Very cool posts! A few comments: I have an iPhone…my reluctance with a designed-in, play-only device overcome by the need, driven by students, aggressive marketing requirements and demands of the school president where I now work, and the on-going development of the app store.

I was also a very late adopter of the MP3 phenom…mostly because I couldn’t stand the idea of NOT having RECORD capability on a music device.

The iPhone can be used with a bluetooth keyboard. Of course, you have to jail-break it to accept the software….Now we have the Droid and other metaPhones (More capable than ‘smart’ phones or PDAs by themselves), running Android…an Open Source OS.

This is a prime example of people thinking outside the box…given the limitations of the slick, but non-creative, play only capabilities of the iPhone, two paths appeared: The tech-savy went after the creation of a new Operating System (Android) for these devices, which could be further modified on an ad-hoc basis by other, software-tech-savy owners; and the pirates, who developed a hack which ‘broke’ the Apple lock on ‘only Apple approved’ software on these things.

The most successful aspect of the iPhone is, in fact, the App store….and by Jail Breaking your device, you suddenly have access to tons more applications, which allow, for example, creation of your OWN MSWord docs and Excel Spreadsheets….at a strictly business level.
This would be cool, if not for the Palm series of PDAs, which had these features years ago. I was very excited to hear about the Palm Pre…only to have my hopes dashed when it required signing up with an even worse network than AT&T. (It’s also a ‘year one’ product, and I have learned my le$$on about gen0 to gen1 product$)
Why can’t we just BUY AND OWN our PDA/Phones, and subscribe to whichever service we choose? This is how it’s done outside the US.

AIDA indeed! I have Facebook and Plaxo accounts, and visit them occasionally, but am snowed under with ‘friend’ requests from people I don’t know, product demos I’m not interested in, and the requests from people on several other Social Networking sites that I simply have no time to explore on any given day. I HATE that Yahoo has gone this way as well, since it mines my contact list and keeps throwing up psudo-requests from my own contacts, who, mostly, have no idea that they have ‘requested’ my chatter.

…part of the magic of all this media coolness is revealing the splash at the right time…and not showing or communicating the back-room/kitchen trials and disasters until well after the brand/movie/new toy has made it’s successful market debut…Hollywood really has been teaching the military about security, since before the turn of the century…actually the 1980s. I was there.