Technology analysts are always on the cutting edge of the news out of Silicon Valley. Why, just last night, Gartner Research realized that Apple had licensed Exchange Active Sync, making the iPhone a great option for smart phone users. And they only noticed two weeks after it was announced!

I kid, of course, The report praising the iPhone’s readiness for business customers puts Apple firmly on a competitive plane with Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and S60 phones. Less than a year after its launch as a multimedia device, the iPhone is poised to really take charge in the smart phone space. That’s a big deal, and the endorsement from Gartner does mean a lot to some people making IT support decisions in big companies.

Apple has never had real success in corporate sales, so I can’t wait to see how the iPhone does once it’s ready for its close-up. This note is a sign that it has a fair shot at success.

Via Barrons

Though the Financial Times is without question a vastly more reliable source than most places that spawn rumors of Apple’s impending moves, I just can’t convince myself to buy into reports that Apple wants to create a monthly iTunes subscription plan or all-you-can eat music business model with the purchase of an iPod or iPhone. It isn’t their style

While denials from Steve Jobs are usually a good way to spot what he’s working on, this is an area where he has remained steadfast. He believes that people want to own their music, and I believe that he’s right. Sure, I love to sample music as much as anyone else, but the songs that I keep are really personal to me. Renting music just doesn’t work out. Even if Nokia is doing it, too.

Moreover, the monthly subscription business model is one that Apple hasn’t ever offered before to anyone. Not for movies, TV, or software. In fact, Apple’s only experience of recurring payments are with the iPhone’s service fees, which the company gets just a small slice of. There are far too many accounting headaches to resolve to make it worthwhile, and the record companies are angry at Apple. At Apple’s restaurant, they dine ala carte.

Wired’s Editor in Chief Chris Anderson says the future of business is free, and so my publisher and I are giving away free copies of my books.

Bill Pollock of No Starch Press has seeded full electronic versions of my coffeetable books — Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod — to Bittorrent via Pirate Bay.

We want to see if giving away copies of the books will have any effect on sales.

“I’ve been in publishing for just over 20 years and my training has not been to give books away,” writes Pollock on the No Starch blog. “But I think there’s something to this and logic tells me that if we increase the visibility of our titles, we’ll sell more books.”

We came up with the idea after reading about the amazing success to bestselling author Paulo Coelho, who seeds his own books to file-sharing networks and then promotes them on his blog. Coelho claims great success with “pirating” his own books, saying it has had a slow but dramatic effect on sales.

Of course, Coelho is an internationally acclaimed author with a high profile, which may account for his success more than giving away free books. But still, it’s an experiment worth trying.

As Pollock says on his blog: “I think that publishers (music and book) are spending too much time circling the wagons and not enough time thinking of ways that they can use technology to advantage. Certainly, our move here is a bit unusual, but someone has to take the plunge. May as well be us.”

Here’s the torrent for Cult of Mac.

And the torrent for Cult of iPod.

If you download the books, remember to keep your torrent client open so that others can also download the files.

Please let me know what you think of the experiment and the books. Send mail to: [email protected]

Even though it was announced a month ago that “American Idol” had made the iPhone its official phone, and we all know that “Idol” is the most crassly commercial TV show in the history of the galaxy, I don’t think anyone was prepared for the abomination that aired midway through last night’s episode.

After “returning” from an ad break, host Ryan Seacrest reached into the audience to pull an iPhone from the hands of a female “audience member.” He then used the iPhone to visit the “Idol” website, text in a vote for a contestant, and show how easy it is to use the WiFi iTunes Store to download content “directly to your device.” I threw up in my mouth during the segment – A LOT.

I don’t know, can association with Ryan Seacrest make the iPhone less appealing? It’ll take a little while for the taint to wash away, so far as I’m concerned. I’ll post the clip if and when it turns up…

As if we needed another piece of evidence that the MacBook Air is the ultimate lust object of the style-conscious intelligentsia, consider this: Charlie Rose, the PBS talk show host known for his deep, probing and often ponderous conversations with celebrities and authors, appeared on his show the other night with a bandage on his eye that he earned diving to the pavement headfirst to protect his Air. Sooner his face – a TV host’s most important asset – than his computer.

I stand corrected. Without any question, Apple has completely reframed the value of a computer. It’s worth more than a career on PBS.

