All this coverage stems from the leaked video that surfaced online showing Android running on a T-Mobile HTC dream.

Now, I don’t know about you but using a Linux based OS on a mobile phone is dreadful. Most open source projects are wonderful, but they all suffer from one flaw. People trying too hard. When you have a team of extremely talented engineers working on a common goal sometimes the objective gets lost. Think of the adage, If you try to design a horse by committee don’t be shocked if you end up with a camel.

The Android OS is muddled by too many features. It is not designed for the common user. Look at the Blackberry, Palm and iPhone OS (Mind you I left WinMo out). You KNOW that all the previous mentioned OSes are designed for the for the “average” user. Blackberry with their click wheel enabled OS, Apple with their instance on eye candy and no background processes. Palm with their extremely familiar UI. The Android just leaves me uninspired and unimpressed.

Now these might be words I eat later down the road, but the Android alliance is a coalition of second stringers. Again, look at Apple, Blackberry, Palm, Nokia, Motorola. These are all companies working solo and leading the industry, and with the exception of Apple available on almost every mobile carrier in the world. Now if you look at the Android alliance you have Verizon, and AT&T absent - the TWO largest phone networks in the US. HTC is a nice hardware manufacturer but if Google wants to win the mobile war, they need to make their own hardware and get out of this coalition of the weak.

Here is the formula. Steal a bunch of UI designers from Apple. Hide the geeky Linux Stuff. Buy Palm for the hardware (Hey the have the guy behind the Sidekick and iPod working there) and use them to manufacture your own devices. Make insane deals with the cellphone carriers, they are fueled by their unquenchable thirst for money and coincidentally you are sitting on a pile of it. Being secret only works for Apple, embrace the user show them you care. If all else fails become your own MVNO. Buy wholesale minutes for AT&T in the US make your phone available for a VERY low cost (Say $99 as shown by the success by the Centro) and give the service away for free. Enable your phone with GPS and bombard the user with ads. Repeat elsewhere in the world.

But in all honesty, the Android OS is going to be another one of Google’s pipe dreams. They came to the party too late.

If you are interested, drop a comment. Be sure to put your email address in the “email” field (Dont worry, it won’t be published) and I’ll get in contact with you.

Since switching to the iPhone my “on the fly” podcast consuming days were quickly put to an end. Thankfully someone saw a need for podcasting on the iPhone and created one of the best web apps I have ever seen called Podcaster.fm. But, web apps are only good if you have a data connection. Alex, the developer of Podcaster.fm, has been secretly programming a NATIVE iPhone podcasting application that lets you stream and download podcasts to your iPhone so you can get your podcast fix on the fly, without a computer.

Alex kindly let me beta test the software, which he is submitting to the AppStore tomorrow and I must say I’m very impressed.

[The native podcaster streams] just like the web app but it also allows you to download podcasts and listen to them when your offline (iPod Touch) or on edge(Old iPhone).

The interface is broken out in 3 sections.
My Podcasts - Displays all your podcasts. This screen also allows you to refresh your podcast list to see if there are any new items.
Unplayed - Displays unplayed podcasts.
Downloads - This is where you can see all your downloaded items.

Initially all sections have no items. It is up to you to subscribe to podcasts. We have provided several ways to subscribe. The easiest of which is to search our Podcast Directory. You can search by podcast title. If you cant find what you are looking for, you can use 1 of the other 3 methods to subscribe. Import from podcaster.fm account. Import by feed url and import by opml url.

After you have setup your podcast list. You are ready to listen. Simply select the item you want and click play. The podcast starts streaming in the media player. You also have the option to download the podcast. We have put a max limit of 40 MB for this current release but that is temporary and will be lifted in future updates. You can download as many podcasts as will fit on your iPhone or iPod Touch. [#

The application will, however, not be free when released in the App Store but I must say with my time using the product it will be well worth the cost!

An insider has informed me that AT&T has been actively trying to block iPhone users from using Microsoft Exchange that don’t pay a “secret” $11 fee. This filter has taken a toll on AT&T’s DNS servers that are making some websites inaccessible.

All the reports are from the North East area of the US and I can’t verify if that is a nationwide issue.

Are you effected by this “outage”?

