I am a happy camper in that my iPhone ordered through AT&T came today via FedEx. Originally I was told at the AT&T store last Friday that I would have to return to the store to pick up the phone, which is now obviously not true. I’m in the middle of unboxing as I write (There Will Be Pictures) and activation.

I know a few of my readers ordered their iPhones directly from Apple. Have you guys seen them?

So, while you wait for unboxing pics, here’s a link to David Pogue’s iPhone the Musical

Technorati Tags: iPhone, Apple, AT&T, iPhone unboxing, iPhone activation

Yup. I am just a little bummed. I was 55th in line (got there around 5:30pm) at the local AT&T store in Exton, PA and by the time the part of the line I was in got to the front, they had already run out of 8GB iPhones and a bunch of people either left or placed a direct order with AT&T for the 8GB phone.

The only reason why I stayed in line was because I figured I would order from them and then I’d at least have a point of contact if I had problems porting my cell phone number over. I even told the nice young guy who was helping me out that I would most definitely hunt him down if I had a problem.

So, yeah, it was very obvious that local AT&T stores had nothing like the rumored 300 or so iPhones per store. I guess that Apple was being bearish on the units they would need for this launch.

As for the experience, it was very similar to going to an Apple Store Grand Opening. People clapped when the first customers walked out with their phones and the salespeople were overly nice. I can say that I did appreciate Brian, the store manager, coming out and giving the line updates. He did a great job considering the circumstances. The hostesses at the Applebees next door came around the line around 6:30 or so asking if anyone wanted reservations or to order something to go. Passersby were generally nice, although a few were like “All this for a phone?” Oh and yes, there was a security guard placed at this store just for this event. It was a bit of overkill for a suburban strip mall.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, iPhone line, iPhone SOLD OUT, AT&T, there were definitely not enough iPhones, I am bummed

or at least someone, a non-Apple, non AT&T civilian has written a post on how he got to use an iPhone for a few minutes.

One…More…Week!

Update: Link to the Guided iPhone tour that was in today’s Apple email. And as a marketer, I will keep the clickthrough tracking that Apple oh so helpfully appended to the URL.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, fangirlism

By chance today, I happened to catch this MSDN blog article announcing the official End of Life of Microsoft Office 2003. Yup. What it means is that Office 2003 will not be sold by Microsoft after June 30, 2007.

So if you’re part of an organization which has standardized on 2003 and weren’t planning to upgrade any time soon, think again. You apparently can purchase Office 2007 Volume Licenses with “downgrade rights” and use Office 2003 instead. Here’s a link to a Microsoft Live search on downgrade rights.

I dunno about you, but the blog posting seems a little crotchety, don’t you think?

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Office 2003, Microsoft Office 2007, there is no real reason to upgrade to 2007 except to act as a income generator for Microsoft

In an article on Philly.com today, there was an update on the Philadelphia municipal Wi-Fi project that is being built and soon to be deployed fully, starting in July 07. The system will provide outdoor and indoor access, and while you need to have a wireless capable computer, for guaranteed indoor service an EarthLink supplied Wi-Fi modem is needed. EarthLink, the ISP building the system, expects 5,000 subscribers in July and 12,000 subscribers by years end. I’d say that is an aggressive subscriber timetable.

Being curious, I nosed around the EarthLink FAQ for the municipal Wi-Fi service and found a few interesting tidbits.

1) To use Wi-Fi indoors, you are strongly recommended to purchase the EarthLink Wi-Fi product (i.e. the monthly fee plan which includes a Wi-Fi modem) to ensure you have a signal in your home. However, if you live on the upper floors of a high rise, you may be out of luck since the Wi-Fi signal may not reach there.

2) The Wi-Fi service is intended for use by one computer at a time. So, say you’re a multi-computer household, by the way this FAQ reads, you’re out of luck. In fact the EarthLink FAQ doesn’t address such a situation, only to say that if they catch you, “you will be charged $1 for every hour (or part of an hour) that more than one person is connected via your account. This service charge is capped at $21.95 per month.” Nice. Although later in the FAQ, EarthLink provides instructions on working with a home network, so as long as you have a router behind that Wi-Fi modem, you should be ok.

In another piece, two Inquirer reporters tried the outdoor available wireless in the current 15 square mile testing area. According to the article, sometimes the Wi-Fi worked and sometimes it didn’t. And honestly, I have yet to see a Wi-Fi system that reaches 100% saturation everywhere.

Outdoor Wi-Fi access in Philly can be purchased through Earthlink’s Feather product - with access available from 1 hour, 1 day and 3 day increments.

Technorati Tags: Philadelphia, Philadelphia wireless, Philadelphia Wi-Fi, EarthLink

From the sourceforge page, FeedOnFeeds-Redux (FoFRedux) is a continuation of the popular, but stagnated FeedOnFeeds project. FoFRedux provides a simple, yet effective browser-based news aggregator.

Agent: fofRedux/0.3.x (+http://fofredux.sourceforge.net/)

Also, I know who you are… Hi Harald!

Technorati Tags: RSS, RSS Reader, RSS aggregator

I hadn’t realized it, but there are companies which provide Mac OS X based Web hosting, aside from Apple’s consumer oriented .Mac service.

Technorati Tags: Mac OS X, Web Hosting

for this.

Related: What are the odds that I will be able to keep my current phone number?

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, iPhone, fangirlism, the local Cingular store is just down the street

Well, kinda. There aren’t official Apple stores in Chile, but there are Apple resellers.

Thanks, Bert!

Update: More information about MacOnline in Chile at ifoAppleStore.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, Apple Store, Chile, Apple Reseller, MacOnline

From an undisclosed source, I got a hit in my logs for what appears to be the newest version of the Mac OS X Safari Web browser. It’s at version 3.0 now.

Http Code: 200 Date: May 08 19:23:52 Http Version: HTTP/1.1
Size in Bytes: 15822
Referer: -
Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/522.6 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Safari/522.6

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac OS X, Safari, Web browser, User Agent

So, just in the past couple of days, I started seeing the referrer URLs from Google.com in the following format.

http://www.google.com/url?q=http://cleverhack.com/category/tech/page/3/&sa=D&usg=AFrqEzf8B4L3sqq1hwGNYSLtBbO9HB8P3g

What’s unique about the referrer URL is that it’s a redirect and my logs are showing the incoming search term as http://cleverhack.com/category/tech/page/3/ from Google, which doesn’t seem right at all. In a perfect world you’d want to see incoming search terms such as “cleverhack” or “tech blogger” or “needs a date on Friday” not the URL that Google served and the person clicked through on.

I’ve been seeing IP addresses from all over - lots of Comcast, Verizon, Bell South, so it’s definitely real people making the requests, but why Google is using a redirect, I don’t know. Is this a side effect of iGoogle?

Technorati Tags: Google, iGoogle, Google Referrer, Google URL, Can I get a job at Google?

I was browsing the news sites today, and stumbled upon this wire article mentioning Apple battery issues, I just had to take a look.

Apparently MacBooks and MacBook Pros manufactured between Feb 2006 and April 2007 could be affected by the problems - which are said to be underperforming batteries, but could include batteries that are visibly deformed.

Aside from the possible deformed batteries, which should be returned to Apple no matter what, if your battery seems to be underperforming, there’s a new battery update patch. If your battery still does not perform properly, then you should contact Apple about returning your battery and getting a new one.

The official Apple writeup with recall instructions can be found here.

I haven’t really used my MacBook Pro on battery, so I can’t really tell if it’s underperforming. However, I installed the patch just to be sure.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Apple laptops, MacBook, MacBook Pro, Apple Battery Recall