Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
Speaker 1: tech stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hi there,
Speaker 1: welcome to the podcast. My name is Chris Poulett. I'm
Speaker 1: an editor here at how Stuff Works. And with me
Speaker 1: today is Jonathan Strickland. I'm a writer that he thank you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was gonna mention that, I'm sure you were along
Speaker 1: with along with mentioning that I should mention that there's
Speaker 1: been a new product from Apple or you know, brand
Speaker 1: new generation of the product maybe right. Oh, that's right.
Speaker 1: It's the thing that's been in the news that you
Speaker 1: can't avoid no matter what. Oh yeah, that yeah, well, yes,
Speaker 1: it's the three G I phone. It's the it's the
Speaker 1: second generation of iPhone. It's called three G. What's up
Speaker 1: with that? Well, the three G isn't about generation. It's
Speaker 1: about the three G phone network. It's the third generation
Speaker 1: phone network, which is much faster than the edge network
Speaker 1: that most phones are using in the United States. UM
Speaker 1: and the iPhone one point out if you will, right,
Speaker 1: that was that that ran on a second generation UH
Speaker 1: network as well, so the new one can run on
Speaker 1: three G. Which sounds great, except that, UM, there's one
Speaker 1: kind of small drawback for the for people in the US, UH,
Speaker 1: the three G network isn't very big. It actually only
Speaker 1: covers some pretty major metropolitan areas and anyone else you're
Speaker 1: still stuck using the older networks because they're just there's
Speaker 1: no infrastructure there. Right. But the phone also has other things.
Speaker 1: It's got GPS, which the old iPhone did not have,
Speaker 1: So now you've got a GPS system. UM. It can't
Speaker 1: run in the background because it drains battery life, so
Speaker 1: it only runs in short burst. But you still got it.
Speaker 1: So no turn by turn instructions or anything, but you
Speaker 1: you at least know where you are now. That's true.
Speaker 1: That's true. That's very useful. UM. The iPhone. Also, the
Speaker 1: new iPhone also has UH the advantage of having iPhone
Speaker 1: two point oh software installed right at the store at
Speaker 1: the point of sale, which they used to update the
Speaker 1: original iPhone users. They send it out to them over
Speaker 1: the network. UM, so they have been gradually updating to that,
Speaker 1: and that gives them a new UH slate of software
Speaker 1: applications designed by third party developers, so that that gives
Speaker 1: them a whole lot of options that they didn't have
Speaker 1: in the original iPhone, and it's a huge deal because
Speaker 1: Apple tends to be very much in house, so to
Speaker 1: open up this sort of thing to other developers is
Speaker 1: pretty big. Although we also have to mention these applications
Speaker 1: can't run in the background on the iPhone that's still
Speaker 1: locked away. So let's say you have an instant messaging
Speaker 1: program application on your new iPhone. If you were to
Speaker 1: go and use something else, you wouldn't continue to get
Speaker 1: updates from your instant messenger until you went back to
Speaker 1: that program directly brought it back to the front of
Speaker 1: your of the operating system essentially, and then it would update.
Speaker 1: So there's some you know, little drawbacks there, but that's
Speaker 1: not the big big story about the whole update issue,
Speaker 1: is it. No? No, I'm sure I'm sure that that
Speaker 1: You also mean the mobile me because you know you've
Speaker 1: got pushed the email, now, you've got the ability to
Speaker 1: back up with the calendar. I mean, you know you've
Speaker 1: got that in the new software and the faster network.
Speaker 1: What could possibly go wrong? Right? Yeah? I mean, if
Speaker 1: you're going to have all these updates happen at the
Speaker 1: same time, there's that's got to be a smooth sale
Speaker 1: all the way down, right, Well, and unless you're a
Speaker 1: customer of the original iPhone waiting for your software download
Speaker 1: or it uh you know, bricks your phone, or you know,
Speaker 1: you're waiting in a very very very very long line
Speaker 1: to get your three G I phone at the Apple store,
Speaker 1: and it's taking a long time to upgrade or actually
Speaker 1: activate your phone because you had to activate in the
Speaker 1: store instead of the way they did it with the
Speaker 1: first one, right, Apple kind of wanted to make sure
Speaker 1: people weren't going to just purchase phones and sell them
Speaker 1: on eBay or jail break their phones neatly. Uh didn't
Speaker 1: work so well that there's been reports that the three
Speaker 1: G I phone has already been jailbroken. But that meant
Speaker 1: that if something went wrong, it went wrong for a
Speaker 1: lot of people, and that's exactly what happened. UM services
Speaker 1: were down for days. The mobile Meat service was down
Speaker 1: for at least five days from what I read UM
Speaker 1: you know activations. There were people still waiting in long
Speaker 1: lines Monday morning after the Friday release the iPhone at
Speaker 1: the Apple stores nationwide. So for those of you who
Speaker 1: don't have an iPhone and didn't try to up upgrade
Speaker 1: your your software. Just imagine having a cell phone and
Speaker 1: being told there's this new update that will make your
Speaker 1: cell phone much more powerful and and have a lot
Speaker 1: more functionality. And then you start the update, and then
Speaker 1: it it fails, and now you can't use your phone
Speaker 1: at all because the old software has gone, the new
Speaker 1: software is not there, and now you just have a
Speaker 1: paper weight until they fix whatever the them is. That's
Speaker 1: kind of what happened. A lot of people think Apple
Speaker 1: should apologize, but I'm not sure certain that they will.
Speaker 1: Know I have I'm firmly of the belief that Apple
Speaker 1: fanboys will take whatever Apple dishes out. Well, that is,
Speaker 1: that is very probable, since they have such a sexy
Speaker 1: product on their hands. Yes, well, whoa hold on there.
Speaker 1: You know, the funny thing about doing technology podcasts is
Speaker 1: that things change very rapidly. And only a few hours
Speaker 1: after we recorded this podcast, Apple issued an apology for
Speaker 1: their mobile me service outage, proving us completely and utterly wrong. However,
Speaker 1: the Apple fans did respond with thank you sir. May
Speaker 1: I have another and now back to your regularly scheduled
Speaker 1: podcast already in progress. If you'd like to learn more,
Speaker 1: we have an article called how the iPhone works, and
Speaker 1: that's available today at how stuff works dot com. Thanks
Speaker 1: for listening. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
Speaker 1: ho stof works dot com. Well us know what you think.
Speaker 1: Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com.
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