I’ve been spending some time with the iPhone 2.0 software, and I have to say I’m pleasantly surprised with many of the new enterprise features.

Setting up an iPhone to connect to an Exchange server was quick, and relatively painless. Apple’s implementation of ActiveSync supports self-issued server certificates directly, and so smaller businesses can work the CEO’s iPhone without having to set up an expensive third-part certificate. Apple does provide a tool for helping configure multiple devices, and if you don’t use it each phone will have to be set up by hand, so you may prefer to stick with Blackberry or Windows Mobile for ease of management.

There is one big omission which will hamper the iPhone’s enterprise uptake: mail isn’t encrypted. So if your business is regulated in any way, and your staff work with sensitive information, then the iPhone - version 2.0 or not - will be strictly off limits. The fact there’s also no remote wipe (Apple says you can use Exchange’s tools for this, but our test device couldn’t be seen in Exchange’s device management tools) or device management beyond setup tools will also count against Apple’s latest software releases. Until Apple really understands the needs of enterprises the iPhone will remain the shiny phone on the CEO’s desk, not the workhorse device used by hundreds and thousands of staff.

Still, it is only a second generation device, and there’s plenty of time for Apple to fix its deficiencies.

If you really do want to use the iPhone with Exchange, what’s the experience like? We took some screenshots to show you what you and your users will see.

Making the inital connection is easy - all you need are an email address, a user name and password, and the DNS name of the Exchange server on the public internet. Once connected to an Exchange server you can manage accounts from the iPhone’s settings menu. You’re able to quickly switch functions, as well as choosing just how much mail is synchronised.

Mail can be pushed automatically using Exchange’s built-in ActiveSync (Apple has licensed it from Microsoft), or can be collected on a schedule. If you’re roaming and need to keep data bills to a minimum, switching to a manual fetch will help keep data traffic to a minimum - as well as increasing battery life!

Once you’ve set up Exchange mail, you’ll be able to see a list of all the mail folders in your Exchange account. The iPhone (unlike other mobile devices) will only automatically synchronise your main inbox, and you’ll need to manually download the contents of any other folders you wish to read.

Of course Apple handles HTML mail just fine, and you’ll get a good overview of your mailbox contents with headers and the first couple of lines of any message.

Mail doesn’t take up that much space - a large Exchange account (with sensible download windows) will only take a few tens of MB out of the iPhone’s 8 or 16GB storage. That leaves you plenty of space for applications - which already include tools from Salesforce.com and from Oracle. Applications download from the App Store, and open from the familiar launcher.

(Oh yes, and the new iPhone software makes it easy to take screenshots - just hold down the home button and tap the power switch. The screen will fade for a moment and you’ll find the image in the device’s camera roll.)

–Simon

But you’ll still need iTunes on every desktop to install applications. Would you put that in your organization?
We spent Friday with Telefonica at their new headquarters in Madrid, a campus laid out around a lake to deal with the climate; solar panels, vanes that push the heat up, a tower in each corner and wide roofs to add shade plus wireless antenna sprouting in the flowerbeds like candelabra. Telefonica has technology plans for the networks it runs as well, which includes O2.

Even Telefonica can’t actually show off the new iPhone yet: O2’s Steve Alder kept his in his pocket and described it instead. What he did show off was the price: free if you pay £45 or £75 a month for the tariff or £99 if you want the cheapest £30 a month plan. Existing iPhone owners get the same deal, although you have to sign up for the full 18 month contract again. None of the plans let you use the iPhone as a modem with your laptop and the price for international roaming is a hefty £50 for 50MB of data.

O2 will finally have a business tariff for the 3G iPhone, including a single bill for multiple handsets. And if you only want Exchange ActiveSync. O2 will be able to set that up for enterprises directly rather than making you put iTunes on each user’s desk to do it. You’ll be able to install apps you write for your own business without iTunes as well, according to Alder, but if you want to buy apps for the iPhone they’ll still have to come from the iTunes store - and you’ll still have to install them to each phone individually, through iTunes.

