If you would like to play with most of these features you will need to be running a recent WebKit Nightly. Once downloaded make sure that you enable the Web Inspector by checking “Show Develop menu in menu bar” under the Advanced tab in the Preferences.

Editing Element Attributes and Style Properties #

Editing Element Attributes and Style Properties has been made even simpler and more developer friendly. The interfaces for editing attributes and properties now support tabbing to allow you to move between items, and create new items with ease.

Besides tabbing you can also add a new attributes to a node.  Start by hovering over the node in the Element’s Tree Hierarchy and after a polite wait a clickable template for a new attribute will appear.

Related Bug Reports: Add Element Attributes, Tabbing, and Improved UI.

Creating and Modifying CSS Rules and Selectors #

A powerful new feature in the Web Inspector allows you create new or modify existing CSS Rules and Selectors. We expect both developers and designers will find this very useful when experimenting with new ideas or tweaking existing designs.

The interface for working with selectors starts with a new Gear Menu in the Styles Sidebar Pane. Select “New Style Rule” and a new section will be created for you, pre-populated with an intelligent selector from the selection in the Elements Tree Hierarchy. Editing selectors is activated by double-clicking. Once again, tabbing will allow you to navigate between selectors and their properties.

When editing selectors there is visual feedback when you create or modify a selector that does not affect the selected node in the Elements Tree Hierarchy. This indicator helps detect errors when making changes.

One more tweak to the Styles Pane is that there is always a section for the selected node’s style attribute. This allows you to easily add style information to the node as you usually would via the Styles Pane instead of editing or creating a “style” attribute. This section is nearly always on top due to how CSS specificity works.

Related Bug Reports: Selectors Support and Move to Gear Menu.

CSS Color Representations #

Colors in the Styles Pane can be shown in any of their possible representations. For simple colors this includes short hex, full hex, rgb, hsl, and potentially a nickname. For advanced colors this includes rgba and hsla. For example the color “white” can be represented as: #FFF, #FFFFFF, rgb(255, 255, 255), hsl(0, 100%, 100%), and white.

You can use the Styles Pane’s Gear Menu to set your preferred representation. However, if you want to cycle through an individual color’s different representations you can do so by clicking on its associated color swatch.

Related Bug Reports: Color Representations, Preference and Gear Menu, and UI Improvement.

DOM Storage #

The Storage Panel (formerly the Databases Panel) now allows you to monitor DOM Storage areas like localStorage and sessionStorage in a familiar datagrid. The DOM Storage datagrid displays live updates so monitoring changes is possible without manually refreshing the view.

Also, the familiar creation and editing techniques apply to the datagrid. To add a new key/value pair just double-click in any open area, or double-click an existing item to start editing. Tabbing works as you would expect.

Related Bug Reports: DOM Storage Support, Live Updates, Create New Items, and Tabbing.

Keyboard Shortcuts #

Keyboard shortcuts are always desired by developers. They can be hard to discover, so here is a complete list and here are the ones that were added recently:

• Switch Panels — Command-[ and Command-] on a Mac or Control-[ and Control-] on other platforms.
• Delete a Node in the Tree Hierarchy — either Delete or Backspace keys will do the trick.
• Quick Edits in the Tree Hierarchy — Hitting Enter or Return on a Node in the Tree enters the editing mode for that type of Node. For a Text Node you will start editing the content. For Element Nodes you start editing the first attribute, or, for convenience, a new attribute will be added for you.

The Scripts Debugger was updated to support some popular keyboard shortcuts:

• Continue — F8 or Command-/ on a Mac or Control-/ on other platforms.
• Step Over — F10 or Command-’ on a Mac or Control-’ on other platforms.
• Step Into — F11 or Command-; on a Mac or Control-; on other platforms.
• Step Out — Shift-F11 or Shift-Command-; on a Mac or Shift-Control-; on other platforms.
• Next Call Frame — Control-. on all platforms.
• Previous Call Frame — Control-, on all platforms.
• Evaluate Selection When on a Breakpoint — Shift-Command-E on a Mac or Shift-Control-E on other platforms.

Related Bug Reports: Switch Panels, Delete Node, Quick Edit, General Debugger Shortcuts and Evaluate Selection.

Cookies #

Viewing Cookie information is now possible under the Storage Panel. Supported platforms show all of the cookies and their hidden information for all domains accessed on the inspected page. Cookie information includes the name, value, path, expiration date, http only flag, and secure (https) flag. Supported platforms may also delete cookies.

If your platform doesn’t have full support you aren’t left in the dark. You will still be able to see the keys and values of the cookies that are accessible via JavaScript on the inspected page.

Related Bug Reports: Initial Support, Hidden Data 1 and 2, Cookies for Sub-Resources, and UI Improvements

Event Listeners #

A new Sidebar Pane has been added to the Elements Panel which displays the registered Event Listeners for the selected node.  The Event Listeners that are shown for the selected node are in the exact order that they are fired through the Capturing and Bubbling phases.  This provides developers with the most accurate and useful information possible.

The user interface shows the registered Event Listeners separated by type. If a node has both “onclick” and “onmouseover” listeners then they will naturally appear in different sections. You can also set your filter preference using the Gear Menu. You can choose to see only the listeners registered on the selected node, or the entire event flow.

We are actively looking for UI improvements in this area. So if you have some ideas or feedback please feel free to let us know on this bug report!

Related Bug Reports: Event Listeners.

Syntax Highlighting #

Syntax highlighting enhances readability, makes debugging code easier, and looks really awesome. The Web Inspector now includes syntax highlighting for JSON and CSS.

CSS Syntax Highlighting even works on the more complex “at-rules” such as @import, @media and @font-face. In addition to supporting the syntax highlighting in the Resources Panel, inline scripts and styles in the Elements Tree Hierarchy are syntax highlighted!

Related Bug Reports: JSON Highlighting, CSS Highlighting, and Inline Highlighting.

Breakpoints and Watch Expressions #

The Script Debugger continues to become more powerful and more useful.  We already mentioned the keyboard shortcuts above, but there are plenty of other enhancements.

There is a new Breakpoints Sidebar Pane that allows you to easily monitor and work with your breakpoints across all files without the hassle of searching for them.  Each sidebar entry shows the source line and contains a checkbox that allows you to directly enable or disable the breakpoint. Clicking on the entry will jump you directly to the highlighted line in the source file. Finally, deleting a breakpoint has been made easier by clicking the “blue tag” breakpoint indicator.  The tag will cycle through its three states of active, inactive, and removed.

A powerful feature added to the debugger is Conditional Breakpoints. Once you have a breakpoint set, right click on the “blue tag” breakpoint indicator and you will get a popup asking for a conditional statement for that breakpoint. Simply provide an expression and the breakpoint will only pause from then on only if the condition is true.

Another new feature in the Debugger is Watch Expressions.  In this new Sidebar Pane you can add any number of expressions that evaluate in the global scope normally but in the local scope when paused in the debugger. Once added you get the full Object Properties tree view of the values of each expression.  These watch expressions automatically refresh when the debugger pauses. They are also persist across page loads.

Related Bug Reports: Breakpoints Sidebar Pane, Watch Expressions, Evaluate on Breakpoint, Conditional Breakpoints, and Delete Breakpoints.

Debugging AJAX #

An extremely valuable feature for developers working with AJAX is the ability to view the exact parameters and payload sent on XMLHttpRequests.

In the individual resource view there are new sections for viewing submitted Form Data, Query String Parameters, and Request Payloads when appropriate. You can toggle viewing the information in its unencoded (default) and encoded forms with a double-click.

There is also new section named HTTP Information which contains the Request Method (GET, POST, etc.) and the Status Code (200, 404, etc.). Additionally, it adds a colored dot next to the requested URL to show the status (green for success, orange for redirect, and red for error).

Related Bug Reports: HTTP Status Code and Data, Parameters, and Payload

Resources and Console Scope Bars #

In order to filter through the Resources or Console messages the Web Inspector now sports some familiar Scope Bars. This has proven to be very useful in the Resources Panel for easily viewing all resources of a particular type.

Related Bug Reports: Resources Scope Bar and Console Scope Bars.

Resources Timeline #

The Web Inspector now specifically shows in the timeline when the DOMContentLoaded and Load events fire. This helps clarify the time it takes for pages to load and helps you improve your websites load times.

Related Bug Reports: Show Load Lines

Resources Interactivity #

A couple new features allow you to more directly access individual resources from within the Web Inspector. Instead of copying their URL and opening a new tab manually you can now double-click the Resource in the sidebar to open it directly in a new window. Or, you can drag and drop the resource using HTML5 drag and drop events!

Related Bug Reports: Open Resource Directly and Drag and Drop.

Console Improvements #

Properties in the Web Inspector’s Console are now sorted in a much more natural and useful way. By sorting keys alphanumerically Arrays with greater then 10 elements are much easier to work with.

Another tweak is that collections such as NodeLists and HTMLCollections are now displayed like Arrays.  This meaning that their contents are shown directly in the console, no longer requiring any extra boilerplate.

Related Bug Reports: Sorting and NodeLists.

Firebug Command API Improvements #

More improvements have been made to support more of the Firebug Command Line API. The Web Inspector now supports the inspect() function, which can take an Element, Database, or Storage area and automatically jumps to the appropriate Panel with information. Also, the $0-$4 variables contain the current and previous selected nodes from the Elements Tree Hierarchy.

These command line APIs are usable inside the Web Inspector’s Console. To make working with these APIs even easier, they now show up in the Console’s autocompletion.

Related Bug Reports: $# Variables, inspect() Function, and Autocompletion.

How You Can Contribute #

Many of these new features were added by members of the Open Source Community. We would like to encourage you to contribute as well! Since the Web Inspector itself is mostly HTML, JavaScript, and CSS that means that you already have the skills you need to join in! Interested? Play around right now by inspecting the inspector itself!

If you’re interested in contributing and have any questions please stop by the #webkit-inspector IRC channel! As an encouragement to developers, included at the end of each section above are the core bug reports that were involved in bringing each of these features to life.

Finally, if you have ideas for new features, any improvements, or if you’ve stumbled across a bug then please don’t hesitate to create a bug report. This link has pre-populated most of the fields so that you only need to fill out the Summary and Description. As always you should do a quick search through the existing inspector bugs first.

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Mock up as many pages as you need, link them together, and rearrange them with ease.

Hidden in this story is the true meaning of all information technology.

A brief statement of the problem.

There is an old logical puzzle called the Sorites Paradox, first articulated by the Megarian logician Eubulides of Miletus. It predates the stored program computer by 2,000 years but it similarly concerns the production of pastries:

Would you describe a single grain of wheat as a heap? No. Would you describe two grains of wheat as a heap? No…. You must admit the presence of a heap sooner or later, so where do you draw the line?

This problem was of keen interest to the philosophical community for thousands of years, principally because the Greek recipe for tea cakes called for two heaping tablespoons of sugar. Some philosophers went so far as to vow to grow a beard and engage in pederasty until a solution to the problem was found. But all efforts were in vain; the problem remains unsolved to this day.

Unfortunately, the problem has only become ever more acute in the modern era. In fact, far from only destabilizing the fabrication of pastries, it has further undermined every area of society. Consider the process of voting. If no one voted, one vote would affect the outcome. But if millions of people vote, one vote makes little difference.

In fact, the defining characteristic of the modern era is that every aspect of society is heaping. To understand how this came to be, we must revisit ancient history.

Some scientifical facts.

During the pre-historic era, when mankind lived in trees and swam in lagoons, we lived in small clans and tribes of dozens up to a few hundred people. During this long honeymoon period in homo sapiens history, we evolved our cognitive abilities through careful grooming and diligent fornicating. The brain developed the ability to speak languages and sympathize with other people and feel jealousy and kindness and all that other stuff. In other words, we evolved a social technology that equipped us for living in society and dealing with the ordeals caused by other people.

But that social technology is ill-equipped to deal with the humongous heaps of the modern world. We meet hundreds of people every year and can’t remember any of their names. We evolved language and vocal chords to cover long distances but somebody put skyscrapers in the way and anyway we now live like really long distances away, like you have to fly an airplane to see them or at least ride a bicycle. And then there are these celebrity neanderthals like Ashton Kutcher who are adored for their plumage by a multitude who greedily read every banal detail of his private life in magazines like Star that ship millions of copies to every end of a giant sphere whose radius is 6,378.1 kilometers; or on a Twitter that delivers every inane thing he tweets to 4 million people, 10 times daily. It goes without saying that this would not be possible if not for a defect in our programming in the face of the massive scale of the world.

Everything has become a giant fucking heap.

The modern world is profoundly inhumane. Mankind is incapable of reasoning about the heaping constructs of mass culture using the technes of intimacy that are an hundred thousand years old. For example, we need to be constantly reassured that celebrities are just like us. They eat waffles and pick up dry cleaning. If we do not share this understanding of Ashton Kutcher, we become overwhelmed by existential anomie and commit suicide.

Human beings need to understand one another in terms of primordial intimacies because man has no other tools for understanding the solicitations of man. But if the size of the world no is on longer amenable to intimacy technologies, then mankind must invent information technologies that rehumanize the world.

Thus the proliferation of social software on the web. The reification of the social graph in Friendster; the Facebook Newsfeed and the Twitter; and the Foursquare all serve this one purpose: to rehumanize an inhumane world. Let’s consider each of these technologies one at a time.

1. Friendster’s reification of the social graph makes it possible to understand the ties that bind us all together when we only have room in our brains for the intrigues of a few dozen relationships.
2. The Facebook Newsfeed and the Twitter make it possible to share in the thoughts and intimate moments of those who inhabit different neighborhoods, and different schools, and different jobs, and make different choices than us from amongst the vast cornucopia of mass-produced art sold to us by the culture industry. Finally,
3. the Foursquare coordinates the alienated existence of cosmopolitan voluptuaries into a shared bacchanal.

Technology and self-criticism.

I cannot help but be a technological optimist because technology is mankind’s only bulwark against the barbarism of heaps. But I’ll grant that technology is imperfect; it is sometimes fair to criticize the Tyranny of Technology. The usual argument goes that all these tweets and text messages and notifications that “a software update is available” leave no space quiet, provide no room for contemplation. It is true: we do live in a world of interruptions; interruptions created by information technology. But we should not be surprised by this fact and no more should we despair of it. One generation of technology solves the problems of the previous but causes problems of its own. The next generation of technology repeats this story; a story as old as mankind itself. This is the dialectics of history.

Do not doubt, then, that a technology will arise to solve this problem too. We, the makers, shall fabricate a machine to produce quiet and contemplation. In fact, at this very moment, I have a patent pending on a pair of contemplation goggles. And in just a few weeks I will release a beta of a contemplation-inducing goggular Twitter client. I’m sure it will be received to massive acclaim and to the profound benefit of humanity.

So! Old men: do not fear for the future. We young people, we hackers and makers, we have it all under control. We know the true meaning of information technology. We shall save us all from the giant fucking heaps.

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The big multi-touch gesture that Apple uses in the iPhone is pinching — in particular, pinch-to-zoom. You pinch to zoom in MobileSafari. You pinch to zoom photos. You pinch to zoom maps.

There is no pinching on a Droid running Android 2.0. As for why, my somewhat-informed best guess is that it is related to Apple’s patent applications for the pinch-to-zoom gesture. If so, this stinks. — John Gruber, Daring Fireball

Personally, I’m all about innovation. Allowing an innovator to benefit from his or her innovation through patents is what makes businesses innovate in the first place. At the same time however, gestures are not innovative, nor should they be patentable. Pinch-to-zoom is just common sense. How else would you do it with one motion? If Apple wants to patent something, patent the technology that allows the device to recognize multi touch and react to it, don’t patent the gestures themselves.

Gestures should be treated as a language, like sign language for touch devices. We need a common set of gestures to interact with all touch enabled devices. I shouldn’t have to lean a different language just to use a different device.

This situation reminds me of the hyperlink fiasco from many years ago when BT contacted Prodigy and 16 other ISPs, including AOL asking them to buy a hyperlink licence. If Apple goes down this path and tries to enforce pinch-to-zoom as “theirs” I would only hope it, as well as any other gesture parents, would lose.

Herman mentioned something about the fact that clicking on background Finder windows in column view would sometimes trigger unwanted behaviours. I had noticed something like that myself, but hadn’t taken the time to try and pinpoint the problem. (Like most Mac OS X users, I guess I am just used to the Finder’s “quirkiness” and to having to click and click again until I get what I want, while hoping to avoid getting what I don’t want.)

I believe I now have more information about this particular problem and it definitely warrants a blog post.

Take the following situation: a test folder containing several text files, named “file1.txt,” “file2.txt,” “file3.txt,” “file4.txt,” etc.

Bring the window to the foreground and select one of the files in the column, file3.txt for example:

Now click on another Finder window to relegate this particular window with the selected file to the background:

Now comes the important part. Try clicking on one of the files that is not currently selected in the column in the background window, like “file1.txt” in the example below:

After you click on that file, you’ll notice something odd, which is that Mac OS X responds to the click by bringing the background window to the foreground, but it does not select the file that you’ve just attempted to click on:

This is because, in Snow Leopard, Apple has apparently decided to turn off the “click-through” behaviour that was standard in all view modes in Leopard, where the Finder would respond to a single click on a background window by 1) bringing the background window to the foreground and 2) selecting the item on which the user appears to have chosen to click, if there happens to be an item in that location.

Now, in Snow Leopard, the “click-through” behaviour only works in icon view. In both list view and column view, clicking on a background window only brings the window to the foreground, without affecting the current selection in that window in any way. (Click-through still works for the buttons in the Finder window’s toolbar, but it no longer works when clicking somewhere in the actual content of the window, i.e. in a list or column of items.)

Why did Apple make this change in list and column view, and not in icon view? Your guess is as good as mine. But it gets even weirder.

Go back to the step where the Finder window was still in the background and you were about to attempt to click on a file that was not the current selection in that background window, like “file1.txt” in the example below:

But now, instead of a single click on “file1.txt,” try a double click. If Snow Leopard behaved logically, since click-through no longer works in column view, this double click would no longer be interpreted as a double click on the file itself, but only as a succession of two clicks, one to bring the Finder window to the foreground, and one to select “file1.txt.”

Alas, what happens in Snow Leopard in this situation is that, unlike the single click, the double click on “file1.txt” in the background window is interpreted as a double click on “file1.txt,” as if click-through were still active in column view.

This makes no sense whatsoever. If click-through is no longer supported in column view (or list view), then a double click on a specific location in a background window cannot be the same as a double click on the same location in the same window when the window is the foreground. The first click in the double click only brings the window to the foreground. It doesn’t affect the contents of the window in any way, and so the second click is just a single click.

This particular issue might sound like a small detail to some readers, and to a certain extent it is. But it is a pretty fundamental thing that affects basic interactions with Finder windows in a very real way, and creates an ever more inconsistent, unpredictable experience for the end user.

How is the user supposed to “know” and remember intuitively that click-through now only works in icon view mode and not in list view mode and column view mode? And how is the user supposed to “know” and remember intuitively that, even though click-through no longer works, “double-click-through” (to coin a phrase) still does?

With such inconsistencies, it is pretty much impossible for the user to develop instinctive habits in his or her interactions with the Finder, and he or she ends up constantly having to correct the inappropriate/unexpected behaviour triggered by his or her mouse clicks.

And, in the absence of a forum where Apple developers would actually explain their decisions to Mac users, we are left with the impression that the guys in charge of single clicks and the guys in charge of double clicks work in two separate departments and never talk to each other.

Which is, you know, kind of problematic for a GUI platform.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 at 6:46 pm and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

It appears one enterprising Dutch hacker used port scanning to identify jailbroken iPhones on T-mobile Netherlands with SSH running. Enabling SSH is a common procedure for jailbroken iPhones, allowing a user to log in via Terminal and run standard UNIX commands. Unfortunately, iPhones all have a default root password that many forget to change after jailbreaking, leaving their phone as vulnerable as a Lamborghini parked on a public street with the windows down, the doors unlocked, and the keys in the ignition.

The hacker relied on unchanged root passwords to hack into the phones. He then sent what appears to be an SMS alert to the hacked phones (in reality it's a replaced wallpaper) that read, "You iPhone's been hacked because it's really insecure! Please visit doiop.com/iHacked and secure your iPhone right now! Right now, I can access all your files." Going to the website directs the user to send €5 to a PayPal account, after which the hacker will e-mail instructions to remove the hack—which most likely involve restoring the iPhone to factory settings.

The hacker doesn't appear to have malicious intent, other than to glean some extra cash. "If you don't pay, it's fine by me," reads the page mentioned in the message to the hacked iPhone owners. "But remember, the way I got access to your iPhone can be used by thousands of others—they can send text messages from your number (like I did), use it to call or record your calls, and actually whatever they want, even use it for their hacking activities! I can assure you, I have no intention of harming you or whatever, but, some hackers do! It's just my advice to secure your phone."

An Ars reader familiar with computer security let us know that security researchers have done similar port scanning in the past, and downloaded users' SMS databases as a "proof of concept." However, this is the first time that it seems the technique has been used in the wild. It's worth noting that the technique is fairly trivial and could be done by anyone with even a modicum of networking know-how.

The incident highlights the fact that jailbreaking removes the security mechanisms that Apple has in place for the iPhone OS—which are as much about securing the device against hackers as they are about preventing "unauthorized" applications. If you do jailbreak, then the onus of security is on you, so be sure to change the root password to something other than the default. You can also disable the SSH daemon when not in use to prevent this particular attack from happening to you.

UPDATE: It appears the young hacker has had a change of heart on the money issue, and posted instructions for undoing what he did to several Dutch iPhone users. According to a commenter below, he has also apologized for asking for money and returned whatever ill-gotten gains he received from his stunt. However, that doesn't mean someone else couldn't pull the same trick and just not tell you about it. So for goodness sake, if you jailbreak and do things like leave an SSH daemon running, change the default passwords.

Apple (finally) coming to Philly

PHILADELPHIA. After years of rumors and wishful thinking,  fans of Apple products will soon get one of the trademark, futuristic all-glass exterior shops in Center City.

