Digital Impulses

Teenager moves from T-Mobile to Verizon

So this afternoon I get a call from the teenager, stating that he had worked out a special deal with a Verizon sales rep to get a couple of Voyager by LG cellphones for him and his girlfriend.

This will be his first contract on his own, without his parents being in on the contract.  He called me after the deal was done and he is apparently VERY happy with the phones.  I asked him to bring the phone by tomorrow with the manuals, so I can explore it fully.

Good for him.

iPhone Release Date Confirmed: June 11th, 2007

According to this story on CNet, Cingular Wireless has confirmed a release date for the much anticipated, much hyped, iPhone from Apple.

So.  74 days and counting...  I really wonder just how many of thees units Apple and Cingular will actually sell AFTER the hype and the euphoria and the reality distortion field dissipates. 

I suspect that once people get a chance to put the iPhone through its paces and start bumping up against the battery life, the small storage size (4 or 8 GB is *nothing* to hold video podcasts, movies, etc), and the still-to-be-determined actual usefulness of the on-screen virtual keyboard, the word-of-mouth emanating from having spent north of $500 on it may be slightly less than rosy.

It will be very interesting to see what happens and what the sales are like after the iPhone has been out 3 months, 6 months and a year later.

iPhone Reality: The day Apple changed Cell phones forever.

This is one of those nerd moments that you never forget.  You know, like everyone knows where they were when the Challenger shuttle blew up, when 9/11 happened, when the Iraq war started, etc.

Well, I will be able to tell my grandkids where I was and what I was doing the day the iPhone was introduced to the world.

This morning, Tuesday,January 9, 2007, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA, Steve Jobs simply rocked the world of consumer electronics and personal technology to its very foundations.

It was a complete paradigm shift of historic, utterly epic proportions.  Instantly, with the unveiling of this gadget, Jobs and Apple have made all other cell phones obsolete and utterly unimportant and pathetic in comparison. 

When he revealed the 1st images and specs of the device, I immediately looked at my phone (a bulky, heavy, battleship grey, butt-ugly Cingular 8125) and saw how utterly primitive it looked and felt.

My god.  In one fell swoop, Jobs and Apple swept aside the entire cell phone industry and "leap-frogged 5 years ahead" (as Jobs claimed) of everyone else.  Really.  Smartphones, flip phones, Blackberrys all seem hopelessly trinkety and toy like next to the sleek, beautiful, thin, iPhone.

Some specs:

• 160ppi Super High Resolution screen
• Wide-screen Video iPod with touchscreen controls
• Internet communicator that includes full rich-text HTML email and SMS Texting
• 4 or 8 GB of Flash memory ($499 for 4 GB, $599 for 8 GB)
• 4.8 ounces
• 11.6 mm thin (thinner than the Cingular Blackjack or the Motorola Q)
• 5 hours battery life for video watching and 16 hours for regular phone use
• Runs OS X
• Runs a full version of Safari, the Mac web browser
• Runs the same Widgets available on the Mac in OS X
• Access to Push Email in partnership with Yahoo!
• Access to Google Maps in partnership with Google
• Visual voice-mail, a feature co-provided with Cingular that allows you to visually pick and choose what voice-mail messages you want to listen to without having to listen to them sequentially
• scrolling Cover Album Art from with your iTunes library

The device has a single button on the front; the 'Home' button, that controls navigation to the main features of the phone, like the iPod library, email, SMS texting, widgets, etc.

Everything else is pretty much software-based, including a technology called "multi-touch" that allows you to "touch" your music, scroll through your library, zoom in to web pages and pictures, etc.

Of course, the feasability of just 5 hours battery life if you watch videos, the workability of extended typing on the on-screen virtual keyboard, "only" 8 GB of storage, 720i video only, etc.  These are all things that remain to be reviewed when the iPhone makes its much anticipated debut in June 2007.

