Clearly, Steve Jobs is pissed. I would be, too. You pour thousands of hours collectively into a project like this and you want people to just use the damned thing, enjoy it, and have it change their lives on some level. That the media has churned up such a storm over this issue has got to be not-a-little-bit frustrating.

Apple’s media materials are always top notch, and what they produced highlighting the antenna design process at Apple, the tour of the inner sanctum of antenna design on campus, meet the standard. They included videos on apple.com and in the conference demonstrating the exact same signal loss on previous generation iPhones, along with phones from Nokia, Blackberry, HTC, and Samsung. Hold the phone in just the right way, signal drops. In fact, as Josh pointed out in the linked piece over at Apple Insider,

In June, Nokia’s official blog poked fun at the iPhone 4 “death grip” issue. The post included a variety of pictures showing a range of grips, encouraging consumers to feel free to hold their Nokia device any way they like without suffering any signal loss.

Users of the site then posted links to videos showing signal loss on several of Nokia’s handsets, as well as instructions from a Nokia manual warning users “to avoid touching the antenna area” and that “contact with antennas affects the communication quality.”

I waxed sarcastically on Twitter that Verizon’s cheeky attitude toward this antenna thing would bite them in the ass. I’m bummed the prediction isn’t wholly accurate in that I didn’t use Nokia as my case point. That would have made me far more prescient. At least someone looks foolish here. It’s never really smart to publish material dragging your competitors through the mud on untested, unconfirmed reports.

Which is why I’m on the fence about Apple doing just that in this case, dragging these other manufacturers into the ring with them on this issue.

As uncharacteristic as it is, I’m not sure they had another choice. This is a PR disaster. It’s a disaster specifically because it’s a nominally interesting story that has been spun out of Apple’s tight control, not because there is any more or less scandal to it. Their response strategy of choice is clearly to soften by deflection — get us all thinking about these other guys so we’re not so focused on the iPhone 4 soft spot.

Apple’s biggest issue in this mess is completely self-created, and it’s not that they created a phone that has a major antenna flaw (we know there’s a flaw, I’m just saying that’s not the biggest problem here). It’s that Steve Jobs stood on stage for the iPhone announcement and choose to point out that the antenna design is legendary, revolutionary, incredible, and then showed the world exactly where the antenna is. The fact that the world media has been so focused on the antenna is a problem of Apple’s own making. Given the tone and timbre of the press conference, it’s clear that Apple knows this. Their own duct tape solution is to give out the bumpers for free. It’s payola for those who bought the phone, love the phone, and want to keep the phone in spite of their problems with connectivity.

The other manufacturers have come out pissed. Rightfully so, but it sure is hard to defend indignation in the face of video evidence. Apple knows this. So does Nokia, RIM, Samsung. Best case result of Antennagate is that we all get the phone of our dreams because of a renewed focus on better, smarter, clearer antennas from all these manufacturers. At least we know from their responses so far that the intent may be there to do it, if only because Apple just made the target in Cupertino that much bigger.

In TechCrunch’s follow up, Arrington makes an ironically apt comparison. Job’s coming on stage to give all this data of the reality of the ecosystem, that 30-day returns at AT&T is about 1.7% — down from 6% for the iPhone 3GS, is akin to Facebook execs coming out to talk about how people really aren’t jumping off the service as a result of Facebook Privacygate 2009-10. But for all those affected — punditry, gadget hounds, privacy advocates, the works — those affected are not likely to change their opinions based on reported data from the company. People who feel betrayed by Facebook will not come back to the service as a result of a press conference. And folks like Arrington will continue to be as venomous as ever of the iPhone.

Anandtech has been leading the charge with data-driven coverage of this whole mess. After the iPhone iOS 4.0.1 update which mixed up all the bar data display across iPhones, they posted some terrific graphs which compare the dBm mapping to bars displayed to cover just what has changed on the phone and how it will help to convey more clearly what level of coverage you might be able to expect in a certain area.

So then, as long as Apple is trotting out the dog and pony show about their antenna labs, where was this data from them? If Anandtech is able to produce such terrific analysis as an external party, it seems only natural to have even greater expectations of Apple. Just because the Blackberry or Nokia drops two bars has no effective comparison to the iPhone dropping two bars without those dBm comparables — they’re just bars, tiny pixels that (as far as I understand it) have little relation to actual connectivity at all. On TWiT 255, Jerry Pournelle and Spencer Webb remind us that on digital phones, bars mean little; that a more effective indicator would be a lightbulb. If it’s on, you have signal. If it’s off, you don’t.

[UPDATE: Dammit. Gruber and Aaron Swartz beat me to this little bit of wisdom. I hate being late to the party.]

I got my iPhone 4 the day before it launched. I’ve dropped one call. I was talking to my dad, and driving through an area at the top of Sylvan Hill on highway 26 in Portland. With my iPhone 3Gs, I’d drop calls there every single day. With the iPhone 4, I’ve dropped only one, in spite of regular use in that area. Other than that, the phone has absolutely out-performed all my previous iPhones. I have a bumper, but I rarely use it. Yes, I’ll likely go get the refund Apple is offering for it, just cause, you know, 30 bucks.

Still, my impression here is not that Apple has perpetrated some kind of crime on consumers. I really do believe that Apple is learning as they go along based on data they’re collecting in real time. This is a monster of their own creation and is more a result of the death grip they have on their own communications, testing, and public relations policies than anything else. It’s a trade-off, and if you’re going to build policy around secrecy, this is the no-win scenario you have to be willing to confront. Kobayashi Maru, indeed.

Even the rumor of a CDMA phone in 2010 is going to piss people off. Q4 isn’t that far away, and with all the fervor over iPhone 4 sales this week — and all those freshly-minted 2-year AT&T contracts — that there’s even a remote chance for a Verizon CDMA iPhone on the heels of launch will spark that good, old fashioned spirit of entitlement all over again. Get ready to let yourselves feel all wonky and let down by the man, people.