Design plans for a new store near 16th and Walnut streets go before the city Art Commission tomorrow. Apple has already posted job listings on its Web site for the store, but a spokeswoman said yesterday that an official announcement about a new store here isn't ready yet.

Adding an Apple Store to 1607 Walnut St. will add a dose of visual appeal — and a level of hipness from the tens of thousands of iPhone and Mac users — to a block that's been hit by a bit of a retail slowdown.

"For what that building is now, what you see at this moment, is a series of three or four rehab jobs over the last 40 years," Art Commission executive director William Burke said yesterday. "They're going to clean all that off and purify the design. It’s a nice building that contributes to the character of the street."

Planning officials said the store likely won't need any zoning change, so once it receives approval from the Art Commission, construction permits from Licenses and Inspections would be the last step before construction.

"I haven’t seen the plans for Philly yet but whatever they are, I hope it'll be equally elegant and exciting visually as some others, like the Fifth Avenue location in New York," Planning Commission deputy director Gary Jastrzab said.

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Daring Fireball just linked to two equally foolish articles about how PDFs are “bad” for Open Government.

The premise of these articles is that the world would be a much better place if all governments would publish all of their information on the web in HTML or XML. You know what else would make the world a much better place? Unicorns.

The issue at hand is not whether governments should pick HTML or PDF. The issue at hand is whether governments are capable of publishing information at all. Show me an HTML creation tool that creates high quality, standards conformant markup from a Word document or any of the zillions of editing tools that government employees use. Now add in all the tools used by people who submit documents to the government. And all the versions of those tools released in the last 20 years. Now make sure that the HTML/XML works correctly even when the user doesn’t have the right browser or the right fonts installed. Guess what? There are no such conversion tools available. And who would pay to make sure that everyone had access to these tools and knew how to use them correctly?

Creating PDFs is trivially easy for all these cases, whether you use Acrobat or something built into your OS. It works regardless of what tool was used to create the content in the first place, and it works on pretty much every OS out there and on mobile.

HTML/XML Standards nerds should get a grip. They aren’t even in the running to compete with PDF here.

~ by Andrew Shebanow on 02Nov09.

Posted in Document Formats, Openness, XML

I’d like to propose a new, optional HTML tag:

IMG

Required argument is SRC="url".

This names a bitmap or pixmap file for the browser to attempt to pull over the network and interpret as an image, to be embedded in the text at the point of the tag’s occurrence.

An example is:

<IMG SRC="file://foobar.com/foo/bar/blargh.xbm">

(There is no closing tag; this is just a standalone tag.)

This tag can be embedded in an anchor like anything else; when that happens, it becomes an icon that’s sensitive to activation just like a regular text anchor.

Browsers should be afforded flexibility as to which image formats they support. Xbm and Xpm are good ones to support, for example. If a browser cannot interpret a given format, it can do whatever it wants instead (X Mosaic will pop up a default bitmap as a placeholder).

This is required functionality for X Mosaic; we have this working, and we’ll at least be using it internally. I’m certainly open to suggestions as to how this should be handled within HTML; if you have a better idea than what I’m presenting now, please let me know. I know this is hazy wrt image format, but I don’t see an alternative than to just say “let the browser do what it can” and wait for the perfect solution to come along (MIME, someday, maybe).

Xbm and Xpm were popular graphics formats on Unix systems. They are still supported in modern browsers. (I tested in Internet Explorer 8 and Google Chrome.)

“X Mosaic” was one of the earliest web browsers. When he wrote this message in early 1993, Marc Andreessen had not yet founded the company that made him famous, Mosaic Communications Corporation. He still called his browser “X Mosaic.” He had not yet renamed it “Mosaic Netscape.” (You may know it better by its third name, “Netscape Navigator.”)

“MIME, someday, maybe” is a reference to content negotiation, a feature of HTTP where a client (like a web browser) tells the server (like a web server) what types of resources it supports (like image/jpeg) so the server can return something in the client’s preferred format. The Original HTTP as defined in 1991 (the only version that was implemented in February 1993) did not have a way for clients to tell servers what kind of images they supported, thus the design dilemma that Marc faced.

A few hours later, Tony Johnson replied:

I have something very similar in Midas 2.0 (in use here at SLAC, and due for public release any week now), except that all the names are different, and it has an extra argument NAME="name". It has almost exactly the same functionality as your proposed IMG tag. e.g.

<ICON name="NoEntry" href="http://note/foo/bar/NoEntry.xbm">

The idea of the name parameter was to allow the browser to have a set of “built in” images. If the name matches a “built in” image it would use that instead of having to go out and fetch the image. The name could also act as a hint for “line mode” browsers as to what kind of a symbol to put in place of the image.

I don’t much care about the parameter or tag names, but it would be sensible if we used the same things. I don’t much care for abbreviations, ie why not IMAGE= and SOURCE=. I somewhat prefer ICON since it imlies that the IMAGE should be smallish, but maybe ICON is an overloaded word?

Midas was another early web browser, a contemporary of X Mosaic. It was cross-platform; it ran on both Unix and VMS. “SLAC” refers to the Standard Linear Accelerator Center (now the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory). SLAC hosted the first web server in the United States (in fact the first web server outside Europe). When Tony wrote this message, SLAC was an old-timer on the WWW, having hosted five pages on their web server for a whopping 441 days.

Tony continued:

While we are on the subject of new tags, I have another, somewhat similar tag, which I would like to support in Midas 2.0. In principle it is:

<INCLUDE HREF="...">

The intention here would be that the second document is to be included into the first document at the place where the tag occured. In principle the referenced document could be anything, but the main purpose was to allow images (in this case arbitrary sized) to be embedded into documents. Again the intention would be that when HTTP2 comes along the format of the included document would be up for separate negotiation.

“HTTP2” is a reference to Basic HTTP as defined in 1992. At this point in early 1993, it was still largely unimplemented. The draft known as “HTTP2” evolved and eventually became standardized as HTTP 1.0 (albeit not for another three years). HTTP 1.0 did include request headers for content negotiation, a.k.a. “MIME, someday, maybe.”

Tony continued:

An alternative I was considering was:

<A HREF="..." INCLUDE>See photo</A>

I don’t much like adding more functionality to the <A> tag, but the idea here is to maintain compatibility with browsers that can not honour the INCLUDE parameter. The intention is that browsers which do understand INCLUDE, replace the anchor text (in this case “See photo”) with the included document (picture), while older or dumber browsers ignore the INCLUDE tag completely.

This proposal was never implemented, although the idea of text-if-an-image-is-missing is an important accessibility technique which was missing from Marc’s initial <IMG> proposal. Many years later, this feature was bolted on as the <img alt> attribute, which Netscape promptly broke by erroneously treating it as a tooltip.

A few hours after that, Tim Berners-Lee responded:

I had imagined that figues would be reprented as

<a name=fig1 href="fghjkdfghj" REL="EMBED, PRESENT">Figure </a>

where the relation ship values mean

EMBED	 Embed this here when presenting it
PRESENT	 Present this whenever the source document is presented

Note that you can have various combinations of these, and if the browser doesn’t support either one, it doesn’t break.

[I] see that using this as a method for selectable icons means nesting anchors. Hmmm. But I hadn’t wanted a special tag.

This proposal was never implemented, but the rel attribute is still around.

Jim Davis added:

It would be nice if there was a way to specify the content type, e.g.

<IMG HREF="http://nsa.gov/pub/sounds/gorby.au" CONTENT-TYPE=audio/basic>

But I am completely willing to live with the requirement that I specify the content type by file extension.

This proposal was never implemented, but Netscape did later add arbitrary embedding of media objects with the <embed> element.

Jay C. Weber asked:

While images are at the top of my list of desired medium types in a WWW browser, I don’t think we should add idiosyncratic hooks for media one at a time. Whatever happened to the enthusiasm for using the MIME typing mechanism?

Marc Andreessen replied:

This isn’t a substitute for the upcoming use of MIME as a standard document mechanism; this provides a necessary and simple implementation of functionality that’s needed independently from MIME.

Jay C. Weber responded:

Let’s temporarily forget about MIME, if it clouds the issue. My objection was to the discussion of “how are we going to support embedded images” rather than “how are we going to support embedded objections in various media”.

Otherwise, next week someone is going to suggest ‘lets put in a new tag <AUD SRC="file://foobar.com/foo/bar/blargh.snd">‘ for audio.

There shouldn’t be much cost in going with something that generalizes.

With the benefit of hindsight, it appears that Jay’s concerns were well-founded. It took a little more than a week, but HTML5 did finally add new <video> and <audio> elements.

Responding to Jay’s original message, Dave Raggett said:

True indeed! I want to consider a whole range of possible image/line art types, along with the possibility of format negotiation. Tim’s note on supporting clickable areas within images is also important.

Later in 1993, Dave Raggett proposed HTML+ as an evolution of the HTML standard. The proposal was never implemented, and it was superceded by HTML 2.0. HTML 2.0 was a “retro-spec,” which means it formalized features already in common use. “This specification brings together, clarifies, and formalizes a set of features that roughly corresponds to the capabilities of HTML in common use prior to June 1994.”

Dave later wrote HTML 3.0, based on his earlier HTML+ draft. HTML 3.0 was also never implemented (outside of the W3C’s own reference implementation, Arena), and it was superceded by HTML 3.2. HTML 3.2 was also a “retro-spec” — “HTML 3.2 adds widely deployed features such as tables, applets and text flow around images, while providing full backwards compatibility with the existing standard HTML 2.0.”

Dave later co-authored HTML 4.0 and developed HTML Tidy, and went on to help with XHTML, XForms, MathML, and other modern W3C specifications.

Getting back to 1993, Marc replied to Dave:

Actually, maybe we should think about a general-purpose procedural graphics language within which we can embed arbitrary hyperlinks attached to icons, images, or text, or anything. Has anyone else seen Intermedia’s capabilities wrt this?

Intermedia was a hypertext project from Brown University. It was developed from 1985 to 1991 and ran on A/UX, a Unix-like operating system for early Macintosh computers.

The idea of a “general-purpose procedural graphics language” did eventually catch on. Modern browsers support both SVG (declarative markup with embedded scripting) and <canvas> (procedural direct-mode graphics API), although the latter started as a proprietary extension before being “retro-specced” by the WHATWG.

Bill Janssen replied:

Other systems to look at which have this (fairly valuable) notion are Andrew and Slate. Andrew is built with _insets_, each of which has some interesting type, such as text, bitmap, drawing, animation, message, spreadsheet, etc. The notion of arbitrary recursive embedding is present, so that an inset of any kind can be embedded in any other kind which supports embedding. For example, an inset can be embedded at any point in the text of the text widget, or in any rectangular area in the drawing widget, or in any cell of the spreadsheet.

“Andrew” is a reference to the Andrew User Interface System (although at that time it was simply known as the Andrew Project).

Meanwhile, Thomas Fine had a different idea:

Here’s my opinion. The best way to do images in WWW is by using MIME. I’m sure postscript is already a supported subtype in MIME, and it deals very nicely with mixing text and graphics.

But it isn’t clickable, you say? Yes your right. I suspect there is already an answer to this in display postscript. Even if there isn’t the addition to standard postscript is trivial. Define an anchor command which specifies the URL and uses the current path as a closed region for the button. Since postscript deals so well with paths, this makes arbitrary button shapes trivial.

Display Postscript was an on-screen rendering technology co-developed by Adobe and NeXT.

This proposal was never implemented, but the idea that the best way to fix HTML is to replace it with something else altogether still pops up from time to time.

Tim Berners-Lee, March 2, 1993:

HTTP2 allows a document to contain any type which the user has said he can handle, not just registered MIME types. So one can experiment. Yes I think there is a case for postscript with hypertext. I don’t know whether display postcript has enough. I know Adobe are trying to establish their own postscript-based “PDF” which will have links, and be readable by their proprietory brand of viewers.

I thought that a generic overlaying language for anchors (Hytime based?) would allow the hypertext and the graphics/video standards to evolve separately, which would help both.

Let the IMG tag be INCLUDE and let it refer to an arbitrary document type. Or EMBED if INCLUDE sounds like a cpp include which people will expect to provide SGML source code to be parsed inline — not what was intended.

HyTime was an early, SGML-based hypertext document system. It loomed large in many early discussions of HTML, and later XML.

Tim’s proposal for an <INCLUDE> tag was never implemented, although you can see echoes of it in <object>, <embed>, and the <iframe> element.

Finally, on March 12, 1993, Marc Andreessen revisited the thread:

Back to the inlined image thread again — I’m getting close to releasing Mosaic v0.10, which will support inlined GIF and XBM images/bitmaps, as mentioned previously. …

We’re not prepared to support INCLUDE/EMBED at this point. … So we’re probably going to go with <IMG SRC="url"> (not ICON, since not all inlined images can be meaningfully called icons). For the time being, inlined images won’t be explicitly content-type’d; down the road, we plan to support that (along with the general adaptation of MIME). Actually, the image reading routines we’re currently using figure out the image format on the fly, so the filename extension won’t even be significant.

I don’t really know why I wrote this. It wasn’t what I set out to write. That happens. But I am extraordinarily fascinated with all aspects of this almost-17-year-old conversation. Consider:

• HTTP still exists. HTTP successfully evolved from 0.9 into 1.0 and later 1.1. And still it evolves.
• HTML still exists. That rudimentary data format — it didn’t even support inline images! — successfully evolved into 2.0, 3.2, 4.0. And still it, too, evolves. HTML is an unbroken line. A twisted, knotted, snarled line, to be sure. There were plenty of “dead branches” in the evolutionary tree, places where standards-minded people got ahead of themselves (and ahead of authors and implementors). But still. Here we are, in 2009, and web pages from 1990 still render in modern browsers. I just loaded one up on my Android phone, and I didn’t even get prompted to “please wait while importing legacy format…”
• HTML has always been a conversation between browser makers, authors, standards wonks, and other people who just showed up and liked to talk about angle brackets. Most of the successful versions of HTML have been “retro-specs,” catching up to the world while simultaneously trying to nudge it in the right direction. Anyone who tells you that HTML should be kept “pure” (presumably by ignoring browser makers, or ignoring authors, or both) is simply misinformed. HTML has never been pure, and all attempts to purify it have been spectacular failures, matched only by the attempts to replace it.
• None of the browsers from 1993 still exist in any recognizable form, although if you squint hard enough, you can trace the lineage of X Mosaic all the way to modern-day Firefox. The dominant browser on the web today had its humble “beginnings” in “Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95,” where it was bundled with some desktop themes and a pinball game (but of course that browser can be traced back further too).
• Some of the operating systems from 1993 still exist, but none of them are relevant to the modern web. Most people today who “experience” the web do so on a PC running Windows 2000 or later, a Mac running Mac OS X, a PC running some flavor of Linux, or a handheld device like an iPhone. In 1993, Windows was at version 3.1 (and competing with OS/2), Macs were running System 7, and Linux was distributed via Usenet. (Want to have some fun? Find a graybeard and whisper “Trumpet Winsock” or “MacPPP.”)
• Some of the same people are still around and still involved in what we now simply call “web standards.” That’s after almost 20 years. And some were involved in predecessors of HTML, going back into the 1980s and before.
• Speaking of predecessors… With the eventual popularity of HTML and the web, it is easy to forget the contemporary formats and systems that informed its design. Andrew? Intermedia? HyTime? And HyTime was not some rinky-dink academic research project; it was an ISO standard. It was approved for military use. It was Big Business. And you can read about it yourself… on this HTML page, in your web browser.

But none of this answers the original question: why do we have an <img> element? Why not an <icon> element? Or an <include> element? Why not a hyperlink with an include attribute, or some combination of rel values? Why an <img> element? Quite simply, because Marc Andreessen shipped one, and shipping code wins.

That’s not to say that all shipping code wins; after all, Andrew and Intermedia and HyTime shipped code too. Code is necessary but not sufficient for success. And I certainly don’t mean to say that shipping code before a standard will produce the best solution. Marc’s <img> element didn’t mandate a common graphics format; it didn’t define how text flowed around it; didn’t support text alternatives or fallback content for older browsers. And 16, almost 17 years later, we’re still struggling with content sniffing, and it’s still a source of crazy security vulnerabilities. And you can trace that all the way back, 17 years, through the Great Browser Wars, all the way back to February 25, 1993, when Marc Andreessen offhandedly remarked, “MIME, someday, maybe,” and then shipped his code anyway.

The ones that win are the ones that ship.

Monday, 2 November 2009

Joshua Topolsky, writing for Engadget, gives the Droid a very positive review overall. But regarding something I’d been wondering about, here’s what he writes about multi-touch:

As you have probably heard (or guessed), there’s no multitouch on this device. That’s clearly an issue with Android 2.0 and choices that Google is making about user interface — we’re fairly certain there’s nothing technically holding back the DROID from utilizing multitouch input, and we wouldn’t be surprised to see some tweaked ROMs hit the information superhighway with the functionality onboard. […]

Note: Android 2.0 does support multitouch events, but the functionality isn’t implemented here.

I, alas, don’t have a Droid in hand, but my understanding of the multi-touch situation is as follows. First, “multi-touch” is too general a term. What Topolsky means in his italicized note is that the Android 2.0 OS does have APIs to track multiple simultaneous touch events. Game developers, for example, should be able to write “multi-touch” games equivalent to those on the iPhone. This was not possible with early versions of Android.

So from an API perspective, Android 2.0 allows developers to “see” multiple touch events, but, from a UI perspective, Android 2.0 does not use pinching as a standard gesture.

The big multi-touch gesture that Apple uses in the iPhone is pinching — in particular, pinch-to-zoom. You pinch to zoom in MobileSafari. You pinch to zoom photos. You pinch to zoom maps.

There is no pinching on a Droid running Android 2.0. As for why, my somewhat-informed best guess is that it is related to Apple’s patent applications for the pinch-to-zoom gesture. If so, this stinks.

It’s not like no one else has implemented pinch-to-zoom, though: Palm uses it in WebOS, pretty much just like in the iPhone OS. It’s such an unbelievably useful, convenient, obvious, natural gesture, it’s hard for me to imagine using a handheld device without it.

And then adding to the intrigue, today came this demo video from Eldar Murtazin of Mobile Review, showing the Motorola Milestone, the GSM version of the Droid which will purportedly go on sale in Europe later this month.¹ As noted by Chris Davies at Slash Gear, the demo clearly shows support for pinch-to-zoom in both the Photos app (around the 3:00 mark) and web browser (around the 5:45 mark). In both cases, pinch-zooming on the Milestone seems very jerky — the zooming seems to happen all at once after the pinch gesture stops, very much unlike on the iPhone, where zooming smoothly animates live, as you pinch. My sources suggest that this is a Motorola customization, not code from Google. (Likewise for multi-touch gestures supported by HTC Android phones.)

So it would appear that Palm is willing to risk a lawsuit with Apple over this, and Google is not. The situation certainly brings to mind a gesture of some sort.

The industry is abuzz over the Motorola Droid, the first Google Android 2.0-based smartphone, to be released on Friday, Nov. 6, in the United States, with network access provided by Verizon Wireless. But users who buy the device and expect to use its built-in Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync support to get corporate e-mail from Exchange servers will have to pay an additional $15 per month for the privilege, Verizon confirms.

[ Learn which smartphones support your business's Exchange security and access policies. | Get the InfoWorld editors' 21-page PDF guide to next-gen smartphones. ]

Verizon offers three data plans for Droid customers: $30 month on top of your voice plan's rate for non-Exchange usage, $45 per month on top of your voice plan's rate for Exchange usage, and $50 per month total cost for a data-only plan (whether or not you use it to access Exchange). Verizon spokeswoman Brenda Raney notes that the requirement to get the $45 "smartphone plan" for corporate e-mail usage applies to any smartphone, such as the BlackBerry -- not just to the Droid. "The Droid is primarily a consumer phone," Raney adds.

That pricing contrasts with AT&T's $30 monthly data plan (on top of your voice plan's rates) for the Apple iPhone and Research in Motion BlackBerry, the two most popular business-class smartphones; AT&T offers a $35-per-month data-only plan for the BlackBerry, but has no such plan for the iPhone. However, AT&T's business data plans charge $45 per month if the smartphones are used to access corporate e-mail or servers.

Sprint doesn't break out its data plans' costs for the Palm Pre and BlackBerry, but its smartphone plans cost the same as AT&T's, with a $30-per-month difference in charges for its voice-only phones' plans and its data-capable phones' plans. Like Verizon, Sprint offers a data-only plan for these devices for $50 per month.

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Adobe has set up its "Adobe Opens Up" website to promote the use of Adobe technologies to achieve the goal of "opening up Washington," as well as highlighting ways in which federal, state, and local governments have implemented these technologies. While we agree that making information available in common formats, like PDF, is one helpful piece of this puzzle, we can't help but notice how the entire site—designed in Flash—is practically inaccessible.

After just a cursory browsing, here are some of the usability and data accessibility issues we observed. You can't select, copy, or paste any text. Your browser's font override features won't work, so you can't adjust the font or its size to be more readable. Your browser's built-in in-page search won't work, and you can't use the keyboard to scroll through the text. You can't parse or scrape the data in any way; the design is fixed-width, so it's not going to work well on different screen sizes; and browser plugins, like Greasemonkey, can't adjust anything. Basically when it comes to text at all, if you don't like the style or are visually impaired, you're screwed.

Sunlight Labs, a nonprofit, nonpartisan Washington, DC based organization focused on digitization of government data and making tools and websites to make it easily accessible, similarly feels that technologies like Flash and PDF—while ubiquitous and useful—do not intrinsically make government more open. In particular, the group is critical of the fact that data in PDF format is not easily parsable into other useful forms.

PDFs are great for presenting data and information in a particular format, and the format is a useful tool for getting that formatted version to the public. Anyone who has tried to copy and paste more than one line of text from a PDF, though, has likely experienced the issues that can happen—unrelated text from sidebars or the margins often ends up inline, requiring custom editing. As one example to illustrate the problem further, Sunlight Labs recently had to write custom software to parse a 1,018 page healthcare reform bill (H.R. 3200 "America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009") that was provided to the public only in PDF format. Without this parsing, any analysis of the text would need to be done by hand.

