Pete Mortensen - page 11

Not literally, mind. From the delightful Peter Serafinowicz Show Christmas Special, uploaded to YouTube this evening. The demonstration of the comma is amazing, but you wouldn’t believe what it takes to make a semi-colon.

If I have one complaint about my aluminum MacBook (and I think I might literally have only one complaint), it’s that I don’t have an elegant method for hooking the machine up to my HDTV. As part of the 99.997 percent of the population who don’t own an AppleTV, this means I don’t have any way to watch the video in my living room. The laptop’s Mini DisplayPort is an absurdly new standard, and that means it plays well with virtually nothing. I could buy an MDP to DVI cable from Apple, then use a DVI-to-HDMI cable to provide video and an additional TOSLink cable to deliver audio, but that sounds like a poor way to spend a Sunday evening. It would be nice just to have one cable to do everything.

Well. This frustration should soon be gone. According to MacYourself, an MDP-to-HDMI cable will be arriving in late January from Monoprice.com, the leading source for really cheap cables on the Internet. It looks like a separate audio cable will still be necessary (though no one is really sure), but I’m still a big proponent of the direct to HDMI solution, especially because it should support HDCP protection for watching iTunes HD downloads on an external screen.

I’ll buy one on day one. Who’s with me?

The Blagoblogs are a-buzz this evening with word that Microsoft, though it definitely has no ZunePhone to show at next month’s CES (I know, I’m just as heart-broken as you are), will almost certainly launch some sort of software ‘n’ services platform for Windows Mobile called Zune Mobile. According to ZDNet’s Mary-Jo Foley, who is as interested in Zune Mobile as it is possible for a non-Microsoft employee to be, the platform may include “music purchase, playing, sharing and subscribing — and maybe even a little something special for podcasters/podcast listeners, too.”

Or, in other words, Microsoft may, if it plays its cards right, bring the technical media functionality of the iPhone to the legendarily poor interfaces of a thousand mediocre Windows Mobile phones, many of which have enough on-board storage for two or even three albums worth of music. Rather than attempting to a build a ground-up 21st century mobile platform, Microsoft is attempting to bolt on features that meet current user expectations, and then leave it up to dozens of hardware makers to see if the experience actually holds together. If true, this is a pretty sad bit of competitive response out of Redmond. At best, it’s a duplicate of a famous Apple failure — iTunes for the Motorola ROKR.

In that unfortunate experience, Apple brought iTunes support to a third-party phone, and then ran screaming as it realized the only way to ensure its name would only appear on a great phone would be to build the software and the hardware from the ground-up on its own. The iPhone resulted. Zune was Microsoft’s first attempt to follow such a strategy, to poor results thus far (in large part because Apple’s ecosystem was much stronger). Now, it would appear, Microsoft is relying on its standard software-only approach to respond to the iPhone juggernaut.

That’s pretty sad. As an enormous Apple fan, I would like nothing better than a credible challenge to the iPhone’s dominance — it means an even better iPhone than I can imagine in two years’ time. But if this is the best the Distinguished Competition has to offer, all we have to rely on is the vision of Steve Jobs. Good thing he can see for miles and miles, eh?

Via ZDNet

History has shown again and again that truck accessories are the best of all possible holiday gifts. That’s why I was delighted to discover this shot on Flickr of some beautiful Apple mudflaps outfitted on a fine 4×4 of GMC persuasion.

I mean, it’s like I HAVE to buy a truck now. Even if there’s nowhere to park it in San Francisco. Or I can just wear mudflaps off my pant legs. Whichever makes more sense.

Full pic after the jump.

Flickr via Digg

At a talk in San Francisco tonight, I encountered a very cool (relatively) new OS X app called MemoryMiner. Basically, it takes all of your photos, your address book, and Google Maps to create interesting, shareable stories with friends and family. The most important piece of the app is its ability to quickly tag a portion of an image, much as Facebook and Flickr do, then associate those pieces of data back to your wider social network — over the course of time. It’s explicitly designed to allow you to tag a person at different points in their lifetime, so you can track and associate your family’s history over the course of centuries, if you have the documents to support it.

It’s currently in version 1.85 (available for a 15-day trial or $45), and creator John Fox tells me version 2.0 is well on its way, as is a social tool to track your personal geographic history compared to others. Having played around with the app for a few hours now, I will say that the program is really great at tagging and adding in new people to my MemoryMiner people file. In a few minutes, I had clips of pictures and names with all the people I wanted to. Unfortunately, for those whose birth dates I didn’t know (most of them), I had no ability to track their photos over their lifetimes. But it largely works as advertised.

