Over at Freedom to Tinker, Prof. Felton sums up why the iPhone is important even if you don’t get one:

[…]the iPhone’s arrival and the attendant frenzy mark the beginning of a new phase in the mobile phone world — a phase based on the radical notion that it’s possible to make a pocket-sized device that is a pretty good phone and a pretty good networked computer at the same time.

From a purely technical standpoint, this isn’t surprising at all. Phones are basically computers, and we know how to cram a decent computer into a small, low-power package. The engineering isn’t trivial but we know it can be done. Apple might have modestly better engineering, and significantly better human-factors design, but what they’re doing has been technically possible all along.

Yet somehow it hasn’t happened, because the mobile carriers don’t want it to happen. They have clung to their walled garden models, offering limited, captive services rather than allowing easy development of Internet applications for mobile devices. An open system would provide more benefit overall, but most of that benefit would accrue to consumers. The carriers would rather get a big share of a small pie, than a small share of a big pie.

In most markets, competition keeps this kind of thing from happening, by forcing producers to account for consumer preferences. You would expect competition to have forced the mobile networks open by now, whether the carriers liked it or not. But this hasn’t happened yet. The carriers have managed to keep control by locking customers in to long contracts and erecting barriers to the entry of new devices and applications. The system seemed to be stuck in an unstable equilibrium. All we needed was some kind of shock, to get the ball rolling downhill.

The iPhone could well turn out to be that shock. The carriers will hate it, but the consumers will be the real winners.

We’re pretty much behind this post about not getting an iPhone, and are even moreso in the “glad we got the 8525” camp after reading this very iPhone-friendly writeup from perpetual Apple booster John Gruber. The whole idea of a “smartphone” without cut-and-paste, or the facility to sync notes back to the desktop, strikes us as folly. The list of things our cheaper Windows Mobile device can do that the iPhone can’t grows longer, and as it turns out they’re things we like to do.

In particular, check this out (from Gruber’s article):

Mail: I hope you like top-posting, and quoting the entire message you’re replying to. Me, I despise that style of email, but iPhone Mail doesn’t really work well any other way. One problem is that the iPhone doesn’t support the concept of selected text. That means you can’t just select a specific portion to quote of the message you’re replying to; nor can you select a chunk of the quoted message and delete it while editing. The only way to delete text is one character at a time (although the keyboard does let you press-and-hold to repeat). And to top it off, there’s no way to reply without quoting anything at all.

Yikes.

Or, at least, WANT TO MAKE: Via BoingBoing, we are now obsessed with this steampunk jar of articulated fireflies.

Desktop Tower Defense is just about the best online game we’ve seen. Don’t click if you don’t have some time.

We can’t decide if we like the bomb version or the one with exposed gears better, so you should probably just buy them both.

All you need to know before clicking through is that it’s a programmable LED-equipped fan with five megabytes of storage.

This inspires all sorts of awe for the sheer over-the-toppedness at work. Sure, it’s a 92-pound plywood box powered by a car battery, but it’s also got an 8-track deck, a cupholder, dual antennae, an internal FM hookup for your iPod, live cigarette lighters, and two conventional electrical outlets as well. We are not making this up. Don’t miss the video.

(From the makers of Wanky the Safety Cat.)

Two bits:

1. With Safari for Windows now available, you poor folks marooned on Windows no longer have any excuse. Pick Firefox or Safari, but for God’s sake quit using IE.

2. Webkit development on the iPhone doesn’t mollify us. It sounds like a pretty poor way to do “real” apps, like a hypothetical replacement email client, an SSH tool, etc. We’re still pretty happy we didn’t wait.

3. We’re really excited about Leopard, but October seems like a long time to wait.

More: Gizmodo has a long writeup on why the iPhone will be crippled by the lack of an SDK. It’s spot on.

So far we’ve avoided the whole Guitar Hero craze, but the 80s edition may well push us over the top. Like the best PS2 games, it’s actually possible for it to be a social endeavor, as opposed to a solitary one.