Still, this is a bit of old news. Apple’s put an awful lot of weight behind GSM and to go to Verizon with essentially a custom phone seems oddly uncharacteristic of their behavior in the market.

There’s that, plus DigiTimes’ loose relationship with accuracy, too.

Pegatron will also start shipping a CDMA version of the iPhone 4 to Apple in the fourth quarter and is currently using its plants in Shanghai, China to produce the products, the sources noted.

From Jobs missive on Flash today:

Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

Of course, Adobe is going to make a great product for authoring in HTML5 and so on, because a great-big-non-trivial-part-of-the-business exists to do that. But by saying this out loud, Jobs just guaranteed that Adobe will be resentful the whole time.

It’s been over two weeks that the iPad has been on the market in the US. I’m writing this post on the iPad, in fact, in a moving car on the way to Canyonville, Oregon for a lovely weekend at the casino with the wife and family. Cause, nothing says ‘vacation’ like the Seven Feathers for a family that doesn’t gamble or drink much.

As a strange aside, take a look at the Seven Feathers on Google maps; there is a crazy proximity to the cemetery right at the edge of the parking lot. I’m not much into the occult, but I saw Poltergeist.

I have read what I have to imagine now amounts to all of the iPad reviews. I’ve read the early ones calling the iPad a silly also-ran in a soon to be saturated market. I’ve read the reviews calling the thing an oversized iPod touch. I’ve read the ones calling it a game-changer, a magical tool that will change the way we live, raise our children, tame lions, and ride bikes. As much as I’ve been longing to get a few words out on the device, I didn’t feel like I would be able to add much to the discussion without actually — you know — using it for a while. So, here we are. Two weeks in and I think, now, I have something to say.

The Hardware

I’m on the record as being a fanboy for Apple stuff. I’ve tried to shake that, but once I did the commercial, I really cemented the door closed on that whole objectivity thing. Whatever. The truth is that the unboxing experience for Apple hardware is next to godliness. You may be able to tell right now where the rest of this is going.

Apart from the Spartan and practical packaging, the device itself exudes something of a halo when you pull the lid from the box. That may be from the incredible shine of the perfect screen. Don’t worry. That shine is soiled mere seconds later, just after you lay a single finger upon it, when the smudge magnet is activated. If you’re looking to maintain that perfect shine, you’ll be wiping it with a soft cloth three minutes for every one minute that you are actually computing with it.

Its heavier than you expect at 1.5 pounds. I’m a former kindle user and the one of the things that was decidedly not annoying about the kindle hardware experience was the weight of the device. I got used the featherweight feel of the thing. Compare to the kindle, the iPad is a cinderblock.

What comes with that weight, though, is a distinct feeling of significance. This device is made solid, battle-ready. The block aluminum housing is smooth, baby’s bottom smooth. And, much like a baby, you wouldn’t want to hold this thing up high and wave it around a bunch, as it might just slip right through your fingers. This, I have to imagine, is a welcomed coincidence for third party case makers.

The thing is, the weight and texture of this thing feels damned good to hold. After about a half hour of constant use, I found myself unable to let it go, unnaturally stroking the back of it with my fingertips as I tap away with the other hand. This combination of large screen, texture, weight, and temperature is simply heaven for tactile people like me. And, after the first day or so of getting used to the weight, muscle memory has kicked in and it’s no longer a surprise just how heavy it is when I pick it up.

Speaking of things that are unnatural, this screen is amazing. As has been widely reported, those that have touched iPad tend to be converts, and I found the same true for me. There’s no give to it — the large capacitive glass is solid as stone and wildly responsive to each touch, far more so than the iPhone, in my experience so far. I’ve owned three iPhones so far, and each of them has had some sort of manufacturing weirdness at the point where the glass meets the body. Not so with the iPad; the seam is level, smooth and tight all the way around the face of the device.

Battery life is a stunner. I consider myself a heavy user, and I’ve been working hard to test the limits of this thing, and now, after two days of normal use, including writing several long documents (this entire series included) I’m only just now at 40%. Movies. TV. Podcasts. Office work. Through it all, it doesn’t get hot, and it powers right on through.

It’s a joy to touch, so be it. But that’s not the real story of iPad. The real story of ipad is in the things that you can do with it.

The Software

I carry (carried) a Moleskine notebook with me everywhere. I prefer the middle size, with the grid rule paper. I use it for notes and sketches at meetings, free-writing, brainstorming and mapping, and for letting my kids bathe the thing in stickers.

When I first saw iPad, long before actually touching iPad, I knew I wanted to use it to replace my Moleskine notebook.

Out of the box, that’s impossible. Which is a shame, since the form factor to me makes it such a natural content creation device. The Apple-included apps really are rejiggered iPhone and iPod touch apps. They look great on the big screen of iPad, but the don’t really add much new to the experience that changes the way you’re going to use a computer forever when it comes to creating. In fact, in some cases, they went ahead and screwed — or royally screwed — the way you expect things to work.

Things that are interesting

No doubt, Safari on iPad is a killer app. Browsing with your fingers is every bit the intimate experience that you never knew you wanted to have with the internet. You can think of that any way you need to. The thing is, it’s just plum different, and this different is good. I find what I’m looking for faster on the iPad than my laptop, and thanks I think to the flat form factor, I’m more engaged in the research on it. The modal nature of the iPhone OS is such that I find myself more focused and attentive to whatever it is I’m looking for online.

