For those still thinking Apple is going to have to recall the iPhone 3G over faulty chip issues hampering its connections, there are two reports today suggesting that will not happen. One indicates the iPhone connections are perfectly normal, while another seems to put the blame solely on the carriers' networks for any connection woes.

Complaints about the iPhone 3G's networking speeds - or, more appropriately, lack thereof - have been floating around ever since the phone's release last month. We even did a little testing of our own and established that the results varied widely depending on geopgrahic location.

Now, the fine folks over at Wired (led by none other than former Macworld editor Brian X. Chen) have taken it a step further, compiling a global survey of iPhone users' experiences with their network connectivity. What did the big W find? Well, they've concluded, as we did, that 3G speeds do fluctuate broadly, and that those differences seem largely to fall at the feet of not the iPhone itself, but to the carriers.

Canadian 3G iPhone users are experiencing some of the fastest network speeds in the world, according to a study by Wired magazine's website.

In an admittedly unscientific poll of more than 2,600 3G iPhone users around the world, Wired.com found that Rogers and Fido customers in Canada had an average download speed of 1,330 kilobits per second on their device. That ranked just behind the 1,822 kilobits experienced by T-Mobile subscribers in several European countries, including Germany and the Netherlands.

Rogers and Fido customers reported better speeds than their U.S. counterparts, who averaged speeds of 990 kilobits on AT&T's cellphone network. The worst speeds were reported by Australians on the Optus and Virgin networks, with about 390 kilobits.

Apple Inc.'s iPhone 3G offers "normal" reception, Swedish engineers who tested the smart phone said today, adding to the controversy over recent user reports of dropped calls and slow surfing speeds.

According to the Goeteborgs-Posten, Sweden's second-largest daily newspaper, tests done at Bluetest AB, a testing chamber manufacturer, showed that the iPhone 3G's transmission and receiving results were "completely normal."

Is there a problem with iPhone's antenna? Is the coverage worse than for other mobiles? There are many rumors on the internet. In the USA someone is going to sue Apple. We took our iphone to a test chamber for fact-finding.

Bluetest is a small company at Lindholmen Science Park which sells test chambers for wireless devices with small antennas. In a noise free metal chamber the mobile communicates with a simulated base station. The equipment measures how the mobile sends and receives signals under different conditions. For manufacturers and others who want to make a test the test is much faster and more reliable than travelling around to check the performance at different locations.

Bluetest's chambers are used by among others mobile phone manufacturers such as Motorola, and TCO which has a system for certifying mobiles.

In my opinion my iphone has worked perfectly. The only time a call has been disconnected was on the train to Stockholm, and that has happened with other mobiles as well. But when I on the evening before the test looked at the signal strength bars, and compared with a Nokia, the iphone looked pretty bad. Several bars less and often preferring to switch to Edge.....

I had already in my thoughts started to write the awkward article about how the mobile I think works so well failed the test. But after some rotations in the test chamber, where the mobile is rotating as in a microwave oven, I get the good news.

- The values are completely normal, says Magnus Franzn, an antenna engineer with an M.Sc. in Engineering Physics.....

There's been a lot of discussion lately about iPhone 3G reception issues. Whether they exist or not is largely irrelevant in a world dominated by sound-bite driven perceptions. Nevertheless, some industrious Swedes decided to apply a little scientific method to the argument and found something interesting.....

A team of former Apple engineers are promising to bring TV-like simplicity and some iPhone touches to the task of finding and consuming media on any smart phone.

Their company, Kinoma, is today launching a smart media browser and player - Kinoma Play - to search video, photos, music, radio and podcasts on your phone and online, and to consolidate them behind a single interface. Kinoma Play 1.0 lets you create playlists and slideshows, find RSS feeds and zoom and rotate pictures and video on any smart phone.

Technology vastly simplifies keeping track of your finances, especially if you're a small business owner. But sometimes you need those figures at your fingertips when you're not in front of your computer. Now Intuit has made available a new web-based QuickBooks Online iPhone interface via its Intuit Labs site, so your financial information can go everywhere that your iPhone does.

For well over a month now, I have been trying out a 3G Apple iPhone. And let me say right up front, it really is the best mobile device I've ever used. Calling it a phone does it a disservice; it's more like a pocket Mac. What makes the device so remarkable is its flexibility. You can download literally 100s of applications from the iTunes AppStore. Throughout the weeks that I have been experimenting with the iPhone, I've had to struggle to wrest the phone out of the hands of my tech-savvy kids, who downloaded free apps by the dozen. At a certain level, the iPhone is simply more fun - by a wide margin - than any other phone I've come across. And it does a myriad of things that my aging Blackberry can't. It plays songs and videos. It takes pictures. It can run some nifty games. It has built in GPS navigation. You can access WiFi networks. And you can surf the Web at reasonable speeds.

But I can't quite bring myself to give up my trusty Research In Motion Blackberry for the iPhone, at least not yet. And let me tell you why....

We're saddened to report an Apple move has stymied attempts to create a copy-&-paste solution for the iPhone.

We recently introduced the developers at OpenClip who are attempting to create a way to copy-&-paste text between applications on an iPhone. They had a simple plan - Open Clip would essentially save copy you select within an area of the iPhone's memory which can then be accessed by other apps. And the roll call of developers then planning to use and support the solution includes: Dial Zero, Twittelator, Wordpress, Cocktail, Ultralingua and more. And we looked forward to being able to blog a little better using the device.

But things have changed. Apple's iPhone Software 2.1 prevents OpenClip's solution copying and pasting between applications, though it will still be possible to store data inside the application, meaning that copy and paste within the app will still work fine....

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