I was on the old Cingular network when I first went into business. My first smartphone was a Treo 650. It sucked. Switched to a Treo 700p on Verizon a couple of years later when it came out. Network was a little better, phone sucked worse. Far worse.

After debating it with myself for a while, I bought the first iPhone when it came out in 2007. I still wasn't impressed by the AT&T network, but the phone worked so well I didn't care. When 3G came to pass I was unimpressed enough that if Verizon had an equivalent phone then that could have done simultaneous voice and data I might have switched.

Starting in late 2008, the AT&T network in my area's gotten a lot better. Good enough that I'm not tempted to switch anymore. I upgraded to the iPhone 4 last month, and antenna problems or not it improves reception even more for me - drop spots I had with older AT&T phones (going back to my Treo 650) are not a problem anymore. 3G speeds are excellent. When my VZ contract expires for the data card I have with them next month I will cancel it and just use tethering on my iPhone to save more money.

Basically, I pay less than I used to, have a better phone, and next to no network issues anywhere I go regularly. On the rare occasion I've had to call customer service they've been helpful and easy to reach. More than once they've called me back to follow up and make sure I'm happy. Bottom line for me - I'm happy with AT&T, and I see no reason to change. And I'm a happy iPhone user as well. As long as they don't screw it up, I'll stick with AT&T.

I'd mod that as funny if I had any points right now. In fact, even Chris Hansen would mod that as funny.

Then he'd show up at your house with a camera crew.

I think freezing the market only works when you're not in the space already and you have a product that is a radical departure from the competition. The original iPhone met that measure - the newer models since then have not. The iPad met it as well, but even then it was out just over 2 months later.

Preannouncements don't really hold up too well outside of that because the market changes too fast and you've got two real possibilities when you announce 6 months ahead of time:

- Other competitors have used your announced specs to meet or exceed what you're doing, and they were out quicker

- You fail to meet or exceed the product spec yourself and look bad.

If the rest of the market was sitting still, it'd be a no-risk play for Cisco. After all, they are new to the tablet space. But Apple has a huge lead and enough time for more product iterations and another OS rev, other Android tablet vendors could match or blow away what Cisco has announced, or a host of other things could derail them.

Yeah, but this is the Osborne Effect applied back to them. Why wait for a device that may or may not ship in half a year when you can start deploying a known platform now?

The iPad isn't perfect, of course, but it's here now, there's a robust OS on it today with a big software library available, a known development path, methods for controlled deployment (businesses can set up their own App Store path), and we also know what's coming in the platform OS this year for it (everything that's in iOS 4, with some additional features that'll be announced as the beta cycle kicks in).

I don't have anything against Android as such, and I also don't think all tablets except iPad are inherently doomed. I just see the strategy of announcing things so far ahead as a Bad Idea, especially when you are shipping a "me too" device. The only reason it worked for Apple once is because there was no iPhone before to cannibalize, and because it was a pretty radical change from what was already in the marketplace.

Now Apple announces new iPhones a couple of weeks before they go on sale. The next iPad won't be announced in July for January delivery. It'll be announced less than a month before you can walk into a store and buy it. And until then, it won't exist outside of the supply chain rumor mills.

No, Apple doesn't need Verizon. They need millions of people who are locked into the App Store ecosystem, and between the tens of millions of iPhones sold, the millions of iPod Touches, and the millions of iPads - they've got all that and more.

And because of the App Store, virtually all of those users will stay yoked to their device and its upgrade path forever.

Verizon's 92 million subscribers are tempting, and if all 92 million of them were going to get iPhones it would be compelling. But they aren't. Maybe a few million would over the remaining life of the EVDO network, but meanwhile Apple would have to build an iPhone that couldn't do simultaneous voice and data, didn't use a SIM, and probably couldn't easily be activated at home. Until LTE I just don't see any good reason for Apple to do it.