Mail is a treat. With Mail, this thing has actually made me more productive when I’m working on my laptop; I leave my email closed on the computer, and pick up my iPad to check mail when I head to lunch or coffee. I’ll talk about the keyboard in more detail later, but suffice it to say that my typing speed on this thing is such that I can get through even longer responses quickly and with no pain. The user experience eye candy in mail actually adds to the mail experience, supporting user input rather than just showing it off. In landscape mode, seeing all your mail in the left column, message in the right, is perfect for quick filing. But in portrait mode, the message column disappears and you’re brought into just one message at a time. It’s funny, what happens next: you feel like you’re reading each message on paper. It’s the experience you get when you used to print those super important emails so you’d have them for reference later, or just wanted to make sure someone else noted that you knew an email was important enough to print and pose on the corner of your desk, all politicky and full of snark.

Maps. Huge. Maps on the iPad is the app that you’re going to use out of the box to show your friends just how cool the iPad is. Pinching and zooming in the maps app is as close to the Minority Report experience as you can get on the device. It’s totally intuitive, an extension of your brain, and thoroughly exercises the full definition of the Google imagery. In street view, on this big iPad screen, you can almost make out my license plate numbers. It’s that good.

Things that are not as great as we were led to believe

There is a lot right with the iPad. This is stuff that is just not right enough that I don’t find myself giving it much thought.

• Calendar. Contacts. Notes. Functionally uninspired. None of these apps bring anything new to the table, and in fact regress not a little bit. Now, they look more like paper, but they don’t bring me the feel of paper, or the ability to interact with the elements on the page like paper. In notes, for example, why can’t I type something, then draw something on the page right next to the note? Do Apple engineers ever draw?
• Photos. It’s ok. If you have nice photos, you can really show off the device. If you don’t, you’ll have plenty of fun swiping and pinching your way through your images, but otherwise, the photos app didn’t add much over the iPhone version of the same.
• Camera. Oh. Wait. There’s no damned camera. As a photographer, I wish this thing had a camera, what with all the really wonderful apps for working with images that exist on is platform. The omission of a camera adds steps to the photo process that are just troublesome enough that I don’t find myself actually using photos much on this thing.

Things that are screwed, royally screwed, or buggered

Some things on the iPad, just a few of them, have to be keeping some engineers up all night.

Handling files. Hands down the most un-Apple design I have ever experienced. It’s truly as if some engineer sat down and deliberately designed a system for handling files that would cause user pain, frustration, and confusion. It’s a fundamental step backwards that comes as a weird by-product of the Finder-free modal interface.

Here’s the current situation, for those who haven’t seen it. And to get the real feeling for it all, you have to put yourselves in this mental space: with Pages for word processing, Keynote for presentations, Numbers for spreadsheets, each one an able tool for office documents, you feel like you are being encouraged by Apple to use this thing as an Actual Computer. That’s the scenario. One you should be comfortable with because, you know, you’ve been encouraged to work with office-type apps for the better part of three decades.

So you plug in the iPad, install the appropriate apps and think to yourself, “Ok, so now I want to work on this thing, this document thing. How do I ever communicate with the iPad that I want to get this document thing into it?”

(I honestly don’t think they got around to asking that question during iPad development. There is simply no way that people who are that smart, who turn out such incredible products and software, could come up with the following boat anchor.)

Open iTunes. Sync iPad. Click on iPad in the devices list in iTunes. Click on apps tab. Scroll down to obscurely hidden document well, which includes a list of apps that are currently installed on the iPad which can handle documents. Pages will be listed here. Click on Pages, then click the add button, or find your document and drag it into the document well. The iPad will sync instantly. So, I guess, there’s that.

Now, it’s bad enough that there are so many steps involved here. What’s worse is this: when you add a document to the iPad, you’re creating a version of it. Yes, your original will still exist on your computer. So if you go work on it on your iPad, then put it back on your computer, you have to make sure you delete and replace that original file with the new version. Lest we forget that we live in an era when the great innovations include Google Docs, Dropbox, Box.net, and so many other cloud based collaboration tools. That this tool and the associated apps omit the ability to sync, work, and save in the cloud is more than just annoying. Even Apple’s own iWork.com service creates a new version, though you can tell it really wants to be able to do so much more. Thankfully, many of the above services are working hard to fill in this obvious short-coming.

And on that last point, we get to the real promise of the iPad, something Apple has been curating and cultivating and conditioning all of us to accept: the third party apps.

The Apps

The first application that I paid for and used on my iPad was iMockups. It’s a rapid wire-framing tool used to sketch out website designs very quickly and send them off to clients. When I saw the demo video, three days prior to actually owning the iPad, I knew this one would be in my arsenal. I do too many of these things each week not to see if this would be that first great thing on the new device.

Within two minutes, I’d sent my first wireframe to a client for review. Two minutes.

I do a lot of things pretty fast on the computer. I like to think I have a pretty good connection to it and can turn out good work on deadline, more often than not. But this was a different experience — pinching, squeezing and drawing my way to a wireframe provided a whole new way to engage with what I was doing. It was a fast, almost direct connection between what was in my head and what I wanted on the screen.

It’s a bizarre experience, to be sure. And not every app delivers on this promise of direct connection to your cerebral cortex.

For example, I mentioned earlier that I was looking to recreate the experience I have with my Moleskine notebook. I wanted a simple application that would allow me to draw and type, ideally some sort of handwriting capture (not recognition, mind you, just capture) and a quick way to take those notes and pipe them back onto my Mac for processing and archive.

You would think that I was asking for a cure for cancer. And, actually, the results are about the same for both: there is great promise, but no option that really nails the problem on all fronts, and in the end are disappointing.

I’ve tried a dozen or so of the journaling applications in the App Store now and the closest I’ve found is Ghostwriter for iPad. It has drawing, and within a few taps, handwriting capture. It offers multiple notebooks to keep content organized. The handwriting capture is off-the-charts clever; when you activate a pen tool, a large magnifier pops up in which you write with the tip of your finger, which is copied at a more reasonable size where your cursor sits on the page. It also crashes a lot. A lot, a lot. And it typically crashes just after you’ve written a full page of notes, at which point, you want nothing more than to take an iPad in the face, which would be far less pain than the pain of losing all that work. Or at least, that was my experience.

