November 2007: Monthly Archive

Rakesh Agrawal’s 3 year old daughter devised a clever means for watching instructional videos on her father’s iPhone using common refrigerator magnets to mount the device on the fridge. Positioned for just her height, the industrious little scamp uses her iPhone to learn Yo-yo techniques by watching How-to videos from Veronica Belmont of Mahalo Daily. I’m betting Mom and Dad won’t be so proud once the 3 year old realizes her invention is patentable and a lucrative product market, enjoying fabulous wealth while her parents are left staring at a empty refrigerator.

She’s not the only one learning lessons from Veronica. I kid…Veronica is awesome, and wonderfully entertaining. I’ve always enjoyed her ebullient personality since her days at C|net, co-hosting Buzz Out Loud and Crave. She’s in my Facebook and Pownce friends lists for a reason.

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The title doesn’t give an exact quote, but if I was to say there’s a gist to this interview, that would be it. CNN Money.com Fortune interviewed Apple’s Greg Joswiak, who is in charge of marketing for iPhones and iPods. As is almost always the case with an interview like this, he doles out the money quotes like Michael Jordan sticks out his tongue. Some of it we’ve heard before — they want to take time to make sure everything is going alright, and there isn’t really any new news, just that it’s presented in more detail than before:

“I think the software development kit (SDK) that’s going to be available for the iPhone is very interesting, because we think that with the revolutionary multi-touch interface and the phenomenal product that the iPhone is, and certainly having OS X underneath it, that it’s going to be an unbelievable platform for developers.

“Of course what we want to make sure we’ve done is keep the phone safe and reliable, and that’s why it’s taken us a little while to get this SDK out. Especially now that we’ll have a real SDK which means legitimate developers are going to come into the space. There are all kinds of fantastic and great things that they’re going to do.

[....]

“We do our best to try to understand what customers are going to want down the road. I’m fond of the Wayne Gretzky quote — you skate to where the puck is going to be. We try to understand as we develop our product road map, what’s going to be exciting in the future. And that’s one of the advantages we have over our competitors. Our competitors tend to put the cross hairs on where we are now, and by the time they come up with a product that tries to match where we are now, we’re beyond them. We’re one or two generations beyond, moving faster than they are.”

Last week, there was press of unlocked iPhones as the result of the T-Mobile vs. Vodafone lawsuit. T-Mobile lost the suit and as a result have to sell an unlocked iPhone. To keep anyone from actually buying it, they set the price astronomically high, at €999, or $1500 American. There were really only two possibilities for how the $1500 iPhone would be unlocked: one, they would do it for you at the store. If they could unlock from the point of sale, hackers would figure out how Apple did it in the baseband radio and we’d all get unlocked phones. Apple clearly couldn’t do that, so they instead do it from iTunes. If someone purchases an unlocked iPhone from T-Mobile, their IMEI (kind of like a unique serial number for your iPhone) is put into a database. And when that iPhone is activated, it shows up as unlocked. Presto, that’s it!

If you’re looking to translate the German from the image above: “Unlock Complete. Your iPhone has been successfully unlocked. Click continue to set [?] and sync your iPhone.”

It’s an increasingly rare day when a press release finds its way to my inbox that’s actually relevant to me or anyone that uses an iPhone. But, goosync.com has done it. They have a product that syncs your iPhone with Google’s online calendar. It’s a Windows-only app and it requires Outlook with a plugin, but if you were looking for a way to sync the Google to your iPhone, there’s a way to do it.

“A synchronisation application is not yet available for the Apple iPhone. However, it is still possible to synchronise the device with GooSync by using the Funambol Outlook Plugin. [....] A GooSync client for the Apple iPhone is planned for release in Q1 2008.”

I don’t know why you would, but if you need the press release, it’s after the break.

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Germans. You think you’re all so smart with your pickled cabbage, exotic sausages, fine Pilsners and now UNLOCKED iPhones? For just a few hundred Euros, you can waltz over to a computer, dock your iPhone, pay an unlocked premium fee through iTunes, and enjoy the privilege of using your iPhone on any wireless carrier you choose.

Well that’s all well and good, but just remember we Americans still poses the worlds most egomaniacal corporate CEO, Steve Jobs. Top that!

