Loving my new iPhone 3G!

Recently, I became the owner of a shiny new black, 16GB iPhone 3G. I’ve had a BlackBerry Pearl (8100) for the past 2 years, and the iPhone is a significantly better device for me. Here’s why.

For starters, I’m an avid Mac user. I’ve spent many years on Mac and Windows systems, and I overwhelmingly prefer Mac. One of the biggest problems that I had as a Mac + BlackBerry user is that the syncing tools suck. PocketMac is a disaster, and the Mark/Space app (whatever it’s called) only works about one day per year. I ended up having to install the Google sync app on my BlackBerry and move my iCal calendars into Google Calendar, then re-import them with Google’s CalDAV support. A messy solution at best, and it still doesn’t solve the issue with my contacts.

iPhone 3G, however, syncs with my Mac flawlessly (as expected). Because I have a MobileMe account, my contacts and calendars sync within minutes (faster if I force a push). On top of that, I have all of my email accounts routed through Gmail, so the mail client’s IMAP support makes configuring and managing my email simple.

Beyond that, there are all of the custom apps that are available now that the iPhone OS 2.0 software went live. The apps I find myself using most (besides Contacts, Calendar, Phone, Safari, and iPod) are Brightkite, NetNewsWire, Things touch, Twitterrific, Apple Remote, Klick, TV Forecast, 1Password, Facebook, YPmobile, and nearly a dozen time-wasting games. I’ve even created a ringtone from the Dr. Horrible theme song.

All-in-all, I’m happy with the phone. The on-screen keyboard responds and auto-corrects as quickly as I can type, which makes typing MUCH faster than it was on my BlackBerry. The only irritation I have is that I can’t tether it to my MacBook Pro as a 3G modem without jail-breaking it. This is more due to AT&T’s policies than anything else. The only other thing is that I haven’t found the right setting yet in Handbrake or VisualHub to convert my DVDs into a format that works with both my Playstation 3 AND my iPhone at the same time. Let me know if you find the right combination of settings.

I give it five stars, over and over again.

My thoughts on Twitter

Twitter has tweaked their design as of this morning, and they added a link titled “Tell us your story,” in which they ask about your thoughts as a Twitter user. Here’s what I had to say.

I’m an information junkie with a limited attention span. Twitter has all of the interesting links and thoughts of a Digg, Newspond, del.icio.us, or Ma.gnolia, but is filtered by people I follow, giving me a much higher signal to noise ratio for links and services that require my attention (or that I may want to give my attention to).

I’m interested in what people are thinking about. Twitter is perfect for this. “Tell us what you’re doing, in 140 characters or less” is fantastic because it forces the short, to-the-point posts. As a “thought publisher” on Twitter, it’s less demanding than, say, writing a blog post.

I work on a couple of open-source projects, as well as a commercial project. We’ve configured our subversion post-commit hook to trigger a Twitter update containing the log message. As we all work on the project throughout the day, I’m able to have up-to-the-minute notifications that tell me where in the development process we are at any given time. My commercial project has protected updates, and my open-source project has public updates so that our technically-oriented end-users can follow progress.

Twitter has become an indispensable utility for me. Being a Mac user, Twitter is as critical of a utility to me as Mail, Address Book, QuickSilver, Growl, and Adium. I don’t have to put a lot of time and effort into it, it has a very specific purpose, and I can engage with it passively if I choose to (I receive Growl notifications via Twitterrific, for example).

Twitter is interesting, useful, and non-demanding (both as a “publisher” of tweets as well as a “consumer” of tweets).

My only half-hearted complaint is that the Flash widgets are ugly as sin, but that’s why we have RSS feeds and open-source tools such as SimplePie to parse them, right?

iTunes Movie Rentals, DRM, and The Big Problem™

On Tuesday morning, Apple announced the all-new Movie Rentals in the iTunes Store. Fantastic idea, god-awful implementation. Here are a few points to add clarity to how bad we’re in trouble, and how completely out-of-touch Big Media is with the real world.

