Pauls musings and tidbits

iPhone Researchers Gain a Shell: “SkiifGeek writes ‘A team of researchers dedicated to finding means to fully control and interact with the new Apple iPhone claim to have successfully gained an interactive shell on the device. In order to achieve this feat physical access to the phone is required, as it relies on some minor electronics to be created and connected to the phone’s serial port. It is believed that general control over the iPhone will be available to the enterprising researchers within a week (after all, it has only just been a week since the iPhone was released), with the promise of enough control to allow for self-propagating code not very far away.’

(Read Original Article - Via Slashdot.)

iPhone Report: “

I got a chance to play with an iPhone Saturday. The big-city Apple Store was packed. Even though they had about twenty iPhones out for inspection, you had to wait ten minutes or so to get your hands on one. Here’s my quick review, based on a thorough in-store inspection.

It’s a sweet-looking device. I was blown away by the screen resolution, which made photos and videos look great. For the first time, I believed I might actually be willing to watch a movie on a handheld device.

The other software, from email to Safari, seemed as slick as advertised. This has to be the biggest attraction of the iPhone.

The screen seemed big when I was playing videos. But it seemed too small when I tried to browse the New York Times site. You had to choose between seeing a good portion of the page in nano-print, or zooming in to see a couple sentences in a comfortably readable size. Other newspaper and magazine websites had the same issue.

I tried typing on the on-screen keyboard, which worked poorly, getting about 20% of the keypresses wrong. I typed with my thumbs, Blackberry-style, which was the only way that seemed natural to me while holding the device. My thumbs aren’t particularly large, so I assume many people would have the same problem. Maybe I would get the hang of it after a few days of typing, but if I didn’t the device would be unacceptable for touch typing and I might have had to fall back on tapping keys with a stylus.

The AT&T cellular data network was painfully slow when browsing the web. A colleague and I had a conversation about cellular plans while we waited for one web page to download. A WiFi connection was much better.

My first reaction was that even if you never used your iPhone to make phone calls, it would be a nice little portable communications device. You could use it only with WiFi and be pretty happy.

But Apple won’t let you do that. If you buy an iPhone, it won’t do much of anything until you purchase an AT&T Cellular plan for it. You can’t even use the non-phone features unless accept a two-year contract from AT&T, which I’m not about to do.

So: no iPhone for me.

(Read Original Article - Via Freedom to Tinker.)

Editor: The restrictions mentioned along with the fact that you have to use the AT&T network as your carrier area reason enough for me to hold off getting an iPhone. But then there is also the cost. Sorry but thats to much of my own money, especially since without SSL (or so I’m told) I can’t use it for my primary reason for getting one. Oh well. But the price will probably come down and they will probably add SLL, and hopefully get another carrier. Then who knows

Behind the iPhone Frenzy: “

Let me say right up front that I have not accepted the Jesus Phone as my personal Lord and Savior. The iPhone might turn out to be insanely great. It might become the best-selling mobile phone ever. Or it might not.

Either way, the iPhone’s arrival and the attendant frenzy mark the beginning of a new phase in the mobile phone world — a phase based on the radical notion that it’s possible to make a pocket-sized device that is a pretty good phone and a pretty good networked computer at the same time.

From a purely technical standpoint, this isn’t surprising at all. Phones are basically computers, and we know how to cram a decent computer into a small, low-power package. The engineering isn’t trivial but we know it can be done. Apple might have modestly better engineering, and significantly better human-factors design, but what they’re doing has been technically possible all along.

Yet somehow it hasn’t happened, because the mobile carriers don’t want it to happen. They have clung to their walled garden models, offering limited, captive services rather than allowing easy development of Internet applications for mobile devices. An open system would provide more benefit overall, but most of that benefit would accrue to consumers. The carriers would rather get a big share of a small pie, than a small share of a big pie.

In most markets, competition keeps this kind of thing from happening, by forcing producers to account for consumer preferences. You would expect competition to have forced the mobile networks open by now, whether the carriers liked it or not. But this hasn’t happened yet. The carriers have managed to keep control by locking customers in to long contracts and erecting barriers to the entry of new devices and applications. The system seemed to be stuck in an unstable equilibrium. All we needed was some kind of shock, to get the ball rolling downhill.