Getting started
Here’s how to get your blog (or any other RSS or Atom feed) twittering:

Create a new twitter user at twitter.com (or use your existing one)
this twitter user is going to be the one posting your blog entries - twitterfeed needs to know your chosen twitter username and password so it can post your blog updates to your twitter account

Login to twitterfeed using your OpenID
OpenID is a standard for providing single sign on between web sites
You can register your own OpenID for free, or may even be able to use your existing blog ID [more]

Provide us with the URL for your blog’s RSS feed, and how often we should post to twitter
Our server will check your blog’s feed at the specified interval and post any new items to your twitter account. You just sit back and relax!

If you are a blog publisher this may be down your alley.

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This beer utility belt allows you to store up to six ice cold brews on your person. Available for $18 and seems perfect for the frat dweller in your life.

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I’m interested to know who, if anyone, bought NetShare by Nullsoft? Do you think it is worth $9.99? Think it is worth more? Just download it to download it?

UPDATE: Apple just took the App offline, again)

• Locate your iTunesPrefs.xml file. It’s usually located in C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Apple Computer\iTunes or C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Apple Computer\iTunes.
  Hint: If the folder Application Data does not show up, make sure that hidden files are visible in the Windows Explorer
• Backup your iTunesPrefs.xml file
• Open iTunesPrefs.xml using a text-editor
• Search for a section called User Preferences and paste the following snipped into the User Preferences Section after the first <dict>:

• Save the file and restart iTunes. Backups should now be disabled. To enable backups again delete the XML Snippet from iTunesPrefs.xml file.

US Lawmakers are sick of people sitting on airplanes, talking about all sorts of private matters while waiting for the plane to taxi. After a round of story-tellingon conversations they’ve overheard in the past, the House of Representatives has voted to upgrade the FAA’s ban on in-flight cell phone usage to “Permanent” status.

On one hand, I’ve felt their pain: a few plane trips ago, a girl three seats from me was proudly divulging how sick she’d been a week prior. I’ll spare you the nitty-gritty, but it involved poop and pants. On the other, it’s not everyone’s fault that a few people can’t remember to not talk about poop in public. Taking their cell phones away isn’ going to make them any more courteous.

Not that this decision solves the issue, regardless. It only affects the in-flight period; that is, during and between take off and landing. People are still free to embarrass themselves during loading, taxiing, and unloading.

Honestly, this has to be one of the best bans this government has even enacted. Thoughts?

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Tired of that annoying backup process you iPhone does when you sync it to a computer. With a simple application you can simply disable (and re-enable) iTunes backups with a click of a button.

I’m a firm believer in apps that do one thing, and do it well.
In that spirit, I present Backup Disabler.

The balance between backing up that your latest saved game or text messages and waiting an hour for your phone to sync is a delicate one. Now, you can easily sync without waiting for the backups, and just as easily re-enable them whenever you like.

Available for free, but donations are requested.

Download Now

Think about it. Your cellphone bill is somewhere inbetween $75 - $120 a month, your “triple play” cable bill is an additional $100 a month (If you are lucky enough to have a triple play in your area) not to mention any other data related charges you may have - such as a beeper, separate fax line, etc.

Like energy, bandwidth is an essential economic input. You can’t run an engine without gas, or a cellphone without bandwidth. Both are also resources controlled by a tight group of producers, whether oil companies and Middle Eastern nations or communications companies like AT&T, Comcast and Vodafone. That’s why, as with energy, we need to develop alternative sources of bandwidth.

Wired connections to the home — cable and telephone lines — are the major way that Americans move information. In the United States and in most of the world, a monopoly or duopoly controls the pipes that supply homes with information. These companies, primarily phone and cable companies, have a natural interest in controlling supply to maintain price levels and extract maximum profit from their investments — similar to how OPEC sets production quotas to guarantee high prices.

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We were a bit surprised last week when Yahoo decided to shut down its DRM servers, rendering all sorts of “purchased” music close to worthless. After all, when Microsoft had done the same thing, public outcry forced Microsoft to keep the servers running for a few more years. Now Yahoo has leapfrogged that decision, promising either refunds or a replacement DRM-free version of tracks that you downloaded via its service. This may turn out to be expensive for Yahoo, but that’s what the company gets for agreeing to a DRM’d solution in the first place, rather than trusting its instincts and telling the labels to ditch the DRM years ago. [via]

Do you buy DRMed music? Do you download DRM free music? Do you not even buy music? Sound off!

The Centro is the little device that could over at Palm. The little guy is available in more than 25 countries and almost 20 carriers worldwide (not to mention an unlocked version) which is not too shabby!

