Posts tagged: MOBILE

I bought my Palm TX in December 2005, a few months after it came out. In my blog post where I weighed the pros and cons of the device and the platform, I grumbled that “Palm has successfully crushed any optimism I might have had for fixes appearing in the form of a free, downloadable OS upgrade.” My grumpy intuition was right – in fact, the Palm platform has pretty much just stagnated since that time, punctuated with spastic feints toward Linux that you can read about elsewhere or in my old Palm-related posts.

I’m here in the great city of Portland, Oregon for the 2007 O’Reilly Open Source Convention, or OSCON. Looks like it’s going to be a fun week.

The first two days are for “tutorials”, half-day sessions on specific practical topics. Though you are officially required to sign up for your sessions in advance, sometimes you just need to float. There’s so much going on it can be hard to choose to stay put. Plus you want to make sure you cruise the upper lobby every hour or two in case they put out a fresh batch of cookies. Also, frankly, none of the sessions I sampled in the morning really grabbed me. Not everybody who has written a book is an engaging speaker, alas. My work as a teacher makes me both more understanding and more demanding of presenters.

Apple and Cisco have reached an agreement on the disputed “iPhone” trademark, and – surprise – Apple gets to keep using it. From the Cisco press release:

Under the agreement, both companies are free to use the “iPhone” trademark on their products throughout the world.

To further differentiate brands, the Apple iPhone will also be known as “the real iPhone”, with the Cisco model being referred to as “Oh, I thought you meant the other one.”

In case you missed it, Apple has a new product. You can’t, you know, buy it or anything just yet – that’ll be about six months. And $500, please. While you wait you can compare it to the competition.

They claim that it runs OS X. Hm. I can imagine there’s a BSD kernel (running on what processor I don’t know), QuickTime, WebKit… but really, how much of the stuff in the standard OS X architecture diagram is actually going to be in that phone?