Well, the major question we've all been waiting for has finally been answered. Just how much is this contraption going to cost me a month? The answer came this morning, and it couldn't have been better. Well maybe, if they had offered it for free, but meh. Rate plans for the iPhone start at $59.99 a month for 450 minutes. "Yikes!", yells the Crackberry fanatics! But oh ho, look deeper and see what's included. 200 text messages, 5,000 night and weekend minutes, rollover minutes, unlimited mobile to mobile, oh yea, and UNLIMITED DATA. Umm... Pwn'd? My plan will be exactly this $59.99 one, as I can't see breaking those numbers to easily especially with rollover. The plans do go up to $99.99, as detailed in the image below.

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The other great news is after waiting on line for hours to get an iPhone, you get to go in the store, walk up to the counter.. say, "One iPhone please" they ring you up, and you walk out. Ack! What about activation!? "Hahaha", laughs Steve Jobs! "Puny mortals! I have thought of everything! Go home, connect your new iPhone to your computer, and sync it through the activation process from the comfort of your own home! Bwaaahahaha" (some dialog may not accurately depict the official press release and is instead used for emphasis.")

Needless to say, the news with this product just keeps getting better and better. The Blackberry's on the other hand, while amazing, cost about $99 for a plan somewhat similar to this, but with less weekend and night minutes and no texts; I believe they are a separate $5 or $10 dollar charge. The rate of that of course comes from buying separate phone and unlimited data plans.

Anyway, I will now officially start pulling my hair out until the 29th at 6PM. Yes, the next time you see me I will be bald. But at least I won't be as sweaty as this guy...

Gizmodo - Man waiting in line for iPhone for 100 hours

Flick to the right folks. The iPhone is just a mere week away from launch now. This afternoon/evening AT&T and Apple sent out a pair of emails with a 24+ minute video attached detailing all sorts of info about the iPhone. If there is one thing I can say about these final weeks, the tension has obviously been getting worse and worse for me and many others waiting for this device. If nothing else can be said about Steve Jobs, it's that his keen and yet wicked ability is like none other when it comes to dangling these little tidbits in front of us like yarn in front of a kitten. There's actually so much news and hype right now I couldn't begin to delve into it all for fear of a serious case of carpal tunnel.
At a minimum, I must applaud Apple and AT&T's amazing work in promoting this device. I cannot think of anything including recent gaming systems that has gotten so much hype from the masses with almost no direct work to advertise and really push the item. They have really just announced it, kept it as secret as possible, and let their little calculated bits of info slide; letting us, the common man do all the rest for them. The endless blogs and podcasts have made this product one of the most celebrated devices next to the wheel.
Having watched through the video and seen the amazing things this phone can do in perspective for once, it really satisfies my mind, that I haven't been wasting my time in following this phones development. It will truly go down in history as a game changer.
The video itself was quirky. Very matter-of-factly presented. The speaker who spends too much time waving the iPhone around, managing to keep my eyes following his hand and not at his less-than-normal model ideal of a face man's face. Only briefly does he even flash the front of it at you. It makes you want to jump in the video and snatch it from his hands in the most deranged possible way. Regardless, the video answered many more of the lingering questions. I can only imagine release day will be like the final episode of Lost. All the great mysteries finally answered. In the meantime, they answer a few here and there, and then leave the rest to be thought about and debated over, and ultimately thrown out the window as they unveil all new amazing things. That is why Lost succeeds, and that is why this iPhone's marketing has succeeded so well. It's almost Hitchcockian.
Anyway, as the little bits of news come and go, like the amazing extended battery life announcement earlier this week, as well as the addition of YouTube, and more, I managed to settle on my battle plan. Not that anyone is reading this blog yet anyway (which I hope will change soon), but I must keep it under wraps. I managed to check with the store I'll be going to, and they answered my questions perfectly. Now I can only wait, and hope, and try to get on line at such a reasonable a time as that I go home on the evening of June 29th, 2007 a happy man. I also have to keep my wife away from this blog before she thinks I'm more nuts than she already does. Viva la iPhone!

Fantastic news. A long time ago I signed up with Apple and Cingular/AT&T's mailing lists for info on the iPhone. Since that happened, I think I've seen maybe one or two pretty pointless e-mail's from them. Today, one finally arrived with some good news. The e-mail mostly was reaffirming that the phone would be released on June 29th, and then was giving some pointers on how to prepare your info/pictures so you could quickly and easily transfer it over. Mostly common sense types of stuff.
Anyway, onto the exciting news. Though it has been talked about a lot if the iPhone would support Push type e-mail (email that is automatically delivered to you as it arrives. {a la Crackberry}), it has never really bothered me either way. Figuring in that most of my e-mail could be accessed by web browsers; and the fact that the iPhone has a great one. At the end of the day, it didn't phase me much. The only thing that kind of bothered me was the worry of having to constantly hit send/receive like the Palm Treos. Well worry no more!
"iPhone is the first phone to come with a desktop-class email application. So now your phone can display rich HTML email with graphics and photos alongside the text. iPhone will even fetch your latest email every time you open the application and automatically retrieve your email on a set schedule, just like a computer does."
This was the paragraph in the e-mail that freed me of all my iPhone-E-mail worries. I hadn't even conceptualized they would add a timer like Outlook or other e-mail programs have, to automatically check for mail. But as it turns out, someone at Apple did. Another strong function that is pushing me ever closer to the edge of setting up camp outside my local Apple store.

