Pocket Universe: It's a pinchy, zoomy, 3D star map for the iPhone and iPod Touch. For the iPhone 3GS, for which the new Pocket Universe is designed, you get full-on astronomical augmented reality. Using location services, accelerometer data and the 3GS's compass, Pocket Universe pseudo-overlays information about your stars, planets, constellations and general space things according to whatever you're pointing at. Three dollars.

Loopt for iPod Touch: The Loopt iPhone app has been around as long as, well, iPhone apps. Since 2008, it's earned its keep as one of the only useful friend-locating apps. Just about every mobile platform has a client, with one notable exception: the iPod Touch. That, along with Of course, Loopt isn't quite the same without GPS, but Wi-Fi location will get you by in a bind. Still waiting for a proper 3.0 version though. Free.

Seek 'n Spell: iPhone games tend to be a lot like games for any other portable device, and rarely leverage some of the traditionally non-gaming capabilities of the handset. Part of this is because, until recently, the developer SDK was sort of limited. Most of it, I think, is because developers just haven't been thinking hard enough.

Take this clever, if obvious, idea for a game: A map of wherever you are is overlaid with letters, which you and you teammates can collect by physically running to their icons. Your goal is to come up with words for points, Scrabble-style. It's a very, very cool idea, and decidedly sweatier than your typical iPhone game. A buck.

MSNBC: Hey, look, another news organization has a content app! Let's talk about it! This one's less about news than about catering to fans of the network, with an emphasis on video content as well as Twitter feeds from MSNBC personalities. It's a bit hard on the eyes, and occasionally goes stuttery on you, but it works fine. Fun fact: according to the iTunes description, this iPhone app, being an MSNBC product, uses "Microsoft's Advanced Technologies." What this means, I have no idea. Free.

Fluent News: If you could sense a lack of excitement about that MSNBC app, that was because of apps like Fluent. It's far from the first multi-source news aggregator, but it's one of the better ones. It behave like Google News, more or less, collecting important news from lots of sources and grouping it in a sensible way Why not just use Google News then, you might rudely interject? Well, for one, Fluent can cache news for offline reading, for plans, subways, caves, or wherever. It also prefetches longer articles, though I couldn't really tell in my brief testing. Anyway, it's free, so why not?

Skype: Another incremental update to another extremely popular app. This one gets an interface lift, but most importantly, two useful features for people who use Skype's pay services: text messaging with SkypeOut credit (good for cheap international texts; bad for having no reply function), and Skype Voicemail support. Voicemail support is a bigger deal than it sounds: since receiving calls when you're out is still pretty much out of the question, the voicemail access makes being out of touch a little less irritating. Still free.

Air Sharing Pro: We've always been impressed with Air Sharing—it's a solid file storage/viewing solution in its basic form. The Pro version, though, is a different animal entirely. First of all, it's expensive: $10, to be exact. It's also got expanded support for file storage services like, MobileMe, MyDisk, and Drop.io.

The main draw is that there are tons of new file functions: emailing, which is a huge help; direct printing, via OS X printer sharing; archiving abilities, including viewing archive contents without extracting. It's a bit like a walled-in version of Finder, and the closest to a proper file browser you're going to get on a non-jailbroken iPhone.

This Week's App News on Giz:

• Facebook 3.0 for iPhone Adds Events and Photo Albums, But No Push (Yet)

• Apple's Nudie App Headaches Now Involve Underage Girls

• iPhone OS 3.1 Features: Better Video Editing, Voice Control Over Bluetooth, And More

• Remarkable Speech-to-Speech Voice Translator Coming to iPhone and Blackberry

• Birdfeed Twitter App Review: Lean, Fast and Pretty

• Doom Resurrection for iPhone Hits the App Store, Costs $10

• A Whole Lotta Quake Will Be Blowing Up Your iPhone

This list is in no way definitive. If you've spotted a great app that hit the store this week, give us a heads up or, better yet, your firsthand impressions in the comments. And for even more apps: see our previous weekly roundups here, and check out our Favorite iPhone Apps Directory and our original iPhone App Review Marathon. Have a good weekend everybody.

Get fired up

A note about your second amendment rights
[Busted Tees]

Superweapons

Metal Storm takes you down in a hail of gunfire [Link]

The Navy's Railgun fires a projectile at 5,640 mph—one-third of its potential power. [Link]

The Cornershot does exactly what you think it does.

Boeing recently conducted a successful test with an advanced tactical laser mounted on a modified C-130. [Link]

Hacks

The Rubber Band Gatling Gun takes out co-workers with 40 band per second firepower. [Link]

Set your phasers to 1080p. [Link]

Vietnam shotgun bong is one shot, one kill for glaucoma.

The Doing Da Vinci team builds Leonardo's 11-barreled cannon for the first time.

The MythBusters paintball gun creates instant artwork with 1100 barrels. [Link]

The Toilet paper cannon is the ultimate weapon in the prankster's arsenal.

This water balloon bazooka can fire 12 fluid-filled rounds at once. [Balloon Bazooka]

People Who Shouldn't Be Around Weapons

Watch and laugh as Poncherello gets tasered.

Grandma is armed to the teeth, and she's got her eye on your toodles.

Skinny girls and big guns don't mix.

Toy Guns

This hacked Nerf Vulcan Chaingun shoots 500 rounds per minute. [Link]

This fully automatic gun fires Lego ammunition.

This realistic Halo 3 Plasma Rifle features lights, sounds and recoil. It even vents when overheated. [Link]

Infrared Duck Hunter brings the classic NES game to life. [Latest Buy]

Weird Guns

The G.R.A.D 22-cal knife gun is two kills in one. [Link]

The world's smallest pistol fires 2mm blank pinfire cartridges.

Grand Finale

Hot girls with guns.

[Image via Flickr; special thanks to Don the Intern for research assistance]

We all know there are plenty of products that cause more problems than they solve. As a professional technologian, my job is to sift through innovations to see which ones make for an improved life, and which ones are too troublesome for their own good.

CatGenie—pardon the pun—gives me pause.

After spending a month with it, I declare that it is the perfect zero-sum innovation. Every single advancement comes with drawbacks. While my wife and I no longer suffer from any of the problems associated with a traditional litter box, we are beset with an abundance of unanticipated others.

CatGenie is one of these SkyMall-type gadgets that bills itself as the "World's Only Self-Flushing, Self-Washing Cat Box," tossing in, for good measure, a weighty promise: "Never touch, smell, or buy cat litter again." You install it easily by splicing the cold water line from underneath your toilet, running a waste tube up around the lip of the same toilet, and plugging the contraption into the wall. You pour in beads that resemble litter enough that cats get the idea, and you click in a replaceable cartridge of cleaning agent.

When the automatic cleaning cycle is engaged, a mechanical scooper removes the poo, and detergent-infused water floods the box and then drains, taking any trace of funk with it. The moistened beads are then blown dry, like Ron Burgundy's hair, as a sweet floral scent fills the bathroom and any adjacent living quarters. The crap in the toilet is easily flushed away, as long as you remember to do it.

Compared to the alternative of sifting out chunks from a litter box and tying them off in environmentally uncool plastic bags, this is a beautiful promise. Because of the automatic setup, there's no chance of getting punished by your cat for forgetting to clean a box frequently enough. Everything I described above happens exactly as billed. And even our dumb neurotic brother-and-sister act somehow figured out how to use it very early on. They weren't even intimidated by the swirling Sarlacc pit that it becomes during cleaning. My key initial fear turned out to be totally baseless.

So why does the thing make me yearn for the days of the scoopable Arm & Hammer, even though PetNovations Ltd says there are 82,940 households already enjoying this contraption?

When I first watched the cleaning cycle, with my gadget-lover's grin, I marveled at the swirling and churning and slooshing and clacking. I kept marveling for about 15 minutes, by which time my grin had soured, and I was looking at my watch. By minute 25 I stormed out of the bathroom in annoyance, came back at minute 35, shocked that the thing was still doing its business, and then returned again, sometime after it had stopped, roughly 40 minutes after it had begun. CatGenie recommends that for two cats, the process should run two to three times a day. That's two solid hours of cleaning cycle.

The installation is stupid simple, but you need to be within 8 feet of both a power jack and a toilet (or laundry water line and drain). If you think that's easy, stick your head in the bathroom—very few have power jacks anywhere near toilets, and I had to run my power cord up along the back of a sink. It's not a hazard, but it looks like Wilson's Amateur Home Improvement Show down there.

CatGenie is also massive. Its basin has about half the volume our cats are used to, but because of its wide surrounding lip and the tower of machinery, the system is probably 25% larger than a good-sized plastic litter box.

After a few days, we discovered an interesting characteristic of the non-toxic litter beads: They do not absorb odors. Right around 8:30 every morning, our big male cat, Wade, comes trotting up the stairs with a combination guilty/relieved look on his face, and soon after, we are engulfed in a sickening stink. Mind you, the cats' depository is an entire floor away down the stairs in the guest bathroom. Scooping the offending dung into the toilet would defeat the purpose of owning a robotic litter box. ("Never touch litter again," they promised.) My sole move is to, yep, run the damn machine.

Only the problem doesn't go away instantly. In fact, it gets worse before it gets better.

As the detergent floods the basin containing Wade's leavings, the whole thing becomes a savory poop stew. Even when we run the fan in the bathroom, the smell is unbearable for about 10 minutes, after which it disappears instantly, replaced by the machine's pleasant perfume.

I kept telling myself that these problems are just growing pains, things to get accustomed to. CatGenie is not as messy as a litter box. There's none of that residual ammonia smell that you can't get rid of permanently, and for the most part, none of the crusty extras that come from overzealous (or just misguided) burying. The plastic beads manage to find their way all over the house, and I am embarrassed to confess, our 1.5-year-old kid manages to stick one in her mouth about every two weeks, but they are non-toxic plastic beads after all, and nothing that can't be vacuumed up.

At least, I once told myself, there are no more plastic bags full of poop and urea headed out to some landfill. I read somewhere once that San Francisco had solved something like 90% of its trash problems, and that the remaining 10% was cat and dog poop in plastic bags. (Not the actual stats, btw.) At least by switching to a bagless litter system like this, I'm being environmentally kosher, right?

Not in the least.

During every cleaning cycle, CatGenie runs a built-in hair dryer over all the beads for about 20 minutes. I plugged in my Kill-a-Watt meter and discovered this demanded a constant and alarming 1160 watts of electricity. For up to an hour per day, I am running the equivalent of four large plasma TVs, just so I don't have to touch litter.

The costs start to mount. Besides the up-front $300 and the daily running of water and electricity, the $15 cartridge needs to be replaced every 60 cycles—that is, every 20 to 30 days. And the scatter-prone beads need to be replenished every three to six months, at $24 per carton. Like an inkjet printer, the maintenance costs continue forever, making the notion of buying a $7 box of Arm & Hammer every two weeks seem all the more reasonable.

Despite all these negatives, a great debate rages in my household: I would like to return to the olden ways of scoop and bag, and my wife says, "No." Her argument, a good one, is that the bathroom has never stayed cleaner. Guests have to step around an awfully large contraption, but at least "it doesn't feel like you're walking into a barn."

As Sigmund Freud once explained, moving from the wilderness to the towns didn't solve humankind's problems, it just swapped out the rustic difficulties for more urbane ones. His conclusion, though, was that while life still sucks, there's a reason we don't move back to caves. After experiencing a more civilized litter box, I can't revert to scooping poop, but I impatiently await the next evolutionary leap in cat sanitation. [Product Page]

In brief:
After cleaning it's amazingly fresh

Cats took to it almost from the start

Sounds like the TARDIS when it runs (could be a minus for some but not me)

Easy installation

Can run automatically up to four times per day

Empties into toilet that must be flushed

Non-toxic clean beads get all over house

Beads don't kill odor

It's huge and must be stationed near toilet and power plug

Self-cleaning cycle runs over 40 minutes, smelly at the start and hot at the end

Hot-air bead dryer demands 1160 watts of electricity for about 20 minutes

No way to stop cycle once it has started

OK...meaningful...here goes...

For that definition, it was probably an electronics learning kit I got for Christmas at about age 8 or 9. As I recall, it didn't teach electronics formulas or resistor codes, but was full of projects to hook up input devices like switches and output devices like buzzers and lights. It was like learning how to connect all the devices to your hi-fi, or connecting all your peripherals to a computer. It also gave me a good start toward understanding logic rules, like both switches have to be on for the light to shine, or if switch A is on, then switch B selects which light is on.

I call this one the most meaningful, because, pretty clearly to me, it preceded my other important gadgets and inspired me to like gadgets and to understand how to build some. It's like how the transistor led to the chip, which led to microprocessors, which led to personal computers. Everything goes back to the first invention, in that sense. This electronics kit gave me the understanding that made it easy to progress to large logic devices with multi-pole switches, and some relays, which then progressed to a large tic-tac-toe computer with transistors which progressed to a large adding/subtracting machine with transistors, etc.

The word 'meaningful' has the root 'meaning' which implies some emotion. In that sense, my first transistor radio, at about age 10, would fit the bill. It gave me portable music that I could listen to all night long as I slept, every night. 20 years later came the walkman, and 20 more years later came the iPod, but the real change in life, the one having the most 'meaning', was with the transistor radio.

I always wanted my own computer. With the Apple I, I now had a machine that I could program. I would never run out of things to do in my entire life. So it's a close runner up to the other two.

The gadget that has been the most attractive of attention ever is not my Segway. It's my nixie tube watch from CathodeCorner. It looks very large to other people and looks very strange. It's handmade in America too. The nixie tubes run on 140 volts on your wrist. Airport security guards who have seen every kind of watch ever made have a thrilling time with this watch.

I used to fly to Japan regularly to scour new gadgets, and always bought tons of things which were always surprising at the time, but looking back, few have special meaning. The first consumer digital camera, I think the Mavica technology, was meaningful. The first one for computers, not TV's, was the QuickTake from Apple. But in many ways, no digital camera to this day has been as good as the first Ricoh one.

The HP-35 calculator was also very meaningful in my life, as it led me to an incredible job designing for the follow-on models.

Much thanks to Woz for helping to kick off our series. Coming up soon: Phil Torrone, gadget maker and modder extraordinare.

Image credit: Sony Mav, HP Calculator

1. In the Walkman's first 10 years, how many different designs did Sony release?
A) 25
B) 70
C) 130
D) 170

2. What was the full product name of the first Walkman?
A) Super Karate Monkey Machine
B) WM-1
C) TPS-L2
D) Excalibur

3. What is the official, Sony-approved plural form of Walkman?
A) Walkmans
B) Walkmen
C) Walkmanidae
D) Walkman personal stereos

4. What is another name that the Walkman was to have gone by?
A) Soundabout
B) Freestyle
C) Stowaway
D) Super Karate Monkey Machine

5. What was the original desired name for the Walkman?
A) Stereo Buddy
B) Music Boy
C) Stereo Walky
D) Singman

6. What was the inspiration for the Walkman?
A) Sony founder Masaru Ibuka wanted to listen to opera tapes during his long trans-Atlantic flights
B) Sony president Akio Morita wanted to listen to music while he played tennis
C) In 1978, Sony's cassette division had lost its radio-cassette business to the radio division, and needed to impress their bosses with something new
D) All of the above

7. How many Walkman units sold in the first 10 years?
A) 1 million
B) 10 million
C) 50 million
D) 100 million

8. And how many competing Walkman clones sold?
A) 10 million
B) 50 million
C) 100 million
D) 150 million

9. Complete this sentence from a 1981 UK Daily Mirror article: "The Walkman has become the _________ of electronics."
A) Hairpiece
B) Skateboard
C) Lucky Strike
D) Hula Hoop

10. Which all-time great wrestler/movie star does the figure in the Walkman 10th-anniversary monument (at left) resemble?
A) "Macho Man" Randy Savage
B) Andre the Giant
C) Jesse "The Body" Ventura
D) Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson

1. (D) 170 different models, so basically 17 per year on average, enough to suit every man woman and child. [Source; Image Source]

2. (C) TPS-L2 - We're not entirely sure what happened to TPS-L1, but they quickly switched to the WM naming system. [Source]

3. (D) "Walkman personal stereos," which is totally unfair for journalists with tight word counts. "Walkmen" is a band, however, if you like bands named after your personal electronics. [Source]

4. (A) in the US (B) in Sweden (C) in the UK, but alas never (D) [Source]

5. (C) "Stereo Walky" – but, fortunately, Walky was already trademarked by Toshiba [Source]

6. (D) All of the above, and probably a handful of other apocryphal tales, too. [Source, Source; Image Source]

7. (C) 50 million [Source]

8. (D) 150 million, proving you can't patent a general concept, no matter how slick. [Source; Image Source]

9. (B) Skateboard [Source]

10. (B) Andre the Giant—seriously, doesn't he? [Source]

ANSWER KEY [Image Source]

Special serious thanks to Don the Intern for kicking ass all over the research end of our little Walkman 30th-anniversary party. Don't forget to check out our gallery of the craziest Walkman models, and of course, those brilliant Walkman ads from back in the 1980s. Hat tips to Pocket Calculator's Walkman Museum and to Tim and Nick Jarman's Walkman Central.

