You wouldn’t think of Paul Otellini as someone who uses “hip” consumer products, given his stodgy corporate background and boardroom persona. But beneath his mild professional demeanor lies a Mac fanboy and iPhone lover. Yes, his secret is out: Intel’s number one man uses a MacBook Pro, and both he and his spouse carry iPhones.
In a recent interview with BusinessWeek, Otellini admits to using Apple products for personal use, though he does preface his confession by saying that he still carries a ThinkPad for work, in the event Steve Ballmer should happen to stop by and catch him with a MacBook sitting in his lap.
By the way, am I the only one who is utterly dumbfounded by the continued success of the antiquated ThinkPad series? The damn things still look the same after nearly a decade… and they were ugly to begin with. If forced to carry a corporate portable (mind you, you’d have to hold a gun to my head) Dell’s Latitude line would be my first choice. Not that I’m enamored with Dell products, but their business portables are well designed, highly configurable, and decently priced.
Well, I thought I sit down this morning with my cup of tea and tell you about the Speck ToughSkin (store link, $29.95). Due to errands and just plain procrastination, the tea is cold. Anyhow, that’s enough about the start to my day and on to the review because things are certainly looking up. The Spec ToughSkin is a two part solution. The first is a ‘ruggedized’ silicon layer that fits snuggly around your iPhone. Then there is a plastic holster attached to a belt clip. The entire iPhone case can be plunked into the holster clip on your belt. This is, in theory, a best of both worlds scenario, or as Speck puts it ‘best case’ scenario. So I’ll start with the silicon case itself.
Well, the bad news is that I just got a letter from Sprint. Suffice to say that I’m still going to be out three hundred bucks to cancel my contract. A wrong decision a year ago is going to cost me an additional couple hundred that I didn’t need to lose. I thought about calling them to try to sort it all out, but I realized I’d waste a couple hours on the phone with their customer service when instead I could be writing this fine review and getting paid a little something for it. Then I could call it all a wash. Just a bit of warning: Sprint offered me an additional 10% discount to up my contract for two years more a while back (this was before the iPhone was on the horizon). Unfortunately, it knocked out a 5% discount I already had. Net gain 5%. I may dash off a quick letter, but I think even that may be a waste of time.
So instead of wasting my time with Sprint, let’s move on to Apple and AT&T’s wonderful iPhone and Mobi Products Protector Case (store link, $19.95). Important things first: this comes in Smoke, Clear, Red and Pink, though studying all of the pictures, all of the cases are translucent. I received the Smoke version, which to my taste is neither here nor there. That said, it does seem to be the best of the options.
Google has been enabling IMAP access for everyone that has been using GMail. IMAP, like POP, is a method of downloading mail from a mail service. POP works really well if you just use one computer, but it’s a nightmare if you use more than one. And you know, the iPhone is a lot like a computer, enough that using POP on it has kind of been a nightmare in terms of checking my work email. The option for IMAP hasn’t showed up on my account yet, but it’s showed up for Dieter, and he has a good account of how it works up at WMExperts. If you prefer, there’s also an official Google video available at YouTube, catered specifically for iPhone users. If you want article help on how to install everything on your desktop email, GMail has posted a help file on their site.
And now, that video for any iPhone users out there:
Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook, gave a great talk today. His talk actually dovetails perfectly with what I wrote last night, that all of these “walled garden” methodologies have got to go. My notes from the talk have been posted up; you’ll see them refined into a story at BerryShack and Crackberry soon enough, I’m sure.
I’ll dig a bit deeper into his talk later today, but the highlight for me is that Moskovitz knows that as computers get smaller, they’ll eat into mobiles. Mobiles will have to become open like computers, or people will start using computers instead of mobiles. As computers miniaturize, that’s just going to be a fact of life.
figure 1: this image from Moskovitz’s talk shows the nature of the computer world versus the nature of the mobile world. In the mobile world, everything is locked. Carriers try to monetize various kinds of data over their own network, the OS is locked to everyone, and the hardware is similarly locked, which isn’t what people really want (witness the energy put into hacking openness into the iPhone). The locked-in aspect of the mobile world is also what leads to people thinking of their mobile phone as jsut a landline that they can take with them wherever they go, instead of a mobile computing device. This is a barrier to smartphone adoption.
figure 2: this is Moskovitz’s picture that depicts the collision that’s going to occur in the mobile world as the computer world miniaturizes to the point where the computer hardware makers can put their software and services onto mobile-sized devices that have full computer power.