Further, we note the irony of the fact that the bill Sunlight Labs was attempting to analyze is actually stored internally in XML format, but only offered to the public in PDF form. XML is easily converted to a formatted PDF, which is what the House did to generate the PDF that it made available. Going the other direction—from formatted PDF to structured, machine-readable data—is a much harder, and sometimes insurmountable, task. It's also worth noting that XML is also easily transformed to other structured formats, like HTML.

Wrapping all publicly accessible information in proprietary formats is neither a good nor complete solution. Providing documents in PDF form, or augmenting a website with additional Flash content is certainly useful. However, the goal of open government would be better served using open standards, like HTML, XML, JSON, ODF, and other formats that are both accessible and machine-readable. Doing so ensures that public information truly remains usable by the public.

Here at the Sunlight Foundation, we spend a lot of time with Adobe's products-- mainly trying to reverse the damage that these technologies create when government discloses information. The PDF file format, for instance, isn't particularly easily parsed. As ubiquitous as a PDF file is, often times they're non-parsable by software, unfindable by search engines, and unreliable if text is extracted.

Take, for instance, H.R. 3200-- otherwise known as "America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009", a 1017 page healthcare bill from congress. Because it is primarily published in PDF, we've got to build a special parser for it-- that bill-- in order to represent it programatically. Or Carl Malamud's IRS filings for 527 (stealth PAC) organizations: gigabytes of PDF files, all released by government. Government releasing data in PDF tends to be catastrophic for Open Government advocates, journalists and our readers because of the amount of overhead it takes to get data out of it. When a government agency publishes its data and documents as PDFs, it makes us Open Government advocates and developers cringe, tear our hair out, and swear a little (just a little). Most earmark requests by members of congress are published as PDF files of scanned letters, leading the Sunlight Foundation and others to write custom parsers for each letter.

Yet, for some reason, Adobe feels they're essential to the new administration's mission of transparent and open government. I on the other hand feel like picketing the event they're having next week to sell their wares (hey hey! ho ho! your-binary-low-parsable-formats-for-government-data has got to go!) because in fact, they're quite the opposite. Here at Sunlight we want the government to STOP publishing bills, and data in PDFs and Flash and start publish them in open, machine readable formats like XML and XSLT. What's most frustrating is, Government seems to transform documents that are in XML into PDF to release them to the public, thinking that that's a good thing for citizens. Government: We can turn XML into PDFs. We can't turn PDFs into XML.

Flash isn't off the hook either. Government has spent lots of time and money developing flash tools to allow citizens to view charts and graphs online, and while we're happy the government is interested in allowing citizens to do this, Government's primary method of disclosure should not be these visualizations, but rather publishing the APIs and datasets that allow citizens to make their own. Only after those things are completed to the fullest extent possible should government be working on its own visualizations. While Adobe may say in their open government whitepaper:

"Since the advent of the web, an entire infrastructure has evolved to enable public access to information. Such technologies include HTML, Adobe PDF, and Adobe® Flash® technology."

This is nonsense. The fact is, sticking to open, standards based technologies like HTML, XML, JSON and others are far more important and useful in getting your information out to the public than the proprietary formats of Adobe. Here's a hint-- if the data format has an ® by its name, it probably isn't great for transparency or open data.

So don't get me wrong-- I appreciate just like the next guy that I can download a nice PDF file of an IRS form, print it out, and send it in. I think that members of congress publishing their "Dear Colleague" letters with accuracy is great and important, and I think the pie charts on the IT dashboard are really neat. But when it comes down to it, these technologies aren't helping to fully open our government. They have their place, but in terms of transparency and openness, I'm afraid they do more harm than good. Relying on them only yields frustration from the people who use the data government publishes the most, and they should be considered a bell or a whistle on top of the foundation that an agency should do to be fully transparent: putting data online, obeying the 8 principles of Open Data to the fullest extent.

Update (3:10pm): At the strong urging of our Policy Director, I'll add this caveat: any time Government decides to release data to the public, we're glad that government has taken a step forward. But the PDF file format, especially when it comes to data, and large documents like bills, is something that government should strongly consider open, machine readable, parsable alternatives to. There are plenty, and we're happy to help find them for you.

Update (3:20pm): PJ Doland has the right answer. PDF by itself is insufficient. So is Flash. But what makes PDF in particular bad is that more often than not, you can turn XML into a human readable PDF. But you can't turn PDF into a machine readable XML/JSON/whatever file.

Other stuff: We initially opted for 3.1 because API methods related to saving videos were not available on 3.0. This meant that videos taken within the app would be permanently lost in the event of a flaky/slow internet connection. This happened to us enough in testing that we felt it wasn’t a risk we wanted to expose to our users.

That said, Will, the maestro of our iPhone app, deftly crafted a solution for this problem. The result is what you see in the app store today! Will also says that there will be plenty of bug fixes to come in the future, as well as a huge feature push when 1.5 arrives. Please feel free to let us know in the forums how the app is working out for you!

PS. I know we’ve had some heartache in the past, but to those of you who rated us down for not having 3.0 support the first time around… could you maybe find it in your hearts to give us another chance? We’ve changed, we promise! This time we’ll be good!

Our part of this open ecosystem is Ibis Reader, an in-development digital reading system for a range of internet devices that provides access to books both online and offline. Like Bookworm, it provides ePub support and a traditional web interface. But I’m really excited about its unique features:

1. A total commitment to giving readers what they want.
2. For platforms that support it, HTML5 offline storage. This means that when you’re not connected, your library is still available. Other web-enabled devices will also work but must be online (Google Gears also supported).
3. A mobile web architecture, allowing new devices running iPhone OS, Android, or Palm webOS to be immediately supported. (And no App Store censorship.)
4. All of the cross-device syncing and bookmarking that customers are coming to expect from multi-platform reading systems. Start reading on your iPhone and pick up where you left off on your computer.
5. A great shopping experience with no DRM. Ibis Reader uses the BookServer ecosystem to help you find, download, and buy books, and none of the books we sell will have DRM. Guaranteed.
6. Ebook portability means that all your DRM-free library can be exported out of the “cloud” and onto any device that supports ePub.
7. For publishers, an attractive revenue split, real-time sales reporting, and help with getting into the BookServer ecology.

We’re not launching for several months, but we’ll be posting updates as we get closer. It was exciting to demo an early version of the reading client at the BookServer event, and it’s only going to get better.

The reason for this omission is the Chinese government's efforts since 2003 - in fits and starts - to promote a proprietary security standard for 802.11 devices called WAPI, which stands, in a cumbersome fashion, for "WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network) Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure."

For the first few years, non-Chinese firms were required to partner with one of a handful of Chinese companies that had access to the WAPI specification, and many of these companies were tied to the Chinese military, which has active control of a number of businesses separate from the rest of government. Foreign firms protested, because they would have had to disclose significant portions of their intellectual property in a country that has a mixed record in honoring patents and trade secrets.

The issue was significant enough that U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell raised WAPI in trade talks in 2004 because if required it would be a bar for U.S. firms to sell Wi-Fi products in the country. The WAPI requirement may also violate World Trade Organization rules, although that hasn't been tested. China attempted to get WAPI approved by standards group ISO, but that effort failed largely because the group representing China wouldn't provide the spec's details - kind of a problem for a proposed standard. China was recently invited to introduce WAPI to ISO once more, although it's hard to see how it has a better chance. (The IEEE 802.11i security standard was accepted instead of WAPI.)

A second concern about WAPI, one that I've raised for years in my writing at Wi-Fi Networking News, is that one must presume that a proprietary standard that hasn't been subjected to full disclosure and outside scrutiny includes backdoors for government access to secured sessions. The Wi-Fi approved WPA/WPA2 (Wi-Fi Protected Access) has no known generic exploits, and can't be deciphered over the air. While WAPI may be completely secure, this can't be determined, nor does that conform with the Chinese government's history of Internet oversight.

There is some suspicion that WAPI's authentication aspect, in which a login would be required to join a network securely, was partly desirable to track users, too. This would eliminate the "problem" of untrackable connections to Wi-Fi hotspots, coupled with security that would prevent local interception.

In the last few years, China hasn't pushed WAPI with the same vigor, and has made noises about backing down. However, its official status appears to still be in place, and other mobile phones in China have WAPI installed. This AP story says that Wi-Fi was banned in China, but it's apparently possible and straightforward to buy Wi-Fi access points without WAPI in China, and Wi-Fi is in wide use.

Because Apple already has its phones manufactured in China, there appears to be wide agreement that future versions of the iPhone will have Wi-Fi with WAPI as an option.

The Associated Press estimates as many as two million unlocked iPhones brought in from other countries are in use in China already, and none of those use WAPI.

Spots – The Wi-Fi Hotspot Directory

Spots helps you locate hotspots around you or anywhere in the world. No internet connection needed, no waiting while your iPhone connects to a website. Using its internal database of 600,000+ locations, Spots offers the results you are looking for immediately. The offline feature makes Spots work perfectly on the iPod Touch.

The database is updated regularly. It contains hotspot locations from multiple providers and a lot of independent access points.

The Stars of Eff You

*Yankees? Cowboys?

Beginning about a week before its launch (largely due to Verizon’s incredibly intense marketing campaign) I began getting calls and tweets from friends and colleagues asking about the Droid. They always had two questions: the first would be something like “What do you think of the Droid?”, followed by “Would you recommend it over the iPhone?” Same questions, each.. and.. every.. time.

I’ve been using the Droid as my primary phone for a few days now, and I think I’m finally ready to answer them.

A bit about the reviewer:

Being that I’m only human, it is absolutely impossible for me to be 100% objective when comparing two phones. Thus, my only option is to be as transparent as possible. Going into this review, I had used an iPhone (which, for disclosures sake, I pay for in full) as my primary device for around 2 years. I also regularly use a Palm Pre, Nokia N97, BlackBerry Tour, T-Mobile G1, and an HTC Touch2 to ensure a general knowledge of all the major platforms. I am an iPhone developer by hobby. This Droid unit was provided by Motorola for review.

The Looks:

Comparing the aesthetics of the iPhone and the Droid is.. ludicrous, if not impossible. It’d be like having a heated argument over whether Angelina Jolie was more or less gorgeous than Halle Berry. Each is stunning for their own reasons. Same deal here; the iPhone is engulfed in glistening curves that give it a softer, friendlier look, while the Droid is wrapped in tight, clean angles that make it a shining example of great industrial design.

If we were to consider the overall designs par-for-par, all we’d have left to nitpick is the details. In the Droid’s case, the gold details on the camera button, 5-way D-Pad, and rear casing lose it some points for looking like something straight out of a bad 70’s bachelor pad. The iPhone then loses its ground for the fact that the glossy back casing is damned near impossible to keep clean and free of fingerprints.

The Winner: It’s a tie. Both are drop dead gorgeous, and the only flaws of each are downright trivial.

On-Screen Keyboards:

In preparation for the onslaught of candybar Touchscreens that were sure to follow after the success of the iPhone, Android earned on-screen keyboard support shortly after the launch of the G1. At first, it.. well, it sucked. A lot.

It has gotten better since, however – on the stock build of Android 2.0 I’ve got running on this Droid, I’m able to blast about at nearly the same rate as I can on my iPhone. That’s impressive for Android’s sake, considering that I’ve spent considerably more time on the iPhone keyboard.

That said, the iPhone’s autocorrect seems a bit better at properly attending to my typos, primarily on shorter words that have more potential alternatives.

The Winner: iPhone, by a very slim margin. It just does a better job at guessing what I’m trying to type as I poke my way around a sea of glass. That said..

Physical Keyboard:

For many, a physical keyboard is a must-have. Every smartphone I had prior to an iPhone had a physical keyboard, and I still prefer a physical keyboard after two years. The Droid has one, and the iPhone doesn’t – so it wins this one by default.

That’s not to say the Droid keyboard is all that great – nor is it terrible. It is decidedly average. The buttons are practically flush with each other, and it’s quite easy to jam down on two buttons at once.

To rank it amongst some of the more well known keyboarded handsets of the past few years: the Droid keyboard is better than that of the G1, Helio Ocean, and the BlackBerry Curve, but not nearly as good as anything from the Danger Sidekick line, the BlackBerry Tour, or the HTC Touch Pro 2.

The Winner: Droid, by default.

The Browser:

On the popular web-standards test known as Acid3, the iPhone scores a 100/100 while the Droid caps out at 93/100. Thus, if we’re going purely by measurable standards here, the iPhone browser wins. That said, we’re not robots – standards schmandards, we like what we like.

With that said, I still prefer the iPhone browser. It tends to render pages pixel perfect (as implied by the Acid3 test results), while the Droid would occasionally fall short. Oddly, it renders pages more accurately when they’re being viewed in landscape mode than in portrait mode. What really sealed the deal, however, was multi-touch in the browser. Once you’ve grown accustomed to pinch-zooming, the level of accuracy provided by tap-zooming alone simply doesn’t cut it.

The iPhone browser is also considerably faster, with page loads completing anywhere from 15-30% more quickly with both handsets on WiFi.

The Winner: iPhone, thanks to multitouch, faster pageloads and web standards compliance.

Navigation:

When it comes to the standard mapping/directions stuff, the two phones are about on par. Turn-by-turn voice navigation is a whole different matter, however.

Out of the box, the iPhone 3GS has Google Maps, which does not currently do turn-by-turn voice navigation. The App Store provides a bunch of solutions for this, ranging from a few bucks a month all the way up to a one-time payment of $99 bucks.

The Droid also has Google Maps, but it’s Google Maps with Navigation – and it really, really rocks. It does nearly everything the iPhone Maps app does, with the addition of toggleable layers (show/hide traffic, satellite views, Wikipedia entries, and transit lines), support for Google’s Latitude location-sharing service and, most notably, completely free turn-by-turn voice navigation. You can also search for locations by voice, something we were surprised was absent when Apple added voice recognition to the iPhone.

Like with the browser, we miss the multi-touch support – but we’d gladly give that up for the free voice navigation.

The Winner: Droid. None of the for-pay apps we’ve used come close to the ease of use and functionality Google provides in their free app.

Lock Screen:

On both the iPhone and the Droid, the lock screen is essentially just that: a screen which shows when your handset is locked. The Droid has one small (but clever) bonus feature thrown in which allows you to quickly silence the handset with a single swipe – but considering that the iPhone has a physical silence switch on the side, this isn’t a defining feature. Out of the box, both handset’s lockscreens are equally meh.

Yet, this is still somewhere the Droid manages to outshine the iPhone, by playing on the open nature of Android. Right within the Android Market, you can download applications which greatly expand the functionality of the lockscreen, such as the widget-based Flyscreen.

You can do similar things on an iPhone – but not without jailbreaking. Considering that Apple wanted to make jailbreaking illegal, it’s hard to consider things that require jailbreaking as fair equivalents to things that come straight from Google’s own catalog.

The Winner: Droid.

Battery Life:

I’ll be honest: I haven’t done a formal battery life test with the Droid. Hell, I’ve never done one with the iPhone, either. That said, I’ve been using both devices equally throughout the day, and they’re both hovering around a 50% charge. This holds true with what I’ve seen for the last few days of testing; the Droid’s battery life is right around par with the iPhone’s. The Droid’s 1400 mAh battery is slightly larger than the iPhone 3GS’ at 1150mAh, but the battery hungry multi-tasking probably cancels that out. Without any formal testing, I’ve got to declare it a tie.

The Winner: Tie (With a slight lean in Droid’s direction as it has a swappable battery – but really, what percentage of the population carries one?)

App Stores:

Google’s got around 10,000 apps in their collection. Apple’s got somewhere around 10x that, with the App Store currently floating right around 100,000 items.

Of course, quantity does not equal quality. As anyone who’s really spent a ton of time in either App Store would agree, the majority of applications in both range from bad to horrible, and their are plenty of gems in both. Both have a great application (and a handful of not so great alternatives) for nearly every common need.

The primary strength of the Android market is its openness. Google has stood quite true to their original promise of allowing anything outside of what was undeniably illegal or malicious. This is something members of the tech industry like to tout about as a killer feature – but in the end, it simply doesn’t matter. The only way to gauge the success of an App Store is to try to view it as an average consumer — you know, the ones spending the most money — would. By and large, the average consumer would not care about any of the things Apple has thus far banned. To make an argument that could go on for many pages very, very short: your grandma does not care about Google Voice.

After spending a lot of time in both stores, I feel that I can honestly say that the selection and overall quality of the App Store is significantly better. Everything we’ve seen and all conversations we’ve had with big development houses indicates that they’re putting much, much more effort in iPhone app development than they are with Android.

The iPhone has a tremendous lead here, both in quantity and quality. In time, as Android handsets flood the market and hopefully do away with the feature phone all together, it may very well catch up – but that’s simply not the case in the foreseeable feature.

Winner: iPhone.

Customization:

The smartphone is the fifth limb we never knew we needed. It goes with us wherever we go, helps us function from day to day, and serves countless purposes. Where as many turn to body art to customize their original limbs to express themselves and claim ownership, many will customize their smartphone for all the same reasons.

Customization on the iPhone is depressingly limited. You can customize wallpaper of the lock screen, change your ringtone, and.. well, that’s it. Want to add your own text alert sound? Nope. E-mail alert sound? Nope. That would be absolutely okay be it that the iPhone was a Nokia from 1998.

The flexibility of Android customization is still somewhat limited, but it at least has the basics covered. You can change e-mail and text alerts, app icons, and your ringtone/wallpaper.

The Winner: Droid

Camera Quality Samples:

Photos on the left are from the iPhone; photos on right are from the Droid. Click through to see bigger samples.

The Winner: Based off these photos alone, we can’t say. We had a hard time getting the Droid to focus, especially in lower light. While the iPhone was focusing just fine, the details kept getting lost.

The Screen:

The iPhone rocks a 3.5″, 480×320 touchscreen display, while the Droid has a 3.7″ 854×480 touchscreen display. While the Droid’s screen isn’t that much bigger, they’ve crammed over 160% more pixels onto that tiny little screen. The result? The Droid screen is absolutely, jaw-droppingly stunning.

Now, no one was complaining that the iPhone’s screen was junk. Given more than 10 seconds from device to device, most people probably wouldn’t even notice a difference. When you’ve got both devices side-by-side, however, the difference is clear. Text is that much clearer; curves just that much curvier.

The Winner: Droid

Interface:

This is a huge point, and one that often goes overlooked in reviews. For the past 10 years, Apple has really only done one thing, over and over: they’ve taken something we thought worked fine, and then simplified the hell out of it while maintaining the feature set. That’s exactly what they did to the idea of the smartphone with the iPhone, and it turned the damned market on its head. Windows Mobile suddenly looks like a hot mess by comparison, and most people would go into shock if they tried to screw with S60.

Even in version 2.0, Android does not match the intuitiveness of the iPhone. If you need to change a setting on the iPhone, you always know where to go: the Settings app. On Android, it can be in one of any number of places.

You can hand an iPhone to a toddler, and they’ll figure out the general gist of things in an instant. (No, really – we’ve done it.) That ease of use is one of the things that makes the iPhone so damned appealing.

The Winner: iPhone

Multi-Tasking:

I can listen to Pandora on the Droid while I peruse around the Facebook App. I can’t on the iPhone. Enough said.

The Winner: Droid

Conclusion:

There are really many, many, many dozens of categories we could dive in to – hell, I’ve got 10 more scratched out in my head alone. But we’d be avoiding an inevitable truth: apples-to-apples, the Droid tends to beat or meet the iPhone. Remote wipe and GPS location? Droid. On-device search? Droid wins. Voice control, contacts, coverage, and call quality? Droid, droid, droid, droid.

Now, back to the two questions we had at the beginning:

Get it? He's on the fence. HAH.

Would I recommend it over the iPhone? Two thousand plus words later, you might be a bit sad to read: Nope. But I wouldn’t recommend the iPhone over the Droid, either – and that’s the Droid’s real win here. This is the very first phone in over two years that I would consider carrying for day-to-day use instead of my iPhone, but that doesn’t mean I would recommend it whole heartedly to everyone.

Each phone platform has such tremendous merits. Androids got better navigation; the iPhone has a better browser. Androids got unbeatable expandability and flexibility; the iPhone OS is mind-numbingly easy to use and the rate of growth and drive behind the App Store is simply explosive.

With Android 2.0, we’ve come to a very difficult crossroad. No longer can we recommend one handset over the other simply by its feature set. At this point, it’s all about the person who will be carrying it. For you, dearest TechCrunch Network reader: Yes, I’d probably recommend the Droid over an iPhone. Would I recommend it for your mother, father, or little sister? Nope. If you want a phone that just works and does damned near everything you could want and don’t mind Apple’s closed garden: by all means, get the iPhone. If you can handle a bit of complexity for the sake of flexibility and don’t mind having to tinker a bit: by all means, get the Droid. At this point, I honestly feel that either choice would make any sane person incredibly happy.

With the DROID, the company has perhaps created its most attractive and intriguing piece of technology yet. Forging an alliance with both Verizon and Google, Motorola has come up with a second compelling reason to count the phonemaker down, but certainly not out, while the other two giants have finally found a seemingly worthy device to position against the iPhone. So we must pose these questions: is this the phone which will catapult Android into the mainstream? Is it the device that will pull Motorola back from the brink? And -- most importantly -- is it the lynchpin Google and Verizon have needed to challenge the leader in mindshare in the smartphone market? After putting the device through its paces, we think we can give you the answers you seek -- so read on to find out!

Hardware

The DROID is an odd and beautiful device. Looking at the hardware from a purely philosophical standpoint, the ID of the phone seems staunchly defiant. Instead of taking its cues (and lines) from current contenders in the smartphone space, the DROID is all hard edges and angular slopes. The construction is a mix of plastic and metal, and the phone has a solid, expensive heft to it. Couple that weight with soft touch materials and gold highlights, and the effect is somewhere halfway between a Vertu device and the European version of the Hero -- and it's a good mix.

