Yes, and there were mp3 players before the iPod, but which one is considering the ultimate version of the technology that caused it to take root?

And there were smartphones before the iPhone too. But which one is the one that finally get things right (mostly.)

I owned one of the original tablets, the Apple Newton. I loved that thing back in college. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he killed off the Newton project, mostly because it wasn't his baby. Newton had been spun off into a subsidiary company and was starting to flourish. The project wasn't making money, but it was breaking even.

Newton OS 1.0 was a joke, the handwriting technology was lampooned and with good reason. It was lousy. The product was released before it was ready. Newton OS 2.0 was no joke. The handwriting technology actually worked.

In college, I used to carry around a Newton 120 running Quicken and I would log all of my purchases into it. I would use it for taking notes in class.

On last week's MacBreak, Leo Laporte made a great point about the Newton. The technology in it was fantastic. It was way ahead of its time. They're still impressive machines to this day. But it was the perfect product to highlight the difference between an Apple with and without Steve Jobs. Apple with Jobs has a track record of finding that nexus of form and function that is so crucial.

There have been Apple tablet rumors since 2002. The iPhone actually originated as a "Safari Pad" idea:

"Apple's multitouch technology began life not as a cellphone, but as a notepad-sized skunkworks project internally dubbed Safari Pad, run by Tim Bucher, then Apple’s head of Macintosh hardware. To his credit, Mr. Jobs seized on the technology and morphed it into the iPhone."
New York Times, June 2007

Apple clearly had the technology to release such a product. Most companies in the tech industry would have already done so. This thing has been in development for years and years now. If it comes out and it does indeed look like a big iPhone, that's not necessarily a cop-out design-wise. The hype machine has been in overdrive for a long time now on this thing, so I think that the first reaction might be disappointment from the tech blogs. If they had come out with this thing with the exact same interface as the iPhone 2 years ago as the iPhone was introduced, people would be drooling. Funny how quickly what was revolutionary seems passé.

Apple stock tends to drop a little when they introduce a new product. I'm betting it drops a bit today.

I was there in San Francisco when they introduced the iPhone. A Steve Jobs keynote is a pilgrimage all Apple geeks should make. I hate that they don't do them at Macworld anymore, where the fans can attend. It was indeed a landmark day... what will today bring?

I'm predicting:

10" screen (LCD, not OLED)
Wifi
3G support (hope this doesn't cost an arm and a leg. I already have a data plan, let me tether iPhone to it for $5 a month)
iPhone OS 4.0 with new gestures
Pressure sensitive screen for sketching
No stylus, but it will support handwriting via 2 fingers gripped like a pen
Won't be named iPad or iSlate. I like Canvas.
Will support scaled iPhone apps, but will have apps that are built just for it
Front facing camera, but no rear one - do you really want to carry this to shoot snapshots?
Apple sets Bing as default search on iPhone 4.0 over Google
Google Maps replaced with Apple's own mapping app with Turn by Turn GPS
Cost? $800, which is too much, but it will drop

Well if Neocon Ben Ferguson is a PC, I'm definitely a Mac.

The Seinfeld ads were a disaster, but these are an improvement. The problem is that sure, a lot of people use PC's, but do they harbor the same affinity for them and for the brand that Mac users have? Was that phenomenon created by the Apple ads? Or just reflected by it?

And by being so referential, are they not reinforcing the message of the Apple ads?

This gives Apple something to lampoon in their next ads. We'll see what they come up with.

MobileMe Support

The MobileMess problems continue. A post on TUAW details how Apple wouldn't even talk to someone who couldn't get their email because Apple's records say that he's not one of the people who can't get access. He goes on to get support via the chat system they've got running on the website and here's the response he got:

"I'm sorry, according to our records, you were not one of the members affected by the email outage that began on July 18th. MobileMe Mail 24-hour chat support is a temporary measure designed specifically for users whose accounts were affected by that outage. For help, please visit http://www.apple.com/support/mobileme/ww for access to all of our support resources"

That's just plain bad form. I have signed on (with an 18 minute wait) to get support this morning because our renewal activation numbers for MobileMe have come in. I get my MobileMe account through the school — I'd have the think long and hard about actually buying it otherwise. If it wasn't for the sync features, which are problematic but a necessity, I probably wouldn't. I've tried 3 days in a row now to renew my account and it just tells me "An Error Occurred." Even when you want to give them your money, you can't do it. And the MobileMe web resources are completely unhelpful when things don't work they way they are supposed to.

I think that Walt Mossberg of the New York Times is right that it's not a service that he can recommend using at this time.

18 minutes? Was over an hour. 15 minutes of the countdown and then the rest was "I'll be right with you." Their answer was, wait a few days and try again.

The final word (?) on Steve Jobs' health?

Interesting article that has a nugget of new information at the end of it. Would the death of Steve Jobs be the end of Apple? Hard to say. When he left the first time (and he didn't really leave, he was forced out the first time because of how big of a giant jerk he was. He was a total loose cannon), Apple lost direction, but honestly they weren't that focused of a company during his initial time there. The Macintosh was his greatest achievement, but that project was started by others within the company, Jobs just came in and saw it to fruition. It was never a hit, never enjoyed huge market share, that was the Apple II series, which was a personal computer, but by no means was it user-friendly.

