Wow, this is a crap deal. How disappointing. Why is the app is 1.2GB in size, when the iPhone is designed as an always-on device? A $30 1GB app with paid map downloads on demand, instead of storing the entire USA on the phone at once, would make much more sense. I agree that streaming maps (such as the google maps app) are useless if you're in the sticks with no coverage or Edge-only coverage, but giving up over 1/8th or 1/16th of my total storage for maps I won't use 99% of the time is a terrible compromise. if I could install map packs based on my travel plans, that would make much more sense. And $100 for the USA, when I can buy a standalone TomTom 125 for $80? Unless the $100 app has feature parity with the $400 standalone units, the only conclusion I can come to is that they are trying to incentivise people away from using the iPhone app, and toward buying a dedicated GPS unit instead. I can think of no other excuse. Bad form, guys. I hope someone sees the market opportunity and steals your cake.

Reposted with a few slight edits from my own blog a few days ago:

My poor PC broke. Some of my RAM went bad due to the summer heat, combined and my obstinate refusal to turn the AC on until the temperature in my office is well into the 90's. Fortunately RAM is cheap as hell these days, and I can get twice as much memory for half the price I paid a year ago, so I ordered a full 8GB of replacement memory, as much as my motherboard can handle.

The problem is that I was running Windows Vista 32bit, which can only address a bit under 4GB of RAM. The only way my Windows computer could use the extra memory I'd purchased would be to re-install a 64-bit version of Windows. But I've already pre-ordered Windows 7 Pro, and it seems silly to install Vista 64-bit now when my copy of Windows 7 will arrive in October. So, over the weekend I got a correctly-checksumming ISO of Windows 7 from The Usual Sources and installed it without a key, giving me 30 days to register. The plan is to just use the rearm trick to tide me over until my legal activation keys come in the mail.

It took a few hours to get everything installed, but today all my apps and games are back, and my files are copied over. I gotta say, if you're going to run a Windows desktop, this is the way to do it. It's NICE. It feels much snappier than Vista, and while it's got more overhead (and thus runs a bit slower) than XP 64-bit, the UI enhancements make up for it. Since today is apparently a bullet-list day, here's a quick rundown of my favorite things:

• The taskbar / quicklaunch toolbar / system tray / start menu have all been revamped, and the new way is awesome. The taskbar and the quicklaunch bar have been completely integrated, making the functionality very similar to the OS X Dock. To see the open windows for a running application, just hover your mouse over the icon. IE8 integrates very well with this, showing a preview window for each of the open tabs, regardless of window, and allowing you to switch quickly. It's like mini-expose. All very polished. Right-clicking on a Windows 7-native app, whether it's open or not, gives you a jumplist of recently used items, similar to right-clicking on a systray icon.
• The icon management in the system tray is much improved. You can banish icons from your sight forever, so annoying applications that refuse to let you remove the icon can be shoved off the desktop. No more company logos cluttering up your screen.
• IE8 rules. Who'd have thought? The privacy filters let you duplicate the functionality of adblock by importing an XML file, and the accelerator framework lets you do things like hilite text and post it to a blog, or email it to someone, all with a couple of clicks. New pages and tabs are linked in a security jail with their parent and can't work with other tabs/windows, and they're automatically color-coded. I like it a lot.
• The 'show desktop' hover / button in the bottom right. I HATE not being able to look at the desktop for stray icons or whatnot. Now there's a permanent show desktop button in that little strip of pixels between the system tray and the edge of the screen. Formerly useless real estate has been reclaimed for a good purpose!
• Vista's sidebar gadgets are now completely free-roaming anywhere on the desktop. This is nice, since I always liked the idea of gadgets but didn't want a whole sidebar. Now I can put them wherever, not worry about putting Windows over them, and just hover over the "show desktop" area on the taskbar to check the weather.
• Fast fast fast. 64-bit IE is speedy! File copies are speedy! The operating system is speedy! Everything just feels snappy and quick.
• Libraries - this is really neat, Libraries are consolidated collections of folders that all have the same kind of data. So if C:\photos and d:\photos both contain images, I can make them both part of the photo library, and view it as one folder. What makes this interesting is that I can plug in an external disk o' photos, add it to my Library, and as you'd expect view all the photos as part of the library. But once I unplug the disk, they're gone. Plug it in again with file changes, it's re-added and the changes are picked up. Ditto this for music, videos. External storage gets handled in a very sane manner!
• Better handling of peripherals. There's a peripheral manager that covers keyboards, mice, webcams, external disks, scanners, printers etc. separately form the monolithic device manager, which was always a bit intimidating to people who don't care about the computer's internals.
• Interesting-looking scanner/fax app. I still have to send more faxes than I'd like, and there's no modem in this computer, but having a good app for it could save me some money on eFaxing with a $5 winmodem from the used PC shop.

