The Sprint CFO says that the HTC EVO can take on the iPhone 4. I know he thinks the EVO is great because it's his company, but everyone thinks their kids are the cutest kids in the world. There are always these quote, unquote "iPhone killers" that come along and are all the rage for about 15 minutes. Then brand confusion is created when you come out with another phone that's better a month later. EVO will go the way of the Palm Pre, mark my words. Remember when that phone was all the rage? Where is it now? What's the best Android phone, and who makes it? How does the average consumer understand the difference between buzzwords, brands, and operating systems like smartphone, HTC, Droid, Incredible, Google Phone, Android, & EVO? With Apple, you know the best one is the latest one, and they're released about once a year. Take LG for example... they announced that they are releasing 20 Android smartphones this year. Really? How will anyone know what to buy? The five so far are the LG GW620, the LG Optimus GT540, the LG Ally for Verizon, the LG Optimus Q LU2300 and the LG SU2300. Only 15 more confusing model numbers left to go this year. Will the average consumer sort through them, or just say I want the iPhone 4? Branding makes these phones sell. For example, the iPhone 4 has FaceTime and a Retina display. If we were to convert that into LG speak, or any other brand for that matter, it would sound like this...
The LG Fathom VS750 won't do video calls, but it does have Windows Mobile® 6.5 Professional installed with a screen that has 262K Color TFT & 800 x 480 Pixels. Apple has the branding thing going for them, so tell me how these other phones are going to compete?
Alright, so lets get some of the iPhone AT&T stuff out of the way. Cut back to late Monday night / Tuesday morning. Now, I'm a late worker anyway so I'm usually up around 3 and 4 in the morning. It turned out that everyone was twittering that the iPhone pre-sale would start at 3:00 my time. I figured I'd get it out of the way since I'm already up and I have stuff to do the next day. At 3:00 the store did, indeed go live and someone obviously dropped the ball. Most people have said it was AT&T's fault, but I don't think it was, completely. There were many steps involved to get the phone and it looked like most of them were checking AT&T's servers. I'd let the thing sit and chew on it while I did other things, then come back to it. Most of the time if would error out, but about 5 times I got to the "add to cart" section. I'm pretty sure once you're there, it's not AT&T's fault if you can't add it to your cart. After about 40 attempts or so, I gave up and ordered from AT&T, which is another mistake. If you have any issues with the phone on AT&T, you have to get them fixed through AT&T. If you have issues from buying from the Apple Online Store, you have to send the thing back to them. The best way to do it is to pick up in-store.
iAds are no doubt not only a money maker for Apple, but a way to fire back at Google. Steve Jobs tries to make it sound like he's not at war with Google. He cleverly choses his words to make everyone feel better. He's been quoted as saying, "We did not enter the search business, They entered the phone business." But search isn't Google's business. It's advertising. That's where all their money comes from. So these iAds are a way to make ad revenue the way Jobs wants to, and takes a slice of the Google pie, which will be served up cold, if you get my drift. The FTC has been looking into these iAds, but we'll see if they ever take the investigation any further. Having exclusive deals to run exclusive ads on an exclusively closed system is quite ballsy when you're already being criticized for being a closed platform. 
There has been an uproar over Google's decision to add photo backgrounds to their search page. I don't know if this is a "me too" moment for Google in order to look like Bing, or if it's actually a shot at Bing. Maybe it's Google's way of saying, "Look, we can add a picture to our homepage too, it doesn't mean the value of our algorithm changes." But everyone is up in arms over this. It's the end of a tradition. "Oh no, what will we do without a clean search page?" Well, iGoogle has been around forever, so this only changes it for people who use the default Google homepage. Plus, you can turn this option off. My opinion is that it is, indeed, a shot at Bing. Maybe they're getting a little uneasy since Safari 5 and iPhone 4 now have Bing search.
The leaked 
As someone who is surrounded with video technology on a regular basis, it really makes me laugh to look at a DVD and see a label that says, "Filmed in HD." This is what I see on many DVD's in the stores now days because it's a buzz word. The looping fireplace DVD I got for Christmas last year had this written on it, and it's just funny to see from a videographer's perspective because it just doesn't matter. No matter what camera you shoot it with, it still has to be down-converted to standard definition in order to be saved on a DVD. No matter what you do, a DVD is still a DVD.