Ghostwriter is a great example of an app that is testing the bounds of what the iPad interaction mechanic is capable of. And for that, some early bugginess is certainly forgivable — that the developer had this app in the store on opening day without having tested it on an actual functioning iPad is laudable. All the day-one developers deserve great respect for turning out generally terrific software without a lot of time and tools needed to do so properly.

Not all apps have been so buggy on day one. Another hole to fill for me early on was Google Reader. While Google did an admirable job updating the mobile interface for Gmail for large screen mobile devices like the iPad, they haven’t gotten around to updating the Google Reader web interface. While I use Google Reader on the web when I’m on my Mac, the iPad called for an app.

I tried Early Edition first. Very clever interface, but slow slow slow in as a version one, and no sync with Reader, though word from the developer is that Reader sync is coming very soon. For now, no dice.

Next was FeeddlerRSS. Syncs with Google Reader, but the way it spawns in-app browser windows made navigation tough for me to wrap my head around. It is a solid app, to be sure, just not for me.

I finally landed on NetNewsWire. At $9.99, it was the most expensive of the lot, but worth every penny. Excellent sync with Reader, no crashes, and an intuitive interface that had me browsing, staring and sharing stories in no time. It’s a simple app that brings fantastic utility to reading RSS feeds, and having them on the iPad rejuvenates the whole concept of RSS as a tool for anyone who needs to engage in a lot of content quickly.

And such is the nature of the app ecosystem right now. Name a tool you’d like to use, and there will be three apps that fit the bill. One of them that nails it, and two others that just don’t. Unfortunately, App Store pricing is a bit of a wild west. Rather than the quick race to the basement that we’re seeing in the iPhone side of the house, iPad apps are more expensive, so the cost of casual exploration starts to smart after not too long.

We’re already seeing the surge of the next wave of iPad apps hitting the store that illustrates the pace of evolution taking place now that developers have devices to use, test, and play with. So far, it’s promising, since without the apps, this device has no future.

And that really is the bottom line. The future of the iPad is in the hands of the developers, and Apple knows it. After using the device for a while, you get the feeling that Apple’s apps are proofs of concept for what is possible, tip-toeing along the line that separates cleverness from utility, waiting for developers to unleash the real innovation. The iPad is not a device. It’s a platform. It’s a platform with enormous promise, but it’s still a platform.

The Verdict

No way. I was taught better than that. No, I think everyone should have a shot with this thing, to be sure. And now, just a few weeks in, I think I can safely say that it’s right for me — that it’s finding its place in my gear ecosystem, and that is helping me be more productive, more quickly. But there is clearly a lot to learn, a lot to create out there. My only message in this first post is a two-parter. For those who don’t like Apple, don’t want this product to succeed because you think the iPhone has gone too far, whatever: you people need to wait for the Courier. It’ll be perfect for you. If it ships.

For everyone else: I don’t know how this will turn out yet, but Apple has changed the world again. They’ve done it because with iPad they’ve gotten the right people at the right companies thinking. They’ve done it because they’ve inspired a new horserace around glass. They’ve done it because in the last three years they’ve conditioned us to a new world of tapping, and in doing so have changed the way you will compute for the next 100 years.

They’ve done it because for the first time in 25 years, Apple has mainstreamed a technology that fundamentally changes the physicality of our interaction with data. Your next computer might still have a keyboard, but it’ll seem antiquated next to what you can do by simply reaching out and giving it a little tap.

Yeah, I didn’t get bit by this myself, but it’s a big deal. It amounts to a smack on the wrists for Apple UX people who didn’t button this issue up tight pre-launch, but it’s something that we should all remember. From RWW:

Generally speaking, RTFM is not enough. Thinking through user experience, including testing by people outside the team, is mandatory.

I don’t have my iPad yet so I’m doing my very best to reserve judgement on just how it’s going to change things. But based on iFixit’s teardown, I think I can safely say that there is an equal amount of engineering inside this thing as there is pure art.

This is sort of big news. See, currently, in the United States, if you want a cell phone, you start at a wireless provider, like AT&T or Verizon Wireless or T-Mobile, and you pick out a phone that works for you. That phone will be locked to that provider, meaning that the wireless company will be subsidizing the cost of the phone to you, making it a cheaper purchase, in exchange for your 1 or 2-year commitment to wireless service.

This model was shaken with the release of Apple’s iPhone two years ago, which was offered in partnership with AT&T, but was initially sold unsubsidized — meaning that early adopters paid the full price for the phone, $599 for the high end model back then — and then paid for service with AT&T on top of it. Today, the iPhone is like most other phones, subsidized through AT&T to bring the price down for end users in exchange for the 2-year commitment on service.

When Google launched their Android operating system for handhelds, they did it with the promise that they were not in the hardware business, that they were in the OS business to make phones better across the board. From Android chief Andy Rubin, “‘We’re not making hardware,’ Rubin said. ‘We’re enabling other people to build hardware.’”

Technically, that may still be true. What came out of Mountain View this weekend is a report that Google has handed out a new handset dubbed the “Nexus One” to employees at the Google holiday party. It runs the latest unreleased version of the Android operating system and is manufactured by HTC, long-time manufacturing partner to big wireless. Note, it’s not manufactured by Google.

Subtle. Very subtle.

What Google said publicly is this:

We recently came up with the concept of a mobile lab, which is a device that combines innovative hardware from a partner with software that runs on Android to experiment with new mobile features and capabilities, and we shared this device with Google employees across the globe. This means they get to test out a new technology and help improve it.

