Linked List: October 6, 2010

Wednesday, 6 October 2010

The Talk Show, Episode 11 

Me and Dan Benjamin, talking about Wookiee dingleberries. And other stuff.

This week’s episode is sponsored by Squarespace — fully hosted, completely managed environment for creating and maintaining a website, blog or portfolio, starting at just $12/month.

WSJ: ‘Apple Making Verizon-Ready iPhone by Year End’ 

Yukari Iwatani Kane and Ting-I Tsai, reporting for the WSJ:

Apple Inc. plans to begin mass producing a new iPhone by the end of 2010 that would allow Verizon Wireless to sell the smartphone early next year, said people briefed by Apple.

The new iPhone would be similar in design to the iPhone 4 currently sold by AT&T Inc. but would be based on an alternative wireless technology called CDMA used by Verizon, these people said. The phone, for which Qualcomm Inc. is providing a key chip, is expected to be released in the first quarter of next year, according to the same people.

Note that there’s a difference between Apple making a CDMA iPhone and Verizon carrying it. The WSJ is only reporting what I did two months ago: that a CDMA iPhone 4 is heading toward production. They’re not saying Verizon has agreed to carry it.

Instagram 

Slick new camera app for the iPhone, with a great UI, cool filters, and a built-in photo-sharing social network. Or maybe it’s a photo-sharing social network with a free iPhone client.

The app is nice, but I can’t see why I’d use the sharing service instead of Flickr.

Android is Open, Exhibit 72 

John Biggs at AOL/MobileCrunch:

Some excited rooters at the XDA Dev Forum tried to root the G2 — namely to unlock the software so they can add their own programs and control the OS — only to find that there is a built-in lock in the G2 hardware that returns the handset to the stock state upon rooting.

“Openness” jokes aside, there’s an argument to be made that this is a security feature.

Ben Metcalfe: ‘The .ly Domain Space to Be Considered Unsafe’ 

Who’d have thought you can’t trust the Libyan government?

The Symmetry of Share Shifts in Mobile Phones 

More interesting data visualization on the mobile market, by Horace Dediu.