Netly News

A Phew Things

We got a couple of phones last night (cnnmoney wants me to do a small stunt which we'll do later. Watch this space.) but a few things are worth mentioning until then.

1. I got the second to last one at an AT&T store in San Rafael, California. The clerk said that many iPhone customers were first-time cellphone buyers. That's fairly wild if true.

2. I set the phone up at 9 pm; it took AT&T until about 4:30 a.m. (according to the email they sent while I as sleeping) to activate the thing.

3. There's been a lot of bad info about whether the SIM card in the phone can be taken out, or whether Apple worked some special mojo to make it impossible to remove it. Happily it turns out that the phone's SIM card is easily removed with a paper clip, and pops out through a latch on the top of the phone. The manual also says that you can put the SIM card in another GSM phone—which is, apparently, the recommended solution during the next two years when you have to send the thing back to Apple for 3 business days so they can replace the battery. For more on the battery issue, see Joe Nocera's excellent story here.

4. Is it true that, using the YouTube app, you can only search a subset of YouTube videos and not the whole site? Neither the manual nor anything else I've seen is clear on that, and we can't search anything beyond the enclosed Most Viewed, Most Popular, etc. sets.

5. It took a few tries, but I was able to pair it with the Bluetooth in my 2006 BMW i325. I *think* BMW only guarantees it with 3 series post March 2007, so this was a victory. Works way better than my Treo, which was paired via a dumb hack I found online.

The Missing Manual: What Every Gadget Reviewer Should Know

David Pogue, iPhone reviewer for the New York Times, responds to my criticism of him, in the comments below:

There are many more books in the Missing Manual series about *Windows* than about Macintosh (see www.missingmanuals.com).

So by your calculations, my Apple reviews should be biased in a NEGATIVE way, not positive.

And I also speak on the Windows geek cruises, not just the Macintosh ones.

I don't know whether you're deliberately ignoring the facts or you just don't do your homework. Either way, you're off-base.

You also, frankly, have no business reviewing the reviews until you yourself have tried the iPhone. I would hope that by this point in your life, you'd recognize that there's more to a product's success than the length of its feature list.”

Bias is bias, David, and as an editor, I want to be sure none of my reviewers have it. I don’t care if it’s positive OR negative. (Indeed, I believe the rap on one of your predecessors was his constant negativity, which is just as corrosive to credibility.) You're a fine reviewer—of everything BUT Apple stuff. You should steer clear of reviewing anything that comes out of 1 Infinite Loop.

iPhone Blogging for Dollars

Apple's iPhone has been very, very good to the blogosphere.

Whether the $500 gadget  actually sells out at Apple stores on Friday remains to be seen. But the blogs that have been fanning iPhone Fever since January can already declare a healthy windfall: Millions of extra dollars in ad-generated income have already flowed into bloggers' pockets, thanks to record pageviews, according to estimates. And the best may be yet to come.

The Five Worst Foods You Can Eat

This is what I just had for lunch.

A Review of Reviewers

The first reviews are in, and to no one’s surprise, they are all favorable.

In fact, the big four—the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today and Newsweek—reach precisely the same conclusion: The most-hyped cellphone in the history of the world, while it has plenty of flaws, is nonetheless worthy of the hype. The phone is groundbreaking! And gorgeous! The soft keyboard works pretty darn well! The software is nifty! The only real criticism each review levels is at the phone carrier iPhone buyers must use, AT&T, whose EDGE data network is slow and its coverage is spotty. (More than one reviewer used the same word “pokey.”)

An Unhealthy Conversation

Image from small biz marketing

The Microsoft “people-ready” kerfluffle, broken by Nick Denton and now playing at finer blogs everywhere, is one of the most interesting things to have happened here in years. It raises a key question about independence and credibility: Are bloggers truth tellers (i.e. journalists?) or are they money makers (business people)?

My friend John Battelle, who runs Federated Media, responded well Saturday night, and his conclusion is much on target. Disclosure is key in media. Readers must know at all times whether what they’re reading is edit, or advertising.

