To fix the economy, Americans should work more by spending less time watching commercials. Also, we should invest in infrastructure, education, clean energy and healthcare.

Can Engadget sponsor that?

WM and the iPhone definitely compete, especially now that the iPhone has activesync support.

I have an HTC Mogul and certainly hope 6.1 improves things, especially RAM use. Still, it's silly to say that the iPhone doesn't blow away WM in terms of interface and web use.

@Amit

To use Time Machine through your network you need either an AEBS or a Time Capsule, and even though you have a USB drive I'm not sure which you should get. The Time Capsule is faster, smaller, less power hungry setup; most if not all USB drives don't spin down when connected to the AEBS. At least I think that's true, please correct me if I'm wrong.

The AEBS is $120 cheaper. If you'd use your USB external drive for something else and can afford it, I'd go with the Time Capsule, otherwise buy the AEBS.

It also may be worth going to *hack* Best Buy *hack* which doesn't charge a restocking fee, just in case the network performance of either is inadequate.

And I meant to say, Time Machine may take up all available space. I don't know for sure.

The advantage of keeping it all on one partition is that space will be used efficiently. The flip side is that Time Machine will take every megabyte of free space and not leave Mac OS X enough room for a scratch disk.

would love to go.

I do love me some Jet Blue-- especially if I'm going to St. Maarten.

I don't like the input manager mechanism, but I do like some of the add-ons it allows-- what we really need is a way to add plug-ins to Safari.

Some might consider plug-ins unnecessary, but apart from ad-blocking there are quite a few Safari input managers that I can't browse without.

The primary one is Greasekit, which enables a javascript that allows me to open up Google Reader items with the keyboard. Greasekit is actually a version of Firefox's Greasemonkey, and there are some great scripts for it-- I really like the one that lets you know if the local library has the item you're looking at on Amazon, or the one that opens all the New York Times articles in single page view.

Inquisitor is neat too. I could use Firefox, and it may come to it, but Safari is far nicer, save its lack of plug-ins. One could argue that Apple wants to keep Safari simple and shouldn't add plug-ins. If it wants to add them at all, it could allow them in webkit-derivatives. That's a defensible point, but I doubt at that point there would be enough of a market for any plug-in development.

Hmm... do you think this NAS offers far better performance than a USB drive connected to an Airport Extreme?

I have the AE, but if this does the job far better, it could be a addition.

Davo,

You're right that other phones can do much of what the iPhone can do. The problem is, they don't do them well.

On other phones, playing music, syncing pictures, and watching movies are out of reach tasks for non-geeks. Even for geeks, navigating Windows Mobile and hanging on to a stylus is no fun.

According to the 4 reviews I've seen the iPhone is so easy and elegant it's a revelation. You can ignore how much different that is than the current status-quo, but it will put you at odds with your friends, neighbors, and the millions of people who end up buying or wanting iPhones.

Calling them all stupid and ignoring why the iPhone is so cool just makes you (and I'm talking to you Engadget) look rigid.