The Mobile Ping

In case you haven’t been paying attention, Iran just had it’s elections, and the Iranians are pissed. The defending president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, just “won by a landslide”. This statement was made, however, after counting paper ballots for just over 4 hours. The riots are enormous, as you can imagine. Now I don’t want to go into politics on this site, but what is happening in Iran bears mention on a site that focuses on the mobile lifestyle.

In Iran, sms messages and websites are being monitord and blocked by the government, presumably to prevent the views of the opposition from spreading. But they have found how to beat a technically ignorant administration. From their cell phones, Iranians they are posting videos of the protests to YouTube, and Tweeting news, opinions and photos to Twitter. The word will always get out when you care enough, and are smart enough to do it.

Good luck to you, friends in Iran. I salute you.

See the Source

According to palmwebos.org the CEO of Logicomm leaked the release date of the Palm Pre for April 30th. Most of their research looks sound, and if you go to his Twitter feed you can see that the updates have been locked.

This could have been an imposter Twitter account trying to spread some hotly anticipated information. However, based on the locked Twitter account it seems more and more likely that this is possibly legit and Palm asked them to take it down before it spread too far. The fact that I’m writing this means they obviously didn’t get there quite in time.

I for one am incredibly excited if this date ends up being true. I know Scott and I will be at our local Sprint store waiting to get some sweet Pre action.

It was just yesterday that I made a comment to a couple of friends that I thought it was shady that AT&T required a service contract for the iPhone no matter what. The legality of this seems pretty gray. Imagine having to sign a 2 year commitment with Comcast to buy a television? I sign a 2 year contract with a television provider for discounted prices on service, but the option to pay more and cancel my TV in 6 months time is there.

Wireless service is the same price whether you are in contract or out, and they excuse this by taking 150-200 dollars of the price of the phone. This model doesn’t bother me. What does bother me is selling a phone that you can’t choose to pay extra for and cancel your wireless 1 year later.

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In a word, predictable.

The iPhone finally has most of the things it’s competitors have had for years and most iPhone users have been begging for. To me, this new update is not entirely exciting. It provides some nice additions, but it isn’t necessarily a game changer when comparing the iPhone to other, more “true” smartphones. Considering that iPhone has a huge lead in the market, there’s probably not much incentive for Apple to innovate. Rather, they’re probably better off combating the small issues that deter some people from getting the phone (MMS, copy and paste being the major culprits). Having Apple call 3.0 an innovation that makes the Palm Pre obsolete before it’s inception is a ridiculous claim. The Palm Pre is still the most exciting device coming to the market, 3.0 should be called iPhoneOS 2.5, at least for the consumer. For the most part the features that they added don’t change the way you look at the iPhone the way 2.0 did. I assume this will be a general consensus among the community, and unfortunately this train of thought will probably end up underplaying the huge improvements to the SDK that they have made.

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I came off as fairly unimpressed yesterday. While today I still feel underwhelmed, I wanted to go through Apple’s announcement section by section with my thoughts.

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A liveblog based on liveblogs across other blogs.

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