The inclusion of Chinese handwriting recognition suggests they have their eyes on the Middle Kingdom. If you ever go to downtown Shanghai you will already see imported Iphones everywhere. An official launch is long overdue except that mainland China is not on the list of countries where the 3G Iphone will be launched. The other problem is that the new phone needs in-store activation. This makes it more difficult to get hold of unlocked handsets from the US to export to China. I expect local suppliers will need to source the Iphone from Hong Kong.

Iphone 2.0 is slimmer than its predecessor. It has better battery life, gps tracking and third party apps will be available to all lphone users from the Itunes store, which is not accessible to Chinese credit card holders. Those using jail broken handsets have been able to install software such as messaging and drawing programs since DVD John first cracked the device soon after it was launched last summer.

The biggest upgrade in the new Iphone is the inclusion of a 3g Chip to access HSDPA data networks for high speed mobile data networks. This will make it possible for Iphone users to stream audio and video using their handsets wherever they may roam even if it is not in range of a wifi hotspot. There is a catch for 3g Iphone users in China. HSDPA is not supported on the nascent 3G network that is being trialled in Chinese cities. China Mobile has just launched its own homegrown 3G standard called td-scdma. It looks like the Chinese Iphone will need to have its own td-scdma chip or find a way to make the handset play nicely with China’s high speed network.

Price is another mystery. The original Iphone went on sale in the US for $600, but the price soon tumbled to $399 for a 16 gb model. The new version appears to be even cheaper at $199 and $299 for the 8 gb and 16 gb models. The new handset is more expensive than it appears, because US data plans have risen to $30 a month so the cost of the phone increases over a two year contract by $40. It is not so easy to predict the cost of the 3G Iphone in China, because handsets are always unlocked so users tend not to be locked into expensive tariffs. Therefore, handsets are not subsidised by the networks trying to dupe customers into accepting long term contracts. Unlocked Iphones have recently been traded in China for less than 4000 RMB, but the price of the new handsets is less certain for the time being.

It is not a good time to buy an Iphone in China, because the new 3G version will go on sale after July 11th. On the other hand, it may be an excellent time to pick up a bargain first generation handset as suppliers get rid of their old stock or early adopters trade them up for new models. If you are not in the market for gps and are not bothered about waiting to see if 3G will be supported then you may be very happy using an Iphone 1.0. Don’t make the mistake of buying a first generation handset expecting second generation features. I’m sure some naive shoppers will fall into this trap.

The Iphone has sold 6 million handsets world wide. In spite of the hype, it continues to be a minority niche product compared with better featured phones from RIM (Blackberry), Nokia and HTC. Even though the Iphone has still not been officially launched in China, it has still managed to etch itself onto the minds of aspirational Chinese as an icon of style and status. The Iphone will continue to be ostentatiously displayed at Starbucks and restaurants in big Chinese cities for months and years to come.

Indochino is a Canadian company with offices in Vancouver and Shanghai. It runs a website that sells made to measure suits over the Internet for as little as $199, which can be a great bargain if you don’t mind waiting for your suit to to arrive from China. Selling clothes over the Internet did not work out for Boo.com 8 years ago, but we’ve come a long way since then. They have an answer for many of the issues that would stop many of us from buying a tailored suit this way.

Firstly, they tell you how to take your measurements. Your register as a new user and enter your measurement details. You can pay $1 for a swatch, which they will send to you if you want to get a feel for the fabric before ordering and they will honour the first $25 of any alterations, which need to be made. They claim to have a return rate of only 3 percent compared with an industry average of 17 percent.

Jenny was horrified by the concept of an online tailors, because getting bespoke clothes is such a personal experience. You need someone to help you choose the colours, cuttings and fabrics. She feels that simple commodity items like socks can be sold over the Internet, but not suits.

Indochino’s suits are not meant to compete with Taville Row tailors, but they are seeking to use the Internet to offer made to measure suits in a similar price range to items bought off the rack.

The online catalogue has a choice of about twenty basic designs from conservative to fashion suits. They also supply coats, shirts, blazers and accessories. Some of the garments look quite snappy, although they have promised to upgrade the photos. (See the techcrunch article here)It might appeal to folks in western countries who don’t want to spend $1000 for a made to measure suit, but those of us living in Shanghai will do just as well for less than 1000 RMB using the same tailors.

Good luck to Indochino for their bold E-commerce endeavour.

