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It’s almost certain that Apple will unveil a new iPhone at the WWDC in San Francisco tomorrow, and possibly some other important products, including a new version of OSX.

There is also a rumour on the Internet that Microsoft will try to undermine Apple’s news by announcing the future support for Blu-Ray on the Xbox platform.

Either way, it should be an interesting afternoon.

The iPhone is a good thing.

In a stagnant and decadent market, it has injected a much needed revival in innovation; something the mobile telecommunications industry desperately needed. The problem is, despite all it’s goodness, it is still lacking so very much.

I have never owned a smart-phone, for a few simple reasons; the high cost has never justified the feature-set, especially when the said feature-sets are so doggedly inconsistent. Windows Mobile handsets have Mobile Office, which I really want, but they don’t have the hard-drive the iPhone sports (not to mention the style, have you seen Windows Mobile handsets?). The iPhone has Wi-Fi, but no 3G. And no tactile keyboard (stupid, stupid, stupid). The Nokia E65 has Wi-Fi and document viewing, but a micro-sized screen. The recently announced Nokia N810 has everything I want, but no goddamn phone!

I’m going to single out the N810 in this article, rather than bash the iPhone (it’s been done).

Nokia make good machines. I’ve always liked their handset build quality and the Symbian Operating System. They pack in good features with an attractive price. Unfortunately they seem doomed to remain hopeless at tackling the high-end smart-phone arena (for the life of me I still don’t know why they don’t release a Windows Mobile handset, Symbian is great and all, but it’s not suitable for the high-end market). The Nokia N810 is the closest I’ve seen to an appealing smart-phone from the Nokia.

The problem is it’s not a smart-phone. It’s an ‘Internet Tablet’, whatever the hell that is. Why can’t they release a model with an antena? The ‘Internet Tablet Phone Edition’? Why can’t they release a phone with Linux, Wi-Fi, 3G and the super web browser they’ve developed (no, I’m not talking about the Communicator)? They can keep the ‘Internet Tablet’ as a separate product line, but give me the smart-phone I want! Doing so would strongly challenge the iPhone, something the mobile handset makers seem to be struggling at. Please, Nokia, please; do the right thing.

Steve Jobs spoke to the entire company on the eve of the iPhone launch about the gravity of the iPhone and what it means to the company. He also alluded to some crazy things coming down the pipeline, such as new Macs that are “off the charts” and hinted at iPods with OS X.

read more | digg story

Source: Ars Technica

When asked to respond to the availability of Safari on Windows, Mozilla’s vice-president of engineering, Mike Schroepfer, expressed his desire to see Apple supporting open standards for the web:

“It’s hard to predict what will happen with market share but we are excited to see the resurgence of interest in browsers. The availability of Safari on Windows reinforces the importance of browsers as critical components of today’s Internet experience. Mozilla’s mission is to promote an open, interoperable and participatory Internet. We encourage Apple to put their weight behind open standards and the open Web to help ensure all browser users, regardless of operating system or browser, can enjoy the best possible Web experience.”

Microsoft’s Kevin Kutz, a Windows business director, has this to say:

“With hundreds of millions of Windows users, it’s not a surprise that a company that makes web browsers would want it to work with Windows. We’re glad our customers have a choice in browsers, and we think that Internet Explorer 7 is the best available.”

I think one digg user summed it up best:

Mozilla: *YAWN*
Microsoft: *YAWN*
Opera: “Why didn’t anyone ask us?”

Apple recently released a version of their web browser Safari for Windows (XP and Vista) as a public beta, in an apparent attempt to nab some of the browser market away from Internet Explorer and Firefox (at a paltry 5% it certainly has a lot of work to do, although admittedly its share has, until now, been ceilinged by the Mac’s limited market share up).

I’ve been trying it out all day, so I thought I’d document my initial impressions:

• It looks identical to the Mac version; the only noticeable deviation from the theme is the Windows buttons in the top right of the window.
• The Apple site claims it renders 75% faster than IE but I haven’t noticed any speed advantage over IE7, Firefox 2.0 or Opera 9 (It should be noted that my impression is based on my use of a 3mbit broadband connection, users on slower connection speeds may indeed experience faster browsing).
• Automatically imports your other browsers (IE, FF and Opera) history and cookies. Also supports bonjour.
• Alt-Enter doesn’t open a new tab by default. Annoying. In fact none of the standard IE/FF keyboard shortcuts seem to work (this can be changed).
• Text looks funny, like cleartype on steroids. It looks nice at first but destroys your eyes after a while. You can turn it down in the preferences but it still looks funny to me.
• Uses OSX widgets in webpages (something Firefox doesn’t do on the Mac apparently, this will change in 3.0), which is interesting but irritating if you like a consistent UI.
• Has a nifty bookmark manager, although features nothing you can’t do with a few Firefox extensions.
• Performance is less than satisfactory, but it doesn’t suffer from memory-leaks a la Firefox.

Anyway, it’s not a bad browser, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen or done before. I can’t see it catching on with regular Windows users, unless they buy into the iPhone thing. Anyway, a least it’ll make testing sites on multiple browsers that much easier.