But reporters being who they are, we now know the news seems to be somewhat different. We’re hearing that this new phone will hit the market in January of 2010, on the heels of Verizon’s foray into the Android smartphone market with the Droid, and that the phone would be unlocked for a GSM network. That means customers would be able to choose their wireless provider, compatible with AT&T and T-Mobile in the US. Unfortunately for Verizon, early pics of the new Google phone seem to indicate that it is much better looking, and there appears to be no battery door to fall off. Tumultuous times indeed.

Buying advice? January 2010 is right around the corner. If you’re hot for a smartphone and can’t switch to AT&T for an iPhone, wait. What Google is hopefully doing with their Google phone is fixing what’s wrong with the iPhone ecosystem. The Google phone will allow customers to buy closer to the center of the ecosystem, with access to an application store not mired by the hotly debated approval process employed by Apple. As long as you’re diving into the Googleverse, you might as well dive into the deep end.

According to NPD MusicWatch, when it comes to the unit-sales volume of music sold at retail – including paid digital music downloads and CDs – Apple iTunes leads in the U.S. with 25 percent of music units sold, which is up from 21 percent in 2008 and 14 percent in 2007. Walmart (including Walmart, Walmart.com, Walmart Music Downloads) remains in second position with 14 percent of music volume sold at their stores and Web sites with Best Buy ranked third.

via Digital Music Increases Share of Overall Music Sales Volume in the U.S. .

This is where we are starting to see the trouble of Apple’s dominance in the market. Competition is important. Competition drives innovation. Apple, of all companies needs competitors. But the dominance in the market of iTunes and the iPod/iPhone is killing it. I want the Palm Pre to succeed on the merits. I want Amazon to be a killer digital music store (it’s on the way). I believe Apple’s products and store ecosystem are best-of-breed right now. But they can be beat. What is scaring me most about the current state of the digital music market is that before long, the most creative among us may just stop trying.

So Flash is kind of a big deal on new smartphones. The iPhone doesn’t have it, the Pre doesn’t have it, BlackBerry devices don’t have it… but the Hero does. Unfortunately, in our testing, we found the inclusion actually hurts operation of the phone more than it helps. When browsing to a site heavy on Flash (there are many), the browser loading times were abysmal. Furthermore, trying to view videos in-window produced choppy, nearly unwatchable results. You may have a better experience with lighter kinds of content, but in our opinion the main reason to introduce Flash into a mobile environment is to allow for broader media viewing options, and in the current state of this Flash player, you’re not really going to get much mileage out of it.

Watch the video and see for yourself. Loading the Flash movie is an atrocious, fist-pounding experience, and while I thought Topolsky nailed the rest of the review, on this point he was far too gracious. Two things I take out of it:

1) If your customers are clamoring for a feature in a product which you know will deliver a maddening experience for them, don’t deliver the feature. There’s a reason the iPhone doesn’t have Flash. There’s a reason the Blackberry doesn’t have Flash. There’s a reason the Pre doesn’t have Flash. It’s because the experience is abysmal for users.

2) This is more of a damning review for Adobe than it is for HTC. It’s clearly tough to scale Flash down to mobile devices, but it’s been years now and the natives are moving passed “restless” and into resignation that they’ll never get Flash at all. Politics aside, maybe HTML5 is a better bet?

And for my next theory, Palm is making a very simple play for Apple to shut them up by buying the company outright. And they’re doing it the only way they know how anymore: engineering hooliganry. Audacious play, indeed.

Oh, and one more thing: Palm webOS 1.1 re-enables Palm media sync. That’s right — you once again can have seamless access to your music, photos and videos from the current version of iTunes (8.2.1).

No surprise that the latest iTunes breaks the Palm Pre USB hack which allowed the device to sync with iTunes. This is a promise Palm should never have made, and users who bought the Pre thinking this was a viable option to get music on their phones are the folks who suffer.

Who wins? doubleTwist is on that list. Check it out if you were counting on that iTunes sync. This may be a good alternative to managing your media.

Apple yesterday seeded iPhone OS 3.1 and iPhone SDK 3.1 betas to developers for testing, and users have been digging through the new releases to document new features. Among the changes found so far by readers in our forums, at Redmond Pie, and at MobileCrunch:

- Trimming video clips on the iPhone 3GS now offers the ability to save the edited version as a copy rather than simply overwriting the original file.
- Voice Control over Bluetooth is now available, allowing users to Initiate calls and control music playback via Bluetooth headsets.
- MMS is now enabled by default, but still not supported by AT&T.
- iPhone vibrates when rearranging Home screen icons.
- A “Fraud Protection” toggle is now available in Safari settings.
- iPhone startup and shutdown and app launching times have improved.
- New APIs allow developers of third-party application to access and edit videos.
- OpenGL and Quartz have seen improvements.

Some of these simple bullets are a big deal. Non-destructive editing in the simply-fantastic video recorder? Voice control over Bluetooth? Speed improvements? This is a dot-release to a very recent major system update, and some of these features would be big enough to be part of yet another press event.

I’ve had a handset since 1994. Back then I upgraded once a year, a pace which increased over time. In 2003, I was upgrading once ever 3-5 months. I’ve been a happy iPhone user for over two years now and have no interest in changing platforms. I just don’t feel the same level of innovation in the handset market that I get from Apple.

WWDC Keynote Snooze

Part of the challenge was all about bad timing. In a special event months ago, Jobs took the stage and told the world that the iPhone SDK was coming, that all developer prayers would be answered, that they would have access to the iPhone core API’s, allowing the masses to write apps just like Apple does. They would just have to wait. Be patient. It’s coming.

Then, they seeded the developers. Certain developers. OK, not very many developers. Still, the applications that were teased out of the process looked good. Really good. The world was getting excited.

