Watch the bidding here

Apple announced the new iPhone today. Oh, you missed it?

I own an original 2G iPhone with the nice silver back. I didn’t upgrade to a 3G last year because I wasn’t bothered by the network speed. What I wanted was an increase in performance. This new iPhone has an increase in performance amongst other things. So I’ll be upgrading in a few weeks.

The problem is I doubt I’ll be able to offload my 2G iPhone for much. The 3G will be retailing for $99 (which will probably be £70 or so) and there’s a glut of the buggers on eBay as it is. So I tweeted a ponder to the cloud, as it were:

A swiss roll was offered and then the bidding started. As I write Charlie’s in the lead with a home made carrot cake is in the lead. Oh, hang on. Neil’s raised the game with “Triple choc, three layer cake with buttercream icing filling, and hand piped funky stuff on top.”

This is obviously going to get out of control unless we Lay Down Some Rules. So here they are.

• All bids must be made on Twitter, be addressed to @peteashton and contain the hashtag #iphonecake.
• Current top bids will be recorded here. Or maybe somewhere else. I’ll figure that out later.
• All bids must be a cake or combination of cakes. No biscuits. No other forms of pudding. Just cake.
• Ranking of which cake is better is my decision. Since I’m the one consuming the cake subjectivity is fine. Your cake may be bigger or more expensive than another cake but if I prefer the smaller, less expensive cake then you lose.
• You may provide additional information in the form of photographs or links. This may help your case. For example, Kate has just bid a “crunchy top lemon cake”. I have no idea what that is so it’s not going to beat Neil’s.
• We must be able to meet to exchange cake for phone. This means you need to be able to bring a cake to Birmingham city centre or Moseley / Kings Heath.
• The bidding stops on June 19th when the iPhone 3GS is released. The winner then has, ooh, let’s say a month to meet me to exchange.
• You’ll get everything that came with the iPhone. I think I even have the box somewhere. That includes the headphones which I’ve been using. (You might want to buy new ones.)
• More rules will probably be added as the bidding progresses. I expect nonsense to occur.
• New rule: The auction will be canceled if O2 decide to not play fair and charge significantly more than the equivalent of Apple’s announced $199 for a 16GB iPhone 3GS. This may not be a problem as I think my current contract is nearly up so I’ll be happy to take a new one but since O2 are a mobile phone company and the business model of mobile phone companies is based on ripping people off so I’m going to wait and see. cf AT&T in the US. Update to the new rule: It looks like it’ll be okay. Less than £200 is fine with me.
• New rule: Well, more advice really. If you specify how large the cake will be you stand a better chance of becoming the higher bidder. How big is this Dundee cake of which you speak? 6 inches will earn a shrug but 12 inches in diameter? That’s certainly going to be taken under consideration.
• New rule: Winning cakes will be recorded on this blog. You have to beat the most recent entry.
• New rule: The order of the cake bids on iphonecake.tumblr.com may change as I reconsider the relative value of each cake. And research what they actually are.
• New rule: You can re-bid the same cake in larger quantities if you think it’ll help.
• New rule: My current O2 contract is up on July 19th (or thereabouts) so I won’t be getting the new iPhone before then. If you win on June 19th you’ll have to wait until I switch over before getting your prize.
• My decision is final.

Get to it.