MacRumors

Best Buy is expected to announce that they will begin selling the iPhone 3G next month, according to AppleInsider.

The announcement should come as early as Wednesday and represents the first time a 3rd party U.S. retailer will be selling Apple's iPhone. The iPhone will reportedly be sold in 970 Best Buy stores in addition to 16 Best Buy Mobile specialty outlets starting on September 7th.

Rumors of Best Buy's interest in the iPhone began over a year ago. More recently, Boy Genius Report had heard that both Best Buy and Radio Shack had been working on iPhone distribution. There has been no further word on any distribution deals with Radio Shack, however.

Update: BestBuy has officially announced that they will be selling the iPhone 3G starting on September 7th.

"We had a lot of work to do, obviously, to get in a position where Apple and AT&T would feel good about Best Buy Mobile carrying it, and that's what we've done in the last 18 months," said Shawn Score, president of Best Buy Mobile.

There are a number of reports of iPhone 3G users having problems with inconsistent cellular connections with their new phones. CNet points to a growing discussion thread at Apple's forums detailing the problems.

Specifically, some users have having problems with frequent dropped calls on 3G networks. One customer describes his experience:

"I was driving down Folsom Street in San Francisco, and I got a dropped call 10 times. I get dropped calls just standing in one place," said Yarbrough, a 34-year-old accountant. "I'm extremely annoyed, but I'm hopeful a software update will fix it."

Mark Siegel, a spokesman for AT&T, has said that they are looking into individual cases, but claims that the iPhone 3G has not generated an unusual number of complaints:

"How a device performs in individual situations depends on circumstances like where you are in the 3G coverage, how close you are to a cell site. Things like terrain and buildings all come into play," Siegel said. "I'm not denying that people are having a less than satisfactory experience, but overall, the phone is doing great."

CNet points out that it can be difficult to determine the scope of a problem based on online complaints alone. Some reports have claimed simply replacing the SIM card has corrected the problems, while one analyst has claimed that the problems could be related to the 3G chipset that Apple used.

A new analyst report from Piper Jaffray claims that Apple's September announcement will reveal a new iPod Touch and new MacBooks.

Analyst Mike Olson predicts that the iPod Touch will be tweaked to resemble Apple's new iPhone 3G and also raises the possibility of price drops and/or capacity increases. Recent Firmware hints have suggested the iPod Touch could see feature upgrades as well. The expectation of a new iPod Touch is also consistent with whispers we've heard.

Olson also points to slimmer MacBooks which could also have newly designed keyboards. This prediction may have been inspired by circulating rumors and photos depicting an aluminum MacBook. Apple has been rumored to be introducing "major design changes" to their notebook computers this fall.

Apple's choice of processors for a new MacBook revision will certainly be Intel's upgraded Penryn processors which were introduced alongside the Montevina platform in July. The latest Intel processors boost processor speeds up to 3.06GHz and also increase bus speeds to 1066MHz (from 800MHz). The new MacBooks will likely also benefit from upgraded integrated graphics with the GMA X4500. The GMA X4500 benchmarks significantly faster than the GMA X3100 found in current MacBooks. While there has been some talk that Apple will migrate to a 3rd party chipset, the implications of such a move remain unclear.

Two weeks after Apple announced that all MobileMe systems were up and operational after a rocky transition, there continue to be sporadic reports around the web of various service outages inclusive of a 4.5 hour mail outage yesterday. But has MobileMe gotten more reliable?

According to Apple's MobileMe status history, there have been approximately 13.5 hours of various downtime over the past two weeks (336 hours); that is, MobileMe has a 96% overall uptime over the past two weeks.

Determining whether 96% is good or bad can be subjective to the user. This editor and user of MobileMe has hardly been affected by the outages but other users may have been more affected by the timing or the content of the outages. In general we would consider a consumer-oriented service such as MobileMe to have an uptime of at least 98% which would effectively half the downtime that MobileMe currently experiences.

Walt Mossberg has expressed similar sentiments, saying that currently MobileMe is far too flawed to be reliable.

Last week an analyst report speculated that Apple would hold some sort of media event this September to refresh the iPod line as well as introduce updates to both the MacBook and MacBook Pro lines.

While the report appeared to be mostly speculative, Apple has been predictably updating their iPods in September for the past couple of years. Combined with circulating rumors of iPod revisions and the end of the Back to School promo, it seems probable that late September will bring us new Apple products.

While rumors have focused on new iPod nanos, MacRumors has heard whispers that an iPod Touch update is also likely in the same timeframe.

Given the likelihood of updates, readers should be cautious about buying a new Apple notebook or iPod at this time.

AlleyInsider publishes an unconfirmed rumor that Apple will be incorporating QuickTime encoding/decoding chips into their products in the coming months. AlleyInsider's Dan Frommer describes it as "pure speculation" but felt it plausible enough to publish for discussion.

Our understanding is that a QuickTime encoding/decoding chip would handle the grunt work of processing video, presumably in the H.264 format, so that Mac computers' processors wouldn't have to do as much heavy lifting. That could be used in any number of cirumstances, such as a live, hi-def iChat AV video chat, watching HD video off the Web, or faster encoding HD video for distribution. (Perhaps the iSight cameras built into MacBooks and iMacs might get a HD upgrade, too.)

The rumor actually mirrors an old claim by Robert Cringely from 2007 that describes the same details:

Now comes the rumor I have heard, that I believe to be a fact, that has simply yet to be confirmed. I have heard that Apple plans to add hardware video decoding to ALL of its new computers beginning fairly soon, certainly this year.

The significance of this rumor is somewhat unclear as many modern day graphics cards already contain dedicated H.264 decoding hardware. The addition of encoding hardware, however, may be of benefit for low end and mobile configurations.

Incidentally, H.264 is one of the codecs used in Blu-Ray high definition video discs which Apple has yet to adopt.

In an interview with Steve Jobs, The Wall Street Journal reports that the iTunes App Store has delivered over 60 million programs to customers over the course of the first month. While most of those applications were free, Jobs does reveal that Apple has sold an average of $1 million a day in applications for a total of $30 million in sales over the first month. Jobs says he's "never seen anything like this in my career for software."

Some of the big winners amongst the sales include Sega's Super Monkey Ball [App Store] which saw over 300,000 downloads in the first 20 days. This represents over $2 million in net revenue for this $9.99 game alone. Meanwhile, the popular medical reference Epocrates [App Store] has seen over 125,000 downloads during its short time in the App Store. This compares quite favorably to Epocrates previously installed base of 500,000 other mobile users.

Also addressed is the recent discussion surrounding application removals. An Apple spokesperson described the pulling of the I am Rich application as a "judgement call".

Finally, Jobs confirms the ability to remotely disable an application:

"Hopefully we never have to pull that lever, but we would be irresponsible not to have a lever like that to pull"