Linked List: July 1, 2007

Sunday, 1 July 2007

iPhone Not Quite the Cash Cow eBay Sellers Were Hoping ★

Corey Spring analyzed 933 eBay auctions for iPhones and found that over 50 percent of them came and went without a single bidder.

Kottke on New iPhone Features ★

I’ve been thinking about this all weekend. Yes, I want cut/copy/paste and selectable text. But it’s easy to see why iPhone doesn’t have these features: it’s not at all obvious how they could be added without adding physical buttons or on-screen clutter.

Some pretty good ideas in the comments.

iPhone Components ★

Samsung CPU and flash memory, Wi-Fi chipset from Marvell.

Paul Kafasis’s iPhone Timeline ★

Paul Kafasis, 14 hours into “waiting for activation”:

12:54 AM: Consider calling 9-1-1 with the iPhone’s Emergency Mode, just to get it doing something. Reject idea out of hand as a criminal waste of resources.

1:01 AM: Recall Charlie Brown. Feel that I too got a rock. Both sit there doing nothing, but only one costs $600.

Potentially helpful for anyone one else stuck waiting for activation: He fixed it in an hour the next day by calling AT&T customer service.

Waiting in Style ★

Smart guy: Dan Budiac spent Friday waiting in line at the 5th Avenue Apple Store with his dog and a great book.

Steven Johnson: How to Make the iPhone More of a Phone ★

Steven Berlin Johnson, on the fact that it takes about 6 taps to go from a turned-off iPhone to placing a call to a favorite:

On my old Nokia, I could generally get to my wife’s number (assuming it was recently dialed) in 3-4 steps, even if I’d left the phone running the Gmail app. My gut is that 6 steps is asking a bit too much for calls you make ten or twenty times a day to your core group.

So here’s my solution: double clicking the home button automatically takes you to the phone favorites screen.

Maybe if you wake your phone with a double-tap of Home, it should take you to the Home screen after sliding to unlock, instead of taking you back to what you were doing when it went to sleep.

Mocked London Olympic Logo ‘Evolves’ ★

But it still “sucks”.

New Definition of ‘Only’ ★

CNNMoney:

The iPhone is designed to work with only one music store, iTunes (though MP3s unprotected by digital rights management, as sold by stores like eMusic, can be played, just like on other phones).

So it only works with one music store, except for a bunch of other stores that don’t count because they don’t use DRM. WTF?

This is how mainstream business journalists say that Apple refuses to support Microsoft’s proprietary DRM.

iRony ★

Mark Pilgrim:

You gotta admit, that’s at least a little bit funny.

It does seem funny. Except when I want to paste a URL from one Safari page into a Twitter text field in another Safari page.

Palm Reports Profit Drop, Expects iPhone Effect ★

Palm CEO Ed Colligan, in a conference call to analysts forecasting a small quarterly loss, on the effect the iPhone might have on Palm:

“They will have 30 days to return (iPhone) so we hope we’ll benefit from that, if that happens.”

Great plan. And maybe next week Colligan will find a billion-dollar bill on the sidewalk.

(Via Mike Rohde.)

RIM’s Shares Hit Three-Year High ★

Seems like an odd thing for their stock to jump so high the same day the iPhone was released, but the BlackBerry-maker reported surprisingly strong quarterly results. There are a lot of happy BlackBerry users.