I've waited a little while before posting my personal review of the iPhone. While the phone was released more than six months ago, it still garners a great deal of attention and hype. The iPhone seems to have a following that is nearly as polarized as American politics. People seem to either think it a wonderful device that at the very least changes the face of mobile telephony for ever or that it's just a phone that while pretty is missing key features. While detractors are correct in that some features other phones have the iPhone is missing; they miss the simple fact that the iPhone has the features most people want and does them very well. Best of all, the key function "phone calls" work terrifically; and it is after all a PHONE.

Until someone has actually used the IPhone it's very hard to describe how different the experience is from other so called "Smart" phones, or any mobile phone. I can say this after using both Blackberries and Windows Mobile devices as well as many other phones. Most phones have lots of features, yet do few of them well and most poorly. These features seem added by the marketing department first and then rushed through the engineering department to meet a long decided release date. In stark contrast, the features of the iPhone seem to have been thoroughly thought out by both marketers and engineers then compromises made with the end user in mind. Some features were seemingly left out, while others were added with missing components; both of which Apple new could be added later and since the phones release Apple has done 3 updates, two bringing feature enhancements. Click Here to Read More...

Tags: iPhone, iTunes

Leopard's Safari has a great new clipping feature that allows you to grab any website element and turn it into a widget that appears in Dashboard (Mac Users know what I am talking about). To demonstrate I chose YouTube and their "Videos Being Watched Right Now." The clipping appeared on the Dashboard and I then clicked on one of the videos to demonstrate. I got more than I bargained for, a huge laugh. No, Tracy wasn't laughing at me; but a pretty talented blogger Kevin Jumba. He describes high school and the various cliques, showing you what they look like and how they act.

I've never heard of him before or seen his YouTube videos, but this one made us both laugh. It's amazing what you can find just cruising the information super highway; sometimes it's a good laugh.

If you want to see more Kevin Juma check out his YouTube Website.


If you don't see a video above, your company or ISP may block YouTube.

Tags: Video, Comedy, YouTube, iTunes

The future of entertainment is on-line; at least many of us who use the internet believe this to be true. Now, whether that is downloading the video and then watching on your computer or iPod, or if it is streaming the video to your computer via a website or a program like Joost; seems to be a matter of debate. Apple has been leading the charge for the past few years, enjoying a great deal of success with music and to a lesser extent with video.

Over the past 12 months you may have heard that the music publishers and the major studios have started to experiment with options other than iTunes. It seems the over riding reasons have been less to do with meeting customer needs and demands, and more with keeping control of their products through the entire life cycle. To date no one has really been very successful in going up against the iTunes store; except maybe Amazon, but they already know on-line retailing.

Earlier this week NBC Universal released a beta of their new service Hulu. It is designed to be an iTunes killer. I can't tell you much about it as I am still waiting to get an invite so that I can log on and take a tour. MacRumors was able to get an invite and showed off an interesting aspect of Hulu, the ability to embed video in a blog or web-page. You-tube and other services allow this, but this should be the very first time a major company offered such a service for copy righted materials.

Below is a full length episode of The Office. Check it out, pretty interesting. For TV episodes I'm not sure how useful this is; but apparently you can edit down to clips as well. One thing I know, you can't do this with iTunes.

Tags: Video, Entertainment, iTunes

Came across a cool website while reading Digg, Josh's iTunes Album Art. What is it? Well, it is a webisite that had figured out a way to dig into the heart of the iTunes Music Store and pull out the album art it holds. Why is this cool? Well, if you don't buy your albums on iTunes you may not have the album art and don't want to scan it yourself. If that is the case, then you can use this website to try and grab a high-res version of your new album's cover.

Now, if you are using iTunes then you may already know that Apple gives anyone the ability to download their digital album art; even if you didn't buy the album from iTunes Music Store. It's really easy and works on both Macs and PCs. Josh's iTunes Album Art website is great if you don't have this or don't use iTunes. In any event, it's pretty cool to use. Of course, Apple could shut him down anything they want, and may do so. One never knows with Apple.

Tags: Apple, iTunes, Entertainment, Music

I was reading an article on MacRumors I saw a posting that showed this image of an iTunes support page dropdown that included the following (click on image):

• DidNotReceiveMovie-RentalMovie
• AccidentalPurchase-RentalMovie
• ContentQuality-RentalMovie
• DuplicatePurchase-RentalMovie
• WrongVErsion-RentalMovie
• BadMetadata-RentalMovie
• Other-RentalMovie

There have been rumors that movie rentals were coming to iTunes. While Steve Jobs seems dead set against a subscription model for music (I agree with this stance), a rental plan for movies makes sense. The rumor is that you could rent the movie for 30 days for $2.99 and be able to move it to one other device (i.e., iPod, AppleTV, iPhone, etc...).

Read the MacRumors article HERE

Tags: Rumors, iTunes, Entertainment, Apple