But I disagree with a lot of what he says about the growing, and to my mind obnoxious, trend of “conversational marketing.”

How much for Business2.com?

Image from 80s Tees

If the domain name business.com is worth north of $300 million—as today's WSJ suggests—business2.com must be worth at least $150 million, right? Right?

I knew I should have held onto mcdonalds.com when I had the chance.

Where to Buy an Unlocked Apple Phone

Image from The School Bell

Recently, I went with my wife to Chinatown in San Francisco to buy an unlocked GSM cellphone for my daughter's graduation present.

Phone companies in the U.S. "lock" their phones so you have to use their networks. Unlocking a phone—which often is nothing more than typing in a secret numeric code—let's you use the phone on any GSM network—AT&T and Sprint, T-Mobile. All you need to do is buy a prepaid card which, if large enough, gets you down to 10 cents a minute. Gangsters love unlocked phones because they are virtually untraceable. Cheapskates love them because you only pay for the time you use; unused minutes roll over. If you had an unlocked Apple Phone, you wouldn't have to use it on AT&T's network, and presumably, you could also use it overseas...

The One True Phone

From Quanto a MMMiM

And on the 29th day of the sixth month, when the sun was at its lowest point in the sky, the Phones appeared, one after another, each in its tasteful white black box without any adornment whatsoever. And the People rejoiced, for they had been waiting a long time and could wait no longer. A great unboxing occurred across the land and many two-year service contracts were entered into.

The Opinion Changers had received no review product in advance and thus despaired and called the Phone a hype and said that the battery would never last and asked what all the fuss was about anyway. But they all wanted one, and only Mossberg of the Journal 4 reporters in the national media got one, and pronounced it “pretty good,” which for him worthy of the hype, which for them was a rave. And the other Opinion Changers were cast out of the Temple.

Is Myspace a Prodigy?

    

Some of you kids may be old enough to remember Prodigy, which was one of the first break-out "interactive services" to attract the attention of mainstream America. Prodigy was ugly and dumbed down and annoying. Its environment was so closed and proprietary, it made AOL, briefly, look smart and open. Which is why, ultimately, it became AOL's lunch. Still, it's an important footnote to history: Prodigy introduced regular folks—over a million of them, which children, was a lot in those days— to the glories of the online world.

I wonder if Myspace isn't doing the same thing for social networks, and whether it's headed for a similar fate at the hands of Facebook.

OK, clearly, Facebook is having some kind of a moment. (See especially my wife's take in the paper today.) But beyond the 15 minutes of fame, we are witnessing the birth of the latest uber-network. Already, Facebook's population rivals that of Shanghai, and it feels like it's ready to grow even bigger.

I never saw the appeal of Myspace. (I understand why others do it, but it never hooked me.) Plus, it's ugly and chaotic, and closed. I find Facebook, by comparison, hugely amusing. Its white space and neat layout is positively Apple-like. It's interface simple but powerful. The way it handles privacy is smart. There's plenty do there—and with developers working to add new stuff, you can easily see how a network effect will create exponential growth. Where LinkedIn is an excellent tool for recruiting people, or finding a job or a contact within a company, there's no reason to hang out there. Facebook, though, is sticky.

The implications of all this are fairly fascinating. Prodigy declined when its users got pissed off over restrictive rules. Is Myspace hollowing out?  And if Facebook becomes the uber-social network, how long can it hold on?

(For an opposing opinion, see Owen's take.)

Mea Culpa

At the end of a dispatch I filed from the Wall Street Journal's excellent D conference last week, I wrote that one of the most interesting things about Walt Mossberg's interview of Steve Jobs was what wasn't said:

Not a single word about his role in the stock options imbroglio. I assume, given the hard-nosed, take-no-prisoners approach of his inquisitor, Walt Mossberg, that a deal was cut ahead of time. You want Jobs, you pay his price.

Walt Mossberg recently emailed me, rightfully taking umbrage with my assumption. Walt says no deal was cut.

Sorry Walt. I didn't mean to impugn your integrity, which is beyond reproach. One of the things I admire most about you is that.

Still, you should have asked him about the stock options.