January 2007: Monthly Archive

New York Times columnist David Pogue has published an ammended blog entry containing a second round of FAQs everyone seems to interested in finding answers to. This is definitely worth the click, as it paints a clearer picture of this “micro” OSX platform. I found one comment from Steve Jobs to be rather dishy…

Markoff: “And what are you thinking about Flash and Java?”

Jobs: “Java’s not worth building in. Nobody uses Java anymore. It’s this big heavyweight ball and chain.”

Markoff: “Flash?”

Jobs: “Well, you might see that.”

Markoff: “What about YouTube–”

Jobs: “Yeah, YouTube—of course. But you don’t need to have Flash to show YouTube. All you need to do is deal with YouTube. And plus, we could get ‘em to up their video resolution at the same time, by using h.264 instead of the old codec.”

Err..I hate to break this to Steve but YouTube’s embedded video playback feature is based on Flash, so I’m not sure whether he understood the relevance of Markoff’s line of questions regarding Flash and its inclusion in the iPhone. Partnering with YouTube isn’t going to enable playback of YouTube content on the iPhone unless that partnership involves said company building a portable Flash package for Apple’s new phone. But I digress.

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As “iPhone euphoria” slowly wears off, replaced with sobering reality, some of iPhone’s less shiny aspects are beginning to come into view. Wilmington North Corolina’s StarNews (I didn’t know they had newspapers in NC. Wonder if they have internets as well ) pointed out the unfairness of Apple’s FairPlay digital rights management (DRM) technology which locks users into Apple’s walled garden by limiting playback of songs purchased through the iTunes Store only on Apple authorized hardware. Since Apple doesn’t license FairPlay to any other vendor, that means you can only listen to these legally purchased tracks on an iPod, or iPhone in this case.

Needless to say a good many users, and competitors to Apple, are not happy with this arrangement. Some are seeking legal recourse, accusing Apple of being a monopoly.

As consumers become more aware of how copy protection limits perfectly lawful behavior, they should throw their support behind the music labels that offer digital music for sale in plain-vanilla MP3 format, without copy protection.

Apple pretends that the decision to use copy protection is out of its hands. In defending itself against Ms. Tucker’s lawsuit, Apple’s lawyers noted in passing that digital-rights-management software is required by the major record companies as a condition of permitting their music to be sold online: “Without D.R.M., legal online music stores would not exist.”

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If there is one thing I cannot tolerate it’s a technology company playing with my emotions by promising one thing and delivering another. During the keynote, Steve Jobs clearly indicated the iPhone will not have 3G support built-in, meaning it will not poses UMTS or HSDPA technology. And yet John Markoff of the New York Times is claiming that Apple will provide a firmware upgrade that will unlock this hidden functionality.

Hint to Mr. Markoff 3G is a hardware feature, not software. Meaning that it’s going to take a hell of a lot more than a firmware upgrade to add 3G capability to iPhone if the underlying hardware that enables it is missing. Smacks John on forehead

Read on

PC World’s Yardena Arar and Eric Dahl interviewed Apple VP Greg Joswiak, posing some of the same questions formulated by Mike Elgan of ComputerWorld.

I found this item particularly juicy, and disturbing …

The touchscreen technology worked, but not as perfectly as it did in the demo, at least in my brief experiment with the prototype. In particular, I had real problems with the software keyboard: My thumb-typing was consistently hitting keys adjacent to the ones I targeted. The iPhone has auto-correcting text entry technology that’s supposed to figure out what word you were trying to enter, but there’s a limit to its second-guessing skills after you’ve entered three or four incorrect characters in a row. Joswiak kept telling me to stop trying to backtrack and correct the typos (”Have faith,” he said repeatedly), but it just wasn’t working for me.

Renowned columnist Bob Cringely, an old favorite of mine, has written a great editorial about iPhone and Apple’s struggle to wrestle control of the product name away from Cisco’s clutches.

The iPhone is cool; the iPhone is neat; the iPhone is weird in a couple of ways. You know it isn’t even close to being the most expensive mobile phone on the market, for all the grousing I’ve read about the price. My Nokia N.93, which was technically not available yet in the U.S. until recently, but could be freely found in the United States of eBay, costs substantially more at around $800. What’s weird about the iPhone is, first, its name, since iPhone is a registered trademark of Cisco Systems, which sells a variety of products under that brand. Apple has been negotiating with Cisco about licensing the iPhone name, so they can hardly claim ignorance of the trademark, yet this week they announced the product without such a license and of course Cisco filed a lawsuit in response. As the trademark holder, Cisco had no choice, because to not file suit would have been to not defend the trademark, perhaps making it more vulnerable to poaching by Apple.

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More industry publications weigh in on iPhone, forecasting a less than rosey outlook. This from Mercury News…

“My perspective since I first learned about it is, `Wow, this is really cool.’ But `really cool’ doesn’t mean success right away,” said Neil Strother, an analyst who covers the mobile phone business for NPD Group, a research firm.

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And this year’s “things we say that come back to bite us right in the ass” award goes to Palm CEO Ed Colligan, who was interviewed back in November ‘06 during a Churchil Club event by the New York Time’s John Markoff about his thoughts on Apple’s secret development of a mobile phone device. Colligan proudly boasted…

“PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

Oh, Ed. I feel your pain. If only I hadn’t consumed that last Gin and tonic at the company Christmas party I might not have told my boss he looked sexy in that suit he was wearing. He still gives me nervous looks as we pass each other.

On a serious note, it remains to be seen just how “right” Apple may have gotten it. But Apple’s vision of mobile software certainly forces the moguls of mediocrity Triumvirate of telephony (RIM, Palm, and Nokia) to rethink product strategies and begin taking software development more seriously. That is especially true of Palm whose orphaned Operating System, the beleaguered PalmOS Garnet, has languished.

This is your wake up call, boys! Pick up the phone before the market hangs up on you.

The tech world’s greatest child custody battle continues; it’s Kramer vs. Kramer, or Apple vs. Cisco. Who will win, who will lose. Slowly I turn…Niagra Falls!

Read the story on MarketWatch.

AppleInsider has posted some really great shots (from behind the giant Bell glass display case) of the iPhone on display at MacWorld.

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Wall Street Journal columnist, Walt “Uncle Walty” Mossberg says iPhone beats out the BlackJack and Palm’s new Treo 750. High praise indeed coming from such an Apple shill unbiased product reviewer.

“…But if you’re in the market for a smart phone and can afford $499, you might want to wait until June for the Apple iPhone. The Apple entry is so full of promise that anyone buying a smart phone in 2007 should at least wait for the full reviews and a chance to try it out.”

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