Please get for us this clock.

On Saturday, we finally broke down and got a new phone, which meant we also needed a new case. These things are too damned expensive to NOT have some kind of protection on the screen. The folks at Sena Cases did a fine job with the case on our old Treo, so we went over to their site and ended up ordering a very similar case for the 8525. Again, on SATURDAY. As we’re cheap, we also opted for the “fast, but US Mail” delivery option.

It arrived today.

(More on the migration from Palm to WinMo later.)

Palm’s founder Jeff Hawkins unveiled a new device today, and the response has been appropriately underwhelming. The “Foleo” is a $500 companion to your Treo; it pairs therewith and provides a full-size screen and keyboard, plus wifi, but isn’t useful on its own.

TechDirt lays it out:

The unspoken marketing message here is that users need to shell out for the Foleo on top of a Treo because the smartphone doesn’t deliver an acceptable user experience for mobile email. Palm would be far better off improving its outdated smartphones, instead of focusing on creating new (and pointless) product lines, but it’s really beginning to look like that’s asking too much of the company.

We’re pretty sure Palm has basically just announced they’re going under, just kind of subtly and relatively far in advance. So long. It’s been fun.

Dan Dickenson has more spot-on commentary:

Palm is in a desperate fight to stay alive at this point. Palm OS has languished horribly, so much so that when I got my Treo at work last year, the only significant different from the Palm V I had back in 2000 was that the Treo had a color display. Worse, the company doesn’t seem to have anyone focused on application design – the Sidekick thrashes it up and down the street for usability. If a company can’t innovate within their own product line in over 6 years, I can’t find any enthusiasm as they try and invent a new class of devices.

Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeer’s Johnny!

Shelby is at it again. The upcoming SuperSnake Cobra variant will boat up to 725 horsepower. That is not a typo.

Las Vegas – April 27, 2007 – Shelby Automobiles will use newly-developed Ford Racing GT500 performance packs to help transform a limited number of 2007 and 2008 Ford Shelby GT500’s into fire breathing “Super Snake” coupes. The Super Snake post-title package will include enhancements to the Ford Shelby GT500’s handling, styling and power; tuning options will range from a warranted 600 HP V8 to over 725 HP (unwarranted). Only a limited number of Super Snakes will be built per model year at the Shelby Automobiles facility in Las Vegas beginning in late 2007.

Now we have to get a pool so we can get some pool lights like these.

Apparently, there’s Porn for the Playstation Portable on its stupid UMD video format. Wow.

Blood puddle pillow. We’ve had this tab open so long we’re not sure where it came from.

Check out Popular Mechanics Top 6 Computers of 1982, via BoingBoing.

Best part: even in 1982, PopMech knew DRM was shit:

It used to be that programs were easy to copy and change. But manufacturers began to lose money as many people made copies of software and gave them to their friends. Now, many manufacturers have figured out how to ‘copy-protect’ discs. A copy-protected disc-like a cartridge–can’t be copied or changed. To our mind this is a disaster: Most people learn programming by changing programs to fit their own needs. This capability of customization is what makes computers so attractive. New ways of copy protection will probably be found soon. Until then, a computer owner may have to put up with being ‘locked out’ of his own machine.

For the record, their top 6 were:

• IBM PC
• Apple ][
• Commodore PET
• TI 99/4A
• Atari 800
• Radio Shack TRS-80

Said of the IBM, “If interest holds, could be a contender by year end.” Heh. (Drink, Jeff.)

This one’s full size.

Best. Shredder. EVAR.

But, honey, it’s got wrenches on it!

Dude, check these magnets out.

We’re pretty much certain that this is the best thing ever done with Rubik’s Cubes.

WANT:

We know some of you might; Bargainist points out this Doc Martens sale you might enjoy.

Former Gizmodo editor Joel Johnson delivers the smackdown, and it’s beautiful. And we say this as a somewhat reformed gadget fiend.