Unfortunately, it has some pretty basic, pretty show-stopping limitations for the time-being. I couldn’t get it to import my iPhoto 08 Library, so that’s a huge portion of my memories that aren’t included right now. Even more troublingly, the program lacks the basic functionality to rotate photos so they’re in the correct orientation. Or, if it’s there, I just couldn’t locate it, which would almost be worse

Still, it’s a program with considerable potential. I could even imagine the company setting up a service to scan, upload, and tag archival photos so they can be associated and studied by users at home. I can just see the genealogy lovers getting way into this. Maybe in version 2.0.

Other than some irritation about the death of FireWire and a few missing video output adapters from the Mini DisplayPort, the new Aluminum MacBooks are pretty much perfect. They’re fast, they run cool, and are incredibly light but also incredibly strong.

But not every MacBook out in MacVille is behaving nicely. As a matter of fact, many users on Apple’s support forums claim that their MacBooks became incredibly unstable after upgrading their RAM with third-party hardware. Frequent freezes, program crashes, garbled data on the screen. Though it’s anecdotal, most also claim that their problems went away upon switching back to the factory-installed memory from Apple, or upon taking it in to Apple for a swap. Even the normally impeccable OWC and Crucial are alleged to be having problems here.

This is a big surprise to me, not least because I installed Crucial RAM in my new MacBook more than a month ago and have experienced nothing but performance improvements ever since. It’s always possible that very minute changes in hardware between models could cause trouble. I have a 2.4 Ghz machine, so there could be an issue with the lower-speed machines, or it could just be that I got lucky. Anyone dealing with this?

jkontherun via TUAW

Apple Bomb Pillow from MicroRevolt

Today in Europe, Nokia introduced the N97, its first serious effort to combat the iPhone’s rapid rise in the smartphone market. And I have to say, I’m pretty impressed. It’s chock full of features the iPhone can’t match (twice the storage, higher-res screen, 5 megapixel camera with a real lens and a good flash), and it’s actually attractive, too. Even better, it doesn’t run Windows Mobile, and the S60 OS seems to have been much better adapted to touch form than the BlackBerry OS on the unfortunate Storm. Plus, it has a really nice QWERTY keyboard, for those who are into that kind of thing.

On the downside, it’s thicker than an iPhone, doesn’t sync with iTunes, doesn’t run OS X and can’t run AppStore apps. Precisely the actual competitive advantage that Apple has built in. It also doesn’t appear to use an on-screen keyboard in portrait mode (favoring T9 text entry), which is pretty obnoxious when browsing with one hand (at least until your bookmarks get set).

Still, this looks like a heck of a phone to be reckoned with for Apple in the European market. No North American release announced at this time, but it does support the 3G network already deployed by AT&T and it will be sold unlocked, so enthusiasts can grab it in the first half of next year.

Via SlashGear and PhoneScoop

Apple’s new MacBooks are great — but as a proud owner of one of the milled wonders, I can confirm that the much-vaunted glass trackpad did have issues. Not constant ones by any means, but it would miss clicks quite often — probably one in ten times.

Having finally downloaded and installed Trackpad Firmware Update 1.0 yesterday, I can also confirm that the problems have completely gone away now. No fuss, and every click counts.

My experience has not been universal, however. MacFixIt reports that many users are having difficulty installing the update, and I’ve even heard of some people getting kernel panics and other bad news. Install at your own risk, obviously, but it’s a very welcome update — makes the already good significantly better.

As has been widely rumored, Apple rolled out iPhone OS 2.2 tonight via software update, which brings Google Street View, mass transit directions, location sharing by e-mail, and, most excitingly, over-the-air podcast downloads, which has been a fairly glaring oversight (and source of considerable controversy).

At the same time, Apple has whipped out iTunes 8.0.2, which is basically a bug fix, plus improved results for VoiceOver, Apple’s accessibility technology for the visually impaired.

Nothing big, but good to see Apple improving its software nonetheless.

Via Engadget

The big tech news of the last few days is that Hewlett-Packard‘s 2008 earnings are better than analyst estimates — and this most recent quarter should be their strongest. It was a major bright spot from one of the world’s largest companies, showing that the current credit crisis doesn’t actually mean that the entire economy has shut down. Specifically, the tech sector might be in less trouble than everyone else.

