iPhone

Safari used to crash on me several times a day ever since I got the iPhone. Since iPhone 2.2, I was able to not only wait for my train for half an hour, but make it the entire way home, Penn to Westbury, a 50 minute ride, without a single crash using the browser non-stop. Fantastic!

Now if only the battery would last longer.

As noted above, Microsoft had "fixed" Vista a long long time before the ads appeared. And as I noted at the time, too, maybe Apple itself should have fixed its own incredibly buggy recent products--MobileMe, iPhone/iPhone 3G, and Leopard among them--instead of hypocritically and falsely calling out a competitor.

Did Apple launch MobileMe poorly? Beyond a doubt. But it seems they got the bugs out of it after a few months. Leopard? Fine on this end and I was an early adopter there. iPhone? I had the original and now a 3G (the applications available brought me back and justify the cost).

Vista? I'm still telling those who buy computers to avoid it if possible and stick with XP.

And advertising budgets? Well, Apple has a hefty markup on the products they sell (unlike, for example, the xbox) so they need to spend that money someplace.

Users of Apple's iPhone are using the device to do everything but talk on the phone, according to a new study, transforming the product into a mobile entertainment platform rather than just a cellular phone.

Owners of competing products - such as Nokia's N92 or Research in Motion's Blackberry - use their phones for voice communications 71.7 percent of the time market researcher, iSuppli discovered, while iPhone owners spend just 46.5 percent of their time with the product engaged in voice calls.

"This usage pattern shows Apple has succeeded in producing a true convergence product that consumers like to use for multiple purposes," said Greg Sheppard, chief development officer for iSuppli.

I hardly ever used it to talk on the phone.

The iPhone (or iPod Touch) is a 667MHz computer (albeit one that is only running at 412MHz) with 128MB of RAM and between 4 and 32 GB of flash. For software, it is running a pared down Mac OS X with its standard compliment of a FreeBSD-based userland over a Darwin kernel. While some people wonder why anyone would attempt to use it as a Unix workstation, to me and many others it seems ludicrous not to.

...

For distribution, I have chosen Debian's APT, which I have ported to this new platform along with a few custom tweaks to integrate better with Apple's network settings. I have also spent the time to write a UIKit front-end to APT called Cydia, in order to make the transition easier for a larger number of users. (Cydia pomonella is the scientific name for the codling moth, which is what we often think of the as the stereotypical apple worm. I felt the name was fitting.)

Sweet, I love apt.

There's a week to go before Apple's commitment to release the iPhone Software Developers Kit in February runs out of room. I'm hearing from one source that its going to be late. I'm not yet hearing any reasons why, and it's sounding like the official release date could slide by anywhere from one to three weeks.

Well, we've just got word from a reliable source that Flash support is on its way to the iPhone, and it should be coming very, very soon.

To be honest, I wasn't missing it. I can imagine that viewing a website with three flash ads on it is going to suck. Though I guess the upside is homestarrunner.com now fits in my pocket, too.

Apple today added new models of the iPhone and iPod Touch which have double the memory. The new 16GB iPhone is available for $499, while the 8GB model remains at $399. The 32GB iPod touch comes in at $499 while 16GB and 8GB models are priced at $399 and $299, respectively.

Again, isn't a $500 phone crazy?

Apple announced today new Mac Pro's:

Apple® today introduced the new Mac® Pro with eight processor cores and a new system architecture that delivers up to twice the performance of its predecessor*. The new Mac Pro combines two of Intel’s new 45 nanometer Quad-Core Xeon processors running up to 3.2 GHz, powerful new graphics and up to 4TB of internal storage to offer the ideal system for creative professionals, 3D digital content creators and scientists. The standard 8-core configuration starts at just $2,799.

...

Every Mac Pro comes standard with the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics card with 256MB of video memory. The Mac Pro includes a new PCI Express 2.0 graphics slot that delivers up to double the bandwidth compared to the previous generation, and supports the latest generation of graphics cards from NVIDIA, such as the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT with 512MB of video memory, or NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 with 1.5GB of video memory and a 3-D stereo port for stereo-in-a-window applications.

Time to eBay my MacBook Pro tonight and pick up one of these. It will make photo work much much faster. I thought about getting a single 2.8 GHz quad-core CPU and just popping in a second one myself since Apple tends to charge through the nose for components, but apparently, the pricing on the CPUs is quite competitive. Factor in the Mac Pro-specific heatsink I'd need to track down and it isn't actually worth it. (But I'll certainly be doing the RAM upgrades myself.)

I remember when I had a dual Pentium Pro tower and all my friends had CPUs that were much faster, but they were single processor machines. But under load, mine was fine and their mouse pointer's position would refresh every half a second. Since then I've been using laptops for portability, but thanks to my iPhone, I've got the web and email in a much smaller (though often not as convenient) form factor. Since I'm starting to do more photography and dealing with many gigabytes of RAW photos, the horsepower would be a welcome addition.

Besides, if I find I really need a portable computer, and not just a phone, I can run XFCE and Ubuntu on an EEE.

Here is our video proof that iPhone 1.1.3 firmware is, in fact, real.

• The ability to send an SMS message to multiple people is now there
• Google Maps application can now pinpoint your location using cell tower triangulation
• Google Maps can now display the Hybrid map view
• You can now drag and drop application icons on your home screen
• The home screen supports pagination
• You can now add web bookmarks to your home screen