Flickr is an Internet photo sharing site that has been broken in China since the beginning of June. The site works, but you can’t see any images unless you install the Access Flickr plugin. Jenny’s site used to make use of the Flickr API to show galleries of her collections. Her site was effectively vandalised when Flickr stopped working in China. She couldn’t expect her local customers to install obscure Firefox plugins to be able to view photographs of her designs. I don’t suppose that the Chinese government was targeting Jenny, but it left us with an irritating headache of how to make her website accessible to customers.

I looked at a number of alternative photosharing sites including Photobucket and Zooomr. Today’s Shanghaiist had a blog post about a number of Chinese equivalents, but I learnt about those after we opted for Picasa. We chose Picasa, because it is owned by Google and offers 1GB of free storage before they start to charge. I am a Dreamhost customer and considered making greater use of their bundled open source galleries webapp. It works fine, but there is no embedded slideshows or wordpress integration plugins that work right out of the box.

Even though we chose Picasa, I still prefer Flickr’s powerful web based interface and it offers more features such as forwarding images to blogs and great cellphone support, but all modern Internet photosharing services have the same basic features to create albums, tag images and embed flash slideshows on your site. All signed up Google users automatically get a Picasa account. We still plan to cancel our pro Flickr accounts and hope they give us back some money.

I could have uploaded Jenny’s pictures straight from my computer to Picasa, but I am still improving my organisation skills so I lost track of the photos that needed to be in Jenny’s galleries. This meant I had to download the Flickr images and reupload them. Picasa has various editing and uploading tools for Windows, Mac and Linux. I like F-Spot Manager for Ubuntu Linux that makes it very easy to upload images to any web photo service.

Maybe Picasa will be blocked someday if someone publishes scandalous pictures of rioting in the countryside. Until that happens, Jenny’s website is working again.

Why are we so vexed this morning? Shanghai’s Australia and New Zealand Bank (ANZ) branch have been treating us like international money launderers. We sold our house in the UK to buy a place in Shanghai, but have now exceeded our annual quota of $50000 for inward foreign currency transfers. We have a modest pot of British money sitting in our ANZ bank account waiting to be spent on building work, refurbishment and household goods, but we are not allowed to convert these funds to be transferred into our local ICBC account until we present fapiaos (tax invoices) proving we have already bought these items.

The logic of this situation is that we have to buy things in order to get the fapiaos to pay for them.

The teller was not very impressed or helpful when we told him he was having a common sense bypass. He kept telling us that this was the law and we needed to present the correct paperwork in order to spend our money. He used the age old tactic of quoting the law and giving the same information in slightly different and more confusing ways. They could have saved us a lot of trouble by making it clear what we had to do when we remitted the funds from the UK. At that time, they were just as useless, because they failed to tell me I had to present a long list of mortgage documents to release the money for a downpayment.

No thanks to the useless bank tellers, we’re looking into some workarounds such as getting the building contractor and vendors to issue us with fapiaos before we pay. We are also going to try to transfer our British money to a friend who can then send it on to our ICBC account. ANZ does not make Chinese banking regulations, but they interpret and work with them. The issue is that other customers must have this problem from time to time and we shouldn’t have to dream up such elaborate plans to make use of our money. The useless ANZ staff should have warned us of ahead of time or guided us through the process more constructively.

Update
Another workaround was to withdraw all the cash as British pounds before converting it into RMB that could be paid into our ICBC account, but that costs 1800 RMB for every 100000 RMB. We may have solved this problem finally. If you have a husband or wife, you can get them to open an account and then transfer the money to them in sterling, which can be converted into RMB and wired to a different account. The trick is that they would not have exceeded the limit of $50000 foreign currency transfer even if you have.

They had big problems as they failed to compete with cheaper more modern high street competitors leading to falling sales, a plummeting share price and years of instability.
See http://www.guardian.co.uk/marks/story/0,,1752140,00.html

When I went back to the UK in the summer, I noticed the shops were playing Latin music, had more colour than I remember and mixed up reasonably everyday commodity items (t-shirts, underwear) with more expensive garments.

I have just had a look at the M&S website (www.marksandspencer.com) to see if it deserves the useability award that webcredible (www.webcredible.co.uk) gave it. My first glance is that it is almost as good as Amazon’s e-commerce website. It’s simple, elegant and very easy to find what you want, although the button to add an item to a basket could be simplified slightly. You have to deliberately choose a quantity. I suppose that makes the transaction more deliberate. When I have digested the webcredible report and looked at the high street opposition, I will write a follow up.