An average user has two things in their pockets: a phone, and a wallet. There's been a lot of effort to put the wallet into the phone, but metro cards, door keys, cash, business cards, and so many other things just fit better in a wallet. The specs that really matter to non-power users are physical size and battery life. As a power user, I can't wait until 512GB capacity and Disk Mode so I can boot my laptop from my phone, but I think I'm in the minority. Peter

Apple charged Samsung $1 bn in court. Each A6 processor costs $17.50. A 20% price increase is $3.50. Samsung supply Apple 200 million processors per year. Samsung have a contract to keep supplying Apple until 2014 = 2 years. 3.5 * 200 * 2 = $1.4 bn. And now Samsung has the money to pay off the lawyers. "Don't bite the hand that feeds" Peter

With high-resolution imagery? A group of college students already mapped North Korea's infrastructure using only existing satellite photos. http://www.nkeconwatch.com/north-korea-uncovered-google-earth/

As a contract job for Galileo (the main offline map for iOS, http://galileo-app.com/ I wrote a parser for the OpenStreetMap data. Those "X-million data points" fill 800 MB in txt.bz2 format, or 8 GB in plain text. That's why they're not provided by default. Anybody interested in parsing the 25 GB OSM planet database can contact me; I'd be happy to help. There are a few awk scripts I wrote that made it quite straightforward, and fast. You can then use BashServer (Cydia) and lighttpd on the phone, with bookmarks added to your home screen, to make an "app". The icon loads a local webpage (127.0.0.1/Scripts/poi.html), which runs Javascript to give a dialog "Enter search terms". Clicking OK triggers BashServer to run the associated shell script to generate a KML with the search results. The script then opens tells iFile to open the KML, which gives a popup asking which application to open it with. Choosing Galileo launches the "Import KML" feature, and your search results are in your offline map! Simple as that ;-).

That's fine; just forward your email to SMS, and it works the same way. Although you only get the first 160 characters, it is instant, and doesn't require 3G. If you can't figure out how to set up Email-SMS forwarding, for free, with no incoming or outgoing text message charges... email me.

Ok, so I didn't actually have my own email account until I was 8 years old, via AOL dialup. However, I have used the World Wide Web, on a GUI-based laptop computer, for all of my life (since 1989). And I think I might be the oldest person to claim that. Read my blog at: http://goo.gl/i7Kw1

Thanks to seeing this on the news, I've written an AppleScript called iPhone Geotag. It uses the location data to tag Places for your pictures in iPhoto. Brings a happy ending to this scandal, eh? Check it out on: http://goo.gl/OQzfB

Thanks to seeing this on the news, I've written an AppleScript called iPhone Geotag. It uses the location data to tag Places for your pictures in iPhoto. Brings a happy ending to this scandal, eh? Check it out on: http://goo.gl/OQzfB