YouTube iPhone not the only H.264 player

The Associated Press reports on the iPhone quote Apple as saying, "The iPhone will be the first cell phone to use H.264." That's kind of a stretch since there are media players available for Palm Garnet OS, Windows Mobile and Symbian that can play H.264 videos. The OEM phones may not ship with the capability pre-installed, but for years it's been a fairly easy addition.

Ducks Win

After 4 rounds of playoff series, I was elated to see the Ducks hoist the Stanley Cup in celebration of winning the NHL championship. When I bought a 13 pack of tickets for the regular season, I never expected to also attend 12 playoff games that ultimately lead to the cup and these great pictures.

NYC Cab Caption Contest

I enjoyed this giant taxicab photo from Engadget and added my own caption.

Cool Toys for Grownups

If anybody is looking to buy me birthday gifts, check out these Cool Toys for Grownups.

Steve Jobs Inadvertantly Kills iTunes

I found Steve Job's open letter (Apple - Thoughts on Music) kind of funny.

What I'm laughing about is that Jobs is basically calling for the destruction of the iTunes Music Store. Think about it. If the record labels decide to just sell open, MP3 files; why do they need iTunes? Wouldn't they just create universalmusic.com, bmgmusic.com, etc. and start selling directly to the consumer? Why make Apple the middle man?

The ONLY reason the big four work with Apple is because iTMS is the ONLY way to sell DRM content to 80% of the portable player market. Heck, anybody can sell content to iPods if you remove the "DRM" requirement. Look at Podcasting. Without DRM the labels would eliminate as many middle men and competition as possible in order to maximize profit. Bye, bye iTMS, Napster, et. al.

I don't think Steve thought this one through. Without DRM, iTMS is only useful as a promotion tool. That might help smaller labels, but the big four don't need a promotion tool. Music promotion is their core business.

DivX at CES

Pure Pwnage visited the DivX booth for 45 minutes to give a rare, insider's commentary on the evolution of the show. The video is also available in HD on the same Stage6 channel. Don't forget to watch Jeremy and Kyle play Wii with Gej and pwn noobs from the CES audience, in part 2 of this video.

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Alternatives to Apple iPhone

If you were excited by the iPhone announcement, you may have missed photos of the LG wide-screen smartphone,LG KE850

The Sony w880 also looks promising.

The OpenMoko FIC Neo1973 Smartphone was announced several months ago and will be available in February, 2007.

As I've pointed out in previous postings, I'm not a big fan of all-in-one devices. Yes, the iPhone includes a camera, a music player, and PDA functionality. However, the 2 Megapixel camera isn't likely to replace my 10 Megapixel Pentax, the 8 Gig music player won't replace my 30 Gig iPod, and iPhone lacks the applications available on the iPaq. I expect my PDA to include Word, Excel, handwriting recognition, DivX Mobile Player, removable memory cards, IRDA, and maybe most importantly, the ability to install 3rd party applications.