Well, I AM an avid Windows Mobile fan - and I've just put in an order for a 16GB iPhone. The reason is fairly simple: with loyalty dollars, I can get the 16GB for less than the price of the 8GB and since the data plan isn't iPhone specific - if I don't like the iPhone, I can swap back to my WiMo phone.

Also, it's easy to find inexpensive unlocked WiMo phones - but pretty hard to find inexpensive unlocked iPhones (especially 3Gs) - and unlike the WiMo phones which only have to be unlocked once, you have to and unlocker and unlock the iPhone every time there's an upgrade or patch.

So, logic dicates using my plan renewal to get the iPhone to play with. I may end up liking it - I may not. We'll see.

But weirdly, I may be one of the few people around who'll be able to do a real world comparison as a knowledgable WiMo user between those phones and the iPhone. And since I'm not all googly-eyed about the iPhone, we'll see if it can impress me.

Come on up here to Canada.

Rogers shorted pretty much everyone. They opened their flagship stores at 8am and promised breakfast to anyone who would stand in line. The breakfast ended up being a granola bar [and wow - did I mention Canadians love irony? - because it's pretty thick in that one] and then all those poor idiots who lined up found out they only had 100 units.

Even worse, since they were also sending units to affiliates, in most cases, if you just walked over to the Wireless Wave - or over to Fido [which is wholly owned by Rogers] you could get one, because of course, no one had been mentioning these facts. So, by end of day, the Fido store by my place still had stock. :)

But wait - not *quite* enough... The $30/mo 6GB plan they coughed up at the last second to make the iPhone even faintly acceptable? Wellll.. it's not just for iPhone - you can get it with *any* smartphone including Windows Mobile phones.

Still more - go to the Fido or Rogers website and try to actually BUY an iPhone with the $30 plan... go on... I dares ya. :) Because you can't. You have to call and order it by phone.

Ah Rogers.. could you have screwed up something so simple any worse than this? I don't think so.

Just for the record - wouldn't Walt Mossburg and a handful of other people like Stevey J be the first people to own an iPhone 3G? You mean 'these are the first ten people most likely to be able to buy one in 48 hours...'.

Which really only makes it even more pathetic. :)

yaddayadda...

Well, since we don't have an actual price - just a 'it's gotta be cheaper than'... so we can't really compare price per unit storage which is the major difference between these two products.

And unless MLC doesn't have cell-fatigue (or at least has far less of it), then the 20x numbers sound like they're pulled out of someone's a.... hat.... Then again, let's assume they're right - we're talking 80 to 100 year lifespans. Why does that just seem insanely improbable unless we're talking all that time in a box on the shelf?

But ok - as I noted before - how many of us hold on to their laptops for 5 years? (And while we're at it - where did the 4 to 5 year lifespan for HDs in laptops come from? I have several laptops and four of them are 8 years old or more and their HDs are fine... Collectable laptops, ok?)

Then there's the speed. The 3Gbps figure isn't realistic - that's SATA2 max bandwidth, no one gets that - but 160MBps is more believable. Mind you, the real issue is access speed - and at least in theory, SSD should win there even if it's not that much better at burst.

Powerwise, we'll I'll wait until someone does the OBVIOUS test and sticks a current meter on these things and just measures real world power consumption rather than trying all the indirect tests.

Finally, if you REALLY have a need to dropkick your laptop - then it's only fair that you'll have to spend more on your laptop. Stupidity shouldn't be free.

For the rest of us, a tiny amount of self-control and forward thinking and we can save a ton on storage devices.

Cheers.

Well, I think it's been summed up nicely.

It's 10 minutes of additional use - but to get that, you pay an order of magnitude more. Worse, we're arguing better/worse based on an amazingly small sample.

As for durability - well, I've already addressed that. There's worst case and real world durability - and if laptop hard drives couldn't handle some shaking - people wouldn't be making games and utilities which rely on slapping and shaking your laptop.

Will an SSD survive being slammed against the edge of a desktop better? Probably. But your screen probably won't... And then there's SSD wear.

SSDs also don't seem to scale up well (yet, at least). HDs are growing faster (and becoming cheaper faster). So... maybe someday.. but not today.

My netbook will have an HD, thanks.

