Why? You’ll buy it anyway, you know.

No, no, no, there’s nothing new to buy. I’m just trying to find out how stable it is and how polished the new features are. Early adopters sometimes bleed for their efforts and I’m not into that.

You’d bleed for Steve Jobs.  You know you would.

As they say, you can tell the pioneers by the bleeding arrow wounds.

It’s only a flesh wound.

Shame about its location, “down there”.

Hey!

iPad --> $800 cat toy

iPhones? Feh, Android is where all the cool kids hang out.

Cool kids, pshaw. Let them have their droidiness; I’ll keep my Appleeness.

Love my iPhone. Not as much as I love my wife (she has a Motorola Droid (I bought it for her), but she doesn’t use it nearly as extensively as I use my iPhone), but more than I love my Xbox.

I have nothing against the Android based gadgets, but, having used it, I prefer the way the iPhone operating system works. Android isn’t as polished or as predictable.

Actually, I kind of liked the Palm Pre OS nearly as much as the iPhone OS. I just don’t like the devices that it’s running on, there aren’t many applications to run on the things, and I don’t think Palm is going to make it too much longer without someone coming in and buying them up. But the OS they designed is really nice.

Yep. It’s just like Apple and IBM back in the 90s. You can buy an iPhone, or you can buy any machine made from a variety of companies that run Android.

The iPhone OS is pretty slick. But you have to buy an iPhone to use it. Eventually it’s going to be relegated to 4% of the market like Macs.

Very possibly--although I would guess more like 20-25% of the smart phone market since there isn’t necessarily a price break for going with something else. It wasn’t just freedom of choice that drove PC sales, it was cheaper prices. It cost me about the same to get her Android as it did for me to get my iPhone 3GS and our contracts are pretty close to the same, too.

The questions in my mind are these:

Will Apple get around to allowing the iPhone on other carriers. That will spur a big bump in sales--my wife would have asked for an iPhone if they had been available on Verizon since she is more loyal to the carrier than she is to the device. I’ve been an AT&T client for as long as I’ve owned a cell phone (although for a little while in the 90’s, it was Cingular instead of AT&T), but I probably would be more loyal to the device than to the carrier.

Can Google keep a Linux-like splintering of the Android market that could work against it when the user experience from device to device is wildly different. That’s not just OS versions, but also modifications to the OS by the carriers and the handset manufacturers. We looked at a few different Android devices and, let me tell you, the experience from one to the next was often very different. Apple is the perfect control freak, which gratifies my own control freak nature and drives some others crazy.

Unless HTC does something interesting with their own rumored operating system or Windows Mobile 7 is more compelling than I imagine, and unless RIM can somehow bring their Blackberries out of the corporate environment and into the consumer market, I don’t think there’s much to stop Android from being the big dog in the consumer smartphone market. But there isn’t much to make me think that Apple can’t hold a really good sized chunk of that market--more, by far, than their desktop share.

But, then, I tend to over think things.

Yeah. PHPbb3 now has a function built into it where you ask the user a basic question before they can sign up. The owner of the site sets up the question and a list of acceptable answer.

Out of all the questions I’ve set up, my personal favorite is “Can kittens breathe fire?”

Is the answer yes? If it isn’t, I’m not sure I could prove that I’m human.

Anyway, my first step will be updating the CMS. I’m a few versions back; maybe they have some tools that can help. I haven’t forced people to register to comment (although I prefer it that way), but that’s a possibility for the future. I don’t want to have to moderate comments, I don’t like closing comments (although I’m doing that more and more on individual threads), and I’d like it to be easy for anyone to come through and say their piece.

I hate spammers not only because cleaning up after them sucks but because they are going to force me to make it harder for casual visitors to actually use this site. That makes me angry.

Did you see the alien autopsy of the “lost” engineering example of the new iPhone ?