The first rule of vi club is: You do not talk about vi club.

Let's not forget the lowly touch here. There is no functionality on those that it replicates. It would be neat to use a touch as a home phone that you can bring to hotels and use the same way. Apple are really crippling a neat little product. And would apple want to have the touch compete with the phone? I'm not really sure. They have an awful lot of relationships with phone companies right now that would get strained.

I also think Apple is now seeing Google as a threat and is removing similar apps so it can say it is being fair. With the exception of skype that is. There would be an unholy rebellion if that got pulled.

I'm of the same view of another commenter. Love my 3GS (and the other 2 models) but I'll consider switching next time.

Even though the contract indicates refunds exclude the commission, I would have thought that was a provision for other things such as a developer stopping supporting a buggy app that stopped working in future OS's and scenarios like that. It's a real stretch to think Apple can call it fair game to pull an app months after it was approved and smile knowing they can keep their money. Bad Apple, bad apple.

Let's not forget that it could also run on the touch. It seems to me that Apple is letting a great little device languish by making decisions like this. I would gladly buy a touch for a family member overseas so they could use voip over wifi over a service like this. Granted you can do that with Skype, but what is the difference here. Definitely some shenanigans going on.

Time to stop using AOL or any IM then. For example, I use Beejive and all messages are going to come through Apple as I am registered for push. But then some jerk has my keys by random or other means, so any message meant for me from any IM flavor could get sent to anyone using Beejive. Seems the ball is in Apple's court and this is really going to upset any IM provider no?

Am I missing something? Isn't this a problem for legitimate users too? Isn't the problem that the notification and message is sent to a hacktivated phone with duplicated keys, potentially from a legit phone?

For google apps try:

mail.google.com/tasks/a/yourdomain/iphone

I use google apps to host my domain for my email. Just stuff for me and wife and some other relatives. I live in the US but the rest of my family is in the UK. When over there good luck accessing a US based and cached email account on yahoo and gmail. The only way I could access mine was through IMAP. My wife was out of luck because she hadnt enabled IMAP. Yahoo figured we weren't in the US and tried to recache in Europe but it never managed. My father uses an account on the same domain but as he lives there his works flawlessly. Anyways, just a long ramble to say I use email on iPhone and mac when I have to.

I've been using handbrake for a long time and it has come on in leaps and bounds since development picked up again.

I recently wrote a hack in perl to search for my mp4 files and generate some real simple html to get to them. I then switch on httpd and then I can access and watch them over wifi in my house - not that elegant but really effective when you have a spare time and don't want to sit in front of the tv. My iPhone streams the mp4 really well and I haven't noticed any problems with framerate.

Is anyone aware of a more elegant solution out there?

Free? Sure.

I remember my brother who in a rather rebellious stage became a skinhead in the late seventies/early eighties and much to his chagrin was told by one of the nuns at school that his new "bonehead" was a nice clean haircut. People need to address the real problems rather than descending to stereotyping and bigotry.