The original TPS-L2 Walkman went on sale 30 years ago today, July 1st 1979, in Japan. It played stereo and had dual mini headphone jacks for sharing audio with a friend. There was a mic, but it was not used for recording, but to output your voice to your buddy's headset so he could hear you over the music. The press received it in a lukewarm fashion, but the device took off thanks to celebrity product placement.

The 1981 WM-2 is the first attempt at making a Walkman so small, its only slightly bigger than the tape.

The first Sony Sport walkman was quite waterproof, with jack plug and gaskets around the buttons and tape hold. From 1984. They offered special edition models for locations like Hawaii and Okinana Beach.

The WM-F2 came out in 1982 and was the first Walkman to include both playback, recording and an FM tuner.

The WM-DD was the first personal model to move from a belt driven motor to a "disc drive" reducing wow and flutter and greatly improving the quality of sound reproduction. It also had a metal case.

The WM-F107 was solar charged, but would not support playback as the power to run the tape was more demand than the now ancient back mounted panel could keep up with. It handled FM fine, however, off the stream of electrons. 1987.

The WM-10 expanded on the tiny WM-2's small form factor, and is considered by the experts at Walkman Central to remain a fine example of reduction engineering. For example: the single AA battery was not actually powerful enough to turn the motors, so they used a step up converter to power the tape drive. 1983.

The 1983 Walkman Music Shuttle was a Walkman that docked into a car stereo. Wow that guy is super stoked to be listening to the same song he was just driving to!

1985: The WM-W800 is a Walkman with TWO tape decks. One for playback, one for recording, which made dubbing tapes ridiculously easy. More photos at Walkman Central.

The WM-3000 from 1990 is one of the earliest My First Sony products designed for kids. They took a basic walkman, and made sure the edges weren't sharp, the batteries couldn't be easily popped out of the back and swallowed and the volume limiter ensured baby eardrums didn't pop under duress of mother goose tapes.

The WM-GX202 is one of the last tape playing Walkmen and guess what? They're still being sold in Japan in 2009! The product's focus is not on music, but on language learning tapes.

Whether you're buying a new computer, building your own or upgrading an old one, the process of choosing a new graphics card can be daunting. Integrated graphics solutions—the kind that come standard with many PCs—have trouble playing games from three years ago, let alone today, and will put you at a disadvantage when future technologies like GPGPU computing, which essentially uses your graphics card as an additional processor, finally take hold. On top of all this, we're in the middle of a price dip—it's objectively a great time to buy. (Assuming you're settled on a desktop. Ahem.) The point is, you'll want to make the right choice. But how?

Set Specific Goals, Sight Unseen
Your first step to finding the right graphics card is to just step back. Just as graphics card specs are nigh-on impossible to understand, naming conventions and marketing materials will do nothing except give you a headache. The endlessly higher numerical names, the overlapping product lines, the misleadingly-named chip technologies—just leave them. For now, pretend they don't exist.

Now, choose your goals. What games do you want to play? What video output options and ports do you want? What resolution will you be playing your games at? Do you have any use for the fledgling GPGPU technologies that are slowly permeating the marketplace? And although you may have to adjust this, set a price goal. Ready-built PC buyers will have to consider whatever upgrade cost your chosen company is charging, and adjust accordingly. For people upgrading their own systems, $150-$200 has been something of a sweet spot: It'll get you a card with a new enough GPU, and sufficient VRAM to handily deal with mainstream games for a solid two years. If you want to spend less, you can; if you want to spend more, fine.

These are the terms that matter most. Seriously, disregard any allegiance to Nvidia or ATI, prior experiences with years-old graphics hardware or some heretofore distant, unreleased and unspec'd game franchise. Be decisive about what you want, but as far as hardware and marketing materials go, start blind.

Don't Get Caught Up In Specs
Now that you've laid out your ambitions, as modest or extreme as they may be, it's time to dive into the seething, disorienting pool of hardware that you'll be choosing from. The selection, as you'll find out, is daunting. The first layer of complexity comes from the big two—Nvidia and ATI—whose product lines read more like Terminator robot taxonomies than something generated by humans. Here's Nvidia's desktop product line, right now:

It seems like you ought to be able glean a linear progression of performance (or at least price) out of that alphanumeric pile, right? Not at all. How in the world are we to know that the 9800GTX is generally more powerful than the GTS 250, or that the 8800GTS trumps a 9600GT? A two letter suffix can mean more than a model number, and likewise, a model number can mean more than membership in a product line. These naming conventions change every couple years, and occasionally even get traded between companies. For example, I've personally owned two graphics cards that bore 9x00 names—you just won't see them on the chart above, because they were made by ATI. Point is: You don't need to bother with this nonsense.

The next layer of awfulness comes from the sundry OEMs that rebrand, tweak and come up with elaborate ways to cool offerings from the big two. This is what Sapphire, EVGA, HIS, Sparkle, Zotac and any number of other inanely named companies do. They can, on occasion, cause some sizable changes to the performance of the GPUs they're built around, but by and large, the Nvidia or ATI label on the box is still the best indication of what to expect from the product, i.e., a Zotax Gtx285 won't be that much better or worse than an eVGA or stock model. You'll get a different fan/heatsink configuration, different hardware styling, and possibly different memory or GPU frequency specs, but the most important difference—and the only one you should really concern yourself with—is price.

Graphics cards' last, least penetrable line of defense against your comprehension is hardware jargon. Bizarre, unhelpful spec sheets are, and always have been, a common feature in PC hardware, from RAM (DDR3-1600!) to processors (12 MB L2 cache! 1333MHz FSB!).

Graphics cards are worse. Each one has three MHz-measured speeds you'll see advertised—the core clock, the CPU (shader) clock and the memory frequency. VRAM—the amount of dedicated memory your card has to work with—is another touted specification, ranging from 256MB to well beyond the 1GB barrier for gaming cards. On top of frequency, memory introduces a whole slew of additional confusing numbers: memory type (as in, DDR2 or DDR3); interface width (in bits, the higher the better); and memory bandwidth, nowadays measured in GB/s. And increasingly, you'll see processor core numbers trotted out. Did you know that Nvidia's top-line card has 480 of them? No? Good.

The best way to approach these numbers is to ignore them. Sure, they provide comparative evaluation and yes, they do actually mean something, but unless you're a bonafide graphics card enthusiast, you won't be able to look at a single spec—or a whole spec sheet—and come to any useful conclusions about the cards. Think of it like cars: horsepower, torque and engine displacement are all real things. They just demand context before they can be taken to mean anything to the driver. That's why road tests carry so much weight.

Graphics cards have their own road testers, and they've got the only numbers you need to worry about.

Respect the Bench, or Trust the Experts
In the absence of meaningful specs, names or distinguishing features, we're left with benchmarks. This is a good thing! For years, sites like Tom's Hardware, Maximum PC, and Anandtech have tirelessly run nearly every new piece of graphics hardware through a battery of tests, providing the buying public with comparative measures of real-word performance. These are the only numbers you need to bother yourself with, and where those goals you settled on come into play.

Here's how to apply them. Say you just really want to play Left 4 Dead, and have about a hundred dollars to spend. Navigate over to Tom's, check their benchmarks for that particular game, and scroll down the list. You're looking for a card that is a) an option on whatever system you're buying and b) can handle the game well—at a high resolution and high texture quality—which, generally speaking, is a comfortable 60 frames per second. Find the card, check the price and you're practically done. Once you've zeroed in on a card based on your narrow criteria, expand outward. You can check out more games benchmarks and seek out standalone reviews, which will enlighten you on other, less obvious considerations, like fan noise, power draw and reported reliability. (Note: resources for notebook users are a little more sparse. That said, Notebook Check [click the British flag for English] does good work.]

From there, your next worry will be buying for the future. You shouldn't buy the bare minimum hardware for the current generation of games—there's no need to spring for a card that'll be obsolete within a few months, no matter how cheap it is. But buying the latest, greatest dual-GPU graphics cards is an equally bad value proposition. As generations of video hardware have come and gone, one thing has remained constant: A company's midrange offerings, usually pegged at about $150-$200, are your best bet, period. Sometimes they'll be new products, and sometimes they'll have been around a while. What you'll be buying, basically, is the top end of the last generation. This is fine, and will keep the vast majority of users happy for the lifecycle of their PC. Those of you who live on the bleeding edge probably don't need this guide anyway.

Your alternative route is to just trust the experts. Sites like Ars Technica and Maximum PC regularly assemble system guides at various pricepoints, in which they've made your value judgments for you. Tom's even assembles a "Best Cards for the Money" guide each month, which is invaluable. At given price points, the answer will often be obvious, and these guys know what they're talking about.

But keep in mind, they're applying the same formula you can, just with a slightly more knowing eye. The matter truly is as simple as broadly deciding what you need, consulting the right sources and floating far enough above the spec-ravaged landscape so as to avoid getting a headache. Good luck.

Back in 1983, Sony declared the WM-10 Super Walkman the "world's smallest cassette player," and promoted it with ads that appealed to the dudes and to the ladies. There's the fantasy hardware building demonstration, 1 minute into the following ad compilation (here if you don't want to wade through Seth Green's Matchbox spot and the rockin' Simon hair-band ad):

And then there's the dancer who'd prefer a slenderer music player:

OK, maybe that second one appealed to anybody with a leotard fixation (which, in 1983, was pretty much everybody).

Most people in their 30s will hate me for bringing this one up: The 1986 My First Sony campaign was responsible for sticking the following song inside the heads of a generation of people who are just now able to forget it. Click at your own peril...

Here's one of the last cassette Walkman commercials, from 1990 or thereabouts, where a father grills his ridiculously dumb daughter on the pictures that appear on TV. She gets everything wrong—everything—but he let's her mistaken sighting of a Walkman slide, because Walkmen (Walkmans?) are so cool.

And about that noble monkey, his name was Choromatsu, and he died at the extremely ripe age of 29 back in 2007. Here's his 1988 spot, in which he grips a (Japan-only?) WM-501 and contemplates nature:

Before the zany TV commercials there were the fat-bucking-insane print ads. For instance, the small sampling below contains:
• A slick-looking posse of urbanites with nice shoes and likely heroin addictions
• A sensei sucking a lollipop while sitting next to a nipply lass 2X his height
• A lady perilously guiding a ten-speed at velocity while holding a Walkman

Special shoutout to Don the Intern for those mad researching skills. Hat tips to Pocket Calculator's Walkman Museum, to Tim and Nick Jarman's Walkman Central and to Bing's image search tool. Try it out—it's really quite different than Google's.

Camera Be Still
When it comes to still shooting, there is no difference between the GH1 and the G1 that Mahoney reviewed last November. It has a digital viewfinder instead of an optical one, which takes some getting used to but tends to work. It's got a huge number of manual and automatic options, as well as some uniquely digital settings, like "film mode" where you can manually adjust the color balance, saturation, contrast and noise reduction of the "film" you're using. Because the sensor is 4:3 (hence the format's name), you can change the aspect ratio to 16:9 for a wider view, but of course you sacrifice some pixels in the process. Update: Reader Ben tells me that no pixels are lost in the aspect ratio switch.

The camera has many of these novel options to keep track of, but it doesn't pay a huge dividend to those who do. As Mahoney said in the original piece, its high-ISO shots are a bit more noisy than most DSLRs, and the lens selection is paltry compared to Canon and Nikon. As someone who carries mainly entry-level DSLRs (and generally wants for nothing more), I found myself simultaneously overwhelmed and unimpressed, though I did manage to eek out a few halfway decent shots, which I've stuck in the gallery below.

All of the above features and capabilities can be found on the $800 DMC-G1. What I tested, though, was the $1500 GH1, with an "H" for "Highdefinitionvideo."

It's Got an H In It
The H makes a big big difference, as David Pogue mentioned, and as Mahoney lamented.

The 1080p video is, in fact, astonishingly good, when you're shooting in the right light with a decent lens. I used two lenses, the highly functional 14-140mm kit lens, and a playful 7-14mm wide angle lens with a touch of the fisheye.

The video comes in AVCHD format, which some people don't like. I don't mind it, though when I previewed it in VLC, it appeared to have a painful amount of compression artifacts. I was going to condemn the camera for that, until I wrangled the video in VisualHub, and found that all of the playback artifacts disappeared in conversion, and probably wouldn't appear in other software. (Panasonic sent me GH1 software, but it was for PCs only, and I didn't have a chance to check it out; some of you already know what to do with AVCHD vid anyway, so I wouldn't make a big deal out of the included software either way.) As you can see in this quick up-close video of Wynona—dropped from 1080p to 500x280 and converted to FLV for your consumption—you can certainly get a lot done:

The rustling you hear is me playing with the camera strap to attract an otherwise lethargic cat's attention; over the weekend, when I shot video of my family, the stereo mic array worked well, as long as I kept my own stinkin' trap shut. Its placement, facing upwards, on top of the flash, means that the shooter's voice is far louder than that of his or her subjects.

Video certainly is the GH1's coup de grace, as others have proclaimed. Practically speaking, it's a damn sight better than the video from the Canon T1i and the Nikon D5000, which are fine for quick snips but lack the autofocus necessary for a nice fluid continuous shot (Touch of Evil opener, anyone?). The GH1 dynamically refocuses well enough, though as you can see in the Wynona video, it can't go super-macro with that 7-14mm lens.

Stupid Money
Still, we're back to the same dilemma here: If moderately video capable DSLRs are selling for MSRPs around $900 (also with decent kit lenses), how can this baby be worth $600 extra? Still-only DSLRs cost in the $600 range—how can the GH1 be $900 more than those?

It's a powerful camera, but I certainly didn't feel as comfortable shooting with it as I do with Canon and Nikon DSLRs, and the video is, after all, video. The argument for video on other DSLRs is their compatibility with all kinds of lenses; here, it's more like a decent video camera without a huge number of lenses. As Mahoney mentioned in the G1 review, you can get a lens adapter and use some nice Leica lenses, but do you really want to go to all that trouble? We'd be better suited for some a handful of interesting, made-for-micro-four-thirds primes.

Even if we get all that, though, the price remains prohibitive. If you are tempted by the video capability of this camera, you are still better suited to buying a nice DSLR and a true HD camcorder of your choosing from Panasonic or Sony or Canon. I wish I could say that the excellent 1080p video tips the scales, but it doesn't. [Product Page]

In Brief:
HD video performance is exceptional for a high-end still camera, and notably better than "competing" DSLRs

Lots of manual digital manipulation means a lot to read up on and remember—it's not easily hidden from the beginner, but in the hands of an undaunted shooter, there's a lot of potential

The camera's entry cost is far too high to justify when it's not a big winner in still shooting, and when HD camcorder prices are dropping

The machine's designers assumed that housewives would do all the cooking, and yet, also assumed they'd be open to learning binary: is the Honeywell Kitchen Computer the most or least sexist computer ever made? I don't know. I do know its the most beautiful minicomputer I've ever put my eyes on. The plastic chassis hid so much of the 150 pound machine's weight in its black pedestal. Then again, it could have been a lot bigger, had it had an actual user interface that wasn't binary: The $10,600 price set by Neiman Marcus included two weeks of programming lessons in a language known as BACK.