That said, there's still some problems, although I think time will handle most of them. I'm looking forward to the following:

• Compatible scanner driver for the new scanner/fax app, since my existing TWAIN driver from Vista doesn't seem to work.
• Installing a modem so I can fax directly from PC instead of paying an online fax service for their printer driver (have to send faxes for insurance co a fair amount). Welcome back to the 90's! Seriously, I wasn't expecting the new OS to be awesome for faxing, of all things.
• The apps I use most, like Steam, being recompiled to be Win7-native. It would be fantastic if Steam games could show up in the Games folder with the proper icons & metadata, and it would be awesome if Steam would ditch the system tray and just run with the Windows 7 jumplists. Ditto Stardock's Reactor, Putty, really EVERYTHING. The jumplist is revolutionary.
• 64-bit Flash Player, so I can retire the 32-bit browser.
• Figuring out how to change the default Explorer location.

For an OS transition, this has been pretty damn smooth. And I love the UI changes. Overall I'm very, very pleased.

Look: If you are willing to buy a data access plan to a wireless network on the following terms:
-Higher per-month cost than access to traditional wired infrastructure at lower bandwidth;
-Access is sold on a per-device basis, meaning that if you own a laptop and a smartphone and want them both online, you must pay twice;
-Specific technically inconsequential data packets cost exponentially more than all other packets (txt messages);
-The device you connect to this network automatically prefers to use other wireless networks when possible (802.11);

Then you are a fool. Speaking as one such fool, I recognize that the market is so corrupt that there is no intelligent option for the buyer, but that does not make me any less a fool than the other 40 million people who also agreed to take part in this chicanery.

In the age of the internet, games are uniquely poised to capitalize on aftermarket sales (and sales due to piracy) in a way that no medium in history has been able to, and it can all be done just by modifying the design of the product. Here's some examples that work extremely well:

-DLC. Look at Burnout Paradise. Two years later, it's still getting meaty, significant upgrades on a regular basis. The game has had ELEVEN content updates, 5 of which were paid / premium add-ons. The publisher gets paid for each of those! Bethesda knows how to nail this too, despite some early mishaps with horse armor. Rockstar's figuring it out too. The right DLC will make you a ton of cash, even from the pirates.

-Recurring subscriptions: Some MMO's give away their clients, and make their money on premium DLC and monthly subscription fees. Apogee understood this years ago, with the original Wolfenstein shareware. Download it and get 1/6 of the game, which was a meaty, satisfying experience on its own. But pay up and you can get the other 5/6ths!

-High replay value: Rock Band & Left 4 Dead's co-operative multiplayer emphasis give them huge replay. I almost never see a reasonably priced copy of Rock Band sitting on the used shelf (trust me, I've looked, I want to import the songs into Rock Band 2). Rock Band follows the DLC model, too! The longer you convince someone to hold onto your game, the lower the aftermarket churn, and the higher you can keep your MSRP before you're undercut by the used market. Just ask the creators of Mass Effect, or Super Mario Galaxy (I dare you, get all 242 stars).

-In-game advertsiing. The people who buy games used are necessarily doing so after the big retail splash of the original launch. These new eyeballs can view ads impressions just as well as the original pair, though, and the value of that digital billboard is only as high as the number of people who can look at it at any given time.