Via GadgetLab

I’m not a daily Safari user – more of a Camino man myself – but I think all of us should be excited to see Apple pushing some standards forward with this morning’s Safari 3.1 update. Though it’s just a bug fix at first blush, the most significant change in this version is support for CSS Animations, CSS WebFonts, and HTML 5’s video and audio tags. Though WebFonts have shown up in other browsers, Apple is claiming to be first to support Animations and HTML 5 video and audio. And that’s great.

Here’s why: Adding support for standards never has an immediate impact. There simply isn’t much, if any content that Safari users can enjoy today that will make the upgrade worth it. But by building a platform with support for new features, the rest of the web – and other browsers – will start to come along, too. And that means heading toward a web that’s faster, more compelling, and more compatible. Nicely done, Apple.

To learn more about CSS Animations, head over to Snook.
For more on HTML 5 tags, head to W3C.

The Apple nay-sayers love to pretend that Mac OS X and all of Apple’s other products are destined to be destroyed by hackers. Although Apple has marketed its products as being far less hackable than Windows, someday, the Mac will just be riddled with viruses. It’s inevitable! Except that it’s never happened, and what do you know, Mac OS X is far less troubled by malware than Windows is.

Still, the notion persists, and Apple detractors such as the bearded man at right, Roger L. Kay of Endpoint Technologies Associates, will continue to draw irrelevant correlations between minor software hacks on Apple products and overall platform insecurity.

Hilariously, Mr. Kay is under the impression that iPhone jailbreaks and the major unlocking project “Project Pwned” are somehow indicators that virus writers will soon over-run all of Apple’s products. Riiiiiiight. Because individual users finding ways to maximize the value of their own machine is exactly the same as a random prankster taking control of someone else’s machine. His poorly reasoned opinion, courtesy of BusinessWeek, argues that unauthorized iPhone apps will stink, and people will blame Apple for no apparent reason:

Apple, welcome to Microsoft’s world! This is an environment in which you have to support thousands of developers of varying quality, and all sorts of apps, well made or not. Some of these developers make you look good, but others end up trashing your reputation. And despite your best efforts to monetize what they do, it’s not always possible. The elegant simplicity of your platform just makes hacking easier. There is no such thing as real security. All you can do is throw up roadblocks–which, by the way, make it harder for both crooks and law-abiding citizens to drive on your roads.

Wait, what? You think Apple will feel bad that some of the jail-broken apps will suck? That will provide additional evidence that Apple is right to lock down the iPhone. I think the iPhone should be a lot more open than it is, but the only possible conclusion to this situation is the opposite of what Kay argues. But who am I to disagree with a man who has this to say?

Though Apple’s Swiss online store retracted the announcement of an updated version of Apple’s venerable Airport Express basestation, the mother ship in Cupertino today unleashed the $99 gadget, now with speedy 802.11n data, on the rest of the world. I’m a big proponent of the Express for home use, particularly given its music sharing capabilities. It’s Apple’s best device for making iTunes more than just a support system for iPods and iPhones – even more so than the AppleTV — when it comes to music.

Apple – AirPort Express via Engadget

Tags: apple, hardware, 802.11n, airport, airport express

You want to know what’s 800 times as expensive as a 1GB iPod shuffle and twice as ugly? That would be the iDiamond shuffle, an absurdly encrusted former Apple product coated in white and pink gold and dozens of diamonds. See that ear bud? It still doesn’t sound any good. But hey, only $40,000!

Techotic via Digg

Int13, a prominent mobile games developer, has released a video showing its racing game, “Crazy Kart 2,” running on the iPhone. I hadn’t seen the title before, but I’m pretty impressed by the demo. Nice environments and graphics, wacky gameplay highly reminiscent of “Mario Kart,” but, you know, touch-controlled steering wheel! I can’t wait to see the state of the iPhone gaming platform a year from today…

Via iPhoneAlley

Just, um…21 years…after its predecessor, the long-anticipated “Return to Dark Castle” has finally been released for Mac OS X. This is some seriously old-school Mac gaming, stretching back to 1986 and the hey-day of WASD controls. I remember playing Dark Castle on a Mac SE FD/HD that I picked up from the local school district for a nominal fee. Truly innovative for its day, though Return to Dark Castle is all about staying true to the DNA. The screenshots look great, so if you’ve been itching to get some vintage exploration and adventuring on, get over to download a game more than two decades in the waiting.

Via Digg.

Cool tech demo for something new called “NeXTStep 3.” Could be big. Just kidding, of course. Always interesting to see Steve before his more recent, peak form. A little less suave than you might be used to. Still, NeXTStep 3 was awesome for its era – just barely shy of the first few releases of OS X.