That’s going to hold back acceptance of the iPhone in the enterprise, which is used to the security and manageability of the BlackBerry. Even Microsoft has got the message, using industry standard OMA DM to control Windows Mobile 6.1 devices with the new System Center Mobile Device Manager using Active Directory. If you want to, you can force files on Windows Mobile handsets to be encrypted, block any application from Facebook clients to pre-installed games or stop users synching POP3 and IMAP email at all, as well as installing and updating apps automatically over the air to specific users or particular AD groups. And the VPN on Windows Mobile now uses IPsec and IKE (Internet Key Exchange) v2 rather than SSL for improved security and better management of mobile connectivity. Apple is picking IPsec too - but Cisco’s proprietary implementation of it.

O2 probably didn’t get the choice about getting involved in installing apps on iPhones; Apple is taking a  generous 30% royalty and doesn’t want to share that with operators now that it has to subsidize the cost of the phone. O2 plans to produce some apps of its own, which fits in with chief operating officer Julio Linares’ view that the future is services - the usual mobile operator to becoming just an Internet pipe. Even iPhone cynics like me have to be impressed by the usability; 80% of O2 iPhone users are actually using email, Web browsing and the other tools that make it a smartphone.
-Mary
 

My phone knows where I am, and when I flew to Geneva the other week it knew what time it was; the operator pushed a time signal and Windows Mobile 6 happily picked it up. It confused me when I took the phone out to change the time - but it also meant the appointment with the contact number for the taxi driver was up on screen where I needed it. I connected my PC to the Orange World Wi-Fi in the hotel (at the fifth time of asking; if you’re using a mix of numbers and letters as your username and password, please use a font that allows the user to distinguish 6 and G ). My PC sat there stubbornly believing it was on UK time, even though it had a French IP number.

I’m not expecting every PC to have a GPS in, and it doesn’t need to. Never mind battery life, it’s useless inside anything bigger than a garden shed and even in a city canyon it’s impractical; it took my O2 XDA Stellar 15 minutes to get a GPS fix in Covent Garden this week. What I’m after is a utility that uses the location services like Spotigo, Aruba, Navizon, PlaceSite, Skyhook and all the rest that give you location based on your IP address/what wireless access points you can see and when it gets a location that’s different from the time zone Windows is set to, up pops a prompt asking if you want to change it. If you want to be all social networking about it, the utility could upload my location to services like Facebook - or preferably just my timezone, as I’m sure burglars read Facebook too. I could have a widget in the Sidebar showing who’s in the same timezone as me or get an alert if someone I know is in the next street.

I’ve used Navizon on Windows Mobile for the last year to get locations and I like it but the desktop version is a Java applet and although the API supports time as part of the location info I haven’t found a timezone utility for it.

Skyhook’s Loki will do the locating and publishing bit. It’s pretty good at locating too; this is the service used by Google Maps on Windows Mobile and the iPhone and it knows where we live. Skyhook can use a combination of GPS, IP address, Wi-Fi and cell tower to cope with a range of environments.

Navizon uses user-contributed data for Wi-FI and cell tower and is either very accurate or about 2 miles out; Loki (and Google Maps Mobile) are either very accurate or not working at all.

Loki s obsessed with search; that’s because ads you click on make money. Personally, results in the same town as me may or may not be more relevant to be depending on how far ahead I’m planning and I don’t actually want any more browser plugins, thank you. But digging through the options - yes, it will change my timezone for me, or ask if I want to in case it’s wrong.

This would be a good service for tools like Xobni to use; this handy Outlook plugin shows a ‘heat map’ of the times of day a particular person sends and replies to email. That’s pretty useful already - it tells you that you have a much better chance of getting a reply from me between 10.30 am and 7pm or between 11pm and 1am than at any other time. Assuming I’m in the office; the location timezone service could tell you if I’m in California - and if Xobni was really smart and I said it was OK for you to know where I am (cue my usual call for an identity abstraction layer for the Internet), it could shift the heat map to California time. Or better still, it could calculate a different heat map for when I’m in California, when you’ll reach me between 9am and 11am, 2pm and 6pm and 9pm to midnight most days.