And it made me wonder, yet again, why exactly stock analysts continue to assume that Apple can’t continue to grow and innovate in the coming years. After all, if one organization knows something about hitting the gas during a down time to get light years ahead of the competition, it is Apple. The stock chart I’ve reproduced above from Google shows the performance of AAPL since the introduction of the iPod in the depths of the post-9/11 and -Enron recession. Even with the recent precipitous drop in AAPL (it’s down almost 60 percent since January), the stock is worth about eight times what it was before the iPod (when you factor in the stock split in 2005).

The iPhone is burning up the charts. Apple has its strongest line-up of laptops in the history of the company and is gobbling up market share. The iPod touch and new nano has cemented Apple’s lead in the media player market. When people aren’t buying cars and houses, they still find time for personal entertainment — it’s a comfort when everything else is crazy. With Apple’s current technology and product pipeline, I believe that Steve has the organization poised to thrive once again. They’re going to maintain their position, continue growth, and get out ahead in creating new markets while their competitors are battening down the hatches and sticking to doing what they already know.

What Apple has to offer isn’t going away because credit is scarce. If anything, it may grow even more appealing.

I took quite ill on Thursday, and literally didn’t leave the house at any point between Friday and Sunday mornings. And, like a lot of bed-ridden people, I was in far too much pain to actually think about reading, writing, or, well, thinking. Instead, I got caught up on all of the junky entertainment I never find time for otherwise. Comic I hadn’t yet read. DVR’d episodes of Top Design. And virtually all of the content on Netflix Watch Instantly.

Now, for those of you who still haven’t had the chance to try out streaming Netflix, I will say that it works incredibly well. Movies start quickly, the new interface allows you to scrub through looking for your exact place, it resumes play if you accidentally quit. (I had a few films with skewed soundtracks, but it was a rare occurrence). What’s astounding, however, is just how tiny the Netflix streaming library is compared to Hulu, iTunes, or, you know, Netflix DVD service. After a few days in bed, I’d watched literally everything that I had any interest in seeing that the streaming service had. I mean, there are only two seasons of 30 Rock.

And that’s when it hit me: everyone who’s called for Apple to start a monthly subscription model for iTunes has been almost right. There’s tons of money to be made there. But the opportunity isn’t from making its full music library available for $15 a month. It’s in charging $20-30 a month for unlimited TV show access.

Think about it: Apple has the largest library of digital downloadable video on the planet right now. Sales haven’t been as good as hoped. Apple has begun to rent movies, which means it has the DRM to prevent people from keeping a permanent copy of a rented clip on their hard drive. And yet TV shows are still available only for $1.99 each. While that’s a pretty good price, it’s not one that I’ve paid since Apple first made TV available through iTunes (I briefly had 10-pack passes for The Daily Show and Colbert way back). But I would gladly ditch my Netflix subscription and pony up the same $20 a month for unlimited rentals of the TV shows on iTunes, even without movies. That’s $240 gross from me that Apple and the TV studios wouldn’t see otherwise.

Now, if it were anyone but Apple, I would say that kind of price is too high to pay. But this wouldn’t be a streaming competitor to Hulu — it would be for files that could work on any iPod or iPhone. That’s a compelling proposition right there. It would further cement Apple’s vertical integration as the premiere agent for digital entertainment on earth. It would make an AppleTV as essential as a TiVo. It could even begin to make the cable companies nervous if Apple’s selection continues to improve (live sports being an obvious exception).

I think it’s a slam dunk. Does it make sense to you?

Though we’re still several months away from the launch of either Mac OS X Snow Leopard or Microsoft’s Windows 7, America’s Finest News Source The Onion has already decoded the coming OS war in a handy chart, which you can read after the jump.

I have to say, I’m really impressed that MS is getting close to getting the spontaneous combustion thing under control. Dare to dream!

It’s no secret than I’ve been a less-prolific blogger over the last, oh, six months or so. Part of this is fairly dull personal life details (marriage, etc. Hi, honey!), but a bigger part of it has been the very quiet development of my first book, Wired to Care, which I co-wrote with my dear friend and colleague Dev Patnaik of Jump Associates. The book won’t be out until January, but our new blog is live now.