The other great part is that Moskovitz gave a warning to everyone attending: open up your platform or become obsolete, either by Apple’s hand or Google’s hand. Pick your poison, really. Both of them are looking to either destroy or warp the industry, and to do it from within.
By now you’re all wondering why I haven’t been posting this week. Well I can dispel the myth of my tragic death in a storm of Judgment day proportions. No, much to my misfortune I was incapacitated by the smallest of all things… a virus. Since Sunday evening I have suffered one of the worst bouts with flu in my young life. This virus comes equipped with all the latest features and options. When not doubled over with excruciating abdominal pains, I’m sitting on a porcelain throne experiencing all the joys of uncontrollable diarrhea. In the few brief moments respite from pain and purging, I suffer delirium as a result of high fever and insatiable fatigue. Needless to say, the past three days have not been fun for this lad.
But the show, or blog as it were, must go on. And on it goes. It is the Captain’s duty to go down with his ship, but the ship should not go down with it’s Captain. I will resume normal posting starting today, which won’t be easy for me since I have a backlog of “my real job” work piled high on my desk. But enough of my whining.
figure 1: various logos of CTIA. It’s probably supposed to show multi-facetedness and diversity, but it’s a lot more like untreated schizophrenia.
There is something seriously wrong with the wireless industry. The CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment is emblematic of the issues that plague the wireless industry. It’s seriously like a microcosm of what’s broken in the wireless world.
Well, we’ve been walking the floor for about an hour, and… nothing. For an entertainment conference, there isn’t much entertainment to be had. There will be more on that in a bit; I’m typing on my iPhone and I’m not about to tap out some gigantic Tolstoy-esque missive. The biggest news for iPhone users is probably weatherbug for the iPhone and iPod Touch. That news is almost a week old; that should give you an idea of the bleak nature of this conference.
He had a lot to say about Windows Mobile, this of course being a mobile conference. He didn’t have a lot to say in regards to competition with the iPhone. Windows Live Search, Microsoft’s one-stop app for personal searches, crashed on stage. The presenter handled it quite well, there will be no horror stories of 5 minute waits for devices to reboot, etc.
The biggest news of his keynote is that Microsoft is bringing all of the parts of Windows Mobile phones further into their domain network structure. Windows Mobile devices will be further managed by the network administrators. They can push applications out, settings, practically the entire phone experience. It looks like it will be quite popular with the enterprise; but not by any means at the cost of the iPhone. No, this isn’t a shot across the iPhone’s bow. It’s a direct hit on Blackberry. I’ve said over and over in our Treocast podcasts that RiM plays a very dangerous game in the mobile space — they compete directly with Microsoft, and their job just got a lot harder.
It’s curious to me that Ballmer never really even mentions Google. Thinly-veiled insults are hurled their way a fair amount by both Ballmer and former Seahawks player / former U.S. Representative / current CTIA presidentSteve Largent, but Microsoft curiously has the decency to mention Yahoo!. Anyway, we’re off to the show floor. I’ll be posting more later.
Apple just posted their quarterly results, and the results are great. Apple sold a staggering amount of Macs this quarter. iPod sales are still growing. They sold 400,000 more Macs than they’ve ever sold, 2.1 million altogether. They’re selling their stuff like gangbusters in Europe. They earned a dollar per share over the last quarter. Apple has sold about 1.4 million iPhones, and the small-to-medium business segment loves the iPhone. Oh, and perhaps 250,000 of those iPhones were sold to unlockers. So yeah, business as usual. Look for more of the same next quarter, I’ll predict — once Leopard is out, there’s going to be a stronger-than-usual rush to get new machines as people upgrade.
The iPhone Blog merged with the Phone different site in May of 2008. Both sites were founded on a premise that comes one from one of Apple's old slogans: Think different. The iPhone Blog: for people who dare to phone different.
By now you’re all wondering why I haven’t been posting this week. Well I can dispel the myth of my tragic death in a 