At the moment you can look at my Dopplr trips, or my Facebook status, or my most recent personal blog post or the last photo I posted on flickr to work out where I might be - if I’ve remembered to update them and you remember to check them (a friend assumed I’d be in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress this week, and ended up having a night in instead of coming round for dinner). That’s both of us doing extra work that the computer should be taking care of and I’m sure that’s the wrong way round. 

There’s two halves to this. One is that location is a really useful service (see my 2008 Technology Resolutions), especially as more of us work from home, travel around more and run out of time to arrange meetings with friends. And that’s the really big thing. I want computers to start saving me time and getting more done for me, not by making it faster to get my accounts done or by letting me try 90 versions of my Web site in the time it used to take to write one, but by working out the context and giving me opportunities. If my To Do list says I need to get something from the Lurgashall Winery for a friend and I get a message from a friend in Billingshurst needing help with something and a mail from a client in Horsham wanting to talk about work, having my PC suggest that I’m in Guildford on Monday is handy (and we think it’s why Microsoft wants Yahoo!); having it know I’m actually in Guildford today even though I didn’t update my calendar and give me an itinerary for the afternoon is even more useful. And it’s the computer doing the running around, not me. For that, I’ll put up with another browser plugin.
-Mary

The latest patent idiocies could put phone prices up and increase your security bill. And only one of the cases would be fixed by my own theory of patents (if you don’t yourself manufacture the item or use the process protected by a patent, I think you shouldn’t be able to benefit from the patent by extorting money from companies that do go to the effort of actually making something).

That would get rid of the patent trolls who buy up IP and sneak it past the patent office. Take the owners of the ludicrous new smartphone patent, which seems to ignore more prior art than I could shake a phone battery at. Read through http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=7,321,783&OS=7,321,783&RS=7,321,783 and you’ll find it’s not Nokia, RIM, Microsoft, HTC, Palm, Apple, Symbian, Sony Ericsson, HP or Motorola claiming to have invented the smartphone; it’s one Ki Il Kim of Minerva Industries, Los Angeles.

Minerva is part of a company called Gigatech, which claims to hold patents on “user-operated cell phones for audio/video and sensor event reporting” - and on air bags and seat belts. The company is also claiming patents for memory cards, connecting phones by USB and putting a mobile phone holder and charger on the dashboard of your car.

Minerva/Gigatech claims that CEO John Kim was 2003 Businessman of the Year - although the link that’s supposed to say who gave him the award reloads the same page and Google can’t find any reference to the honour. 2003 was, however, the year that Kim won a lawsuit against Shell to get royalty payments for those sun shades you stick to the inside of your car windows. Just what the inventor of the smartphone would be working on…

Click on the Products section of the Gigatech site and you’ll find a list of patents rather than phones; the News section is full of the lawsuits the company has filed. Last summer it sued 41 mobile phone companies, and this time the LA lawyers didn’t even wait until the patent came through to sue Nokia, RIM, Apple, HP, Motorola, HTC, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Helio, Sprint, AT&T and a few others for good measure.

And even though Gigatech and its lawyers are based in LA the lawsuits are filed in Texas, in a court that’s notorious for enforcing dubious patents.

Minerva wasn’t even founded until 1996. That’s the year that Nokia shipped its first Communicator - and Philips sold a long-forgotten phone with an Internet connection then as well. By 1996 I’d been using an analogue Motorola StarTac to get online from the train for months (I plugged it in to an HP OmniBook and read my mail on CIX at 2400 baud and 125 miles an hour on the journey from Bath to London).

