Late Friday night I started reading the various blog and news sites discovering that the iPhone was selling out (which turned out to not be totally true..) regardless I decided to head out to the Apple Store just over the border in New Hampshire. I arrived to find about 20 people in line so we decided to stick it out. They came out and said they had well over 100 8gb iPhones left so I was good to go. It was certainly much better than some folks who had been sitting around in lines for days and camping out.. no need for that.

About an hour later I had my new shiny iPhone. And let me say it’s a pretty impressive device. The only thing I have been disappointed with so far is the battery life however I can’t totally blame that on the phone because I seem to work and live in the lowest service areas in all of Massachusetts so the damn phone keeps trying to acquire and transfer data over a low signal thus using more battery power.

Overall though I have been very impressed with it’s performance. It does what I ask it to do and doesn’t crash or freeze. Mobile Safari is a pretty nice mobile browser compared to the other shitty ones floating around out there all it needs now is some flash support to make it even better. The GPS functionality is really cool and usually it acquires my location in 5-10 seconds. Also you can take a screenshot of any screen on the iPhone if you hold the home button then hit the sleep button, it saves it to your photo roll.

Anyway it’s a short week here for me, in a couple days I head north to Canada to visit Jen’s family.. let’s hope that the data roaming feature works!

  So just a couple days now till the much anticipated iPhone 3G hits the stores and I am pretty much 99% sold on getting it at this point. I know I know, it’s an over priced closed device that nobody should buy, don’t pay into the Apple Machine.. blah blah blah. Truth is I never even considered getting the original iPhone instead settling for a iPod touch. I needed an iPod and I didn’t have 300gb of music to store like some folks do and the multi touch screen really appealed to me.

This time around though they’ve pretty much fixed or added anything I didn’t like about the original. First off it was a 1st generation device which you knew would be improved upon in short order. Second it was overpriced, I couldn’t justify the cost of the original plus the data fees. Third there really was no expandability to the device. All of those things among others are now fixed and I honestly can justify the costs associated with it. I’ve used and managed a variety of devices from Windows Mobile, to Palm, to Blackberry. Most of them were a bitch and a half to manage, some downright suck ass (Blackberry I am looking at you..)

The additional features some of which I never expected like Microsoft Exchange Active Sync support and some pretty sweet GPS capability with Google Maps, and even add to that the ability to download and install apps from the new “App Store” pretty much finally sold me on it. Sure you can bag on Apple all you want but what they are doing for the average Joe and for the SmartPhone industry in general is great (ie Mobile Me “Exchange for the Poor Man”). Sure some of this functionality has been around for a while but what makes Apple successful is they make it easy enough for any average Joe to use. Many tech heads can’t look past their own geekery and see that this device appeals to the masses. So even if you can’t do something ridiculous on it or if it doesn’t have some obscure ass feature nobody cares about people will still buy it.

Well today Apple had one of their trademark press conferences where Steve Jobs introduced a fixed up iPod lineup. Among these were a new iPod Nano, new iPod “Classic” and the iPod “Touch”. Now I must admit, I hated Apple for a good long time because they were such a pain in the ass to deal with. But since OS 10, Intel processors, and their newer modern design’s they have started to grow on me. Steve Jobs and Apple are also marketing geniuses, who else creates this kind of hype before a press conference anyway? I don’t really think anyone else can compare. Apple today however fumbled a bit by slashing the price on the iPhone significantly, angering allot of the early iPhone adopters.

I’ve been toying around with buying an iPod for a couple years but always end up holding out for something better. I’ve always loved their sturdy design/case and their easy to use interface. Sometimes it’s refreshing not to have to fuck around with something for hours on end to get it to work.. these are things someone in IT lives for. In the end I will probably wait a while… again and see if they cut the price. And also see how hackable it ends up being, it would be nice to be able to check a mail client, use google maps etc in the same way its used on an iPhone.

Yep, I must be a gay fanboy.

DEFCON 2007 is underway this weekend in Las Vegas, NV a perfect opportunity for Dateline NBC to try and up its undercover reporting series, unfortunately for them this time they were the ones who were uncovered. Dateline reporter Michelle Madigan was revealed as she was hiding in the audience among other hackers and DEFCON staff announced a game called “Spot the undercover reporter” turns out, they really knew who she was all along.

Too bad. They knew when her plane took off. They knew when her plane landed. They knew when she picked up her non-press attendee pass (human in the vernacular). They followed her around. They knew when she walked into the ladies room to wire up, camera and sound. She knew that the camera was not allowed but did it anyway, and told a goon that she was doing so.
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Oopsie.. looks like when you are attempting to pull off an operation like this you should make sure you aren’t dealing with people smarter than you. Their tactics may work against dumbass criminals and pedophiles but it isn’t going to work when you are dealing with a smarter crowd, as she found out the hard way. She was chased out the door by around 150 DEFCON attendees who were shouting questions at her as she made her way to the exit, she promptly entered her car hidden camera and all and tried to go out the wrong way.. having to back up again and be harassed by the contingency following her.

Looks like Dateline wasted some cash on that run and they won’t be getting their “Story” after all. I’m sure Joe-Bob somewhere in America would have been appalled at what the “Hackers” were up to. But when push comes to shove most of these guys do nothing illegal and actually help companies to resolve security holes before they get out into the general public. Recent iPhone flaws that were discovered were patched up in short order by Apple among countless other situations where hackers have helped keep the average oblivious computer user safe.

Hey at least they sent a semi hot reporter! So here’s to Dateline for getting owned I wonder if Chris Hansen was going to be involved in this story? Check out more coverage on Google News and also the Youtube video of the chase..

Update: Wired Threat Level has a ton more information and photos here.