Also, this is the first year that blu ray players have started to drop in price to the point where most people can afford them. A *lot* of people I know have commented on how players are cheap enough to consider now. This holiday season we're going to see a lot of households get the ability to play blu ray discs

More than a day of battery life?

Looking at app world now, it looks like there's at least a few thousand on there. I was able to download a network file manager, VNC client, and SSH client, all of which I use pretty much daily. Plus good old Shazam.

I get it, you have so far installed a dozen flashlight applications, some tetris clones, and a winnie-the-pooh theme. But there's more out there. Just open up the application and take a look.

That's too bad. Otherwise this would have been a serious contender for my next media box.

It seems there's no "do-it-all" media center on the market. Games, Blu-Ray, XBMC. Pick any two. I'm waiting for someone to get XBMC going on a PS3. When that happens, I will have chosen my corner in this fight.

Interesting. I installed DD-WRT on my wrt54g and I noticed a dramatic speed increase. Running vendor's firmware, samba transfers in my house over the wifi would cap out at about 1.3 megs/sec. After changing only the router firmware, I can often pull in 2.2 megs/sec. I noticed similar speedups with my cable connection.

For sure they are. I went through University around the turn of the century, and the lecture method of choice were pdfs with lecture slides. Put up the slides, talk about them, let students download the pdf. Unfortunately, this was also used as a method of teaching for professors whose English skills weren't up to par. I recall one prof who spent most of the lecture pointing at equations on the projector. The upside of this method is that you do get to download the slides, and for cases like I just mentioned, you can more or less teach yourself the content.

I'd have to agree. It was great when I was younger, but since then my tastes have expanded somewhat.

I got into it about the same time, maybe junior high. I was pretty much riveted until the end of book 7 or 8. Then it got *really old* *really fast*. However, I was so smitten with the series back when I was a teen that I made a solemn promise to myself that I would finish the series, no matter what. And here we are, with me approaching 30, and damnit I am still determined to finish this, one way or another. I read book 11 (is that the latest? I don't even care) recently and somehow managed to plod through it. I'll finish the series, but only out of pure determination.

"Obviously the iPhone isn't as hot to non-geeks as you think, as almost half the smartphone buyers still pick a Nokia."

That's true. I remember talking to a couple one time, and the man (stocky, pudgy, eccentric, classic geek type) had just bought his fiancee (relatively normal, had a job in HR or something like that) an iPhone. She didn't seem to getting the emphasis he was putting on this phone.

Her: "I just got a new phone"
Him: "WHAT? Not just ANY phone! It's an iPhone!!!"
Her: "Uhhh....yeah I guess so. It doesn't have any buttons, if that's what you mean."

Most people don't give nearly the kind of a shit that people on tech forums give about smart phones.

I really don't understand this. Just about every iPhone user on the web loves to shout to the heavens about how fantastic the browser is. What makes it so great? Technically it's the most capable browser on a mobile device, but not by very much. Take a look at this http://www.quirksmode.org/webkit.html . Iris browser and Bolt browser both fare very well, but nobody ever talks about them like they do with Safari. I tried Opera Mini 5 the other day and I was extremely impressed. It basically gave me web pages like my desktop does. Still, it gets no love. I have one of the newest blackberries, and its browser gets me by just fine. I make it tell web pages that it's a firefox browser, and I get full versions of pages like I would at a PC. I use it at least a half a dozen times a day, and have no real complaints about it (except maybe the lack of tabbed browsing but that's not a big deal for me). Yet every iPhone user loves to get smug about how they have Safari. Every time I've asked someone for clarification, they either ignore me or they say something to the effect of "oh you wouldn't understand, you don't use an iPhone". So I figure I'll try my luck and ask again.

What makes the iPhone's browser that noteworthy? Is it that great in other ways? Or is this just the users being vocal again?

I was under the impression that there were *many* more apps available for Blackberry than Android.

Are you talking about how on a Mac, ProgramName->Preferences is always the prefs dialog? In Windows it's always Tools->Options. Getting the program version on a mac is ProgramName->About, Windows is Help->About.

I'd really be interested in hearing some examples of how Macs are more usable. Everyone loves to sound off about how easy it is to use their Mac/iPhone/whatever compared to everything else out there, but I've found neither one any more usable than any of my other devices or computers. In a lot of cases, Apple's products are actually pretty damn annoying to use compared to the competition. I have yet to hear any good evidence to back up this claim of alleged "usability". It seems to come from people who just prefer Apple. That's fine, but please don't pass off preference as fact.

Once you're ssh'd in, wouldn't you have those CLI tools available?

With the exception of the CLI tools, sounds like you're looking for one of the new blackberries. I use mine to ssh into my servers all the time, and it does pretty much everything else on your list. I've even done some basic vim over ssh, although at that point it's worth it to switch to a laptop.

It's news when something is invented that runs on a smart phone. And then it's news all over again when Apple copies it. I'll never understand that.

Funny, that. Whenever I rip a CD to MP3 I spend some time *adding* art and crap like that (genre, year, etc...) so it feels more like an album than just a file. Everyone sees the world through different eyes I suppose.

But yes you're right, I've been getting by with MP3 just fine for quite some time now. For those who *really* want to go all out and get the liner notes, lyrics, front and back cover artwork, etc, a collection of properly named jpegs and a music player that knows what it's doing will fill that need nicely. However, a new dominant format ensures that you will yet again have to purchase the White Album, which translates to money in the pockets of the recording companies. Is it any wonder they have their best eggheads on the job?

Most people won't do it though. Sure your average college kid or whatever has no problem downloading an app to jailbreak the phone, but joe average on the street doesn't tend to flock towards anything involving firmware modification. They buy a phone, they use the phone, and that's all they do.