It’s a little more complicated with Trend Micro and Barracuda. Trend says its patent covers gateway virus scanning and wants Barracuda to take the open source ClamAV software out of its appliances. Barracuda says ’shan’t’ on the grounds that “scanning for viruses at the gateway is an obvious and common technique that is utilized by most businesses worldwide.” You’re not supposed to be able to get a patent for anything that could be classed as specialist subject - the bleeding obvious.  Between then Trend and Barracuda are wading through the US patent system, US federal court and - because some of the software was written outside the US - the import-overseeing International Trade Commission. And while patent lawsuits are two a penny these days, this one raises some interesting issues around open source and patents.

Open source projects that infringe on patents can be hard to shut down, if they’re widely distributed. But it’s easier to take legal action against a company with money and business to lose than against individual programmers. Adopt an open source project that’s not covered by a patent promise and you’re getting a responsibility as well as a resource.

SourceFire acquired ClamAV last summer and its open source background with SNORT means the company will understand that open source isn’t a free ride. Less experienced companies - whether they’re developing or just using open source software - might not realise that one reason you pay more for commercial software is that the software company you buy it from is funding a legal department who can take the time to go to court and building up a patent portfolio of its own. Mutually assured patent claims keep a lot of cases out of court. 

Interestingly, Barracuda is going down the open source route in compiling its case against Trend and asking the community for examples of software that had network virus scanning features before September 1995. Maybe the best thing for patent reform would be a comment page for every patent application where we could point out all the academic papers and shipping products that predate the ‘invention’.

We spotted a blog post the other day claiming that the iPhone set new standards as an open phone platform . Rubbish, I said; you can’t install your choice of applications without hacking the pone via an image bug in the browser - and if you do, then you can’t get the updates that come out because they fix the hole and lock the iPhone right up again. How can you call that open? Apple may have an SDK on the way, but the iPhone is as closed as one of LG’s shiny bling machines.

The examples in the article look odd to British eyes, as we’ve become used to ubiquitous high-speed data and unlocked smartphones. You can run Google Maps and get your location from the mobile phone masts? You can do that on Windows Mobile, and you can have Live Search and Yahoo! Go on there too, along with more apps than you can shake a stick at. And you can search your emails properly (once you upgrade to Windows Mobile 6; if your operator hasn’t made an upgrade available and neither has the manufacturer, check the enthusiast sites for ROM upgrades that won’t compromise security or stop you being able to get future updates).

What he means, said Simon, is that it’s a new level of openness on the part of the AT&T network in accepting a device like the iPhone in the first place. Look at the ill-fated ROKR; it had a paltry capacity for music, a terrible interface and was generally a pitiful excuse for a music phone, because Motorola did everything the networks wanted. Verizon put pressure on Palm to lock down the Bluetooth profile on Treo smartphones so you couldn’t transfer files directly to force subscribers to send the photos they took with a Treo through Verizon’s pay-for picture messaging service. Things haven’t been as open as we’d like them in the UK either, as Orange used to require applications running on its phones to be signed with its certificate before you could install them (though there was a relatively easy official unlock process).

For the iPhone to look like a beacon of openness in this scenario you have to ignore the fact that US operators like T-Mobile have been carrying much the same range of Windows Mobile devices we have in the UK and while they may be locked down a little more, big-name apps like Google Maps still run on them just fine. One thing to note: GSM-derived technologies and networks are still the minority in the US, and  CDMA networks like Verizon and Sprint have the largest market share – but CDMA’s influence is weakening. The plan to switch away from the tightly-controlled CDMA technology in favour of LTE – the successor to 3G/HSDPA/HSUPA – may be as much of a reason for Verizon promising to open up its network as the success of the ‘open’ iPhone.

But Apple tends to punch above its weight. In the last three months of 2007 Apple sold 2.3 million iPhones (and about the same number of Macs). Sony Ericsson shipped almost 31 million phones in the same time; Samsung sold 46.3 million. Motorola – a company that’s doing so badly at phone sales that CEO Ed Zander had to step down – sold 40.9 million phones. And Nokia shipped as many phones as everyone else put together - 133.5 million handsets.