The machine itself was a 16-bit minicomputer—the class right below mainframes—and its official name was actually the H316 Pedestal. It was part of the Series 16 lineup, based on the DDP-116. (A machine most notable for its use as ARPANET Interface Message Processors, early machinations that ran the predecessor to the modern internet.)

It had 4KB of magnetic memory, expandable to 16KB, which was pre programmed with a few recipes. Its system clock was 2.5MHz. It took 475 watts to operate.

Dag Spicer, curator from the Computer History Museum, says, "None were ever sold."

He adds, in an article at Dr. Dobbs, that in the late 1960s, "with that kind of budget, the solution would likely be a live-in chef or the traditional 3x5 card file, no?"

Indeed.

[Wiki, The Computer History Museum, Dr. Dobbs, Old Computers.com]

The Computer History Museum is a wonderful place. If you're in northern CA, I recommend you find a way to stop by. We'll be running pieces from their collection as an ongoing series called Computing Classic. Special thanks to Fiona Tang, John Hollar and the amazing Dag Spicer for their help.

First Place — Nick Dwyer
Second Place —T. Baxter
Third Place — Dave Corrasa

The 3GS turned out to be slightly faster in downloads (1202kbps vs. 1161kbps), but just about the same in uploads. Its latency was much better 175ms vs. 210ms, which reflects the same thing we found in our iPhone 3GS review and is probably attributable to its faster processor.

Either AT&T's 7.2Mbps isn't really widely deployed yet even in Chicago, a city they've been running deployment tests on for a few months now, or it makes no real difference in everyday usage. We'll test this again once 7.2Mbps gets rolled out to more cities to find out which.

And if you're still not sure about what 3G speeds mean, or the differences between different phone techs, see our Giz explainer on all the mobile terms. And the next generation technology? 4G? See what's coming up in that explainer. [Thanks to all our readers who participated!]

Update: AT&T tells us that the trial is only live in Chicago on a handful of cell sites and on an internal basis, so none of you guys should be connecting to the faster network. The public trials are coming later this year, so it makes sense that the speeds are exactly the same.

I say this as a guy who was baptized into the tech world with a desktop; who still obsessively follows the latest PC components from Intel, Nvidia, ATI and the like; who has built, fixed or upgraded more towers than I care to remember; and who, until a few years ago, was an avid PC gamer. As someone who would be, by most measures, a desktop-PC kinda guy, I just can't go on pretending there's a future for them.

The State of the Industry
This is more than a hunch; a grim future is borne out by the numbers. A week ago, iSuppli issued a broad report on the state of the PC industry. The leading claim was predictable: The PC industry was experiencing lower-than-expected quarterly sales—down about 8% from the same time last year. This included laptops, and made sense, because the whole economy's gone to hell, right? People aren't buying computers.

Except that's not quite what's happening. In the same period, laptop shipments—already higher than desktop shipments on the whole—grew 10% over last year. Desktops were entirely to blame, dropping by an astounding 23%. That's not decline—it's free fall.

Stephen Baker, an analyst for industry watchers NPD, shared with me a wider picture of how retail PC sales break down. The way he put it made measuring the rise and fall of sales percentages seem dumb—there really aren't any sales to lose: "In US retail, 80% of sales are notebooks now," he said. "Start throwing in stuff like iMacs and all-in-ones"—which share more hardware DNA with laptops and netbooks than traditional desktops—"and it gets even higher."

The Buyer's Dilemma
To understand why this is happening doesn't take anything more than a little empathy. Put yourself in the shoes of any number of potential consumers, be it kids, adults, techies, or luddites. In virtually any scenario, a laptop is the sensible buy.

Take my dad. Despite spending three decades in front of commercial jet instrument panels, his relationship with computers is, at best, strained. When he came to me a few months ago asking for advice about a laptop to replace his desktop, I assumed it was a just a whim, based on what he saw happening around him. It wasn't, at all. As someone who uses a computer mostly for news, email, music, etc—like a significant part of the population—he was actually being intensely rational. A laptop would do everything he needs simply and wirelessly, with a negligible price difference from a functionally equivalent desktop. If he wants a monitor, keyboard and mouse, he can just attach them. Choosing a desktop PC wouldn't just be a not-quite-as-good choice—it'd be a bad one.

The TradeoffsLet's look at mainly stock examples taken (hastily) from Dell's current product line. Their configurations could be tweaked and changed to make desktops look slightly better or slightly worse, but we chose them because they are typical budget-minded consumer choices. We are not talking about workstations, and we're not talking about all-in-ones, because if anything, they are keeping this category alive. When it comes to pure household computer buying, you can hunt for deals all you want, but laptops and desktops are more closely paired than you might expect.

That's not to say that there aren't noticeable tradeoffs. Graphics performance, although I wasn't specifically angling for that with these configurations, is generally better in a desktop. Likewise, hard drives—being that desktops use larger, cheaper 3.5-inch units—are faster and more capacious across the board. Greater amounts of RAM can be had for less in a desktop, the optical drives can be slightly faster, and the ports for those and other drives can be used for expansion.

But these tradeoffs aren't nearly as pronounced as they once were, nor are they as consequential. On account of the huge demand and sales volume, newer mobile processors have become a hotbed for innovation, now rivaling most any desktop processor, and mobile graphics engines—though still markedly inferior to dedicated desktop cards—have improved vastly in recent years, to a point where most consumers are more than satisfied.

And if you really look out for them, there are some amazing deals to be had on new notebooks. (Look at Acer's 15-inch, 2.1GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB DDR3 RAM laptop with 1GB GeForce GT130 graphics card and Blu-ray for $750, and then try to build the equivalent in a desktop at the same price.)

The important takeaway here is that the performance sacrifice you make in owning laptop is minimal, and mitigated, or even outweighed, by its practical advantages. Want a bigger screen on your notebook? Hook it up your HDTV. Want more storage? Buy a cheap, stylish bus-powered external USB drive. Want to use your desktop on the toilet? Good freakin' luck.

The Fall of the Gaming PC
But to say that the average user doesn't have any reason to buy a hulking beige box isn't that controversial, and even borders on obvious. The real, emotional, diehard support for the form factor is going to be found elsewhere anyway. I mean, hey, what about gamers? Have you ever tried to play Crysis on an Inspiron? Let's jump back to the numbers.

Last year saw a huge 26% increase in game sales across platforms, powered mostly by Xbox 360, Wii and Nintendo DS sales, according to NPD. Breaking that number down, we see PC game sales down by 14%. That decrease barely even registered in the broader scheme of things, since total PC game sales amounted to just $700m of the industry's $11b take. This year is looking even worse. You know what, let's just call this one too: PC gaming? Also dead. Update: Luke at Kotaku points out that NPD's numbers only cover retail game sales, where PC gaming is hurting the most. Due mostly to MMOs—hardly the exclusive domain of desktops—the PC gaming industry take is actually higher.

As the laptop is to my old man, the console is to the gamer. Just a few years ago, buying—or just as likely, building—a high-end gaming PC granted you access to a rich, unique section of the gaming world. Dropping a pile of cash for ATI's Radeon 9800 to get that precious 128MB of VRAM was damn well worth it, since there was no other way to play your Half Life 2 and your Doom 3. PC titles were often demonstrably better than console games, and practically owned the concept of multiplayer gaming—a situation that's changed, or even reversed, since all the major consoles now live online. We even spotted a prominent PC magazine editor (and friend of Giz) copping on Twitter to buying an Xbox game because it has multiplayer features the PC version doesn't. Yes, things are different now.

NPD's Baker sees it too: "Go back two years ago and think about all the buzz that someone like Falcon or Alienware or Voodoo was generating, and how much buzz they generate now, that might be a little bit telling." He adds, "There's considerably less interest in high powered gaming machines." They're luxury items in every sense, from their limited utility to their ridiculous price to their extremely low sales.

A Form Factor on Life Support
But no matter how irrational a choice the desktop tower is for the regular consumer, sales won't hit zero anytime soon. As we've hinted, much of this can be explained by simple niche markets: Some businesses will always need powerful workstations; older folks will feel comfortable with a familiar form factor; some people will want a tower as a central file or media server; DIY types will insist on the economy and environmental benefit of desktop's upgradeability; and a core contingent of diehard PC gamers, despite their drastically thinning ranks, will keep on building their LED-riddled, liquid-cooled megatowers until the day they die.

Baker sees another factor—less organic, more cynical—that'll keep the numbers from bottoming too hard. "Desktops are a lot more profitable than notebooks for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that big shiny monitor, which has a nice margin attached to it. For the retailers, people tend to buy a lot more peripherals and accessories when they buy desktops than when they buy notebooks." Even if the volumes are ultra-low and concept is bankrupt, retailers are going to keep bloated, price-inflated desktops and desktop accessories out there on the sales floor until they've drained every last dollar out of them.

You'll see plenty of desktop towers for years to come, in megamarts if not in people's homes. You'll still hear news about the latest, greatest graphics cards, desktop processors and the like. Enthusiasts and fansites will stay as enthusiastic and fanatical as they've ever been. These, though, are lagging indicators, trailing behind a dead (or maybe more accurately, undead) computing ideal that the computer-using public has pretty much finished abandoning.

Zagat nru: You know that compass thing the iPhone 3GS does? Yeah, whatever. Imagine it repurposed to show you nearby restaurants or bars with Zagat power. Zagat nru is flashy, and neat, though a bit limited, since the places are plotted according to proximity on a radar-type interface rather than an actual map. When you click one, it takes you to Zagat's mobile site, so it's not a completely in-app experience. Also, to get to the full reviews, you've got be a paying Zagat customer. Still worth a download—a hunch on where to eat is better than starving while you figure out where the hell you are. Free.

Brightkite: Another semi-famous social thinger making its way to Android. After sitting in beta for a bit, Brightkite's finally released its Android app for everybody. For the uninitiated, Brightkite is another location-based social network dealio—you see friends and people around you, post notes and photos to wherever you're at, that kind of thing. Stalking will only get easier and prettier from here on out people, might as well get used to it. Free.

Qik alpha: It's the live video streaming app Qik! On Android! That pretty much sums it up, actually—but if you're not familiar with Qik, it's a live video streaming app/service that's basically on every major smartphone platform (with one major exception). You can share via Twitter, Facebook or GooTube. It does require Cupcake, as well as an SD card for storing video. Pretty awesome that it's finally here. Free.

Places: Not to be outdone, Google's got their Places directory app—guess what it does? It's rather standard directory-style fare, though it covers pretty much the whole gamut of stuff you'd wanna find close by—restaurants, bars, parking, shopping, hotels, theaters, "attractions," and more. Where it really loses to Yelp is the reviews of places—there are so pitifully few of them by users that you won't have any idea where a place is worth a crap or not. Where is that Android Yelp app, anyway? Free. Update: As commenters have noted, Where, an app that's been out for a bit, is the best directory app by far and it does access Yelp—I was just curious where an official Yelp app was, since we seem to be entering a "brand name" phase of Android apps.

Flickr Photos Nearby: Not technically an app, but mobile Flickr will now show Android users photos taken nearby with some new location hotness using the regular ol' browser.

Android App News on Giz:

• HTC CEO Says the Sexy "Sense" Android Interface Coming to Existing Phones.... Or Maybe They Won't

• Flash on Android and WebOS Landing in October

• Google Offers Updated Maps Features Through Android Market

• Layar: First Mobile Augmented Reality Browser Is Your Real-Life HUD

• Dildroid: Runs on Android, You Know Exactly What It Does

This list is in no way definitive. If you've spotted a great app that hit the store this week, give us a heads up or, better yet, your firsthand impressions in the comments. And for even more apps: see our past app coverage here. Also, why isn't it easier to take a screenshot in Android dammit? Have a good week everybody.

Locavore 2.0: An hefty update to an already decent app, Locavore 2.0 mixes social networking with its local, seasonal food-finding abilities. Since everything's got some kind of "social networking" feature nowadays, here's what that means: Facebook Connect provides Facebook integration, so you can brag about your totally rad local potatoes to your whole friends list, and the "I Ate Local" screen shows what people are eating in your 150-mile proximity. Four dollars.

Mass Effect Galaxy: This as much a promotional tool for Mass Effect 2 as it is a game. As both, it does OK: the top-down, tilt-controlled gameplay is passable, and there's a little bit of fresh story (and a new character!) for fans of the franchise. EA says beating this game will unlock some kind of content in ME2, but doesn't care to tell us what. For fans, basically. Three bucks.

AlarmTunes: I've been quietly fuming about the lack of a proper music-based iPhone alarm clock for two years now now, so ugh, finally, 3.0 lets us have one—at least, by way of a third party. It's not an ideal solution, since you've got to leave the app open all night, but it works, and it's about time. A dollar.

WorldVoice Radio: This app tries—with some success—to emulate the experience of operating a ham radio. In more modern terms, it's a streamlined, centralized podcasting service that lets you broadcast content and listen to others' streams. The podcast-service-as-a-shortwave-radio conceit is kinda cute, I guess, but the recording system is oriented toward shorter messages (longer messages have to be imported from the Voice Memo app) and I don't get the sense there's a huge "scene" that buys into the whole pseudo-ham community thing. Three dollars, with (very) reduced-feature free version. [via TUAW]

AT&T Mobile Remote Access: AT&T has always been pretty good about letting their users control their U-verse IPTV DVRs over the internet (it's been possible over a mobile web interface since 2007), and their iPhone app is an unsurprising addition to their lineup of management tools. Program search, scheduling, and deletion are all there, as are some helpfully specific search parameters. Free.

This Week's App News on Giz:

•HP Invents Time Machine, Converts iPhone into Classic Calculator

•Say Goodbye To the Hottest Girls iPhone App

•iPhone 3GS's Upgraded Hardware Means Console Emulators No Longer Suck

•First Apple-Approved iPhone Porn App

•iPhone Remote App Now Supports Apple TV Controlling With Gestures

•Shazam Now Tweets, Maps Your Music Journeys">Shazam Now Tweets, Maps Your Music Journeys

•AT&T Wants You to Pay $10 a Month for Their iPhone GPS Navigator

•iPhone AIM and Beejive IM Apps With Push Notifications Are Live

•Navigon GPS Navi iPhone App: Europe-Only Maps, $95 "Special Introduction Price"

This list is in no way definitive. If you've spotted a great app that hit the store this week, give us a heads up or, better yet, your firsthand impressions in the comments. And for even more apps: see our previous weekly roundups here, and check out our Favorite iPhone Apps Directory and our original iPhone App Review Marathon. Have a good weekend everybody.

[Image via rangerumors]

The Price: $700 (4TB), $400 (2TB)

The Verdict: It's a NAS for normal people. With a simple curved white design highlighted by a single hypnotic bar of white LED, the diminutive My Book plugs in to your router via ethernet to give you up to 4TB of networked storage. You plug it in, it shows up on your network, and that's that. (There's a more advanced CD installation that allows you to auto-backup your PC hard drive should you want the software.)
We tested the large, 4TB RAID 1 (mirrored drive) version of the My Book. In other words, you have about 2TB of recordable space that's backed up to another drive so that if one drive fails, you don't lose any data. If you wanted more speed/space, the drive can be reconfigured to RAID 0 (Striped) mode allowing you to access all 4TB. And it's easy to forget, if you choose to mainline the My Book right into your computer's ethernet jack, transfer speeds are fast. Gigabit ethernet reaches 1000Mbps, which is easily faster than USB but also quicker on paper than even Firewire 800. Still, transferring a 700MB file took 1:32. Transferring 8.2GB in files took 18:49. Not so fast in practice. (In other words, you won't actually be copying files at 1000Mbps, but the installed system has no trouble streaming HD media over Wi-Fi.)

