iPhone Passion

Steve Jobs shows the Apple iPhone on Saturday Night Live – SNL Jan 13, 2007
Update 19/01/2007 – lost and found again. Here is another one:

Update 16/01/2007: unfortunately the video seems to have been erased by the YouTube guys. Damn!

“Steve Jobs” appeared on Saturday Night Live last night to talk about the iPhone and it’s even better than we thought. Apparently it holds 2 billion, with a ‘b,’ songs! And it even has an on/off button and a clock! Oh, yeah, and don’t forget to download The Office in iTunes.

(via TUAW)

Pretty funny. I personally like this video, although opinions seem to vary

The BoingBoing guys have made my day. Here is the coolest Apple phone image I saw lately. As they say: Apple phone: no need to wait for June on this one.

Techcrunch has an interesting insight on Apple’s UGLY practice of bullying bloggers, that’s getting UGLIER by the minute. You know the first case: Apple taking bloggers to court because of published pictures of the Mac Mini.
Now, they are getting beyond the absurd: somebody created a skin for Windows Mobile phones that looks exactly like the new iPhone user interface. Somebody else created one for the Palm. Now, Apple lawyers are threatening all bloggers that even LINK to the software in question.
I believe Apple is BAD whenever doing this. While the creators of the skins in question might breach the copyright(although, come on, the iPhone won’t be any less successful because of these skins; even more, they will make it even more popular), the persons linking to them are in a very legal position, nonetheless.
SO. Without any further ado.
Also, please read engadget’s take on the matter . Dont’ forget to read gizomodo’s one as well.

How to install? Read details at the links pointed from techcrunch, and here as well.

Joy of Tech’s “the other iPhone lawsuit”

Because he didn’t have access to the real one, Jason Kottke has scaled, printed and cut a real-size paper version of the iPhone. A good opportunity to photograph it compared to other daily-life items. So, here you are, together with my previous post on iPhone sizes, enjoy some interesting pictures of Mr. Kottke’s hairy hands:-) :

Read the rest of this entry »

Does The iPhone Need Patents? – the Techdirt guys seem to believe the 200 patents or so the Steve Jobs boasted during the keynote are a bit too much. Such an innovative concept would be successful even without the protection offered by the patents. While bad for the consumers, these kind of patents are ment to protect Apple’s conceptual and technical innovation.
Anyway, feel free to join the discussion over on Techmeme. Pro or contra the iPhone patents? You decide.

via Youtube. relatively funny animation.

Via Engadget: comparing the two best-designed touch-screen phones of the moment: Apple’s iPhone versus LG’s LG KE850
LG has already won the International Forum Design Product Design Award for 2007. My guess is that the award for 2008 goes to iPhone

Computer World has a set of 20 questions now, after the Reality Distortion Effect has faded out. Read their article for a feet-on-the-earth view:
Among the questions:

• How much will it actually cost to own it? (data fees and SMS fees seem to get pretty important)
• How fast is it, actually?
• Can you use it as a mobile modem as well?
• Will the name remain the same once the CISCO suit takes off the ground?

Etc…

In an interview given to the nytimes, Steve Jobs confirmed that people won’t be able to install third-party apps on the iPhone:

“We define everything that is on the phone,” he said. “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.”

The iPhone, he insisted, would not look like the rest of the wireless industry.

“These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn’t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.”

This is bad news for independent developers, looks like only Apple and its partners will get to develop software for the iPhone. Really bad news, I was already looking forward to develop some cool drag&drop games for the multitouch screen. Well.. with a bit of luck, maybe we’ll at least get to use already-existing Dashboard widgets. After all, Jobs greatest concern (besides making shitloads of money) seems to be the well-being of the network provider(Cingular, in our case):

“You don’t want your phone to be an open platform,” meaning that anyone can write applications for it and potentially gum up the provider’s network, says Jobs. “You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.”

(msnbc)

Also, Jobs doesn’t seem excited at the thought of letting people freely install their own ringtones onto the system(or make custom ringtones out of their iTunes songs). Plenty of money in sight? Definitely.

What can we say? The man is a hardware genius. If he is a bit evil on the side, we still may forgive him. As long as the iPhone will live up to its promise

Mac Forums 2001 – see here the reactions and rants of hard-core Apple users to the new iPod. Quite a change of perspective from now, ain’t it?