The basic structure of the phone is made up of two main pieces, the large, glass display up top, and the slightly longer keyboard / mainboard lower half. Above, the 3.7-inch screen dominates, almost filling the space edge-to-edge, though there are four capacitive buttons at the bottom of the display: back, menu, home, and search (which might be tricky for folks coming from other Android devices, since they've thrown the order of the buttons in the blender). The top section slides smoothly upwards to reveal the aforementioned QWERTY keyboard, though unlike other models of this ilk, it doesn't snap automatically into place; rather, it requires a bit of force to move up, then clicks firmly once settled. The keyboard is a wide (though mostly flush) affair, with minimal amount of spacing between the keys. To the right of the four row QWERTY is a 5-way rocker -- a bizarre deviation from the CLIQ's left-sided controls -- and the bottom piece has a strip which juts out from the device with a small mic hole (closed or open). It's almost like Motorola's version of the HTC chin... though tempered somewhat. Atop the phone is a 3.5mm headphone jack and a power / sleep button; along the right edge is a volume rocker, and camera button on opposite ends; the left side houses a MicroUSB port; around back the 5 megapixel camera (and flash) are revealed, along with a thin, gold, crosshatch strip that hides the DROID's speaker.

The thickness of the DROID is striking, coming in at just a hair (13.7mm vs 12.33mm) thicker than the iPhone 3GS. The body itself is actually narrower than the iPhone. While thinness is important (though typically not a deal breaker for us), the fact that the phone packs a larger, higher resolution screen and a physical keyboard in such a small frame is notable.

In all, Motorola has pulled off what seemed unimaginable for them just 12 months ago; they've made a device which is truly lustworthy, even next to the best efforts of Apple, HTC, and Palm.

Internals

Inside the DROID beats an Arm Cortex A8 CPU (a 600MHz, OMAP3430 chip downclocked to 550MHz), 256MB of RAM, and 512MB of ROM. If that CPU sounds familiar, it should -- it's similar to the chip inside the iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre. If you're wondering about performance, you can breathe a sigh of relief... kind of. Yes, there is a noticeable bump in speed when switching applications on the phone, scrolling through lists, and generally getting any basic tasks done. We did notice, however, that paging through homescreens on the DROID actually seemed somewhat stuttery; odd, considering this phone is certainly better equipped than most Android devices to handle pixel pushing. Pulling down the window shade notification area also seemed less than optimal. We don't know if this was due to the screen resolution being jacked up, or just a software quirk, but it was mildly disheartening -- especially considering that the rest of the phone's performance seemed extra snappy to us. As an aside, in a totally unscientific test of playing a 3D game (Mystique, in case you're wondering) the rendering seemed considerably smoother on the DROID than with other, older Android-based phones we've used.

Throughout our tests, we were consistently impressed with the tightness and speed of navigation on the phone. The DROID makes Android feel modern the way the iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre are -- like machines designed for a pace of life that's increasingly more Twitter and less USPS.

Display

As we mentioned, the screen on the DROID is a 3.7-inch capacitive touchscreen -- a full glass display with a WVGA resolution clocking in at a handsome 480 x 854. We found the responsiveness on the DROID to be on par (if not better) than most of its Android contemporaries; gestures and flicks registered with little to no lag. Whether that can be attributed to Moto's screen technology, Android 2.0 improvements, or just the speedy CPU inside the DROID is anyone's guess, but we certainly won't knock the phone for it. Another perk to having that big screen is seeing webpages how they're meant to be viewed (or at least closer), and browsing on the DROID is a solid experience. Those additional pixels definitely come in handy when you're looking at something graphically intensive or wordy... such as Engadget.

As you have probably heard (or guessed), there's no multitouch on this device. That's clearly an issue with Android 2.0 and choices that Google is making about user interface -- we're fairly certain there's nothing technically holding back the DROID from utilizing multitouch input, and we wouldn't be surprised to see some tweaked ROMs hit the information superhighway with the functionality onboard. Regardless, the resolution, materials, and clarity of the DROID display make it an absolute pleasure to keep your eyes on. Motorola gets a +1 for the bump in resolution, and we can only hope everyone else follows suit.

Note: Android 2.0 does support multitouch events, but the functionality isn't implemented here.

Keyboard

A physical keyboard can be a blessing or a curse, depending on just how well (or poorly) it performs. In the case of Android devices, QWERTYs have definitely been hit or miss. We think the closest case for comparison with the DROID's version would be the G1; both have shallow, clicky keys, and both force your right hand into a bit of an awkward position. On the G1, it's due to the placement of the "chin," and with the DROID, it's all down to the five-way rocker living next to the 'board itself. We're happy to report, however, that after a short adjustment period, typing on the DROID is a reasonable experience. It's not as slick or comfortable as a nice, portrait-oriented Tour or (better yet) Bold layout, though it bests the CLIQ, and holds its own against other landscape contenders like the Moment.

Visually, the keyboard is an easier read (and more aesthetically pleasing) than those other QWERTY phones too, though sometimes the keys can feel a bit cramped. Additionally, we had major issues with the auto-dimming on the DROID. If we left the screen in auto brightness mode, the constant on / off dimming of the keyboard was intolerable; eventually we had to just switch the auto dim off altogether. We also had issues with the keyboard not lighting up at all in some instances, requiring us to close and open the pad again. Not a huge deal, but annoying when you're trying to quickly tap out a message. Admittedly, we missed the CLIQ's two-stage keyboard backlighting that only enabled the second light when ALT was pressed, but it's a luxury we can do without.

As you would expect, Android 2.0 includes the onscreen keyboard as well, but there don't seem to be many improvements in this area. As a backup keyboard for quick SMSs and the like, it works, though we eventually had to replace it with the Better Keyboard application -- which we think is more usable and snappier. In comparison to the iPhone keyboard (really the high bar for virtual keys) Android continues to feel like a distant second. Still, you won't go to it that much -- the DROID's physical keyboard is solid, but it's going to take some getting used to for most people.

Camera

Google has made some pretty major changes to the camera application in Android 2.0 (including more control over white balance, focal length, flash settings, and effects), and Motorola has smartly outfitted the DROID with a 5 megapixel camera coupled with an LED flash. It sounds like a match made in heaven, right? Well, not quite.

While the camera certainly seems capable of taking great looking photos, getting everything to play nice isn't as easy as it should be. First off, the camera is painfully slow to focus and snap pictures -- and when it does, the results can be unpredictable. Strangely, the lens seems to be able to take pretty sharp macro photos (it's even a setting in the camera app), but it struggled with getting adjusted to close subjects, even in broad daylight. Sometimes we got lucky and cranked out a decent pic, but the process was frustrating. Furthermore, the new settings Google has added to 2.0 are contained in a hard to get to and counterintuitive menu which sits to the left of your viewing area. Trying to make changes on the fly was a hassle. If this is the best the engineers at Google can do, they need to outsource this work.

Video, on the other hand, was somewhat of a pleasant surprise. The DROID is capable of shooting at a 720 x 480 resolution, and in our tests, produced watchable -- if not totally shake-free -- video. The phone definitely fares better in this department than with stills, and we could easily see using the DROID as a stand-in for a flip cam. You can check out a little of the action in the video below (with a surprise cameo from !!!'s Nic Offer).

Speaker / earpiece

The sound on the DROID is second to none -- really. In fact, this is simply one of the best sounding devices we've ever used. Whether it's audio through the loud (but undistorted) earpiece, or a speakerphone call -- even music -- the sound which Motorola's device outputs is crystal clear. Now, obviously Verizon's reception has something to do with our in-call sound, but it's likely Moto put some thought into the aural aspect of the phone. There's not really much to say except that we were more than pleased with the audio fidelity of the DROID, and we can only hope that future phone makers (ahem, Apple) look to this device as a high water mark in this department.

Software

Besides the introduction of the phone itself, obviously 2.0 is a major update for Android. Based on the launch and hype surrounding Moto's device, we'd say it's fair to assume that Google wanted as many eyes on the achievement as possible. They definitely got it with the DROID -- but was it worth all the fuss?

The first thing you should know is that Android 2.0 isn't drastically different than 1.5 or 1.6, save for a few notable features and tweaks that have significant impact. True to form, Google hasn't gone for visual flair or wild embellishments for the sake of a few dropped jaws; most of these changes are about functionality and usability.

One of the first major changes Google has made is support for multiple Gmail or Exchange accounts, and a new universal inbox which allows you to get a look at your electronic correspondences in a single view. For BlackBerry users, this concept is old hat, but for most people with multiple accounts, it should feel like manna from heaven. We would have been slightly more stoked about the feature if it allowed you to look at both Gmail and POP / IMAP / Exchange accounts in one field. Instead, you can view your Gmail accounts separately (not in a single stream, but in one place), and your other accounts can be blended in the "Combined Inbox" view. Not exactly a perfect implementation for those of us with both Exchange and Google accounts, but certainly a solution light years beyond what previous versions of Android were offering. Another minor niggle: deleting an email now takes you to the next email in your inbox rather than bumping you back out to the list of emails, as it did in 1.5 and 1.6. We preferred the old functionality, though we imagine some will prefer the new as well.

We loved being able to keep a few of our accounts in the phone, but we ran into a weird and annoying issue when attempting to remove one of them. We were using the DROID with two Gmail accounts active, but when we tried to remove the second one we'd added (note: not the account we used for our contacts or calendars) the device informed us that we would need to factory reset the phone because that account was "required" for certain applications. Try as we might, we couldn't find a way around the problem, and we eventually did reset the device. The behavior was strange to say the least, especially since it was a barely-used, secondary account -- not a daily use address which tied into services.

As you may have heard, Facebook account integration is now built into 2.0, and there should be more of that coming, as Google has created "sync adapters" which allow third parties to plug into the contact and calendars of your phone. Mercifully, Google has figure out that you might not want your Facebook contacts in your address book, and gives you the option to turn off contact syncing (as it does with Exchange and Gmail accounts). You're also given the option to sync contacts, but keep certain sets from displaying in your contacts list; this variation is best demonstrated with Facebook integration, because it merges duplicate names and pulls the accompanying images, but doesn't clutter up your Gmail contacts with additional names. Beyond that, the pairing doesn't go tremendously deep, even though we're told Facebook had a hand in this version of the OS as well. Really, you get a widget for your homescreen which auto-updates, and that contact integration if you really want it. This is obviously just the tip of the iceberg for this kind of... er, synergy, and we expect to see lots of people taking advantage of the feature (hello, Twitter). Regardless, it's a forward thinking move that will clearly obviate the need for some of the functionality built into BLUR, and makes the DROID (and other 2.0 phones) competitive against the Pre and Pixi when it comes to social networking integration.

Speaking of contacts, Google has made some big and thoughtful changes to how contacts are handled (and used) in Android 2.0, most notably adding a "Quick Contact" menu to your contact list. The quick contact function allows you to tap on someone's name and get a context menu with jumps to the various ways you can reach out; if you're friends with someone on Facebook, you'll be given an option to message them there, along with SMS, phone, and email choices. It's a brilliant little touch that makes quickly pinging someone a cinch. Android 2.0 also improves the SMS and MMS experience by giving you the option to search your messages, and also allowing you to set a limit on how many SMSs to store before beginning to delete old threads. It's not groundbreaking stuff, but nice choices to have (finally).

You'll notice some major changes within the browser, most notably the fact that when you load up pages now, you're presented with a fully zoomed-out "overview" (much like the iPhone and Pre). If you've been griping about that weird, half-zoom that Android has relied on for so long (as we have), this is a breath of fresh air. Coupled with the DROID's massive display, it makes navigating pages roughly a million times more pleasant. The updated browser also now supports double-taps to zoom (as does Google Maps) -- making navigation a bit more natural -- though we noticed some weird column display issues on our site and others. As we mentioned before, there's still no multitouch, but this does stand in quite well for pinch zooming. While the overall browser speed still isn't as snappy as the iPhone 3GS (or even the Pre), it's a step up from previous efforts, and when you factor in little touches like auto-prediction on URL entry, it's eminently usable.

As we said, most of the alterations are under the hood -- not stuff that immediately jumps out at you, though there are some notable visual tweaks which bear mentioning. Google has added some new fades and cross-application animations into 2.0 which makes Android seem a bit more contemporary. Of course, older iterations of Android contained animations, but 2.0 seems far more polished to our eyes. Additionally, icons and elements have been updated across the board to give the OS a more modern look, sadly there is much of this UI and its applications that remain unchanged -- and not for the better.

A few of the obvious spots include the music player, which is quite frankly a mess; not only is the navigation poorly thought out, but the application is just straight-up ugly. It's not easy on the eyes, and not much fun to use either. The same goes for the phone app -- the remnants of a hastily thrown together interface are plain here, and the functionality of the phone itself gave us some issues. Often the screen was confused or unresponsive during calls, as if the hardware and software weren't communicating with each other properly. It seems obvious to us that some portions of Android need a serious, ground-up reworking... but they don't get them here. Another annoyance was the home screen -- unlike with HTC's tweaks (or even Motorola's BLUR), you only get three screens for icons and widgets. Furthermore, the DROID doesn't come equipped with even the most basic widgets you see in most new builds, like weather. The weird thing is that there is a weather app in the dock display, but no way to access the application in standard phone mode.

Additionally, some third-party (and even some first-party) software seems unable to deal with the DROID's new resolution. There are bitmaps that look upscaled and jagged, such as the attachment icon in Gmail. The game Robo Defense seemed to play slower than it did on the Hero, which was a bit of a surprise, though it has been updated to support the new resolution. None of these problems are show stoppers, but it points to a disconnect between where Google is at versus its developers. There is catch-up to be played.

Also notable (and perhaps a selling point for some) is that the DROID is a Google Experience device, which should theoretically mean that it's more likely to receive fast and frequent software updates than its skinned cousins like the CLIQ. The Google Experience is sort of the "gold standard" Android showcase for the company, so to speak, and it's in Google's best interest to keep it rock solid at all times -- and since there's no third-party skin to revalidate after every Android version is released, the update process should go a heck of a lot smoother.

One thing to keep in mind: when it comes to media syncing, you're in the same boat you were for previous versions of Android -- which means sideloading or additional desktop apps. doubleTwist has just introduced DROID compatibility, though the experience leaves much to be desired. In fact, after our tests, we'd say you're better off just mounting that SD card and dragging your content over.

Navigation

One of the biggest pieces of news (perhaps the biggest) to come out of the DROID launch was the introduction of dedicated, fully realized turn-by-turn navigation which integrates with Google Maps. The DROID makes further use of this functionality by switching into a nav mode when snapped into a dock (you can also enter the application normally, sans dock). Google has gone all out on this, providing a rich mixture of its satellite, map, traffic, and location info with text-to-speech directions. Of course, the big G takes it one step further and adds layers like parking info, ATM spots, restaurants, and gas station locations (amongst others) to the stew, making the navigation more robust than many dedicated PNDs -- which would explain that nasty drop in Garmin and TomTom stock we saw yesterday.

In our tests, the nav worked excellently for the most part, though as you can see in the video above, we did run into some minor issues on our hunt for cannoli. It's not uncommon for a GPS unit to send you the wrong way down a one way street, and maybe it was just unlucky coincidence that it happened on our first outing, but being told to turn left where you can't -- then being sent in a loop -- doesn't fill us with warm, fuzzy sensations. Still, the navigation is super intuitive and cleanly laid out, and even if there were major issues (which there really aren't), it's hard to knock a service that is completely free. We think a little more time and some longer trips will help put it in better perspective, but we like what we've seen so far.

Accessories

The DROID will get a few nifty extras when it launches, most notably a dock for setting your phone on a nightstand (or appropriate flat surface), and a car mount for using the device as a proper GPS unit. Both are notable because they use sensors to alter the DROID's functionality. The dock turns the DROID into something that looks not entirely dissimilar from Verizon's now defunct Hub, while the car mount just boots the phone into nav mode. Both are nice touches, and you'll want the car mount if you plan on taking Google up on that offer of free satnav.

Battery life

We haven't had a lot of time to put the DROID through its paces when it comes to battery life, but at a glance it seems to be holding its own against the current crop of 3G devices -- impressive considering it's only packing a 1400mAh battery behind that extremely sexy door. Paul Miller, who has been concurrently testing the phone, claims he had 24 hours of on and off usage before requiring a recharge (syncing, but no major phone calls or lots of screen time). In general, you won't be blown away by the DROID's staying power, but it doesn't deviate in any wild ways which should make you take pause. It's solid, not breathtaking, and it seems better than the CLIQ, which -- despite using the same battery -- typically manages to just barely eke through a day's worth of typical use.

Wrap-up

It will be difficult for casual observers not to see the DROID as a kind of anti-iPhone in Verizon's arsenal. Certainly the company has played up the comparison with its "DROID does" ad campaign, and it's no secret that Verizon and Apple have previously had some friction -- the V famously passed on the first-generation iPhone, after all. Of course, it's easy to draw parallels between the two devices; as with most current smartphones, they share a tremendous number of similarities, though there is plenty that set the two apart as well. And that's really kind of the point -- it's useless to look at devices like this in black and white, or to try and figure out if an Android device on Verizon is better than an Apple device on AT&T (or any other device on any other carrier, for that matter). What it ultimately comes down to when judging this kind of device is more complicated than a "yes" or "no" answer.

If you must compare the DROID to the iPhone, then know that the Android platform still has a ways to go before the experience of using the phone is as seamless as the one Apple has created -- but also know that Apple has a long way to go before its messaging, email, and customization can match what Google is offering. Both products have very distinct strengths and weaknesses.

So, is the DROID a good smartphone? Yes, the DROID is an excellent smartphone with many (if not all) of the features that a modern user would expect, and if you're a Verizon customer, there probably isn't a more action packed device on the network. That's not to say the device doesn't have its faults; the camera was unpleasant to use, the application selection feels thin in both quantity and quality (despite the claim of 10,000 options), and the phone has bits of basic, non-intuitive functionality that might chafe on some users after a while. But even still, it's hard not to recommend the DROID to potential buyers eager to do more with their devices. It's easily the best Android phone to date, and when you couple the revamped OS, Verizon's killer network, and an industrial design straight from a gadget enthusiast's fever-dream, it makes for a powerful concoction. Ultimately, the DROID won't usurp the iPhone from the public's collective mindshare or convince casual users that they must switch to Android, but it will make a lot of serious geeks seriously happy -- and that's good enough for us.

Don't expect to see Google-developed hardware competing with the Motorola Droid anytime soon.

(Credit: Motorola)

Last week TheStreet.com reported that Google had plans to sell a Google-developed phone at retail this year, bypassing carriers with its own Android implementation. But Rubin, vice president of engineering for Android at Google, scoffed at the notion that the company would "compete with its customers" by releasing its own phone.

"We're not making hardware," Rubin said. "We're enabling other people to build hardware."

Now, Google has played a role in designing phones that have emerged with Android, such as the G1. For example, Google advocated the infamous hinge design on the G1 based on its desire to offer a phone with a five-row keyboard, Rubin said. That design was not popular with reviewers, however, and Rubin joked that perhaps that's why Google shouldn't make its own hardware.

But pushing for a design feature is a far cry from designing an entire phone, contracting with a manufacturing partner to build it, and working the distribution channels to get it to market. That would be "a fundamental shift" in Google's business model, Rubin said, and one the company does not seem prepared to make at this time.

Rumors of a so-called "Gphone" date back years, long before Google formally announced Android in November 2007. But Google's strategy to date has been a somewhat traditional volume licensing play, working with hardware and carrier partners to spread Android far and wide as the mobile operating system of choice, rather than following Apple's lead with a complete hardware and software design like the iPhone.

Almost two years later, the software is rounding into form with the release of several phones this year along with the pending release of the Motorola Droid, which runs Android 2.0 on Verizon's network.

Corrected at 5:50 p.m. PDT with Rubin's correct title.

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I’m still living with the effects of the chicken pox I had in third grade.

There was no vaccine then. Every kid just got it. It swept through school, and nobody tried too hard to prevent the spread, because every kid would get it, and it was better to get it when you were young.

It was just a thing. We thought we were modern because it was just chicken pox — not polio or smallpox or one of those scarier diseases that had been conquered.

But now there is a vaccine, and I wish like crazy there had been a vaccine when I was a kid.

I was nearly hospitalized — my Mom tells me I was within an hour or so of having to go the hospital when I could finally sip a few drops of water without vomiting.

I remember vomiting so much that the vomiting itself didn’t even bother me any more. I started crying out of frustration. Just when I started to feel a little better, a little cooler, and hungry and thirsty, I’d try the smallest sip of water, and whatever was left in me to come up would come back up. It just went on and on.

For days? I don’t know. It seemed like weeks of nights. Trying to sleep. Itchy, exhausted, unable. The screaming heat inside that wouldn’t end. Then the stomach convulsions.

I was told I had chicken pox not just on my skin but inside me, too. Could that be true? Was that possible? I still don’t know — but I didn’t question it, because it sure felt like it.

Of course I had chicken pox on my head. So I had pink hair — pink with the Calamine Lotion my Mom applied. The pink was mortifying to a third-grade boy.

A friend of my Mom’s, a woman from down the street, came by one day. (She was cool: she drove a white Corvette. Here’s one.) I can still feel the embarassment of my pink hair. The spots all over my face I could deal with: the pink hair was devastating.

I was finally able to drink water, and then I moved up to jello and then on to chicken noodle soup. I was able to sit at the dinner table and watch the network news. (ABC news broadcast from WPVI in Philadelphia.)

I got better. After about three weeks of the chicken pox, I could return to school, even though still slightly scarred. Prepared to be teased.

I was the smartest kid in the grade. I won every spelling bee. I got 100% test scores. I always had.

And though I was prepared to be teased for the visible remains of my chicken pox, I was not prepared to get in trouble with my teacher for cheating.

Cheating? Me? People cheated off me, not the other way around.

But I was looking at someone else’s paper. Because I couldn’t see the chalkboard anymore and I couldn’t read the questions to copy them down.

I kept getting in trouble, and I kept getting teased, and I was angry and hot-headed a whole bunch of the time. I started getting in trouble for accidents, and for things other kids had done. (Which wasn’t that new, actually: I was in trouble at school, or about to be and dreading it, most of the time as a kid.)

It was a few weeks before news got to my parents and they took me for an eye exam.

Chicken pox had ruined my eyesight.

So I got glasses, and that worked. But my vision, once gotten a head-start down that path, kept getting worse for a few years.

Though it pretty much stabilized while I was in high school, it got bad enough that it’s dangerous for me to walk around my own house with my contact lenses out.

