Walt, after all, is the basis for this. And this. Microsoft should be very proud, or we should all be very scared. [WSJ]

Unfortunately for Palm, Apple has both a new iPhone operating system and new iPhone hardware coming, likely available within a month, that could obviate many of these advantages.

AND

I'd note that the new iPhone to be unveiled next week will have lots of added features that could alter those calculations.

It's not like everybody didn't already know that new iPhone hardware was coming soon, but for Mossberg to say it in a review, it's all but certain. One, he doesn't just make things up. Two, he has that special relationship with Apple we talked about earlier that lets him get seated at Apple events early, with the VIPs. It's safe to say he knows what he's talking about. [WSJ Pre Review via Dave Zatz's Observant Twitter - Image Credit]

And our own Palm Pre review

In the second part Kamen talks about how the arm's control systems were developed, simplifying an 18-degrees of freedom movement space so that it could be controlled almost subconsciously by the user.
Part three is where Kamen talks about his not-for profit scheme to get young people interested in science through robots: "For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology" (FIRST); "like sports, nobody ever walks around saying 'I wanna be second'."

Interesting stuff, as I said, and the Luke arm seems to have a pretty astounding future ahead of it. I can't help thinking I'd've asked a few more direct questions though. Is the arm dexterous enough for it to let a wearer/user use the toilet? When the Luke arm gets to that level of sophistication—and, more importantly, when its developer/users trust it enough to do intimate tasks like that with it—that's the point at which I reckon the arm will stop being a science-technology showpiece and really make a difference in people's lives. Over to you in the comments. [Kara.AllthingsD]

Walt Mossberg of the WSJ has been testing it "for a couple of weeks" and sees that surfing on the faster 3G is between three and five times the speed of the original iPhone. However, Moss found that browsing on the 3G network drained his battery much faster than browsing on the original. Externally, he says the speaker was "much louder" (YES!) for both music and speakerphone, but otherwise pretty much the same as the original. One bug/feature he ran into was that you can only sync your calendar and contacts with either Exchange or your personal accounts, not both.

In Mossberg's own battery tests, he got 4 hours and 27 minutes (short of 5 hours) of talk time, which is three hours less than his test on the original iPhone. Using 3G, he got 5 hours and 49 minutes, which is slightly better than Apple's own claim. He couldn't test any apps on his iPhone 3G, but did on his old iPhone—they worked pretty much as advertised. He concludes with pretty much what we've all known: it's slightly more expensive on AT&T due to the higher price plan, but satisfies people who really need that 3G speed. What's weird is that Mossberg didn't test the GPS functionality at all, so we're left wondering how that is. [All Things D]

Ed Baig of USA Today also tested the iPhone 3G and claims both that it was worth the wait, but still not perfect. His complaints of the first one—no video capture, no Bluetooth stereo and no voice dialing—are still there. Also, AT&T's 3G coverage was nonexistent in his New Jersey home, which kinda negates the whole "iPhone 3G" thing. He notes that the new plastic backing helps reception, and the new flush headphone jack is "a welcome development." Unlike Mossberg, Baig does have something to note on the GPS. He says he was quite impressed by its accuracy when searching for pizza places while driving, and hopes that there will be a third-party add-on for turn-by-turn live directions.

Baig also says that the speaker is improved, but notes strangely that you can't directly charge the new iPhone 3G in some old accessories, such as a Bose SoundDock or a Belkin car kit. There's actually an adapter coming that will enable charging on those. Weird. He finishes up with his wishes for the next generation: Flash, Java and WMV support, removable battery and an expandable memory slot. All in all, a pretty positive review. [USA Today]

David Pogue of the NYT says that the audio quality is much improved, and notes that both incoming and outgoing sound is better than before. "In fact, few cellphones sound this good." The curved back makes the phone feel better in your hand, which is a definite plus. However, he says, the missing "standard cellphone features" from the first generation are also missing from this one. He hopes that the third-party Apps from the iPhone App Store will help fill in the gaps, but some of the ones we've seen—finding parking spots, free phone calls at Wi-Fi hotspots, random restaurant recommender, expense tracker, Etch-a-Sketch and tip calculator—don't exactly make up for the missing MMS, video recording and cut and paste features. Pogue also noticed the GPS does not support turn-by-turn navigation.