You feel a bit of warmth dissipating out of the My Book's large top to rear vent panel (that we wish were metal instal of plastic), but system runs cool enough, offers easy access to the drives (you just pop the lid) and operates with very little noise. Quite simply, it works pretty well and makes a cute little media server (if you've got the scratch).

It's As Simple as RAIDs Get

Small, Quiet Formfactor

Mega Storage

Venting Could Feel More Durable, But It's Flexible and Thereby Easy to Pop Off

Simply put, the Teflon-coated back just feels and looks a lot better than the iPhone's—now crappy looking, I admit—plastic back. The Hero's polytetrafluoroethylene—the technical name for DuPont's Teflon—coating feels perfect in your hand. It doesn't appear to get any skin oil at all. No greasy fingerprints, just a perfect matte finish no matter how much I touched it.

It feels and looks like a white thermal tile out of NASA's shuttle.

The iPhone's plastic finish, on the other side, is a fingerprint magnet that looks as cheap as any Chinese knockoff after holding it for a few seconds. The Hero wins hands down on appearance, even while its front is too complicated for my taste. For a company like Apple—which takes such pride in their design and manufacturing—this is bad. For a consumer like me, this sucks.

"They are getting so boring"

Once upon a time Apple used to be innovators in the use of new materials. Those were the times in which they experimented with the iMacs and PowerMacs, which finished with the arrival of aluminum. Today, apart from the unibody manufacturing—which is just a form of aluminum manufacturing, a material that has been used forever in consumer products—their use of groundbreaking materials has stagnated.

I'm not the only one saying this. About a month ago Matt Buchanan and I asked the top executive of one of the most important industrial design firms in the world about his thoughts on Apple's design. After seing Objectified—and watching a legend like Dieter Rams glorifying Apple as the only consumer electronics company that counts when it comes to industrial design—I was expecting an ode to Jon Ive and his team. Instead, he replied:

They are great, but we [him and his colleagues in the industrial design world] think they are getting so boring. I mean, don't get me wrong, they got the use of aluminum perfected now... but what happened with the excitement that they used to generate with new materials? We all expect a lot more from Apple.

He is right. Their use of plastics in the iMac spread to every single consumer appliance out there. And Kara Johnson, materials expert from IDEO believes it'll be going out of style any day now (Maybe yesterday.) But now, even aluminum is the new beige. (Even if some experts believe there are few alternatives, there are a few.)

So yes, Apple should use new materials. Not for the sake of it, of course. They should use whatever materials fit the product technical needs. And for me, one of these needs as a consumer is that the product should look great at all times, and not just look great in the box or behind a store glass.

The need for new materials

The iPhone has this problem. It looks like crap with little use. They have tried to fix part of it with the oleophobic coating on the front glass—something that the HTC Hero also has—but the overall effect keeps being the same: Its back still looks cheap after some time.

One thing to note

For this reason we were all hoping for a matte back in the iPhone 3GS, but apparently Apple decided not to release it for one reason or the other.

I don't know and I don't care. What I do care about is that, after playing with the Hero, my iPhone now feels like cheap crap. And I don't even like Android.

Related reading: What Beautiful Gadgets Will Be Made Of

Looking at full (non-upgrade) pricing of consumer Windows editions really tells the story: When you compare sticker prices, you can see that most editions hovered around the $200 mark, with a rare spike found in the $260 Vista Home Premium. When you adjust for inflation, that fairly regular pricing becomes a downward cascade—except for that Vista price hike.

The pro versions of Windows, starting with NT, tell the same story. $320 across the board, with a dip when XP Pro followed quickly on the heels of Windows 2000. But when you calculate for inflation, it's just a smooth downward curve.

[Windows 7 Pricing: The Full Story; prices sourced from the following multiple or official locations: Washington Post, Businessweek, Microsoft, Cnet, Wired, Microsoft, CBROnline, Microsoft, Microsoft; inflation calculations made with Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI Calc - Special thanks to Don the Intern for doing a ton of research on this!]

Step 1
Let's check to see if jailbreaking or unlocking an iPhone makes sense for you by explaining what they actually mean: Jailbreaking allows you to load non-iTunes, third-party apps like these onto the phone, at your own risk. Unlocking lets you use another company's SIM card (for T-Mobile or international travel). That's it. And if you don't like it, you can restore the original Apple software any time using iTunes' Restore button—we've done it plenty of times.

This guide is for the original iPhone, iPhone 3G and iPod Touch running the new iPhone 3.0 firmware. If you own a 3GS, you'll need to wait since it hasn't been hacked quite yet. But if you're ready to hack your iPhone, grab your Mac or PC, iPhone and the USB adapter cable. Let's do this. (Oh, and go to THIS LINK if you'd rather see all of the instructions on one big page.)


Step 2
Even if all you want to do is unlock the phone, you need to jailbreak it first, and that requires redsn0w, a Mac/PC jailbreaking program. Download the official redsnow torrent files HERE, then download redsn0w via your Bittorrent client of choice. Make sure you've backed up your iPhone to your computer before moving forward. That creates a data restore point in case you want to ditch the jailbreak apps. Done? OK. Last, if you're moving your phone to T-Mobile, disable 3G before going on to the next step.


Step 3
Redsn0w works by patching the iPhone firmware file on your computer, then loading it onto your iPhone without using iTunes. So open redsn0w. Follow its instructions to select your .ipsw (iPhone firmware) file. On Macs, you can find the file at Home Folder/Library/iTunes/iPhone Software Updates. Or just download a new one from HERE. Once you've found your .ipsw, move on.


Step 4
Begin patching, but keep in mind this one setting: Redsn0w will ask if you want to install Cydia or Icy or Both. (These are apps that can load programs on jailbroken phones and will be needed to unlock the phone later.) JUST INSTALL CYDIA, NOT BOTH, OR ERRORS ARE PRONE TO ARISE LATER. TRUST ME. Once the .ipsw file is patched, make sure to plug in your iPhone then turn it off while still plugged. When you see the screen "Click NEXT when your iPhone is both OFF and plugged in..." go on to the next step.


Step 5
Now you need to put your phone into DFU mode to load the patched firmware. You'll hold the top power button for two seconds, then hold the Home button with it for 10. Then you'll release the top button and just hold Home for 30 or so. It's not as hard as it sounds, and if you mess up you can just try again, but you need to pay attention, so make sure you're holding your phone and watching the computer screen when you hit "next." Redsn0w will guide you through the pattern of holding the top and home buttons in timed succession. If you're successful, redsn0w will inform you that your phone is being jailbroken and you can stop holding the Home button. If you're not, redsn0w will reset the process and you'll probably need to manually restart your iPhone.


Step 6
Wait as the jailbroken firmware loads onto your iPhone. (You'll see a disk drive on the phone's screen, then this cute pineapple graphic as it installs.) After a few minutes, the phone will reboot just as it does with official firmware. Congratulations, your phone is jailbroken! Most of you are done—just load Cydia (which is now an app on your iPhone) and search for apps you'd like to install. Others need to continue this tutorial for the unlock.


Step 7
If you want to unlock your original or 3G iPhone so it can take a T-Mobile or international SIM, follow these next steps. You're done with your computer, so make sure your iPhone is on a Wi-Fi connection. We're going to use Cydia to download and install ultrasn0w, which unlocks your iPhone.


Step 8
Cydia will first ask what kind of interface you'd like. I'm no hacker, so I chose the graphical view. Then Cydia will want to download at least 2 Essential Upgrades. Let it by choosing "complete upgrade." If Cydia's successful, you'll see a bunch of install code and the option to "Close Cydia (Restart)." Hit that button. (Note: If you are getting errors in this step, it may be because you installed both Cydia and Icy. If you did that, restore your iPhone with official 3.0 firmware via iTunes and start the process over.)


Step 9
Reopen Cydia. Go to Manage -> Sources -> Edit - > Add and then enter "repo666.ultrasn0w.com" in the text field. This should add ultrasn0w as a Cydia source so that you can download the ultrasn0w software. Choose to return to Cydia and then click "Done".


Step 10
Click the repo666.ultrasn0w.com listing under your Sources. Click repo666.ultrasn0w.com again at the next screen (redundant, we know). Then click Install. You'll see a black screen with some text and, after a few seconds, it should read "Complete". Reboot your phone with your new SIM.

Congratulations, your iPhone is unlocked! But if you're having any type of problems (it's not our fault!!) check out the Dev Team blog. Chances are that if you've encountered a particular issue, so has someone else.

Odds are, you won't pay the official prices, so I'm telling you the launch specials first. If you play your cards right, you'll either get it as a free upgrade for buying a PC, or you'll pay $50 for Win 7 Home Premium and $100 for Win 7 Professional. It's not the $30 Mac users will pay for the Snow Leopard upgrade, but it's a move in the right direction.

Free Upgrades
If you buy a PC starting Friday, June 26th, it should be covered under a free upgrade plan. (I say "should" because it depends on the manufacturer, but most of them are jumping on this with both feet.) Say you buy a computer with Vista Home Premium this weekend; you get a Windows 7 Home Premium upgrade on October 22, free. If you buy Vista Business, you'll get Win 7 Professional, and if you buy Vista Ultimate, you'll get Win 7 Ultimate. There's no upgrade path for Home Basic (the reason is below) but as I understand it, the number of systems sold at retail with Home Basic on them are in the low single digits.

That should take care of most PC buyers.

The Half-Price Pre-Order Deal
People in the US, Canada or Japan who already own a PC running XP or Vista will be able to pre-order the upgrade disc at around half the price that they'll eventually sell for. The pre-order deal also starts Friday, June 26th, and will run for a limited time.

As I said, Windows 7 Home Premium, usually $120, will cost $50, and Windows 7 Professional, usually $200, will cost $100. Windows 7 Ultimate is not part of this discount plan, but it might get its own incentive plan later on. (You could technically buy Home Premium upgrade, then pay to convert it to Ultimate, saving at least a little cash.) The pre-order deal will be visible at store.microsoft.com and at "most major retailers."

What's this about a limited time? Mike Ybarra, general manager of Windows Product Management, told me that the pre-order deal will go away when a certain undisclosed number of licenses is sold. "We have enough quantity," he said, adding that the magic number was "equivalent to a year of Vista sales volume at retail." (Ironically, those of you who want this upgrade offer to last have to hope that the Mojave Experiment worked, at least a little.) Some Microsoft materials suggest that July 11th might be the cutoff for the deal, but from what I understand, that's an estimate—this is based on supply. Regardless, if you want Windows 7, pre-order the damn thing come Friday.

European Hijinks
Europe is getting kinda screwed in this deal, because of the European Commission's banning of IE8 from any Windows installer media. Basically, starting July 15th in France, Germany and the UK, Microsoft will be selling full versions of Windows 7 Home Premium and Professional at the discounted upgrade prices, but that means there's no way to upgrade directly from Vista.

Euros who buy Win 7 will be forced to perform a clean install, and migrate their data and apps over any way they know how. The logic is that, while the Windows team can do a clean install without IE8, there's not enough quality assurance on what an upgrade install would be like without IE8, with assorted HTML rendering apps co-existing in the OS already. Could be messy, says Ybarra. "We don't want to break anyone else's software, we don't want to break our own software, and we don't want the customer on the phone with support." That funky deal is supposed to run through December.

The Official Prices
So, now that we got the immediate realities out of the way, here are the "estimated retail prices" that we'll eventually see in stores, for the people who aren't yet moving on the upgrade offers:

Windows 7 Home Premium: $120 for upgrade; $200 for full version
Windows 7 Professional: $200 for upgrade; $300 for full version
Windows 7 Ultimate: $220 for upgrade; $320 for full version

To be clear, the term "upgrade" just means you already own and run a version of Windows on the PC you're upgrading. It's still a complete set of bits that you can clean install and even set up for dual booting. The "full" version is mostly for people who are building their own systems.

You may remember that there are other Win 7 SKUs such as Home Basic and Starter. Windows 7 Home Basic is not available in the United States or most of Europe though, along with residents of Burkina Faso and Vanuatu, Montenegrans will be able to buy it.

Windows 7 Starter will be offered to Dell, HP, Asus and other manufacturers to stick on netbooks. Just in case you were concerned, Windows XP will also be available, distributed and supported for 12 months after Windows 7 launches though limited to these same "small notebook PCs." I think Microsoft—and quite a few non-vested-interests—are expecting netbooks to ditch XP for Win 7 pretty fast.

When You Actually Get It
As we've previously reported, October 22 is the day when almost everybody gets Windows 7. Anyone, anywhere in the world, in 35 different languages, will be able to buy a Windows 7 PC on October 22. The actual box of software will be available in most countries, covering 14 languages, on the 22nd, with the other 21 languages getting their retail boxes by October 31. It's a damn fast rollout, especially given all of the terrain it's going to cover.

Stay tuned, because we're going to post more details on this pre-order business soon. In the meantime, talk amongst yourselves. Is this a good deal? Is it crap? And most importantly, are you going to pony up cash on Friday? [Windows Blog]

And don't forget to check out our Complete Guide to Windows 7, covering all the new features, plus our experiences with the Beta and RC1 releases.

We uploaded nude topless pics today. This is the first app to have nudity.

This is not just an application that downloads softcore content from the Web, bypassing Apple's censorship. There is no censorship here, as this is truly an Apple approved app "rated 17+" for "frequent/intense sexual content or nudity" and "frequent/intense mature/suggestive theme."

My fellow citizens, in case you didn't already noticed with the Debby-Approved™ iPhone vibrator app, a New Era has begun. Expect Apple application business to explode as the Hustlers, Vivids, and Playboys of this world invade the biggest smartphone application store in the planet. [iTunes App Store via Macenstein]

Update: it's down.

Foreword (It's long. You can skip this if you want.)
The timeline itself is made from a half dozen books, which I've listed below, and several websites. I'm sure there are some errors and missing parts, because the books often contradict each other. Also, I consider this timeline/biography to be in Alpha, so let me know if there's a mistake and send me a good piece of source material and I'll make corrections. Also, images are very welcome. Here's the bio in a single page.

When Bill Gates went into retirement, we threw him a week-long celebration and wished him well on his journey through philanthropy at his foundation. The comings and goings of Steve Jobs have been less ceremonious. He's been sick and Apple's tried to down play that and his importance to the company so the company, his life's work, can go on after he retires. And having to do it without much fanfare so the company doesn't seem too reliant on him. Look: Last Monday the first press release came out in months with a Steve quote in it, and he was seen on campus. But no one at Cupertino is making a big deal of it. Here's the thing: None of us really want to believe that he's not important. It's total bullshit to think that, if you look at his life and where his work fits in history. I mean, this is the co-founder of Apple getting sick, and slowly leaving behind his 30 year legacy in computing to the next generation. That deserves more respect, as it did in the case of Gates stepping down. Not many news pieces were written in this context.

As I was doing some background reporting, digging up pieces I hoped would give stronger context to the current events, I realized there wasn't a good reference for all the little stories collected from the Valley and beyond about Steve Jobs' life. The best information comes from books and quotes in magazine articles here and there, not the web. And so, it was hard to find a frame of reference online that would give better context to all that was happening today.

So I started collecting a lot of it here, and found it enjoyable to document this notable life, rather than tear it down one hospital or liver transplant rumor at a time. In some ways, it dissolved away some of the guilt I felt about writing about tracking someone's health as if it were merely a piece of news. And so I kept going, until it was a somewhat presentable record of what we know about Jobs. From what I've seen, it's the most complete online.

Before we go, I'd like to eschew the custom of linking to sources at the end and place them here because all these books are pretty amazing and worth checking out if you have the inclination. The three notables are Owen Linzmayer's Apple Confidential 2.0 which has exactly levels of detail in regard to dates, times, etc, although less on Jobs personal life. And VC and former Time Valley reporter Michael Moritz's out of print The Little Kingdom, which is out of print and I paid handsomely for on ebay. Lastly, Andy Hertzfeld, one of the creators of the Mac, created Revolution in the Valley (also available in website form at folklore.org), a telling of maybe 100 personal anecdotes from the development of the Mac. It will make you think you were there. I'm not done with the pile below, but I'll keep updating this timeline as more bits come up.