[…] you guys just ate it up. Kept buying shitty phones and broken media devices green and dripping with DRM. You broke the site, clogging up the pipe like retarded salmon, to read the latest announcements of the most trivial jerk-off products, completely ignoring the stories about technology actually making a difference to real human beings, because you wanted a new chromed robot turd to put in your pocket to impress your friends and make you forget for just a few minutes, blood coursing as you tremblingly cut through the blister pack, that your life is utterly void of any lasting purpose. […]

[…] Stop buying this crap. Just stop it. You don’t need it. Wait a year until the reviews come out and the other suckers too addicted to having the very latest and greatest buy it, put up a review, and have moved on to something else. Stop buying broken products and then shrugging your shoulders when it doesn’t do what it is supposed to. Stop buying products that serve any other master than you. Use older stuff that works. […]

Get it together: every single one of these consumer electronics companies should be approached as the enemy. They work for us. Hold their feet to the fire when they say their product is going to change even a small part of our lives. Circle back again in six months when they’re shilling the incremental upgrade and ask them why the last version didn’t cut the mustard. Step out of your blogging trench and ask yourself what your responsibility is to the tens of thousands of idiots who are reading this site right now to determine what they should spend their next paycheck on. They’ve already proven they’re too imbicilic to make any smart purchases on their own. (Remember, Gizmodo was a nexus of debate over which MP3 player was going to “kill” the iPod two years after Apple won.) If you write like another stupid fanboy who ricochets a pillar of spunk off the roof of his gaping mouth just because something is glossy and uses electricity, you’re just doing the work of the companies trying to get rich selling us broken promises.

WORD. Seriously.

A friend has a new T-Mobile Dash smartphone, and opined last night that he’s utterly shocked, as it appears to have no facility at all for highlighting, selecting, cutting, or pasting text.

Wow. If anyone knows differently, please let Heathen know. We’ll pass the info on to the Dash owner.

From an article on choosing a new high-end watch:

“Do not consider scuba diving in your Patek to a madman’s undersea nuclear laboratory.”

Noted.

We’re still pissed off about this. Deal with it.

First, Jobs on the iPhone:

“We define everything that is on the phone,” he said. “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.”

The iPhone, he insisted, would not look like the rest of the wireless industry.

“These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn’t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.”

Actually, Steve, that’s all bullshit, and in fact a small telephone/computing device is exactly what I and others want. And the whole “it won’t work if you put software on it” thing is a damned lie; I don’t recall Treo or Windows Mobile people having this problem.

Mark Pilgrim has more, as does Open the Future; the latter suggests that regardless of how wrongheaded this is, Jobs may be digging in his heels on the “no outside software” point. The Steve isn’t known for backing up when he’s been wrong, so we’re pretty sure this means the iPhone will remain a crippled, useless thing instead of what it could have been.

Great job, Steve. Fuck you.

Geek productivity-porn site 43Folders weighs in on the suckitude of the closed platform:

Yes I’d understand, but I’d feel like Apple was abandoning an opportunity to make this more than a phone, and more that an iPod, and even — let’s be frank about the elephant in the room — much more than a Palm or a Pocket PC. There’s the potential here for some serious George Jetson shit and it would be a pity not to capitalize on that as early as possible.

Exactly. The problem is: every Treo or Windows Mobile device can already do orders of magnitude more things than the iPhone precisely because they’re open platforms.

The last great hope for smartphone geeks was the Sidekick, which T-Mobile foolishly insisted on controlling completely. Like, there was no way to download your own apps, and T-Mobile could delete anything they liked from the phone at any time, over the cell network. It wasn’t and isn’t really yours with that kind of power imbalance. As a consequence, instead of the technorati carrying them, idiots like Paris Hilton carry them.

Apple and Cingular don’t seem to be fucking up quite that much — the iPhone will sync with your desktop, not remote servers, for example — but they’re close. Openness is paramount. It’s Freedom 0. Without it, the iPhone is useless to a significant and influential demographic.