Except that GUI. YEESH. Who on earth thought that all those floating palettes was a good idea?

Via Macenstein

French Mac site MacGeneration discovered that the Swiss Apple Store touted a new version of Apple’s delightfully compact and stereo-friendly Airport Express that would stay the same on the outside but throw in blazing hot 802.11n WiFi on the inside, too. The evidence is in the picture above. Unfortunately, there is no word that this upgrade is on its way at any other Apple Stores, and even Switzerland, breaking neutrality, now bears not a trace of any 802.11n verbiage.

As MacGeneration puts it,

Le webmaster qui a fait la bourde a se faire taper sur les doigts. La page consacrée  la borne Airport Express sur l’Apple Store suisse a été modifiée et ne fait plus mention de la prise en charge du 802.11n.

Or, if you’re into the whole English thing,

[Update: 16/03 23:30] webmaster who made the bourde had to be done to tap on the wrist. The page devoted to the Airport Express at the Apple Store Swiss has been modified and no longer refer to the taking over of 802.11n.

Let’s hope the wrist-tap is temporary. How soon is next Tuesday, anyway?

MacGeneration via AppleInsider

Look closely at the driver’s side window on Space Shuttle Endeavour. What’s that white thing floating around the cabin in zero G?

Look closer…

It looks like an iPod Classic!

It was spotted in this high-res photo of the Endeavour, by eagle-eyed TUAW reader Walker. The Space Shuttle is presently docked with the International Space Station.

According to TUAW, space-bound iPods have to have their lithium batteries replaced with specially certified alkaline ones. And iPods aren;t allowed inside the ISS, since they aren’t certified as safe on the space station.

UPDATE: The survey has concluded. Thanks to everyone who took part.We’d like to ask you — the readers — for a favor.We’re trying to get a better idea of who you are and what you like to do — more than your thoughtfully-written comments can tell us.So, we’ve crafted a little questionnaire. Click here to take our Cult of Mac reader survey. We’ve kept it as painless as possible. It’s just two pages and it takes about a minute or so to complete. Everything is totally anonymous.Most of it is the standard reader survey stuff (did we mention it’s fast and anonymous?), but when you’re done, we’ll have a better understanding of each other. And really, isn’t that reason enough?

Auto sales are collapsing in Japan, especially among young people who view the car as a climate-destroying anachronism, according to a fascinating report in the Wall Street Journal.

“Young people can borrow their parents’ car, and I think they’d rather spend money on PCs or iPods than cars,” says the student with shaggy hair who is in no rush to get a driver’s license.

Sales of cars in Japan have dropped to the lowest level in a decade. Only 25 percent of Japanese in their 20s want a car, down from about 50 percent in 2000, according to a recent survey cited by the Journal.

Disdain for the car is a growing phenomenon worldwide, the Journal notes.

The drama caused by lithium-ion batteries just continues to snap, crackle and pop along, according to our friends at Epicenter, as an old-school iPod nano reportedly began shooting sparks out while recharging at a home in Japan.

Overall, details remain spotty about the case, but the problem supposedly surfaced in January in Kanagawa Prefecture southwest of Tokyo. Once again, officials are blaming those occasionally unstable lithium-ion batteries. While no one was injured during the mini fireworks show, Japanese officials have publicly chastised Apple for failing to report the incident earlier (the company submitted its report on March 7). In the meantime, Apple has been ordered to look into the matter further and report back to the Ministry.

This could be a major black eye for Apple is it turns out to be a widespread problem. A recall on the previous generation iPod nano would be extraordinarily costly. Has anyone ever had problems with older nano batteries?

Back in January, I was fairly effusive in my disappointment in the MacBook Air. I still think it’s a product that has a long way to go before it fulfills its promise as a thin, light, road warrior’s machine (the fact that it isn’t standard with an SSD is a pretty poor statement about its long-term reliability), but I’m now willing to admit that it hits the mark with at least some people, including people I really respect, like BusinessWeek’s Reena Jana, their innovation editor.

I’ve had a lot of conversations with Reena in the past, and she’s a constantly on-the-go kind of person, meeting with design and innovation leaders around the country. She probably travels for business more than I do. And she loves her MacBook Air:

OK, so I personally don’t have the need for many USB ports, nor for a huge, huge hard drive. And I don’t even feel that bad that there’s no Ethernet port, although I could get an attachment for it, which to me isn’t such a big deal (I rarely use the Ethernet jack). I’m reminded of when MacBook’s stopped having a floppy drive, or a dial-up jack. People were upset. But other laptops followed, because these features became obsolete. I see a parallel here, and my laptop lifestyle was starting to reflect the phasing out of DVDs and Ethernet jacks before the Air was released.

