We’ve all been reading and watching intently the latest iPhone rumours, all with different perspectives on the issue.

Marc, one of our user interface designers is most interested in the size of the device (you know men, always got size on their mind…):

“I find the current iPhone model just a little too cumbersome, so I love the idea of a slender iPhone that I can stick in my jeans pocket and just forget about, as covered by Jeremy Horwitz on iLounge. Sure, the upcoming smaller 2.8″-screen model is just a rumour at this point, but it would be a sensible move from Apple - the iPhone can’t be all things to all users. A product family makes complete sense to me.

If you’re an existing iPhone user you may have spotted a new version of our interface we just released into wild. It was our mission to create a rich, usable experience that is complementary to the iPhone’s native UI. We couldn’t help ourselves from sprinkling in some fancy Apple-style widgets in there. Just go to taptu.com on your iPhone to check it out.”

Meanwhile, I’m most excited about the faster 3G connection (assuming O2 doesn’t mess customers around). I unfortunately live in the middle of nowhere, where EDGE generally isn’t available, which means that I often find myself following a link on Twitter, which leads to a YouTube video, just to get a pop-up telling me that I must be on EDGE or wi-fi to be able to watch it.

On wi-fi, the iPhone’s a total gem, a great browsing device. Not so great on the input, even with my small hands, so the thought of an even smaller iPhone doesn’t appeal to me. On EDGE, it’s quite acceptable, but unleashing full HSDPA speeds in that device would make it even better. I don’t think I’ll be swapping my 6-months old iPhone for the 3G one purely on the speed factor, but if new features which I can’t get through software updates appear, you may find out I’m first in line for the new one.

Are you at all interested in the next iPhone release? Sick of the rumours already? Got your own theory on what’s coming up next?

This morning, The Register reports O2’s admission that its 3G customers are limited to 128Kb/s connections - with some business users being upgraded as O2 sees fit.

“384Kb/s is the technical limit of 3G technology, without resorting to HSPDA, but topping out at 128Kb/s is something of an embarrassment for a 3G network. Not that using HSDPA will help the O2 customer, depending on the “profile” O2 has decided to assign to them they might still find themselves allocated only 128Kb/sec”, says El Reg.

In non-techy terms, this means that you’re buying a 3G phone, with the expectation of fast mobile web browsing, but in fact, you’re being limited to half the potential speed you should get.

A clever fella from the 3G.co.uk forum did a speed test on the network, getting the following speeds:

GPRS 44kbit/sec
EDGE 145kbit/sec
3G 112kbit/sec
HSDPA 124kbit/sec

I tried the tests a few times and posted the fastest. The 3G and HSDPA speeds are consistently around the times posted. The EDGE speeds were more variable, from 90 to 145kbit/sec I assume depending on cell traffic at the time.

Is it just me, or are customers not getting at all what O2 is claiming. It’s supposed to be 3G, and it ain’t doing what it says on the tin!

Granted, I’ve got an iPhone, I wouldn’t get 3G speeds anyways, but I do feel sorry for the cheeky sods who’ve been giving me a tough time for having a non-3G phone. I’m currently getting better speeds than you are if you’re also on O2!

Now, immature raspberry-blowing aside, I do hope O2 get their act together and allow non-business users to experience the full potential the network has to offer. This is a stick in the wheels of the mobile web we simply do not need.

[Update: Seems like O2 are set on making an impression on their customer base today. Did you know we’re “a bunch of geeks” and would be “muppets” for considering changing networks? Well, it seems too funny to be true, but O2 PR staff may need some coaching on locking their phone before having private conversations.

Did you hear that? Yes, it’s the sound of two PR people who are going to have a very bad end of Wednesday…]

On the heels of CTIA in Las Vegas, Mobile Point View hosts the first April Carnival of the Mobilists.

Chetan Sharma writes a roundup of CTIA for those of us who didn’t attend, Michael Mace posts a rather humourous survey conducted by Rubicon Consulting on things you didn’t know about iPhone owners, and I contributed our entry on 20 resources for mobile designers and developers.

The odds are in your favour, you’ll find some great content in this week’s contributions.

The mobile web is still only a fragment of the wider desktop web we use everyday, so one of the challenges operators, website owners and users face is how on Earth to cram this big web onto small screens.

Different people tackle the problem in different ways, as the Sender 11 blog points out:

Apple: Adapt the phone to the web.
Opera: Adapt the web to the phone.

But then, there’s a third option: Bulldoze everything with a transcoder, including sites which are already mobile, and don’t shed a tear for the casualties.

This approach has unfortunately been adopted by a number of operators, namely Vodafone and TeliaSonera with Novarra, and Sprint with OpenWave.

When I think of the carelessness these guys are exhibiting, I get a Hulk moment “Vero angry, Vero smash phones! ARGGHHHH!” It boggles the mind how Sprint can go as far as saying it’s in the customer’s best interest. If they really cared about the customer experience, they wouldn’t highjack user agents, they would acknowledge sites which are already mobile-ready and they would listen to the community’s needs.

Anyone who isn’t directly involved in the mobile industry is unlikely to realise that the site they’re browsing looks crap on their phone, not by the website owner’s fault or because their phone isn’t up to par, but squarely because of the operator’s complete disregard for its customers. A little bit of me dies every time I see a friend criticize the mobile web’s shortcomings when it’s really due to bastardised transcoding.

Operators claim to be offering a proverbial olive branch by telling mobile website owners to request to be added to a whitelist. Dennis at Wapreview sounded the alarm on the latest whitelist to join but this is a neverending game of whack-a-mole! As far as I know, between Spain and the UK, Vodafone doesn’t even share its whitelist! (If anyone can tell me I’m wrong on this one, I’ll regain a bit of faith in the Big Red.)