Pogue doesn't have much else in the way of benchmarks or impressions, but comes off seeming like he really likes the phone because of the iPhone 2.0 software; something old iPhone owners will be able to get for free. [NYT]

Notes: We have to say that Mossberg's review was the best in terms of completeness (save for the GPS omission). Normally, Newsweek would have a review up for the iPhone along with these three guys, but both they and Wired don't have an early review. This, we think, is because Steven Levy (the old Newsweek guy) at Wired, and Fake Steve Jobs (who hasn't quite started at Newsweek) didn't get the nod from Apple. We had our own hands on with the phone back at WWDC, which covers a lot of the exterior hardware elements as well as some of the software details.

The study, by Gerard J. Tellis—from the University of Southern California—and Joseph Johnson—from the University of Miami (well, hello there alma mater), points out that the average change in actual stock valuation is $200 million down (a 5% drop) for bad reviews and $500 million for good product reviews.

Abstract:
Product quality is probably under-valued by firms because there is little consensus about appropriate measures and methods to research quality. We suggest that published ratings of a product's quality are a valid source of quality information with important strategic and financial impact. We test this thesis by an event analysis of abnormal returns to stock prices of firms whose new products are evaluated in the Wall Street Journal. Quality has a strong immediate effect on abnormal returns, which is substantially higher than that for other marketing events assessed in prior studies. Moreover, there are some important asymmetries in the effect. We discuss the research, managerial, investing, and policy implications.

When they say policy implications read "send Russian mafia thugs to Walt's flat." [SSRN via Business Week]

Kevin basically responds that there isn't enough subsidation in the US.

Mossberg moves onto openness of the networks.

Kevin Martin is saying that both consumers and entrepreneurs want it. So in the last auction, they put a condition in that the spectrum needs to be open to any handset or application. And our willingness to embrace that is important. We're not completely there yet, so that every major carrier is embracing openness.

Kara: Would you have done this openness thing before Google spoke up?
Verizon: You see in Japan and Korea that what networks can do when open. But in the past, customers wanted to do things like downloading apps to their phones. And that increased as the broadband speeds picked up.

If someone builds a device that isn't efficient, or uses too much bandwidth, we have to be careful. The shared resource [of the wireless network] is not like a DSL line. (Funny, isn't that what the Net neutrality enemies are saying is a shared resource, too? B.L.)

Mossberg: Will rates be the same for plans using phones that we didn't buy from you?
Lowell: They will be the same, but the functionalities might be different, because of your handset. (Obviously —B.L.)

Mossberg: So you're purely a provider of network services then?
Lowell: Yes.

Mossberg: Let's talk about cancellation fees. How to you justify charging people $175-$200 to cancel plans that have already worked through their subsidation.
Lowell: We don't do that anymore, as of a year ago. In Italy, they don't allow subsidization for these reasons. We tier our termination fees so that over time they get lower. And we sell all our phones without any subsidies as an option but 98% of the people choose the contract. If subsidies were outlawed, we'd have no problem and no other carriers would, too.

Kevin: It should be declined over time if its a recovering fixed cost. There should be a reasonable amount of time to take your phone/service home and try it out. There's a 14-day allowance for this. Some people are wondering what restocking fees should be, too.

Kevin on Net netrality: We have to allow carriers to manage their networks without limiting consumers access to info, but not only info but innovation.

Verizon on Wireless EVDO and 3G vs HSDPA (ATT claimed that EVDO's roadmap is limited): We study a lot of competitor claims. I've got an engineering background and there aren't a lot of miracles out there. We're reliable and fast, and we're not going to relinquish that. (Fluff, didn't address the competitive question.—B.L.)

Martin: For the first time in 10 years, we enforced the rule that the cable companies needed to open up and that probably contributed to Sony's news this week in collaboration with the cable companies.

Lowell on Coverage maps: What DB level constitutes coverage? There's no standard, and I'd be fine if some rules were made. Same with dropped call data. We need those rules before we can get fair comparisons between companies.

D is Done!
[All Things D]

Dean says that fatalities are down because of battlefield tech and triage methods. But that many soldiers are coming back missing limbs. He wanted to make an arm to replace their missing ones. He wants it sensitive enough to pick up a grape or allow soldiers to use a razor to shave, but be self-contained in terms of power. And a two- year deadline.

He say that a year later, they built an 8.9-pound arm using titanium, custom motors, and so on. There's 18 degrees of freedom, and they're now seeing a demo of a man who is scratching his nose. Dean says he did this in one year.

