[From How a Minnesota man blew the whistle on the New York Times | News Cut | Minnesota Public Radio ]

[From Spezify]

[From Spinning the Web - P.R. in Silicon Valley - NYTimes.com]

[From Apple TV 2.4 Update Now Available, Updated Remote App with Gestures [Updated] - Mac Rumors]

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[From Register parent names new CEO - OC Business News - OCRegister.com]

[From Behind the Design of a New Android Phone - Gadgetwise Blog - NYTimes.com]

I think it’s telling then that since I got the iPhone 3GS, I haven’t touched my netbook.

To me, the iPhone 3GS is as seismic of a change for the iPhone/iPod Touch platform as going from G5’s to Intel processors were. Speed in consumer electronics and computers becomes an annoyance in subtle ways: jitteriness, crashing, unresponsiveness all lead to make a device usable, but not necessarily fun to use.

When a device has some horsepower behind it, it can move at the speed of your thought. My work computer, which is a heavy duty Mac Pro has this. I’m able to have dozens of apps open, and move effortlessly between them. My MacBook Pro, for all that I love about it, does not have this.

The iPhone 3GS’ speed upgrade makes the device move at the speed of use rather than makes the user move at the speed of the device. It’s a huge change for the iPhone, and so welcome that you find yourself using the iPhone for more than before with less effort.

The video recording, magnetometer and the like are awesome, but not going to really play themselves out as killer features until app developers can get their hooks into them.

The speed though is pushing the iPhone from being a smart phone to a true handheld computing platform. All Apple has to really do is increase the size, vary the form factor, to go into emerging markets, to compete with Kindles’, e-books, netbooks, whatever.

Now, I would love to see Apple turn their attention back to the AppleTV and go for broke there. TV’s are a nascent market (the 10 foot market). I have a MacMini hooked to my TV and its difficult to get high usability from a machine not meant to be operated from 10 feet. Apple should take the lessons learned from the iPhone interface and apply them to the 10 foot view as well as they did the 2 foot.

Until then, we have the MacMini on the TV, MacMini in the wall for lights and the iPhones as our handhelds. The Dell netbook is useful, but looking more and more like it has the potential to be a novelty item, especially when a handheld “phone” outperforms it on nearly every level.

[From Geeking Out]

More photos here.

On a personal note: this birth means so much more to me because of a birth in our family that did not happen this year. I know it was a bittersweet emotion for my family, which makes Eli’s birth all that much more of a miracle.

On a blog note: Eli will have his own site (elimichaelkaplan.com) so not so much content here. I have some record industry things queued up.

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