Apple. What’s up? Why in three months all we have seen added to the feature list of the iPhone is some way for you to make more money and that’s it? Where’s the copy-and-paste? Full Exchange server support? vCal notices for new appointments to meeting attendees? Landscape mode for e-mail? Ringtones in your Bluetooth ear set? (Man, you’ve charged $2 for it, why not let us live a little?) Speaking of Bluetooth, how ’bout full support of the protocol? You know, “Beam Contact to Other iPhone”.

No, oddly in the last three months, all Apple really has done is fix bugs, disable custom ringtones (twice), bricked unlocked phones, and given users the iTunes Store. That’s it. Forget all these wish lists floating around the Internet. Forget the fact cooperate users have asked for more business support. Nope, the honeymoon is over and now it’s time to make AT&T happy. That’s about it.

This attitude begs the question. Is version 1.1.1 worthy of an upgrade? Like Sony’s PSP updates that broke homebrew hacks two years ago, Apple’s latest update prevents third-party applications from functioning including SIM unlocking software. Is a double-tap space bar really that cool? I don’t think so and I’m betting not many others feel the same way as well. In fact, if you think about it, none of the updates have been worthy of “gotta have” updates. It’s really quite funny if you think of it.

Apple wants to get peoples iPhones back in its control, yet it hasn’t given any incentive to do so! For me, custom ringtones is way more valuable than being able to buy David Matthews at Starbucks. I can buy him on Amazon — cheaper — when I get home. (Read more.) Nothing in any of these updates out weighs the advantages I get from staying with 1.0.2 and using all the wonderful third-party applications out there. If Apple doesn’t want to listen to its customers, that’s okay, we don’t have to listen to it. There’s no need to have any particular version installed to sync at this point and thus no reason to upgrade to the Evil 1.1.1. Now of course, Apple can really dig a hole for itself and force users to upgrade in order to continue syncing, but that would also require an iTunes upgrade. No, for now, I’m happy, well, kind of, with 1.0.2.

I actually rely on my custom ringtone to audible identify if I need to pull my iPhone out of my holster or not to answer the call or let it go to voicemail. I highly doubt I’ll ever see any song from Donut Man or Boney M as an iTunes Store download. But because those two artists have songs that identify two particular people perfectly, I’ll stick with iToner and version 1.0.2 on my iPhone. But, give me vCal and true Exchange sync support and then I’ll gladly find something on the iTunes store for those two suckers of my contacts. But as history is showing, I don’t think I’ll have to worry about that for a loooong time.

Remember the good ol’ days when Steve Jobs was all about a good joke and hacking? Like his failed graduation middle-finger banner that was to wish all the on lookers good luck in the coming year, Jobs has failed to consider all the details once again. With Apple lieutenants shooting off their mouths about how it doesn’t care about third-party apps to Jobs himself calling this hacking issue a “cat and mouse” game, Mr. once iCEO is loosing sight of his roots. There was once a Steve Jobs that didn’t care about a record company called Apple Records, Limited or a phone company called Bell while he and Apple co-founder Steve “Woz” used a “blue box” to make free phone calls to where ever. When faced with possible jail time with some local Bay Area cops one very late night with the now famous blue box, Jobs was relieved to have escaped justice and still have use of his box without fear of it being bricked.

Now decades later, the Zen man Jobs himself has a whole new outlook on things. Never mind the fact that Jobs once was able to call anywhere in the world on Ma Bells tab without a feeling of guilt in his bones. Nope, Jobs now wants all-yall that freed your iPhone to be punished for it. Screw you! That’s the message Mr. Jobs is sending nice and loud and believe you me, it’s coming in clear.

What happened, Steve? Maybe a few dollars in the Apple bank account made the difference? When it was you ripping off a big company, that was okay, but now that your company is the one getting ripped, different ringtone, huh? With all the “enlightenment” and other new age stuff Jobs has been known to embrace, it makes you wonder if this is just some bad trip like he had once experienced in the early 70s. I can understand removing the ability to unlock a phone, but to brick one? Man, that’s bad karma, brother. To also flaunt how your phone runs on OS X and then prevent others from exploiting its power, not cool, hommie. Not cool at all. No, this isn’t the Steve Jobs that started Apple with another buddy in his garage. This is a cooperate Jobs that has more similarities to his arch rival in Redmond than the guy that once loved hanging out with Capitan Crunch.