As Dennis explains, unless you have a handset on the local network, it’s difficult to find out what’s happening to your site once it goes through the shredder:

Unless you have a Sprint handset there’s really no way to tell if your site’s being transcoded. If you do have a Sprint phone you can generally tell just by looking at the screen but if in doubt use the device’s Show URL browser menu command. If it starts with http://sprint.aopwv.com/ you are being transcoded.

Mobhappy, Mike Rowehl, Techype, RCR Wireless News and Semapedia, amongst others, have picked up on the issue, and they’re all as unimpressed as I am with the situation.

How could anyone, in their infinite wisdom, think this was a scaleable and manageable way to decide what sites to leave as-is? Seriously, I’m willing to give anyone from an operator a fair hearing, I’ll even buy ‘em a beer, if they can explain to me how they’re going to improve on the current situation from here.

If you’re a developer and your mobile site is affected by the latest Sprint issue, register on the Sprint forums and leave a comment in this thread to get whitelisted.

[Update: Russ at Mowser posted, following my angry post, to shed light on how what Mowser does is different to the operator’s transcoders, so if you’re still fuzzy on what is proper and improper behaviour for adapting content, check out his post. At the core of it all though, Mowser listen to their users and are part of the community rather than living up in that cozy ivory tower. That makes all the difference.]

In technology, we’re always so focused on the future, on what’s coming next and what’s going to be the next big gadget or web app to break into the spotlight. Gizmodo’s Jesus Diaz looks to the past for the designs that inspired Apple’s products. It’s impossible to deny the resemblance in some of the 60’s styling and our latest shiny goodies.

We’re big fans of great, simple design here, so it’s comforting to think that great design is here to stay, revived in different forms through the ages. I’ve had this quote from Rams stuck in my scrapbook for years now, but it’s good to see Gizmodo bring it up as well.

This passion for “simplicity” and “honest design” that is always declared by Ive whenever he’s interviewed or appears in a promo video, is at the core of Dieter Rams’ 10 principles for good design:

• Good design is innovative.
• Good design makes a product useful.
• Good design is aesthetic.
• Good design helps us to understand a product.
• Good design is unobtrusive.
• Good design is honest.
• Good design is durable.
• Good design is consequent to the last detail.
• Good design is concerned with the environment.
• Good design is as little design as possible.

[Via Thought Balloons]

Having been in Austin, Texas for a few days now, I’ve witnessed one of the greatest social gathering of tech-minded people to ever happen, once a year at South by SouthWest Interactive.

The killer app this year is undeniably… the same as last year. It’s Twitter through and through. In the context of a conference where thousands of people are milling around between panels, looking for each other and the Next Big Thing, Twitter is the killer app. It’s assumed and expected amongst all attendees that, just as we have a little heart pumping on the inside of our ribcage, we all have a Twitter username.

However, the observation that I found most interesting is the energy everyone put into communicating what they were hearing. The Zuckerberg keynote got the room buzzing and, in no time, even bloggers who were nowhere near the event were getting the echos of a poorly led interview. In previous years, it would have at least taken a few hours until someone did a write-up of the keynote, but with these social devices and the perfect system to communicate short snippets of information, it was broadcasted as soon as the sentiment arose amongst the crowd.

I’m at risk of pointing out the very obvious here but the Blackberry - probably the most common phone here at SXSW - is mindblowingly business-focussed. Even the font is dry, harsh and doesn’t make the faintest attempt at being visually pleasing. It is a stark, utilitarian device in contrast to the iPhone’s soft, rounded curves and swish user interface - the other baby of the conference. While each device has its pros and cons - attempts at typing while walking on an iPhone very much results in an epic failure - it’s fascinating that this geekfest brings together the two polar opposites, the functional and the creative, in one place as the two most used devices.

What they have in common is that they bring people together socially. From Ballroom A to the depths of Room 19-B, and from Austin to the rest of the world, they make communication easy. Comforting to know that even geeks need to be social too, no?

Not exactly what I’d describe as “light” Friday afternoon reading, but certainly entertaining is Stephen Fry’s first blog post on his fascination with mobile devices going back as far as the early “electronic organisers”.

For me it’s an addiction. Swapping SIMS, syncing, testing, probing, playing. I can’t pretend I’ve any higher purpose. What cars are to some, SmartPhones are to me – much, much more than just a functional tool. We live in the age of these devices. It should be the age of the greatest imaginative drive, flair and creativity in the digital arena. I am disappointed that not everyone in the industry sees it that way.

As the General Confession in the Book of Common Prayer has it, “I have followed too much the devices and desires of my own heart.” Amen.

I came across this quote this morning and find it rings very true. We’ve all experienced some great and some very poor User Interfaces on the web, at the cash machine, on our mobile. Things just get far more complicated than they need to be. Nelson Minar highlights how the iPhone takes a step towards simplicity.

While the sleek touchscreen defines the iPhone’s design, one of the things I like about it are the simple mechanical buttons on the side. There’s a dedicated volume rocker which instantly makes the iPhone a better music player than any iPod. But even better is the silent mode switch, an old fashioned mechanical two position switch. Slide it away, feel a satisfying click, and your phone is now in silent mode. There’s even an orange dot visible for visual confirmation.

You can measure the disaster of cell phone UI by how many button presses it takes to silence the damn ringer. My first Nokia phone took 2, the Ericsson took 3, and on the RAZR it’s like 17 button presses. You don’t need silent mode often, but when you do you need it quickly and without a bunch of screen reading distraction. The physical switch for that is lovely.

What can you do today to simplify the process your users go through?

[From Nelson’s Weblog via Merlin Mann at 43Folders]