June. WWDC. iPhone3G has been leaked. The furor and frenzy about this next gen device is at an all time high. Devs are counting on Apple to deliver. The public is paying more attention to this developer conference than ever before. They’re tracking secret shipping manifests for boxes on the way to Apple stores. They’re lining up at the retail locations for this product that has not been announced. It’s a drumroll of a million crazed fetishists at terminal speeds.

It was an announcement for an announcement. The iPhone3G isn’t coming for another month. iPhone 2.0 firmware, another month. App Store, another month.

This challenge of timing is non-trivial, and most likely not an accident either. From the lay perspective, the market expected a punchline to this long-running joke; a release to the flood of expectation. What was announced yesterday underdelivered on those counts.

First, the next-gen phone is less than the market expected. Yes, we knew it was going to be 3G. Yes, we knew it would have GPS. Yes, we knew it would cost less. But Apple has a history of delivering so much more than expectation, of blowing away the market with things no one has thought of yet. The iPhone 3G satisfies the market. It does not blow it away. Where is the forward facing camera for handset video conferencing, for example? How did that rumor get so out of control? Where is the 32 GB model? 16 GB has been around a while in the iPhone, after all.

Second, the App Store. The keynote languished on and on and on with demos of software we’d seen, tools that developers had been discussing for months. Screenshots had been leaked. Apps are already running on millions of hacked phones. And we had to suffer through nearly an hour of old news from a platform stage architected to deliver WOW. There was no wow. (To be completely fair, the gaming apps are amazing. You should take a look at the keynote just to see what’s coming — cell phone manufacturers have been trying to reach this level of quality for a long, long time).

Third, OS X. The next version of OS X, 10.6, will be called Snow Leopard, and it’s likely the most interesting of the big WWDC 2008 stories so far. The news? No new features.

OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: Hidden Gem

Which, of course, is not true at all. According to Jobs, it’s an opportunity for Apple to take a step back, to focus on efficiency and security, and to build in some core evolution to the OS, while keeping on a one-release-per-year schedule. It’s a truly interesting strategy, actually, and bucks a pretty well accepted gestalt that for public consumption, there must be eye-candy. Apple is betting they can change the course of things with Snow Leopard.

And actually, they’re in a great position to do it. Look at Vista, for example. Microsoft took five years to build XP’s successor and where the OS has received it’s greatest criticism is in usability. The reason for the so-called XP Downgrade Program is because the company has put so much effort into making XP actually function over the years that it does meet user expectation at this point. If you go back in time 6-7 years, you can see Microsoft faced with the same question of direction in OS development that Apple took a stand on yesterday.

1. Focus work on XP and deliver core refinements that make the OS better, more stable, more expandable, more cooperative with more hardware, and increase performance and security… OR
2. Do everything in option 1, plus take several years to re-jigger the interface and add a bunch of eye-candy to the mix, completely changing the way users interact tactilely and visually with the OS, because then we’ll actually have something to talk about.

Vista, as it turns out, is the result of choosing option 2.

Leopard, on the other hand, is both widely accepted as structurally excellent, and functionally elegant. Users like to use it. They aren’t actually screaming for new features. They’re content with letting Apple define what it is they need to be excited about. Exposé. Dashboard. Bells. Whistles. Whatever. Apple is banking that they can cash in on this wide-eyed enthusiasm for the OS and take a break from delivering the bells and whistles, breathe deep and focus on building something truly next gen for the Mac platform.

While they’re at it, they’ll do something really special: they’ll get the consumer public excited about core OS technology. 64-bit. Multi-threading. Multicore. OpenCL. Javascript. They’ll have people using these terms, driving discussion they don’t really understand, and setting an expectation around OS excellence in a way that others will have to emulate to address. Again.

Apple has a recent history of defining a market dialog. Yesterday, they did it again. The keynote may have been a snoozer, but the hidden gems are special. In the coming months, watch how the company frames their discussion on core technology. Watch how they make it special, interesting, compelling for all-comers.

For the record, I’ll be buying a new iPhone. I don’t care about the 3G. I don’t really care about the GPS — the current system actually works quite well for me. I need the memory. And my wife needs an iPhone of her own. When Jobs made the announcement for the first iPhone, he said they’d targeted 10 Million phones by the end of 2008. Given the announcements yesterday, I don’t think 10 million is even in the cards — they’ll top 10 million before 10/1/08.

That’s true. My name is Damon. It’s my middle name, used six years ago the hide my participation in the Apple campaign from my then-day-job. I had thought that I’d exhausted my 32 weeks of fame, but someone has just posted all the old “Switch” commercials to YouTube. Actually, not sure what took so long.

Permanent link, for those who haven’t seen it, is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umHGfSAQb-s

My daughter Sophie is currently enrolled in a Chinese language immersion school. She’s in kindergarten now and her teachers have started introducing the kids to simple oragami projects for crafts time. Then, in a sweet bit of synchronicity, her godfather received a book on some creative origami projects that you can make out of dollar bills for Christmas and brought it over for dinner a few weeks back. We were both schooled handily when we tried to make a Klingon Bird of Prey out of a greenback.

Today we stumbled on this feature in the Apple.com Science section, promoting the creative things you can do with a Mac. Robert Lang uses traditional materials — and his giant 30″ Cinema Display — to make some of the most incredible origami I’ve ever seen.It serves to remind me of two things. First, I’m really lousy at making small folds. I can serviceably fold letters into envelopes. I can fold cardboard into piles for recycling. And the extent of my ability to fold money ends at folding it in half, into my wallet. But what Lang can do with paper is the rough equivalent of folding space.He uses Mathematica to get it all done. He builds simulations that extrapolate the folds and show him how the finished piece will look based on the sim. And he does these things commercially.

