For years, pundits have expressed an opinion that SMS, or text messaging, is dead. Soon to be replaced with MMS, email or a phone call, SMS was on the way out. However, we have seen as time has gone one, text messaging is the beast that cannot be stopped. If you are under 30, chances are the number of text message you send in a month is considerably higher than the number of dollars you earn in the same month. Twitter and similar services have taken off like crazy, and new companies are popping up daily to take advantage of the propensity to text.

Unfortunately, no one, from the cell phone makers to the carriers, have done much to take advantage of this trend. Granted, we have seen improved phones such as the sidekick and Blackberries galore, but really, they are phones with slightly improved entry.

What Google had a chance to do was create a new niche industry. Imagine a new type of “phone” that was designed from the ground up to do texting and web surfing only. There would be no phone included in this new “cell phone”. The teens in my household only use the phone on their cells when I call them, never when communicating with each other. The gPhone would have access to the web, similar to the iPhone, and focused on Google Applications, with built in IM services and super heavy duty text capabilities.

Well, that is neat and all, but what is different that other phones out there now? It all comes down to the phone plan. Text messaging is expensive, and usually in addition to any standard phone plans available. If you didn’t need the phone part, the carrier could just offer a text/data plans. Rather than having to pay $40+ for the phone plan, plus more for a data plan and then again more for texts, you would pay one flat fee for unlimited text messaging and all the data you could eat.

Now that I think about that, wouldn’t the iPhone make a perfect gPhone? Take away the phone capabilities, increase the IM/text capabilities, and off you go.

[ibeginshare]

This is an interesting move by Apple. The release of iTunes on Windows is obvious, why limit iPod use to mac users only, but the windows browser landscape is pretty full. My guess is this has to do with the iPhone. Steve also announced the iPhone will be open to third party apps, but those apps would run in Safari. This now gives everyone, windows and mac users alike full access to Safari.

Update: Apple has also released the Safari 3 beta for Macs.

A film would cost $2.99 for a 30-day rental. Its digital rights-management software would allow films to be moved from a computer to at least one other device such as the video iPod or iPhone. The software would prevent movies being copied.

This could be a killer deal for Apple. With the pricing, you have to imagine they will not be making much money per rental, but this should drive sales of the Apple TV and the video iPod. The key to the deal is the 30 day window. Many of the existing players in this market have a very limited rental period, as short as 1 or 2 days. With 30 days to view the movie as many times as you want on your computer, Apple TV, video iPod or iPhone.

It will be interesting to see if this will be announced at WWDC tomorrow, or if this will wait until it is closer to being launched.

Last week, Steve Jobs when asked if the iPhone was still on track for a June release:

Jobs says Apple is on track to ship iPhone in late June as planned.
Walt: Like the last day of June?
Jobs: (Laughs) Yeah, probably.

Steve wasn’t too far off. Start lining up now at your local Apple or ATT outlet if you want one anytime soon.

With iTunes 7.2, preview and purchase iTunes Plus music—new higher-quality, DRM-free music downloads from participating music labels.

As of right now, iTunes is not showing any DRM-free music available for purchase, we are expecting those to be released sometime tomorrow morning.

From the iTunes Help Menu, it appears you will new be able to upgrade your existing songs to the iTunes Plus (DRM-free) version:

The iTunes Store also offers songs without DRM protection, from participating record labels. These DRM-free songs, called “iTunes Plus,” have no usage restrictions and feature higher-quality encoding.

The first time you buy an iTunes Plus song, you specify whether to make all future purchases iTunes Plus versions (when available). You can change this setting by accessing your account information on the iTunes Store.

If you already have iTunes Store purchases that are now available as iTunes Plus downloads, you may upgrade your existing purchases. To do so, visit the iTunes Store and follow the onscreen instructions.

In an interesting interview in the Seattle Times with Glenn Lurie, the guy from ATT in charge of the iPhone, he revealed Google Apps would be available as a “widget” on the iPhone.

There are other things — you have the widgets, some of the Google applications that are coming — there are just so many things here that the price will not be an issue.

The interesting thing of this quote is that not only will some of not all Google Apps be available on the iPhone, but other widgets will be made available. I have always contended that while the system may not be as wide open and Palm where anyone can release apps, it will be open to a certain extent where niche applications will be able to added to the iPhone.

Nearly 2 million people visit Apple stores every week,” the statement read. “We want to provide everyone a chance to test-drive a Mac, so we are no longer offering access to MySpace in our stores.” According to an Apple representative, the News Corp.-owned MySpace is the only site that has been blocked.

Many of the stores had already set up machines that could only access Apple approved sites prior to the block so they were always available for demonstrations by Apple Store employees. I was in the San Francisco Apple Store last week, mid-day during the week, and the computers were all in use by young people, none of which were there to test out the computers, but were all messing around for hours at a time. We waited for nearly 45 minutes before we could get access to a computer. While I don’t think the MySpace ban will slow down the teen traffic, it will be interesting to see what further bans we will see in attempt to open up public computers.

Ebay has a good policy concerning selling items before they are released:

The seller must guarantee that the item will be available for shipping within 30 days from the date of purchase (i.e., the day the listing ends or the date the item is purchased from a store front listing). The seller must also clearly indicate within the listing the fact that the item is a pre-sale item with a delivery date that indicates the item will be shipped by the 30th day from the end date of the listing.

Apple has announced that the iPhone would be released in June sometime (the seller of the auctions says it will be June 12). So, assuming it will be released on June 12, those who paid $1,400 for their iPhone have to wait a day or two for it to be shipped to them, while I can drive down to my local Apple Store and pick one up for suggested retail. I can understand overpaying for an item that is impossible to find, I have done so myself. I ended up buying a Wii on ebay after trying to find one for weeks.

If you are dying to buy an iPhone, check out the ebay auctions. I might suggest you wait a few weeks and check on availability, really shouldn’t be a big deal to find one.

According to FCC documents obtained by AppleInsider, the “GSM Cellular Telephone with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi” carriers model number A1203 and FCC ID: BCGA1203.

• faster Intel Core 2 Duo processors
• All models now have 1GB of memory
• Bigger hard drives
• built-in 802.11n wireless networking

Apple® today updated its MacBook® consumer notebooks with faster Intel Core 2 Duo processors, 1GB of memory and larger hard drives in every model. The MacBook is just one-inch thin and features built-in 802.11n wireless networking for up to five times the performance and twice the range of 802.11g.* Every MacBook also includes a built-in iSight® video camera for on-the-go video conferencing, Apple’s MagSafe® Power Adapter that safely disconnects when under strain, and iLife® ‘06, Apple’s award-winning suite of digital lifestyle applications.

This is a nice bump for the low end Apple laptops. It is nice to see Apple finally realizing that they are selling 80G iPods and many of their computers do not have hard drives large enough to hold enough music/movies/photos to fill up their iPods.