Apple claim the software update improves the device’s 3G abilities, but as always, not everyone is happy the update has solved the connection problems. It’s also a unclear as top why the 3G problems exist in the first place.

The problem flagged up by users is that the iPhone performs poorly when attempting to connect with high-speed cellular networks. Apple has seen the complaints (on forums and blog’s all over the place), and thus far remained tight-lipped about the issue.

Apple’s shiny new 2.0.2 iPhone update should help to sooth disgruntled customers, but Apple still hasn’t revealed exactly what “bug fixes” have been fixed. To Apple’s defence, they never tend to give much away, so it’s not unusual.

“Based on user reports collected so far, the iPhone 2.0.2 software update does not address 3G issues; however, as we don’t have detailed release notes from Apple, it’s unclear as to what 2.0.2 specifically addresses,” Raven Zachary, founder of iPhoneDevCamp and a contributing analyst for The 451 Group, said.

“So far, I am pleased with this update. On-screen keyboard responsiveness and Contacts performance seem improved,” he added.

Jennifer Bowcock, an Apple iPhone spokesperson, claimed that, “The iPhone 2.0.2 software update improves communication with 3G networks.” Sadly that was all she gave away.

“I never noticed any iPhone-specific connectivity issues to begin with,” Avi Greengart, a research director of wireless devices for Current Analysis, said.

“The last time my iPhone 3G repeatedly dropped from 3G to EDGE, I pulled out four other phones with HSDPA 850/1900 - a BlackBerry Bold prototype, Nokia E71, LG Vu, and HTC Tilt - and they were all down to EDGE as well, indicating a temporary network issue. By the next morning, all five - iPhone 3G included - were back to HSDPA,” he added.

“By no means am I saying that the iPhone 3G is perfect,” he noted. “I have also experienced random slowness and/or crashing with every build of the software, including the 2.0.2 update.

“I have also had serious qualms with the iPhone 3G’s battery life - the 2.0.2 firmware hasn’t been out long enough for me to know if battery life is any better with it,” he said, noting that he’s personally had good service in northern New Jersey, Boston, San Diego, and New York City, while his colleagues have reported good 3G service in northern Virginia as well.

“I’m sure that there are some people who aren’t happy with their iPhone 3Gs. Maybe they have defective units. Maybe they have poor AT&T coverage in their areas, or the network is overloaded,” Greengart said.

Microsoft says the Premier Ultimate bundle is aimed at enterprise customers willing to “dig deep to pursue a proactive support strategy concentrated on attaining and maintaining IT health”.

Elaina Stergiades, a senior research analyst at IDC, said: “IDC recommends that vendors provide preventive and proactive support services to help customers minimize downtime and to ensure consistent availability of their business-critical processes.

“Microsoft is doing just that with Premier Ultimate, highlighting the industry shift toward deeper, more collaborative support relationships with customers,” she added.

The new service level combines unlimited problem resolution support along with other features, including; proactive health assessments, account management, and full-time on-site support.

Companies can pick and mix their services to develop an IT package that best suits their needs. The level of customisation in the three-year contracts means that pricing is not fixed, but instead varies dependant on the services chosen.

“Premier Ultimate is yet another step in the evolution of software support services. As IT departments focus on the availability of technology supporting their business processes, software support becomes less about fixing what is broken and more about preventing problems from occurring in the first place,” Stergiades said.

Microsoft Premier Support includes a specific focus on preventative tools that can help business avoid situations that result in software defect issues and downtime, stergiades explained.

In addition to this, she added, the unlimited hours of problem resolution support is new ground for Microsoft, and shows the company is willing to take some risk as part of this offering.

While the new offering from Microsoft could upset some of the company’s channel partners, their response largely depends on how the software maker handles the Ultimate premier Services launch.

“Any time a change is made to services offerings, vendors run the risk of angering their channel partners. However, we believe that the execution of the roll-out will largely determine how partners are affected by this offering. In addition, Microsoft has historically handled these situations with minimal problems and disruptions,” she noted.

The updated specifications no give manufacturers and software developers something to work with as they wait for the changeover. The specifications also aid in establishing interoperability between devices from multiple manufacturers, which is an important step in terms of consumer adoption of USB 3.0.

The Intel xHCI draft specification revision 0.9 supports compatibility among various implementations of USB devices, which will make it easier to develop software support for the industry, Intel said. The documentation includes descriptions of the of the registers and data structures used to interface between system software and the hardware, which are developed to be compatible with the USB 3.0 specification under development by thw USB 3.0 Promoter Group.