Lang can design and fold some projects in an hour. More complicated patterns take months. “When I have a commercial job, of course,” he adds, “I work on it until the schedule says I have to deliver. I can guarantee that I can produce something in a couple of days that’s going to meet the needs and expectations of the client.”

This story gets to the heart of my mission as a storyteller: that people are motivated to buy through images evocative of use and success thanks to it. And Apple has built on this concept magnificently over the last five years, using the website to deliver some of the most compelling use tales in mass marketing computer marketing. What most companies deliver in the unapproachable white paper, Apple delivers through a sound investment in corporate media.What stories can your products and services tell?

I found this thanks to John Gruber at Daring Fireball and have been waiting days for the video to come back on line. It’s Edward Tufte performing a superficial dissection of the iPhone’s human interface design choices.

It’s a treat to hear someone as adept in the field pulling apart the elegance of the iPhone and finding — largely — very little fault in the choices the design team made. He makes an point between the iPhone’s use of “image resolution” and “Cartoon resolution” that I don’t get completely — that it’s somehow a bad thing that the Stocks widget looks cartoony compared to his example of a stock chart, which looks more like Excel. His re-imagined Weather app compared Apple’s elegance to something you might see on a screen at NIST.

It’s short, and worth watching if you’re an iPhone aficionado.

It’s deeply ironic: For a company that famously celebrates individuality and Thinking Different, Apple has in the past decade kept its image remarkably impersonal. Other than the trinity who go onstage at press events — Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive, Phil Schiller — how many people can you name who work for Apple? How many engineers?

Hello everyone. I’ve waited a LONG time to be able to make the following announcement: as of right now Nine Inch Nails is a totally free agent, free of any recording contract with any label. I have been under recording contracts for 18 years and have watched the business radically mutate from one thing to something inherently very different and it gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a direct relationship with the audience as I see fit and appropriate. Look for some announcements in the near future regarding 2008. Exciting times, indeed.

Telegraph UK notes the Oasis and Jamiroquai are coming along too, which would be a perfectly right thing to do, since — huh? Jamiroquai? Where the hell has that guy been the last decade and a half?This is the next most beautiful extension of the user centered media market. The labels have created a firestorm of controversy around file sharing when the upshot is simply this: users want a relationship with their content creators. They want a personal and meaningful relationship, and a fiduciary one, too. They want to know that the content creators they follow are living off the fruits of their labors, that fans have contributed to the success of their favorite acts, authors, artists.Labels have become the electoral college of the consumer relationship. As we’re seeing in the political sphere, it just might turn out that the proxy vote doesn’t actually work as well as it used to, that the labels don’t actually know what I like and would spend my money to support, and that in fact, artists are served better by dealing directly with the populace.

The difference between the two, obviously, is in storage. The Classic model new comes in 80 GB, and a stunning 160 GB capacity, while the Touch comes in 8 and 16 GB. But, with digital music libraries swelling over the last five years, 160 GB is still chasing the tail of demand. Users have had to adapt their portable media consumption habits.

When the iPod was first launched, part of the beauty of the thing was that many people could, in fact, take their entire music collections with them. Now, they take playlists. They take one or two movies or TV shows. They take a few podcasts.

I have one 750 GB hard drive for my iTunes library alone. It’s just about full right now. That means, I’ll need 4.6 Classics, and 20 of the new Touch models to meet my needs. I don’t have a belt that big. Maybe a sash would be better.

Still, now that my habits have changed, I’ve realized that Apple has changed me yet again. They’ve made me realize that while I once needed to have my entire library, now I don’t. While I once needed to have 15 movies, now I don’t. They trained me once, and now they’ve trained me again.

Clearly, the Touch is the flagship product. It’s cool. It’s new. It’s sexy. It’s touch. And it boasts the iTunes WiFi Music Store. And now that Apple no longer reports iPod sales by version, we likely won’t know how successful the Classic will be, until it’s EOL’d.

Of course, the other Big news from today’s announcement: All of us who paid $599 for an iPhone got screwed. New price for the 8 GB model: $399. Here’s price skimming at it’s most blatant. While Apple usually waits 9 months to a year, plus at least one product revision, to settle pricing into a comfortable market dynamic, with the Rev 1 iPhone, they waited 90 days. This smarts on some level, but this is still the best phone I’ve ever used, and from the market reaction, it sounds like I’m not alone.

That’s my rationalization for the day, and I’m sticking to it.

Interestingly, this $200 cut sets an amazing new bar in the smartphone market. The iPhone is now on the low end of the smartphone market and it will be interesting to see how Nokia, Motorola, and (gawd) Palm respond. Two of the three of those companies might have the overall market weight to capitalize on scale to eek out a profit that feels all right. Palm? Not worth talking about right now. Microsoft makes the list — sort of — only because they slashed their own pricing of the Zune to $200 yesterday, in advance of the Apple announcement. Any other company would have canned the product line by now, but MS has patience and money. They have nothing that can compete with anything in the iPod line-up right now with no momentum behind them, but the holidays are coming. They did wonders with the XBox 360 — their other version two product.

Sort of parenthetically, there’s this new partnership with Starbucks to allow access to the iTunes store, and through it the Starbucks catalog, via WiFi for free in any Starbucks store. I love the idea. I’m completely numb to it right now, since it sounds like they’re going to take two years to roll it out to every store. Ho hum, indeed.

Personally, I have about six Gmail accounts including those through the Google Apps for your Domain service, and I’ve recommended and installed a number for clients. So, given the popularity of the new phone and the email service it was something of a stun to find just how completely insane the two work — sort of — together.

In my case, I have two computers — a laptop and a desktop — and now the iPhone. In my ideal setup, I’d have all my mail download on the desktop, and new mail on the laptop and the iPhone; one would be the archive, and the other two would be my transient accounts.