Apple's darned happy to make a huge profit on their relatively small portion of the overall cellphone market. Android is ultimately going to sell more phones, because Google gives it away to all comers and it's now the standard OS for pretty much anything other than Windows, RIM, and Apple phones. But Android won't make anyone a lot of money - it'll reduce costs for cellphone makers because there's no royalties, and it'll make Google some extra money on search. That isn't going to overthrow Apple or RIM anytime soon.

If any of these companies learned anything at all from Apple, they wouldn't be announcing tablets to ship next year. They'd be announcing finished products that will be out this month. You can't build a product and aim at a moving target.

HP Slate with Windows 7? Dead, and HP bought Palm to recover. Lenovo Ideapad? Announced at CES, still not out, supposedly a new OS is coming. Cisco Cius? Looks cool, not out until next year.

iPad? Over 3 million of them shipped so far, they were in users' hands 10 weeks after they were announced, and by the time most of these competitors ship (if they do at all), Apple will have a second release of the shipping OS and may well have a second generation of the hardware out as well.

The only thing Apple's preannounced several months ahead of time in recent years was the original iPhone. For a reason - that froze the smartphone market for almost six months until the first one shipped.

Word to future iPad wannabes: Tell us about it when you're ready to ship. You're not going to freeze the market by announcing 6 months early. People aren't going to say "screw Apple, let's wait for the Cius to make tablets legitimate". You'll only look stupid when you don't ship the same product you announced 6 months ago.

Ultimately the codebases will pretty much merge - but there is a _lot_ of stuff in desktop MacOS that isn't in iOS, and vice-versa. There's also a need basis behind a lot of it. Desktop operating systems are suited to large systems with higher power consumption, multicore multi-GHz processors, gigabytes of RAM, and massive storage. iOS (and mobile systems in general) are suited to a much more constrained environment.

What pretty much happened in Apple-land is that Leopard forked to provide the basis of what is now iOS - as the platform matures further a lot of that will backport into the core OS. The iOS team picked what they needed and can now give some of it back. I don't think you'll ever get away from a freely downloadable and installable option in the desktop OS. A do think that eventually the App Store will be available for the desktop platform as a distribution option, and all the vendors who now use Escellerate and Kagi (and all the other online distributors) will all jump en masse to the App Store for Mac. Good for developers, good for users, lousy for distributors.

I also think the criteria for App Store for Mac will not be nearly as strict as it is for the iOS version. But it won't matter too much. Distribution choices for the desktop will be like this:

- Direct distribution: Available to anyone, handle sales and fulfillment yourself - whether electronic or physical.

- 3rd party: Still available, but increasingly irrelevant (most will opt for the App Store).

- App Store: The store handles installation and updates for you in exchange for a cut.

"In the fall". (at least, that's what Jobs said at the OS 4.0 announcement in April)

More to the point, 3.2 was for iPad-only. 4.0 is initially just for iPhone/iPod Touch (basically the same device), and 4.1 (that will likely be the version number) will be a unified release supporting all iOS devices and adding some additional functionality. I'm anticipating basic printing support and some form of access to remote/server files as the major additions.

It will probably be out in the October timeframe in time for the fall generation of iPod devices.

That was pretty much my point. If I unlock the iPhone here in the US, my options are T-Mobile (with a tiny footprint and hardly any 3G presence, and what there is for 3G isn't iPhone compatible) and a handful of small rural carriers. That's it. If I want an iPhone in the US AT&T is pretty much the only way to go.

Taking that phone overseas, though, becomes useful with an unlocked phone. I can pay local rates for phone calls instead of roaming rates of $1-$2 per minute. I'd lose my phone number for the duration doing that but at least I'd have a choice.

In the LTE world (once the technology settles down) I should be able to take an unlocked phone and use it with any provider. Might be a while, but that's the best hope - and it's also what AT&T and Verizon have both announced they are using. There is hope...

As much as I want my iPhone carrier-unlocked, what other US carrier with GSM/HSDPA and a nationwide footprint do I have access to?

