All This iPhone Criticism Won't Hurt Apple A Bit

It seems like everywhere I turn these days, I hear somebody griping about how Apple is turning into the new Microsoft, how they have become the "Big Brother" in their 1984 Macintosh commercial, and how they are against the developer community altogether by locking down their more than famous iPhone (so lovingly adorned the 'Jesus Phone' by many - mine has yet to walk on water though) with the latest 1.1.1 firmware update. And although there might be some aspects of truth in these statements, let's face it, neither Apple nor their ground breaking phone are going anywhere.

If you have ever heard the phrase "Bad publicity is good publicity", then you'll understand what I'm talking about. Every time somebody posts an anti-Apple blog, article or column.... BAM! Free advertising.

And then with the millions of people reading these sites every day, some who own iPhones, many more who do not; do we the faithful few realize how many people out there haven't actually seen an iPhone in person? I don't know about you, but when I hear bad publicity about a hyped product that I have never actually held in my hands, it makes me want to go to a store and check it out. If I do that, I might actually want to buy it, or at least another product in their store (I don't think I'm alone in this either. Has anyone been in an Apple Store lately? I always want to buy everything in there).

So, while we're sitting here drolling about how we don't like this or that, let us understand that Apple, Inc. is sitting back tapping their corporate feet to the plastic rhythm being made by the millions who are relentlessly pulling out their credit cards and blowing their children's savings on... you guessed it... Apple products!

In the meantime, my motto in regards to any kind of technology is and most likely always will be, "If it works for you, buy it. If it doesn't work for you, don't buy it."

It's as simple as that.

Why Can't I Access AT&T WiFi With My iPhone?

There's one thing about being an AT&T Wireless customer that I just really don't understand, and that is why my AT&T membership doesn't give me automatic access to all of their WiFi hot spots. It just seems like a natural conclusion that they would give their customers the ability to use their hot spots, but for some reason they don't have it in them to include this, at least in one of their packages. And it kills me every time I see an open AT&T WiFi network, and I can't connect unless I pay as much as I do for my internet at home?!?! I'm already paying an extra $20/mo for unlimited data on my iPhone. Now, I understand that they're probably more interested in making more $$ than they are with making me happy, but don't you think it might draw more people to their service?

I'm interested in what everyone thinks about this. And while I'm at it, how about free Mobile-To-Mobile Texting? Anyone? We've had free MTM Calling for some time now, and I think it's high time that they started including it with SMS as well. Give us a break people!

Revolutionary: Fusion-io SAN Drive, The Power of SAN on PCIe

This is definitely worth mentioning.

DEMOfall '07 housed one of the most revolutionary announcements that I have seen in a long time that could very well change the way we all store our information in the very near future. Fusion-io CEO David Flinn demonstrated their company's wave-of-the-future SAN drive, the 'ioDrive' which reportedly combines hundreds of gigabytes of flash storage on a small computer card that can fit in your shirt pocket. The device will connect through PCIe, and will have capacities up to 640GB!!! And that's only the start, the company is hoping to roll out a 1.2TB card in the not-too-distant future.

The impressive part to me is the data transfer rates. Flynn stated that the card has 160 parallel pipelines that can read data at 800 megabytes per second and write at 600 MB/sec.
Which in marketing terms means the ioDrive can perform "nearly a thousand times faster than any existing disk drive," and it can reportedly be integrated into existing data centers or workstations without any alterations to your infrastructure. This could play a huge role down the road in slimmer portable devices whose size limitations have had to do with the need for an internal Hard Drive.

Any guesses when Apple will jump on the bandwagon? I'd love to have some of these hooked up to a MacPro!

The devices will start showing up on the market next Quarter for professional Servers at $30 per GB, starting at 40 and 80GB, with 320 and 640GB models rolling out some time next year. Fusion also hopes to develop a 1.2TB version by the end of 2008.

Videos of the unveiling can be seen here.

[via TG Daily]

Cybook Gen3 eBook Reader

And so continues my fascination with Electronic Ink / Paper.

The French based company Bookeen has developed the Cybook Gen3, an amazing E-Book reader that uses Electronic Ink / Electronic Paper tehcnology. The reader was originally set to be released this month, but the company announced today that the released date has been pushed back until sometime next month. But the good news is that when it does come out, it will support the PDF format which is pretty cool in my opinion.

This past Tuesday, the company posted a YouTube video showing the reader in action. Just watching the video blows me away, the contrast looks unbelievable, and I love how small it is. I guess when I see the pictures, I just imagine it being more like the size of a Tablet PC, and not so much the size of my iPhone.

I really want these eInk eBook readers to come my way because I want one, plain and simple, I want one!