But in the default setup, regardless of how you set up the Gmail account, mail only downloads once — once on each client — and then gets frozen, never downloaded again.

According to Google, that’s a feature. But it’s a funny one. It presumes that users will be spending more time on the website than downloading via POP.

Turns out, it’s a simple fix that introduces even more complications. In your POP settings, if you update your user login to include “recent:login@gmail.com,” you trigger this new “Recent Mode” which downloads all messages for the last 30 days. I did this to all three of my machines and, as advertised, all mail from the last 30 days downloaded.

All mail.

600+ messages per account.

Once I got through the process of deleting 600 messages on my iPhone (not an easy task by the way), things started clipping right along. All mail comes into all devices all the time. Of course, that really does mean ALL mail. Even mail I send on my iPhone gets delivered to the other two accounts. I guess that’s a good thing — how come it feels like such a nuissance?

Was it worth it? Now that I’ve had three days with the thing, was it worth the money, the time, the sales tax?

First things first. The Apple Stores were — I have to imagine I can speak generally here, extrapolating my experience in the NY store — awesome. They were managed impeccably. Lines were bled into the store at around 4 customers every few minutes, ensuring no logjams on the store floor itself. We were shuttled all the way to the back of the store and asked the simple question: “What do you want — 4 or 8?”

I said 8. I gather I wasn’t alone. Word from the store manager is that they were sent around 4 of the 8 gig models for every one 4-gig model of the phone.

“One or two?”

One for me. I’m not one of those eBayers I’ve be reading about.

So, there I was, asked to buy the phone before being allowed to see it, to play with it, to touch it. That, my friends, is a seller that is confident in their product.

I paid, and headed back around to the iPhone tables to play with the demo units. The floor sales staff had been allowed only a few minutes with the phones themselves, busy with the store setup prior to the 6 p.m. launch, so they were reasonably useless in answering questions. Though, thanks to Apple’s brilliantly orchestrated Campaign of Obviousness, there were precious few questions.

There wasn’t one person in line with me that hadn’t seen every one of the training videos Apple released prior to iPhone launch. They knew how to type, how to browse the net, how to email — they understood the device inside and out. By the time it was in their hands, they were old friends.

The same was true for me, thankfully. Here, I think, is the highest compliment I can possibly give to this device: it works exactly as advertised.

My expectations were quite high, and the iPhone delivers. I was up and running with reasonable accuracy on the virtual keyboard in about 36 hours. What’s reasonable? I make a ton of mistakes, but once I learned to trust the smarts of the auto-correct, I got very quick on the thing.

The applications are intuitive, navigation a breeze, and call quality? The best I’ve had. I’m switching from the Treo 680 and it’s like a brand new day.

Downsides? There are a few, and I think Apple knows them because these weren’t actually advertised.

1. Notes. This application is about as lame as they come. Can’t do anything with notes you take on the device besides email them — no syncing allowed. Seems like they’re ripe to sync directly with Leopard’s mail application, but we’re a few months out from that actually working. Until then, we’re hosed.

2. Copy/Paste. There isn’t any. Pretty short-sighted diss of a convention that the vast majority of PC users actually “get”.

3. To Dos. OK, this is the biggest one for me. To Dos that you create in iCal DO NOT SYNC WITH IPHONE. Apple has chosen to break fidelity with one of their core applications and ignore a major function. Of course, there’s no way to actually create To Dos on the phone itself, so that there’s nothing on the computer to sync to is just about moot.

4. SMS. Not so much of a downer here. The downside is that the SMS application was designed in such a friendly manner that it will encourage much longer chat conversations over text messaging. This will blow through the 200 base of SMS messages in the default plan and force users to spend more money. Beautiful execution here — AT&T’s lock-in to SMS suddenly reveals why there’s no native iChat client on the phone: if there was such a client, then I wouldn’t pay for the texts.

EDGE

One of the biggest cries I’d heard pre-launch was on the perceived sluggishness of the EDGE network, AT&T’s 2.5G data network, and Apple’s choice to stick with EDGE over the more peppy 3G networks of other providers. Your mileage may vary, of course, but in my usage here in Western NY, I’ve found Edge to be quite sufficient, even when watching YouTube videos over the air. For everyday email, SMS, and casual browsing, it works perfectly. For more power, a quick switch to Wi-Fi and I’m browsing at PC speeds.

This device does for the phone what the Mac did for me five years ago: it moves the interface out of the way, and let’s me get to work. And for the first time, getting to work on a mobile device can be taken seriously.

But there’s raw beauty in the iPhone campaign that comes from lessons learned over the last decade of Apple advertising. This is as unadulterated a product marketing mix as I’ve seen in the market in very long time, and the point it serves to prove is thus: EB White had it right — “Simplify, simplify, simplify.”

The “Switch” campaign was considered (mostly by me) to be a critical success and a business non-starter. But it was the first time that Apple attempted to tell their story transparently, and that was an important move. It taught them the power of the unadulterated user’s voice, the untarnished message. They were already making powerful, beautiful products. The “Switch” campaign sold the experience, sort of.

The iPod “Sillouhette” campaign drove the message further, selling the outcomes of the experience, linking the product to the feeling you get when you use it. It was beautiful and compelling and engaging, and sold the experience, sort of.

The iPhone capitalizes on everything the first two campaigns delivered so well, and drives the messaging completely naked. The broadcast advertising is nothing more than a screencast on using features of the product. Their print and outdoor focus on dates. Their 25 minute introduction to iPhone uses Young Steve Jobs to deliver transparent, real world use cases to demonstrate the device.

All this is to say one thing: tell your story. Rely less on agency steerage and paranoia and more on your own instinct. You’re the only one that knows your customer the way you know your customer. The closer you get to mirroring their experience in your messaging, the closer you’ll get to communicating your product or service to the unititiated.

Stick to the simple truth.