I think it took Jobs being ousted for him to find himself and to develop his vision. Since he engineered a coupe and came back into the company, he's taken it from being days away from bankruptcy to one of the top technology companies in the world again. So what happens when he leaves/dies? Hopefully he's surrounded himself with good people who will carry on. I think in the short-run, the company will be fine. But in the long-run? Who knows? I think they'll be fine. One of the more interesting things that Jobs has said publicly is that he's as proud of the things that Apple hasn't released as he is of the things they have. Knowing that you have a great product that just isn't marketable and knowing not to release it is a skillset that a lot of the tech companies just don't have. Jobs doesn't have a perfect record at that by any means. Look at the G4 Cube for instance.

I think this is much ado about nothing. I expect him to be around another 10 years at Apple.

There’s a good chance that if you installed this application you’ve made the same mistake that most people made. While searching for friends who were on the service, apparently a text message was sent out to a large portion of my contact list, along with my phone number and my exact location (you know, since that’s the point of the application). Granted, you would think that if you have someone’s phone number, they’d have yours as well…

I think I may have spammed everyone on my list with a text message from Loopt... Sorry about that. That app is about to get uninstalled.

Symptoms
With MobileMe Push, you can choose how often your computer syncs your contacts, calendars, and other sync data via MobileMe.   If you select "Automatically", changes made on your computer may not immediately sync to MobileMe.

Resolution
Selecting Automatic in Mac OS X allows your computer to immediately sync and update when there are any changes on the MobileMe servers.  Those changes can come from your iPhone, iPod touch, the MobileMe website, or another computer.  Changes made on your computer will be synced to the MobileMe "cloud" once every 15 minutes (or every hour in Mac OS X 10.4.11).

And now quoting the MobileMe part of Apple's main site:

Push email. Push contacts. Push calendar.
MobileMe stores all your email, contacts, and calendars in the cloud and pushes them down to your iPhone, iPod touch, Mac, and PC. When you make a change on one device, the cloud updates the others. Push happens automatically, instantly, and continuously. You don’t have to wait for it or remember to do anything — such as docking your iPhone and syncing manually — to stay up to date.

15 minutes is hardly instantly. Now for me, that's not really that big of a deal, but for some of the folks I've told about the service, who have secretaries and busy schedules, 15 minutes might be a big deal. It's just a case of the reality not coming even close to the marketing, which is not typical for Apple.

So I got in line at 8:45 a.m., and I was about 100 people back from the front of the line. For the first 2 hours, the line didn't move at all. I'm a little disappointed in Apple. They knew this launch was coming and yet they were totally unprepared with the activation system. By 11 or so, a guy who got in line at 6am got his phone. Totally ridiculous. After what happened with the original launch, you'd think that Steve Jobs would have blown a fuse and made sure they were ready this time.

At any rate, I spent SEVEN hours in line to get my iPhone 3G. My friend Paul called and asked if I wanted lunch. He came all the way out from PDS to bring me some Chick-Fil-A. Very cool. By 12:30, people were starting to get hot, hungry and cranky, and that gave me what I needed to make it through.

So... what about the phone:

This guy covers that in detail. Beyond that, I'll add that the battery life is going to be more of an issue with this phone. I'll probably have my car charger out a lot more often than I did with the original. I'm pleased with the 3G internet so far, and the app store rocks. I've gotten a couple of paid apps, Super Monkey Ball and OmniFocus. I love that you can redownload them if you've deleted them. Very nice.

The GPS is a nice addition, but we really need live turn by turn. That's coming, but at extra cost. Still, I only need that a few times a year, most of the time, just knowing which direction to go and where I am on that route is enough.

Curiously, yesterday the location button showed my correct location when sitting in the house. Today, it says I am in Stamford, CT. This is without the GPS assistance, since I'm indoors. But even going outside, it didn't bother to check with the GPS. Will have to check that out while driving. Hopefully there's just some glitch with the database of cell towers or something.

OmniFocus is location aware, so I can set a context like grocery store to know where my store is and quickly pull up only tasks that I can take care of right then and there. Nice. Same with home. It doesn't show me my work tasks in that mode when I'm at home.

Sound quality does seem better. I need to get in a place with a lot of background noise to really be able to tell, but I think it will be better.

Hallelujah for the flush 3.5mm headphone jack!

MobileMe has potential, but I'll reserve judgement for when it's really working. Push works great from iPhone. To iPhone—not so much yet.

Jailbreak
The iPhone hackers are just about ready to release their jailbreak tool to allow unauthorized 3rd party apps on the phone. I did this with my previous phone because there are some great utilities and tweaks: having a button on your home screen to quickly turn on/off wifi for instance. I want to be able to do that with 3G too, to save on battery life. Same with screen brightness. I had an app that would toggle between 2 settings for my screen brightness. Plus some free games, and other cool apps, some of which are now for pay apps in the App Store.

