iPhone Centre

Who says gadgets have to be expensive? Here are two simple and effective iPhone/audio accessories that will enhance your ownership of portable audio devices.

InfoWorld has been all over this week's official launch of Android, the new smartphone platform from Google. With its slick interface and open application platform, Android shows every sign of giving Apple's iPhone a run for its money when the first phones begin shipping in late October.

I was all set to give this week's column over to a new register-direct implementation of a JavaScript interpreter that's many times faster than all currently available implementations. It's not exactly growing hair on a billiard ball, but a nitro-boosted JavaScript will put a shine on AJAX and keep my most beloved language on track to becoming the gold standard for dynamic languages.

Don't look now, but your mobile phone is out to get you. This deadly device can cause accidents, give you cancer or even kill you, according to a rising chorus of alarmist reports.

Apple apparently chose the best possible template for its iPhone developer programs: its own Apple Developer Connection for OS X. Why it then made the iPhone SDK confidential even for those who download it for free poses a puzzling contradiction in the company's seemingly open approach to development.

I have no excuses - I should have known better than to let my gadget envy get the better of me. But, with all the new way cool features added to the iPhone 3G and the fact that my existing AT&T plan allowed me to upgrade at US$199, I decided to join the other crazies in line last Saturday afternoon and spend 2 hours to get my hands on a new iPhone 3G. I've spent more than 20 hours since then trying to get it to do what I needed it to do (i.e., synchronize with Outlook, stay charged up for more than a day, not die when I touch a button, etc.) and then I spent another 3 hours yesterday trying to return it. For more about why I now feel like a moron, read on...

With the iPhone 3G launch now a week behind us, it's time to look back and see how the second coming of the iPhone turned out.

Like the presidential seal that vanished without comment from a politician's press podium, the competitive marketing brickbat that Apple flung at BlackBerry -- that BlackBerry's push e-mail works only with Microsoft Exchange, as if Exchange were an onerous burden -- quietly vanished from Apple's campaign.

As I write this, my new white 16GB iPhone 3G is in the process of syncing about 10GB of music from my iTunes library. This is my second sync. Although I was one of the lucky ones able to both buy and eventually activate an iPhone 3G on Friday, I at first opted to copy over the same paltry 2GB of music that was stored on my first-generation 4GB iPhone along with my e-mail accounts and a handful of applications from the App Store. Having waited close to four hours in line at a New York AT&T store, close to 20 minutes for the purchase process, and another four-plus hours attempting to activate my iPhone at home via iTunes, I simply couldn't wait for a full sync before putting my iPhone through its paces.

Is the iPhone 3G worth waiting in line for? Early reviewers of Apple's new smart phone are mostly positive, but they share some common gripes about battery life and two aspects of dealing with AT&T: the service-plan costs and the skimpy 3G coverage areas.

I'm developing mobile applications -- for the iPhone. Considering all of the mobile platforms available to programmers, why would I select the development platform for the Apple device when I could have chosen Symbian, BlackBerry, or Android?