So, without further delay, here are the books this timeline is based on, and here's a link to a single page if you don't want to read the timeline in gallery format.

• Apple Confidential 2.0 by Owen Linzmayer
• The Little Kingdom: The Private Story of Apple Computer by Michael Moritz
• Revolution in the Valley by Andy Hertzfeld
• Inside Steve's Brain by Leander Lahney
• iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Businessby Jeffrey Young
• The Perfect Thing by Steven Levy
• The Journey is the Reward by Jeffrey Young
• West of Eden: The End of Innocence at Apple Computer by Frank Rose

Websites:
• Apple 2 History
• Apple Turns 30 Timeline at CNet
• Wikipedia on Lisa, the Mac and Steve Jobs
• YouTube, Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech 2005
• Folklore.org, homepage of Revolution in the Valley
• NY Times interview with Jobs during the NeXT era
• Businessweek, 1988 Steve Jobs profile

1955
Steven Paul Jobs was born on February 24th, 1955. He was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs, where they lived on 45th avenue in San Francisco. His father was of "imposing demeanor" and before he was a repo man, he was an engine room machinist in the Coast guard. He'd tinker with cars and sell them for a profit.

Steve was a hyperactive child. Somewhere in his childhood, he ingested a bottle of ant poison and had to be brought to the emergency room.

Of being adopted, Steve would later say, "I think it's a natural curiosity for people to want to understand where certain traits come from." "But mostly, I'm an environmentalist. I think the way you are raised, your values, and most of your worldview come from the experiences you had growing up."

1963
Steve said this about his early school years, with a hint of pride: "You should have seen us in third grade." "We basically destroyed the teacher."

1965
Even at 10, Steve's attraction to electronics was becoming obvious to his parents. At one point in his childhood he got a bad shock when jamming a bobby pin into a wall socket. Paul moved with the family to Palo Alto, to handle the greater number of car repossessions that went with the greater of number of loans in the fast growing area known as Silicon Valley.




1970-1971
Steve Jobs discovers marijuana. (Note: That there is what we call a Photoshop.)



1970-1971 Part 2
Steve Jobs meets Steve Wozniak through a friend and they bonded quickly over electronics and pranks, Bob Dylan and the Beatles. They attempted and failed one particular prank, where a rigged sheet with the acronym SWAB JOB (The initals of the Steves' and Allen Baum's) was supposed to fall and cover a roof during graduation. The lesson Woz learned: Never brag about your pranks. Woz was the first person Jobs had ever met who knew more about electronics than he did; Woz admired Steve's confidence with people.

1970-1971 Part 3
After reading an article in Esquire about phone phreaking, they begin working on Blue Boxes used to crack codes on the public telephone systems for free calls. Steve Jobs was still a senior in high school. They sold these boxes for $150 on campus, spending $40 on parts. Woz prank-called the Pope as Henry Kissinger. They met Captain Crunch, the subject of the article, one night. After departing, their car broke down on the side of the road. Some police found them trying to make free calls and got suspicious. Woz and Jobs got out of trouble by telling the officers their Blue Box was a music synth.

1972
Jobs attends Reed college and drops out after one semester. (He stated in his Stanford commencement speech in 2005 that he went because his birth parents insisted to the Jobs that he go to college.)

Jobs and Woz take $3 an hour jobs at the Westgate Mall in San Jose, dressing up as Alice in Wonderland characters.




1973
Jobs remains in the Reed college area for 18 months dropping in random classes like calligraphy, which would later impact the typography on Macs.




1974
Returned to California and worked at Atari. He just showed up and said he wouldn't leave until they hired him.

Steve goes on a spiritual trip to India with his friend Dan Kottke, and paid for Dan's ticket. Upon wandering into a religious gathering, Jobs was taken away to the top of this mountain where the guru shaved his head. In India, Steve experimented with LSD. Dan shaved his head later, too, because he had lice. Steve left for California and gave Dan the rest of his money to continue his journey in India.

Back at Atari, Nolan Bushnell asked Jobs to work on a special project that would eventually become the game Break-Out. He made a deal to pay Jobs a certain amount if the machine had less than 40 chips. Woz, who was an expert at such things, helped Jobs complete the design in 48 hours, and Jobs got the bonus. The design was too complex to be manufactured. In 1985, Woz found out that his friend and partner had shorted him on that bonus, and is rumored to have been so hurt that he cried. When he was confronted at that time, Jobs is said to have repeated that he didn't remember that happening. If Woz had found out earlier, he may have never joined up with Jobs to create Apple.

1975
In the Homebrew Computer Club, Woz was showing off two printed circuit boards that were built to drive output to a TV. Jobs continued working at Atari while Woz continued at HP.

1976
Woz and Jobs start Apple. It wasn't a thrilling name, but it was functional, and it reminded Jobs of the time he spent on an apple farm in Oregon. On April 1st, they signed papers for equal ownership. To raise capital, Woz sold his HP 65 electronic calculator for $520 and Jobs sold his red-and-white VW bus for $1500—only half of which was ever paid, because the engine blew out soon after the sale. Their first order was for 50 Apple I computers, and Jobs made the sale barefoot. He confused the order and delivered circuitboards instead of finished machines with cases, and so had to take partial payment. By the end of the year, they shipped 150 computers.

1976 Part 2
Woz and Jobs decided the Apple II would load their OS from the circuit board, instead of needing to be loaded manually. It would also have a fanless power supply, something that needed to be designed from scratch using a switching model instead of a linear source.

Mike Markkula is their first investor. Seeing their work, he thinks he can put Apple on the Fortune 500 in 5 years (and he eventually does).

1977
Apple Computer becomes a corporation when Mike Markkula and Jobs and Woz sign papers at Mike's house, on January 3rd.

Mike Scott becomes Apple's president, and offends Jobs in two ways: First he awards Woz the position of being Employee #1 because his design was instrumental in the company's founding. Jobs would later insert himself as Employee #0. Later, he informs Jobs his body odor is stinking up the office.

Jobs begins leaving his mark on Apple's design by hiring Intel's ad agency, Regis McKenna, to redesign the logo to the rainbow-filled Apple, which would be easily recognizable when small, although expensive to reproduce with its many colors. The bite out of its side was a play on the word "byte" and kept it from being confused with a tomato.

The Apple II premieres at the West Coast Computer Faire on April 17th as the world's sleekest personal computer, in its plastic case. Woz developed the machine with only 62 chips and Jobs insisted they be neatly placed on the board. It has expansion slots but no visible screws (all were on the bottom).

Randy Wigginton, one of Apple's first programmers, said that during the development of the Apple II, Woz and Jobs' BFF friendship began to dissolve.

Jobs' girlfriend, Chris-Ann Brennan, becomes pregnant, and Steve denies being the father. She refuses to get an abortion and it ends their relationship.

1978
May 17th 1978, Jobs' daughter Lisa Nicole is born at the All-One farmhouse in Oregon, near apple orchards. Steve visited and helped name her but still denied paternity. At that time, Steve begins pitching a next generation business machine that will eventually be called the Lisa.

Steve Jobs designs a case for the Apple III, and builds it too small to fit the components the engineering team had constructed.

Apple moves into its Cupertino headquarters.

At the first Apple Halloween costume party, Jobs dresses up as Jesus Christ.

1979

He starts working on the Lisa project, rumored to be named after his then estranged daughter. They reversed engineered an acronym, "Local Integrated Software Architecture", and a joke at the time insisted it stood for "Let's Invent Some Acronym."

The computer would have a UI based on the windowed and mouse driven interfaces inspired by tech at Xerox PARC. At one of the meetings at PARC, where they showed Jobs the tech, he reportedly jumped around the room excited saying, "Why aren't you doing anything with this? This is the greatest thing! This is revolutionary!" He also said, to Rolling Stone magazine, " I don't think rational people could argue that every computer wouldn't work this way someday."

He bought a house in Los Gatos, and left it mostly undecorated. Only a painting by Maxfield Parrish, a mattresss and some cushions are noted as the major possessions in the home. (The photo above was taken by Diana Walker in 1982.)

Jobs is known for owning a Mercedes coupe. In this year he buys his first, along with a BMW motorcycle.

Jobs cuts his hair neatly and vows to become more business saavy. He started wearing suits, occassionally.

A word processor called AppleWriter was released. It worked with Apple's first printer, Silenttype.

He takes a paternity test and it is 94.97% certain that Lisa Nicole is his daughter. He still denies that he is her father and Chris-Ann goes on welfare. A court order forces him to pay child support.

1980
Apple stock goes public. Jobs is worth $217 million by the end of the first day of trading.

Jobs' friend and India travel partner Dan Kottke, received no stock at all, despite being employee #11. It is rumored that Jobs denied him stock because he felt betrayed that Kottke offered Chris-Ann a shoulder to cry on after her split with Jobs. Other early employees received little or no stock. Woz, on the other hand, offered stock to many who Apple did not provide for, giving away 1/3 worth of his shares under his Wozplan.

1980's
Sometime in the '80s, Jobs had this moustache. Related: Magnum PI aired first in December 1980.



1981
Mike Scott leaves post as CEO, unhappy with the job, but happy about the stock. Jobs takes over as president.

Booted from the Lisa team by management that disagreed with his tactics and doubted his leadership abilities beyond his vision, Jobs gets involved with the Jef Raskin's Macintosh project, named after the McIntosh apple, with a typo. It was designed to be a $1000 appliance computer that would turn on and just work. Eventually, Jobs would take the project away from Raskin. At one meeting, Jobs threw a telephone book on the table and insisted it be no longer than that, and vertical standing. He commissioned frogdesign and Hartmut Esslinger to come up with the design language for the Mac, called Snow White.

Unlike Woz's Apple II, it had no expansion cards. While much of Apple was becoming more straight laced, some credit Burrell Smith, a wildly creative tech who's talent was being wasted in the service department, for creating a brilliant digital board that the rest of the team could build around. It was also notable, because unlike the Lisa project and others that were usually named after females (wives, girlfriends, daughters) the Mac was purposely named by Raskin to buck the sexist trend. (The project was originally called Annie.) Before much of this, in 1979, Jobs asked Raskin to come up with the specs before the price. And Raskin wrote a list of outrageous features meant to mock the idea. The list would, years later, describe most of the machine, vidicating Jobs' method.

The Mac team defines the "reality distortion field" as different from how we describe it today: An engineer would mention an idea to Jobs, who would call it stupid, and weeks later he'd bring it up as his own, knowingly or not.

Jobs describes the case design of the Mac needing to be more like a Porsche than a VW. (He drove a Porsche 928 at the time.) He spoke design-ese and said this when judging a prototype coming from the car conversation: "It's way too boxy, it's got to be more curvaceous. The radius of the first chamfer [a beveled edge connecting two surfaces, says Wikipedia] needs to be bigger, and I don't like the size of the bezel. But it's a start."

1981 Part 2
Jobs gives Bill Gates a demo of the Macintosh, and Gates agrees to develop software for it. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs disagree on the future of the computer, Gates believing in its business utility and Jobs believing in its benefit to common people. In the dramatized movie, Pirates of Silicon Valley, Gates uses this demo to kickstart Windows development, behind Jobs' back. Apple engineers were to avoid showing Gates the Lisa, though, and were very secretive about what they demoed. Jobs cuts off Andy Hertzfeld, engineer and presenter, by shouting "Shut Up!" when he thought Andy was getting too close to revealing a secret.

When the first IBM PC came out, Apple took out a cocky ad in the Wall Street Journal led with the text "Welcome IBM. Seriously." Jobs was quoted as saying that if IBM were to win, there would be a sort of "computer dark ages for about 20 years". Steve also said, "We're going to out-market IBM. We've got our shit together." 20 years later, the heirs of the IBM PC, running Microsoft's Windows, would have over 90% market share.

1981 Part 3
Here's another photo of Jobs saying hello to IBM.

1982
Jobs makes Bill Gates and Microsoft promise to never work on any business software that would use a mouse unless it was for Apple. The fact that they did not exclude them from developing a competing operating system would allow Gates to develop Windows alongside the Mac software Microsoft was developing.

The Mac team's building had a security system that would arm itself at 5:30PM, far too early for programmers who tended to come back to work after dinner. It went off every day, or at least plenty of times. Finally, Steve yelled for someone to destroy it. Andy Hertzfeld drove a screwdriver into the alarm and when a security guard showed up and yelled at them, Jobs took responsibility for the destruction. Obviously, he didn't get in trouble.

Jobs is dating singer Joan Baez. Some say Jobs' fascination with Bob Dylan, a former lover of Baez's, is part of the attraction.

Jobs buys an apartment in NYC in the San Remo building over looking Central Park. He had it renovated by architect I.M. Pei, but would never move in and eventually sells it to U2's Bono decades later.

1983
Steve Capps of the Macintosh team hoists a pirate flag above their building. The Lisa team steals it, but it is retrieved and stands for over a year.

Early in the year, a Time magazine cover story written by Michael Moritz (today a venture capitalist who was on the board of Google) began to reveal the darker side of Jobs to the public. It had quotes by Woz claiming he didn't design much tech in the Apple II, and lots of snipes by anonymous sources. Jobs cancelled his new year's plans and thought about the article.

People could tell when Steve was in the office, because he parked in the handicapped spot out front in his blue Mercedes. People think he did it because he was a dick, but David Bunnell has been quoted as saying it was because disgruntled Lisa or Apple II employees would come by and scratch it with their keys.

"It's better to be a pirate than to join the Navy," said Steve. The Mac project stole more and more technology from the Lisa project, especially after Burrell Smith figured out how to get the same processor as the Lisa, the Moto 68000, into the Mac. Jobs refused to make the two machines code compatible, however.

The final Lisa product would be released years later for $10K, 5 times the original project's cost. It would tank, competing with IBM's $3K machine.

Jobs hires John Scully to be CEO, from Pepsi, with the line, "Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?" Others considered Scully's lack of tech knowledge a drawback; Jobs saw it as an opportunity to guide the man who would be his boss.

Gates unveils Windows, claiming over 90% of the IBM machines on the market would run the software by the end of 1984.

1984
Jobs meets Lee Clow, creative director at ad agency Chiat/Day. He says, "Am I getting anything I should give a shit about?"

Jobs presents the famous "1984" ad, directed by Ridley Scott (of Blade Runner), to the board. They absolutely hate it and vote to sell back the Super Bowl air time they'd bought (which cost more than the commercial's production costs of $750K). They couldn't sell the space, and they decided to run the ad, which pictured a dystopian world like that in Orwell's novel, implicitly run by IBM and shattered by the coming arrival of the new Mac. The ad went on to win awards. Jobs said, "Luck is a force of nature...Using the 1984 theme was such an obvious idea that I worried that someone else would beat us to it, but nobody did."

The Mac launches on January 24th. Jobs wore a polka dot bow tie and recited Bob Dylan lyrics from "The Times They Are A-Changin'." Then he unveiled the Mac, which began to speak using a voice synthesis program: "Hello, I am Macintosh", finishing with, "So it is with considerable pride that I introduce the man who's been like a father to me, Steve Jobs."

The Apple III, meant to replace the Apple II, is discontinued on the same day Jobs announces the Apple IIc, a compact version of the II meant to feel more appliance like, to Jobs' insistence. The celebration, called "Apple II Forever," was interrupted by a 6.2 richter scale earthquake in San Francisco.

1984 Part 2
The Mac initially sells well, but starts to falter in sales because of word of its bugginess and lack of competitive functionality. Programmers joke about the need to continuously swap disks for programs and saving files; they called it the "Disk Swap Olympics" or the resulting injury "Disk Swapper's Elbow." Microsoft's three programs, Paint, Word and Write, were some of the rare applications available. People start to blame Jobs for not doing any market testing beyond what he would want.

Jobs gains control of the Lisa team again and berates them as having "fucked up" in front of the newly combined Mac/Lisa team.

Jobs' Mac development team starts to discover that they, slaving under the motto of "working 90 hours a week and loving it" were grossly underpaid compared to the Lisa team's staff, and even compared to the junior engineers on the Mac team. Many feel betrayed by Jobs. Bonuses helped alleviate morale problems, but then the profitable Apple II team became resentful of the Mac team's privileges.

