June 2008

Everything cellular is hot right now, driven in part the enormous market pressure being created by Apple around iPhone. In addition to the hoopla over iPhone, in the last few days, we’ve seen stories a whole bunch of stories.

New products are hitting the market: the Nokia E66 and E71 phones which we talked about yesterday, and the Sony Ericsson XPeria-X1 which had engadget just drooling a couple of days ago. We talked at length about the E-Series phones (which some were very excited about), and while we thought that the XPeria had beautiful industrial design the quality of the browser had the potential to make that all moot.

There has also has been an unprecedented volume of new video, including the Garmin Nuviphone and that blurry little video of the BlackBerry Javelin. We discussed whether Nuviphone had a chance, given their delays and strong focus on GPS. Does it really have a chance after the iPhone 3G ships with GPS built in?

New operating systems are also debuting: There’ll be a TREO upgrade this summer to Windows Mobile 6 as well… the HTC Diamond will be out with… Android first and then Windows Mobile 7? Wow.

And in the middle of all this, there’s an oddball patent from Microsoft for something called the Microsoft VEDA which looks like a bad 1980′s drawing of a futuristic science fiction notebook computer.

Today we discussed the Associated Press’ decision to issue “guidelines” for bloggers on what consitutes acceptable use of their stories. AP recently sent a C&D to the Drudge Retort, and then backed down. Some blogs, like TechCrunch, have announced a boycott of AP stories until they change their position. We talked about what AP’s bonehead stance would mean for bloggers, and their motivations for taking such an extreme position. What next? The NIAA (Newspaper Industry Association of America) suing children for bootleg papers?

We also talked about Olga Kharif’s story about how the iPhone will impact rivals. A year after it’s introduction, it has completely turned the mobile industry on its head, and now other manufactures and carriers who don’t have access to iphone are scrambling to compete.