Verizon Phones

Just got off the phone with Verizon Wireless and I asked about new phones they might be getting. The woman said that there is "speculation" about Verizon carrying the Pre but nothing concrete and I shouldn't count on it.

She flat out said that as far as she knows Verizon will NOT carry the iPhone. She said that was all rumors and it was probably not going to happen.

I asked about Android phones and she said she had not heard about that, but in terms of possibilities it was somewhere between the Pre (a matter of time) and the iPhone (not likely.)

She recommended the Blackberry Tour. I'm not a big Blackberry fan. We'll wait and see I guess.

Blackberry vs Treo

Lately I've been thinking about trading in my Treo for a Blackberry. I've been trying to do some research on the two of them and stumbled across this article today, which isn't about Treos but about iPhone vs Blackberry.

The feedback I've gotten from people who have used both phones is that the Blackberry user interface is nicer, but it has some drawbacks - namely the lack of a touch screen and the lack of threaded SMS.

I haven't been able to find much about the threaded SMS online. I get the impression that Blackberry user's don't know how the Treo handles SMS because the reply is usually, "it does do it." But while they have come up with a way to sort of do it, it defeats the whole purpose of keeping things clean and simple. I am shocked that someone has not written a Blackberry app to do that.

Anyway I will be sticking with my Treo for now. Hopefully soon Blackberry will add this feature. I could live without the touch screen, although I love my Palm touch screen, but the threaded SMS I can not do.

More Crap

Some more commentary on the Apple iPhone numbers from last night.

From the NYT special on sleep today, a bunch of articles:

• Should kids sleep with their parents? My kid says yes, but I say no.
• The effects of sleep deprivation, which I know all too well, which is why I go to bed at 8:30pm every night. (Yes, I am old and boring and I am aware of that.)
• Do the elderly sleep worse? I say maybe not, but they sure sleep less. Getting up at 4am everyday... Insanity!
• Something about birds.
• Something about how sleep helps your memory.
• About how sleeping pills are huge rip-offs.
• About nightmares, what dreams mean, why we dream, etc.
  

Tom, everyone's favorite MySpace friend, is apparently doing a pretty common MySpace thing to do - lying about his age.

Natali del Conte - a somewhat cute tech vlogger, in a bloopers reel that really has no point, other than looking at her.

Some crazy Christian televangelist cursing up a storm:



Startup to kill junk mail.
An article about StumbleUpon, which apparently is a better version of Digg or one of those types of sites. And by article I mean half-assed weak attempt at a blog post.

Netflix profits are up... Which is odd because, while I still am a subscriber, I am strongly thinking of switching to Blockbuster. I love Netflix and I will feel like a traitor if/when I do switch; and I hate Blockbuster for being the Starbucks of movie rentals. But with Netflix if I want to watch a movie I have to put it on a list, wait weeks for it to come, and by the time it comes I don't want to watch it anymore, so it sits there for months delaying the next movie I really do want to see.

With Blockbuster I can exchange the movie in the store, and get the next one on my list. I'm doing a two week trial of Blockbuster and I've watched more movies than I have watched from Netflix in the last 3 or 4 months, maybe even longer.

How to Pretend You Have an iPhone

From Cory Arcangel comes this easy way to make everyone think you have an iPhone.

I know a lot of people dislike Cory but I went to school with him and I like him. Yes, his parents do live in a big, huge McMansion in Buffalo (or at least they did about 12 years ago); and for all I know they may pay his Williamsburg rent. But he actually has talent and he is a genuinely nice guy. He and Paul Davis did a stop-motion animation video with Legos set to one of Paul's songs that was genius. The song was brilliant and the video was awesome.

The Bruce Springsteen Born to Run glockenspiel addendum was brilliant and I still want a copy of it.

And... Apparently one of the other Rolling Stones has done even more drugs than Keith Richards. If that is even possible.

Apparently some old people use Facebook. This deserves a whole article in the NYT. I don't understand why anyone uses Facebook. And neither do a lot of other tech people.

Lastly, a woman who charges parents obscene amounts to get their kids into their prestigious schools where they can pay out the nose for their child to drink and get A's for doing nothing. A roommate of mine's father was a professor at Princeton and he refused to let his son go there because he said the undergraduate education was so shoddy.