Now, far be it for me to avoid any shameless self-promotion, but I bring it up for another reason. The top post of the moment is my epic manifesto on why it is that Apple has never made significant in-roads in the enterprise space, while IBM remains the machine of choice more than 30 years after Steve Jobs declared war on Big Blue. It’s tied tightly to the theme of the book, but I think it can be regarded most as a guest appearance by Cult of Mac at the Wired to Care blog. Plus, it has the Apple Lemmings ad:

“Steve Jobs doesn’t have a clue about how to sell anything to business customers. From 1981’s defective Apple III to the $10,000 NeXT Computer to Apple’s current efforts, the offerings that Steve Jobs has created for enterprise technology customers have universally flopped. The company’s current high-profile effort in that arena is the xServe, a sleek metal computer meant to handle the file-sharing needs of a small or medium business. While beautifully designed in the way that all of Apple’s products are, the xServe screams to the world of business that it was not designed with them in mind. People working in technology at companies want to buy something that looks reliable, fast, and, most importantly, too complex-looking for ordinary people to manage. Simple hardware doesn’t connect with its intended audience, and the xServe has no traction whatsoever with business customers.”

I have a lot more to say on the subject, and I hope you do, too! Let the argument begin in the comments thread at W2C, and I’ll keep you updated whenever there’s more Apple content over there!

Tony Fadell, Apple’s Senior VP of the iPod division and the man who first brought the idea of a small hard drive-based music player to the company, will step down shortly, according to the Wall Street Journal. He joined the company in 2001, setting up the first iPod engineering team and overseeing its design.

According to the Journal, Mark Papermaster, the IBM VP that is being sued by Big Blue to try to stop him from working for Apple, will take over the role. This all makes sense — Steve Jobs has publicly stated that Apple bought PA-Semi in order to develop systems on a chip to power iPods and iPhones, and Papermaster is a total guru of the POWER architecture upon which PowerPC chips and, in turn, PA-Semi’s silicon, are based.

Fadell is one of Apple’s least-known legends, even though he should be credit more than anyone else with creating the iPod. It’s a shame to see him go, but Apple tends to be a place where people burn out fast, and Tony rose incredibly quickly from contractor to SVP in five years.

Just a few days after announcing that Mac support for Netflix’s Watch Instantly service was on the way, the company has opened the door to its public beta here. With a quick install of Microsoft Silverlight 2.0, you’ll be good to go — not even a browser restart was necessary for me. I’ve been playing with it for about an hour now, and I’m really impressed. At least on my (admittedly brand-new) MacBook, it loads almost instantly, the video and audio quality is great, and the suggestions really do mesh with my taste. And none of the bizarre error messages I’ve seen in reviews of the older Windows version.

The site suggests that a 1.5 Ghz Intel chip is the minimum for Mac support. Anyone with an older machine had the chance to put this service through its paces?

I was amused to see early shots of the latest Dell OptiPlex desktops. These are pretty much the mainline of Dell’s line-up, and are among the most popular desktop PCs in the country. Electronista talked about the new line-up’s “industrial, metal” look, which Dell credits for dramatic reductions in power consumption. And despite Dell’s much-remarked-upon commitment to industrial design, the new boxes are incredibly hideous.

Why? Because Dell is perfectly willing to sacrifice a design vision in order to save on manufacturing costs. Compare the box at left to a Mac Pro. Both have metal grill faces, but only one is metal all over and uses modified commodity components in order to maintain a consistent look. Dell, meanwhile, dropped in ugly black plastic components for the drives and sides, presumably because it was a lot easier than speccing a custom mold for all parts. AND they left in the floppy drive, a full 10 years after Apple ditched it.

This, in a nutshell, is the difference between Apple and nearly every other computer company on earth (Sony might be the one exception, and HP is improving): Apple just won’t compromise. If a computer is going to be an imposing metal tower that recalls a steel factory, it will be that all over, even if it’s nearly impossible to engineer. A company like Dell, on the other hand, will throw such interesting design ideas out as soon they get hard to pull off. Apple is committed to engineering designs exactly as crafted, down to the millimeter and the routing of interior cables. A company like Dell wants to provide just enough design and taste that people aren’t actively repulsed by its products.

It’s not even close.

Electronista via Engadget

Image Credit: Engadget

Few things rankle a Mac user more than seeing new and interesting products and services rolled out that only work on PC. In my household, Netflix’s “Watch Instantly” is at the top of this maddening list. Basically, anyone with a Netflix account and sufficiently fast PC can watch any of 12,000 movies direct from Netflix servers at no extra charge. It hasn’t come to Macs because the service relies on PC-only DRM. And this drives my wife nuts. As she sees it, she’s already paying Netflix for service, and since that subscription now includes streaming she can’t use, she’s getting charged for a phantom service.