I can tell you that my staircase has 16 steps. (Easy number for a programmer to remember!)

To read with my contacts out, I have to hold the book so close that I have to close one eye.

I can look down at my feet and not see the cat.

My parents were both near-sighted — they both got glasses in the eighth grade. Their eyesight is better than mine. Odds are I would have gotten glasses around the eighth grade too, and had eyesight about like theirs. Not great, but not terrible.

I wish, to this day, that there had been a chicken pox vaccine.

I later got shingles when I was 20. I won’t be surprised to get it again, but I sure hope not. Shingles hurts.

So I was out about three weeks from school. I hated school anyway.

But we were doing a special unit on the history of native Americans, which I thought would be pretty cool.

I missed some arts and crafts things — creating a diorama, carving a miniature dugout canoe out of Ivory soap. I was just as glad to miss that stuff, as I liked reading and writing better.

I also missed out learning about the history of native Americans, though I did pick up some later.

Which brings me back to the subject of vaccines. And, you know, I thought I was going to, but I don’t really need to state the obvious.

Friday, 30 October 2009

Dan Frommer is pretty down on the Apple TV 3.0 update:

Apple needs to make major changes to the Apple TV’s software and platform. That could include some or all of these options:

• Opening Apple TV up to all Web video content, whether Apple controls it or not. (Rival Roku is heading in this direction with its $99 box.)

Apple isn’t going to do that. Love it or leave it, Apple TV is a front-end to the iTunes Store and a player for open video and audio content (i.e. non-DRM-protected MP4 video and MP3 and AAC audio, synced from a Mac or PC on your home network). If you want access to everything, use a Mac Mini — more powerful, open to just about anything, but also a lot more fiddly. Apple TV is not a Mac, it’s a top-to-bottom Apple experience device.

• Adding a Blu-ray player to Apple TV so it could replace an existing port on peoples’ TVs, not take up a new one.

That would be nice. (I bought a PS3 just for use as a Blu-ray player; I would have bought a new Blu-ray equipped Apple TV instead if there were one.) But: Apple seems to have made a decision to ignore Blu-ray across the board, at least for now. Apple’s answer for HD movies is the iTunes Store.

• Establishing an App Store for Apple TV, so that companies could offer video services, games, other apps, hardware accessories, etc., the way they do on the iPhone.

This sort of did happen with the 3.0 software — Apple TV can now play iTunes Extras and iTunes LPs, which are bundles of WebKit content.

More importantly, Frommer’s last two points would require new hardware. When you talk about “apps” for a computer hooked up to your TV, you’re going to want games. And there’s no way you’re going to have games where the input is a little five-button Apple Remote, or anything else connected by IR. As Jason Snell pointed out in his Apple TV 3.0 review, the current hardware doesn’t do 1080p or 720p at 30 fps, and occasionally struggles even with 720p at 24 fps.

You can argue that Apple should have released major new Apple TV hardware in time for this holiday season, but it’s not fair to complain that a software update doesn’t include features that would require new hardware. Surely they have to update the hardware eventually, but if not now, when?

That said, my biggest Apple TV complaint has nothing to do with its hardware or software, but instead remains the paltry number of movies available through iTunes — especially the number of rentable movies.

The Apple TV is a strange beast. Steve Jobs famously referred to his company's media-playback box as “a hobby.” In early 2008 Apple released a major software update, Apple TV 2.0, that revamped its interface and added movie rentals to the mix. Yet in a world increasingly full of Internet-connected TV boxes, Apple’s “hobby” has remained strangely static.

Thursday’s release of Apple TV 3.0 software doesn’t do a lot to change that, but for the unknown number of people who have bought an Apple TV box over the past two and a half years, it seems to be a pleasant improvement that addresses some lingering interface issues while adding whole new levels of mystery about exactly what (if anything) Apple is going to do with the product.

Revamped main menu

The highlight of the Apple TV 3.0 software update is its revamped main menu. Gone is the two-column grid introduced as a part of Apple TV “take two.” Instead, there’s a new interface that takes full advantage of widescreen TVs.

Spread out across the screen is a row with seven columns which forms the backbone of the new menu system: Movies, TV Shows, Music, Podcasts, Photos, Internet, and Settings. Clicking right or left determines which one of the columns is highlighted. When an item in that row is selected, the Apple TV displays a column of menu items beneath it. Spatially, this layout seems to makes a lot more sense than the old Apple TV menu.

Within the individual stacks of menu options, Apple has addressed the interface feature of Apple TV 2.0 that I disliked the most: the placement of all iTunes Store-related items at the top, with the menu item containing your own media placed all the way at the bottom. Now your media—movies, TV shows, music, and more—can always be found behind the top item of each column. It makes the whole experience feel a bit friendlier and a bit less like the entire device was created as a vehicle for Apple to sell you more stuff.

Above the menu items, in the top third of the screen, is a strip of tiles similar to the ones used in Apple TV 2.0’s iTunes Store interface. But even here, Apple’s has showed restraint when it comes to commerce. The first few items of the strip all feature your content—unwatched movies or TV shows, Genius mixes and recently-added albums (as well as the currently playing track, if there is one), unplayed podcasts, photos, and the like. For some media types, such as movies and TV shows, there’s also integration with the iTunes store: keep moving to the right, past your recently unwatched movies, and you’ll find top movies on iTunes. But it’s handled with the right emphasis. More than that, the appearance of the media tiles atop the menu items makes the entire main menu seem more vibrant and interesting.

(Font fans will be happy to know that the Apple TV interface is now drawn with famous, comforting, star-of-a-major-motion-picture Helvetica. It looks nice. Even non-font geeks may notice, though they won’t be able to put their finger on just what’s different. However, one of our editors reported that the lighter-weight font causes flickering on his older HDTV set.)

Apple’s new packages

Main menu aside, the major new feature addition in Apple TV 3.0 is support for the new expanded-feature formats Apple introduced to the iTunes store back in September, iTunes LP and iTunes Extras. Since these formats bring a DVD-menu-style interface to music collections and movies, respectively, it was a natural that they’d end up on the Apple TV. And now they have.

I think iTunes Extras is a fantastic idea. It allows Apple to bundle together the bonus content previously seen only on DVDs, and make it available as a part of an iTunes download. It closes the gap between iTunes downloads and DVDs in a compelling way, and I expect that it will be come the new standard for how movies are sold on iTunes.

On the Apple TV, iTunes Extras work pretty much as you expect. I navigated to My Movies and chose Iron Man, which has a small icon of a stack of items off to its right to indicate that it’s a film containing iTunes Extras. When I click, Apple TV brings me to the Iron Man main menu, rather than just playing the movie. At that point, it’s essentially a DVD experience—I can play the movie, navigate through a list of chapters, see special features, and even see a page of ads for other stuff the movie studio wants to promote. (Let’s hope the format doesn’t allow for mandatory trailers and an FBI warning every time you want to play an iTunes Extras file!)

I was excited about iTunes LP, too, but after having used it on the Apple TV I'm less convinced it's a good idea. Unlike iTunes Extras, iTunes LP files just show up within an album’s track listings—you have to select the iTunes LP file and click on it to launch the menu-driven interface. That’s probably a fine interface choice, since it’s more likely that you’d just want to pick a track than thumb through a set of virtual liner notes.

But I was still disappointed once I entered the iTunes LP interface. When you choose Play Album, the interface drops away and you’re left with the standard Apple TV Now Playing screen. The same thing happens if you pick a track from an iTunes LP’s Song List menu, go to the page that features song lyrics and artwork, and click Play Song.

I own a handful of DVD Audio discs, and one of the fun things those discs tend to do is display the lyrics pages for the songs as they play, along with playback controls. But iTunes LP doesn’t work like that. Yes, if you want to read lyrics while a song is playing, you can click the menu button to re-enter the iTunes LP interface. But there’s no way to simply start playing an album and then sit back and watch as the album art advances as each track plays.

iTunes LP pages can also be quite long, scrolling things—at least that was the case with the iTunes LP I tried, Paramore’s “Brand New Eyes.” (Peppy punk-pop. I like it.) The scrolling interface on the Apple TV is smooth, but I completely missed the faint scroll bar in the corner that indicates that I could press the down button on my remote to scroll down and see more of the lyrics pages.

Then there’s the matter of Apple’s boner when it came to both these formats, which the company only released last month. People who have bought iTunes LPs and iTunes Extras in the past 50 days will discover that their files aren’t yet compatible with the Apple TV. Apple will have to push out an update via iTunes to the libraries of every single person who has purchased this content. Sure, in a couple of weeks this will be nothing more than a hazy memory, but it shows a remarkable lack of planning on Apple’s part.

Other new stuff

Great news, everyone: Apple has finally added streaming Internet content sources to the Apple TV! Hooray! Dance the happy dance!

No, wait a second. You’re dancing because you think Apple added support for Netflix or Hulu or Vimeo or MLB.tv or something, right? Well, stop dancing. Because Apple’s addition to Apple TV is a whole lot more modest than that: Internet Radio.

Yes, it’s hard to believe that the Apple TV hasn’t officially supported Internet Radio before now, but it hasn’t. (You could work around this issue by adding a radio-station stream to a playlist.) Now, at last, you can choose from a large directory of sources and add favorite stations. It’s great to see this feature, but honestly, it’s embarrassing that it’s taken this long.

The other major audio addition in Apple TV 3.0 is support for the Genius Mix feature that was rolled out with iTunes 9 back in September. This is the feature that looks at your music library and creates endless playlists of related songs and artists in various categories. Looking at my library, I ended up with a pop mix, an indie pop mix, the Coldplay/Radiohead/Oasis mix, an embarrassing pop mix, a punk/grunge mix, a power pop mix, a ’70s rock list, an ’80s rock list, and a collection of children’s music. Okay.

The Photos section of Apple TV has been upgraded as well. If you sync your photos to the Apple TV, you’ll find support for iPhoto events and the ability to browse photos by face, courtesy of iPhoto’s Faces feature.

On the iTunes side, Apple TV syncing has been greatly improved. You can now select individual shows and individual episodes to sync, echoing the iPhone- and iPod-syncing improvements introduced with iTunes 9.

So, now what?

As far as I can tell, the Apple TV 3.0 software update improves the Apple TV I bought in 2007, and I’m grateful for that. The new features are welcome, and I think that iTunes Extras has the potential to drain all remaining enthusiasm Apple TV owners might have had for buying DVDs.

And yet…

It’s impossible to talk about the Apple TV without asking the big question: Where is this relationship going?

With the exception of price cuts and storage improvements, the base Apple TV hardware hasn’t been improved since it was released. It’s running a 1GHz Pentium M processor and has a measly 256MB of RAM. It can’t play video of any resolution higher than 720p at 24 frames per second, and I’ve actually seen it struggle and drop frames consistently even on those “supported” HD video files.

The $229 Apple TV is increasingly surrounded by competitors, from Roku’s $100 Player that streams Netflix and Amazon Video on Demand to media extenders for the Playstation 3 and XBox 360. Right now the biggest advantage of Apple’s box is simply that it’s the only one that can play videos purchased from iTunes. But it remains woefully ignorant of the rest of the Internet—the addition of Internet Radio at this late date proving the point.

Then there's the Mac Mini, which has turned into a powerful, competent device that works well as a home-media server. But the Mac Mini doesn't have the plug-it-and-forget-it ease of use of the Apple TV, and Front Row lacks some of the best features of Apple TV (namely its ability to seamlessly meld the contents of a remote iTunes computer and its own iTunes library). Front Row replacements such as Boxee and Plex are promising, but not exactly friendly to less geeky users. Not yet, at least.

Perhaps Apple is content with Apple TV never being anything more than a front-end for the iTunes store. Or perhaps Apple is well aware of its device’s limitations and is hard at work on a new version with upgraded hardware and improved support for the rest of the stuff that’s out there on the Net.

Steve Jobs said, “The reason I call [Apple TV] a hobby is, a lot of people have tried and failed to make it a business. And it’s a hard problem. So we’re trying. I think if we work on it and improve things over the next year, 18 months, we can crack that.”

That was 29 months ago. Apple still hasn’t cracked it. Apple TV 3.0 is a nice, mild update to an outdated piece of hardware that’s still not nearly as capable as it should be. The real question is, what’s next for Apple’s hobby? If Steve Jobs knows the answer, he’s not talking.

Sure, there are apps available for Android that will allow you to share your phones Internet connection with other devices such as your netbook or notebook, one that comes to mind is PdaNet.

That said, those of you, like myself who are using a Hero on the Sprint network will never be officially allowed to tether — despite having an Everything plan. This news comes courtesy of Sprint executive David Owens who was quoted as stating;

“No tethering for phones that require Everything plans (such as all smartphones) from here on out.”

This quote came by way of a virtual chat that was recently offered on the Sprint website. Nothing really to say here, other than it looks like Sprint would rather you pick up a second device and second plan in the form of a 3G modem (such as the MiFi).

Of course, there was also a mention that Sprint was “considering an Android phone with a built-in MiFi-type router.”

[via GearLog]

• Free Cash Flow* of approximately $660 million after a $200 million pension contribution
• Achieved best net retail subscriber results in more than two years, driven by sequential improvement in both post-paid and prepaid gross subscriber additions
• Launched industry-leading Any Mobile, Anytime^SM calling feature to eliminate mobile calling circles
• Seven consecutive quarters of improvement in Customer Care Satisfaction and First Call Resolution
• Extended 4G leadership into seventeen markets

The company’s third quarter earnings conference call will be held at 8 a.m. EDT today. Participants may dial 800-938-1120 in the U.S. or Canada (706-634-7849 internationally) and provide the following ID: 29897906, or may listen via the Internet at www.sprint.com/investor.

OVERLAND PARK, Kan.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 29, 2009-- Sprint Nextel Corp. (NYSE: S) today reported third quarter 2009 financial results that included consolidated net operating revenues of $8.0 billion, a net loss of $478 million and a diluted loss per share of 17 cents. The company generated Free Cash Flow* of $664 million in the quarter and $2.1 billion year-to-date in 2009. As of September 30, 2009, the company had $5.9 billion in cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments and $1.6 billion in borrowing capacity available under its revolving bank credit facility, for total liquidity of $7.5 billion.

Sprint lost a total of 135,000 net retail subscribers in the quarter. The company’s year-over-year post-paid gross addition improvement was the best in Sprint Nextel history, and the sequential improvement was the best in more than five years. Net post-paid subscriber losses have improved by approximately 20 percent in each of the second and third quarters of 2009.

“Sprint achieved its best net retail subscriber results in more than two years and improvement in both post-paid and prepaid gross subscriber additions in the third quarter,” said Dan Hesse, Sprint Nextel CEO. “Sprint is beginning to attract more customers with the industry’s best device line-up and the clarity and simplicity of our offers, seven sequential quarters of improvement in customer care satisfaction, a network declared to be most reliable by PC World magazine, and recognition from Newsweek magazine which ranked Sprint 15^th of 500 companies on its 2009 Green Ratings list -- the only telecom company in the Top 100.

“The company again generated strong cash flow, and while Operating Income Before Depreciation and Amortization* (OIBDA) was impacted by costs associated with growth in customer additions, previous quarters’ subscriber losses and certain seasonal costs in the quarter, Sprint continues to manage costs rigorously. We expect to see sequential quarterly improvement in both post-paid and total net subscriber losses in the fourth quarter of 2009,” Hesse said.

In 2009 Sprint has launched or announced 16 new touch, QWERTY and smart devices with a full selection of operating systems. They include Palm^® Pre™ and Palm^® Pixi™, Blackberry^® Tour™; HTC Hero™ and Samsung Moment™ -- which are both based on Google’s Android™ platform; HTC Touch Pro 2, Samsung Instinct^® HD, and Samsung Intrepid^TM, which offers the new Windows Mobile^® 6.5 Professional operating system. In addition, Sprint launched the nation’s first full-featured, eco-friendly phone, Samsung Reclaim™ which earlier this month was given the “Hottest in Show” award at the CTIA Convention in San Diego.

Additionally, Sprint 4G is now available in 17 markets, including Philadelphia, PA, which launched earlier this week. Sprint 4G coverage should serve a population of more than 30 million people by the end of 2009, and cover a population of up to 120 million people in about 80 markets by the end of 2010. Sprint 4G service is planned for deployment in these additional markets in 2009: Austin, TX; Charlotte, NC; Chicago, IL; Dallas/Ft. Worth, TX; Greensboro, NC; Honolulu, HI; Maui, HI; Raleigh, NC; San Antonio, TX; and Seattle, WA.

CONSOLIDATED RESULTS

• Consolidated net operating revenues of $8.0 billion for the quarter were 9% lower than in the third quarter of 2008 and 1% lower than the second quarter of 2009. The year-over-year decline is primarily due to lower contribution from post-paid wireless service revenues as well as wireline voice and legacy data revenues, partially offset by an increase in prepaid wireless service and equipment revenues.
• Adjusted OIBDA* was $1.5 billion for the quarter, compared to $1.8 billion for both the third quarter of 2008 and the second quarter of 2009. The year-over-year decline in Adjusted OIBDA* was due to revenue declines as a result of fewer post-paid subscribers, partially offset by lower SG&A; expenses. Sequentially, Adjusted OIBDA* decreased as the decline in operating revenue, seasonally higher cost of service, and increased subsidy expenses offset continued reductions in SG&A; expenses.
• Capital expenditures were $431 million in the quarter, compared to $485 million in the third quarter of 2008 and $321 million in the second quarter of 2009.
• Free Cash Flow* was $664 million for the quarter, compared to $1.1 billion for the third quarter of 2008 and $676 million for the second quarter of 2009. In the quarter, the company made a $200 million cash contribution to its defined benefit pension plan. Without this payment, Free Cash Flow would have been $864 million in the quarter.
• In August, the company issued $1.3 billion in principal of senior notes due in 2017 for general corporate purposes. In September, all outstanding 5.25% convertible senior notes due in 2010 were redeemed at 100% of the principal amount, totaling $607 million plus accrued and unpaid interest.

WIRELESS RESULTS

Wireless Customers

• The company served 48.3 million customers at the end of the third quarter of 2009, compared to 48.8 million at the end of the second quarter of 2009. This includes 33.6 million post-paid subscribers (25.0 million on CDMA, 7.8 million on iDEN, and 870,000 Power Source users who utilize both networks), 5.7 million prepaid subscribers (5.2 million on iDEN and 500,000 on CDMA) and 8.9 million wholesale and affiliate subscribers, all of whom utilize our CDMA network.
• For the quarter, net retail subscribers declined by a total of 135,000 and net wireless customers declined by approximately 545,000, including net losses of 801,000 post-paid customers – comprising 271,000 CDMA and 530,000 iDEN customers (including a net 64,000 customers who transferred from the iDEN network to the CDMA network). The company gained a net 801,000 prepaid iDEN customers, offset by net losses of 135,000 prepaid CDMA customers. The company also experienced a net loss of 410,000 wholesale and affiliate subscribers as a result of subscriber losses from our mobile virtual network operators and deactivation of open machine-to-machine devices that had been activated in the second quarter but may not be utilized.
• The credit quality of our post-paid customers reached the company’s highest historical level of almost 85% prime and improved year-over-year from 83% at the end of the third quarter of 2008.
• More than 9% of post-paid customers upgraded their handsets during the third quarter, a slight increase sequentially, resulting in increased contract renewals.
• During the third quarter, the company added to its device line-up with the Blackberry^® Tour™, Samsung Reclaim™, HTC Touch Pro 2 and Samsung Instinct^® HD. In addition, Sprint launched HTC Hero™, Samsung Intrepid and Motorola Debut™ in October, with Samsung Moment™ and Palm^® Pixi™ also planned for availability before the holidays.

Wireless Churn

• Post-paid churn in the quarter was 2.17% compared to 2.15% in the year-ago period and 2.05% in the second quarter of 2009. The sequential increase is due to seasonality and heightened competition.
• Prepaid churn in the third quarter of 2009 was 6.65%, compared to 8.16% in the year-ago period and 6.38% in the second quarter of 2009. The year-over-year improvement in churn is due to increased subscriber additions related to our national Boost Monthly Unlimited offering. The sequential increase in prepaid churn is related to seasonality and the significant growth of the Boost Monthly Unlimited customer base during the second quarter.

Wireless Service Revenues

• Wireless service revenues for the quarter of $6.3 billion declined 8% year-over-year and 2% sequentially. The year-over-year and sequential decline is due to fewer post-paid subscribers, partially offset by more prepaid subscribers.
• Wireless post-paid ARPU has been stable for the past seven quarters at approximately $56, primarily due to continued growth in fixed-rate bundled plans such as Simply Everything, offset by declines in usage and roaming. As a result of the company’s focus on improving the customer experience and seven consecutive quarters of improvement in customer care satisfaction, post-paid ARPU benefited from reduced credits to customer bills year-over-year.
• Data revenues contributed more than $16.25 to overall post-paid ARPU in the third quarter, led by growth in CDMA data ARPU. CDMA data ARPU increased to greater than $19, an industry-best that now represents 34% of total CDMA ARPU.
• Prepaid ARPU in the quarter was approximately $35 compared to $31 in the year-ago period and $34 in the second quarter of 2009. The year-over-year and sequential increases reflect a growing contribution from prepaid subscribers on unlimited plans.
• Wholesale, affiliate and other revenues were down 41% compared to the year-ago period and flat sequentially. The year-over-year decline is primarily due to subscriber losses from one of our large carrier customers.

