I can’t believe I am going to dive into this issue. Who wants to bet that I’ll get torched and end up regretting writing about this tomorrow? At any rate, here it goes…

Okay, quick show of hands:

How many of you saw the $200 price drop in the iPhone coming so soon? I sure as hell didn’t.

Now how many expected the loud outcry from iPhone owners? I sure as hell didn’t.

Lastly, how many of you expected Apple to give every iPhone owner who bought their phone before the price drop a $100 store credit? You can probably guess my response to this last one.

I don’t own an iPhone and I probably won’t for a while. It’s not that I can’t afford it; I was able to afford one on June 29 and I can afford one now. I simply have no way to justify one considering the fact that I rarely use my current phone. I’m lame like that. That said, I don’t really know for certain how I would react to the $200 price drop on the 8 GB iPhone, but I suspect my reaction would be the same as it was when Apple unveiled the G4 iMac a mere two weeks after I got my iMac G3. And the time that I bought my iBook G3 only to see it replaced by the iBook G4 about two months later. And the time I bought my MacBook only to see it replaced by the Core 2…
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Price drops are good, right? Not if you already own an iPhone and found out yesterday that Apple would be knocking $200 off the price of the 8 GB model and dropping the 4 GB model completely, in which case you might be a little angry. Upset iPhone owners flooded online message boards and Steve Jobs’ own inbox. Today, Jobs wrote an open letter to iPhone owners, offering them an olive branch:

Third, even though we are making the right decision to lower the price of iPhone, and even though the technology road is bumpy, we need to do a better job taking care of our early iPhone customers as we aggressively go after new ones with a lower price. Our early customers trusted us, and we must live up to that trust with our actions in moments like these.

As a result of the outcry from iPhone owners, Apple will offer everyone who bought an iPhone a $100 credit for Apple’s online and retail stores. More information will be available from Apple’s web site next week. Stay tuned.

Okay, the Apple media event isn’t even over as I write this, so what you are about to read are very early first impressions. Enough with the formalities of an introduction, let’s get to it:

Ringtones

Why this wasn’t there when the iPhone was released is beyond me, though I think we all saw this coming eventually. .99 cents isn’t bad compared to some other ringtone services out there, but it strikes me as lame that in order to have the song and the ringtone, you need to pay $1.98. So it goes, I guess.

I wonder what other features itunes will sport, and whether Apple will continue the 7.x numbering or jump to 8.0.

iPod shuffle

All right, new colors, but no capacity boost?

iPod nano

Okay, this event was just the worst-kept secret in Apple’s history! Yes, the new nanos are exactly what was rumored. The new user interface looks quite slick (it was time for a refresh), and I appreciate the longer battery life for video playback, but, man, those poor nanos look so squished! I also find the colors to be a little bland. Classy, but bland. I’m sure my eye will adjust in time, however.

iPod Classic

I was not expecting the older iPod form factor to survive, however, but it makes sense considering the fact that the iPod Touch doesn’t have as high a capacity. Speaking of capacities, 80 and 160 GB? At the same prices as before? That’s just insane! Too bad I bought…
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Sometimes you get it right, sometimes you don’t. In the nearly three years I’ve been writing for Deep Thought, I’ve put on my pundit hat and made a number of predictions. So how’d I do? Let’s just say this: I won’t be starting a psychic hotline anytime soon--unless I want to be like Miss Cleo, that is. That’s one career path I’m not planning to follow, that’s for sure.

But I digress.

To start things off, let’s look at a classic prediction of mine from May 2005:

Also, there’s the issue of creating a user interface for these super phones that store contacts, send e-mail, take pictures, play movies, music, wash your car, make you breakfast, and do your taxes for you. It is very hard to make a decent single user interface that can handle all sorts of functions, especially considering the small size of cell phone screens. It has the potential to become an unusable mess, or, as Steve Jobs puts it, a “tortured user interface.” If anyone could pull it off though, it would be Apple. I don’t see Apple going in that direction anytime soon, however.

I got that first part right! Apple came out with a phone that went against the grain of today’s smart phones by designing a phone with a larger screen and no physical keyboard. The result has been a very nice user experience. On the other hand, I completely blew it when I said that I didn’t see Apple releasing a cell…
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Much to the disappointment of, well, nobody really, Palm cancelled the much-maligned and derided Foleo, a subnotebook computer designed to complement Palm’s PDAs and smart phones, before it even hit the market.

The announcement was made by Palm CEO Ed Colligan in a post to the company’s blog:

In the course of the past several months, it has become clear that the right path for Palm is to offer a single, consistent user experience around this new platform design and a single focus for our platform development efforts. To that end, and after careful deliberation, I have decided to cancel the Foleo mobile companion product in its current configuration and focus all of our energies on delivering our next generation platform and the first smartphones that will bring this platform to market.

The door was left open for another Foleo-like product in the future, however, based on their next-generation mobile software platform.

The cancellation comes at a cost: a “limited charge of less than $10 million dollars” will be assessed on Palm’s quarterly earnings.

Since it was announced in May, the Foleo has been the target of largely negative feedback. Late last month, Engadget posted an open letter to Palm, suggesting, among other things, that the Foleo be put down. It looks like Palm was listening.

Deep Thought’s take:
Killing off the Foleo is probably the best thing Palm could have done right now. What disappoints me, though, is that the Foleo could have been so much more.

I think there…
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