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The companies name: Cuil (Pronounced “Cool”)

Cuil launched today with a index of 120 billion web pages (compared to Google’s 1 Trillion) making them a formidable competitor out of the gate. This is the brain child of the husband and wife super team Tom Costello and Anna Patterson who, while at Google, were responsible for much of the way the search engine functions today.

Patterson and Costello’s impressive feat is that they’ve done this with a total of 1,400 eight-CPU computers (1,000 find and data-mine Web pages, the remaining 400 serve up those pages), while the big search services have warehouses of servers numbering in the many thousands.

Cuil attempts to see relationships between words and to group related pages in a single server. Patterson says this enables quicker, more efficient searching: “While most queries [at competitors] go out to thousands of servers looking for an answer, 90% of our queries go to just one machine.”

Patterson and Costello believe this yields more insightful results. “We aren’t a popularity contest,” says Costello, knocking Google’s well-known “PageRank” method, which counts not just relevance of a page but the number of other sites linking to it. [via]

Despite all the hype, I found the engine to be quite inaccurate and irrelevant. Anybody care to share their experiences?

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Sprint Nextel today announced an agreement to sell approximately 3,300 towers to TowerCo for approximately $670 million in cash. Additionally, the two companies have entered into a long term leasing agreement where TowerCo will provide Sprint Nextel with wireless communications towers to support the company’s CDMA, iDEN and WiMAX networks.

“By leasing rather than owning these network facilities, we can better focus on our core business of providing communications services to consumers, businesses and government customers,” said Bob Azzi, senior vice president, Field Engineering and Operations, Sprint Nextel. “Significantly, this transaction provides Sprint Nextel with additional liquidity which gives us greater flexibility in managing our company.”

Sprint, word of advise… If you sell the cow you better expect to pay more for the milk. You read me here?

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Ok, if this ad (which is to counter Apple’s Mac vs. PC campaign) was designed to show the loyal flock that Windows Vista is better then the Mac - Microsoft must be delusional. The ads simply makes Microsoft, literally, the ship lost in the middle of the sea.

A $300 million campaign basically has Microsoft teaching a history lesson about how Christopher Columbus risked falling off the world to prove that it was round. Sorry Microsoft, I’m not willing to jump off the end of the world for Vista. Also, side note - everybody know how much Americans enjoy history class… Good Move!

Basically, with your high speed if you use more then what is viewed as your fair share - AT&T will charge you more.

“When AT&T provides broadband service by speed, it will do so in discrete, non-overlapping tiers,” Quinn said in written testimony. “We will strive to provide service within the speed tier purchased by the customer and, if we find that we are not providing service within the ordered speed tier, AT&T will take action either to bring the customer’s service within the ordered tier or give the customer an option to move to a different tier.” [...] n this case AT&T appears to be softly selling the idea of usage-based pricing, which the company last month proclaimed was “inevitable.” Quinn appeared to show his hand when he stated the new system would “clearly identify any limitations on the amount of usage that may apply to a customer’s service plan.”

Nice, hopefully AT&T with this experiment will find far more customer resistance and defection then anticipated and abandon the effort.

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The highly anticipated Wordpress iPhone application is now available to download from the iTunes App store.

The app lets you post on the go to both WordPress.com and personal WordPress blogs.

As I’m using the App I see the ability to cover live events and product launches has gotten so much easier!

PS: They are all real and spotted by me and my friends.

Care to leave a caption? Would have posted sooner, but its hard to get internet at 35,000 feet. Thanks JetBlue!

Version 2.6 of WordPress.org is now available, almost a month ahead schedule. Version 2.6 “Tyner,” named for jazz pianist McCoy Tyner, contains a number of new features that make WordPress a more powerful CMS: you can now track changes to every post and page and easily post from wherever you are on the web, plus there are dozens of incremental improvements to the features introduced in version 2.5.

If you like being on the bleeding edge, you can get the latest download here.

Apple today announced that iPhone and iPod touch users have already downloaded more than 10 million applications from its groundbreaking new App Store since its launch late last week. Developers have created a wide array of innovative mobile applications ranging from games to location-based social networking to medical applications to enterprise productivity tools. Users can wirelessly download applications directly onto their iPhone or iPod touch and start using them immediately. More than 800 native applications are now available on the App Store, with more than 200 offered for free and more than 90 percent priced at less than $10.

“The App Store is a grand slam, with a staggering 10 million applications downloaded in just three days,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Developers have created some extraordinary applications, and the App Store can wirelessly deliver them to every iPhone and iPod touch user instantly.”[via

To give some perspective here it took 74 days to sell 1 million of the original iPhones. I must say thats impressive!