I can’t say I disagree.

At any rate, Netflix today proclaimed that this sad state of affairs won’t continue for long. Starting tomorrow, a limited number of Mac subscribers will be able to use Watch Instantly via a new version of the software rooted in Microsoft’s Silverlight technology (it’s a lot like Flash). Since Silverlight bakes in the PC DRM, it runs fine on a Mac and takes no additional tweaking to function.

Unfortunately, the new platform will be rolled out slowly, with Netflix only promising support for all Intel Mac users by the end of the year. So it might be awhile before Netflix stops getting the stinkeye from my apartment.

Anyone got access yet? How’s it run?

Image credit: Barry Falls/BusinessWeek

Apple’s giant stash of cash is a constant source of speculation in the tech world. Now standing north of $25 Billion, Apple has the money to acquire all but a few hundred companies in the world, and it makes people nervous that the Cupertino Kings won’t snatch up someone big.

Our friend Brian over at Epicenter has an interesting piece of speculation, rating the most likely and least likely acquisition targets Apple could go after during the current downturn. It’s a thought-provoking read, and it’s accompanied by a really fun poll in which readers suggest who Apple should take on. The Dell entry is priceless.

For my part, I always think that the big questions about Apple’s cash and who the company will acquire tend to be misguided. Over its entire history, Apple has shown again and again that it will buy small organizations that possess a specific technology or capability that Apple lacks. That’s the story with NeXT, it’s the story with Logic, and it’s the store with PA Semi. Other than that, Apple invests in its own ideas and its own new efforts, because Steve Jobs believes the solutions Apple needs to triumph don’t exist yet. Apple spends way more time doing its own thing than it does snapping up outsiders.

And a portion of that $25 billion is going straight back into Apple’s future – the company still needs to build that brand new campus in Cupertino, right? Not to mention, new aluminum milling processes aren’t cheap to implement, either…

The T-Mobile G1 has only been out for a couple of days, but new problems with the first generation of Google’s entry into the phone business continue to materialize just about every hour on the hour. Still the most shocking is the lack of corporate e-mail and calendaring support, with Google assuming that a third-party developer will just magically figure out how to do Exchange ActiveSync and Lotus integration.

Today, the big news is that Google plans to send out a software update at some point with a touchscreen keyboard so that it becomes possible to enter text while using the phone in vertical portrait orientation. Yes, in case you missed it earlier, it’s impossible to even type in a URL while browsing the web in the preferred one-handed iPhone style orientation. Granted, the G1 has a physical QWERTY and a pretty decent one at that, but it’s incredible that any company could ship a phone this intricate without realizing this could be a deal-breaker in actual human use. It’s like they didn’t even test their ideas out before sending them to final production.

I bring all of this up, because it’s another piece of evidence that even though an open-source model works incredibly well when working on technical feasibility and optimization, it’s pretty poor at making a consumer-facing complex system work well together. It’s the same reason that Linux has incredibly low-level networking and multithreading code, and it’s still impossible to expect a decent graphical user interface.

Apple’s focus on freakishly detailed design and engineering can have its own failings, of course (most specifically in leaving out any features that Steve Jobs can’t understand the value of), but it also tends to lead to solutions that were considered as full experiences instead of a collection of features. It all works together well, instead of working well in spite of contradictory features. The holistic approach Apple takes to product design is the reason we love it. Android’s haphazard approach of fixing things as they become crises. Google will mostly catch up eventually, but I have to pity T-Mobile for being forced to fight back with such an unfinished product. The G1 is so far behind that it’s hard to imagine anyone who isn’t a hobbyist being pleased with the first kludgy Android phone.

Android Roadmap via HTC Source via Gizmodo

I walked into the Apple Store in San Francisco tonight fully expecting to walk out with a brand-new MacBook Pro — the 2.53 GHz model, if at all possible. After 30 minutes playing with all of Apple’s latest laptops, I was stunned to find myself instead walking out the door with a 2.4 GHz MacBook and a smile on my face.