I'm bewildered by the obsession with CableCard, DirecTV and H.264 myself.

Let's get down to real basics:
- the ability to support more than one tuner
- the ability to support analogue/digital hybrid tuners (hey - Canada doesn't go fully digital until 2011 - and I'm willing to bet 2009 won't be the real switch year for the US either - we've heard that a lot... but from my experiements in the US and Canada, ATSC reception is stunningly poor)
- the ability to support multiple standards at the same time (people do take their laptops when they travel and since as usual the US - and Canada always following along - had to pick a standard not used anywhere else on the planet... the ability to switch easily between analogue, ATSC, DVB-T and Seg1 would be nice.
- improve the ability to use tuners that don't have hardware MPEG-2
- better yet - stop using MPEG-2 as the one true encoder... DiVX, Xvid, generic MPEG-4... all faster and more compatible.

Yes, HD is cool.. but a lot of people are using MCE on laptops and desktop systems directly - so HD is kind of irrelevent.

One question I've never actually seen asked, let alone answered: is there *really* a problem with HD reliability in laptops - or is this a perception thing? Most of the arguments for SSDs are: speed (iffy), low power (well - there goes that one), durability (the debate on real MTBF is still on) and ruggedness (technically, SSD should win this one).

However, there's a tendency to confuse 'potential' with 'reality'. If a product has an MTBF of 100,000 hrs and another with an MTBF of 500,000 hrs.. but it's typical use lifespan is 50,000 hrs - then the two products are essentially *identical* for this application, even though one is technically 5x 'better'.

The average lifespan of a laptop is about 2-3 years but Western Digital warranties their laptop drives for 5 years. One assumes they don't expect a significant number of failures in that time frame (or they'd shorten the warranty). Modern HDs also include advanced shock protection including accelerometers to park the drive head within 2/10th of a second to avoid head/disk collision.

Then there's cost. Yes, SSDs are getting cheaper - but then so are HDs. 320GB for < $200 still trumps 64GB < $250. For the price of 128GB SSD, you can get TWO 320GB HDs and use one just a s straight backup for the internal drive.

So, sorry - the arguments for SSD really just don't stack up. It's neat technology - and yeah, if play pingpong with your laptop (or are a fan of software tricks that do things with the accelerometer, and so constantly slap or shake your laptop, increasing the risk of impact), then SSD is for you.

For the rest of us, HDs just make more sense.

Since you cannot buy the iPhone at Rogers or Fido without it being activated in the store... why is everyone trying to figure out how to get the 'special' version of iTune to unlock their phone?

The only exception to this rule we know of is Germany where one of the carriers will be selling it unlocked retail - but it's 599 Euro. Everywhere else (so far) required the phone to be unlocked by the seller who will, of course, require you to buy a plan.

This is the part that's got me bewildered - yes, Rogers is ripping us off royally - BUT - why isn't anyone dumping on Apple for not making an unlocked version of the phone available at a higher price? Now that there's no revenue sharing - the iPhone becomes a normal phone from the perspective of the dealer, so there's no good reason not to.

Then again, I know people who are going ahead with a Rogers iPhone anyway.

I guess you really can fool some of the people all of the time - as long as it's Apple doing the fooling...

I'll always remember Bill Gates as the guy who changed software development from a social activity to a being all about money.

Back in the 70s, you were lucky if you had access to a computer, let alone own one. Software was typically sold with the computer - it was pretty rare to buy it. Developers were hired to write software on a demand basis and it ended up being owned by the company hiring you.

Then BillG came along with his crappy TinyBASIC and refused to share, wanting to sell it to people copy by copy. His genius contribution was the idea that you didn't own the software, you *licensed* it... and everyone had to pay - the notion of royalites for software pretty much didn't exist before then.

As for Apple being the first personal computer, really that was the Altair 8800 - they even gave away the plans for it in Radio Electronics magazine. The thing is, none of these were affordable until the IBM got into the game and built the first real 'PC'... but they only legitimised the concept.

It was a little startup company called Compaq who reverse engineered the BIOS and built the first really affordable computer in 1982, and BillG was right there, selling copies of MSDOS.

That made BillG rich.

The rest is history.

Is it over yet?

The BillG flood is actually slightly MORE annoying than the iPhone flood.