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God hates me. Nothing else can explain my recent steady string of bad luck. My plans to devote free time to writing, and my entire holiday, were derailed by a bout with food poisoning…or stomach flu (it’s not clear which is the culprit). While most of you were enjoying vast portions of poultry, piled on plates, and devouring drumsticks, I was in bed convalescing. I was struck down Wednesday evening and didn’t fully recover until late Saturday, and by that time my only goal was to salvage what was left of Thanksgiving. On the bright side, illness provided a way of avoiding family. Hallelujah!

So that was my week. Enough ruminating. Now for some good news - I freed up this whole bloody week to devote to blogging…and I am raring to go. Today will be a little spotty due to a couple meetings with clients (you know, that whole job thing), but from then on it’s off to the blogosphere. Provided of course God ceases his campaign to punish me. Was I Hitler in a past life? I thought having Vista running on my PC was punishment enough. sigh

Now, if you’ll all excuse me, I have to see a man about some wallpaper.

In observance of the Thanksgiving holiday here the US, I will be posting content tomorrow and throughout the remainder of this week. How’s that, you ask? Yes…well it seems the only free time I have for writing these days is when not working at my real job. The holiday provides the perfect opportunity to publish a backlog of content and reviews I’ve been hammering out. Plus it gives me something to do while digesting an explosive combination of Turkey and Aunt Clara’s lethally over sweetened cranberry stuffing - killing two birds with one stone, if you’ll excuse pun. So now you have something to cure both boredom and Turkey toxemia while visiting family and friends this week.

I’m still contemplating future plans for this site and whether or not to open it to volunteer contributions. Based on the email responses I’ve gotten most of you favor maintaining the status quo, but with me posting more content. I think you’re all just trying to drive me insane…it’s what I’ve suspected all along. To that end I plan on devoting more time to writing, and less time to work. Homelessness can’t be that bad…can it? We’ll see how this goes. Until then, have a wonderful holiday and be sure to check back here, in between second helpings of Mashed potatoes.

I think that I’ve been lucky with all of the phones that I’ve reviewed in the Smartphone Round Robin. I think there’s a proper order. I began with the device furthest away in mentality to the iPhone, the BlackBerry Curve, and it was a fine device. I missed having a touchscreen, but it was a good device. Then, I got to use the Tilt for a week, and that was actually another good device — very powerful with its touchscreen, and it has a form factor at least in parts reminiscent of the iPhone, though maybe without some of its ease of use. And last, I get to review the Treo, which is in many ways the closest of all of the phones we’ll review to the iPhone. Did you know that iPhone owners were 7 times more likely to have used a Treo (or Sidekick) than any other phone?

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There are a lot of rumors floating around that various carriers will get the 3G iPhone. Telefonica is one of the carriers usually named, Vodafone is usually the other. The rumors lately indicate that the next generation of iPhone, the iPhone 3G, will be available in May.

This blog post is basically for the record — I don’t buy it. These posts are all referencing obscure foreign blogs while the more traditional scoop-based mac sites remain silent on the matter (like thinksecret.com, for example). I don’t think Apple will replace the iPhone hardware that soon, either — part of me thinks that Apple will unveil a new iPhone right about the time that original purchasers near the end of their contracts. You know, selling stuff to their already-captive audience. Apple has hinted that maybe we’d maybe see something iPhoney with 3G in late 2008, and that’s probably still true.

I had earlier decided to skip this story, since I’m not aware that we have many, if any German readers, and T-Mobile of Germany only sold 10,000 or so iPhones so far. UK-based Vodafone has been calling sour grapes on the iPhone for a while now. They’re the parent company of Verizon, they passed on the iPhone 1.0, they want 3G, they don’t want to give up their control and just become a data network, they’ve made a lot of noise throughout the iPhone’s launch and they’ve been very effective about staying in the press. Anyway, Vodafone sued T-Mobile for a stop of how they marketed the iPhone because it violated some German laws. They filed the lawsuit a few days ago, and it would appear that Vodafone just won their case.

The resolution of the lawsuit ended in an interesting outcome: it would seem that the iPhone is available unlocked for use with any carrier, with no contract, available from T-Mobile for €999. That’s right, an unlocked iPhone can be yours for the bargain price of about $1500 U.S. I don’t think they’ll have many takers, but my hope is that at least one hacker figures out how they activate these special $1500 iPhones and mimics the process so that any unlocked phone can skip or bypass the sometimes-very-difficult activation process and publishes it for the cred. Barring that, that a group of hackers figure it out and charge for a solution.