“The future of computing and consumer devices is increasingly visual and bandwidth-intensive,” said Phil Eisler, AMD corporate vice president and general manager of the Chipset Business Unit.

“Lifestyles filled with HD (high definition) media and digital audio demand quick and universal data transfer. USB 3.0 is an answer to the future bandwidth need of the PC platform. AMD believes strongly in open industry standards, and therefore is supporting a common xHCI specification,” he added.

USB 3.0 is Intel’s next-gen USB standard, providing 5 Gbps (gigabits per second) throughput, a tenfold speed increase over the current USB 2.0 standard. Brian O’Rourke, an In-Stat analyst, noted that USB 3.0 reduced the amount of power the USB consumes by limiting the number of times a host contacts a USB device, such as an external hard disk drive.

With devices featuring USB 2.0 numbering around 2 billion, industry support is vital.

“As with the previous versions of USB, it does have industry-wide support throughout the PC ecosystem,” O’Rourke noted.

SuperSpeed USB will be aimed initially at high-end devices that need increased bandwidth, including PCs, external hard drives and next-gen mobile phones, he said.

“These devices are increasingly offering more storage, and so [they] need a faster way to get data on and off the device. There will likely be devices that use USB that will not need all the bandwidth that SuperSpeed provides, including mice, keyboards and printers. However, over time as SuperSpeed USB becomes less expensive, more devices will add it,” O’Rourke said.

“We are actually reviewing iPhone’s from a HSBC Group perspective … and when I say that, I mean globally,” HSBC’s Australia and New Zealand chief information officer Brenton Hush said yesterday

HSBC has around 300,000 staff internationally, so if the move went ahead it would likely be one of the world’s largest iPhone orders.

“A decision on a piece of hardware like that would potentially be deployed, conservatively, to 200,000 people,” said Hush. “You know, it’s a big decision, especially when you have an existing fleet out there.”

“But it’s definitely something we are considering from a HSBC Group perspective,” he said.

“We always explore the potential application of new technologies and this is no different.”

Were HSBC to select the iPhone as its official corporate mobile device, the decision would be a major blow to Research in Motion (RIM), the designer of the Blackberry.

When the iPhone made its debut, many large firms passed up switching to the device, mainly due to limited availability and the lack of support for Microsoft’s Exchange email platform. Now though, Apple has rectified these issues and built a number of new tools in to the new model specifically targeted for corporate use.

Hush said that although he did not own an iPhone, he has “obviously had hands on experience with them.”

Steven Bandrowczak, global CIO of Nortel, which has 30,000 staff, said he doubted whether his staff would choose the iPhone over its current device, the BlackBerry due to the latter device’s superior email functionality.

However, Hush’s believes the iPhone is more than up to task.

“I think [the iPhone] would change some underlying infrastructure considerations from an enterprise perspective. But [Apple] have been pretty smart with the design.”

The CIO, whose office is located at HSBC’s Sydney headquarters on George Street, Sydney is just 500 metres away from Apple’s new Sydney store, but he said he had not entered due to persistent queues.

“I’m blown away every time I walk past that Apple store, and there’s always people queued up outside to get in,” he said. “I haven’t been in there. It’s always too busy.”

The communications watchdog is concerned that customers are getting ripped off by internet service providers (ISPs) because they lure customers in with speeds that will never be attainable.

Many ISPs claim to offer broadband of 8 megabits-per-second (mbps), with others saying you can get up to 20 mbps – which is the UK’s top available speed.

In practice, your internet speed is wholly dependant on the distance you are from the telephone exchange and the number of users on the network at the same time.

Ofcom have estimated that only about half of those customers paying for an 8 mbps connection are actually close enough to get that kind of speed.

The six month probe will examine how broadband seeds are affected by various factors including region, ISP choice and the time of day. The findings will likely put further pressure on companies to increase their investments in next-generation broadband access.

Ofcom has made it clear on many occasions that if the UK des not invest in new technology (upgrading the current copper wire network) we could be left behind on the information superhighway. They cite as an example: if a large number of people wanted to watch high definition television over the internet, the network would struggle.

Already though there are company’s who are looking into developing the network; Virgin Media is looking at ways of offering 50 mbps broadband over its cable network, and BT has said that at new developments, such as Ebbsfleet in Kent, it can offer speeds of up to 100 mbps by installing fibre-optic cables. However, BT say that to upgrade all UK households to fibre optic would cost more than £15bn and the company is reluctant to commit to such a project.

