Nokia Internet Tablets + Windows Mobile 6 != online

So I filed a "bug" on Nokia's maemo site a few months ago. This site is for the developers to be kept apprised of things they need to fix on their Internet Tablets (770 & n800). So my bug was to request them to add the ability for me to get online by connecting with a Windows Mobile 5 AKU3 or Windows Mobile 6 phone. This was due to the fact that Microsoft in their non-infinite wisdom completely dropped the "Dial-Up Networking (DUN)" bluetooth profile off their phones and replaced it with "Personal Area Networking (PAN)." Which is fine and dandy if you're running Windows XP or Vista. Which is also why I was bitching so much about OS X Tiger not supporting PAN for the longest time. Eventually Apple got of their lazy asses and fixed it in their 10.4.9 release.

But Nokia? No...they refuse to even acknowledge that they needed to have add this enhancement YESTERDAY. In fact, Daniel over at tabletblog.com started stirring the soup and ended up having the whole bug squashed...and not in a good way. Now Nokia's henchmen refuse to fix it citing the fact that there are hacks around it and that they don't want to do the paperwork to push it through. Why are they getting paid then? To attend conference after conference about Linux and push all this crap about openness when their whole operating system itself is closed-source? What a pain in the ass, and yet, they're the only kid in town right now. It won't be long before Palm releases their linux-based Foleo (much to the tech community's chagrin) and also Intel's MIDs are somewhere in the pipleine so hopefully that will stimulate someone getting off their ass to do something.

Of course Nokia is also migrating parts of their Maemo platform into a framework for open-source goodness, so hopefully someone else might take up the reigns and do something. From a user standpoint though, all I can do is wait.

iPhone...will it tether?

All the hoopla about the iPhone and yet there hasn't been a peep about the data plans and if I can hook my macbook or xp computers up to it or not.

If I was Steve Jobs, I'd say, "why would you need to tether? you've got the GREATEST web browsing experience right on the iPhone! In fact, we're doing users a favor by not letting them tether, because that's just one more thing that could crash the phone!" Which is the same lame excuse he used for not providing an SDK to developers at the WWDC.

Let's face it, the reason Apple did amazingly well with the iPod was because there is a walled garden. No one had access to the iPod's internal OS except for a few "trusted" developers, and the only official way to load songs onto your iPod was through iTunes. Its a great concept but it leaves very little wiggle room for those that don't want to play by Apple's rules. SO...my guess? A lot of people are going to be bitching a lot more about things they expected to be in the iPhone and are not there...

Jobsnote = underwhelming

Talk about underwhelming. Here's the problem, the iPhone...2 weeks before the big launch of something so huge that Apple can't take any risks to steal its own limelight, they had to give us one of the most mediocre keynote events ever... I mean seriously, how can you follow up something as huge of an announcement as the iPhone back in January. You can't. You can't try to top it, you have to give all the fans a snoozer to re-align their expectations. So there was no Macbook Nano, nor was there any new iMacs. There was just a website redesign, some demos of Leopard, and adding Safari to the mix.

My assumption is Apple wants to eventually use Safari to be the trojan horse of whatever the next big web services thing is. Probably once Safari hits version 5 or 6 will it suddenly be interesting. Until then....Zzzzzzzzz...