Point being, what am I supposed to do with my newly unlocked iPhone - go to T-Mobile? Not really, at least not in this country. The use I can see for an unlocked US iPhone is simply that were I to travel overseas I could use a local SIM over there and use it with a native carrier instead of getting violated with international roaming fees.

Not having left the States in seven years, I'm not worrying about it too much so far.

When the day eventually comes that LTE is everywhere, then it's worth worrying more about unlocking the iPhone for me. Because then I'll be free to shop between AT&T, Verizon, or whomever else is on LTE by then. Until then, unlocking an iPhone is mainly for the international traveler. And in many other countries, you can buy your unlocked, unsubsidized iPhone there and bring it back with you. Which sounds like the way to go at this point.

So Apple came out with a ridiculously high-res LCD to put in the iPhone 4, and then they came up with a slick name for it in marketing to make it sound even better.

And the point of this nitpick article is what?

Newsflash: color E-6 film has better resolution than CCDs in digital cameras. That doesn't stop camera companies from comparing their sensors favorably to film, and people don't write articles that are Slashdot link-worthy about it. But it's the iPhone, so it's news.

Let's just put it like this: The new iPhone has a frickin' gorgeous screen. It's way higher-res than anything else for the moment. Apple even came up with a catchy name for it. We good with that?

Already available now with iPhone 3. Funny post, though.

More seriously, Apple lets you write your own wrapper for WebKit if you want on the iPhone OS. A few 3rd parties are doing it now, adding features like ad blocking, side-by-side display, and so on. What Apple won't let you do is create your own rendering engine (Opera does it by rendering web pages on Opera's own servers and just sending down the optimized display) or add plugins to MobileSafari itself (not only will they not allow that, but they also don't have any frameworks to do it).

So if you want to write a WebKit wrapper that handles ad blocking, go for it. But you've already got competition out there.

Plus iAds isn't a framework for inserting ads on websites. It's a framework to allow app developers to distribute ad-supported software, using a pretty transparent revenue model. There's a bunch of third parties (AdMob, the Deck, etc.) providing that right now for developers, and iAds is joining them.

The "intent" of the eBays and Craigslists of the world is supposedly to let people sell things they don't want around (more or less). If I buy something with my income, and pay sales taxes on it, then sell it later on then so be it. If I'm lucky enough to make a little money on the arrangement (like if it turns out to be collectible), that's splendid. But it's not a business. Taxes due at each step of a transaction are a VAT, and we don't do that here.

If I'm buying goods wholesale or as an investment and I'm trying to sell them at a profit as my means of earning a living, though - well, that's taxable in this country and that's just all there is to it.

I run a services business (as an S Corp), and I could probably pay a little less tax if I weaseled appropriately and just buried all my income as "expenses". I don't. The business pays what are real, legitimate expenses (I don't buy an iPod for my kid and call it "computing equipment" or any of that kind of shady stuff). I keep my business and personal money separate and I pay myself and my employees a salary. I could probably make a few more bucks being really aggressive about things, but I know I'm doing the Right Thing and I'm not in line for an eventual trip to Federal Pound Me In The Ass Prison.

In other words, if you're trying to live free of the IRS by doing a cash business on eBay, screw you. Pay up.

True. And you're free to buy any competing product, or nothing at all.

What a lot of folks are missing is that this is not a monopoly. Apple owns the iTunes App Store, and they produce the devices that can use it and approve the content. When you choose to buy an iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch, you are making a consumer statement that you like that model and you accept Apple's system. But you don't have to. Other devices run apps, there are other touchscreen phones, other tablets, and other media players.

For better or worse, Apple made a value judgement that they won't sell software for the iPhone OS that is built with any but Apple Xcode tools. And they won't let you run any software that's not signed. They don't have to justify it to anyone.

Open is good, but not required. And the average consumer couldn't care less. They want apps, nice-looking web pages, and an easy-to-use gadget that looks nice and has a really long battery life.

You're right. They don't need your business. They've got plenty of people who like that model.