FYI, I still don’t have an iPhone yet. Why?

Despite of how much I love the iPhone, I still don’t believe in signing  a two year contract for AT&T/Cingular. I’ve been a customer with Cingular back since when they were PacBell PCS, I have no reason to be locked down to a contract to prove my loyalty to a carrier. Especially since the iPhone isn’t subsidized at all. If signing a contract meant I can save a few hundred dollars, then at least the value proposition is existent. There is absolutely no reason to a sign a contract for a phone that will inevitably be unlocked (and probably be available at the same price).

Service issues aside, the iPhone itself is simply one of the most brilliant consumer product ever made. It is a device that will completely reshape the mobile phone market. The problem is, the other phone manufacturers seem to be thinking, “Wow, the iPhone has a touchscreen, we must all move to touchscreen-only phones as well.” I’m not saying that iPhone’s touchscreen isn’t brilliant, but it isn’t the end-all solution to the woes of the mobile phone design we’ve seen in the past decade.

There are already several manufacturers that’s decided to manufacture their own versions of a touchscreen phone. Some of which has been offering touchscreen capability for years (for example, most of HTC’s Windows Mobile based phones). The problem with these phones isn’t whether or not your buttons are placed on a screen or engraved into a rubber…

This is the video clip from WWDC, so hilarious~

[youtube Bf5qZrFfQFg]

Enjoy!

When EMI announced that they were going to be offering DRM-free tracks on iTMS in May, I was pretty psyched to see that a major label has finally stepped forward and admitted that DRM doesn’t work. However, the month of May passed slowly, and I was somewhat paranoid that EMI would back out on the deal.

Finally, on the last day of May, iTunes has been updated to version 7.2 along with the arrival of “iTunes Plus”. DRM-less, 256kbps AAC files at last. I was excited enough to hop on right away and purchase 2 albums that has been sitting in my Amazon shopping cart for months (in their CD form, no less).

I’ve always been a very discerning audiophile, which only recently finally succumbed to the fact that keeping all of my music in Apple Lossless is really just a waste of hard drive space for a small (although still perceivable) quality gain. I have over thousands of dollars invested in pretty good audio equipments, most of which I no longer listen to on even a monthly basis anymore.

My Super Audio CD player is completely useless, as the format has died a painful and slow death. Now it is nothing more than a glorified CD changer that I never, ever bother to change. I have racks of CD’s that I don’t really want to deal with on my next move, only half of which has been ripped into MP3’s.

Fact of the matter is, there are only so many hours of entertainment…

It’s rare that Microsoft comes up with something truly funny, but this parody is really, actually, LOL-kinda good. Which makes you wonder, if they had this much time to make this parody… where is the ZunePhone?!

[youtube WazA77xcf0A]

A very interesting thing happened at Digg yesterday. There was public posting of a HD-DVD decryption key, which was very promptly deleted by Digg’s admin. It created a public outrage of Digg users feel like they are being censored, and prompted a reaction that resulted in even more posting of the decryption key, and more posting about the deletion and the censorship that Digg was exercising.

The whole fiasco is summarized at TechCrunch, with the users eventually winning out at the end. Obviously, there was no way that Digg can fight back against their entire user community. It’s a demonstration of how powerful the public voice can be, especially given the proper medium.

The question here, is that if a decryption key can be made into such highly publicized information, then what is the boundary for any information to remain private? Traditionally these type of information are always available, but only through backdoor channels, you always had to “know somebody that knew somebody” and digg around (no pun intended) for these ever-elusive hack. Now a HD-DVD decryption key is out in the wild, what’s a software maker’s right to protect say… their serial numbers?

If everyone posted their Windows Vista serial key, for example, what is Microsoft’s right to protect themselves against a possible outbreak of millions of serial keys being made public, and the ensuing windows activation nightmare?

For many Mac users, QuickSilver is one application they can’t do without. It’s one of those amazingly simple application that be can extended to be extremely powerful, but still elegant enough to be used for its most basic function as a program launcher. It’s also one of those software that permanently changes an user’s behavior in how they interact with an operating system forever.

As I was listening to Windows Weekly podcast this morning, I found out that Leo Laporte had gotten a new sponsor (for at least this episode) that makes a software called “Engage”. It offers a bit of the same functionality as QuickSilver for those envious Windows users. Although most likely, Windows users never knew such an approach to program launcher existed, but Mac users dual-booting or virtualizing Windows on their machine is probably incredibly frustrated every time they had to reach into that Start Menu. It is still far less powerful than QuickSilver in terms of extensibility and integration via plugins into other programs, but at least it’s better than the bare minimum Start Menu that Windows comes with.

Engage - the automatic start menu organizer

Apple announced today that Leopard is going to be delayed (via TUAW) until October because of the focused effort in getting iPhone out in time.

Personally, I think the delay doesn’t really mean much. As much as I love to see a new OS from Apple, there’s nothing obviously wrong and needs to be improved in MacOS X now. Unless Leopard has some insane, awesome unknown trick up its sleeve, there aren’t any feature that I have to have now. There certainly weren’t any new features introduced by Vista that makes me say, “I wish MacOS had this…”

Getting iPhone out on-time, and without bugs is probably the most important issue to Apple’s continued success at the moment. A bad iPhone launch could set back years of good will that Apple has built up. It’s funny how much it takes to rebuild a company (dating back to Steve Job’s return and the cute multi-color iMacs), and how easy it is to destroy it and see it crumple (the entire 1990’s for Apple).

Just updated WordPress to the newest version. I have no idea what security flaw the newest version fixes, but any security flaw fix is better than none. If you have not upgraded to WordPress 2.1.3 yet, download it here.

I used a plugin to import Blogger into WordPress by processing the RSS feeds that Blogger creates. Consequently, not everything is perfect. There are a few comments which are broken (no longer links back to the author of the comments), a few posts where the formatting is screwed up, and a few more posts were the links to other sites are no longer functional.

It’s unlikely that I will read through every single one of my post and fix those errors. If anyone cares to sort through them and sees some information they really need (a link to a certain site, for example), please let me know and I’ll attempt to fix them.

Meanwhile, if you are in the same situation, and are looking for way to import Blogger into WordPress, here is the plugin that will do a very decent job:

Import New Blogger to WordPress

…That’s often the mantra of many consumer product companies. It’s not just about finding an unfulfilled need in the marketplace, but creating a new need in the market. As devious as it sounds, the reality is that if you break down “need” to its most simplistic form, our lives would only be able survival on the bare minimum of food and water. For example, television was a “created need”, and for the most part, is it now an ingrained part of our daily lives.

However, for every created need, there are a dozen of “WTF were you thinking?” I think this qualifies as one of them:

iCarta: Stereo Dock for iPod® with Bath Tissue Holder

I realize the product is a bit on the old side. I ran across a picture while browsing TUAW, and couldn’t resist posting it here. Since the product has been released for almost a year now, I’d like to see how many of these they’ve actually sold.