The Weekly Round-Up: 09.11.07

So, after much waiting, gnashing of teeth and an absurd amount of press attention the iPhone finally makes its UK debut today. Hooray.

The device could turn out to be the most revolutionary product launch since the wheel. Perhaps ever, if you listen to the hype or Apple's PR mill.

Apple will sell the phone through its smattering of UK stores, those of its telecoms partner O2, and The Carphone Warehouse.

If you are one of the many ready to part company with quite a lot of money to get your hands on one, here's a tip: you almost certainly won't have to queue up overnight to get hold of an iPhone as many strange people did in the US. (And for a sense of just how strange some people's gadget love can be, take a look at this chap.)

Not unless you want to be a curiosity item at the end of the local news report and be filmed braving the inclement weather queuing for a phone that will be in stock for months.

This is Apple's biggest product launch in years. The company will have more than a dozen or so on the shelves, as people in the states discovered to their chagrin this June.

Besides, you might want to wait a few days anyway. You'll need to register your iPhone with O2 via iTunes before you can use it. And according to reports in June, registration with AT&T took some people a long time on the first weekend the iPhone was on sale.

So you needn't queue, OK? Unless you really want to. Actually, they've started already in London's Regent Street. Still, it's one of the few things that we're still world class at. But do you really want to be remembered like this guy. It may guarantee you 15 minutes of fame but as quarters of an hour go it's pretty pants.

Anyway, being Brits such ostentatious displays of emotion in public are highly unlikely. More like a tight-lipped smile and a smattering of polite applause from pipe-smoking Apple store employees. Well done, old chap.

So are we all going to be going gaga for the iPhone? Not according to some passing analysts who this week were kind enough to share their views on the prospective sales of the device in the UK.

The two big problems, according to the analysts, are the lack of 3G and the £269 price-tag. Big mistakes, they reckon. Will the lack of 3G or a high price-tag stop Apple and its partners shifting enormous quantities of iPhones? Will it hell.

Face it, they're going to fly off the shelves. When did reason and logic ever come to bear on Apple's success stories in recent years?

That's what O2 is counting on. A nice, shiny, new phone means lots of nice, shiny, new customers. It's pulling out all the stops to ensure that the iPhone user experience won't be anything other than absolutely fabulous, darling.

It's introduced an unlimited internet access plan that actually is unlimited - quite novel, actually. What's more, it's gone completely mental and has hired an additional 1,427 members of staff to deal with sales and support for the device.

Of that total, 727 will be located in O2's 450 shops around the country. The company said it is investing in staff training so customers have "a fantastic overall experience". They really are deep within the Apple CEO's reality distortion field, aren't they? It's only a phone, albeit an extremely cool one.

O2 is also employing an additional 700 support staff and deploying 300 existing employees. So that's 1,000 support staff to deal with help calls for the most user-friendly phone in the history of personal communication.

Now there's faith in action...

Mobile phones are very much the flavour of the week, with even bigger news than the European launch of the iPhone - cue flaming from Mac fanboys - breaking in the US.

The Google Gphone rumours have been circulating for some time in tech circles. This week all was revealed. It’s all about the search engine's mission bring the web content experience into the mobile space. It's also about advertising, lots and lots of advertising. About the only thing the company makes any money out of - albeit a hell of a lot of it.

However, what was finally revealed was not a handset but a suite of mobile technologies and an alliance between some of the biggest names in mobile technology to develop for the platform.

Yep, the Round-Up said 'platform' - for one of the underlying technologies that Google has been working on is a Linux-based operating system for mobile devices.

Google has a mission statement. Actually it has 10 but it has one really famous one. It's called: "It's best to do one thing really well". Considering that philosophy it's somewhat ironic the other nine exist but we're not going to dwell on that. Or indeed the continuing diversification of its product range.

Anyway, that 'one thing' is surely to annoy the living hell out of Microsoft. And they're really good at it. Actually it's 'search' but cold fact isn't going to deny the Round-Up a little poetic licence.

Ballmer and co will be spitting feathers as Google attacks the lumbering behemoth on another front, this time Windows Mobile. The ongoing battle between the two companies is like a corporate version of the YouTube classic 'Monkey versus Tiger'.

In this case, the monkey gets more powerful each time it slaps the tiger's snout and is now hard as nails. Meanwhile, the tiger is going postal. The Round-Up makes no apologies for the most convoluted simile in its nine-year history.

