It looks like the tools are not ready yet, despite the frenzy of 15-year-olds screaming on PWN blogs and forums to release them.

Best estimate is tomorrow, according to my sources.

[I've harped on this before. Warning.]

I wirelessly synced my phone — a Sony Ericsson — via Bluetooth (BT) with Mac OS from 2003-2008.

Then in 2008 I got an iPhone and lost this capability because Apple saw fit to disable BT sync.

BT too slow for music/movies? Fine, give us the choice to sync contacts, which are typically thousands of times smaller. My Sony Ericsson would sync in usually 5-10 seconds.

It was so simple, so elegant. I’d get home, click the Sync Now icon in my menu bar, and everything would be done while the phone sat in my pocket.

If I had to guess, I’d say Apple disabled this to sell Mobile Me, a very “Microsoft” thing to do.

Appleswitcher Forum post How Many iPods Have You Owned? sheds some light on iPod Turnover. No, not the recipe. I mean how often do Apple devotees buy iPods for themselves (or are gifted them)?

The more data we get, the more accurate the numbers. I’m going to to halt the poll and divide the iPod total # by number of voters to get an iPod/voter count. Right now we have 15 votes, with a bell curve around the 3-4 iPods owned slots.

iPhones and Touches do count.

So if you haven’t registered for the AppleSwitcher forum, register now and vote.

Fortune.com writer Philip Elmer-DeWitt makes a good case that this scenario is NOT the future, at least not the immediate future.

Let’s back up. What is the table that Elmer-DeWitt is setting? The iPhone:Android=Mac:Windows similie is this: Google’s free, open-source Android phone platform will inevitably crush Apple’s brilliant iPhone platform like Windows crushed Mac in the 1990s, despite the Mac’s far superior interface/experience*.

So will it? Elmer-DeWitt says no, that there are two problems: carrier adoption of the massive changes needed to support Android, and the relatively small Android 3rd-party development community vs. Apple’s large, well-coordinated developer community. Continue reading »

Background

Unless you’ve been living in Vega, Texas, you’ve probably heard the iPhone does not have a replaceable battery, meaning you can’t bring a second (or third etc.) to pop in that iPhone when you run out of juice, like you can with a notebook computer.

I just got back from a 3-day camping-at-night roadtrip, and I had my iPhone on me. Here’s what I learned about power management.

iPhone Travel Tips

So what can you do on the road? Here’s some quick tips:

1. bring a car charger Pretty simple stuff. We had a Belkin iPod charger that worked fine for my iPhone. It’s just slow to charge the iPhone.
2. bring your wall charger and grab AC power whenever you can The iPhone recharges much faster from AC wall power than it does from a car charger. As few as 15 mintes can give you a 1/4 to 1/3 charge. We’d stop at restaurants and I’d find an AC outlet and pop the phone in it.
3. turn off WiFi while driving You won’t need it, and it sucks juice.
4. dim the display I had mine on auto-dim, and realized I could really conserve battery by turning this off and moving the slider as far left as I could stand.

Next time I’ll come equipped with a solar charger, an external USB phone charger, or both. Fighting for  car charger time (vs. another iPhone owner and an ancient MP3 player) was no fun.

I’m not going to pull punches. In my opinion the iPhone is the coolest consumer gadget that man has ever produced. Following up on What I Don’t Like About the iPhone, here’s what I do like about it, and what I think Apple got right.

Integration

The iPhone is stunningly well integrated. It’s a phone, music player, web browser, light emailer, SMS’er, map utility, calendar, weather updater, alarm clock, and game player, and all these features work well together and blend visually and conceptually.

Example: do a search for a shop on Google. If like most business searches on Google these days, it’s under “Local results for [business name]” (has a tiny map icon next to it), click the link

1. you’re taken to the iPhone’s Map application and the store is centered, and “pinned” with a standard Google pin marker
2. a tap to the flag for the pin takes you to a Contacts-style page with the phone (just tap to call), store URL, address, and some map buttons including Directions to Here
3. a tap on Directions to Here will do a faux-GPS of your current location and mark the route to the shop on a Google map from wherever you are
4. Holy F#ck!

Continue reading »

Texting has its oddities. In email or SMS mode texting is vertical (portrait) -only, making the keyboard narrow. But when the iPhone is in browser mode and you’re entering text into a page’s <textarea>, the keyboard can go into landscape mode, making writing much easier. What gives? Give us landscape SMS and email capability.

The headphone jack port doubles as a surgical-quality flesh-removing device. It’s REALLY sharp. I keep my phone in my front jeans pocket, and 4 times now I’ve conducted impromptu surgery on my finger reaching for a ringing phone. I now keep the phone upside down in my pocket, so when I reach for it I get to keep my digits.

No Bluetooth sync!? No BT syncing of Address Book contacts and iCal events?! Something I’ve been doing for FOUR YEARS with my lowly Sony Ericsson T610 is suddenly NOT AVAILABLE to me with this $500 phone? Hmm. Note I’m not asking for music sync over Bluetooth because I understand it would take decades to transfer gigabytes over Bluetooth.

The silent ringer switch sometimes moves itself. Nitpick. Many things in my pocket move.

My iPhone hunts for WiFi connections. And it asks me several times if I’d like to join. There’s an on/off setting for this, which is a little all-or-nothing for me. I’d like intelligent hunting, for instance,

• alert me if there’s an unlocked WiFi signal,
• connect to known signals,
• but stay silent and in EDGE data mode if the only signals around are unknown and locked

The interface is laggy. Sometimes it will not keep up with my scrolling in Safari, and will stutter after deleting a few emails back-to-back. X-ing a URL in Safari sometimes locks the interface for 5 seconds. C’mon, iPhone, just clear the URL field so I can type.

Overall I love my iPhone. These gripes don’t really affect my intense enjoyment of the device. I’ll have a What I Like About the iPhone post in a week.

Wired has a fantastic story running about how the iPhone came to be amid the intrigues of Steve Jobs’ inner court.

It was a late morning in the fall of 2006. Almost a year earlier, Steve Jobs had tasked about 200 of Apple’s top engineers with creating the iPhone. Yet here, in Apple’s boardroom, it was clear that the prototype was still a disaster. It wasn’t just buggy, it flat-out didn’t work. The phone dropped calls constantly, the battery stopped charging before it was full, data and applications routinely became corrupted and unusable. The list of problems seemed endless. At the end of the demo, Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, “We don’t have a product yet.”
The effect was even more terrifying than one of Jobs’ trademark tantrums. When the Apple chief screamed at his staff, it was scary but familiar. This time, his relative calm was unnerving. “It was one of the few times at Apple when I got a chill,” says someone who was in the meeting.