I have been out most of the time today, and while browsing the BBC News site noticed the nice in page links they had recently started putting in articles alsobm work nicely on the iPhone. Well, except for YouTube, which asks for Flash. And yes, there will be some real posts later :D.

Funnily enough, I was messing around with my iPhone today and discovered that Google had opened up a Google Translate version, specifically for Mobile Safari. Now this is not a native app, but a handy way of getting quick translations on the go. It’s available at the same address you access it on your computer - www.google.com/translate.

This goes with the other list of web apps Google have developed or the iPhone, such as Reader and GMail (although I just use Mobile Mail).

If you are loving your iPhone 3G, but not so much loving the colour’s, then Colorware have just announced that they will start painting iPhone 3G’s, like they did with the original iPhone. Unlike some, I love the plastic back to the iPhone 3G, as I think it has a much nicer feel in your hands. The plastic also seems like it will mix well with new colors, like the red above, which looks very nice.

You can get the back done for $150, which is roughly £75 (although you need to ship it to America, so yeah, grab the spraycans…) but you can ramp it up all the way to around $210 if you have things like the home screen button done as well. Unfortunately, since you can’t buy the iPhone without signing up to a contract, you can only send it to them, instead of buying it directly from them. Still, if you have some colour that you really like, and a load of money to blow then this is the perfect thing for you.

I’m happy with my black though, to be perfectly honest…

For many months both the U.S. and Canadian iTunes stores have offered a weekly movie rental at a heavily discounted price (typically $0.99). The promotion is similar to Apple’s ‘Song of the week’ promotions in many countries, however this new movie discount will only let you watch the movie within the next 30 days for 48 hours.

Today, this promotion has arrived at the UK store, under the title ‘99p Film of the Week’ (double the price in the U.S.) offering a film rental for £2 less than usual. The first feature on offer is the 1998 movie ‘Ronin‘, starring Robert De Niro.

MobileMe is a service from Apple which many of you will no doubt have heard of before; the service replaced .Mac and in doing so brought more emphasis to having your data ‘in the cloud’ and it being ‘pushed’ (or at least nearly pushed) to all your devices. I myself have been a .Mac subscriber for just under a year so was salivating when i heard the new of the update, however, the transition to MobileMe was anything but smooth and has left many, many subscribers with “rocky” service (to quote Apple themselves).

At first the ‘groundbreaking’ web applications promised for your email, contacts and calendars simply failed to load for almost every MobileMe member. Apple now claims that this was due to “a lot more traffic to our servers than” they anticipated. They now assure us that they’ve “since added server capacity and tuned our software to scale better”. So, this would seem all well and good, however, there is one more major issue. For the last week or so many MobileMe users have been shouting from the hilltops, saying that their MobileMe email either on the desktop or on iPhone is simply not working. After a few days Apple did acknowledge this problem, but went on to say it was only affecting 1% of MobileMe users.

Yesterday, Apple had this to say about the issue:

“Last Friday a serious problem with one of our mail servers blocked those members’ access to their MobileMe mail accounts. As of today a team was able to restore limited web access to those accounts so the affected members can use their browsers to read mail that has arrived since last Friday (though not before) as well as send and receive new mail.”

Apple’s MobileMe support staff also say they expect all email accounts to be functioning fully by the end of next week. What’s more Apple is now saying that at least 10% of email messages sent to this “1%” of subscribers between the 16th and 18th of July have been lost.

With the advent of the MobileMe service many people, such as myself, have left their previous email provider (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail…) and have attempted a complete switch over to MobileMe. This extended and hellish debacle will no doubt have made many switchers question their actions and perhaps already turn back to their old email service. None of this can be construed as anything but awful news for Apple.

One interesting development came yesterday on the MobileMe support pages however. As a gesture to show understanding and sympathy this page now tells us that Steve Jobs has personally requested a member of his team to “write a posting every other day or so to let everyone know what’s happening with MobileMe”. The anonymous poster says they are working alongside the MobileMe engineers so will have up to date information at every moment.

Despite all of this hideous trouble, MobileMe is shaping up to be a good, useful service. There is certainly a lot more work to be done in the way of stability, scaling and new features, but if Apple can eradicate these problems and listen to their users’ requests MobileMe could be in for a long and fruitful life to come.

Right now I am posting from the awesome Wordpress app for the iPhone.

You can even take photos and put ones from your library into the post very easily. This will be very very handy when I am out and about and I need to get around and blog. As you use the iPhone typing gets much easier so it doesn’t worry me so much.