Only a company with marketing muscle, design mojo, and a world-historic Reality Distortion Field could provide the needed bump. Apple decided to try, in the hope of selling zillions of the new, more capable devices. The real significance of the iPhone, whether it succeeds or fails in the market, is that it will trigger the transition to more open networks. Once people see that a pretty good phone can be a pretty good mobile computer, they won’t settle for less anymore; and mobile networks will be pried open.

Whether or not the Jesus Phone achieves worldly success, it will succeed in its own way by convincing people that the world can be different.

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(Read Original Article - Via Freedom to Tinker.)

Apple - Mac - QuickTime - WWDC 2007 Keynote: “Watch Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveil and demo Leopard features in his World Wide Developer Conference keynote address from San Francisco’s Moscone West. See the video-on-demand (VOD) event right here, exclusively in QuickTime and MPEG-4.”

(Read Original Article .)

Puncturing the “PCs Are Cheaper Than Macs” Myth: “jcatcw writes ‘The recently converted Scot Finnie went notebook shopping. At the high end of the notebook spectrum, in order to get comparable power and features, a Dell machine comes in $650 over the Apple, and it was clunkier and weighed more. Sony couldn’t beat the Apple either. Midrange and low-end machines, though, turn out to be pretty comparable, with more choices in the PC arena but some good values if you happen to want what Apple has decided you need. So, if you’re talking name-brand hardware, it’s just no longer the case that PCs are cheaper than Macs.’

(Read Original Article - Via Slashdot.)

Fever Builds for iPhone (Anxiety Too): SAN FRANCISCO, June 3 — During an onscreen demonstration of the iPhone in Apple’s sprawling retail store here recently, an employee, clad in a black T-shirt, of course, surprised a potential customer.

Nonplused, the customer stammered, “You mean it’s a cellphone, too?”

Such is the spell that Steven P. Jobs has cast on the American consumer.

It has been almost six months since Mr. Jobs, the world’s consummate salesman, introduced the iPhone as the Ronco Veg-O-Matic for the Internet era. Tongue only partly in cheek, Mr. Jobs promised that Apple’s entry into the cellular handset market would be a better phone, Web browser and music player.

Mr. Jobs succeeded in building expectations for what some have called “the God machine.” The bar-of-soap-size phone is being coveted as a talisman for a digital age, and iPhone hysteria is beginning to reach levels usually reserved for video-game machines at Christmas.

Although the phones are expected to cost as much as $600 when they go on sale at Apple and AT&T stores later this month, each company has received more than a million inquiries about the product’s availability. Apple disclosed in television commercials Sunday night that the phone would be released June 29.

Further evidence that expectations have been wound up to a fever pitch: the phones, or promises to deliver a phone, are already on sale on eBay for $830. A pundit as unlikely as Arianna Huffington sought out Mr. Jobs directly for advice on being the first to score a phone. (He told her to go to an AT&T store.)

Last week, during an appearance at a technology industry conference in Southern California, Mr. Jobs teased the audience by briefly pulling an iPhone out of his jeans pocket and immediately slipping it back out of sight.

(Read Original Article - Via NYT > Technology.)

AppleInsider | News Flash: Apple iPhone receives FCC approval: “Apple Inc. on Thursday received the official go-ahead on its first ever mobile handset, as regulators for the Federal Communications Commission gave the iPod maker the green light to commence sales of the device in the United States.

According to FCC documents obtained by AppleInsider, the ‘GSM Cellular Telephone with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi’ carries model number A1203 and FCC ID: BCGA1203.”

(Read Original Article - Via AppleInsider.)

AppleInsider | News Flash: Apple iPhone receives FCC approval: “Apple Inc. on Thursday received the official go-ahead on its first ever mobile handset, as regulators for the Federal Communications Commission gave the iPod maker the green light to commence sales of the device in the United States.

According to FCC documents obtained by AppleInsider, the ‘GSM Cellular Telephone with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi’ carries model number A1203 and FCC ID: BCGA1203.”

(Read Original Article - Via AppleInsider.)