  Efforts to thwart the aftermarket's existence entirely, through one-time activation keys and emphasizing downloadable games, are just going to piss the customer off. The days of making a 4-hour singleplayer game with no replay value beyond deathmatch/ctf and expecting to have high sell-through are over; The high-budget $60 Terminator: Salvation game is only 4 hours long, it's going to be littering the shelves of used stores. The only way to stop the used market from undercutting the new market is to make the new experience so compelling, people don't want to part with their new game for a long, long time.

This. AD's management tools are brutally efficient and understandable. The newest versions of Samba+KB5 make it trivial to authenticate *nix systems against it and have fully integrated, cross-platform user & privilege management with consistent uid's/gid's across all hosts. Assuming you throw the right amount of resources at it (at least 2 AD servers per tree in the forest, per site), and take advantage of the DDNS services, you'll have a really scalable, easily managed infrastructure for years to come.

Refurbs, monoprice, and pricewatch, bruthaman. Refurbs, monoprice, and pricewatch.

And God bless Qwest. 1.5/8 for $33 a month, uncapped. I ssl encrypt all my usenet connections just for safety's sake though.

You're right, I do confuse container with codec a bit. I should have said that *264 video + mkv container == mp3 audio + mpeg container.

yeah, integrated optical/headphone jack. Monoprice has a $4 cable for it.

Popcorn Hour suffers by not including local storage (though it can be added later), or a disk reader. Not having used one, I can't comment on their interface. They're closer than anybody though.

We've been waiting for years for a killer video container, and it appears to me that mkv is probably going to be the one. It seems poised to become the mp3 of video. There's finally a container that can be played back in an acceptable number of hardware devices, with acceptable quality, at acceptable filesizes. The lack of file-embedded metadata in the container is still a problem, one that's been holding back online video distribution for years, but external sites such as imdb and thetvdb seem to be working around this well enough.

iPod / iTunes took off like a rocket imho because of a few key factors:
-They created hardware that followed the pipe dream of the mp3: A portable player capable of holding many gigs of music in the size of a deck of cards, with headphone out. This wasn't innovation, such solutions were already on the market, but theirs was the most beautiful.;
-They smoothed out the rough usability edges in existing portable hdd player solutions by offering great desktop software in iTunes, which took advantage of metadata to create not only a really compelling library system, but also provided very tight integration that was intuitively the same across the iPod & iTunes.
-They offered a legal means of acquiring music on demand for their solution.
-They made it ridiculously easy to use their device with black market content.

Because Apple were the first with the sack to give people their dream device, with a sensible organized interface, a legal means of acquiring content, and full integration with illegal content, they dominated the marketplace.

Video has been held back, as I said above, by a couple of things. The first was the lack of file-embedded metadata (I can't search for all files in my library directed by James Cameron, for instance), but the ubiquity of always-on wireless connections has solved some of that, and external metadata references are now acceptable. Second, it's been held back by codecs & containers that were way out of date, and don't deliver broadcast-quality (especially HDTV) at acceptable filesizes. The average mp4 vs a highly compressed digital cable channel might be equivalent, but the market wants DVD quality without any sacrifice from downloaded video.

Finally, video has also been held back by the lack of elegant playback solutions. Apple missed the boat with the AppleTV by failing to step up and partner with the black market, which is why the device hasn't been a wild success. Software solutions based on the xbmc core, such as boxee, plex, and uh.... xbmc, are doing much better, but they're still software solutions dependent on having a PC. People want a fully-integrated solution.

Mark my words: The first company with the temerity to market a device that will take a user's existing library and integrate it into an elegant set-top solution is going to CLEAN UP. They will dominate the set-top completely for years to come. It looks like TiVO is going to miss the boat, as is Apple. Are there any dark horses in this race?