This is what you get when you combine an aging geek with a penchant for model rocketry and a GI Joe Mercury Capsule re-issue kit.

Hawesome.

Gizmodo is reporting, and we have heard elsewhere as well, that the new Apple iPhone will be a closed system — i.e., like an iPod, not like a proper handheld smart device.

By contrast, all Treos and Windows Mobile machines have the ability to add programs from third party developers. Their usefulness is limited only by developer ingenuity and the phone’s owner. Apple, by contrast, has apparently chosen the opposite plan, where only they can decide what can run on the iPhone.

If this is true — and at this point is seems very much so — Steve was being very disingenuous when he said this thing “runs OS X.”

Laura Lemay put it this way, over on The Well:

From the further info coming out it doesn’t run Mac OSX — it runs something that looks like OSX but is actually a locked down, proprietary system similar to that of the iPod.

When us geeks hear “it runs OSX” we think we’re hearing “It’s unix, we can write apps for it and get a bash prompt.” But when Steve says “it runs OSX” he’s saying “it looks like OSX and has the same icons and interface whizzies you expect from OSX.”

Exactly.

It’s still a very nice phone, if it lives up to the hype, but $500 for a closed machine is more than Heathen will consider no matter who pays the bill. In fact, it’s overpriced by a factor of 5. There’s no chance at all of us adopting such a phone, Apple shiny-ness or no, for more than $100 if we’re limited to what Steve thinks is useful. No thanks, Apple. We’ll take another Treo and wait for someone else to do this properly.

So, Apple introduced this, which made this happen to RIM and Palm stock. Heh.

I mean, come ON.

So, monkey, or one of the tiki designs?

(Heights Lawyer, don’t miss this.)

Is immolation enough for canonization? Because we really want to make a St. Elmo’s Fire joke.

Pierre Scerri loved Ferraris, specifically the legendary 312PB.

So he made one of his own at 1:3 scale. That works. It took him 15 years and 20,000 hours, but his model includes not just faithfully recreated body and interior work (the trademark shift grate is there!), but also a fully functional 1:3 scale 12-cylinder engine, transmission, and exhaust system — which means his tiny car even sounds like a Ferrari.

Mr Scerri has his own website now, detailing additional models he’s working on, including a Ford GT40.

A USB pole dancer, though perhaps Mr Rhymes-with-Schloachim might.

“Can you hear me now?“

Afraid of losing your thumb drive? Someone’s solved that problem for you.

This reviewer at the Chicago Sun-Times lays it out: the Zune bites, and the reason it does is that a significant chunk of the differences between it and the iPod are changes calculated to please the recording industry, not the consumer. The author helpfully points out some non-iPod players that deliver features people might actually want, as opposed to crippled bullshit like the Zune’s wifi.

This is, without a doubt, one of the coolest things we’ve ever seen.

We still want a Nixie Tube Clock.

WillItBlend.com showcases the dangerously powerful BlendTec blender. Our favorite video? 50 marbles. However, the “coke and a chicken” concoction has a certain horror to it as well.

We’ll stick with our Kitchenaid.

Please get us one of these. And a Caucasian.

The world’s fastest street-legal car? A 1972 Vauxhall Victor with, shall we say, extensive modifications: 2,200 horses, two turbos, and a 9-liter V-8.

FanTAStic.

BoingBoing points us to The Device, a handcrafted cherry box with two analog dials and a USB interface. With host software, you can have it display whatever you want on the dials and lights that festoon this mad-scientist-worthy gadget.

We want one, but only after they release the OS X and/or Linux software.

At least BoingBoing is on top of the jetpack part.

Now we can use novelty soaps to mislead our children about marine biology!

Via BoingBoing, video of the best damn rideable mechanical lion you’ll ever see.

We absolutely need a Suspicious Looking Device. (Via BB.)