The control techniques are revolutionary. He's playing a video of a guy who didn't have both his arms for 18 years, and learned how to use the arms effectively in less than two dozen hours of training. He's showing a video that shows a guy who knows how to punch, pass a Ping Pong ball to his friend and pour a drink for another man who is holding a cup with the same type of arm. Then the video shows Chuck, the man with no arms, for the first time in 13 years, feeding himself cereal.

Holy shit, now he's showing a video of a guy using the arm using only his MIND. He learned this technique in two days, but Dean says it was more like the system learned how to interface with the human.

Looking at what he's doing, the guy drinks and people applaud. It's been two days. But the amazing thing is that he's put the cup down so it's become a lower brain stem function in two hours of doing cup functions.

Attaching the arm directly to nerves required a lot of surgery.

But there are limited arm functions, even if it's very complicated. Learning how to control a back hoe, with four controls, takes years. And the arm has 18 degrees of freedom. But people don't learn how by using each degree. In fact, it's more efficient, Dean says. There are three degrees of freedom, so they did macros. With this, a man learned how to pick up bottles, nails and other items.

Attaching the arm was a challenge, day to day. Nine pounds on an arm is heavy over a few minutes, let alone a day. So they knew that no one would wear them because of that. So Dean designed air bladders that shift the weight on the body when passive (like fidgeting in a chair) and inflate to be hard when the servos in the arm detect load.

When they did a demo for the secretary of the Army, they showed a man picking up 12 grapes and eating them without breaking or dropping any.

You can literally use infrared light, reading signals going through the skull without any invasive insertion. That's what we're working on next as a controller.

Dean is taking five minutes to explain the plight of the modern world and the responsibility of the smart, rich people in the world to help change that. I'm not sure I have the words to express his thoughts, so I'll wait for the official D video and embed it here later.

Vid from All Things D:

[All Things D]

Mossberg asks what's the difference between your work here and at Microsoft?
Melinda says that there's a lot of crossover because of advances in tech that aren't available to the developing worlds. The skill set is very transferable.
Mossberg: What's the difference between your Foundation and others like it? More money?
Melinda Gates: We can take risks. There's a market failure for malaria vaccines, so no one's done anything on this in a while. (There's a traveler's market only.) But we can take on some of that risk and work with the pharmaceutical companies and then distribute through government. We can show them that there is a market.

Melinda says they could tap their entire budget by attempting to fix the problems in the education system alone. Their mission is more to help take on that risk that governments can't in fixing problems.

Mossberg: How do you work with countries with governments that are more part of the problem (corrupt, poor) than part of the solution?

Mossberg: Are you applying business principles? More organized than others?
Melinda Gates: We take a very economic and business approach, which doesn't mean we don't pay attention to the social issues.

(Bill and Melinda go through a list of diseases and evaluate where they can be most effective.)

Mossberg: Do people tell you how to spend the money?
Bill carried around a letter in his briefcase for a month about a kid who needed a new liver. It's hard, but we try to treat all lives with equal value. And the world does not do that. So with that in mind, it's easier to focus on that.

Melinda: Why does it take 25 years to put a vaccine's technology in Bangladesh compared to here, today?
There's no world fund for getting doses to the developing world. There's a lot of infrastructure problems. And we've been adding new vaccines like tetanus and hepatitis. Several million kids die from measles a year, and now it's less than 300k. (From the vaccines they've helped get out there.)

Bill and Melinda don't want to do the day-to-day stuff, but they've had a lot of help from people like Bill Gates Senior. She spends a lot of time setting strategy with Bill Junior.

Mossberg: Will having Bill around in 30 days full-time be annoying? (Jokingly.)
Melinda: I knew that Bill wouldn't wear a tool belt around the house when he retired. He'll take a sabbatical this summer, he'll spend a day on special projects at Microsoft that Ballmer wants him to work on and 2-3 days at the foundation a week. And some time being curious and learning about science, education, etc. We love working on the foundation together and not many days go by at home that we don't talk about this. Vacations are huge for talking about the foundation, too.

Re: education, the US loses a million or so as drop-outs. The foundation worked on data measurement. For example, that million only counts senior-year drop-outs, while it should be measured from freshman year. The other problem is that many graduates aren't ready for college.

