My head is going to explode
In case you did not hear, Apple released the news of their new iPhone 3G, GPS, $199, 3rd party applications, released Date July 12, yada, yada, yada.
It still cant record movies, no cut and paste feature and poor MMS messaging, so there.
I was hoping for a mini tablet device from them, bit to no avail. They did announce MobileMe, goofy name but is basically replaces their lame .MAC service. Basically this ties together all their services for the normal user and doesn’t scatter all their offerings like Google or Microsoft Live does. One thing to remember is .MAC users will be migrated free to the new MobileMe and Amazon has a good price on the current .MAC subscription.
Microsoft is trying very much to convince people that the Windows Mobile environment is still relevant in the post iPhone announcements. They are having Alltel (re: Verizon) send me one of their newest mobile devices to look at and pick apart. One thing to remember that even though you hear nothing but iPhone news, BlackBerry still owns upward to 42% (depending on who you get your numbers from) of the mobile smartphone environment. Although it does lack the consumer feature sexiness (opps, I did not mean to write that word, this may not be viewable for our internal computers because of the word “sex” which will be marked as porn, oops there I go again, no more XXX, sex or porn words that will flag this article as deviant to useless web blocker software) that will be found on the iPhone. The Blackberry has a very good developer environment, but mostly geared towards boring money rich business users (or maybe because RIM is Canadian, who knows).
One thing that has started to burn me is how, being an American, I am punished whenever I buy things. Look at the iPhone, to get an iPhone in the US I need to go through AT&T. I can’t get it through any other carrier. AT&T service stinks compared to Verizon. Also AT&T can charge me anything they want for service, because guess what? I have no alternative. Any other place in the world I can get at least another provider in the same country to compare service with. I know AT&T is one of the few Providers in the US to support GSM and most of the other carriers are CDMA but they are not the only ones.
Another is the OLPC. In the US I cannot buy one at the real price of $199, occasionally if they allow me to, I need to buy 2, for a total of $398. One for me and one for some kid over seas, who is going to use it to write more phishing software to empty my bank account. I am not rich and I could sure use this cheap laptop for the kids to do Word Processing, email and Internet. OLPC is now complaining since they chose AMD over Intel to make the thing, that Intel is now offering the Classmate for close to the same price to everyone in the world, if they were really trying to get computers to third world children, shouldn’t they applaud the effort?
Microsoft is doing the same thing with Windows and Office for the “emerging markets”. They can pick up Windows, Office and other software for $3, at least make it more expensive than a gallon of gas in California ($4.49 at this writing).
Later.