In the mean time, judging by the soaring of Apple's stock as Jobs spoke and the plunging of the stocks of Palm, Motorola and RiM, I suspoect that there will be a whole lot of "back to the drawing board" in the labs of many a hi-tech firm in Silicon Valley and other places around the planet.

Meanwhile, Apple has truly upset the "Apple" cart with this annoncement.  It sure is an exciting time to be alive, let me tell you.

Motorola 'Q' cell phone to debut on Sprint

Today Sprint announced that it will be adding the Motorola Q cell phone to its 'Power Vision Device' lineup.  Details of the announcement can be found here.

Reception has been luke warm, as Sprint did not really add anything noteworthy to the unit.  It still runs slow, the keys are mushy and it's running Windows Mobile 5.0, still considered buggy.

The 'Q" on Sprint should be available in retail stores by mid February.

Canada Fulbright Chair Speaker Series: Steven Starr

USC
Annenberg School Center for Public Diplomacy
Room 207
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
1837 Hrs

I am sitting at USC in the Annenberg School for Communication waiting for the talk by Steven Starr to begin at 1900 hours. 

Cory Doctorow is holding an animated discussion with two gentlemen on the evils of DRM and what the MPAA and the RIAA in lockstep with the hardware manufacturers are planning to foist on the public in terms of DRM and your ability to do what you want with the media you pay for.

Cory just stated that if you update your Creative MP3 player to get the newest firmware, it surreptitiously disables the ability to record from the built-in FM receiver, all this under the guise of “added functionality”. This is precisely the reason I am here tonight.

 Here we go:
 (1903 hrs) 

• Steven Starr is the co-founder of a company called Revver.
• Revver pays MORE the MORE a media file gets played
• He just mentioned the sale of YouTube to Google
• Revver sets up technology to allow the distribution of media files
• They have developed ‘Super Distribution’, where media files fly through the      Internet, reporting back to Revver “Hey, I'm being watched! Send me an Ad!”. So people get paid on those terms.
• Revver splits ad revenue 50-50 with the media creator
• The Mentos and Coke creators got:
  • 5 – 6M views and
  • got $70K in Ad revenue that they split with Revver, thus
  • making 35K on a 2.5 minute video that cost
  • $100-200 to make
• Revver has a set of tools and technologies, with an API that allows you to create      your own site and become an affiliate of Revver that makes money as a      re-distributor who makes 20% of the Ad revenue
• Content creators can opt out of Ad categories that they do not wish to be associated with
• Revver released its BETA 11 months ago
• They do NOT allow copyrighted video
• Revver has been seen as a company that has taken UGC to the forfront of the ‘free media conversation”.
• Revver uses CC licenses. Every piece of video flies out with a 2.5 version CC license.
• Revver is NOT a video portal destination site, per se. They differentiate themselves as a tools and services company

All in all, it was a great talk, where a lot of very good questions and issues were raised on the legalities and dangers of content creation and rights retentions/ownership in the world of UGC or User Generated Content.

A SideKick III for A.J.

Well, We've done it for sure now. 

We must be clinically insane.  There is no other explanation for it.  We have gone to T-Mobile and opened an ADDITIONAL cell phone account for my son so that he can have a SideKick III to text with.

We drove over to the T-Mobile in store on Rosecrans Avenue in Hawthorne and dealt with a very nice employee named Nikki (Hi, Nikki!) who took the time to set us up with everything we needed.  Opening a new account meant that we got the discounted price on the phone ($299) and for $326 after taxes, my son had the coveted SideKick III in his hot little hands.

SInce he claims that he is going to use this phone **STRICTLY** for texting, chatting and other Internet apps, we got him the $39.00 plan that includes 600 minutes and we added the $20.00 monthly UNLIMITED DATA OPTION for him to text away to his heart's content...

God, I hope to everything holy that he does not lose his mind and decide to start talking on this phone and causes us a huge cell phone bill...

If he does, I deserve it.  This is nuts.  A 16-year old running around with two (!!) cell phones... What the hell was I thinking?

I must be out of my mind.