Well, looks like Universal had a trick card up its sleeve when it “left” iTunes for Amazon. (It really didn’t leave, but rather stated it would be selective in material available on iTunes for the future.) Many thought it was going to an “Unboxed” formula with music downloads on Amazon but I must say, Amazon’s MP3 Download service is mighty fine. Fine indeed. No DRM and with a bit rate of 256 kbps, this looks like it has a good start out of the, um, box. Add the fact that you can use Amazon’s MP3 Downloader, both for the Mac and Windows, that automatically adds all purchases to your iTunes library, and now you have a bona fide contender for an iTunes Store competitor. Yeah!

Most songs come in at 89 cents and albums at $8.99 (USD). This is a dime and dollar difference from iTunes. I’ve found other albums that are at the five dollar mark making Amazon’s service a first stop for me before making any music purchases. What I love about this service is the ability to pay less than $9.99 per album than if I went to iTunes. I love the irony in Steve Jobs “one price” model and yet iTunes Store is littered like the Las Vegas Strip with high priced trash all over it. I still can remember the first time I tripped over an $18 album. And yes, I ended up purchasing it on CD from Amazon for $11.99 shipped. Now, in some cases, I can get it cheaper…downloaded!

I must say that I do love the iTunes Store. It’s a one stop place for most of my (DRM-free) music shopping. But with Amazon’s downloader and cheaper prices, I’m going to go here every time first. If the song or album is not available or is more expensive than iTunes (which I doubt will ever happen,) then I’ll hit iTunes. Thankfully, I once again have a choice and I intend to fully use it. Just like the old days of going to Tower Records, Rainbow Records, or the Record Factory, to find the best deal on Billy Squire’s Don’t Say No, I can now shop around “town”.

This of course gives Steve Jobs a problem that he’ll have to re-evaluate his pressure hold on the music industry. While it’s fairly common knowledge that Apple really makes very little on music purchase from iTunes, variable pricing may be something Apple will be forced into accepting with the advent of the Amazon store.

Hey NBC (and Universal.) I’d like to thank you for saving me about $40 in a Season Pass ticket from iTunes and for giving me a higher quality version of your very entertaining show. Man, the details are so much better than what I was getting from iTunes that I can’t wait ’til I start downloading The Office, too!

Now since I’m on a Mac and your true intentions was not about the viewer (as you tried to tell the world), I had to go elsewhere besides Amazon.com or Hulu to get my season premiere of Hereos. Elsewhere meant going to this fine site and using Miro for the download. Miro nicely displays not just the most recent episode, but all of them including entire seasons! Now granted, you have to wait for all the seeders to get busy, but once that happens, it’s only a few hours and I have my free episode of Hereos…in 720p HD! How nice is that?!

Now, would I have done all this if NBC was still on iTunes? No. ‘But what about the HD?’ you ask. Well, while the high def is nice, iTunes is still faster and more convenient. I also do want to pay for my videos; however, if the provider that once gave me a paying way to do so and then takes that option away, what’s a hooked fan to do? You gave me no choice, NBC!

I’m sure we’re going to be seeing a spike in torrent traffic and a massive drop in NBC’s bottom line for downloads after this is all done. It’ll be fun to watch NBC come back to Apple like a dog with its tail between the legs. Man, is Steve Jobs going to have a fun day at work when that happens.

Okay, I have to get back to this free show on my Mac. L8.

When Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced that the 8GB iPhone was going to drop $200 in price, immediately, only 9 weeks after its initial release, I chuckled. “Figures,” I said out loud to my Cinema HD screen. And while we did post a story about the event with the subject line “Apple Shafts iPhone Early Adopters with $200 Price Break and Finally Releases an iPod That Can Hold All of My Music!“, truth is, that’s the business in the technology world. Early adopters have been “burned” by lower prices for decades. Talk to some old timers who purchased the first Apple II and they’ll all tell you stories of how soon after release, the price was lowered. Back to the phone analogy, let me remind you that nobody seemed to be too upset when the Motorola RAZR dove from the high five hundred field down to the mid-hundreds just a few months after its release. So why the hoopla on the iPhone?

Let’s look at it another way. The iPhone stirred the desires of so many that lines nationwide could be found at both AT&T and Apple Stores. Not just small lines, but lines that wrapped around blocks. News reporters up-and-down the street would liken it to a line of a super-star concert. And in a sense, this was a super-star concert. Having spent many nights on hard concert for a prime ticket at a concert in my college days, I can tell you that when I didn’t get front row…or even the front section, I was still happy that I even got a ticket at all! I think many could agree with the same statement when they walked out of the store with their iPhone on June 29th. That $200 “mark-up” was the fee we all paid to be of an elite crowd. The first to rock out with the iPhone crowd. And we rocked for two months. To me, well worth it.

Digging in deeper, let’s talk about the high approval rating of the iPhone. Never in the history of cellular phones has a device received such a high rating. Nearly everyone polled stated they would go back and do it all over to get the phone again if they had to. And this poll is only a few weeks old.

