Gee, I'm glad they don't let modesty stand in the way of truth.

maybe you should consider that there might be a well-thought-out reason why they do it. Quite simply, if they let every third-party app have free access to the CPU, the battery would last about 10 minutes. The reason that lots of people are bitching about the battery life on the Pre: multitasking. There's a technical trade-off between CPU load and battery life. Considering that battery life for a mobile phone is an important consideration, I think Apple made the right decision to limit CPU access. Sure, you could build a bigger iPhone that had a replaceable battery and carry a bag of batteries around with you, but the compactness of the iPhone appeals to a lot of people. Aside from the technical considerations, the functionality of Latitude, which allows the whole world to know where you are, strikes me as creepy.

like Apple TV is Steve Jobs'.

Isn't this photo thing nothing more than replacing a simple solution (GPS) with an extremely complicated one??? Way to go, MR! Your string of impractical duds continues.

When I have a problem with an Apple iphone, the buck stops with Apple (or, occasionally, with AT&T). But open the thing up so that there are hundreds of versions of hardware and imagine the fun it would be to resolve a problem with the product. This is precisely what happens with Windows Mobile or Windows in general. The finger pointing starts between hardware and software, and getting a problem resolved is a true pain in the ass. Wait until Microsoft opens their retail stores and the "Genius Bar" personnel get a taste of resolving problems with Microsoft software on thousands of different hardware variations! What fun that's gonna be! Oh, yeah!!!!!

Guess the lessons learned in the good ol' mainframe/dumb terminal days still apply, eh?: The network is fallible, and when the network croaks, you're royally forked.