Well, just having sat through my early afternoon catching up on the WWDC keynote address via live blogs, I must say that it was fairly boring and not much was newsworthy.
To preface there were a few exciting items for OSX Leopard. I rather liked the new finder and iChat. Though finder's new found capabilities, or at least the shiny ones, are just going back through time and reusing an old idea; coverflow.
Steveo brought up a back-up program, called time machine at one point. He found it amazing but its basically a built in one touch backup software. Sure haven't seen any of those before. But the metaphor of the time machine was well and alive throughout the rest of his performance. It seems that audience reactions were meager, and the whole thing certainly left me not blown away. Much of what he debuted for the new OSX is just rehashing old ideas, a few new little morsels that were relatively uninspired, and a few cracks on windows, especially vista (a platform which in all fairness really just reinvented the wheel for itself unlike the new OSX). Which, I should point out, that Mr. Jobs sided back up to in hopes of raising Apple's minuscule stakes in the browser market by introducing Safari for pc's. Hooray. (Can you feel my enthusiasm? I can't).
Anyway, like this post's category suggests, I was in it for iPhone news, and he gave out 2 nuggets. Nugget, a fitting word for sure. First up, iPhone will release on June 29th, but instead of a 12am midnight bash or the normal path of just letting individual store's door's swing open for the morning and letting the awaiting line in, they are going with a 6:30 PM launch. Ok, well this will be a great idea! Your average working Joe Shmo can finish his Friday afternoon work, then stroll over to the Apple store or AT&T wireless and pick his iPhone up in as leisurely a fashion as possible. Hum dee dum! But oh, wait, that's right, by that time there will be a line a mile long of people who have been waiting all day, people who took off, or who don't necessarily have, or need to be at a job. And how exactly does this work when the doors would presumably already be open at all these institutions? Wouldn't people just be able to meander in? As someone who firmly believe in lines, and firmly believes most morons will disregard lines, and who firmly believes there to be an extremely large population of morons floating around, I can't help but wonder how they will keep order. Especially when you figure most contracts and phone sales take often over 30 minutes per person to set up. And thats a giving number when all I can imagine first day is "circus". This throws off my original plans, but the lucky thing is I happen to be getting off at 1PM that day, so perhaps I'll be at a happy medium. Not waiting 9+ hours, and not arriving only to stand at the end of the line either. Only time will tell.
Secondly, they announced that iPhone development will be done at least for now, through Web2.0 and Ajax programming. I would have liked to have seen the ability to build some non-web-based apps, but I won't complain too much either. Either way, I think they could have done better, but again only time will tell. There may be some ajax genius's out there who have some amazing cards up their sleeves.
Either way I was fairly un-impressed with this keynote, and I felt like it borrowed too much from the last WWDC's results.
On a final note, having used a plethora of live blogs to learn this information just mere minutes after it was announced, I have to say one site stood above the rest. Engadget did not have the so-called live and rapidly refreshing page that some other sites like Gizmodo or Macrumors did, but it didn't bother me either. Their site was the fastest, the most reliable, and conveyed not only the most, but the best information well above the others.
Macrumors was fast but every update had no more than a sentence and the pictures on the side were nothing to write home about. Gizmodo plain didn't work, it was supposed to automatically refresh and it would occasionally but for the most part, I couldn't get info to load as the site must have been just too bogged down to deliver. Engadget on the other hand divulged quotes, opinions and great pictures very rapidly, that just plain gave the info across in a much better way. Way to go Engadget, and thanks for your hard work on delivering the news ASAP!

Let me start this by saying I've been following the development of the Apple iPhone for quite some time. And finding news on new developments has become a bit of an obsession for me. I'm readily awaiting it's upcoming release on June 29th. So in the meantime I've been indulging myself with the new series of four iPhone ads. During my time watching these ad's I noticed a few funny things. Perhaps slips of the ad agency who created them, or maybe little bits of thread Steve Jobs is dangling in front of us. Only time will tell. Anyway, the evidence is below. First up is a mysterious 12th button. In all the iPhone ads and demonstrations previous to these ads and even in the ads themselves there has only ever been 11 icons on the front screen to choose from. In a few frames during a close up shot of the hand model pressing the iPod button, it is visible that there are not three, but four buttons on the bottom row. Meaning? A new button has found its way into the space above and shifted all the other down or over one space. See the modified screen cap image below.

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Second involves an interesting thing dealing with the date. I noticed that at one point you can clearly see the date on the New York Times site. It lists October 2, 2006 12:59AM as the last time it was updated. This is visible in the attached screen cap I took. This makes me wonder if these ads were created as far back as then. The date displayed on the phone is clearly June 3rd, so does this indicate a cached page/image from October 2nd, 2006? It is obvious that the phone in the commercial has a full wifi connection, but as many others have pointed out in this and previous ads, the speed of the internet seems just conveniently too quick to be realistic. And further, what significance then does October 2, 2006 hold? Was this when the ads were actually created? Or is the date significant enough for some reason that someone would have cached the page back then for use now? Screen cap below with the date blown up for clarity.

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Lastly, in a very exciting turn of events, should it pan out, an adobe flash file was visible on the page. The New York Times site features a small flash video player about midway down its page, as well as a few other flash advertisements, but since the player has been a constant for some time and is visible now as you visit the site, that's what I'm going to focus on. The inclusion of the player on the page indicates one of two things in my mind. The more skeptical of the two is that the page is fact screen simulated or some sort of image file, or the more hopeful of the two; that flash will be working on the release of the iPhone. If flash weren't enabled, the space would most likely be empty or have placeholder text mentioning it would need to install flash, or flash isn't available etc. Screen cap below blown up for clarity and including today's flash player from the NY Times site for comparison.

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