The vast majority of those are feature phones rather than smartphones. Last time I checked RIM only had around 10 million BlackBerry users. But if Microsoft hits its predictions of selling 20 million Windows Mobile phones in the year ending this July (up from 11 million the previous year), that will be around 5 million in 3 months. Selling half that many for a smartphone you can’t even install applications on means Apple is having an impact – and if the networks do see sense in the US, open smartphones from Windows Mobile to Linux will get a lot more useful too.

–Mary

The Mac Air is cute, shiny, lightweight – and a true reflection of the Mac market in many ways.

Walking around the show floor at MacWorld shows the difference between the Mac and PC markets. There was the new Mac version of Office of course, Office 2008, which combines the logically arranged big icons of 2007 Office with the menus of every other version, adding the SmartArt and XML file formats without making a fuss about them. There was Bento, the build-your-own-catalogue tool for people who find FileMaker too complicated. There was Parallels, making an excellent business of putting Windows onto the Mac.

And then there were the colours. You can thank the Mac market for the different colour cases for iomega’s portable eGo hard drives, because Mac users are used to colours. We saw whale-print neoprene laptop sleeves, embroidered neoprene laptop sleeves, oversize purple leather handbags designed to take notebooks and more rubber, leather, plastic and metal iPod and iPhone cases than you could shake an unlocked iPhone at. Whatever your tastes in technology as personal jewellry, there’s a case to suit.

It’s great to see so much style; when I bought my Portégé 2000 back in 2001, I hunted high and low for a stylish, small case that didn’t make me feel like a corporate drone. I had to go to a Japanese stationery store in San Jose to find a protective sleeve and even then it was black. Now, whether your heart’s desire is a MacBook Air – the first Apple notebook in a very long time that you can truly call ultraportable – or a 17” MacBook Pro that needs its own wheeled suitcase, you can snap on a red cover or stick on a Van Gogh skin.

If your heart’s desire is a touchscreen Mac, that’s not quite as easy. You have to take your Mac to Axiotron and have it undergo major surgery to add a Wacom layer and remove the keyboard. (And if you want to use it in portrait mode, run BootCamp and Vista on it, as Apple hasn’t built screen rotation into the Leopard graphics drivers). If your heart’s desire is a MacBook Air and a second battery, you either need to be very skilled with a screwdriver (and we wouldn’t advise doing it on a transatlantic flight) or you have to go to BatteryGeek and buy an external battery that plugs into the MagSafe power port. You’ll have to wait until they make a new tip for the new MagSafe connector for the Air; Apple hasn’t licensed them the details of the MagSafe connector so they’re reverse engineering it, along with Nokia and dozens of other connectors.

If your heart’s desire is a 7” ultramobile, or a computer built right into a TV screen rather than an extra box (no matter how stylish the box), or any other niche form factor, there isn’t a Mac for you. That’s not a criticism of Apple; Apple is making computers for the largest audience it can get. It can’t afford to be HP, Dell, OQO, Motion Computing and Asus rolled into one. Apple isn’t going to license the Mac OS (or lets VMWare and Parallels virtualise it on non-Mac hardware) because that means supporting a lot of different hardware and writing a lot of different drivers. The choice isn’t what style of machine, it’s which Mac and what colour accessories.

The PC market is about choice in a different way. The Toshiba Portégé R500 is lighter than the Air even with an optical drive in the case and as thin as the thickest slice of the Air; it doesn’t look nearly as sleek but it was available last summer, and it wasn’t the first ultraportable PC, just the lightest one so far. Hardly any of them have looked as good as a Mac and while you can get stick-on skins for every HP laptop – and the new Artist’s Edition has gorgeous colours and designs printed right into the case – you can’t get a purple brushed metal clip-on case custom built to fit. By definition, Mac users don’t need the range of hardware choice you get with the PC (or they’d have bought a PC instead) and PC users will continue to envy Mac users their stylish design and colourful accessories

At least the lime-green neoprene sleeves will look good on my shiny white Toshiba R400 tablet…
-Mary

At the FiRE conference in San Diego, back in May, the science fiction wtiter and TV presenter David Brin set a group of CTOs a challenge. The men behind the technology decisions at EMC, Adobe and IBM were challenged to rethink the phone - completely.