Wireless Operating Expenses and Adjusted OIBDA*

• Total operating expenses were $7.4 billion in the third quarter, compared to $7.8 billion in the year-ago period and $7.3 billion in the second quarter of 2009.
• Adjusted OIBDA* of $1.2 billion in the third quarter of 2009 compares to $1.6 billion in the third quarter of 2008 and $1.4 billion in the second quarter of 2009. The year-over-year decline in Adjusted OIBDA* was primarily due to fewer post-paid subscribers, partially offset by more prepaid subscribers and an improvement of $340 million in SG&A; expenses. Sequentially, Adjusted OIBDA* declined almost $230 million as the decline in service revenue, seasonally higher cost of service, and increased subsidy expenses associated with higher customer additions, offset continued reductions in SG&A; expenses.
• Equipment subsidy was approximately $950 million (equipment revenue of approximately $530 million, less cost of products of $1.48 billion) as compared to about $700 million in the year-ago period and almost $850 million in the second quarter of 2009. The year-over-year increase in subsidy is a combination of a greater mix of post-paid handsets sold with higher-functionality, an increase in the number of prepaid handsets shipped as a result of the national Boost Monthly Unlimited offering and a decrease in average post-paid revenue per handset sold. The sequential increase in subsidy is primarily due to the increase in the number of handsets sold and the increase in average cost per handset sold as the company continues to sell a greater number of higher-functionality handsets.
• SG&A; expenses declined 14% year-over-year from the third quarter of 2008, and declined 2% sequentially from the second quarter of 2009. The year-over-year improvement is due to lower customer care, bad debt, and labor expenses. On a sequential basis, the decline reflects lower labor and customer care expenses partially offset by an increase in bad debt expenses.

Wireless Capital Spending

Wireless capital expenditures were $310 million in the third quarter of 2009, compared to $217 million spent in the third quarter of 2008 and $227 million in the second quarter of 2009. The company continues to invest capital in the quality and performance of its networks. At the end of the third quarter of 2009, Sprint’s networks continue to operate at best-ever levels and, according to third-party data, Sprint has the most dependable⁺ 3G network in the country.

WIRELINE RESULTS

• Wireline revenues of $1.4 billion for the quarter declined 10% year-over-year as voice and data declines more than offset Internet revenue growth, and were 1% lower sequentially.
• Internet revenues for the third quarter of 2009 increased 5% from the year-ago period and were flat sequentially. The year-over-year increase reflects strong enterprise demand for Global MPLS services and the increased base of cable subscribers who utilize our VoIP services. In the quarter, Sprint received a 2009 Business Connectivity Carrier Excellence Award for Customer Service (ILEC/IXC) (tied with another carrier in this category) from ATLANTIC-ACM, the third award this year from the research company. The award marks Sprint’s leadership in providing quality customer service for business customers using IP-based and converged solutions.
• Internet revenues as a percent of wireline revenues have increased to 41% in the third quarter of 2009 from 35% in the third quarter of 2008. At the end of the third quarter of 2009, the company supported approximately 4.9 million users of cable partner VoIP services. These services are currently available to almost 31 million households served by cable companies.
• Voice revenues for the quarter declined 14% year-over-year and were flat sequentially.
• Data revenues are impacted in part by customer transitions to IP services. These legacy services declined 35% compared to the third quarter of 2008 and 12% sequentially.
• Adjusted OIBDA* was $324 million compared to $263 million in the third quarter of 2008 and $352 million reported for the second quarter of 2009. Total operating expenses were $1.2 billion in the third quarter of 2009. Year-over-year, total operating expenses improved 16% due to the declines in costs of service and improvement in SG&A; expenses, and were flat sequentially as higher cost of service was offset by continued improvement in labor expenses.
• Wireline capital expenditures were $72 million in the third quarter of 2009, compared to $81 million in the third quarter of 2008 and $47 million in the second quarter of 2009. The company made significant capital investments in prior years to build out its IP network, and less capital was required year-over-year as the pace of our IP growth rate has slowed.

Forecast

Sprint Nextel continues to expect that both post-paid and total subscriber full-year losses should improve in 2009 as compared to 2008. The company also expects both post-paid and total subscriber net losses to improve sequentially from 3Q to 4Q of 2009. In addition, Sprint Nextel expects that full-year capital expenditures in 2009 will be less than $1.7 billion. The company expects to continue to generate positive Free Cash Flow* during the fourth quarter of 2009.

*FINANCIAL MEASURES

Sprint Nextel provides financial measures determined in accordance with accounting principles generally accepted in the United States (GAAP) and adjusted GAAP (non-GAAP). The non-GAAP financial measures reflect industry conventions, or standard measures of liquidity, profitability or performance commonly used by the investment community for comparability purposes. These measurements should be considered in addition to, but not as a substitute for, financial information prepared in accordance with GAAP. We have defined below each of the non-GAAP measures we use, but these measures may not be synonymous to similar measurement terms used by other companies.

Sprint Nextel provides reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures in its financial reporting. Because Sprint Nextel does not predict special items that might occur in the future, and our forecasts are developed at a level of detail different than that used to prepare GAAP-based financial measures, Sprint Nextel does not provide reconciliations to GAAP of its forward-looking financial measures.

The measures used in this release include the following:

OIBDA is operating income/(loss) before depreciation, amortization, asset impairments and abandonments. Adjusted OIBDA is OIBDA excluding severance, exit costs, and other special items. Adjusted OIBDA Margin represents Adjusted OIBDA divided by non-equipment net operating revenues adjusted for certain non-recurring revenue adjustments for Wireless and Adjusted OIBDA divided by net operating revenues for Wireline. We believe that Adjusted OIBDA and Adjusted OIBDA Margin provide useful information to investors because they are an indicator of the strength and performance of our ongoing business operations, including our ability to fund discretionary spending such as capital expenditures, spectrum acquisitions and other investments and our ability to incur and service debt. While depreciation and amortization are considered operating costs under GAAP, these expenses primarily represent non-cash current period costs associated with the use of long-lived tangible and intangible assets. Adjusted OIBDA and Adjusted OIBDA Margin are calculations commonly used as a basis for investors, analysts and credit rating agencies to evaluate and compare the periodic and future operating performance and value of companies within the telecommunications industry.

Free Cash Flow is the cash provided by operating activities less the cash used in investing activities other than short-term investments during the period. Free cash flow results in the change in cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments less the change in debt and proceeds from other financing activities, net. We believe that Free Cash Flow provides useful information to investors, analysts and our management about the cash generated by our core operations after interest and dividends and our ability to fund scheduled debt maturities and other financing activities, including discretionary refinancing and retirement of debt and purchase or sale of investments.

Net Debt is consolidated debt, including current maturities, less cash and cash equivalents, short-term investments and restricted cash. We believe that Net Debt provides useful information to investors, analysts and credit rating agencies about the capacity of the company to reduce the debt load and improve its capital structure.

SAFE HARBOR

This news release includes “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the securities laws. The statements in this news release regarding the business outlook, expected performance and forward-looking guidance, as well as other statements that are not historical facts, are forward-looking statements. The words "estimate," "project," "forecast," "intend," "expect," "believe," "target," "providing guidance" and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are estimates and projections reflecting management's judgment based on currently available information and involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those suggested by the forward-looking statements. With respect to these forward-looking statements, management has made assumptions regarding, among other things, customer and network usage, customer growth and retention, pricing, operating costs, the timing of various events and the economic and regulatory environment.

Future performance cannot be assured. Actual results may differ materially from those in forward-looking statements. Some factors that could cause actual results to differ include:

• our ability to attract and retain subscribers;
• the effects of vigorous competition on a highly penetrated market, including the impact of competition on the price we are able to charge subscribers for services and equipment we provide and our ability to attract new subscribers and retain existing subscribers; the overall demand for our service offerings, including the impact of decisions of new subscribers between our post-paid and prepaid services offerings and between our two network platforms; and the impact of new, emerging and competing technologies on our business;
• the effect of limiting capital and operating expenditures on our ability to improve and enhance our networks and service offerings, implement our business strategies and provide competitive new technologies;
• volatility in the trading price of our common stock, current economic conditions and our ability to access capital;
• the impact of third parties not meeting our business requirements, including a significant adverse change in the ability or willingness of such parties to provide handset devices or infrastructure equipment for our CDMA network, or Motorola, Inc.’s ability or willingness to provide related handset devices, infrastructure equipment and software applications, or to develop new technologies or features, for our iDEN network;
• the costs and business risks associated with providing new services and entering new geographic markets;
• the financial performance of Clearwire and its deployment of a WiMAX network;
• the effects of mergers and consolidations and new entrants in the communications industry and unexpected announcements or developments from others in the communications industry;
• unexpected results of litigation filed against us or our suppliers or vendors;
• the impact of adverse network performance;
• the costs and/or potential customer impacts of compliance with regulatory mandates;
• equipment failure, natural disasters, terrorist acts, or other breaches of network or information technology security;
• one or more of the markets in which we compete being impacted by changes in political, economic or other factors such as monetary policy, legal and regulatory changes or other external sociological factors over which we have no control; and
• other risks referenced from time to time in this report and other filings of ours with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including in Part I, Item IA “Risk Factors” of our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2008 and risk factors included in our subsequent reports on Form 10-Q.

Sprint Nextel believes these forward-looking statements are reasonable; however, you should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements, which are based on current expectations and speak only as of the date of this release. Sprint Nextel is not obligated to publicly release any revisions to forward-looking statements to reflect events after the date of this release.

⁺ “Dependable” based on independent third-party drive tests for 3G data connection success, session reliability and signal strength for the top 50 most populous markets, January 2008 to July 2009. Not all services available on 3G and coverage may default to separate network when 3G unavailable.

ABOUT SPRINT NEXTEL

Sprint Nextel offers a comprehensive range of wireless and wireline communications services bringing the freedom of mobility to consumers, businesses and government users. Sprint Nextel is widely recognized for developing, engineering and deploying innovative technologies, including two wireless networks serving more than 48 million customers at the end of the third quarter of 2009 and the first and only 4G service from a national carrier in the United States; industry-leading mobile data services; instant national and international walkie-talkie capabilities; and a global Tier 1 Internet backbone. The company’s customer-focused strategy has led to improved first call resolution and customer care satisfaction scores. For more information, visit www.sprint.com.

Source: Sprint Nextel

Sprint Nextel
Media Relations:
James Fisher, 703-433-8677
james.w.fisher@sprint.com
or
Investor Relations:
Yijing Brentano, 800-259-3755
Investor.relations@sprint.com

1. Update to iTunes 9.0.2 or later and Apple TV 3.0 or later.
2. Open iTunes.
3. Choose Store > Check for available downloads.
4. If prompted, enter your account name and password.
5.  Download the new iTunes Extras and iTunes LPs to your Mac or PC.
6.  Sync the movie or album that includes your updated iTunes Extras or iTunes LP to your Apple TV.

Note: If you have checked for available downloads and none were available, make sure to check your email associated with your iTunes Store account. If you have previously purchased a non-compatible iTunes Extras or iTunes LP, you will be receiving an email from Apple with instructions on how to download the updated version of your content over the next couple of weeks.

Apple Introduces Apple TV 3.0 Software With Redesigned User Interface

Enjoy iTunes Extras, iTunes LP & Genius Mixes on Your HD TV

CUPERTINO, California—October 29, 2009—Apple® today introduced new Apple TV® 3.0 software featuring a redesigned main menu that makes navigating your favorite content simpler and faster, and makes enjoying the largest selection of on-demand HD movie rentals and purchases, HD TV shows, music and podcasts from the iTunes® Store even better on your TV. You can now enjoy iTunes Extras and iTunes LP in stunning fullscreen with your Apple TV, as well as listen to Genius Mixes and Internet radio through your home theater system. The new Apple TV software is available immediately free of charge to existing Apple TV owners, and Apple TV with 160GB capacity is available for just $229.

“The new software for Apple TV features a simpler and faster interface that gives you instant access to your favorite content,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of Internet Services. “HD movies and HD TV shows from iTunes have been a huge hit with Apple TV customers, and with Apple TV 3.0 they get great new features including iTunes Extras, Genius Mixes and Internet radio.”

The redesigned main menu on Apple TV gives you instant access to your favorite content. Recently rented or purchased movies, as well as other content including TV shows, music, podcasts, photos and YouTube, are accessible directly from the new main menu. The new software also allows Apple TV users to enjoy stunning fullscreen iTunes Extras and iTunes LP, including great new movie titles such as “Star Trek” or classics like “The Wizard of Oz” and albums such as Taylor Swift’s “Fearless (Platinum Edition)” and Jack Johnson’s “En Concert.” iTunes Extras gives movie fans great additional content such as deleted scenes, interviews and interactive galleries. iTunes LP is the next evolution of the music album, delivering a rich, immersive experience for select albums on the iTunes Store by combining beautiful design with expanded visual features like live performance videos, lyrics, artwork, liner notes, interviews, photos, album credits and more.

Now Apple TV users can enjoy Genius Mixes through their home theater system and listen to up to 12 endless mixes of songs that go great together, automatically generated from their iTunes library. Customers can also enjoy Internet radio, allowing them to browse and listen to thousands of Internet radio stations, as well as tag favorite stations to listen to later. Apple TV’s support of HD photos is enhanced with iPhoto Events, which simplifies finding your favorite photos on Apple TV, as well as iPhoto® Faces, which gives access to photos organized by people identified in iPhoto.

Apple TV users have direct access to a catalog of over 8,000 Hollywood films on iTunes including over 2,000 in stunning HD video available for rent or purchase. Users can also choose from a selection of 11 million songs, 10,000 music videos and over 50,000 TV episodes to purchase directly from their Apple TV or browse and enjoy the iTunes Store podcast directory of over 175,000 free video and audio podcasts. Purchases downloaded to Apple TV are automatically synced back to iTunes on the user’s computer for enjoyment on their Mac® or PC or all current generation iPods or iPhones.* iPod touch® or iPhone® users can download the free Remote app from the App Store to control their Apple TV with a simple tap or flick of the finger.

Pricing & Availability
The new Apple TV software is available as a free automatic download to all Apple TV customers. The 160GB Apple TV is available from the Apple Store® (www.apple.com), Apple’s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers for a suggested retail price of $229 (US). Apple TV requires an 802.11b/g/n wireless network or 10/100 Base-T Ethernet networking, a broadband Internet connection and a high definition widescreen TV. Video availability varies by country.

Apple TV easily connects to a broad range of widescreen TVs and home theater systems and comes standard with HDMI, component video, analog and optical audio ports. Using high-speed Wi-Fi, Apple TV automatically plays your iTunes content without setup or management.

*Movie rentals work on iPod classic®, iPod nano® with video, iPod touch, iPhone, iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS.

Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital media revolution with its iPod portable music and video players and iTunes online store, and has entered the mobile phone market with its revolutionary iPhone.

Press Contacts:
Randi Wolfson
Apple
randi@apple.com
(408) 862-1225

Jason Roth
Apple
jroth@apple.com
(408) 862-2633

NOTE TO EDITORS: For additional information visit Apple’s PR website, or call Apple's Media Helpline at (408) 974-2042.

Apple, the Apple logo, Mac, Mac OS, Macintosh, Apple TV, iTunes, iPhoto, iPod touch, iPhone, Apple Store, iPod classic and iPod nano are trademarks of Apple. Other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Eating is the most obvious potentially one-handed activity most of us engage in. If you must do something other than just enjoy your food ferchristsake, you can answer emails, read Twitter, or catch up on the latest at nytimes.com while munching on that salad.

People carry things. Coffee, shopping bags, books, bags, babies, small dogs, hot dogs, water bottles, coats, etc. It's nice to be able to not put all that crap down just to quickly Google for the closest public restroom (aka Starbucks).

It is very occasionally necessary to use the iPhone while driving. No, not for checking your stock portfolio, you asshole. For directions. Glance quickly and keep your thoughts on the road ahead.

My wife spends about five hours a day breastfeeding our daughter and has only one hand available for non-feeding activities. That hand is frequently occupied by her iPhone; it helps her keep abreast (hey'o!) of current events, stay connected with pals through Twitter & email, track feeding/sleeping/diaper changing times, keep notes (she plans meals and grocery "shops" at 3am), and alert her layabout husband via SMS to come and get the damned baby already.

Straphangers in NYC and elsewhere know what a great one-handed device the iPhone is. Riding the subway and reading has never been so easy, especially during rush hour when pointy hardcovers become weaponized. (Getting shived by a hardbound Harry Potter on the 6pm 5 train is no joke.)

Tim Carmody, one of the shopkeeps over at Snarkmarket, recently broke his arm but is getting plenty of use out of his iPhone: "They should have an ad -- 'If you've got a broken arm, this is the perfect phone for you!'" Broken arms are uncommon, but plenty of people have more permanent physical conditions necessitating one-handed interaction with the world.

And a list of one-handed computing activities wouldn't be complete without at least quickly mentioning, well, you know. It rhymes with "whacking off". I think I've said enough.

Two areas where the iPhone really shines in its one-handedness are gaming and typing. One-handed gaming is pretty much impossible with the Nintendo DS or Sony PSP, but the App Store is full of games that require only your thumb for input. I've been playing lots of Shake & Spell and Strategery lately. Typing with one hand on the iPhone is almost as easy and fast as with two. You can actually *write* on this thing with one hand; not just SMS messages and tweets but also blog posts, emails, meeting minutes, and the like.

Update: Tim Carmody, he of the broken arm above, makes a couple of key observations about the one-handedness of the iPhone:

I think it's fairly easy to dial and answer any cell phone with one hand. It's the fact that you can almost perfectly use smartphone functions with a single hand that set the iPhone apart. I used to have a Blackberry Bold - it bit the dust around the same time my arm did -- and while I really liked a lot of things about the hardware, you really couldn't use it well with one hand

And:

Your cheerfulness about [being injured or handicapped] varies almost directly with your autonomy -- and the iPhone is GREAT at making you feel autonomous. Innovation in interface design isn't just about creating a cooler experience. It's about giving more and more people a shot at that experience to begin with.

And this is exactly how I use my iPhone 95% of the time (except I am left-handed).

[1] This footnote still applies. (Yes, that was a reference to a footnote within another footnote. (And that was a parenthetical within a footnote. (...))) ↩

"Why should Apple be forced to give Palm a free ride in iTunes? Apple makes iTunes to help make the Mac and iPod/iPhone experience better. Palm is trying to COMPETE with that. You don't give your competitors help! Doing that puts you out of business!"

Now THAT is a great argument... You should be a lawyer for Microsoft in the UK, where the EU is forcing them to put in a ballot so that users can get Non IE browsers in Microsoft's own OS. Now, like any Apple apologist you're going to say it's different. But nowdays, it's not. iTunes music store, is the number 1 retailer of music in the US. At this point, Apple distributes it like Malware.. the whole Quicktime thing up there is my point. As successful as iTunes and the iTunes music store is, the "It's just software" argument is starting to become moot. iTunes is probably on more computers than Windows Media Player... which i remind you, MS did get sued in the EU for bundling.

IE's inclusion in ever version of the OS, and integration streamlined the experience, though in a imperfect way. Booting up a new computer and having a, now important, part of the computer using experience, IS EASIER FOR CONSUMERS! Then it's our job to educate ourselves and decide to download, Firefox, Chrome or Opera. Microsoft shouldn't be forced to release an OS removing their browser, or giving their competition the stage themselves at boot. Windows 7 doesn't even have Live messenger, Windows Movie Maker, nor it's email app built in anymore. MS has their own Anti-virus software, but it's not even given any showing above their competitors. I almost missed it!

As for palm making their own software... Do you even pay attention to how consumers work? Apple milks the hell out of iTunes, cause even IT knows that consumers want to use as few programs as possible. So Palm will have to take more rescources to make their own multi-platform software, that.. would basically have to be a clone of iTunes, or people would bitch.. though they'd bitch if it was a clone of iTunes.. so the software would end up being a worse move then the cat and mouse game with Apple.

Photo: Andrew Zuckerman

To hear his enemies talk, you might think Paul Offit is the most hated man in America. A pediatrician in Philadelphia, he is the coinventor of a rotavirus vaccine that could save tens of thousands of lives every year. Yet environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. slams Offit as a “biostitute” who whores for the pharmaceutical industry. Actor Jim Carrey calls him a profiteer and distills the doctor’s attitude toward childhood vaccination down to this chilling mantra: “Grab ‘em and stab ‘em.” Recently, Carrey and his girlfriend, Jenny McCarthy, went on CNN’s Larry King Live and singled out Offit’s vaccine, RotaTeq, as one of many unnecessary vaccines, all administered, they said, for just one reason: “Greed.”

Thousands of people revile Offit publicly at rallies, on Web sites, and in books. Type pauloffit.com into your browser and you’ll find not Offit’s official site but an anti-Offit screed “dedicated to exposing the truth about the vaccine industry’s most well-paid spokesperson.” Go to Wikipedia to read his bio and, as often as not, someone will have tampered with the page. The section on Offit’s education was once altered to say that he’d studied on a pig farm in Toad Suck, Arkansas. (He’s a graduate of Tufts University and the University of Maryland School of Medicine).

Then there are the threats. Offit once got an email from a Seattle man that read, “I will hang you by your neck until you are dead!” Other bracing messages include “You have blood on your hands” and “Your day of reckoning will come.” A few years ago, a man on the phone ominously told Offit he knew where the doctor’s two children went to school. At a meeting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an anti-vaccine protester emerged from a crowd of people holding signs that featured Offit’s face emblazoned with the word terrorist and grabbed the unsuspecting, 6-foot-tall physician by the jacket.

“I don’t think he wanted to hurt me,” Offit recalls. “He was just excited to be close to the personification of such evil.” Still, whenever Offit gets a letter with an unfamiliar return address, he holds the envelope at arm’s length before gingerly tearing it open. “I think about it,” he admits. “Anthrax.”

So what has this award-winning 58-year-old scientist done to elicit such venom? He boldly states — in speeches, in journal articles, and in his 2008 book Autism’s False Prophets — that vaccines do not cause autism or autoimmune disease or any of the other chronic conditions that have been blamed on them. He supports this assertion with meticulous evidence. And he calls to account those who promote bogus treatments for autism — treatments that he says not only don’t work but often cause harm.

As a result, Offit has become the main target of a grassroots movement that opposes the systematic vaccination of children and the laws that require it. McCarthy, an actress and a former Playboy centerfold whose son has been diagnosed with autism, is the best-known leader of the movement, but she is joined by legions of well-organized supporters and sympathizers.

This isn’t a religious dispute, like the debate over creationism and intelligent design. It’s a challenge to traditional science that crosses party, class, and religious lines. It is partly a reaction to Big Pharma’s blunders and PR missteps, from Vioxx to illegal marketing ploys, which have encouraged a distrust of experts. It is also, ironically, a product of the era of instant communication and easy access to information. The doubters and deniers are empowered by the Internet (online, nobody knows you’re not a doctor) and helped by the mainstream media, which has an interest in pumping up bad science to create a “debate” where there should be none.