Was it worth the wait in line? Absolutely. :-)

I think Apple just created themselves a license to print money. Take the iPhone, which is still a joy to use a year later, add in twice as fast internet access (and you can now talk and do data at the same time, or receive calls when you're using the internet), and GPS, and drop the price to $199. Now I'm fully expecting to have to sign a contract for that much, but still. GPS support would make that phone really amazing. It's a little hard to use on a trip right now because you can only roughly figure out where you are. With GPS there will be no doubt.

And mobile.me looks pretty interesting too. Especially for a small business set-up like ours. Push email, push calendars, push contacts.

Anyone want to buy a used 1.0 iPhone? $100. No contract required. I'll bet that the new one will require a data plan too. On mine, you could turn that off and just have the cell access.

So did I miss keeping up with the liveblog of the keynote? Not a chance. :-) It's the Mac Holy Day.

Macrumors.com had an excellent iPhone formatted site for keeping up with the keynote. They posted pictures and a self-updating text feed.

So onto the announcements. There were no real surprises, and I'm sure Steve was pissed about that. He likes to keep the surprises. The iPhone update was a nice tideover until the full SDK comes out that allows 3rd party applications. The best feature is that Google Maps now can figure out where you are based on looking at which cell towers it can see. I tried it out a couple of times today around Helena and Birmingham and it worked really well. 2nd best feature is the ability to save a bookmark as an icon on your home screen.

Apple TV. I'm close to wanting one of these. Right now I have a Mac mini hooked up to my HDTV, so I really have no need for it. I can play pretty much anything with it. I would have to transcode some files to get them to play on the AppleTV. So you can now rent movies via iTunes. Great... pricing is decent. Terms... not so great. I totally agree with Rob Griffiths at Macworld magazine, as a parent, having to watch a movie within 24 hours after starting it is sometimes difficult. I know that the studios are the ones proposing these lousy terms. Xbox Live has similar terms. I would rather see a deal that works like this. After renting the movie, you can watch it as many times as you want in the first 24 hours. After that it expires. But... you get to watch it once, regardless of how long it takes you. Even if it takes you 2 months, you can watch the whole movie once. There's a pretty good chance in our house that we would rent a movie, only to not be able to finish it, wasting the rental fee. For that reason, I doubt I'll use it more than once or twice.

Time Capsule. I'm a big fan of Time Machine, the feature that automatically backs your machine up and allows you to go back in time to retrieve older versions of files. See Apple's brilliant ad for this feature here.

And the major new announcement, the Macbook Air. I'm going to reserve total judgement until I can see one in person, but my initial reaction is positive. I love the size of it. It would be a fantastic laptop for a college student. I hope they roll out the multi-touch trackpad to other models. Lack of ethernet isn't that big a deal. After all, you could add it via USB if you had to. I've only used Ethernet on my laptops a handful of times. Lack of an optical drive isn't that big of a deal either. Toast has a great feature where you can burn discs to a networked machine's burner. They need to build that in. I do wonder about how you install Windows to run without the optical drive, even with the remote disc feature. I'm sure you could install Windows into Parallels that way, but what about boot camp?

I don't swap batteries often, so I guess it's ok that it doesn't have a user serviceable battery. I think for any executive, it would make a great machine, or for a writer, or a presenter, business traveller. For design work, I would still go for a Macbook Pro. The processor inside the Air is a lot slower than what's available in the Pro. The video card in the Pro is much better too.

I have one of the new Mac Pros on order. A Dual Quadcore 3.0Ghz machine. :-) That's going to be my workhorse for the next few years.

News to me. If Mac malware goes from 2 to 4, then you can write a huge headline that says, Mac malware increases by 100%!!!!

I may regret it someday, but my Mac at work sits outside the firewall with no security enabled. Same goes for my home machine. My home wi-fi network doesn't even have a password.

Romney and Religion
On my way home at noon today, I was listening to Rush Limbaugh talking about Romney's big religion speech. I think this was definitely a big moment for Romney. Would I vote for him? No, but it was still a big moment for him. Rush was doing his best to convince listeners that the reason for this speech wasn't that Conservative Evangelicals refuse to vote for a Mormon. He was saying that it was about the media attacking him. Right. The media does question his Mormon faith, I'll give him a half-point for that. But a part of the reason that they do is that Conservative Evangelicals have in fact made public statements to that effect. Nice try though. Still, Romney's sentiments were good. It might work for him. I can tell that he's become Rush's choice for President.
Then he started trying to spin the latest intel on Iran as being co-written by someone who had a grudge against the White House. And then he quoted that 52% of Americans are in favor of invading Iran. -sigh- We need Ron Paul more than ever.
Prayers for the Ill
Anna is the sickest I've ever seen her. She is just miserable. She hasn't eaten anything more than a bite of a biscuit in 48 hours and she can't hardly even keep down a sip of water. They just gave us something to try and make her stop vomiting, but the first dose doesn't appear to have done the trick. She hasn't moved off the sofa all day yesterday and today. So say a little prayer that her body will fight off this virus.