Jobs stars as President Roosevelt in a war-themed "1984" ad parody called "1944," where Macs waged war on IBM computers. It costs $50k to develop and is shown off to the international sales team at the annual meeting in Waikiki, HI. "IBM wants to wipe us off the face of the earth," said Jobs to Fortune magazine.

Vietnam Vet memorial artist Maya Lin is Steve's most recent flame.

Jobs buys Jackling House, a 1926 Woodside CA mansion, built for mining and metallurgical engineer Daniel Cowam Jackling in 1926 by famous architect George Washington Smith. Jobs lived in the 17,000-square-foot house for another 10 years, hardly furnishing it. He rented it out for a time after that.

1985
Jobs and Woz receive the first National Medal of Technology from Ronald Reagan.

Around this time, either before or after it, Jobs discovers that Woz has resigned. Woz would eventually going back to college under an alias, Rocky Clark. He earned a CS/EE bachelor's degree from UC Berkeley.

Ella Fitzgerald sings at Jobs' 30th birthday party at the St. Francis hotel in San Francisco, a black-tie dinner dance.

Jobs visits nerd and supermodel Bo Derek to convert her to a Mac user. She was unimpressed with both Jobs and the Mac.

Jobs says in a Playboy magazine interview that he was not happy that he learned, from a video tape he was not supposed to see, that every US nuke operated out of Europe was being aimed using an Apple II.

Apple executives start blaming him for the miscalculated forecasting of Mac sales and start to build up resentment of his management style. Mike Murray, Jobs' lieutenant in marketing, writes a memo summarizing the problems that Apple has, laying much blame on Steve Jobs. He shows it to Steve first and his reality distortion field begins to deflate. The board and Scully strip Jobs of his control of the Mac group and the Lisa product line is killed.

Scully is tipped off by a VP that Jobs will try to unseat him while Scully attends a a trip to China. When confronted, Jobs says, "I think you're bad for Apple and I think you're the wrong person to run this company." Scully calls an emergency meeting for the next morning. "I'm running this company, Steve, and I want you out for good. Now!" Scully made each man in the room pledge their alliance to Jobs or Scully. Jobs is quiet the entire time. Jobs goes to assure Scully again that he'd respect his leadership, but Jobs is plotting a final coup attempt behind his back. Tuesday evening, May 28th 1985, Jobs is stripped of all duties, but remains the chairman of the board. Friends worry he'll kill himself.

1985 Part 2
Jobs wanders for a bit; he tries to get NASA to let him ride the Space Shuttle, thinks about entering politics and learns about biotechnology. And then he recognizes that he loves creating innovative products and begins plotting a new venture. He informs Apple of his new venture, and his willingness to resign from the board. Apple considers keeping him on and investing in the new company, but realize that he's taking key Apple technologists with him and Jobs ends up resigning entirely from the company.

He resigns at sunset, by handing a letter to Mike Murray on his front lawn, with press in attendance. Dramatically, he told the press, "If Apple becomes a place where computers are a commodity item, where the romance is gone, and where people forget that computers are the most incredible invention that man has ever invented, I'll feel I have lost Apple." "But if I'm a million miles away, and all those people still feel those things...then I will feel that my genes are still there."

Jobs sells almost all his Apple stock, over 4 million shares ($11m), citing a lack of confidence in Apple's managment. He retains one. Some say for sentimental reasons, some say so he still receives quarterly reports.

Apple sues Jobs for using company research to launch a new company. Jobs responds, "It's hard to think that a $2 billion company with 4,300 plus people couldn't compete with six people in blue jeans." The suit is dismissed before it could go to court.

Microsoft launches Windows 1.0, aping the look and feel of early Mac OS GUIs (which aped Xerox GUIs).

Scully allows Gates to use Mac tech in Windows if Microsoft would hold off on selling a Windows version of Excel, allowing Apple to get a foothold in the business market.

Jobs names his company NeXT. Their first project would be a workstation for higher education, inspired by his interest in biotech, that would be cheap enough for students, but powerful enough to run wet lab simulations. A Businessweek cover story at the time featured a quote by Andrea Cunningham, an ex publicist for NeXT, "Part of Steve wanted to prove to others and to himself that Apple wasn't just luck... He wanted to prove that Sculley should never have let him go.''

Sometime during this year, Apple discontinues the Lisa.

1986
Jobs spends $100K to have designer Paul Rand, creator of the IBM logo, among others, to create a brand identity for NeXT, including a logo.

Around this time, Jobs has begun to build his relationship with his daughter, Lisa, who is about 7.

Jobs finishes his sell-off of Apple stock.

Jobs buys Pixar out of Lucasfilm's computer graphics group for a discounted price of $10m—$5m of which will be used for operations—so that Lucas could finance his divorce without selling Star Wars stock. Jobs is quoted as saying, "If I knew in 1986 how much it was going to cost to keep Pixar going, I doubt I would have bought the company."

1987
Ross Perot saw Jobs on TV, called him, and offered to be an investor. Jobs waited a week to play it cool. Perot gained 16% share of NeXT by investing $20m.

Jobs, sometime in his thirties, learns of his birth parents: Joanne Carole Schieble, a speech therapist, and Abdulfattah Jandali, a Syrian political science professor. He also finds out that they have a daughter—his birth sister—Mona Simpson, who is a novelist.

Mona, brings Jobs to a book party for her new novel, Anywhere But Here, revealing their relationship as siblings to those who attended the party. Some believe Jobs was the base from which Mona created her main character in a later book, A Regular Guy. Mona Simpson's husband, Richard Appel, was a writer for The Simpsons, and he named Marge's mother after his wife. His interactions with her, and upon learning how similar they were, impacted Steve Jobs. Steve Lohr wrote for the NY Times, "The effect of all this on Jobs seems to be a certain sense of calming fatalism—less urgency to control his immediate environment and a greater trust that life's outcomes are, to a certain degree, wired in the genes." Just years earlier, Jobs was firm on most of his character having been formed from his experiences, not his birth parents or genetics.

NeXT's robotic factory opens in Fremont, not to control labor costs but to use lasers to more accurately solder circuits for improved quality.

1988
Windows starts looking uncannily like Mac OS. Apple sues Microsoft for copying their GUI, claiming the earlier agreement to use Mac tech in Windows only extended itself only to Windows 1.0.

Jobs sells King Juan Carlos I of Spain a NeXT computer at a party, before it's even been released.

In October, the NeXT computer, nicknamed the Cube, was unveiled in a symphony hall, to show off the machine's stereo sound processing. The magnesium-cased machine had an ethernet port and inline graphics and audio in email (rare at the time), and a 17-inch black-and-white monitor. Most universities preferred color screens for workstations by this time. It also had a magnetic-optical disc that was a bit too slow and expensive. frogdesign's Esslinger works on the ID, but only on the terms that he has free reign.

The PR machine tells the press that Steve's mellowed out a bit, and gained some self awareness. One ex employee told an opposing story that ''everyone would put in their one vote. Then Steve would put in his 70 votes.''

Steve did change, though. One example is of the unusual pay scheme at NeXT. Up till the early '90s, there were only two tiers of pay, $50K and $75K, based on how early you started in the company. Pay day came once a month and the check was for the upcoming 4 weeks. Seniors who joined with NeXT were given 2% in company stock. The even handedness stood in stark contrast with the chaotic pay and reward schemes found early at Apple.

At a dinner with important representatives from universities, the major target buyers of NeXT machines, the staff neglected to prepare a vegetarian dish for Jobs. He canceled the entire entree portion of the meal for the room, leaving a room full of potential customers hungry.

1989
Apple is sued by the Beatles' Apple Corp. Steve's a big Beatles fan, once even saying his model for business is the same as that the Beatles have, the sum of the parts being greater than the individuals involved.

Apple is sued by Xerox for the GUI.

The NeXT cube starts shipping to customers. When asked about the ship date's delay, Jobs responds that the computer is still five years ahead of its time, regardless.

In 1989, the last 2700 Lisa computers would be quietly dumped in a landfill in Logan, Utah, so Apple could collect a tax writeoff.

Mac Portable comes out.

1990
About this time, Jobs meets Laurene Powell, when he speaks at a class at Stanford business school. They exchange numbers. Jobs had a business dinner that night. ''I was in the parking lot, with the key in the car, and I thought to myself, If this is my last night on earth, would I rather spend it at a business meeting or with this woman? I ran across the parking lot, asked her if she'd have dinner with me. She said yes, we walked into town and we've been together ever since.''

1991-1992
The PowerBook comes out.

Steven Jobs and Laurene Powell are married at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park, on March 18th in a ceremony held by Buddhist monk Kobin Chino. Their first child, Reed Paul Smith is born later that year, named after Reed college and Jobs' father.

Around this time, daughter Lisa starts living with Jobs and continues to through her teenage years.

1993
The Newton Message Pad comes out.

The Macintosh TV comes out.

John Scully ousted by the board in June, replaced by Apple Europe head Michael Spindler.

After selling only 50,000 of their machines, NeXT exits the hardware game, focusing solely on software. They work on porting the NeXTSTEP OS to 486 intel processors.

1994
PowerMac 6100/60 comes out.
QuickTake Camera comes out.

1995
Jobs and his best friend Larry Ellison, of Oracle, are on vacation in Hawaii and they discuss the possibility of a hostile takeover of Apple while walking on the beach. They'd arranged for $3m in financing and to have Jobs take the helm. "We came very, very close to doing it,'' Ellison says to the NY Times, ''Steve is the one who decided against it.'' ''I decided I'm not a hostile-takeover kind of guy,'' Jobs says. ''If they had asked me to come back, it might have been different.''

Pixar releases Toy Story, Job's 80% stake in Pixar is worth $600m.

Mac clones live.

Erin Seinna, second child to Steve and Laurene Powell, is born.

The Microsoft/Apple cases are finally settled; Apple loses.

1996
"I am saddened by the fact...that Microsoft...makes really third rate products," said Jobs in an interview this year.

To Fortune magazine, Jobs says, "You know, I've got a plan that could rescue Apple. I can't say any more than that its the perfect product and the perfect strategy for Apple. But no body there will listen to me."

Gil Amelio replaces Michael Spindler as CEO of Apple, and the stock soon hit a 12-year low.

Apple's aging OS needs replacement. Apple considers buying BeOS, or even licensing Windows NT from Microsoft. But instead, they look to NeXT and the NeXTSTEP OS, which directly influenced Apple's modern OS X UI, architecture and multitasking abilities, which is used in the iPhone and all Macs today.

Apple announces intent to purchase of NeXT for $430 million to pay back investors, and 1.5m in Apple shares to Jobs. Jobs would also re-enter the company as an advisor, bringing "a lot of experience and scar tissue." He's also recognized as having mellowed out in his management, as one Pixar employee describes: "After the first three words out of your mouth, he'd interrupt you and say, 'O.K., here's how I see things.' It isn't like that anymore. He listens a lot more, and he's more relaxed, more mature.'' Jobs attributed the change to an increased faith in people: "'I trust people more.''

Jobs steps back onto the Apple campus, wildly changed since he'd last been there, for the first time since 1985.

1997
"Steve is going to fuck Gil so hard his eardrums will pop," says an anonymous ex Apple employee in regards to Jobs returning to Apple, to New Yorker magazine. Sure enough, Steve Jobs is swiftly installed as interim CEO after ousting Gil Amelio.

Jobs: "The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament."

Jobs calls Dell computers boring beige boxes; Michael Dell says if he ran Apple, he'd give the share holders back their money.

Jon Ive is hired, beginning a new era of Apple design.

The 20th Anniversary Mac, with a DVD player and TV tuner comes out as Ive's first piece of work.

1998
Jobs shuts down many projects, focusing on computers at Apple.

Eve Jobs born.

The first iMac is born.

1999
Pirates of Silicon Valley, the movie, comes out. Noah Wyle plays Steve Jobs and Anthony Michael Hall plays Bill Gates. The film opens on the set of the 1984 Super Bowl ad for the Mac.

2000
Jobs is the permanent CEO of Apple again.

PowerMac Cube comes out.

Jobs stops maintaining the Jackling House mansion he bought in 1984.

2001
First Apple retail store opens in McLean, Virginia.

iPod comes out.

OS X 10.0 comes out.

2003
Power Mac G5 comes out in familiar all-aluminum case.

Al Gore joins Apple's Board.

Jobs discovers malignant tumor in his pancreas. It's a rare form of pancreatic cancer that can be cured. He tries 9 months of alternative medicine, unsuccessfully curing the cancer.

2004
Steve has a surgery to remove a tumor in July and takes a month off to recover. In a letter to Apple employees, he wrote from the hospital on a 17-inch PowerBook, "I have some personal news that I need to share with you, and I wanted you to hear it directly from me... This weekend I underwent a successful surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from my pancreas."

Jobs receives permission to demolish the Jackling House and rebuild a smaller home on the land. Local preservationists veto the decision.

2005
Apple announces Intel inside of Macs, long culminating project "Star Trek", which was about running OS X on x86 Intel hardware. PCs and Macs are the same, essentially, component wise. Only software and design are their differences; Jobs' awareness of design, emphasized early on in his days at Apple, and the importance of software over hardware learned at NeXT, would help guide Apple through the coming years.

Jef Raskin, father of the Mac, dies of pancreatic cancer in his home in Pacifica, CA.

Jobs turns 50.

iPod Nano, Video iPod, iPod Shuffle come out.

Jobs gives the commencement speech at Stanford, telling three stories, one about intuition and how he went to college and what he learned from it despite dropping out. One was about his love for Apple and losing the company. And the last was about death and his experience with cancer. The video and transcript are widely available online and the most personal look we have at his life during his second era at Apple.

2007
The iPhone is announced in January, then launched in June.

Apple TV comes out.

2008
Macbook Air comes out. Rumors abound about Steve looking too thin to be healthy.

Psystar announces a $400 mac clone, using Hackintosh work arounds to get OS X on a clone PC.

Jobs beings to give keynotes by sharing the stage with other Apple executives.

Gizmodo runs a rumor that Steve is sick and will step down in the Spring; the mainstream press denies it, particularly CNBC bureau chief Jim Goldman and some WSJ reporters, until January.

2009
Steve Jobs takes a health related leave of absence in January, until June. Tim Cook takes over day to day responsibilities while Jobs retains the CEO title.

Jobs receives permission to tear down Jackling house and build a smaller home on the property.

Steve Jobs receives a liver transplant in Tennessee. The NY Times raises the question of how he received a transplant so quickly and the hospital releases a statement, with Jobs' permission, that he received it quickly because he was the most sick on the list of recipients.

Steve Jobs returns to Apple in June 2009, quietly, by appearing on campus, and by being quoted in a press release.

The rest has yet to be lived, or written. We will be updating, in real time, as his Third act at Apple begins.

The new 3GS iPhone has a coating that helps you leave no, well hardly any, prints–-fingerprints. The glass screen is coated with a polymer, a plastic that human skin oil doesn't adhere to very well. People in the chemical bonding business like to call the finished surface "oleophobic."

Such a lovely Greek cognate may sound like it means "afraid of oil." And, it does, but it also connotes (or carries with) "aversion" or "not-like-to-be-around-tivity," if I may. Instead of sticking to the bonded-plastic surface of your new phone, the oil from you fingers or cheekbone or tip of your nose stays more or less together as its own smooshed droplet.

The Applers were able to do this by bonding this oleophobic polymer to glass. The polymer is an organic (from organisms) compound, carbon-based. The glass is nominally inorganic, silicon-based… solid rock. The trick is getting the one to stick to the other. Although it is nominally proprietary, this is probably done with a third molecule that sticks to silicon on one side and to carbon-based polymers on the other side. Chemical engineers get it to stay stuck by inducing compounds to diffuse or "inter-penetrate" into the polymer. The intermediate chemical is a "silane," a molecule that has silicon and alkanes (chains of carbon atoms).