Ofcom has also published a code of practice to internet service providers to ensure they tell customers the truth about what speeds they are likely to receive. Some 32 internet companies, covering 90 percent of the UK’s broadband customers, have already agreed to follow the code.

Ofcom has made it clear that if the voluntary code was not effective, it would consider more formal regulation.

The new BCM4323 802. 11n, according to Broadcom, is the world’s first single-chip dual-band 802.11n solution for USB adapters. A part Broadcom’s Intensi-fi XLR WLAN family, the BCM4323 enables very small and cost effective USB adapters that consumers can use to connect to PCs, TVs, set-top boxes, personal video recorders, and other devices to a Wi-Fi network. The company’s new Accelerange technology also features in the new dual-band chip and enables transfer of HD content between devices.

Annual shipments of Wi-Fi USB adapters – otherwise known as dongles – will reach 15 million by 2001, according to ABI Research. The majority of these will be dual-band 802.11n adapters as more and more consumers use the 5 GHz portion on their Wi-Fi networks for video streaming and VoIP calls.

The Broadcom BCM4323 USB solution was designed using 65 nanometer CMOS technology. This enables 20mm x 52mm USB modules that are half the size of those built with multi-chip solutions.

Another feature of the BCM4323 is an integrated ARM processor and on-chip RAM that can offload wireless functions from the host processor in consumer devices, which should help manufacturers to easily embed dual-band 802.11n capabilities directly into multimedia products, such as digital TVs, set-top boxes and DVD players.

Also released to day are a new line of 802.11n router chips, the BCM4716, BCM4717 and BCM4718. These chips use two-layer printed circuit boards (PCBs) which brings down the cost of manufacturing high-end routers.

Like all of Broadcoms other Wi-Fi products, the new router solutions use OneDriver software. This provides support for Linux, VxWorks and NetBSD operating systems and is Microsoft Vista Basic/Premium certified.

The BCM4716 integrates a 300MHz CPU architecture to provide the optimal balance of performance and cost for basic WLAN routers that connect to Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet networks.

The BCM4717 provides dual-band (2.4 GHz/5 GHz) capabilities in a small form factor for WLAN routers, access points, set-top boxes, and digital televisions. It also integrates a 300 MHz CPU and offers options for Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet PHYs.

The BCM4718 integrates a 533MHz CPU with high-performance memory architecture to push the limits of simultaneous dual-band performance for high-end Gigabit Ethernet routers, and features USB host ports to support media storage routers.

Steve Jobs, Apples chief executive, will take to the stage on Monday at the Apple Developers Conference but Apple are remaining tight lipped on what he will be talking about, but analysts are betting that he will show off a long-rumoured phone running on a so-called 3G, or third-generation, network.

What we do know is that the new iPhone will be accompanied by support for corporate e-mail and a slate of new programs that could help boost sales of the devices, which sport a touch-sensitive screen, wireless Internet access and iPod-style media functions.

Shiv Bakhshi, director of Mobility Research, for market research firm IDC said, “The thing for Apple is to be able to leverage the iPhone for further innovation, or they run the risk of being the next (Motorola) RAZR, which was iconic in its own way, but for which innovation did not come fast enough.”

One of the chief complaints about the current iPhone: the speed at which it calls up Web pages on AT&T Inc’s pokey EDGE network is likely to be addressed at the conference.

That is a particularly important concern in Europe, which is ahead of the United States in building new networks and where sales of the iPhone have lagged.

Analyst Avi Greengart said of a faster iPhone, “I see 3G as important for the U.S. but essential for overseas, it will be appreciated by technology enthusiasts and anybody who wants to get fast Web browsing outside the hot spots.”

There is also speculation Apple could bow to mobile industry practice and offer a subsidised iPhone, an arrangement where AT&T could kick in a couple hundred dollars to make the devices more affordable. At present time, AT&T already gives Apple a portion of the monthly service fees it gets from iPhone subscribers.

Ben Reitzes, an analyst for Lehman Brothers commented, “We think that actually Apple could talk about a very disruptive business model, or a change in their business model, embracing subsidies where necessary, multiple carriers to help get the iPhone into more hands.”

The new services Apple are expected to launch include the ability to download songs from iTunes using the phone network. IPhone users now have to be connected to a Wi-Fi network to get music from Apples online store.

Apple will also roll out its highly anticipated support for corporate e-mail, a capability it showed off earlier this year and that is expected to give iPhone a push into business, which now overwhelmingly uses Research In Motion Ltd’s Blackberry devices.