Walt sends his kids to public school. It's fine, but maybe that's because of the affluent area.

Melinda: The top 10% of the kids do well in whatever school. The schools track them into their own curriculum. Those parents fight the change and ignore the remainder of the kids. There are parents who demand a better system, but they get no traction because the money is going in the wrong direction. One of the things they learned is that you can't just get a good urban school started without working with the city, district and state because the system will just pull it back down. (You can see how these successful people in tech have started applying similarly huge scale system thinking to the education and healthcare system problems —B.L.)

They are focusing in NY with Bloomberg and Joe Klein (who formerly led the case against Microsoft as a monopoly, I believe). Because they're willing to be bold and think of things in a business-minded way and shut down schools that don't work and rethink labor incentives. The best teachers are currently not treated well in the current school system.

They can't change the minds here and make it change long term. They focus on changing the system, so the negotiation can't happen at the labor level, but has to be at the district level.

Question from the crowd: What's the time frame?
Melinda: We take this lesson from Microsoft: a long-term approach. We're saving lives today, but we have a long horizon. Once we get an HIV vaccine, we'll try to distribute. Why not a 200-year perspective on helping the world? They believe that the wealth Bill and Melinda have will be gone in 50 years or so. And Warren Buffet stipulates in his will that 10 years after his death his money needs to be spent out. That's so that they can give back to people now.

We're working on banking for people who live on less than $2 a day. As tech goes cheaper, this stuff will make a huge difference in the world.

Question from the crowd: How do you deal with violence in schools going from students to teachers?
Melinda says that comes from facelessness in big schools. She's seen schools with three cop cars in front and two metal detectors. You can see the gangs going through schools and once the teachers recognize the kids, the kids act a lot better. Once the teachers know the kids' names, these things fall into place. She's seen schools that have fixed this in NY be able to lose their metal detectors, and graduation rates go up profoundly (up to 78%).

Done!
[All Things D]

8:19 Jeff is on stage.

8:20 Mossberg: Why sell hardware like the Kindle?
Bezos: How we get there is by putting our customer's needs as a priority instead of what we're already good at. You need to renew yourself with new skills. When we looked at ebooks, you needed a microscope to find the sales. What we thought is that what people needed was a frictionless way to buy ebooks. And that required us to build a whole new skill set that would take us like 10 years.

8:22 Mossberg: We're in an time where you need to have factories to make hardware.
Bezos: We hired people who knew what they were doing but it still took them time to work as a team. Books needed to be cheaper, too. And we have a competency that is making the experience easy to use.

8:25 Mossberg: I liked the seamlessness of buying books, even though I had hardware reservations. How many have you sold?
Bezos: We haven't shared this number before so maybe it qualifies as news for you...Kindle sales are 6% of books on the 125k titles available on Kindle.

8:27 Mossberg: Why did you sell out?
Bezos: We underestimated. And we're dropping the price to $359 from $399. Mossberg: Clearing stock for a new model?
Bezos: No.
Mossberg: How many versions? Bezos says many more.

8:28 Mossberg: Kindle is the best ebook reader and I've seen them all. It's the best because of the back-end service, like the iPod and iTunes. But what about the whole idea of people reading on a screen with navigation controls? Are you convinced that books will be shifting to digital formats, as newspapers are?
Bezos: Yes, but books won't go away much like horses won't go away. (Crowd laughs.) It's hard to find a tech that's stayed in its original form for 500 years. And anything around that long is going to be hard to improve. But that's what we see with Kindle, even though the book has stayed the same for 500 years. And Kindle is good, because it disappears as you get into the flow of the story.
Mossberg: Unless the leather case falls off.
Bezos: Right! There are things about old books, like loud pages turning when your spouse is sleeping, or the book gets too heavy over time; Kindle is 10.3 ounces. It can't beep at you, like this microwave I had that at 30-second intervals would beep over and over again after my food was done. I call those self-important devices! I'll get my food when I'm ready! But you can't outbook the book, so you have to improve on it, doing things like dictionary lookup. And changing the font size, very simple thing but much appreciated. But there are big whoppers like delivery of a book in 60 seconds. Mossberg: To me, that's the thing. You guys should have made a better case, but that is the brilliant stroke.

8:33 Mossberg: Could you separate Kindle's whispernet from Sprint?
Bezos: We have to think globally, so yes.