Fair points all, though I think I’d be more comfortable with the Air’s lack of a DVD drive if Apple distributed its own software, such as iWork, on USB key instead of DVD… Still, this is another reminder that a lot of people don’t need anywhere near the file storage capacity that I do. Just this weekend, I learned that my sister-in-law is desperate for an Air, as well. I’ll be very interested to hear how the Air performs in the market. I still think it will meet a fate similar to the G4 Cube, but there are some people who are incredibly excited by it.

For me, I think I’m stuck in Steven Levy’s camp: If I even had one, I think I’d probably throw it out with the newspapers by accident.

I’ve been saying for quite some time that the iPhone and iPod touch would eventually become killer gaming devices. Last week’s SDK presentation in Cupertino finally showed what was possible: Multi-touch and accelerometer-driven GameCube and PS2-quality visuals on the most compelling mobile multimedia platform in the world. It’s actually a lot better than what I was expecting in terms of 3-D visuals performance. Right now, it blows the DS and PSP away visually.

But does that matter? Do we need another portable games platform?

Yes. But not the way you might think. Though Apple is dazzling with visuals and gameplay from upcoming major publisher titles. And iPhone Spore and Monkey Ball will be cool, as will Pac-Man and the new version of Galaga that have been announced. But that’s not what will make the iPhone and touch must-have gaming platforms. What will make them take off and start to pull players away from PSP in particular will be the user-generated games. The creativity of the developer community. Anyone who comes up with a good game can get it published on the App Store and make some serious cash off of it if it takes off. That’s one hell of an incentive to break new ground. I’m tempted myself.

Now, on computers, and even on cell phones, user-designed games are a dime a dozen, and many of them are of far lower-quality than what the commercial publishers create. But this is different. This is a real platform with sophisticated tools available to everyone. There has never been a portable games platform of this power and pro-gaming features that has been this open to outsiders and upstarts. The DS is closed. So’s the PSP. Most cell phones have horrendous gaming interfaces. Keyboards and mice are great for MMORPGs and First Person Shooters but little else. The iPhone will be relatively open, has a great distribution model, and the best interface in the world for portable games.

So keep an eye out. I’m willing to forecast here and now that the best-selling game for iPhone by the end of 2008 will be made by a virtual unknown. Anyone throwing in?

In just four days, Apple has seen the iPhone SDK downloaded more than 100,000 times. In the release, Cupertino notes that ever more major developers are getting on-board with iPhone development, including blogging kingpins Six Apart and Pac-Man purveyors Namco.

I think that’s all fine and good, but I’m not excited to see what the existing powers can do with the iPhone. I’m psyched about what the freeware and shareware community can do on this platform, particularly for games. I have a lot more to say about that (see the previous post), but I’m most interested to hear if any of you are in the development community yet. If so, what are you working on? I’d love to spotlight some Apple fan creativity on this page.

Less than a week after Apple showed off all of the tantalizing SDK and Enterprise features of iPhone OS 2.0, the iPhone Dev Team has announced that it has fully unlocked the iPhone, patching its firmware to work with any carrier and allow the installation of any application, not just what Apple distributes through iTunes.

This is a really big deal, and I’m curious to see how it plays out in the coming months. Apple has made it very clear that it will do whatever it can to relock the iPhone whenever an exploit is discovered. According to the Dev Team, however, this firmware patch, called “Project Pwnage” is unfixable by Apple. I don’t buy it yet, but if this code remains quiet until the official launch of iPhone OS 2, this could be an invaluable tool for anyone who wants the full iPhone experience without AT&T.

Still, a lot of time between now and then, and Apple is as dedicated to lock things down as the hacking community is to opening them up.

Via Gizmodo

At the Mix 08 conference in Las Vegas, Microsoft CEO and noted iPhone fan Steve Ballmer reprised two of his greatest hits in a panel with Apple Evangelist Guy Kawasaki. First Ballmer suggested Apple was trying to get too big of a cut from iPhone application sales (30 percent is fine, in my opinion; exposure on iTunes is worth the royalty). Second, Ballmer did something truly sublime: he actually responded to a “fan’s” request that he do the “Developers, Developers, Developers” chant. And then, HE DID. It’s awesome. You have to hit the link.