The new spectrum sale comes with the condition that the winning bidder must offer free high-speed wireless internet access nationwide (US).

On June 12th, the proposal will be put forward by the FCC at its upcoming meeting, according to spokesperson Chelsea Fallon.

In an interview, fallon said, “The commission is interested in proposals that will give consumers greater choices to access the Internet.”

This plan is one of several ways the FCC hopes to “support initiatives that have a positive impact on the next phase of wireless growth and innovation.”

The plan involves selling off 25 megahertz of spectrum in the 2155MHz band. The details of the proposal are still being worked out but what is known is that the buyer would have to guarantee that it will roll out free access over time, reaching at least half the US population within four years of the license purchase and 90 percent of more within ten years.

The wireless access is likely to be filtered, with some content – such as pornography – being restricted.

The FCC believes that the wireless spectrum holds the key to narrowing the digital divide – the gap between people who have access to high speed internet access and those who do not because of financial of geographic reasons. Wireless is a less costly solution because it removes the need for building fiber optic networks.

Recently the FCC held an auction for 700 megahertz of spectrum, a major portion of which was purchased by Verizon and other major telecommunication companies. Under pressure from Google and others, the FCC conditioned part of that sale to require the winning bidder to open the network to all devices and services.

Whether or not the free Internet access plan works is likely to be determined by how much value potential buyers see in the advertising-supported business model. Advertising would have to be lucrative enough to support building the network out and operating it over time.

Forrester Research Analyst Charles Golvin said in an interview, “A company will have to have either deep pockets or investors who buy into the notion of an ad-supported system,

We’ve seen in other countries that wireless can play a role in connecting people to the Internet who otherwise would remain shut out,” he added.

Since much of the surface of a handheld device is occupied by buttons and similar components, the patent specifies putting the solar panels under the display. Devices described in the application include both handheld and portable computers.

Phones like the iPhone have a large screen and the larger the surface area, the better for catching solar rays. According to the patent, the solar panels would be stacked behind the LCD display, absorbing light rays that pass through the display. This makes the iPhone and iPod candidates.

An analyst for Jupiter Research, noted that some small devices, such as wristwatches or calculators, are solar-powered, but otherwise the potential has only recently emerged for larger portable devices to be energized by the sun.

The analyst, Michael Gartenberg suggested that solar power, at least in the short term, may be employed for short-term recharging or in other supplementary ways, rather than as the exclusive power source.

Other mobile phone companies are also starting to think of the sun as more than just a warm, fiery star. Last month, for example, Vodafone said its plans to dramatically cut its greenhouse-gas emissions included solar-powered phone chargers.

Motorola has already received a patent, originally filed in 2001, for a screen that lets more light through than other designs.

As an LCD is a reflective screen (only six percent of rays get through), Motorola claim to have developed a screen that allows 75 percent ray absorption.

In recent years solar power has begun to be used in a variety of settings as a source of electricity, but there are still substantial technical issues for mobile devices. The Motorola patent, for instance, notes the limited area for solar-panel surfaces, the durability of the panels, and other issues.

If Apple’s patent is approved, it could be quite a few years before we see solar powered gadgets. Apple has already applied for a patent for a new messaging interface for touchscreens, which has media features that the iPhone can’t currently perform. It has also recently filed patents for head-mounted displays and a three-dimensional display system.

Security agencies in India have been pressing RIM to allow them to intercept e-mail that travels across its secure network. Under Indian law, the government has the right to intercept electronic communications for security purposes.

The government and its security forces believe that terrorists will use the internet and e-mails to communicate with each other and hope to be able to put a stop to them.

India’s telecoms director, Andimuthu Raja said last week that RIM had assured the government that it is working on a solution. But late last week, the company said it could not “accommodate” any such request and has told customers that it would be impossible to spy on user’s e-mail messages as the company does not keep a copy of the customer’s encryption key. The company also reportedly said there is no “back door” to customer’s communications.

The blackberry service is being offered by four providers in India: Bharti Airtel, Reliance Communications, Vodafone-controlled Vodafone Essar, and BPL Mobile. At this moment there are 114,000 Blackberry subscribers in the country.

In a statement, RIM said, “Governments have a wide range of resources and methodologies to satisfy national security and law enforcement needs without compromising commercial security requirements.”

India is an important market for RIM and other handset makers. As the North American and European markets mature and reach saturation, developing markets such as India will provide substantial growth in the coming years.