Yep, Hitchhiker's it is. Figured somebody had to represent HG2G fans in this apparent sea of Trekkies.

...a nice, hot cup of tea?

Indeed, the look of the Prada does foreshadow that of the iPhone, but while it LOOKS like an iPhone, it was really just a feature phone with a touch screen (not multitouch) and a few built-in apps. It replaced buttons with on-screen icons, but that was about it: no app store, no full browser, nothing that would make one call it more computer than phone. Basically, a very car-looking buggy. (Meanwhile, Palm's Treo line was still the "smartphone" standard at the time -- all engine, no sleek automotive buggy, though).

Speaking NOT as a fanboy, but as a gadget fan:

In hindsight, it's easy to say the iPhone is just another smartphone, but at the time it was introduced, it was nothing like any phone that came before it. Yes, its individual features -- touch screen, icons, internal antenna, multitouch UI, etc., all existed -- but until the iPhone came along, they had not been put together quite like this before (To use the hackneyed "car" metaphor: wheels, internal combustion engines and axles predate the automobile, but this doesn't mean the car was nothing new when it came along).

Just look at marketing materials from the major carriers in 2006 -- flip phones and candy bars were the typical (practically only) form factors available before the iPhone was revealed in January 2007. It took very little time for all that to change, but when it comes right down to it -- there was nothing akin to the modern smartphone before the iPhone.

It's pretty silly to suggest today's wide array of multi-touch handheld computers have nothing to do with its design and success.

Just because you can't balance a checkbook doesn't mean nobody can. Deficits CAN go away; It's not magic; it's restraint.

I certainly hope we haven't reached a point at which nobody believes problems can be solved without alien intervention.

Unlimited AT&T users still can't use tethering -- even if they'd agree to pay extra for it (They need the not-quite-unlimited-take-it-bitch-take-it plan for that). It will indeed be nice to see what competition does in this space. Both providers have their share of baggage, but at least now there's competition. But what will we do with http://www.thisiswhyiphonesucks.com/ now?

As a developer for both Android and iOS (and a few other mobile) platforms, I can say this is already an issue with Android (from a dev's perspective, at least). While "choice" always sounds good for consumers, the only real choices are usually pre-made by carriers and handset manufacturers, leaving the consumer with little more choice than they had with previous generations of phones (Motorola's RAZR had a pretty good Wheel of Fortune game "app," too).

Although the Android emulator is fine for quick checks, a viable Android product must be tested on a growing number of handsets and other products, making R&D for a new app MUCH more time consuming and costly than that of its iPhone counterpart (Even if you only wanted to support a single device, choosing to support only the latest iPhone 4, for instance, still gives one a much larger target audience than choosing only to support the latest Samsung Galaxy model on a particular carrier).

And supporting a commercial Android app is a larger undertaking too -- more like that of traditional PC development, in which one might expect to deal with a variety of hardware or setting possibilities, but nothing like traditional mobile or game console development -- in which one can expect some level of uniformity among systems.

In other words, iPhone developers can much more easily and affordably offer quality apps at lower prices than their Android counterparts. I'm not saying it's impossible to offer the same quality of user experience across the board, but it is without question a larger undertaking for Android development. And eventually, this WILL affect consumers, too -- either by limiting the size of their pool of quality apps, or by increasing the cost of these same apps.

As a developer on a few mobile platforms, I foresee that Android will be popular for carriers and manufacturers, because it's free. But for consumers, it will, by 2014, be no more useful than any previous handset OS: Your phone WILL be locked into the apps, settings and themes governed by the carrier, and the number of "stellar" apps will dwindle considerably. Unless the carriers subsidize development for their particular handset, there will be very little incentive for major developers to waste time on such a fragmented market.

To risk yet another Bradbury reference today, I highly recommend reading Ray Bradbury's short story, "Night Call, Collect," before implementing a post-mortem bot... Your older self may not think it's as funny as the person you are today.

Anyone who already has the "no contract" service plan gets to keep it... as long as they don't let it lapse. In other words, for everybody who already bought the 3G, expecting to pick up a month or two of service when and if they needed it... they need to buy in NOW, and keep buying in each month, whether they need it or not... in order to "enjoy" the unlimited data plan hyped to them in the first place. In effect, the "contract" is now perpetual... and not what ANYBODY signed up for. So yeah, that's bait and switch. On a personal note, I finally bit the bullet and ordered a 3G iPad yesterday... and canceled it this morning in favor of the WIFI model. Not another F#@%&ing dime to AT&T.

Dear god, these two need to shut the hell up about each other already. Neither is as open as it claims itself to be, and neither is as bad as the other claims it to be. They both make a few good things, but they've becoming the annoying couple that ruins parties by constantly sniping at each other.

As a developer, I hardly "fear (the landlord's) anger." In fact, I find it rather liberating to develop the apps I want without worrying about what hardware and/or drivers the user has installed, and without worrying about how to market and collect payment for the same apps. Yes indeed, the iPhone is a miserable development experience -- which must be why it has so many developers playing in its garden. Is it perfect? Nope. Is it a streamlined development and distribution system? Absolutely.

Holy crap... people are arguing with this. I guess it's true: some brothers wanna play that "hard" role.

The other day I downloaded a contact manager to my iphone, and was shocked and dismayed to realize it had access to all my contacts. Something tells me the personal finance apps I sometimes used might actually have access to some of my financial data! In other words... what a dumb presentation. Of course trusted applications running on a computer will have access to some of the data on that same computer. Otherwise, what's the point? Would saving all this data on your desktop be any safer? How can I live in a world where computers can do things?!!

Every time I've set up new cable service, I try the local carrier's DVR flavor... and so far, I have always gone back to TiVo. TiVo actually DOES have a nice product with several innovative features. Protecting one's patent does NOT make one a troll: it makes one a patent holder. The original poster seems to think all patents should be abolished (which would kinda suck for encouraging some innovations).