I got mine at the NYC launch party last week. It's a great phone.

Even the EDGE isn't too bad!

Slingbox player doesn't work on it, though.

yeah hopefully those rumors of the 3G z-100 are true!

Correction: The song is "Battle Stars." The album is "We are the Night."

i'm sure someone will post this info in some place more prominent than the bottom of an Engadget comment thread, but...

You can buy an individual song from Mac, Windows, or Linux. But if you want to buy a whole album at once (thereby getting the discount), you need to download a little helper app that only exists for Mac or PC (as far as I could tell).

Also: I just purchased a file and looked at it a hex editor. I did not immediately see anything that struck me as uniquely identifying me. It does have a unique song id, but I don't know if that is tied to me on the backend. (The song was "We are the Night" by Chemical Brothers. The ID in my MP3 is 202229080TRC.) There is metadata at the beginning and end of the file.

good post, erica.

this locked-down nonsense is the reason i have not purchased an iphone.

I love the commenter who says, "It's easy! Just open Terminal and type...."

I use Ubuntu every single day of my life, but Mossberg is right: it's not ready for mainstream users, i.e., people who look at you blankly when you say, "Just open Terminal..."

Now, in its defense, downloading and installing programs is easier than it is in Windows, as is installation of drivers during the initial setup for *some* devices. But multimedia -- even with VLC -- is still a pain. It took me several hours to get, for example, MLB.tv to work, whereas it really does work right out of the box on Windows and Mac. CNN's live video STILL doesn't work for me, and I have no idea why, since I get no errors.

But after spending 6 hours trying to set up an external DVR without success, numerous weeks spent wondering why I can't play DVDs anymore (despite all kinds of troubleshooting), and having to switch my external USB drives on and off because they only automount *sometimes*, I definitely have to agree that as much as I love it and hate Windows, Ubuntu is not ready for the mainstream.

you asked a lot of good questions, even if phil (as usual) wasn't very forthcoming and stayed on message the whole time. at least you tried to follow up a couple times. most blogs don't.

i can't imagine he means what he said about the lack of a market for an unlocking utility and real third-party apps. if he does, they really have their heads in the sand over at apple, and it doesn't bode well.

i do think it's important for you guys to push the issues with them as much as possible, even if you get a bit of a smackdown. as long as you're not rude, they probably won't shut you off in the future.

although it's a *great* phone, that $700 price tag on the N95 is starting to seem pretty ridiculous right now. i wonder what it will drop to. (and yes i know it has lots of features the iphone doesn't. but still.)

wow, cathy got married.

the mta offers its subway map as a PDF. can someone explain why this is better?