Anyway, back to the bit and some much-needed drama - it's war! Trum-trum trumm.

Yep, it's kicking off big time on your mobile. Shortly after the announcement, Yahoo! said it is also planning a major move on the mobile space and will be making a determined assault at getting hundreds of millions of advertising customers before the Google-led initiative gathered any pace.

Google's Open Handset Alliance has more than 30 major companies onboard. Yahoo!'s war chest isn't looking too bad either, with strategic alliances with a whole host of telecoms companies all around the world.

So, it's two of the biggest players in internet search and advertising gathering huge armies of partners like a pair of determined but bleary eyed students amassing massive armies in a late-night game of Risk.

With a huge contingent of developers, handset manufactures and telecoms carriers gathering menacingly in Kamchatka, Google is ready to go. Except - classic Risk error - it's not planning its assault for another 10 months or so.

The first phones featuring its technology won't be around until then. Until they arrive it's planning a few idle skirmishes into Yakutsk and Irkutsk to keep its Risk cards ticking over. Soldier, cannon, horsey? Damn.

Will it be a viable tactic? As pint-sized autocrat Napoleon Bonaparte once said, an army marches on its stomach and right now, the Google troops are marching on vapour.

Meanwhile, Yahoo! is planning on launching a blitzkrieg attack to pre-empt its great rival with a series of deals that will aim to put it in the driving seat. Unlike Google, it's not focusing on the technology. More on partnerships and phone distribution deals.

Who'd bet against Google right now? Yahoo! has watched its share price dip in recent times after a raft of interesting decisions.

The dice are being rolled, the smoke of war is thickening and the result is far from certain. Especially if Yahoo! ends up being attacked by the huge lurking force head-quartered in Seattle, which has long been rumoured to be considering taking it over and nicking its Risk cards.

In which case it could get really interesting. Grr, bad monkey, tiger is very cross.

Then again, with Yahoo! already under assault from Google's traditional business and now Android, a possible takeover by Microsoft is enough to make its execs a little paranoid...

Talk of paranoid androids leads one naturally to chirpy popsters Radiohead, who last month released their newest album In Rainbows on their website and allowed users to choose the amount they paid for the 10 DRM-free tracks.

The Round-Up's quick review: it's really good. Not pumping party material you might say but then again it depends on the party.

Back to business. One of the options, was to pay nothing at all to download the music. This is what made it revolutionary and exciting.

It was a brave new experiment for the band who were banking on their legions of slightly grumpy fans to fork out at least a nominal amount for the results of a music collaboration

The Round-Up paid £3 for the album, for the record, so to speak. It's not proud but it seems to be firmly in the moral majority. According to the BBC, around two-thirds of people who downloaded the album paid nothing at all, the freeloaders. Or 'freedownloaders', to coin a neologism.

And anyway, why legally download free music from the source when you can illegally nick it from P2P sites? That's exactly what's happening to In Rainbows according to P2P analysts Big Champagne. Pop.

Almost a quarter of million users downloaded the theoretically free album from P2P sites on the day it was released, while around 100,000 more users per day added the tracks to their music collections on the days following the official release.

The number of copies obtained from P2P sites may well have outnumbered the legal downloads.

What does this tell us about our music downloading habits? Who knows. Perhaps that acquisition of new music through P2P sites is de rigueur for moody students and Sylvia Plath fans.

Perhaps we all like to be a little 'Wor!' a little bit 'Way!' while in the safety net of the web and that borrowing music, whether albums are being given away for free or not, is how we all like to get our hands on new tracks.

In which case the Recording Industry Association of America's lawyers will probably end up suing anyone with an internet connection.

Or, perhaps the Radiohead experiment was a bit rubbish because actually the band is also planning on releasing In Rainbows through more traditional channels. So the Oxford lads aren't going to go without food and Moogs for much longer, thank goodness.

Still, check out In Rainbows. Good stuff and it even features rather old-fashioned, retro things like guitars, drums, singing and so forth.

Oh, brave new world...

Finally this week, don't forget you've got the chance to take an alternative take on the week's news in the Round-Up podcast available here and from iTunes. And pit your wits against other silicon.com readers in the Caption Competition. Go on, give it a go. You're much wittier than them.