8:34 Mossberg: Are you going to have handwriting recognition?
Bezos: There are issues with using a stylus on an e-ink display, and putting something like a digitizer causes visibility reductions.

8:35 Mossberg: People love books and the tactile feel of them.
Bezos: Yes, people love horses but aren't going to ride them to work. We're trying to improve on books.

8:38 Mossberg: This is your first hardware device. How do you limit feature creep and define the product?
Bezos: This is purpose-built for reading. If people want features and they don't detract from that, then we'll consider them.
Mossberg: What about web browsing?
Bezos: E-ink is not great for that without color and bad refresh, etc. But e-ink is unsurpassed for reading.

8:41 Bezos: You might consider the web the ultimate book that you'd choose over everything else.
Mossberg: You might want to go to Amazon.com and order the Kindle Shoe Edition.

8:43 Bezos: When we talk about making products, we talk as missionaries, because missionaries make better products. Someone asked me how much we would spend on making Kindle and I said, how much do we have? We wanted to do this right. Now that 3g and e-ink are coming together, Kindle has a place in the world. The server side too. There are a lot of pieces being pulled together.

8:45 Mossberg is talking about downloads. How serious is Amazon?
Bezos: Very serious. There are a lot of competitors. And music and movies have that glamour element, which is unfortunate, because it attracts people (competition).

8:47 Bezos just announced a web streaming video download service. The system would be pay based.

8:48 Bezos: We've got 5.2 million tracks in MP3 format.

8:49 Mossberg: Are the studios right to be fighting with Steve Jobs?
Bezos; I'd frame it differently and say it's in their best interest to have a multitude of partners and distributors.
Mossberg: I think you're the best positioned to challenge them, even if your marketshare is low.
Bezos: If you're a content owner, you want to get it out there in as many ways as possible. That's why you make chocolate and vanilla.
Mossberg: So iTunes is going down?
Bezos: Laughs, "That's not what I said."

8:51 Mossberg: Can you talk about your cloud storage and computing product, S3? Bezos: These are our infrastructure web services. They allow you to build services in the cloud without owning any hardware. We live in a weird era now, and people build their own data centers. I went on a tour for a 300-year-old brewery, and 100 years ago, they had to make their own generator to make their own power. It didn't make their beer any better to make their own electricity, so they went on the grid as soon as possible. This is just like that. You can scale up and importantly, scale down.

8:53 We had a client who went from five users to 5000 users in three days, and then back down a bit, and you can't scale that if you own your servers.

8:54 Mossberg: Why are you doing this? Will Walt think of Amazon as the people who made elastic computing huge instead of the retail giant in a few years?
Bezos: If you're a programmer, maybe. It could be a meaningful thing for us over time, especially if you are an engineer.

8:57 Mossberg: The economy, are you worried about it?
Bezos: Our business is doing well and there are some things that help us in this economy, as we've been obsessed with low prices for a decade, and as gas gets expensive, driving a 2,000 pound car to pick up five pounds of stuff.
Mossberg: But your packages come in a truck, too.
Bezos: But a route by a postal worker or other is more efficient.

8:59 Questions by the crowd: What about Kindle's DRM? Why, when Amazon does MP3s without drm. The default on Kindle is DRM free, but publishers get to choose. You can't loose things on the Kindle, because we store your books on the cloud. Without thinking about it, you can delete anything on a Kindle and not worry about it. We have the rights from the publishers to let you redownload it again. With music, we had to work with the IP owners over three years to get to the DRM free solution. My own view is that DRM free would not slow down sales.
Man in Crowd: But if you go to another reader, you lose your copies.
Bezos: At the end of the day, it's their decision.

9:02 Another little question: Amazon.com keeps recommending the Kindle to me, even though I own it. That pisses me off.
Walt: That's because you only own one.
Man in Crowd: How good are you at personal recommendations, and are you going to get better?
Bezos: We've been working on it for 12 years and we still make dumb recommendations, but we're pretty good at it. We're trying to create serendipity. Say you're coming to the website and 1-in-100 times a person says "I really like that!" [The challenge is for us] to take that 1% chance and take it to 2% and then 3%. (He's making the numbers up but that's the philosophy.)

9:05 Question: Why should we have different boxes for movies and music?
Bezos: I believe it's intermediate; one day, this stuff will be built into TVs.

[All Things D]

Guys like us avoid monopolies. We like to compete.

[9to5mac—thanks Ted]