CNET via Gizmodo

At its developer event his morning, Apple showed off the iPhone and iPod touch OS 2.0, which is quite an amazing update. It’s got fully loaded Exchange ActiveSync support, a full SDK opening up the complete iPhone toolkit – Spore and Super Monkey Ball for iPhone and touch look awesome and will challenge the DS and PSP – and it’s just got everything that was missing from the original iPhone (though no word on cut and paste yet…).

It’s great – but it’s not shipping until June. The software is in Beta today (you can apply to participate here), and developers have access to download the SDK now. Appl software will be distributed through the iPhone Apps store, available in desktop iTunes and over-the-air iTunes. It’s a slick system, and free applications will carry no fee for developers or customers. Commercial apps will give Apple a 30 percent royalty “to maintain the cost of the Apps store” and 70 percent of revenue to the developer. It’s a little onerous, but it’s good visibility for developers. Beyond which, the upgrade is free to iPhone owners and a “nominal charge” for touch users, who get screwed again.

One more thing about “late June” – that’s the one-year anniversary of the iPhone’s release. And Apple calls it iPhone 2.0. I guarantee that there will be significantly upgraded hardware out there to ship at the same time. Can you say iPhone 3G? I knew you could!

Live from Apple’s iPhone SDK press conference – Engadget

Tags: iphone, ipodtouch, apple, stevejobs, sdk, enterprise

Seven minutes into today’s highly anticipated iPhone SDK conference, Phil Schiller has dropped a bomb on Apple Campus – the iPhone is getting full MS Exchange ActiveSync supoprt, including:

• Push email
• Push calendar
• Push contacts
• Global address list
• Cisco IPSec VPN
• Certificates and Identities

Basically all the big stuff that’s held the iPhone back from mass corporate adoption. This and a physical keyboard have been the only things RIM BlackBerry has over the iPhone, and it should mean a huge boost to sales for Apple. I think the physical keyboard is less relevant than a lot of people do. Die-hard Blackberry and Treo users will miss it, but most of us won’t mind so much.

Live from Apple’s iPhone SDK press conference – Engadget

Tags: iphone, sdk, exchange, enterprise

UPDATE: Guys, chill out. This problem wasn’t about my credit card or my ignorance of iTunes One Click. My problem was that the software didn’t notice the credit card issue until after I had entered my password three times. And, when I went to fix that problem, the store crashed.

And I say again: $13 on iTunes and $9 on Amazon. What possible incentive do I have to stand by iTunes? Amazon has no DRM, plays on all the devices I own and doesn’t demand that I agree to new terms of service every time I update its software. Apple is officially selling an inferior product at a higher price, and I’m not OK with that.

ORIGINAL POST: As I often do, I got a song stuck in my head just as I was getting ready for bed tonight – “Flux” by Bloc Party. Since I was updating my iPod shuffle anyway, I decided to pick up just the song from iTunes, never mind the album, “A Weekend in the City.” Popping over to the iTS, I tried to initiate a download. Apple had me log in to my AppleID, confirm my purchase, then sign off on new terms of services (which I didn’t read all the way through, but you’ll be shocked to learn that the music is more constrained than ever), log in again, confirm my purchase again, and only then announce that the credit card on file had expired, asking for another log in to change the information. I did so, and then the iTunes Store told me that an unexpected error.

I then went over to the Amazon MP3 store, entered my log-in once and got the whole Bloc Party album with one click. The album was not only totally DRM-free, it was $4 less than the iTunes price, and it downloaded incredibly fast, right into iTunes. And all it’s missing was a bonus music video that I don’t care about. There is a serious problem with the current iTunes user experience. Apple shouldn’t be offering me so many opportunities to stop my transactions. It’s a good way to lose business, as it did tonight. The current terms of service are tailored to record companies, not record fans. I’ve said it before, but I really believe it now: unless a song you’re looking for is iTunes-only, buy it from Amazon. You can use it on any device, and it’s totally seamless with Apple’s ecosystem, too. I’ll be very curious to see sales figures as Amazon’s library gets bigger over time…

One last thought: Is Apple planning to charge for most or all iPhone applications through the SDK? If legit freeware is kept off of the iPhone because Apple sees the opportunity to make more money, they’ve officially let the new content business get in the way of great software and hardware experiences. Fingers crossed, eh?