If any of you have used a Windows Mobile phone before, even for just a day, you’d be elated with the iPhone. With or without that $200 drop in price. I know I have been! In the 9 weeks I have had the iPhone, I have had two months of no irritation of frustration because of my phone. In fact, it has gone the distance and helped me in navigation when my dated GPS stirred me in the wrong direction. My Windows Mobile phone could have never been relied on for such a task.

The stability and quality of my iPhone has out shined even the more feature rich phones on the market. Why? Because it just works, stupid! Put another way, while Microsoft has been tinkering with its operating system since 1996 (Windows CE 1.0) to it’s latest update (Windows Mobile 6), which is nothing more than an eye-candy update (Mmm, much like Vista I guess), Apple did on its first try what Microsoft hasn’t been able to do in a decade: Make an outstanding smartphone/PDA. That, folks, is worth $200 to have it before the masses. It should be for you all as well.

It’s a bit ironic that Steve Jobs would make a jab at NBC Wednesday with Apple’s custom ringtone for the iPhone announcement. Basically, the NBC-Universal issue is that Universal wants more control over the DRM and higher prices for its content. If you look at the 99 cent price per ringtone charge Apple is pushing, you could say Apple is committing the same sin as NBC. Think about it. You can only use songs (and not even all of them) from the iTunes store. Control. You have to pay FULL price for a partial song! Higher prices. Sure, you could play the entire song as a ringtone, I guess, but would you get your complete value from it? No. While you can customize the start and end points of the song, does that really justify the high price? Not really.

Going further, what about the fact that you are being double charged? I mean, if you already purchased a song prior, you have to purchase it AGAIN! How does that make sense? I can’t believe Jobs could tell the audience at Moscone Center with a straight face everyone has to pay TWICE for the same song!

What makes this whole thing just amazing is the fact that you can put ringtones on the iPhone now without the help of Apple. Sure, it’s not the easiest thing in the world to use iFuntastic, but iToner (which we reported on) does the drop amazingly easy and costs $15. Granted, not cheap, but after a dozen or more ringtones from iTunes, it will be cheaper than Apple’s alternative.

To customize the start and end points isn’t too difficult, either. Garageband can do the edits on ones files and then you can save that out as your ringtone. Sure, it’s probably not as easy as it is in iTunes 4.7, but the selection and cost doing it this way is so much cheaper.

So that brings us to how Apple blew it. I don’t want to say it is being greedy, because it really could have charged more per song, but it is demonstrating that it likes to a make a buck toward the obscene. Like the DRM argument that even Steve Jobs agreed with, you should only have to pay ONCE for something you already own. If I purchase “Respect” from Aretha Franklin, then I shouldn’t have to buy it again if I want it to be my ringtone.

So why is Steve behind this? Well, there’s a new player in this game and it’s AT&T. Carriers make big money off of ringtones and this topic was sure to have come up with Apple when it brought it’s iPhone to then SBC with all of Apple’s demands. AT&T had a lot to lose and I’m sure ringtone revenue was not one thing it wanted to come out of its grips. Add in the evil record companies and you’re back to high pricing.

While I think Apple blew it with this lame pricing plan of 99 cents (49 cents would have been a better price point if it had to go through with the double charge plan), hopefully it’ll look the other way and continue to allow products such as iToner to work with the iPhone. It may have its back up against the wall, but it has been demonstrating this blind-eye treatment with all the Apple TV hacks. Hopefully, it’ll continue with the iPhone.

It has nearly been a month with my iPhone and I must admit, at times I get home sick. I miss the old neighborhood where everyone came out to play ball and you could hear every word they said. The clarity was great and no matter where you went on the block, you never lost or skipped sight of your pals. But now in my new neighborhood, it just ain’t the same. Some of the kids are rude and just leave in middle of a conversation. Others fade in and out, never repeating what you missed. No, life in the AT&T neighborhood has been tough. Real tough.

I was with Verizon for nearly four years and outside of the hardware selection, I loved my service provider. The Treo and Q are solid smartphones on its network and the RAZR is just a slam dunk for great sound and reception. Plain and simple, I never had issue with Verizon Wireless. Ever. Now let me tell you, my day job takes me all over the place. I’ve been all over Northern California from the Oregon border to the Central Coast. I’ve traveled in L.A., Pasadena, San Diego, through the Southern California desert, and throughout Arizona. I’ve even been through AT&T’s home base of San Antonio, Texas, and even there, Verizon never gave me a brick. I’ve only been one place where I had no signal and that was deep in the eastern hills of Northern California. My wife’s RAZR did get a signal, though.