The results were surprising - with the CTOs coming up with a phone that wasn’t one device, or one software platform, but a tool for brining together the many different portable devices we carry, and the many software services we use. All the information, all the ethnographic studies, all the ergonomic research they had told them one thing: “one size fits all” wasn’t enough, and it never would be. The trend to converged devices like Apple’s iPhone may suit the manufacturers, but it won’t suit the users.

Discrete devices got the same thumbs down. A Windows Mobile phone and a Zune sat in a bag are another technological dead end. They may be perfectly capable tools, with plenty of communications options - but they can’t work together. That’s another pitfall, as best of breed and jack of all trades struggle to support increasingly demanding users. We want it all - and we want it now.

It’s worth going back in time a decade or so, to the ubiquitous computing research of people like the late Mark Weiser. Xerox PARC labs was at the forefront of work in building prototype ubiquitous computing systems. Computing was going to be everywhere, Moore’s Law would see to that - so the big question was how it would fit together and fade into the background. PARC defined a set of communicating devices - from UI-less tabs that sat in a pocket or attached to other pieces of hardware, to communicating, informing pads, and the massive displays of walls. These were all linked together, taking information in and sharing it around the network.

Ubiquitous computing is about more than separate devices that need to be synchronised by a desktop PC - it’s about finding ways to let the devices interact. Apple has made a (pun intended) step in the right direction with its Nike shoe sensor and iPod integration, but that’s only part of the story. Runners are struggling to bring the information from that pairing to the route mapping tools from companies like Garmin, where GPS sensors plot out a run on Google Maps. Now imagine the benefit to a training regime of a set of linked sensors and services that not only plot routes and times, but also pace length and heart rates.

That’s the world the CTOs came up with. It’s a world where the phone acts as a communications hub, but other devices provide elements of the user interface, and remote services add computing power that small form factor devices can’t provide.

You can take that viewpoint and spin it out further, to 20 years from now when Western countries are struggling to support an ageing population., Distributed devices can help people maintain an independent life, while still providing doctors with information on physical capabilities and adherence to drug regimes. It’s a big brother world, but more like the American Big Brother organisations, where adult role models seek to inspire and educate. Tomorrow’s big brother phone will connect you to the world, and help you take advantage of the tools and services the digital world provides.

A brave new world indeed, but one without the solid lump of an iPhone in your pocket.

HP must be quietly fuming. The day after its huge launch - five iPAQs, three new business desktops, two new small business notebooks, solid start drives in five ultraportables plus a slew of home machines, including the impressive Blackbird 002 from the Voodoo division - the team at HP must have been hoping for some good coverage in the US papers. The Wall Street Journal did give Blackbird a good writeup - but all the columns where you might have expected to see a discussion of the MediaSmart TVs or the Windows Home Server or the first mainstream portables with solid state drives were filled with the news that Apple had upset existing customers by cutting the iPhone price.

Apple is news. It’s hip, it’s exciting, it’s controversial. And Steve Jobs knows exactly how to get the most press coverage. Asked about customers who’d just paid twice the price for the iPhone he suggested they try their luck asking for a refund from the store. And if they didn’t have any luck? “That’s technology,” he said. Actually it’s typical Apple.

By the evening of the next day Apple was getting even more coverage, making the evening news with a $100 refund for all iPhone owners. If the company really had sold the million iPhones it predicted but couldn’t prove, that’s a hundred million dollars - expensive free publicity, but it keeps the buzz going. I’d expect it to be half that, which is cheap for that kind of exposure.