In the center of the fray is Paul Offit. “People describe me as a vaccine advocate,” he says. “I see myself as a science advocate.” But in this battle — and make no mistake, he says, it’s a pitched and heated battle — “science alone isn’t enough … People are getting hurt. The parent who reads what Jenny McCarthy says and thinks, ‘Well, maybe I shouldn’t get this vaccine,’ and their child dies of Hib meningitis,” he says, shaking his head. “It’s such a fundamental failure on our part that we haven’t convinced that parent.”

Consider: In certain parts of the US, vaccination rates have dropped so low that occurrences of some children’s diseases are approaching pre-vaccine levels for the first time ever. And the number of people who choose not to vaccinate their children (so-called philosophical exemptions are available in about 20 states, including Pennsylvania, Texas, and much of the West) continues to rise. In states where such opting out is allowed, 2.6 percent of parents did so last year, up from 1 percent in 1991, according to the CDC. In some communities, like California’s affluent Marin County, just north of San Francisco, non-vaccination rates are approaching 6 percent (counterintuitively, higher rates of non-vaccination often correspond with higher levels of education and wealth).

That may not sound like much, but a recent study by the Los Angeles Times indicates that the impact can be devastating. The Times found that even though only about 2 percent of California’s kindergartners are unvaccinated (10,000 kids, or about twice the number as in 1997), they tend to be clustered, disproportionately increasing the risk of an outbreak of such largely eradicated diseases as measles, mumps, and pertussis (whooping cough). The clustering means almost 10 percent of elementary schools statewide may already be at risk.

Photo: Peter Yang

In May, The New England Journal of Medicine laid the blame for clusters of disease outbreaks throughout the US squarely at the feet of declining vaccination rates, while nonprofit health care provider Kaiser Permanente reported that unvaccinated children were 23 times more likely to get pertussis, a highly contagious bacterial disease that causes violent coughing and is potentially lethal to infants. In the June issue of the journal Pediatrics, Jason Glanz, an epidemiologist at Kaiser’s Institute for Health Research, revealed that the number of reported pertussis cases jumped from 1,000 in 1976 to 26,000 in 2004. A disease that vaccines made rare, in other words, is making a comeback. “This study helps dispel one of the commonly held beliefs among vaccine-refusing parents: that their children are not at risk for vaccine-preventable diseases,” Glanz says.

“I used to say that the tide would turn when children started to die. Well, children have started to die,” Offit says, frowning as he ticks off recent fatal cases of meningitis in unvaccinated children in Pennsylvania and Minnesota. “So now I’ve changed it to ‘when enough children start to die.’ Because obviously, we’re not there yet.”

The rejection of hard-won knowledge is by no means a new phenomenon. In 1905, French mathematician and scientist Henri Poincaré said that the willingness to embrace pseudo-science flourished because people “know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether illusion is not more consoling.” Decades later, the astronomer Carl Sagan reached a similar conclusion: Science loses ground to pseudo-science because the latter seems to offer more comfort. “A great many of these belief systems address real human needs that are not being met by our society,” Sagan wrote of certain Americans’ embrace of reincarnation, channeling, and extraterrestrials. “There are unsatisfied medical needs, spiritual needs, and needs for communion with the rest of the human community.”

Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly. Being rational takes work, education, and a sober determination to avoid making hasty inferences, even when they appear to make perfect sense. Much like infectious diseases themselves — beaten back by decades of effort to vaccinate the populace — the irrational lingers just below the surface, waiting for us to let down our guard.

Before smallpox was eradicated with a vaccine, it killed an estimated 500 million people. And just 60 years ago, polio paralyzed 16,000 Americans every year, while rubella caused birth defects and mental retardation in as many as 20,000 newborns. Measles infected 4 million children, killing 3,000 annually, and a bacterium called Haemophilus influenzae type b caused Hib meningitis in more than 15,000 children, leaving many with permanent brain damage. Infant mortality and abbreviated life spans — now regarded as a third world problem — were a first world reality.

Today, because the looming risk of childhood death is out of sight, it is also largely out of mind, leading a growing number of Americans to worry about what is in fact a much lesser risk: the ill effects of vaccines. If your newborn gets pertussis, for example, there is a 1 percent chance that the baby will die of pulmonary hypertension or other complications. The risk of dying from the pertussis vaccine, by contrast, is practically nonexistent — in fact, no study has linked DTaP (the three-in-one immunization that protects against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis) to death in children. Nobody in the pro-vaccine camp asserts that vaccines are risk-free, but the risks are minute in comparison to the alternative.

Still, despite peer-reviewed evidence, many parents ignore the math and agonize about whether to vaccinate. Why? For starters, the human brain has a natural tendency to pattern-match — to ignore the old dictum “correlation does not imply causation” and stubbornly persist in associating proximate phenomena. If two things coexist, the brain often tells us, they must be related. Some parents of autistic children noticed that their child’s condition began to appear shortly after a vaccination. The conclusion: “The vaccine must have caused the autism.” Sounds reasonable, even though, as many scientists have noted, it has long been known that autism and other neurological impairments often become evident at or around the age of 18 to 24 months, which just happens to be the same time children receive multiple vaccinations. Correlation, perhaps. But not causation, as studies have shown.

And if you need a new factoid to support your belief system, it has never been easier to find one. The Internet offers a treasure trove of undifferentiated information, data, research, speculation, half-truths, anecdotes, and conjecture about health and medicine. It is also a democratizing force that tends to undermine authority, cut out the middleman, and empower individuals. In a world where anyone can attend what McCarthy calls the “University of Google,” boning up on immunology before getting your child vaccinated seems like good, responsible parenting. Thanks to the Internet, everyone can be their own medical investigator.

There are anti-vaccine Web sites, Facebook groups, email alerts, and lobbying organizations. Politicians ignore the movement at their peril, and, unlike in the debates over creationism and global warming, Democrats have proved just as likely as Republicans to share misinformation and fuel anxiety.

US senators John Kerry of Massachusetts and Chris Dodd of Connecticut have both curried favor with constituents by trumpeting the notion that vaccines cause autism. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a scion of the most famous Democratic family of all, authored a deeply flawed 2005 Rolling Stone piece called “Deadly Immunity.” In it, he accused the government of protecting drug companies from litigation by concealing evidence that mercury in vaccines may have caused autism in thousands of kids. The article was roundly discredited for, among other things, overestimating the amount of mercury in childhood vaccines by more than 100-fold, causing Rolling Stone to issue not one but a prolonged series of corrections and clarifications. But that did little to unring the bell.

The bottom line: Pseudo-science preys on well-intentioned people who, motivated by love for their kids, become vulnerable to one of the world’s oldest professions. Enter the snake-oil salesman.

When a child is ill, parents will do anything to make it right. If you doubt that, just spend a day or two at the annual conference of the nonprofit organization Autism One, a group built around the conviction that autism is caused by vaccines. It shares its agenda with other advocacy groups like the National Autism Association, the Coalition for SafeMinds, and McCarthy’s Generation Rescue. All these organizations cite similar anecdotes — children who appear to shut down and exhibit signs of autistic behavior immediately after being vaccinated — as proof. Autism One, like others, also points to rising rates of autism — what many parents call an epidemic — as evidence that vaccines are to blame. Finally, Autism One asserts that the condition is preventable and treatable, and that it is the toxins in vaccines and the sheer number of childhood vaccines (the CDC recommends 10 vaccines, in 26 doses, by the age of 2 — up from four vaccines in 1983) that combine to cause disease in certain sensitive children.

Their rhetoric often undergoes subtle shifts, especially when the scientific evidence becomes too overwhelming on one front or another. After all, saying you’re against all vaccines does start to sound crazy, even to a parent in distress over a child’s autism. Until recently, Autism One’s Web site flatly blamed “too many vaccines given too soon.” Lately, the language has gotten more vague, citing “environmental triggers.”

But the underlying argument has not changed: Vaccines harm America’s children, and doctors like Paul Offit are paid shills of the drug industry.

To be clear, there is no credible evidence to indicate that any of this is true. None. Twelve epidemiological studies have found no data that links the MMR (measles/mumps/rubella) vaccine to autism; six studies have found no trace of an association between thimerosal (a preservative containing ethylmercury that has largely been removed from vaccines since 2001¹) and autism, and three other studies have found no indication that thimerosal causes even subtle neurological problems. The so-called epidemic, researchers assert, is the result of improved diagnosis, which has identified as autistic many kids who once might have been labeled mentally retarded or just plain slow. In fact, the growing body of science indicates that the autistic spectrum — which may well turn out to encompass several discrete conditions — may largely be genetic in origin. In April, the journal Nature published two studies that analyzed the genes of almost 10,000 people and identified a common genetic variant present in approximately 65 percent of autistic children.

But that hasn’t stopped as many as one in four Americans from believing vaccines can poison kids, according to a 2008 survey. And outreach by grassroots organizations like Autism One is a big reason why.

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1. An earlier version of this story suggested that no childhood vaccines contain thimerosal; in fact some versions of the influenza vaccine, which is not typically mandated for children’s admission to school, does contain the preservative. Go here for a further explanation.

At this year’s Autism One conference in Chicago, I flashed more than once on Carl Sagan’s idea of the power of an “unsatisfied medical need.” Because a massive research effort has yet to reveal the precise causes of autism, pseudo-science has stepped aggressively into the void. In the hallways of the Westin O’Hare hotel, helpful salespeople strove to catch my eye as I walked past a long line of booths pitching everything from vitamins and supplements to gluten-free cookies (some believe a gluten-free diet alleviates the symptoms of autism), hyperbaric chambers, and neuro-feedback machines.

To a one, the speakers told parents not to despair. Vitamin D would help, said one doctor and supplement salesman who projected the equation “No vaccines + more vitamin d = no autism” onto a huge screen during his presentation. (If only it were that simple.) Others talked of the powers of enzymes, enemas, infrared saunas, glutathione drips, chelation therapy (the controversial — and risky — administration of certain chemicals that leech metals from the body), and Lupron (a medicine that shuts down testosterone synthesis).

Offit calls this stuff, much of which is unproven, ineffectual, or downright dangerous, “a cottage industry of false hope.” He didn’t attend the Autism One conference, though his name was frequently invoked. A California woman with an 11-year-old autistic son told me, aghast, that she’d personally heard Offit say you could safely give a child 10,000 vaccines (in fact, the number he came up with was 100,000 — more on that later). A mom from Arizona, who introduced me to her 10-year-old “recovered” autistic son — a bright, blue-eyed, towheaded boy who hit his head on walls, she said, before he started getting B-12 injections — told me that she’d read Offit had made $50 million from the RotaTeq vaccine. In her view, he was in the pocket of Big Pharma.

The central message at these conferences boils down to this: “The medical establishment doesn’t care, but we do.” Every vendor I talked to echoed this theme. And every parent expressed a frustrated, even desperate belief that no one in traditional science gives a hoot about easing their pain or addressing their theories — based on day-to-day parental experience — about autism’s causes.

Actually, scientists have chased down some of these theories. In August, for example, Pediatrics published an investigation of a popular hypothesis that children with autism have a higher incidence of gastrointestinal problems, which some allege are caused by injected viruses traveling to the intestines. Jenny McCarthy’s foundation posits that autism stems from these bacteria, as well as heavy metals and live viruses present in some vaccines. Healing your child, therefore, is a matter of clearing out the “environmental toxins” with, among other things, special diets. The Pediatrics paper found that while autistic kids suffered more from constipation, the cause was likely behavioral, not organic; there was no significant association between autism and GI symptoms. Moreover, gluten- and dairy-free diets did not appear to improve autism and sometimes caused nutritional deficiencies.

But researchers, alas, can’t respond with the same forceful certainty that the doubters are able to deploy — not if they’re going to follow the rules of science. Those tenets allow them to claim only that there is no evidence of a link between autism and vaccines. But that phrasing — what sounds like equivocation — is just enough to allow doubts to not only remain but to fester. Meanwhile, in the eight years since thimerosal was removed from vaccines (a public relations mistake, in Offit’s view, because it seemed to indicate to the public that thimerosal was toxic), the incidences of autism continue to rise.

In the wake of the latest thimerosal studies, most of the anti-vaccination crowd — even Autism One, despite the ever-changing rhetoric on its Web site — has shifted their aim away from any particular vaccine to a broader, fuzzier target: the sheer number of vaccines that are recommended. It sounds, after all, like common sense. There must be something risky about giving too many vaccines to very young children in too short a time. Opponents argue that for some children the current vaccine schedule creates a “toxic overload.”

“I’m not anti-vaccine,” McCarthy says. “I’m anti-toxin.” She stops just short of calling for an outright ban. McCarthy delivered the keynote address at the Autism One conference this year, just as she had in 2008. She drew a standing-room-only crowd, many of whom know her not from her acting but from her frequent appearances on TV talk shows, Oprah Winfrey’s Web site, and Twitter (@JennyfromMTV). McCarthy has authored two best-selling books on “healing” autism and is on the board of the advocacy group Generation Rescue (motto: “Autism is reversible”). With her stream-of-consciousness rants (”Too many toxins in the body cause neurological problems — look at Ozzy Osbourne, for Christ’s sake!”) and celebrity allure, she is the anti-vaccine movement’s most popular pitchman and prettiest face.

Barbara Loe Fisher, by contrast, is indisputably the movement’s brain. Fisher is the cofounder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center in Vienna, Virginia, the largest, oldest, and most influential of the watchdog groups that oppose universal vaccination. At the Autism One conference, Fisher took the podium with characteristic flair. As she often does, Fisher began with the story of her son Chris, who she believes was damaged by vaccines at the age of two and a half. A short film featuring devastating images of sick kids — some of them seemingly palsied, others with tremors, others catatonic — drove the point home. The film, accompanied by Bryan Adams’ plaintive song “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You,” ended with this message emblazoned on the screen: “All the children in this video were injured or killed by mandatory vaccinations.”

Against this backdrop, Fisher, a skilled debater who often faces down articulate, well-informed scientists on live TV, mentioned Offit frequently. She called him the leading “pro-forced-vaccination proponent” and cast him as a man who walks in lockstep with the pharmaceutical companies and demonizes caring parents. With the likely introduction of a swine flu vaccine later this year, Fisher added, Americans needed to wake up to the “draconian laws” that could force every citizen to either be vaccinated or quarantined. That isn’t true — the swine flu vaccine, like other flu vaccines, will be administered on a voluntary basis. But no matter: Fisher’s argument turns vaccines from a public health issue into one of personal choice, an unwritten bit of the Bill of Rights.

In her speech, Fisher borrowed from the Bible, George Orwell, and the civil rights movement. “The battle we are waging,” she said, “will determine what both health and freedom will look like in America.” She closed by quoting the inscription above the door of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC: “The first to perish were the children.” And then she brought it home: “If we believe in compassion, if we believe in the future, we will do whatever it takes to give our children back the future that is their birthright.” The audience cheered as the words sank in: Whatever it takes. “No forced vaccination,” Fisher concluded. “Not in America.”

Paul Offit has a slightly nasal voice and a forceful delivery that conspire to make him sound remarkably like Hawkeye Pierce, the cantankerous doctor played by Alan Alda on the TV series M*A*S*H. As a young man, Offit was a big fan of the show (though he felt then, and does now, that Hawkeye was “much cooler than me”). Offit is quick-witted, funny, and — despite a generally mild-mannered mien — sometimes so assertive as to seem brash. “Scientists, bound only by reason, are society’s true anarchists,” he has written — and he clearly sees himself as one. “Kaflooey theories” make him crazy, especially if they catch on. Fisher, who has long been the media’s go-to interview for what some in the autism arena call “parents rights,” makes him particularly nuts, as in “You just want to scream.” The reason? “She lies,” he says flatly.

“Barbara Loe Fisher inflames people against me. And wrongly. I’m in this for the same reason she is. I care about kids. Does she think Merck is paying me to speak about vaccines? Is that the logic?” he asks, exasperated. (Merck is doing no such thing). But when it comes to mandating vaccinations, Offit says, Fisher is right about him: He is an adamant supporter.

“We have seat belt rules,” he says. “Seat belts save lives. There was never a question about that. The data was absolutely clear. But people didn’t use them until they were required to use them.” Furthermore, the decision not to buckle up endangers only you. “Unless you fly through the window and hit somebody else,” he adds. “I believe in mandates. I do.”

We are driving north (seat belts on) across Philadelphia in Offit’s gray 2009 Toyota Camry, having just completed a full day of rounds at Children’s Hospital. Over the past eight hours, Offit has directed a team of six residents and med students as they evaluated more than a dozen children with persistent infections. He pulls into the driveway of the comfy four-bedroom Tudor in the suburbs where his family has lived for the past 13 years. It’s a nice enough house, with a leafy green yard and a two-car garage where a second Toyota Camry (this one red, a year older, and belonging to his wife, Bonnie) is already parked. Let’s just say that if Offit has indeed made $50 million from RotaTeq, as his critics love to say, he is hiding it well.

Offit acknowledges that he received a payout — “several million dollars, a lot of money” — when his hospital sold its stake in RotaTeq last year for $182 million. He continues to collect a royalty each year. It’s a fluke, he says — an unexpected outcome. “I’m not embarrassed about it,” he says. “It was the product of a lot of work, although it wasn’t why I did the work, nor was it, frankly, the reward for the work.”

Similarly, the suggestion that pharmaceutical companies make vaccines hoping to pocket huge profits is ludicrous to Offit. Vaccines, after all, are given once or twice or three times in a lifetime. Diabetes drugs, neurological drugs, Lipitor, Viagra, even Rogaine — stuff that a large number of people use every day — that’s where the money is.

That’s not to say vaccines aren’t profitable: RotaTeq costs a little under $4 a dose to make, according to Offit. Merck has sold a total of more than 24 million doses in the US, most for $69.59 a pop — a 17-fold markup. Not bad, but pharmaceutical companies do sell a lot of vaccines at cost to the developing world and in some cases give them away. Merck committed $75 million in 2006 to vaccinate all children born in Nicaragua for three years. In 2008, Merck’s revenue from RotaTeq was $665 million. Meanwhile, a blockbuster drug like Pfizer’s Lipitor is a $12 billion-a-year business.

To understand exactly why Offit became a scientist, you must go back more than half a century, to 1956. That was when doctors in Offit’s hometown of Baltimore operated on one of his legs to correct a club foot, requiring him to spend three weeks recovering in a chronic care facility with 20 other children, all of whom had polio. Parents were allowed to visit just one hour a week, on Sundays. His father, a shirt salesman, came when he could. His mother, who was pregnant with his brother and hospitalized with appendicitis, was unable to visit at all. He was 5 years old. “It was a pretty lonely, isolating experience,” Offit says. “But what was even worse was looking at these other children who were just horribly crippled and disfigured by polio.” That memory, he says, was the first thing that drove him toward a career in pediatric infectious diseases.

There was something else, too. From an early age, Offit embraced the logic and elegance of the scientific method. Science imbued a chaotic world with an order that he found reassuring.

“What I loved about science was its reason. You have data. You stand back and you discuss the strengths and weaknesses of that data. There’s just something very calming about that,” he says. “You formulate a hypothesis, you establish burdens of proof, you subject your hypothesis to rigorous testing. You’ve got 20 pieces of a 1,000-piece puzzle … It’s beautiful, really.”

There were no doctors in the Offit family; he decided to become the first. In 1977, when he was an intern at the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, he witnessed the second event that would determine his career path: the death of a little girl from a rotavirus infection (there was, as yet, no vaccine). The child’s mother had been diligent, calling her pediatrician just a few hours after the girl’s fever, vomiting, and diarrhea had begun. Still, by the time the girl was admitted, she was too dehydrated to have an intravenous line inserted. Doctors tried everything to rehydrate her, including sticking a bone marrow needle into her tibia to inject fluids. She died on the table. “I didn’t realize it killed children in the United States,” Offit says, remembering how the girl’s mother, after hearing the terrible news, came into the room and held her daughter’s hand. “That girl’s image was always in my head.”

The third formative moment for Offit came in the late 1980s, when he met Maurice Hilleman, the most brilliant vaccine maker of the 20th century. Hilleman — a notoriously foulmouthed genius who toiled for years in the Philadelphia labs of Merck — invented vaccines to prevent measles, mumps, and rubella (and later came up with the combination of the three, the MMR). He created vaccines for hepatitis A and B, Hib, chicken pox, pneumococcus, and meningococcus. He became Offit’s mentor; Offit later became Hilleman’s biographer.

Offit believes in the power of good storytelling, which is why he writes books, five so far. He dearly wants to pull people into the exciting mysteries that scientists wrestle with every day. He wants us all to understand that vaccines work by introducing a weakened strain of a particular virus into the body — a strain so weak that it cannot make us sick. He wants us to revel in this miracle of inoculation, which causes our immune systems to produce antibodies and develop “memory cells” that mount a defense if we later encounter a live version of that virus.

It’s easy to see why Offit felt a special pride when, after 25 years of research and testing, he and two colleagues, Fred Clark and Stanley Plotkin, joined the ranks of the vaccine inventors. In February 2006, RotaTeq was approved for inclusion in the US vaccination schedule. The vaccine for rotavirus, which each year kills about 600,000 children in poor countries and about 40 children in the US, probably saves hundreds of lives a day.

But in certain circles, RotaTeq is no grand accomplishment. Instead, it is offered as Exhibit A in the case against Offit, proving his irredeemable bias and his corrupted point of view. Using this reasoning, of course, Watson and Crick would be unreliable on genetics because the Nobel Prize winners had a vested interest in genetic research. But despite the illogic, the argument has had some success. Consider the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which reviews new vaccines and administration schedules: Back in the late ’90s and early ’00s, Offit was a member of the panel, along with experts in infectious diseases, virology, microbiology, and immunology. Now the 15-person panel is made up mostly of state epidemiologists and public-health officials.

