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Walt Mossberg (Wall St. Journal) and David Pogue (NYTimes) both like the iPhone. They and a few other journalists have had test units for some time. They were freed tonight to publish their thoughts. It's going to be interesting to see how the virtual touch screen keyboard plays out. This is the area that "real" smartphone users (blackberry, treo, etc...) have expressed a lot of skepticism about. Both Mossberg and Pogue say you need about a week to adjust to the iPhone's keyboard, with Pogue still not being very happy even then, while Mossberg seems to have had the "I get it" conversion moment. Anyway, expect a lot of press this week.
- jim 6-27-2007 6:40 am [link] [add a comment]

Steve Jobs is giving his keynote at Apple's World Wide Developers conference now. Very interesting how they are positioning themselves with respect to 3rd party app development for the iPhone. We'll have to see the details, but Steve says"...you can write amazing Web 2.0 apps that work exactly like apps on the iPhone...." So that just means javascript and HTML being presented by the Safari engine. I can imagine some people scoffing at this, but the approach might work. It all depends on the slickness of the integration (will they really look like native apps, or will it just feel like a webpage?) Supposedly you can "make calls, send e-mails, google maps, etc" from inside your web app. So there are at least some special hooks you can access from javascript. Hopefully there are enough cool things you can access to really make some useful programs. My guess is that there will be a lot of complaining, but then this will actually work out very well in the end.

I'm not sure if it's just me, or if other people are feeling this too, but javascript used to just be an annoyance. Now it's one of the most important tools.
- jim 6-11-2007 10:30 pm [link] [add a comment]

Apparently Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz just let slip that Apple is going to ship ZFS as "the filesystem" in Leopard. Not sure why he wouldn't say "default filesystem" if that was what he meant, but on the other hand, it's hard to imagine "the filesystem" meaning anything other than "default filesystem." If true maybe this has something to do with Lepard's delay? And I wonder if the idea of pooling in ZFS might help out with mouting and connecting (and then sometimes disconnecting) a lot of disparate media storage devices (macs, ipods, apple tvs, iphones) into one home storage cloud? Anyway, I've been following ZFS for a while, but I'm truely surprised by the speed of this development. Can't wait to check it out.
- jim 6-06-2007 11:21 pm [link] [2 comments]

Apple announced new MacBook Pros (with 15 and 17 inch screens) this morning. Based around Intel's Santa Rosa platform and powered by Intel Core 2 Duo processors at 2.16 and 2.33 GHz. The 15 inch sports a brand new LED powered screen. Base configurations come with 2 GB of RAM, upgradeable to 4 GB. This is my next computer as soon as I earn enough money to afford it.
- jim 6-05-2007 4:45 pm [link] [add a comment]

The Wall St. Journal hosted their annual conference yesterday, D: all things digital. I guess due to Mossberg's status this has become a big thing in the computer / gadget industry. This year Jeff Hawkins from Palm had a big announcement that turned out to just be the introduction of the Palm Foleo, a subnotebook device that basically just piggy-backs on your Treo (and soon other smartphones) giving you a big screen and full sized keyboard when using those devices. I guess that's interesting, but for $500 (not counting several hundred for the Treo) I'm not sure why you just wouldn't carry an actual subnotebook, rather than this strange quasi thin client arrangement. Color me unimpressed once again with Palm. Can't they just concentrate on making the Treo better?

Steve Jobs had a sit down with Mossberg that didn't reveal much new info. Probably the biggest thing was this quote about 3rd party apps on the iPhone: "...we'll find a way to let 3rd parties write apps and still preserve security on the iPhone. But until we find that way we can't compromise the security of the phone." That seems to pretty clearly state that 3rd party apps will be possible in the future, although there are still a bunch of questions around this. I'm happy to at least hear this much though.

Later, Jobs and Gates, somewhat historically, took the stage together. I haven't had a chance to watch the video yet, but supposedly it was a cordial affair.

Earlier Microsoft debuted Surface, their new multi-touch table top Minority Report-ish computer. Sort of like a giant iPhone in terms of it's multi-touch input technology, although Surface goes even further in some ways. Really impressive. Not sure how much market penetration this will have at its' 10K price point, but as a proof of concept it looks amazing. Well done. Here are some more pics.

Updated: And here's a nice Popular Mechanics video of Surface.
- jim 5-31-2007 9:30 pm [link] [2 comments]

Slashdot discussion on the Yahoo news that

Robert Soloway, a prolific Internet marketer responsible so much junk e-mail they called him "Spam King" [...] was arrested in Seattle, Washington, a week after being indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of identity theft, money laundering, and mail, wire, and e-mail fraud. Soloway is accused of using botnets to disguise where e-mail originated and of forging return addresses of real people or businesses for his mass mailings. If convicted as charged, Soloway will face a maximum sentence of more than 65 years in prison and a fine of 250,000 dollars.
I'd love to see an end to spam, and I don't have any particular feelings of regret over the possibility that this guy might go to jail, but I just have a hard time imagining the laws we would need to convict spammers but *not* impinge on reasonable fair uses of the internet. It's clear this guy is bad and I'm happy to see him off the internet, but to codify why he's bad, and someone sending some political action emails - or using an open WiFi they don't own - are not bad seems dicey to say the least. Hopefully they can just get him on the identity theft, money laundering, and wire fraud charges.
- jim 5-31-2007 9:13 pm [link] [add a comment]

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