Now let me talk about my four weeks with AT&T. It is the norm to find myself saying on calls on a major California highway (CA-99), “Could you repeat that again?” due to skips or degrading audio from a poor signal. This is in Stockton area. A large city where you know towers are plenty. Well, maybe for Verizon but apparently not AT&T. I find myself wandering outside of friends houses many times as if I’m searching for exotic coins on their lawn with a metal detector as I randomly bounce in an erratic direction searching for the strongest signal point. You can find me in the most unusual isles of the store due to it being the place for the highest bar reading. In short, I find myself concerned about signal strength on every call I make on my iPhone. I never had this pressure with Verizon.

I love, love, LOVE, my iPhone. It is the best phone I’ve ever had. No issues with what’s on it and even with the short-comings, it’s still one of the best phones I’ve ever had. It just does not disappoint like my XV6700, Treo 700w, Motorola Q, and Samsung 740 did. I tell people all the time, “The iPhone would be perfect if it were on Verizon.” Man, VZW, you guys blew it!

Sure, AT&T isn’t always bad. There are a few areas I have no issue at all. In fact, in my new home in a town of 900 just south of Sacramento, I get better signal with AT&T than I did with Verizon. But at the end of the day, I do find myself wishing I was still on Verizon’s network. I really do miss it.

I haven’t been too many different places with the iPhone yet, but in the coming weeks I will be going to Santa Rosa, Napa, Fairfield, Chico, Half Moon Bay, and some other far out areas and I guess that’s when I’ll get some real testing done on the signal. Then I’ll be able to see if Cingular really did raise the bar before becoming the new AT&T or if it just made me long for Verizon even more.

I feel like I first have to preface this post with somewhat of a defense. Yes, I love my iPhone and yes I am relieved to be off of the Windows Mobile platform. Those two things are true, but I can’t help long for Microsoft’s ActiveSync. While it has it’s deficiencies, it sure syncs a lot faster than iTunes 7.3. How is it that every time I sync my iPhone, it takes forever to just get through my Calendar? Contacts takes a good amount of time, too. But when I use to “fresh” sync my Microsoft-based phone (docking the phone since a prior sync), ActiveSync never took as long as iTunes does to search for changes and sync them. I’m at a lost why iTunes takes as long as it does. Man, it’s unsettling!

Truth is, because of the long sync times, I’ll most likely only sync once a day, which sucks for a business professional like myself in which a single day could demand many syncings to keep both the desktop and portable device up-to-date. (If over-the-air syncing, via Direct Push, was supported, this wouldn’t even be an issue.) But with such lengthy times to get the iPhone up-to-date, stale information is most likely what the phone will have through the day.

Now to be fair to iTunes, I do sync a full year of events which is a lot. But again, iTunes should make an index file to allow the iPhone to check it for changes and then only change the differential, not the entire year of events. It seems like the same thing is happening with my 362 Contacts as well. Apple, there is a better way of doing this, so let’s see it!

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my iPhone for the last five days and without a doubt can say it’s one the best phones I’ve ever had. I haven’t been this excited with a phone since the first Motorola StarTAC back in the mid-nineties. Apple has done a fine job with this phone.

Now it’s not to say there are some short-comings with this wonderful device. With nearly ever e-mail and SMS message I get, I find myself saying, “Why didn’t Apple put in a copy-and-paste function?” Ugh. Or a cut-and-paste or even just a select-entire-word option. When the intelligent keyboard does fail to auto-correct your typo, going back six or more letters at a time is a pain. Selecting the entire word and deleting it to start over is much easier. The problem is only more intensified when you have a sentence or more to yank out. Copying information from a note, for example, to an SMS or an e-mail would makes things much easier.

Apple needs to resolve this issue immediately. It’s very interesting that it was even omitted as a feature in the phone and hopefully with enough outcry from users, it’ll find its way into an iPhone update real soon.

So there I was enjoying a fine rib-eye 20 oz. steak at a well known and upper-scale steakhouse in Elk Grove, California. You know, where Apple makes a lot its stuff and ships from. Anyway, after dinner, I get a call and answer it on my brand new iPhone. After the call, the manager comes up to me and asks, “Was that an iPhone you had?” I told her it was and my wife encouraged me to show her. So I pulled it out and gave her a quick tour of the amazing features. She loved it.

“I’ve been looking all over for that phone all week and no one has it!” she told me as she was holding it. “You’re the first person I’ve seen with one. This is amazing!” She thanked me for letting her see it and walked away from our table. A few minutes later, she stopped by again and said other tables were asking her if that was the iPhone she was looking at. “You’re pretty popular right now,” she told me with a smile.

Yes, it felt good, very good, to have an iPhone last night.