One Last Apple Update

It's not actual money Apple is giving back to people who paid the $200 "stupid tax" on their iPhones. It's $100 store credit. Like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs didn't get rich by writing checks.

Even More on Apple

Apparently NY Magazine shares some of my reservations about Apple and Steve Jobs. And Wired. Theirs is not so much about the company but also the whole iPhone repricing thing. And another one at Wired. Jobs is worth $4.9 billion so what does he care? Here is his interview on the subject...

Excerpt:

Q: Many people already have Beatles music on CDs. Will they really buy it online if they already own it?

A: I do expect them to, yes. That's been the case with other music, as well.

I own every Bob Dylan album ever, but I buy a lot of it on iTunes, because I guess I'm just too lazy to rip it from the CD.

Or maybe that's because the $9.99 for the album doesn't really matter much when you have $4.9 billion of them. It does for those of us who don't have billions.

Update - Apparently Apple agrees with everyone's complaining about the iPhone price cut. "We want to do the right thing for our valued iPhone customers," Jobs said. "We apologize for disappointing some of you, and we are doing our best to live up to your high expectations of Apple."

I still don't think Apple is in a good place. And I don't think Jobs feels at all apologetic about this whole thing. He's probably trying to count how many of his billions of dollars are going to be spent refunding the customers.

More on Apple

Just read an article in the WSJ about how Apple's price cut for the iPhone has "shaken investors." Apple got rid of the $499 model and lowered the price of the $599 model to $399. This will undoubtedly piss off everyone who waited in lines for hours and paid full price for something only to have the price reduced a few months later. And by "everyone" I mean the Apple fanatics that make up the core of Apple's market.

This move reeks of desperation. Eliminating the lower priced model makes sense, and reducing the higher priced one to the lower price could make sense as well. At least it could be rationally explained: the lower priced model wasn't selling so they eliminated it and reduced the price of the higher priced model to the lower price. But going lower than the lowest price just underlines how desperate Apple must be.

I really think that Apple is in for a big downturn.

Update - This news from yesterday was apparently Apple's big news that everyone thought would involve the Beatles catalog. They also announced the new iPod touch, which is essentially an iPhone without the phone. And a new iPod nano that doesn't have the shuffle "feature."

Is it enough to save Apple? I think not.

And some guy likes old Macs.

Apple News

Apple announced a new iPod or something today? I didn't even catch this in the news, I read it on a blog. I am very bored with Apple lately. Everyone I know (which is really just 1 person I ran into once) loves their iPhone even though I've heard not so good things about them, but the new iMacs seemed lackluster and once everyone has an iPod how are they going to keep selling them?

I know, I know... More and cheaper storage. I have a 15GB iPod and I can store about half of my MP3 library on it. A lot of the library is stuff I don't even like and have never and would never listen to. And a lot of it is 2-8 hour DJ sets, so it's a lot of music.

I think a 40 GB iPod would be about the most I would ever need. Maybe 60 GB. More than that? Who has that many MP3s that they actually listen to? I can see someone having more than 60 GB of music but listening to it all? Nope.

WiFi? The Firewire cable works just fine for me. It's probably faster than WiFi as well. I don't own any Apple stock but if I did I would have sold it after the iPhone news was released. I actually bought Apple at $18 a few years back, and sold it at $30 and then bought more at $90 and sold at $110 or something. If I'd kept the original stock I would have made a small fortune. But after I lost a large fortune in the dot-com crash I would rather take a profit than lose it all. So I set trailing stop-limits on most of my holdings. Better safe than sorry is my opinion, which means I should really be investing in bonds, which I am actually doing more and more.

Anyway, I digress. Apple seems boring. Maybe it's because I haven't been a Mac user in almost a decade now or maybe it's just me being cynical, but I think that Apple's time is up, and I would be shorting AAPL now.

Update - Apparently Jim Cramer disagrees with me. I would trust his opinion more than mine as far as financial markets and capital allocation are concerned, but I stand by my opinion. I'm not going to be buying AAPL but I'm not going to be shorting it either.

Update 2 - However it appears that the street agrees with me.