My iPhone Almost Didn't Make It Through The 1.1.1 Update

Earlier this week when I read Apple's notice about unlocked and hacked iPhones possibly rendering iPhones inoperable, I decided to go ahead and remove every 3rd party application from my phone by doing a software restore before the update came out. Despite having done this, I was still very nervous about doing the update, even though I didn't really need to be... or so I thought. I started the process, and was greeted by the now familiar update window with the warning that the update might make iPhones permanently inoperable.

The download was bigger than I was expecting at 152.3MB, and took about 4 minutes to download, and did so seamlessly.



After downloading and extracting the update, it went through the normal steps of extracting the update, and then a message popped up that said "Preparing iPhone For Software Update". All good, right? My iPhone was in its state of suspended animation waiting for the new software to start loading onto it, and then I got a message that I did not want to see:


With my iPhone still in its catatonic state, I did my best not to panic. I unplugged my phone, and tried to turn it on and got the Restore Mode icon on my screen:



I began to pray at this point that connecting to iTunes would actually work, and that my iPhone wasn't broken. The only thing I could think to do was to plug it back in. When I did, I got this warning:

I walked through the steps to recover my phone, and it worked. Tragedy avoided. I was afraid I was going to have to risk voiding my warranty. And while I know that might sound ignorant, when it's your phone at stake, see what goes through your head.

TV On The Go

For as long as I can remember, I have had a fascination with the idea of "Portable TV". From playing with my Dad's black & white hand-held TV to the time when my parents got me my first hand-held Casio TV when I was around 12, I would persistently attempt to pick up any and every TV station that I could, despite our remote location out in the middle-of-nowhere East Texas.

Then, as time passed my fascinations seemed to pass from new laptops that could play DVDs to portable DVD players, all of which kind of pushed the idea of hand-held TVs into the "Old School" area of my mind. And then, a few years back I had my first run-in with an Archos portable media player... my childhood fascinations came back with a fury. Within months, everyone was announcing their portable media devices: Cell Phones with video, iPod Video, PDAs with video, Smart Phones with Video... and the list went on. It seemed that every corner I turned, there was a new multi-media device popping up capable of not only playing your TV shows, but your movies as well! But even in the midst of all of this, I remember asking myself, "Why would anyone want to watch TV on their Cell Phone?" It never even dawned on me that I had always secretly wanted was finally here!

My fascination with this was sparked again when I learned about two new ways not only to get TV shows and movies on the go, but actual live TV. The first comes from Sony with their A910 Walkman with TV recording. [Thanks to MacNN] It's the third model in Sony's video-capable Walkman line, and comes with a built-in 1Seg tuner and an electronic programming guide allowing it to not only receive, but also play digital over-the-air broadcast TV on its 2.4-inch LCD and encode the shows on the go as permanent copies stored in the device's internal memory. Sony reports that up to 100 hours of footage can be saved on a 16GB player. The player also has a built-in noise canceling feature which reportedly eliminates background sound while watching TV or listening to music. It looks like the new Walkman will come in three sizes: 4GB, 8GB and 16GB, and is capable of playing all the pre-recorded formats of Sony's latest players, including H.264 and MPEG-4 video as well as AAC, MP3 and WMA music. On the downside, it's only going to be available in Japan with the possiblity of a U.S. release sometime next year. The question will be whether or not the 1Seg will be included when it comes to our side of the world. It would be unfortunate if it was removed.

The second device that caught my attention is announcement of a new Application for BlackBerry phones. [Thanks toSlingPlayer Mobile Engadget] There's no timetable on when this will be released, but I love the idea of being able to control and watch my home TV while I'm out and about. SlingPlayer Mobile also supports Palm and both the Smartphone and Pocket PC versions of Windows Mobile.

My hopes are high, and fingers crossed for a capability like this for my iPhone. While watching my TV shows and movies on my phone is cool, I would love the ability to watch live. If for no other reason, just to be able to do it.

French Newspaper to Debut Electronic Newspaper

I have this never ending obsession with Electronic Ink and E-Paper.

A press release on their site dated September 12, 2007 states that French Newspaper Les Echos, the French leading newspaper in electronic newspaper is partnering with Dutch based iRex Technologies to release the Les Echos Electronic Paper Edition on the iRex iLiad available for French readers sometime this month.

Two different editions will be offered to readers, and will be updated every hour from 7am - 9pm on Monday - Friday via a WiFi delivery system that will allow updates without the need to connect to a PC.

Pilippe Jannet of Les Echos states, "This will introduce a new era of newspaper publishing. It is a tradition of Les Echos to be the first to bring innovative solutions to their readers. With the subscription our readers will get an attractive offer of a year subscription of Les Echos with multiple editions, two free e-paper editions (one dedicated to Personal Finance information and one to Stock Exchange information), an extra AFP edition, some free e-books and the electronic paper device at a great bargain."

As to when newspapers in the United States will begin offering a service similar to this is yet unknown, but I hope it's not too far down the road.

For more info about the e-paper offer at Les Echos, you can visit: http://www.lesechos.fr/epaper/inscription.htm, or just read the press release