Linked List: June 10, 2008

Tuesday, 10 June 2008

Maybe You Will Be Able to Activate an iPhone 3G From Home? ★

Scott McNulty on a Reuters report that AT&T will somehow impose “penalties” on iPhone owners who don’t activate their phone within 30 days — which suggests that you won’t have to activate them in the store at the time of purchase.

Ars’s Preview of Mobile NetNewsWire ★

Looks cool.

Snowed Out ★

John Siracusa on Snow Leopard.

The Hivelogic Enkoder Form Is Back ★

Update your bookmarks.

Ballad of a Thin Man ★

Nick Wingfield from The Wall Street Journal:

Apple’s iPhone 3G got most of the headlines on Monday after the product was announced at an Apple technical conference in San Francisco. But blogs and other Internet news sites also took note of a gaunt-looking Steve Jobs. […]

In response to a question about his health Tuesday, an Apple spokeswoman said Jobs was hit with a “common bug” in recent weeks but he still felt it was important to participate in the Apple conference. The spokeswoman said he’s now on the mend with the aid of antibiotics.

He does look thin, but I don’t think he’s any thinner than he was a year ago. Yesterday’s Drudge Report link did have people talking here at WWDC, though.

O2 Pricing for the iPhone 3G in the U.K. ★

With higher-level monthly plans, the iPhone 3G is “free” in the U.K.:

Best of all, the new 8GB iPhone won’t cost you a penny on our £45 and £75 tariffs. And it’s just £99 on our £35 tariff and new £30 tariff.

All tariffs include unlimited browsing on your iPhone, unlimited Wi-Fi access, visual voicemail and reduced roaming rates with our International Traveller Service and are subject to a minimum term contract of 18 months.

Changing the Entire Phone Market ★

Mike Davidson:

This sounds overly simplistic, but I really do think Apple just split the mobile world into two choices: settle for a free phone or buy an iPhone. There just aren’t many reasons to do anything else.

Footprint ★

From Apple’s Snow Leopard page:

Snow Leopard dramatically reduces the footprint of Mac OS X, making it even more efficient for users, and giving them back valuable hard drive space for their music and photos.

Subtraction: Investing Strategies for iPhone Customers ★

Interesting graphs, and a clever punchline.

Cheaper, Eh? ★

The $199 starting price is a huge deal, but, given that data plans have gone up $10 per month, we’ll be paying $240 more over two years for a phone that costs $200 less. Update: And it might be $15 per month more, not $10, given Ralph de la Vega’s comment to Om Malik that SMS messages will no longer be included in the base plan.

Apple PR Overview of Snow Leopard ★

They say “no new features”, but what they really mean is no new user-visible features. Grand Central Dispatch (a new and very intriguing approach to multi-core parallel programming, and which includes an extension to the C programming language) and OpenCL (which lets apps offload certain expensive computations to the GPU) are, obviously, features.

No word in the PR about PowerPC support, but if you’ve been following along here at DF, you know the current score on that. But that Apple has said nothing publicly on this point suggests that a decision hasn’t been made yet.

WWDC Keynote Video ★

If you haven’t watched it yet, you should at least watch the third-party app demos, just to get a feel for what’s possible. Scott Forstall’s explanation of the Push Notification Service was great, too.

Om Malik Interviews AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega ★

Smart interview with Ralph de la Vega:

Before this device you weren’t really untethered, but with this you are. I think people have tried to build a $100 laptop, and here is a $200 phone that can do all that over 3G. It will have a big impact, and will be ubiquitous.