That’s not by accident. According to science journalist Michael Specter, author of the new book Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet and Threatens Our Lives, the controversy surrounding vaccine safety has made lack of expertise a requirement when choosing members of prominent advisory panels on the issue. “It’s shocking,” Specter says. “We live in a country where it’s actually a detriment to be an expert about something.” When expertise is diminished to such an extent, irrationality and fear can run amok.

Hence the death threats against Paul Offit. Curt Linderman Sr., the host of “Linderman Live!” on AutismOne Radio and the editor of a blog called the Autism File, recently wrote online that it would “be nice” if Offit “was dead.”

I’d met Linderman at Autism One. He’d given his card to me as we stood outside the Westin O’Hare talking about his autistic son. “We live in a very toxic world,” he’d told me, puffing on a cigarette.

It was hard to argue with that.

Despite his reputation, Offit has occasionally met a vaccine he doesn’t like. In 2002, when he was still a member of the CDC’s advisory committee, the Bush administration was lobbying for a program to give the smallpox vaccine to tens of thousands of Americans. Fear of bioterrorism was rampant, and everyone voted in favor — everyone except Offit. The reason: He feared people would die. And he didn’t keep quiet about his reservations, making appearances on 60 Minutes II and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

The problem with the vaccine, he said, is that “one in every million people who gets it dies.” Moreover, he said, because smallpox is visible when its victims are contagious (it is marked by open sores), outbreaks — if there ever were any — could be quickly contained, and there would be plenty of time to begin vaccinations then. A preventive vaccine, he said, “was a greater risk than the risk of smallpox.”

Ah, risk. It is the idea that fuels the anti-vaccine movement — that parents should be allowed to opt out, because it is their right to evaluate risk for their own children. It is also the idea that underlies the CDC’s vaccination schedule — that the risk to public health is too great to allow individuals, one by one, to make decisions that will impact their communities. (The concept of herd immunity is key here: It holds that, in diseases passed from person to person, it is more difficult to maintain a chain of infection when large numbers of a population are immune.)

Risk is also the motivating idea in Offit’s life. This is a man, after all, who opted to give his own two children — now teenagers — the flu vaccine before it was recommended for their age group. Why? Because the risk of harm if his children got sick was too great. Offit, like everyone else, will do anything to protect his children. And he wants Americans to be fully educated about risk and not hoodwinked into thinking that dropping vaccines keeps their children safe. “The choice not to get a vaccine is not a choice to take no risk,” he says. “It’s just a choice to take a different risk, and we need to be better about saying, ‘Here’s what that different risk looks like.’ Dying of Hib meningitis is a horrible, ugly way to die.”

Getting the measles is no walk in the park, either — not for you or those who come near you. In 2005, a 17-year-old Indiana girl got infected on a trip to Bucharest, Romania. On the return flight home, she was congested, coughing, and feverish but had no rash. The next day, without realizing she was contagious, she went to a church gathering of 500 people. She was there just a few hours. Of the 500 people present, about 450 had either been vaccinated or had developed a natural immunity. Two people in that group had vaccination failure and got measles. Thirty-two people who had not been vaccinated and therefore had no resistance to measles also got sick. Did the girl encounter each of these people face-to-face in her brief visit to the picnic? No. All you have to do to get the measles is to inhabit the airspace of a contagious person within two hours of them being there.

The frightening implications of this kind of anecdote were illustrated by a 2002 study published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases. Looking at 3,292 cases of measles in the Netherlands, the study found that the risk of contracting the disease was lower if you were completely unvaccinated and living in a highly vaccinated community than if you were completely vaccinated and living in a relatively unvaccinated community. Why? Because vaccines don’t always take. What does that mean? You can’t minimize your individual risk unless your herd, your friends and neighbors, also buy in.

Perceived risk — our changing relationship to it and our increasing intolerance of it — is at the crux of vaccine safety concerns, not to mention related fears of pesticides, genetically modified food, and cloning. Sharon Kaufman, a medical anthropologist at UC San Francisco, observes that our concept of risk has evolved from an external threat that’s out of our control (think: statistical probability of a plane crash) to something that can be managed and controlled if we just make the right decisions (eat less fat and you’ll live longer). Improved diagnostic tests, a change in consumer awareness, an aging society determined to stay youthful — all have contributed to the growing perception that risk (of death, illness, accident) is our responsibility to reduce or eliminate. In the old order, risk management was in the hands of your doctor — or God. Under the new dispensation, it’s all up to you. What are the odds that your child will be autistic? It’s your job to manage them, so get thee to the Internet, and fast.

The thimerosal debacle exacerbated this tendency, particularly when the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Public Health Service issued a poorly worded statement in 1999 that said “current levels of thimerosal will not hurt children, but reducing those levels will make safe vaccines even safer.” In other words, there’s no scientific evidence whatsoever, but you never know.

“When science came out and said, ‘Uh-oh, there may be a risk,’ the stage was already set,” Kaufman says, noting that many parents felt it was irresponsible not to have doubts. “It was Pandora’s box.”

The result is that science must somehow prove a negative — that vaccines don’t cause autism — which is not how science typically works. Edward Jenner invented vaccination in 1796 with his smallpox inoculation; it would be 100 years before science, such as it was, understood why the vaccine worked, and it would be even longer before the specific cause of smallpox could be singled out. Until the cause of autism is discovered, scientists can establish only that vaccines are safe — and that threshold has already been met.

The government is still considering funding more research trials to look for a connection between vaccines and autism. To Kaufman, there’s some justification for this, given that it may be the only way to address everyone’s doubts. But the thimerosal panic suggests that, if bungled, such trials could make a bad situation worse. To scientists like Offit, further studies are also a waste of precious scientific resources, not to mention taxpayers’ money. They take funding away from more pressing matters, including the search for autism’s real cause.

A while back, Offit was asked to help put together a reference text on vaccines. Specifically, his colleagues wanted him to write a chapter that assessed the capacity of the human immune system. It was a hypothetical exercise: What was the maximum number of vaccines that a person could handle? The point was to arm doctors with information that could reassure parents. Offit set out to determine two factors: how many B cells, which make antibodies, a person has in a milliliter of blood and how many different epitopes, the part of a bacterium or virus that is recognized by the immune system, there are in a vaccine. Then, he came up with a rough estimate: a person could handle 100,000 vaccines — or up to 10,000 vaccines at once. Currently the most vaccines children receive at any one time is five.

He also published his findings in Pediatrics. Soon, the number was attached to Offit like a scarlet letter. “The 100,000 number makes me sound like a madman. Because that’s the image: 100,000 shots sticking out of you. It’s an awful image,” Offit says. “Many people — including people who are on my side — have criticized me for that. But I was naive. In that article, I was being asked the question and that is the answer to the question.”

Still, he hasn’t backed off. He feels that scientists have to work harder at winning over the public. “It’s our responsibility to stand up for good science. Though it’s not what we’re trained to do,” he says, admitting that his one regret about Autism’s False Prophets is that it didn’t hold scientists accountable for letting fear of criticism render them mute. “Get out there. There’s no venue too small. As someone once said, it would be a very quiet forest indeed if the only birds that sang were those that sang best.”

So Offit keeps singing. Isn’t he afraid of those who wish him harm? “I’m not that brave,” he says. “If I really thought my life was at risk or my children’s lives were at risk, I wouldn’t do it. Not for a second.” Maybe, he acknowledges, he’s in denial.

Later, I ask his wife the same question. When it comes to her husband’s welfare, Bonnie Offit is fiercely protective. A pediatrician with a thriving group practice, she still makes time to monitor the blogosphere. (Her husband refuses to read the attacks.) She wants to believe that if you “keep your finger on the pulse,” as she puts it, you can keep your loved ones safe.

Still, she worries. On the day I find myself sitting at her dining room table, every front page in the nation features an article about George Tiller, the abortion doctor gunned down at his church in Wichita, Kansas. When her husband leaves the room, Bonnie brings up the killing. “It upsets me,” she says, looking away. “I didn’t even tell him that. But it absolutely upsets me.”

Her husband, meanwhile, still rises every morning at 4 am and heads to his small, tidy study in a spare bedroom. Every morning, he spends a couple of hours working on what will be his sixth book, a history of the anti-vaccine movement. Offit gets excited when he talks about it.

In 19th-century England, he explains, Jenner’s smallpox vaccine was known to be effective. But despite the Compulsory Vaccination Act of 1853, many people still refused to take it, and thousands died unnecessarily. “That was the birth of the anti-vaccine movement,” he says, adding that then — as now — those at the forefront “were great at mass marketing. It was a print-oriented society. They were great pamphleteers. And by the 1890s, they had driven immunization rates down to the 20 percent range.”

Immediately, smallpox took off again in England and Wales, killing 1,455 in 1893. Ireland and Scotland, by contrast, “didn’t have any anti-vaccine movement and had very high immunization rates and very little incidence of smallpox disease and death,” he says, taking a breath. “You’d like to think we would learn.”

Offit wants the book to be cinematic, visually riveting. He believes, fervently, that if he can hook people with a good, truthful story, maybe they will absorb his hopeful message: The human race has faced down this kind of doubt before.

His battle is, in at least one respect, probably a losing one. There will always be more illogic and confusion than science can fend off. Offit’s idea is to inoculate people one by one, until the virus of fear, if not fully erased, at least recedes.

Amy Wallace (ecallawyma@gmail.com) has written for GQ, Esquire, and The New Yorker. This is her first article for Wired.

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• Single microfloppy is slow and inadequate.

• There are no internal expansion slots or external expansion buses.

• MacWrite has some severe limitations.

• The system is monochrome only.

• MS-DOS compatibility is ruled out.

• The Macintosh will not multitask.

• You can’t use a Mac away from a desk.

• MacPaint has an easel size limitation.

• Forget about external video.

• Macintosh software development is an involved process.

Bill Gates

Anybody who could write a good application on a 128K Mac deserves a medal.

InfoWorld, Thomas Neudecker, 26 March 1984

We think Apple has at least one thing right — the Macintosh is the one machine with the potential to challenge IBM’s hold on the market

The Seybold Report, Jonathan and Andrew Seybold

Apple also got some important things wrong. Our biggest worry is that Mac may be under-configured… But the dumbest thing Apple did with the whole development effort was to allow two different operating systems for Mac and Lisa.

October 29, 2009 | Onion Sports

PHILADELPHIA—The last time the Philadelphia Phillies brought a World Series title back to the City of Brotherly Love, the nation's financial sector was in complete ruin, the cost of a gallon of milk was only $2.74, fans watched the Fall Classic while huddled around their slightly-less-streamlined high-definition television sets, and Philadelphia slugger Ryan Howard was just 28 years old.

This week Howard, 29, hopes to lead the Phillies to their first World Series championship in more than 360 long days and end a title drought that has been punctuated by several embarrassing losses, including a 2009 opening-day defeat by the Atlanta Braves and a June loss to the Atlanta Braves. During its infamous dry spell, the team has also come up short twice, winning both an NLDS and an NLCS title but having absolutely no World Series ring to show for it.

To put into perspective just how long the Phillies have gone without a championship, the earth has almost made one full orbit of the sun since the franchise last paraded through downtown Philadelphia holding the famed Commissioner's Trophy.

"We have a good group of guys this year, and if we block out all the stuff about how we haven't won a World Series in more than 5,000 waking hours, we'll be fine." Howard said. "Frankly, I'm tired of all that talk. Yes, I know Michael Jackson was still alive the last time we won, and I know Boston Legal was gearing up for its final episode. But look, when the umpire says 'Play ball,' none of that matters."

"After 364 days of constantly coming up short, I think this is finally our year," Howard added.

According to Phillies manager Charlie Manuel, if his players get wrapped up in the fact that they haven't raised a World Series banner since April 5, 2009, they'll never be able to play to the maximum of their ability against the New York Yankees. The veteran manager admitted, however, that going nearly 52 straight weeks without a championship is bound to shake any team's confidence.

"The bottom line is we're a pretty inexperienced team, and for many of these young players, this will be the first time they've been to the World Series in a year." Manuel said. "A lot has changed in that time. If you would have told me last October that this country would elect a black president before the Philadelphia Phillies made it back to the World Series, I would have laughed in your face."

While Philadelphia players admitted the 11-month championship-winless streak has been difficult for them personally, most agreed that it's the fans who've suffered most, enduring more than 500,000 minutes without a World Series victory.

"Our fans are incredible," said left fielder Raul Ibanez, who was brought to the Phillies during the offseason in the hopes that he could help Philadelphia finally get back on the winning track. "If I were them, I would have given up on us weeks ago, after we lost our 69th game and failed to win the National League East by more than 10 [games]. But they stuck with us."

Though the Philly faithful are understandably disappointed with their team's title drought, many believe this will be the season when the team breaks the so-called Curse of 1981—the year in which the Phillies failed to follow up their 1980 championship season with a World Series victory.

"I guess part of me feels like the long wait will make a title all the more special," season-ticket holder Mike Oliver said. "And even though I don't like to compare teams, this Philly squad feels similar to the one who beat the Rays back in the day. They had guys like Jimmy Rollins, Chase Utley, Cole Hamels, Jamie Moyer—guys who could really play the game and knew how to win; not like today's players."

"Man, whatever happened to Jamie Moyer?" Oliver added. "He's got to be dead by now."

"Truthfully, I never thought I would live to see the Phillies get to another World Series," longtime fan David Oswald said. "When I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer last November, the doctor only gave me eight months."

Wednesday, 28 October 2009

Just a bunch of points to keep in mind before you read this piece from Joe Wilcox:

• Wilcox doesn’t come out and say so explicitly, but he’s defining “winning” as “highest unit sale volume”. So he’s probably right. I don’t think the iPhone, or any Apple product, will ever “win” in terms of unit sales. (Update: Uh, except for the iPod, of course.) But that’s because Apple doesn’t even want to win that game. If you instead measure by profits and growth, Apple and the iPhone look like the front-running favorites to me. (Same goes for the Mac.)

• I try my best to shy away from the term “smartphone”, because I don’t know what it means exactly. There are already people calling the iPhone, Pre, and Android models “super smartphones”. What we’re talking about are handheld networked computing devices.

• Wilcox cites Gartner projections regarding 2012 “smartphone” unit sale market share. First, it’s not like Gartner has a great track record in such predictions. Second, from what I’ve seen regarding this particular analysis from Gartner, the iPhone OS numbers are only for “smartphones”, and thus exclude the iPod Touch. Right now the iPod Touch accounts for about 40 percent of iPhone OS devices sold. Of course, maybe Android will be present on a slew of non-phone devices by 2012, too. It’s just another reason not to get too caught up in the word “smartphone”, though.

• All that said, in terms of unit sale share for the entire handheld networked computer market, Apple might do a lot better over the next three years than Wilcox seems to expect. With phones, the biggest cost by far is the monthly service plan. You can “buy” an iPhone 3G for just $99, and the monthly plans from AT&T are about the same as those for any competing devices. (True for other iPhone carriers around the world, too.) The only way for a competitor to undercut the iPhone on price would be for some carrier to undercut AT&T on monthly service plan rates. Don’t hold your breath. And for non-phones, the iPod Touch is cheaper than anything similar.

If you look at the evidence and the direction of the trend lines, the iPhone’s prospects look stunning. I think Wilcox is instead starting with the conclusion that the iPhone will never break out of a Mac-sized market share niche, and working backwards from there.

Tuesday, 27 October 2009

“If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table.”
—Legal Adage

Much of the current hype surrounding the App Store centers around the sheer number of apps available. Apple’s “there’s an app for that” slogan hinges on it, for one thing. Robert Scoble wrote a much-linked to piece this week titled “85,000 Reasons Why the iPhone Isn’t Going to Be Disrupted”. Ian Betteridge largely agreed with Scoble.

And the 85,000 number is, just a few days later, already out of date. App Shopper claims there are 93,144 apps in the store at this writing.

Scoble makes a good argument for how the App Store’s sheer size is a big competitive advantage for Apple. But I think what’s being missed is how this is a competitive advantage. It’s a sign that the iPhone and the App Store are popular, and it’s a self-perpetuating form of popularity, in that developers go where the action is, and users go where the software is.

The danger I see is in conflating cause and effect. Is the App Store popular because the iPhone is great? Or is the iPhone great because the App Store is popular? There’s a big difference between those two arguments. The latter is the argument Microsoft has long made regarding the advantage of Windows: Windows is great because Windows has the most software and most developers.

The iPhone has turned that around, and it’s driving Microsoft executives batty. The situation is so at odds with Microsoft’s view of the computing universe that Steve Ballmer came up with this cockamamie explanation: “The Internet was designed for the PC. The Internet is not designed for the iPhone. That’s why they’ve got 75,000 applications — they’re all trying to make the Internet look decent on the iPhone.” Pound the table, indeed.

The simplest reduction of the age-old Mac-vs.-Windows debate is quality-vs.-quantity. But I don’t blame Apple for bragging about the sheer number of iPhone apps available, because it’s something that can be measured. It’s a powerful marketing point because it is an undeniable fact: there are nearly 100,000 apps, and more every week. You can’t quantify the advantage Mac software has over Windows.

But my interest remains, as ever, in the quality of the apps, not the quantity. Let’s say that when the dust starts to settle in this market, Android winds up with far fewer total apps than iPhone OS, but they’re of generally higher quality. That would make Android the Mac to the iPhone’s Windows. I would switch to that platform. (Feel free to substitute WebOS for Android in the above hypothetical.)

The number of apps already in the store — and, even more so, the momentum with which new ones are being added — almost certainly guarantees the continuing popularity of the iPhone and iPod Touch for the next few years. But Windows is proof that popularity doesn’t guarantee market-leading quality.

Friday, 23 October 2009

Conformity is a powerful instinct. There’s safety in numbers. You have to be different to be better, but different is scary.

So of course there’s some degree of herd mentality in every industry. But I think it’s more pronounced, to a pathological degree, in the PC hardware industry. It was at the root of long-standing punditry holding that Apple should license the Mac OS to other PC makers, or that Apple should dump Mac OS and make Windows PCs. On the surface, those two old canards seem contradictory — one arguing that Apple should be a hardware company, the other arguing that it should be a software company. But at their root they’re the same argument: that Apple should stop being different, and either act just like other PC makers (and sell computers running Windows) or else act just like Microsoft (and sell licenses to its OS).

No one argues those two points any more. But it’s the same herd mentality that led to the rash of Apple needs to get in the “netbook” game punditry that I claim-checked earlier this week. I could have linked to a dozen others. The argument, though, is the same: everyone else is making netbooks, so Apple should, too. Why? Because everyone else is.

I think there’s a simple reason why the herd mentality is worse in the PC industry: Microsoft. In fact, I think it used to be worse. A decade ago the entire computing industry — all facets of it — was dominated by a herd mentality that boiled down to Get behind Microsoft and follow their lead, or else you’ll get stomped. That’s no longer true in application software. The web, and Google in particular, have put an end to that.

But the one area where Microsoft still reigns supreme is in PC operating systems. PC hardware makers are crippled. They can’t stand apart from the herd even if they want to. Their OS choices are: (a) the same version of Windows that every other PC maker includes; or (b) the same open source Linux distributions that every other PC maker could include but which no customers want to buy.¹

Apple’s ability to produce innovative hardware is inextricably intertwined with its ability to produce innovative software. The iPhone is an even better example than the Mac.

It’s not just that Apple is different among computer makers. It’s that Apple is the only one that even can be different, because it’s the only one that has its own OS. Part of the industry-wide herd mentality is an assumption that no one else can make a computer OS — that anyone can make a computer but only Microsoft can make an OS. It should be embarrassing to companies like Dell and Sony, with deep pockets and strong brand names, that they’re stuck selling computers with the same copy of Windows installed as the no-name brands.

And then there’s HP, a company with one of the best names and proudest histories in the industry. Apple made news this week for the design and tech specs of its all-new iMacs, which start at $1199. HP made news this week for unveiling a Windows 7 launch bundle at Best Buy that includes a desktop PC and two laptops, all for $1199. That might be great for Microsoft, but how is it good for HP that their brand now stands for bargain basement prices?

Operating systems aren’t mere components like RAM or CPUs; they’re the single most important part of the computing experience. Other than Apple, there’s not a single PC maker that controls the most important aspect of its computers. Imagine how much better the industry would be if there were more than one computer maker trying to move the state of the art forward.

Wednesday, 21 October 2009

Two days ago, Apple announced its financial results for the quarter ended September 26. The company sold 3 million Macs, of which 2.3 million were laptops, and booked $1.67 billion in profit. Not one of those 2.3 million laptops was a “netbook”.

14 October 2008, Doug Aamoth at CrunchGear: “Five Reasons Why an Apple Netbook Is a No-Brainer”:

When asked today about the possibility of an Apple netbook, Steve Jobs said something to the effect of, “The market is just getting started — we’ll see how it goes.”

Huh? Here’s how the netbook market’s going, Steve: pretty much every major computer company has a netbook but you. Apple’s a prime candidate for a netbook, too.

20 January 2009, Brian Caulfield at Forbes: “Apple’s Real Problem: Netbooks:

The real problem is how Apple’s portfolio of expensive gear — particularly notebooks — will fare as the recession starts to bite.

21 January 2009, Brian X. Chen at Wired Gadget Lab: “Apple Still Oblivious to Netbook Opportunity”. Amazingly, ten months later, they remain equally oblivious.

18 March 2009, Shane O’Neill at PC World: “Recession Breathes Life Into Windows PCs as Apple Gasps for Air”:

At this point, I’m going to stop asking when Apple will acknowledge these dark days we live in because I think the answer is never. Maybe Apple should just be a bull market company. When times are lean, it should pack up like a traveling carnival or disappear like a baseball team in winter and not come back until everybody’s rich and happy again.

24 March 2009, Scott Moritz at TheStreet.com: “Apple’s Netbook Foray Will Flop”

Nonetheless, design hubris and slumping sales will cause Apple to tap a hot segment of computer market.

So Apple will be forced to enter the “netbook” market due to slumping MacBook sales, eh?

19 August 2009, Charles Moore at The Apple Blog: “Lack of Netbook, Price Hurting Apple in This Year’s Back-to-School Market”. That would be the back-to-school period which just ended, with Apple selling 2.3 million laptops at an average price of $1,265.

As Jason Snell put it, imagine how much money Apple could have lost if only it had a netbook.