iPhone 4S on Virgin Mobile June 29, 2012

Yep, it's official.  Got the email from Virgin Mobile about 20 minutes ago.

Not sure why the Virgin Mobile website is willing to say only that the iPhone is "coming soon", but the email says it'll be available starting June 29.  See the screen cap above, where the date appears in the fine print.

No word on what the upfront cost will be, but PC World has already assembled a chart showing the total cost of ownership for 2 years and it looks like Virgin Mobile comes out on top despite your obligation to fork over $649 for the iPhone itself.  Yowza!

Related question: is that retail iPhone unlocked?  Should a Virgin Mobile subscriber discover that her Sprint-run CDMA network is -- as the kids say -- a fail, would it be possible to take the phone to, say, Verizon's CDMA network instead?  Those CDMA phones have no SIM cards, so if Virgin Mobile is baked into the firmware that would likely be a no.

Indeed, I just checked to see what a brand new unlocked 16GB iPhone costs on the Apple store and, by golly, it's $649.  Moreover, it comes with this caveat from Apple:

The unlocked iPhone works only on supported GSM networks, such as AT&T in the U.S. When you travel internationally, you can also use a micro-SIM card from a local GSM carrier. The unlocked iPhone will not work with CDMA carriers such as Verizon Wireless or Sprint [or, my 2 cents, Virgin Mobile].

Lastly, if you're willing to join Auto Pay -- which allows Virgin Mobile to bill your credit or charge card automatically -- you can save 5 bucks a month and pay as little as $30 a month (though, yes, you'll also be charged sales tax on top of that) for the usual 300 voice minutes and unlimited (as in 2.5GB) text, email, and web data.

Virgin lets you sign up for email updates, though I'm not sure what they'd be updating you about ... unless that June 29 arrival date is tentative.  (Possibly they'll alert you when you're eligible to preorder?)

Ah, Virgin Mobile.  Your diabolically clever marketers specialize in Faustian bargains like these.

Put Harry Potter on Your iPad in 5 Easy Steps

NOTE: This post does not offer workarounds for iPad users intent on enjoying Pottermore’s Potions and Wizard’s Duel activities, which require the Adobe Flash Player.  It’s my understanding Adobe Flash is (and will forever remain) unsupported on Apple’s mobile devices.  Sorry!

Pottermore Shop doesn’t yet have an official relationship with Apple’s iTunes store—one that, were it in place, would presumably allow anyone to link an iTunes account to Pottermore Shop and send a purchased book directly to an iBooks bookshelf. Instead, here’s the rather involved 10-step procedure Pottermore Shop recommends for iBooks users:

iBooks App:

1. Purchase your eBook (or collect it, if it is a gift)
2. Your eBook will then appear in 'My books'
3. Click the 'Select' button under the eBook you wish to download
4. Choose the 'Direct download' option
5. Click the 'Yes, download this book' button. Your eBook will now be prepared and download to your computer. If you are prompted to save it to your computer, click 'Yes' or 'Save', taking care to note where it is being saved
6. Open iTunes on your computer
7. Locate your eBook on your computer and use your mouse to drag and drop it into the 'Books' section of iTunes
8. Download the free iBooks App to your device
9. Connect your device to your computer and sync it with 'Books' in iTunes
10. Open the iBooks App on your device and access your eBook

However, if you’ve got an iPad, an iTunes account, and the iBooks app you can cut these 10 steps in half and simply direct download the Harry Potter ebook to your iPad.  Which means you’re beginning as Pottermore Shop suggests above ...

To add a Pottermore Shop ebook directly to your iPad, select the Direct Download option

... but after Step 5 you’ll see this helpful message on your iPad:

Once the direct download is finished, your iPad will invite you to open the file in your iBooks app.  It will also place the book on your iPad's bookshelf.

I suppose there are other ereader apps available for the iPad, which is why you’re also given the choice of using the Open in... button.  I used Open in “iBooks” and found the DRM-free epub file opened flawlessly (which it should, since iBooks supports its epub file format).

Granted, Pottermore Shop may recommend its laborious 10-step approach to ensure that you place the DRM-free copy of your Harry Potter ebook on your Mac or PC for safekeeping.  That way should your iPad meet an untimely end and you require a new (or reformatted) one from Apple you won’t use up another of your 8 (or fewer) allowable downloads obtaining a new copy of your ebook.  Instead, you can simply synch the replacement iPad with your computer and voilà!—your Harry Potter ebook is once again ready to travel.

On the other hand, if you’re impatient to read and would like to skip a few steps ... my approach will save you serious time.

Amazon's Kindle Fire: Sneaky Faster

Okay, I'll make this short -- I can't compete with the 80 bazillion other tech blogs that are spilling plenty of digital ink right now about all the new Amazon Kindle tablets that Jeff Bezos announced this morning.

First, you'll notice that of the four devices Amazon rolled out today, only one, the $149 Kindle Touch 3G, offers cellular access to Amazon's Kindle store and your Kindle library.  The high-end $199 Kindle Fire, a tablet that promises to allow bandwidth-intensive video streaming, sticks to WiFi -- which is hardly surprising.  I doubt any cellular carrier would give Amazon a contract to carry its customers' Kindle Fire traffic without demanding a huge premium.  There's an enormous difference between downloading Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Keira Knightley's Pride and Prejudice.

Still, I'm a little disappointed Amazon hasn't made a deal with a carrier to offer pay-as-you-go 3G data service for the Kindle Fire the way Apple does with the iPad.

Second, the Kindle Fire browser, Amazon Silk, is both an acknowledgment that color tablets are data hogs and a brilliant move to make the Fire both faster and more Amazon-centric.  Essentially Silk has been designed to do all its browsing via Amazon's EC2 servers, which act as a kind of enormous browser cache in the sky.  There's more to it than that -- if you watch Amazon's video about Silk there's some predictive hocus-pocus that seems to claim the browser will adjust itself to your browsing habits and, anticipating where you'll go next, pull those pages onto the EC2 servers, ready to deliver before you even ask for them.  Whether or not this strategy works consistently (and if it does Kindle Fire owners will definitely be expecting 99.999% uptime from those EC2 servers ... even though Amazon promises only "99.95% availability for each Amazon EC2 Region" in its service level agreement for third-party subscribers), it locks Amazon's customers just as firmly into Amazon's content universe as the older Kindles' proprietary ebook format did for the company's legions of readers.

Because you can expect those EC2 servers to be especially fast at serving up Amazon's own web pages -- including video, music, books, magazines, and whatever else Amazon can think to stream.  (And any other browser you install will obviously not benefit from the EC2 turbo boost.)

Come to think of it, Jeff Bezos may be thinking this innovative streaming strategy may be just as effective at keeping customers hanging around Amazon as Mark Zuckerberg's social media strategy is at keeping his members hanging around Facebook.