTunes refresh, Genius Mixes automatically…

Since the dawn of time (well, the dawn of the App Store at least), iPhone owners have been craving a Flickr app. We’ve reviewed what we consider to be the best of the third party offerings, and the Flickr Web App has gone some way toward filling that gaping hole where an official app should have been, but today – seemingly out of nowhere – Yahoo! have released an official Flickr app. But should the likes of Mobile Fotos be quaking in their boots?

It has to be said, the official Flickr app makes a great first impression. Upon launch (screenshot in the header), you’re presented with a simple, uncluttered and clean interface with the Flickr logo atop a very slick slideshow of public photos all sweeping effortlessly across your screen in gorgeous pan-and-zoom-o-vision, similar to the effect you get on your iPhoto screensaver on your Mac (and that was sadly missing from the built-in stock Photos app). This, you say to yourself, is gonna be good.

At the bottom of the screen are three simple buttons – ‘Recent’, ‘You’, and ‘Contacts’. Hitting any of these three the first time…

If you’re an iPhone newcomer, you may not be aware that there is a free Apple-produced app on the App Store that really should be baked in to the iPhone OS. Called simply ‘Remote‘, it’s a fantastic app that turns your iPhone into a remote control for iTunes on your Mac or PC. Even if you have downloaded it already, you may not be aware of all the ways you can use this app to turn your home computer into a music powerhouse. Read on for our definitive guide.

Getting up and running couldn’t be simpler. Download the app, and with iTunes running on your computer, start it. Your iPhone will find your computer’s iTunes library. Select it, and Remote will generate a 4-digit pin code for you. In iTunes, you will now see the remote control appear as a ‘device’ in the left-hand sidebar around where your iPhone would normally appear when connected via USB. Click it, and you will be asked to enter the 4-digit pin code from your iPhone. Once entered, the two devices are paired. You only need ever do this once.

You will now be able to control your iTunes library on…

Losing precious photos is a terrible thing. I learned that the hard way when I accidentally wiped the contents of my hard drive last year. That’s where sites like Flickr (with Flickr itself being arguably the best of them) are real life savers in this world of digital photos where hard copies are so rare. But how can the power and convenience of Flickr be harnessed on the iPhone?

MobileFotos is a kiwi-made app that has been around for as long as the App Store itself, so this is by no means a review of a new product, but a reminder of another great locally-developed app that really does deserve a place on your device.

Once you have authorised your Flickr account on the app, you are launched into a very familiar environment that uses the native iPhone colours and menu structures to allow you to navigate around your Flickr account. Access is given to your photostream, sets, contacts, groups, favourites and tags. Navigating your photos themselves uses an almost identical interface to the Photos app that comes built in to your iPhone. Thumbnails are displayed in a grid which can be fluidly flicked through and then…

Back when we launched, we spoke to 2degrees about their plans for the iPhone. They told us that they would let Vodafone and Telecom battle for that market, but that iPhone owners would still be welcome. Well, that welcome has turned to somewhat of a frosty reception this morning with the company’s pricing announcement.

While calling are text rates seem extremely competitive (22c per min to landlines, 44c per min to mobiles, both anytime) and hopefully game-changing, data has been priced at a lofty 50c per MB with no bulk bundles available. The company has also chosen to offer only pre-pay solutions (presumably to minimise operational costs), meaning that iPhone users will be severely stung for choosing 2degrees – a $20 top-up would give users just 40MB to play with, versus 240MB for $18 on XT or 200MB for $20 on Vodafone.

Furthermore, data is provided via EDGE – a data protocol that sits somewhere between GPRS and 3G in terms of speed. There is no 3G service available.

It is unclear at this stage whether or when better data deals will become available, but with the deepest regret we can only advise iPhone users to…

Apple have released an iPhone update this morning -  3.0.1. The update is a very minor one which does nothing more than patch an SMS vulnerabity highlighted yesterday. Do not confuse this with 3.1 which is still in beta – tethering for XT remains unaffected by updating to this release so go ahead and download it. Remember to hit ‘Update’ rather than ‘Restore’ to save you the task of having to re-apply our carrier bundle.

To continue development with iPhone SDK 3.0 on your iPhone, iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS running iPhone OS 3.0.1 will need to perform the following: Click Here

Anyone about to lay down $140 for an annual subscription should stop what they’re doing right now, and read on to find out how you can buy the exact same thing for just $89.

Amazon are selling what they describe as an “old version” of MobileMe for US$57.99 which equates to NZ$88.93 at today’s exchange rate – but there is nothing “old” about it other than the retail box it arrives in. Inside the box you will find an activation code that you can enter into MobileMe which will give you access to the service for twelve months – nothing “old” about it!

Apple confirm that activation keys are valid for ten years before they expire. There is one small catch however – Amazon don’t ship this to New Zealand, so you’ll need a friend or relative there that you can ship the item to. They won’t need to forward the box to you as all you need them to do is email you the activation code inside, so there are no further shipping costs and shipping within the US is free.

If $89 still doesn’t sound like a deal, then stick around as we’ll be bringing you our guide…

According to campaignmonitor.com, the iPhone now commands a 5.78% marketshare of all email clients, outstripping even GMail. This is pretty big news, considering that the iPhone has only been around for just over two years and that it’s a mobile client. No other mobile clients even make the radar. Not that we’re surprised – the iPhone mail app is by far the best email client I’ve ever used, mobile or desktop. Hit the link to get the full details.

Now here’s a curious couple of apps — dubelle.com produce a series of apps they call “Mobile City Maps” which are essentially cached maps of many world cities, each city sold individually, with POI information such as restaurants and museums. Priced at $1.29 each, I thought I would check out ‘Christchurch‘ and ‘Wellington‘ to see if the price of the app was worth the potential savings on data charges.

Upon opening Christchurch, the user is presented with a map of the city. Zooming and panning is similar in technique to Google Maps, however this is where the similarities end. The maps themselves are – how can I put this politely? – ‘minimalist’. The closest I could zoom in is pictured above, which is almost forgiveable, however I found that once I had scrolled beyond the ‘four aves’ of the Christchurch CBD, street names were no longer present which are kind of, you know, the point of a map.

I hit the little red icon you see at the lower-right of the screenshots to bring up the POI info and tested whether it would at least show me the location of one of these un-named…

Since the 3.0 update, a bug has hit the iPhone which causes Caller ID issues for all New Zealand carriers. The issue is that some events such as text messages send the number to your iPhone in the international +64 2xxxxxxxx format, but other events such as calls send the numbers to your iPhone in the national 02xxxxxxxxx format. Most phones will see these as the same number, but since 3.0 not the iPhone.

The result is that if you have your numbers saved in the international format, incoming calls will not marry up with your saved contact and display the number only, not the name. On the flipside, if you save your numbers in the national format, incoming texts will display the number only and not the name.

The only workaround at this stage is to save the number in both formats, but this is a real mess and causes other complications in itself, like having to manually choose which of the “two” numbers you want to send a text to, and if you pick the “wrong” one the reply will come back in a separate thread in the messaging app.

According to a dicussion…