Roll your own Apple Store with a copy of the “Introducing the iPhone 3G” video that is currently playing at a Apple retail location near you.

Download AppleTV Version
Download Uncompressed Version
Download iPod Video Version

Every tech analyst, blogger and “expert” is voicing their opinions about how the iPhone is more expensive over the life of the 2 year contract than the first generation. This is true and I’m going to explain, in the simplest way, why it’s not that big of a deal.

This is a 3G phone that passes data in and out twice as fast as the 1st generation phone. It’s a 3G data plan so $10 dollars more a month isn’t that much to ask!

About the iPhone plan not including 200 free SMS messages: So what? Some people weren’t even using them. The iPhone’s plan with 450 minutes, unlimited data and no SMS plan is still cheaper than a Blackberry with data and comparable minutes. We have a new iPhone with a faster data connection and GPS and yet complaining about an increase in the rate plan.

What would be a big deal is if they raised the price of the old plan too. AT&T left any iPhones on EDGE (1st gen) with the exact same plan as before. It’s no like AT&T pulled the whole “operating cost” excuse and raised prices all around. I’m going to state this again, this iPhone uses a data service that cost AT&T millions of dollars to deploy and costs more to operate so $10 dollars more a month is not that much to ask.

Another thing, you don’t have to upgrade! Apple isn’t forcing you to buy the newest model. I’m not going to buy a new sports car and complain that I have to use 93 octane gas. I had a choice and decided to go with the better model.

The big picture is, will this affect Apple’s sales of the new device and I say no. People don’t look at the rate plan before a purchase. It’s only $199 and that stands out in people’s head. Apple will sell tons of these, don’t worry.

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OK, all of you folks who got up hours earlier than usual and stood in line in the heat for hours and hours to get your brand new iPhone 3G quit whining already. Sure you probably thought after all that waiting and work you’d have a working phone but come on! This is an iPhone. Didn’t you pay attention the last time? These things never activate properly right after you get one at launch so stop crying already. It will work in a day or two and then you can go back to telling the rest of us how much better than us you are with your new iPhone. [via]

In other news, seems like the iPhone Dev Team is having a little fun at Apple’s expense - their soon to be newest version of the PWNAGE tool can unlock and jailbreak the 2.0 OS (To a special reader out there, I was WRONG - the hack came out in one day despite my instance that it wouldn’t)

Check out the video.

That’s an awful lot of megs, to be sure - just how many words are we talking about here? Microsoft explains:
The words “Friendster,” “Klum,” “Nazr,” “Obama,” and “Racicot” are not recognized when you check the spelling in Windows Vista and in Windows Server 2008.

56MB for Five WORDS, I defy someone to look me straight in the eye and say Vista is NOT bloated. Oh, and by the way it’s an “Important” update. PSH!

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The new Belkin FlyWire is the simple solution that gives you the freedom and flexibility to place your HDTV where you want—without cables. [...]Transmitting high-definition 1080p True Cinema picture resolution with whole-home range.

[...]

Operating in the open 5GHz band, FlyWire offers a completely robust connection. It intelligently manages its own connection, adjusting both frequency and power to avoid interference and overcome impedances. Because FlyWire does not compress video, it transmits video content with no latency. Even the most demanding AV applications, like video games, will not be impaired by the wireless transmission. FlyWire’s SD card slot also allows for upgrade and expansion options.

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So, What’s in your downloads folder - HONESTLY. Put links to the screenshots in the comments if you dare!

Seems that the customers bitching worked. Rogers is launching “promotional pricing” for the iPhone at launch giving users 6GB of data for $30 a month. The catch: customers must sign a three year (yup, three year) contract before August 31.

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On the host machine (the one you want to connect to remotely), go to Control Panel, System, Remote. Check Allow users to connect remotely to this computer. Any account that you want to have access the machine remotely should have a secure password.

Then you need to install Internet Information Services (IIS) from Add/Remove, Windows Components. Specifically you need to install the Remote Desktop Web Connection. This will make your computer accessible via the web. The URL to use would be:

http:///tsweb

This is assuming you have proper port forwarding setup for RDC.

On the guest machine you will be presented with a login screen. When asked for the server name, use the IP address or host name of the server.

Check Send Login information
Enter the user name. This must be a valid user account, which is usually what displays when you hit the start button.

It will also ask for a “Domain name”. Leave that blank and click continue

You’ll get a new screen, and a login prompt. Enter your password for your desktop and you’re all set to go.