1. iTunes Movie Rentals debut 30 days after physical DVD releases. — That’s right, 30 whole days. Why? I have no idea, other than Big Media wants to get people to drive down to their local Walmart store and purchase a physical box with a physical disc in it first. Here’s the problem: In the high-bandwidth digital world that we currently live in, distribution costs are next-to-zero. However, in the archaic world that Big Media lives in, whoever solves the [physical] distribution problem makes the most money. The problem is that distribution is no longer a problem (now that we’re in the digital age), and Big Media is still trying to solve it. (See Sony’s DRM-Free Gift Cards.)
2. iTunes Hi-Definition Movie Rentals are only for AppleTV, not for computers. — You’ve got a 20-inch monitor and a 640×480 resolution movie playing. Seriously? Why? Oh, because Big Media wants to charge a premium for HD content, and if it ends up on a fully-functional computer then the DRM might get broken, and they would lose control of the content. Nevermind that I’m watching a tiny video on a giant monitor/TV/whatever. And nevermind that I don’t have an AppleTV.
3. HD content is available to rent, not to buy. — You can rent HD content on your AppleTV, but you absolutely can’t buy it. Why? Because Big Media wants to get people to drive down to their local Walmart store and purchase a physical box with a physical HDDVD or Blu-ray formatted disc in it. Oh wait, you have a Playstation 3 so you want watch Blu-ray movies, but Bourne Ultimatum is only available in HD in HDDVD format. I guess I’ll need to spend another $300 for an HDDVD player as well.

Now, for a consumer who owns an AppleTV, the fact that they can rent movies directly from their TV without having to drive to the video store is pretty handy. For the rest of us that are more digital media savvy, it is absolutely amazing to me that Big Media is so out of touch with their customers that they would do this to them.

Now, let’s look at the reality:

1. Having two competing HD formats is bad for consumers. — Lots of people have either Playstation 3’s, Xbox 360’s, Tivo HD’s, and relatively modern computers. Why are we wasting shelf space with physical discs where some movies are in one format and other movies are in another format. Digital 720p/1080p movies should be Big Media’s biggest push right now, and it’s not. Lost money, right there, lying on the floor.
2. Having insane DRM restrictions hurts consumers. — Why waste the time with heavily DRM-laden content, when I can just get DRM-free HD content from the darker places on the internet (the “DarkNets”)? After reading about how this guy’s Netflix downloads wouldn’t play because of the monitor he was using, you can bet I’ll never use the Netflix service, Amazon Unbox, or Windows Vista… EVER. I’ll just download content from the DarkNets because the currently-legal-yet-ridiculously-broken models for digital media suck for consumers.
3. The DRM used by the Blu-ray and HDDVD formats has already been broken. — It’s only a matter of time before more people buy HDDVD and/or Blu-ray drives for their computers, crack the DRM on movies they rent, and post those consumer-friendly files on the internet. That business model (give away good stuff for free) is far more effective — and will ramp up faster — than either Blu-ray or HDDVD will in the marketplace.

Now, here’s my proposal: What if, instead of causing consumers grief with ridiculous restrictions on HD content, what if there was a way to monetize the flow of this content across the internet? Where money was made, not by restricting the content beyond belief, nor by forcing people to drive down to their local Walmart store and purchase a physical box with a physical disc, but by monetizing the free flow of the content. The more the content flows, and the more people who share HD movies over P2P, the more money is made.

What would that world look like? Consumers would certainly be happier because they could get whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted it. Labels and Studios would be happy because they’d be making more money than ever before by embracing this new model. Everyone wins, right?

All I’ll say is this: WarpShare. Keep your eyes and ears open folks. More information is coming soon.

Oh, and for anyone keeping track of the current score, Piracy is beating Legal Solutions: 489,672,211,642–0.