Kaum wurde das iPhone von Apple vorgestellt, brummt es schon mächtig, bevor das Gerät überhaupt irgendwer regulär kaufen konnte. Zuerst klagte Cisco wegen der Namensrechte und nun klagt Apple selbst gegen Programmierer, die die Softwareoberfläche für “normale” Handys kopieren wollen. Außerdem stellen einige Kritiker berechtigte Fragen zu dem Gerät, welche bei der umfangreichen Keynote anscheinend nicht beachtet wurden.
Links:

Apple geht gegen erste iPhone-Software für normale Handys vor

iPhone: 20 things we don’t know 

Motorola recently released the MOTOFONE and it seems to be the perfect “just a phone.” Motorola really took usability into consideration when designing the phone. It features a high-contrast screen viewable in a variety of lighting conditions, a cleaned up UI with icon-based navigation and a loud speaker.

Link: Motorola Listened, Made “Just a Phone” - PaulStamatiou.com

Apparently my recent remarks regarding homebrew mobile phone communities were right on the money:

I’m announcing the formation of the “Silicon Valley Homebrew Mobile Phone Club.” Our purpose is to provide support and guidance for individuals building their own “convergence devices.” We’re going to have monthly meetings where we discuss designs and applications with the idea that two heads is frequently better than one. Don’t toil in solitude, trying to get your latest wireless hardware hack to work.

Links: Announcement, The Open Phone Proposal
Preliminary site: telefono.revejo.org

And Stacking Fault points to a number of people already active in the field in the insightful overview Build your own mobile phone.

LONDON (Reuters) - A group of the world’s mobile operators and handset makers said on Thursday they are to join together to develop an open-source Linux-based operating system that could to be used in phones by the end of 2007.

Mobile network operators Vodafone and NTT DoCoMo and handset makers Motorola, Samsung, NEC and Panasonic, said they would form an independent not-for-profit group to share the costs and speed up mobile software and handsets and cut the number of operating platforms on the market.

I’m curious what this will do for the homebrew/customization scene. Ideal scenario: a (usable!) open source operating system for cellphones. Think about how many times you heard someone complain about sucky phone menus — and then imagine what would happen if people would finally be able to do something about it.

This goes way deeper than Palm OS or Symbian in terms of the possibilities — if nobody screws this up it could spawn a wave of mobile user interface innovation, and create an infrastructure of experimentation where 20 year old kids can innovate in a slow-moving industry.

If you put the right tools into the hands of people who are actually using a system, and who aren’t pulled back by business interests, amazing things can happen. Think of Firefox/Flock, of OpenWRT, or even Napster.

(Yeah this isn’t necessarily the motivational factor for these companies, but you can’t develop a Linux derivate without open sourcing the result — so people will have access to a significant part of crucial sourcecode.)

Link: Mobile players form Linux platform pact - Yahoo! News, Slashdot | Cellular Companies Join to Improve Linux

Photo by AMagill

Via Engadget: Samsung just presented a laptop that uses flash memory instead of the conventional hard disk.

While this may sound like another impenetratable tech buzzword that geeks invent to irritate the rest of the non-geek world it’s actually a big deal.

There are a number of attractive advantages of flash drives over conventional mechanical hard drives: because they have no moving parts data access on flash drives is faster and the drive is completely silent. Flash drives are shock resistant. Dropped your computer? Not that big a deal. Flash drives use less energy than a conventional hard drive — expect battery performance to sky rocket with future generations of laptops.

And computers with flash drives can potentially be much smaller than current models. Most people already use this memory-on-a-chip on a daily basis in the form of USB flash drives — and a USB stick with 1 GB of storage is no larger than a small lighter.

Think of it as the difference between the clunky and heavy first-generation iPod (5 GB hard drive) and the current generation iPod nano (5 GB flash drive).

There are still technical quirks to overcome, and the current price of flash memory is breathtaking (PCWorld cites $960 for a 32 GB disk). But it’s only a matter of time that affordable models are available for the mass market, and the effect on consumer products will be huge. Your watch could become a 100 GB flash drive.

See also: Ubiquitous Computing

Image by Ralf Schmerberg/Dropping Knowledge

On the Iced Coffee blog: “I think New Orleans is now one of the most technologically advanced cities in the U.S…”

Says the author, Aaron:

There is literally NO ONE I know in this city who does not have a cell phone, and I’m talking 8 year olds to 80 year olds. […]

Half of the city still doesn’t have land telephone lines and even more don’t have cable, so we have cell phones and we have to hop in the car to drive to a coffee shop (where I am now) if you need to check your email. And you do need to check your email, because many of your previously neighborhood friends are still spread out about the country, once because of evacuating, now because that’s where the new job is, and email might be the only way to stay in touch if you don’t want to talk to them late at night because of time zones and work. […]

The end product is a modern, shiny, 21st century New Orleanian, pretty much across the board. Even grandma learned how to answer the cell phone instead of looking at it like it’s something that might bite her. Crazy flip phones.

Read the full article for some other details, e.g. about how people started buying satellite radio because FM radio stations were scarce.

The screenshot above is from a short documentary by Ralf Schmerberg called “Chocolate City - We are here to stay”, shot on January 12th 2006. You can download this Copyleft-licensed movie at the Dropping Knowledge film gallery.