If you'd like—and I hope you will—take a moment and think about droplets, like water droplets, on a surface. Deep in the droplet, water molecules stick to each other. On the surface though, they stick to each other as well, but they also have to opportunity to stick or not to stick to the surface they're resting on. When they stick, say to the nylon fibers in a bikini strap, the swimsuit feels wet (or so I'm told). When they don't stick to the surface they're resting on, they bead up, like in the car wax commercials.

Well, the polymer that the 3GS iPhone screen is coated with doesn't let the oil of your skin stick to it very much. So, you don't leave fingerprints. The key is in the intermediate compounds, the silanes that hold the plastic to the glass.

So grab a hold of one, and for a change, watch almost nothing happen. It's chemistry.

Thanks so much, Bill! Written for Gizmodo - Copyright 23 June 2009 - Bill Nye The Science Guy®

Now, I know its shape is somewhat boatlike, and its chin—an HTC hallmark—has evolved into something closer to a jaw. But the version I held—the white one—had tasteful aluminum trim, clean lines and a shape that was generally more hand-friendly than the Dream, and slightly heftier than the Magic. Its Teflon coating isn't as slippery as it sounds, thankfully. I wasn't really in a position to drop test the phone to see if the finish is as durable as HTC says, so we'll have to take their word on that.

Software performance was very snappy, though the interface takes a while to figure out at first. Screen input on the multitouch capacitive screen is accurate and quick, and the slight vibratory haptic feedback does the job, but the software doesn't seem quite as buttery smooth—especially during multitouch zooming—as the iPhone or Pre, and I noticed occasional keyboard slowdown during browsing. The Android basics are all there, and the multiple homescreens are the same as they've always been, albeit populated with a pile of new HTC widgets.

On those widgets: Most of them are fine, drawing heavily from previous efforts by HTC on other platforms (weather and stocks, for example, are almost identical to the versions for TF3D). We didn't have a chance to really test the social networking integration, since the display phones weren't loaded with much personal data. In general, it looks a bit like webOS's Synergy. It's a little bit more fragmented in a way that I think people will like: instead of mandating a single flow of status updates, texts, call history or new photos from your contacts, it divides their activity into panels. More on that here.

Finally, we've got Flash support. The implementation is patchy, at least for now. A quick trip to YouTube, as you can see in the gallery, displayed an oddly-sized video frame, and transitioned to a full-screen player when double tapped. It worked OK, although it was clear that the phone was straining. Playback wasn't totally smooth; it would suffice in a bind. Flash ads and animations work more smoothly, and Adobe says that many games are playable. (Note: Eh, what about controls?)

In more than a few ways, the Hero—or Sense, really—represents a lot of what people had hoped for in Android. When the OS came out, everyone was talking about customization, varied hardware and integration with online services. Until now, we hadn't really seen that.

Far from the horrible carrier interface overhauls we're used to seeing on featurephones, the facelifts given to Windows Mobile over the last few years, courtesy of HTC and Samsung, have been the only thing keeping that tired OS alive. Now Android's getting the same treatment. The difference is, customization is easier, the changes are deeping, and Android is a good, modern OS in the first place. HTC has done some exciting stuff here, to be sure. With any luck, others will follow.

If you want a closer look at the software, HTC has posted a complete walkthrough of the OS:

Yes, it's the first Android phone with Flash—and it'll come out more than two months before Adobe's solution is set for wide release. Some specs: We've got a 3.2-inch HVGA (480x320) screen, coated with some kind of anti-print treatment; a five megapixel camera with autofocus; AGPS; a digital compass; a gravity sensor; a 3.5mm headphone jack (seriously!) and a dedicated search button. On the brains'n'guts front, we've got 512MB of storage, expandable by microSD, 288MB of RAM, and a 528MHz Qualcomm processor. Powering the handset is a 1350 mAh battery.

The Hero will be available later this summer in Europe in July and Asia later in the summer, but US availability won't come until "later this year."

[HTC]

HTC SENSE™ DEBUTS ON NEW HTC HERO™

HTC Hero is the world's first Android-based phone with a
customized user interface

HTC Sense to be integrated across a portfolio of
phones beginning with HTC Hero

LONDON – June 24, 2009 – HTC Corporation, a global designer of mobile phones, today debuted HTC Sense™, an intuitive and seamless experience that will be introduced across a portfolio of phones beginning with the new HTC Hero™. With its distinct design and powerful capabilities fully integrated with HTC Sense, Hero introduces a unique blend of form and function that takes Android to new heights.
HTC Sense is focused on putting people at the centre by making your phone work in a more simple and natural way. This experience revolves around three fundamental principles that were designed by quietly listening and observing how people live and communicate.
"HTC Hero introduces a more natural way for reaching out to the people and accessing your important information, not by following the status quo of today's phones, but by following how you communicate and live your life," said Peter Chou, Chief Executive Officer, HTC Corporation. "HTC Sense is a distinct experience created to make HTC phones more simple for people to use, leaving them saying, ‘it just makes sense.'"

HTC Hero
HTC Hero continues HTC's leadership in cutting-edge design that focuses on introducing a variety of distinct devices to represent your own individuality. Boasting bevelled edges and an angled bottom, the HTC Hero is contoured to fit comfortably in your hand and against your face while you're on a call. The HTC Hero is built to last beginning with an anti-fingerprint screen coating for improved smudge resistance and a longer lasting, clearer display. The white HTC Hero includes an industry-first, Teflon coating, resulting in an improved, durable white surface that is soft to the touch.
With its 3.2-inch HVGA display, the HTC Hero is optimized for Web, multimedia and other content while maintaining a small size and weight that fits comfortably in your hand. It also boasts a broad variety of hardware features including a GPS, digital compass, gravity-sensor, 3.5mm stereo headset jack, a 5 mega-pixel autofocus camera and expandable MicroSD memory. HTC Hero also includes a dedicated Search button that goes beyond basic search, providing you with a more natural, contextual search experience that enables you to search through Twitter, locate people in your contact list, find emails in your inbox or search in any other area in Hero.

HTC Sense
Built on a culture of innovation and a passion to enhance people's lives, HTC shapes the mobile experience around the individual. Debuting on the HTC Hero and available on all new HTC devices moving forward, Sense delivers on three basic principles: Make it Mine, Stay Close and Discover the Unexpected.

Make It Mine
Make It Mine, is about feeling your HTC phone was created for and by you. To do this, HTC encourages you to dictate and organize how you want to access the people and content in your life in a way that fits best for you. For some, this means adding glance view widgets that push content like twitter feeds, weather and other content to the surface while others may want quick access to business-focused information like email, calendar and world-times. HTC is also introducing a new profile feature called ‘scenes' that enables you to create different customized content profiles around specific functions or times in your life.

Stay Close
Today, staying in touch with the people in your life means managing a variety of communication channels and applications ranging from phone calls, emails, texts, photos, status updates and more. HTC Sense takes a different approach by integrating these communication channels and applications into one single view enabling you to stay closer to your important people. With HTC Sense, friends' Facebook status updates and photos along with their Flickr photos are included along side their text messages, emails and call history in a single view.

Discover the Unexpected
Many of the most memorable moments in your life are experienced, not explained. HTC Sense is focused on providing a variety of these simple yet innovative experiences on your HTC phone that will sometimes bring you moments of joy and delight. It can be something as basic as turning the phone over to silence a ring or as simple as improving the smart dialler for making calls quicker. HTC Sense also includes perspectives, a new way for viewing your content such as email, photos, Twitter, music and more in different ways.

Availability
The HTC Hero will be available to people across Europe in July and in Asia later in the summer. A distinct North American version will be available later in 2009.

Fans

At the very least a regular fan, a twin window fan that takes advantage of cool night air, room to room fan, or even a bed fan could help save a little extra money—especially if the outside temperature cools sufficiently in your area.

If you have the option of installing a ceiling fan, it can be one of the simplest and most inexpensive ways to reduce energy costs in the home. The average price is around $100 per fan, they can be easily self-installed (as long as you have an existing ceiling light) and they can save you as much as 40% on your energy bills this summer. Take this example from Progress Energy:

...a 48", 75-watt fan used 10 hours a day at half speed or less would cost $.50 to $.90 a month to operate. For a 1,500-square-foot house with air conditioning using two ceiling fans and raising the thermostat setting could save about $70 to $200 over a six-month cooling season.

This is precisely why I just ordered four new fans for my home. Three of the four will be installed upstairs in each of the bedrooms. There will be absolutely no need for A/C at night, and I expect to dramatically lower central air usage on the upper level during the day.

Window A/C Units: Who Should Have One?

The bottom line is that window units use far less electricity than central air units. For example, a typical, medium-sized window unit might use 500 to 1440 watts of electricity per hour while a 2.5 ton central system might use 3500 watts over the same span. Because central air units cool an entire home, users often waste energy in areas that are not occupied. For example, if you live in a small apartment, a 12,000 BTU window unit could effectively cool a 640 square foot space for an upfront cost of around $300. This Fridgidaire model is also Energy Star certified, meaning that it should provide at least an additional 10% savings in monthly energy costs—making it a wise investment when compared to a traditional model. In an apartment around 800 square feet, that would most likely cover the main living space and could be supplemented with something as small as a 5,000 BTU unit for a bedroom. Hell, you might even be able to get away with only a fan—after all, bedrooms see most of their use after the sun has gone down.

Things to consider when buying a window A/C unit:

• Bigger is not better. Too many on/off cycles will reduce efficiency and add result in unnecessary wear and tear. Make sure your A/C unit is sized properly for your room by matching capacity with square footage.
• Make sure your unit has at least three speeds (low, medium and high).
• Buy a model with a thermostat to fine tune your comfort level and save electicity.
• Clean your filters regularly.
• Choose a model with a timer. This gives you even greater flexibility and ensures that the unit is only running when needed.
• Consider building a unit directly into your wall to eliminate the hassle of moving it every year. You can also put an insulated / weather-stripped cover on through-the-wall units in the fall. [HVACKey]

So, to answer the question "who should have one?," I would suggest that people living in small apartments or homes seriously consider investing in a window A/C unit or two. Even if you have central air, keeping it off in favor of à la carte cooling is going to save you some money. For those that have larger dwellings, individual A/C units might come in handy in a bedroom at night, or in rooms that you spend most of your time in.

Getting the Most Out Of Central Air

If you own a home or an upscale rental, you probably already have a central air unit. But simply tweaking the temperature dial now and then doesn't mean you are getting all of the potential cost savings out of your system.

• Get a programmable thermostat. Those old-timey, temperature-only thermostats are a huge waste of money. Simply being able to program your thermostat to kick on when you get home, or run on 78 degrees instead of 72 degrees overnight can result in savings of around $180 per year for an average home. Also, keep in mind that each degree you set your thermostat below 78 degrees will increase your energy use by 3-4%. Plus, basic programmable thermostats can cost less than $30.
• If installing or replacing a unit, keep in mind that the higher the Seasonal Energy Efficiency Ratio (SEER) rating of your unit, the more energy efficient it will be. All Energy Star certified units must have a SEER rating of 13 or higher.
• Units with a thermal expansion valve and a high-temperature rating Energy Efficiency Ratio (EER) greater than 11.6 will be more efficient when the weather is at its hottest.
• Units with a fan-only switch allow for nighttime ventilation to substantially reduce air-conditioning costs.
• Make sure to check filters every month. [Energy Savers]

You may also want to look into a simple misting unit like the Cool-n-Save. It attaches to your central air unit in minutes and can reduce your energy bills by as much as 30%. Plus, the whole system only sets you back $100. On the downside, it does use a significant amount of water, and it may result in a mineral buildup.

Check For Leaks

The most important step in keeping your home cool is making sure that the structure itself isn't working against you. Obviously, if your house or apartment is leaky or poorly insulated, a lot of cash is going to fly out those holes along with the cold air. Furthermore, If you have a central air system, an average of 20% of the air moving through the duct system is lost because of leaks, holes and poor connections. Even if you can't afford insulation upgrades or a blower test to detect leaks, a few DIY tests and some cheap fixes like weatherstripping could save you hundreds if not thousands of dollars in the long term.

Alternatives

They aren't feasible in every situation, but there are a few cost-effective ways to cool a home that break from the norm. These methods include evaporative coolers (swamp coolers), attic fans, and geothermal systems. However, for most of us, just putting up some shades, adding a ceiling fan or two and/or a window A/C unit or programmable thermostat could result in substantially lower utility bills during the hot summer months. And, if all else fails, there is always air conditioned shirts and ice saunas.

Prof. Dealzmodo is a regular section dedicated to helping budget-minded consumers learn how to shop smarter and get the best deals on their favorite gadgets. If you have any topics you would like to see covered, send your idea to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Professor Dealzmodo" in the subject line. [Background Image via Wikimedia]

First Place — Jeffer Mitchell
Second Place — Eric Benge
Third Place — Alex Roemer

http://help.benm.at/help.php

Then scroll down to the Tethering & Internet Settings, then choosing your country and provider. This works for both AT&T and T-Mobile, and will let you install the appropriate configuration.

Now go to your settings and enable tethering. Check the video walkthrough above to help you configure tethering.

We've been testing this for about a day and it's been working quite well. Just be careful though, that AT&T doesn't officially sponsor this and might charge you extra for using tethering while you're not supposed to. So, keep an eye out so you're not shafted at the end of the month.

And if this disables visual voicemail on your phone, just go and reset your network settings, and it should be fixed. If that doesn't work, try updating your phone with an older version of the AT&T carrier settings.

The method is an update of what we showed before, but with a method to get MMS and Visual Voicemail working.

To top it off, the slightly stereotypical product has Obama dressed up like Colonel Sanders, and also features a coin bank for change. Sigh. Get it? One has to wonder whether or not they merely thought it was funny, or if they really just hate Black America. And for the record, a Popeye's bucket (despite them frying up superior chicken) WOULD NOT have made it any better. Regardless, though...WTF!

Final verdict? THAT'S RAAAAAAAACIST! [Brando]

Myself and two compadres, Ryan and Mark, are in Chicago (each of us for the first time) to attend Brickworld, the world's largest Lego convention. Yes we're a bunch of dorks. Yes you totally wish you were here too.

Last night, after seeing Second City improv, we ate at a pleasantly sketchy dive bar in uptown Chicago, where the food was mediocre and the characters were questionable. I definitely had my iPhone while at our table, and I definitely did NOT have it (whoops!) when we were 100 feet down the street.

I raced back into the bar, not even particularly concerned, but it was gone like baby. In less than five minutes, with very few people in the small place, my beloved JesusPhone had managed to vanish into a black hole. Our waitress was sympathetic, and I left a number, but I was immediately glum about my prospects of seeing it again.

So I felt like about zero cents, but then we giddily realized that I had *just* activated the brand-new Find My iPhone service. Even better, Mark had a Sprint (yes, Sprint) USB dongle giving him Internet access over 3G on his MacBook Pro. Excited to try it out, we hopped onto me.com and clicked the Find My iPhone link.

"Your iPhone is not connected to a data network or does not have Find My iPhone enabled."

Well, crap. I guess all bets are off if the thieving person has the bright idea to turn the iPhone off. Oddly the phone still rang when we called it, suggesting it wasn't off; but, one way or the other, it was unable to broadcast itself to Apple so I could track it down. We sent a message to the phone - "CALL 512-796-xxxx" - but no luck. The MobileMe website said it would send me an email when the message had been displayed, but no email arrived.

Dejected, we prowled the bar one more time, but it wasn't that big a place and there weren't any places for the phone to be hiding. Game over. We went back to the hotel and I was disconsolate. This morning we checked again with no additional luck, and when Mark tried dialing the phone around noon, it *did* go straight to voicemail. The odds of ever seeing the phone again were slim to say the least.

After lunch, while at the Lego convention, I checked my email...

Holy crap! I jumped back to me.com and clicked Find My iPhone again, and to my absolute shock and amazement, it displayed Google Maps and drew a circle around Medill St.:

The block was about four or five miles west of the bar. It was too perfect to be a random glitch.

