Vodafone UK Notifies iPhone 4S Users, Warning Them Not To Update to IOS 6.1

British carrier Vodafone is advising its iPhone 4S customers not to upgrade to the latest version of Apple’s operating system because of an issue that can cause problems making calls, sending texts and accessing the Internet.

“We’re aware of an issue caused by Apple iPhone 4s handsets that have been upgraded to iOS 6.1 which impacts performance on 3G,” Vodafone said on its website. “Some customers may occasionally experience difficulty in connecting to the network to make or receive calls or texts or to connect to the Internet.”

Apple released iOS 6.1 last week, an update that added support for LTE networks in more countries as well as Siri-powered movie ticket buying, bug fixes and other updates.

The 3G problems, even for those affected, are intermittent, Vodafone said, while placing the blame on Cupertino for the problem.

“Apple is working on a solution to their software issue,” Vodafone said. “While Apple’s investigations continue, we would recommend that anyone who has not yet installed iOS 6.1 on their iPhone 4s should delay doing so until Apple has confirmed that their problem has been fixed.”

Twitter user Michelle Muirhead posted a text message she said Vodafone had sent advising against downloading the iOS update.

An Apple representative was not immediately available for comment on the issue.

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Instagram Has 90 Million Monthly Users, Denies Mass Account Closure In Regards To The TOS Fiasco

Remember that hubbub about Instagram users abandoning the photo-sharing app as a direct result of those controversial terms of service? The company says it simply isn't so, and for the first time ever has offered up the numbers to prove it. Instagram says over 90 million people are using the service on a monthly basis, which actually represents a ten percent increase in month-over-month activity, according to AllThingsD. That directly contrasts reports from analytics company AppData last month that suggested Instagram was hemorrhaging users that were unhappy with its ill-received ToS changes. It seems the company is doing just fine, even as it prepares to restore an older version of its service terms (without that advertising language) beginning Saturday. [TheVerge]

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Amazon Optimises MP3 Store For iPhone and iPod Touch Users

Amazon today announced a new version of its MP3 store, designed to work on iPhone and iPod touch devices from Apple. The HTML5 web app now allows iOS mobile device users to make direct purchases of tracks from Amazon’s 22 million song library via Safari, which will then make it instantly available to Amazon’s Cloud Player app for those devices.

It’s a similar move to what the company has already tried to do with its Kindle store for e-books. Amazon launched an iPad-formatted version of that store last year (also in January, coincidentally), accessible from the web, after Apple changed its App Store rules to prevent third-party software from selling content through their apps without giving Apple a cut. The lack of a direct sales channel in-app for both e-books and music content means that Amazon is at a usability disadvantage compared to Apple’s own media marketplaces, including iTunes and the iBookstore.

With the web-based Kindle Store, and now the new Amazon MP3 Store for iOS devices, Amazon is narrowing the gap between itself and Apple’s own native offerings. Users still have to use their browser to go to http://www.amazon.com/mp3 to access the new store, rather than being able to buy directly from within Amazon Cloud Player, but they can bookmark the site and save it to their device, and it’s a far easier process than going through the previous version of the MP3 store that wasn’t optimized for Apple’s mobile devices.

Amazon touts its MP3 library at over 22 million songs and over two million albums in the U.S., which is getting closer to the iTunes catalogue size (somewhere around 28 million). Access to those songs for shoppers is now a key battleground, and this could help Amazon considerably in that area, although it is worth noting that we haven’t heard much about how the web-based, iPad-optimized Kindle e-book store has helped conversions for Amazon in that arena. [TechCrunch]

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