Silicon Alley Insider - Peter Kafka | July 16, 2008 2:22 PM

After the iPhone euphoria, the crash, in the form a series of small disappointments: Not only is the machine a bit buggy and hard to keep charged, it turns out that not all the gear iPhone 1.0 owners have will work with their new machines.

Apple itself tells you this — but only in the most passive-agressive of ways. For instance, Apple lists 11 power accessories for the iPhone at its online store — but only offers three of those for the iPhone 3g.

Yahoo’s Eran Hammer-Lahav learned the hard way, when he tried to use the generic battery charger that had worked perfectly fine on his old iPhone with his new machine. Results below:

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BUSINESSWEEK - Techbeat, Posted on July 15

by: Stephen Wildstrom

Among the 500+ applications available from the iTunes App Store, the glaring omission is a turn-by-turn navigation service. This seems odd, since the iPhone, with it’s big display and beautiful touchscreen interface, seems ideally suited to a nav app of the sort available on many lesser handsets.

Why is it missing? And when might we get it?

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Silicon Alley Insider - Dan Frommer | July 14, 2008 11:41 AM

Give Piper Jaffray Apple (AAPL) analyst Gene Munster a mulligan: This morning, Munster had the bad luck of issuing his first-weekend iPhone sales estimate (425,000 units) just a few hours before Apple released its actual sales milestone (1 million units). Munster just sent out a second note, explaining the discrepancy: Strong overseas sales and better-than-expected U.S. sales thanks to improvements Apple made activating iPhones to AT&T’s (T) network. Specifically, it looks as if Gene got his estimates by surveying shoppers in New York and Minneapolis, and may have overestimated how bad the activation problems were (probably because New Yorkers complain so often, and so loudly).

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FORTUNE - Mac news from outside, July 13, 2008, 10:15 am

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

Let the guessing game begin!

On Sunday morning, with one more day of weekend sales to go, analysts and other Apple watchers were already weighing in with their estimates for the iPhone 3Gs three-day launch.

First out of the block was RBC Capital Market’s Mike Abramsky, who issued his best guess on Friday. Based on pent-up demand, expanded distribution, and lower pricing, he predicted that worldwide sales for the first weekend would be more than 1 million units. (link)

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Silicon Alley Insider - Eric Krangel | July 12, 2008 7:00 AM

All eyes were on Apple (AAPL) this week, which released the cheaper-with-a-more-expensive-contract iPhone 3G on Friday. Apple may be shipping up to one million phones to 22 countries, but all of the AT&T (T) stores around Silicon Alley are sold out. But even many people who got their precious handsets weren’t happy: Activation snafus plagued many buyers. The upside: At least New Yorkers are among the privileged few who can take advantage of the new technology — in large swathes of the United States there’s no 3G coverage. iPhone owners old and new will be able to download and purchase some 500 iPhone apps, but Apple will probably veto many of the apps we most want.

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FORTUNE - Mac news, July 12, 2008, 8:06 am

The upside of simultaneously launching four major products — the iPhone 3G, the App Store, iPhone firmware 2.0 and MobileMe — in more than 20 countries around the world is that you get people’s attention.

That’s not an easy thing to do in this media-saturated age.

The downside of this form of event marketing — which Steve Jobs pioneered — is that you risk blowing it on a really big stage, in this case by overloading your servers and triggering a global customer satisfaction meltdown.

That’s what happened to Apple (AAPL) on Friday. Too many of the iPhone’s six-million existing customers tried to upgrade to the new firmware just as hundreds of thousand of new iPhone 3G customers were trying to activate their phones on the same iTunes servers.

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