Flick to the right folks. The iPhone is just a mere week away from launch now. This afternoon/evening AT&T and Apple sent out a pair of emails with a 24+ minute video attached detailing all sorts of info about the iPhone. If there is one thing I can say about these final weeks, the tension has obviously been getting worse and worse for me and many others waiting for this device. If nothing else can be said about Steve Jobs, it’s that his keen and yet wicked ability is like none other when it comes to dangling these little tidbits in front of us like yarn in front of a kitten. There’s actually so much news and hype right now I couldn’t begin to delve into it all for fear of a serious case of carpal tunnel.

At a minimum, I must applaud Apple and AT&T’s amazing work in promoting this device. I cannot think of anything including recent gaming systems that has gotten so much hype from the masses with almost no direct work to advertise and really push the item. They have really just announced it, kept it as secret as possible, and let their little calculated bits of info slide; letting us, the common man do all the rest for them. The endless blogs and podcasts have made this product one of the most celebrated devices next to the wheel.

Having watched through the video and seen the amazing things this phone can do in perspective for once, it really satisfies my mind, that I haven’t been wasting my time in following this phones development. It will truly go down in history as a game changer.

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Fantastic news. A long time ago I signed up with Apple and Cingular/AT&T’s mailing lists for info on the iPhone. Since that happened, I think I’ve seen maybe one or two pretty pointless e-mail’s from them. Today, one finally arrived with some good news. The e-mail mostly was reaffirming that the phone would be released on June 29th, and then was giving some pointers on how to prepare your info/pictures so you could quickly and easily transfer it over. Mostly common sense types of stuff.

Anyway, onto the exciting news. Though it has been talked about a lot if the iPhone would support Push type e-mail (email that is automatically delivered to you as it arrives. {a la Crackberry}), it has never really bothered me either way. Figuring in that most of my e-mail could be accessed by web browsers; and the fact that the iPhone has a great one. At the end of the day, it didn’t phase me much. The only thing that kind of bothered me was the worry of having to constantly hit send/receive like the Palm Treos. Well worry no more!

“iPhone is the first phone to come with a desktop-class email application. So now your phone can display rich HTML email with graphics and photos alongside the text. iPhone will even fetch your latest email every time you open the application and automatically retrieve your email on a set schedule, just like a computer does.”

This was the paragraph in the e-mail that freed me of all my iPhone-E-mail worries. I hadn’t even conceptualized they would add a timer like Outlook or other e-mail programs have, to automatically check for mail. But as it turns out, someone at Apple did. Another strong function that is pushing me ever closer to the edge of setting up camp outside my local Apple store.

Well, just having sat through my early afternoon catching up on the WWDC keynote address via live blogs, I must say that it was fairly boring and not much was newsworthy.

To preface there were a few exciting items for OSX Leopard. I rather liked the new finder and iChat. Though finder’s new found capabilities, or at least the shiny ones, are just going back through time and reusing an old idea; coverflow.

Steveo brought up a back-up program, called time machine at one point. He found it amazing but its basically a built in one touch backup software. Sure haven’t seen any of those before. But the metaphor of the time machine was well and alive throughout the rest of his performance. It seems that audience reactions were meager, and the whole thing certainly left me not blown away. Much of what he debuted for the new OSX is just rehashing old ideas, a few new little morsels that were relatively uninspired, and a few cracks on windows, especially vista (a platform which in all fairness really just reinvented the wheel for itself unlike the new OSX). Which, I should point out, that Mr. Jobs sided back up to in hopes of raising Apple’s minuscule stakes in the browser market by introducing Safari for pc’s. Hooray. (Can you feel my enthusiasm? I can’t).

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Let me start this by saying I’ve been following the development of the Apple iPhone for quite some time. And finding news on new developments has become a bit of an obsession for me. I’m readily awaiting it’s upcoming release on June 29th. So in the meantime I’ve been indulging myself with the new series of four iPhone ads. During my time watching these ad’s I noticed a few funny things. Perhaps slips of the ad agency who created them, or maybe little bits of thread Steve Jobs is dangling in front of us. Only time will tell. Anyway, the evidence is below. First up is a mysterious 12th button. In all the iPhone ads and demonstrations previous to these ads and even in the ads themselves there has only ever been 11 icons on the front screen to choose from. In a few frames during a close up shot of the hand model pressing the iPod button, it is visible that there are not three, but four buttons on the bottom row. Meaning? A new button has found its way into the space above and shifted all the other down or over one space. See the modified screen cap image below.

Click for full size image

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