Apart from the price cut, Apple didn’t have a lot that was new, apart from a version of the iPhone with no phone or camera. If you want to get some work done on the move, HP has the first 3G QWERTY GPS smartphone, which could give RIM a run for it’s money, along with a  4″ Wi-Fi PDA that could be the enterprise equivalent of the Nokia 770 tablet but running the apps you actually use in the enterprise. And those solid state drives; you’ll have to have £500 burning a hole in your pocket just for the drive - and you still have to pay for the notebook, but this marks the start of a real market in serious flash storage. 64GB is still smaller than anyone really wants, but it’s just enough to pay attention to. HP is buying from both Sandisk and Samsung, which means the drives are replacements for a standard hard drive, not proprietary components. And they’re going into notebooks you could do some real work on, unlike Sony’s delightful but niche micro PC.

Whether you measure it by size, revenue, profits, range of products or innovations HP ought to be beating Apple into a cocked hat. But it’s still Apple that has the buzz.

HP’s TV ads emphasis not the products but what the HP achievers - from Princess Fiona to Serena Williams - are doing with them. That’s what matters - but it’s also a marketing tack Apple took ten years back with the Apple Masters - I remember Bryan Adams and Douglas Adams showing off their Mac habit. Satjiv Chahil worked on marketing at Apple before moving to HP and he’s helped revolutionise the image of what used to be a rather worthy industry leader. Apple has switched to showing off industrial design, desirability and how cool its products make you look. And look which of them we’re all talking about.

Are looks everything? Take tablet PCs - I’m travelling with the gorgeous Toshiba R400, all glossy white and good looks, but also a powerful and flexible tablet. Guess which feature draws the compliments?

HP is adding the solid state drive and a sliver-thin battery to its 2710p tablet - I had to think three times to remember the name after talking about it all day and that says something - deliverying10 hours of battery life in something lighter than the R400. The screen is exactly the same size - 12.1″ widescreen - but a superslim bezel makes it look smaller. It has more ports than the R400 - and they bulk large all over the edges. Put the two of them side by side and the R400 looks Apple stylish; the 271p looks like a geek system that needs to go through one more design rev to bring out its inner beauty.

The R400 has the same viscerable desirability as the iPhone or the Blackberry Pearl. That tells you nothing about which is the better machine or whether the 2710p finally delivers a replacement for the beloved TC1000 and TC1100 where HP pioneered the tablet category. But it does tell you that Apple has succeeded in making us think good technology is only skin deep.
-Mary leaving New York for Seattle

First we saw mobile phone networks sharing base stations, instead of building them side by side. Now T-Mobile is using BT for it’s backhaul - the connection from the T-Mobile cellular network into the Internet - instead of building a network of its own duplicating what BT already does.

T-Mobile gets a virtual private network on the BT lines - just as Virgin gets a virtual mobile network on the T-Mobile network. Originally Apple planned to do have its own virtual mobile operator for the iPhone, but you have to employ a lot of customer service representatives, have a lot of phone lines and be ready to take the blame as well as the praise for the performance of someone else’s mobile network. When AT&T accepted a variant of the deal that Verizon turned down, which includes giving Apple a percentage of the revenue for all the calls made on iPhones, it worked out to cost Apple as much and make Apple as much money as running an MVNO on the AT&T network - but without Apple needing to do as much of the work.

Like using Amazon’s storage or Salesforce.com’s servers or Microsoft’s MapPoint service, you’re paying for the benefit of an infrastructure that your business doesn’t have to build and maintain. This is the network equivalent of Web 2.0.

The deal is also good news for BT, because it proves that there’s money in building a high-capacity 21st century network. Initially the service will run over existing leased lines but as BT builds out the network T-Mobile will move over to Ethernet. And that means converged mobile/fixed/VOIP telephony and complex network services all get easier - and possible cheaper. That is one big difference from what Apple is doing with the iPhone - which is limited to simple data connectivity on the EDGE network.
-Mary