I sent a second message to the phone, slightly more to the point: "This phone is missing. Please call 512-796-xxxx to return it. $50 reward." Almost immediately I received a second confirmation email that it had been displayed on the phone. And yet, the minutes ticked by and no call was coming. I kept refreshing the location, and though the circle varied in size, it kept floating around that same block, five miles west of the bar.

The Lego convention was drawing to a close and it was time for the closing ceremony. But I wasn't about to spend an hour sitting through awards and Lego-themed thank-you speeches while my poor lost iPhone sat in some random Chicago neighborhood. So we packed my Lego creations, tossed them in the rental car, and drove from Wheeling back into town. Mark reestablished his trusty Sprint connection and as we drove, every five minutes, he refreshed the location. The phone wasn't moving. It appeared to be in a row of buildings on the north side of Medill St.

We parked along Medill and hopped out. It was a Puerto Rican neighborhood. On the south side of the street, an outdoor birthday fiesta was convening, and some of the participants eyed us three honkeys questioningly. Now at this point I had no fricking clue how we would find the phone; did I think I'd find it under a bush? I certainly didn't plan to go door-to-door, nor did I expect the cops to regard a blue circle around the entire block as sufficient cause for a search warrant. I sent a third message to the phone that I'd been formulating in my head: "We have tracked the phone to Medill St. and are locating it. Please call 512-796-xxxx to help us and claim a reward." Short version: WE KNOW WHERE YOU ARE.

In a burst of inspiration, I took Mark's computer with me as we walked down the block, figuring the recipient of the message might see us prowling the area with an open laptop and realize we meant business. I kept refreshing; the circle kept hovering; but it still stretched across the entire block, and worse, this included a big apartment building.

Suddenly Mark called my number - the umpteenth time he'd tried - and to our shock, somebody answered! He immediately passed the phone to me, but by the time I could say hello, the person on the other side had hung up. DAMMIT! I knew we were on the trail, but as we walked up and down that block of Medill for the third time, I had no idea how we'd get any closer. I pictured the possibility of driving away from the neighborhood knowing my iPhone was around. It was more frustrating than having had no idea where it was. I pulled up Google Translate, and sent a 4th message to the phone: "Por favor, devuelva el teléfono o nos pondremos en contacto con la policía." The email confirmations were arriving immediately in my Inbox, meaning our threats were showing on the phone's screen in real time.

Then an amazingly lucky thing happened. I refreshed the iPhone location and the circle moved, to the corner of the block, and shrunk in size to maybe 100 feet across. I waited a minute and refreshed again. The small circle had shifted southward down Washtenaw.

"THAT WAY!"

Us three skinny white guys walked at a rapid pace in the direction of the circle. We moved past the birthday party, curious if one of the participants might be culpable, but the circle again shifted farther south. I was ready to break for our car if the phone started moving away faster than we could catch it, but it hovered at the very end of the street, at the corner of Washtenaw and Milwaukee:

Ryan and Mark raced ahead, literally making a flanking maneuver to the left and right, as I approached the intersection.

I clicked Refresh. The circle moved again. It was directly over the bus stop on the south side of Milwaukee Avenue.

I yelled and pointed.

Now, put yourself in the shoes of the iPhone thiever who will momentarily be entering the story. You might have told yourself, "Hey, free iPhone!" the night before. You might have seen the gently-threatening messages and ignored them, maybe even scoffed. Then the phone told you it was on Medill St. It talked to you in Spanish. And you saw three skinny white guys prowling in the street with a laptop computer open.

So you take off down the road, and to your shock and horror, the honkeys follow you. You stand at your local bus stop, expecting to lose them. And they converge on your location from across the intersection, the bald one with the laptop yelling and pointing at you. You probably think the angels of death have found you.

He sheepishly waved me over.

"Have you got it?" I asked as I marched up to the guy, acting far more intimidating than I felt. Our iPhone-pilfering friend apparently works at the sketchy bar, and as he fished around in his bag, he gave a questionable alibi about having found the phone, intending to return it, but being intimidated by "all these scary-looking messages" that kept popping up on the display. "Um, yeah, those were from me," I replied curtly. He pulled my phone out, totally unharmed, and handed it over. I resisted the urge to giggle.

I shook his hand - Lord knows why I did that - and the three of us walked off. We laughed triumphantly, adrenaline racing, feeling like the Jack Bauer trio. (Disregard the fact that we'd just left a Lego convention.)

I'd been amazed that the phone had enough battery life to make it through the night and still beam its location; the moment its battery was dead, then it would be game over for our little scavenger hunt. I unlocked my phone and saw almost 20 missed calls. And then, at that very moment, the iPhone shut down and displayed the "Connect to power" icon. My phone's battery literally hung on until the second it was in my hand. I wuv you, iPhone.

All said and done, it was almost worth losing the phone just for the thrill of finding it like this. We want to pitch a reality show to the Discovery Channel: "Phone Hunters." It certainly felt like we were in one there for a second.

And that, my friends, is why the MobileMe service is worth the damn money. It's been around for just over seven years and it FINALLY got a killer feature.

A few thoughts on our successful effort:
- If the man hadn't made a break for it down the street, we probably never would have been able to find him. Oh well, his loss.
- Yes, we sent a real number, not actually 512-796-xxxx.

A few bugs we found with the Find My iPhone process:
- Even though iPhone's alert notification plays whether it's on vibrate or not, it still obeys the ringer volume - so you can still, regrettably, keep it from playing. Also it's a lighter daintier sound effect than we'd prefer for locating something by sound. Hell, I'd prefer it if I could take pictures, play my iTunes library, and tase whoever was holding it.
- There's no real reason MobileMe shouldn't push the location to us; needing to refresh the location repeatedly on the webpage was silly.
- None of this would have been possible without Mark's 3G USB dongle for his MacBook. The biggest single problem is that you can't use me.com from the iPhone, meaning you can't find one iPhone using another. Hopefully Apple realizes this.

Responses to some of the comments made:
- The references to race are for two purposes:
First, to be self-deprecating about how little we actually looked like a bad-ass iPhone tracking team;
Second, to establish how much we stood out in this particular neighborhood.
Besides a bit of self-mockery, I don't think I said or implied a single negative thing about anyone's race.
- Yeah, we could have called the cops, and they probably would have yawned. Granted, in retrospect, chasing after a thief isn't the MOST prudent thing to do, but in the moment we had our adrenaline going and sure as hell weren't just going to watch the little circle recede into the distance.

Reprinted from Happy Waffle with permission by Kevin Miller

The National Electric Code (NEC) states:

NEC ARTICLE 400 Flexible Cords and Cables General 400.1 Scope.
This article covers general requirements, applications, and construction specifications for flexible cords and flexible cables.
400.8 Uses Not Permitted.
Flexible cords and cables shall not be used for the following:
(1) As a substitute for the fixed wiring of a structure
(2) Where run through holes in walls, structural ceilings, suspended ceilings, dropped ceilings, or floors
(3) Where run through doorways, windows, or similar openings
(4) Where attached to building surfaces
Exception: Flexible cord and cable shall be permitted to be attached to building surfaces in accordance with the provisions of 368.8.
(5) Where concealed by walls, floors, or ceilings or located above suspended or dropped ceilings

In other words, running power cords through the walls is not a substitute for permanent wiring. You're supposed to have a new electric socket installed directly behind the TV, where you can plug in the power cord and coil up the slack to tuck underneath. If you drilled some holes and ran cable yourself all willy nilly, in and back out to a power socket, chances are you are in violation of these codes. Should a fire result, your insurance may find reason to get out of covering your losses. Naturally, it is in your best interests to hire a professional to check out your setup and make sure everything is as it should be. That having been said, let's clarify the original poll and focus on how many of you might be on the wrong side of the NEC.

[Powerbridge and Avsforum and ECM and NEC/ Image via CEA]

It's basically the same specs as we've seen in other incarnations, and it'll work with T-Mobile's 3G frequencies. We'll take a look at what customizations T-Mobile has put on the phone, but for a general idea of what to expect of this one over the original T-Mobile G1, take a look at our review of the Google Ion.

Notification came by way of an email, which we've seen from Giz readers as well as around the Net this weekend:

Dear Apple Customer,

Thank you for your recent Apple Store order. We appreciate your patience and apologize for the inconvenience caused by the delay in your iPhone activation.

We are still resolving the issue that was encountered while activating your iPhone with AT&T. Unfortunately, due to system issues and continued high activation volumes, this could take us up to an additional 48 hours to complete.

On Monday, you'll receive an email from Apple with an iTunes Store credit in the amount of $30. We hope you will enjoy this gift and accept our sincere apologies for the inconvenience this delay has caused.

Thank you for choosing Apple.

Sincerely,
Apple Online Store Team

So, on the one hand you're going to get $30 in free stuff from Apple on Monday. On the other hand you could be one of the unlucky saps on the far end of this issue who's about to experience 96 hours without a phone. Worse still, your new iPhone 3GS could be singing to you right now too. [Thanks, Patrick, et al]

Given that the firmware update has only been live for two days now, the vast majority of 3.0-utilizing downloads are just refreshes of older apps. In fact, you can expect that the be the case for a while; iPhone 3.0's new features are nice, but most of them aren't the kind of thing you'd build an entire app around. So, here are the best of the updates:

Leaf Trombone: World Stage: Apple demoed this thing way back in March, but that was pre-3.0, and most importantly for this App, pre-multiplayer. That's the big update here: iPhone faux-trombone duets which can be played over Bluetooth. The "World Stage" aspect of World Stage is still intact, putting your performances in front of an anonymous audience for cheering and heckling, though it's been padded out with some fluffy notification integration. It's a buck, accompanied by a solid free version.

Textfree: Intended as a text message client replacement, this is one of the first mischievous uses I've seen for the iPhone's push notifications. The app itself has been around for a while, but needed to forward texts to your email address in lieu of proper backgrounding/notifications. Now, it works all the time. It's free for 15 texts a day, six dollars for unlimited.

Flick Fishing: Despite sounding like the king of all junk apps, Flick fishing isn't so bad, if you're a fan of fish, nature or accelerometers. With 3.0, it gets multiplayer and some in-app purchases. Completely bewildering fact: this is one of the top 10 most downloaded apps ever. What the hell, people?

Twittelator: There's some smart 3.0 leveraging going on here, with an inbuilt media/web browser, wide video and audio support to complement the new voice recorder and the 3GS's camcorder function, a Tweeter-tracking map feature, and a few more. No push though! Five bucks is a tough sell next to the free Tweetdeck, although previous users upgrade at no cost. Also, guys: What happened to your free version?

AP Mobile: Another early app gets a refresh: this one seems hell-bent on testing the practical limits of push notifications. It says it'll only send "Breaking News" alerts, though I'm not sure what stories qualify. I'm guessing it'll take some fine-tuning, or else it could lead the way towards Push Alert Fatigue Syndrome, which I'm pretty sure we'll be writing about in a week or so. Free.

Bomberman 2: Volcano Party: The price reduction from the first version is enough to recommend this one, and the 3.0 features—mostly (synchronous!) Bluetooth multiplayer—are a huge bonus. As with most of the real-time multiplayer games, there's no 3G support for latency and networking reasons. Three dollars.

Evernote: The free, does-it-all notes app now taps into 3.0's Google Maps API, and organizes notes by location. Sound recording now much better, if a little redundant, and a raft of other features—mostly interface improvements—abound.

This Week's App News on Giz:

• First iPhone App with In-App Purchasing: $1 App, $10 Per Month

• Sirius/XM iPhone App Is Now Live (Also)

• MLB Streaming Full Live Games to iPhone Over 3G, Starting Tomorrow

• TweetDeck for iPhone Lightning Review

• Ngmoco's Xbox Live-esque iPhone Service Set to Launch Tomorrow

• 94 God-Awful iPhone Apps Designed in MS Paint

• iPhone 3.0 Features Slightly Clueless "Objectionable Content" Warnings

This list is in no way definitive. If you've spotted a great app that hit the store this week, give us a heads up or, better yet, your firsthand impressions in the comments. And for even more apps: see our previous weekly roundups here, and check out our Favorite iPhone Apps Directory and our original iPhone App Review Marathon. Have a good weekend everybody.

[Image via SnorgTees]

• The four big carriers, the four best smartphone platforms, the best information you're going to get on the subject anywhere: Smartphone Buyer's Guide: The Best of the Best

• Got a few smartphones already in mind? We probably reviewed them:
Palm Pre (WebOS)
iPhone 3GS
BlackBerry Bold
BlackBerry Storm
T-Mobile G1 (Android)
T-Mobile myTouch 3G (Android)
Samsung Omnia (WinMo)
Note: There's no Nokia Symbian smartphone on this list because at the moment in the US, there's no handset we feel confident to recommend.

• Since surfing the web is one of the biggest reasons to choose a smartphone—and one of the biggest differentiators between smartphones—it's worth it to glance over the Mobile Browser Battlemodo, and its little sister, the Windows Mobile Browser Battlemodo.

• If you've already whittled it down to Palm Pre vs. iPhone 3GS, check out our roundup of reviews and news stories for each: Pre vs. 3GS: How To Make the Right Decision. Or you could just skip to this sweet flowchart.

• OK, OK, so you're set on that durned iPhone, but which one? The $99 3G? Or $199 step-up 3GS? $100 is a lot to think about (even if it amounts to less than two months of actual service): 3GS vs 3G Feature Chart Comparison

First, a direct translation: AT&T's upgraded (or more accurately, upgrading) 3G network claims data download rates of 7.2 megabits per second. Though that's the lingo used to describe bandwidth, it's important to remember that those are not megabytes. AT&T's impressive-sounding 7.2 megabits would yield somewhere closer to .9 megabytes (900 kilobytes) per second, and that's only if you're getting peak performance, which you never will because...

That 7.2Mbps is theoretical, and due to technical overhead, network business, device speed and overzealous marketing, real world speeds are significantly lower. UPDATEDEven looking at the old hardware on the current 3G network—the networking guts in your iPhone 3G is technically capable of reaching the 3.6Mbps downstream that AT&T's network is technically capable of pushing. There are lots of reasons you don't ever see that. For one, it's limited to 1.4Mbps to preserve battery life—the faster you download, the faster you burn that battery. Another is congestion—all the a-holes watching YouTubes around you—and backhaul—the amount of pipe running to a tower, or more English-y still, the total bandwidth the tower has available. Another is proximity—the closer to the tower you are, the faster your phone is gonna fly. So for top speeds, you should sit under a deserted tower with plenty of backhaul.

As you can see on our chart above, our tested speeds for everything from EV-DO Rev. A to WiMax ran at anywhere from one half to one sixth their potential speed. Accordingly, Jason found AT&T's network to run at about 1.6Mbps with the iPhone 3G S—about a third faster than with the 3G, though he was probably still connecting at 3.6Mbps rates—the 7.2 rollout won't be complete until 2011, according to AT&T.

AT&T-style HSDPA is expected to reach out to an eventual theoretical speed of 14Mbps, which will undoubtedly make the current 3G networks feel slow, but won't necessarily blow them out of the water. That's the thing: the iPhone, and indeed just about all high-end handsets on the market today, operate at speeds that are reasonably close to the limits of 3G technology. In a funny sort of way, the iPhone 3GS is already a bit out of date.

So what's next? And what the hell are those really long green bars up there? Those are the so-called 4G (fourth generation) wireless technologies. Americans can ignore HSPA+ and EV-DO Rev B. for the most part, and given that they're the slowest of the next-gen bunch, shouldn't feel too bad. And anyway, as Matt explained, WiMax and LTE are what's next for us.

Both Verizon and AT&T are within a couple of years of deploying LTE in their networks, and WiMax is already out there in some cities. Our own WiMax tests on Clearwire's network peaked at an astounding 12Mbps—nearly eight times faster than the iPhone 3GS on AT&T. And even if WiMax is shaping up to be more of a general broadband protocol than a cellular one, this is the kind of thing that'll be in your phones in a few years, and the promises are mind-boggling: earlier this year, Verizon's LTE were breaking 60Mbps.

So in short, your brand-new, "S"-for-speed iPhone is pretty speedy—as long as you only look to the past.