Lest anyone think that I'm pipe dreaming, a working solution can be assembled out of off-the-shelf parts right now. Here's what I built in a weekend for about $700:

Hardware:
-Mac Mini c2d (winter '09)
-Harmony 720 remote
-DisplayPort --> HDMI cable
-Optical Audio cable
-1TB firewire-800 external storage from pricewatch

Software:
-Plex
-SwitchResX (only necessary for SDTV or older HDTVs)
-RipIt
-SABNZBD+

Subscriptions:
-Usenet service ($11/mo)
-Unnamed usenet header indexer ($.75 / week, roughly)
-rss feed for TV show subscriptions (free)

With these pieces, I've built a DVR that automatically downloads the shows I like the same day they air. Downloads are FAST, maxing out my internet connection. I can play back 1080p blu-ray rips with full surround sound & 0 dropped frames or stuttering. I can drop any DVD into the reader, and have it copied into the library and spit back out again once it's done. And it's all done with a universal remote in a beautiful interface that's not quite as good as TiVO's, but still miles ahead of Comcast & DirecTV's DVRs. This same DVR can watch Hulu videos, Youtube, South Park Studios films, Netflix Streaming, or even freakin' Zero Punctuation. It will play back music from any itunes library on the network with full visualization. It will display photo slideshows from any iPhoto instance. It'll even play emulated games. All in a single interface, with no keyboard/mouse required, from a universal remote (and gamepad for the emulator). It's all 1080p/5.1 capable.

I get the content I want, in the format I want it (HD or SD), for as long as I want it, in an open container, with no DRM. When I'm out with friends, if someone says "you should see this old movie!" I can open a web browser on my mobile phone, plug the film into a search engine, and tag it. My computer will have it downloaded & ready to watch by the time I return home. If I want to start downloading new episodes of a particular program, I just go to a website and check a box.

Convergence is here. This is what OSS & commodity hardware are providing TODAY, but it takes a geek to set it up. A year from now, it'll be cheap enough to build one for my parents. Two years from now, it'll be easy enough that they'll set it up themselves.

This is the new market reality. The question is not whether this will become mass-market technology, but when, and who will capitalize on it best. The avalanche has already started, the pebbles don't get to vote.

Meaning most studios seemed content to save disk space by only putting on DD+ tracks instead of TrueHD or DTS-MA. I'd rather have a lossless track every time over some fluffy back-patting featurette where everyone talks about how great the movie was, but that doesn't sell disks the way a big bullet list of extras does. Not that the 360 can even output anything over full-bitrate DTS, but had HD-DVD won the 360 wouldn't have remained my player of choice.

As far as technical merits, I'll go with you on pretty much everything you said. I have a HD-DVD drive for my 360 and a PS3, and I'll grant that the early software for HD-DVD was much more polished.

However, I do love me some lossless audio, and that just wasn't a common feature on HD-DVD. I liked using the HD-DVD software better, but it was more or less a wash as far as which was the better format from an end-user standpoint, at least for me.

As to the politics, I done just got told. Thanks for the extra perspective!

DVD licensing fees are STILL quite high, and all the money goes to Toshiba, who own the patents. Toshiba's patent trolling is why blu-ray exists.

Toshiba built HD-DVD on top of their existing patent portfolio, and unilaterally altered the rules of the trade association charged with helming DVD's future, the DVD Forum, in order to push through adoption of their arguably-inferior standard over Sony's more advanced, more open, less expensive competing proposal.

Sony, Panasonic, and several other key players walked rather than spend another hardware generation paying through the nose to Toshiba, and formed their own standards body to back Sony's proposed spec.

Thus the format war was born: Toshiba's standard was named HD-DVD, and Sony's Blu-Ray. For once, Sony was the company that had the widely supported, more open standard. This is why you only saw Toshiba HD-DVD players, while dozens of companies were making blu-ray players.

Mind you, they're both closed formats, but of the two, HD-DVD was way more evil. The lesser evil definitely won in that case.

Nobody's forcing you to pay $40-$50. Games are products which are usually heavily discounted but still readily available 12 months after initial release.

Why not just wait a year, buy for $20, and then play, if you're so concerned about your $/hr value?