The Top Line: The Aluminum MacBook is the perfect heir to the 12″ PowerBook G4. It’s light, rugged, and meant to be used as a true laptop — it actually runs cooler than my 12″ PowerBook from 2003. Apple hit it out of the park with this thing, and I couldn’t be more delighted. To learn why, click through.

I swung by the San Francisco Apple Store this afternoon, and employees told me that, while old-skool MacBooks were out on the floor, they had the new stuff in the back room and it was all ready for purchase. Resisting the urge to buy one sight unseen, I vowed to come and play with the new collection tomorrow, once the demo units are out.

Joe Russell, on the other hand, went for the early purchase and made it first to unboxing:

First thing I noticed on the trackpad, the entire surface is in fact not a clickable button… but rather the lower two-thirds. And as far as it being glass, it feels more like the original textured surface of the trackpad on the MacBook Pro.

Be sure to check out the full gallery. The spongy tab to pull the machine out is ingenious.

I’ll be back this weekend with a report on unboxing the MacBook Pro, if all goes according to plan…

Flickr via TUAW

Apple promised that it would finally pull its attention off the cash cow iPhone and iPod product lines to spotlight notebooks at an event this morning, and they weren’t kidding. New MacBook, new Air, new Pro, and a new matching Cinema Display for good measure. The design team absolutely hit it out of the park on these machines, which are all glass, shiny black accents, and subtly tapered corners. Like the iMac whose design they refine and make significantly more appealing, these machines look like they were just made to sync with an iPhone or iPod touch (and, if anything, they make the continued use of white plastic docks for those devices look increasingly incongruous). This is Apple’s best design work, and it’s for a Mac — something we haven’t seen since the 12″ PowerBook G4 that I’m typing on was introduced. Read on for the Pros and the Cons…

Gentlemen, start your copiers! Well, the last one is a stolen image from Blackberry.com, but still. In case these images change over night, I have been to the Vodafone page, and these images really are all there. Someone’s unemployed right now…

Vodafone via Engadget.

The Apple Blogotubes are a-buzz with boffo Interblag bloviating at a rumor from 9to5mac.com that Apple’s rumored “Brick” product was actually a nickname for a new manufacturing process that will use “lasers and jets of water to carve the MacBooks out of a brick of aluminum.” More, it’s a “game-changer;” “totally revolutionary;” “Apple’s biggest innovation in a decade.”

…Yeah, maybe not.

As Adam Richardson, an industrial designer at consultancy frog design and CNet blogger, points out, lasers and waterjets have been used in manufacturing for ages — by Apple.

The glowing LED that appears behind a “solid” front face of the MacBooks is apparently achieved with laser-cutting to thin out and partially perforate the wall in that one area.

Richardson also speculates that the existing iPod Shuffle is manufactured using a similar process, and even the MacBook Air has some telltale signs that it draws on really interesting and unusual manufacturing techniques. But would Apple actually carve an entire laptop out of one block of aluminum? And would it save any money?

On such a small product this is do-able. On a large product like a laptop this would typically result in a massive amount of waste (so kiss your green credentials goodbye). And the notion that this is somehow cheaper than stamping thin sheets or molding plastic is completely wrong – it’s much more expensive.

Yeah… no.

I’ve been talking with other industrial designers about this issue, and they all agree that the reasoning behind the current Brick rumor doesn’t add up. One friend of mine guessed it would add up to $50 in manufacturing costs and might not be any stronger or lighter than more traditional manufacturing approaches.

Does Apple have a game-changing laptop in the wings that will reinvent the MacBook and MacBook Pro design language? For their sake, they’d better. Will it be milled from a single block of aluminum? Not in this lifetime.

Matter/Anti-Matter

Google’s 2001 retro-search tool has provided endless amusement over the past few weeks. None so much as the image at right, which is the “iPhone 2,” released by InfoTech in mid-1999 and reviewed on StreetTech by Gareth Branwyn.

And yes, it was a comical Internet landline phone, featuring full QWERTY keyboard. Like today’s iPhone 3G, it featured a touchscreen, Internet access, e-mail, and location-based services. Also like today’s iPhone 3G, it improved on significant shortcomings in its predecessor, by adding a better keyboard, higher data speed, and better speaker-phone sound quality.

And, eeriest of all, it had notable areas that needed improving. There was no “Forward” browser button, no “Find” function, and, hilariously, no Cut, Copy, or Paste features. In many ways, it’s exactly like today’s iPhone. Just, you know, totally janky.

Some things never change, apparently.

Thanks, Jwester!