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My last post demonstrated suspension of reason. The new iPhone does not do video calling. Exactly why, I’m not sure, but I just read an interview with a Nokia official who claimed that the primary reason for video calling not taking off—apart from the cost—was that it makes people look rather unflattering. Whatever.

So why should one buy the iPhone 3G? The reasoning is pretty simple, really. If you could justify the original iPhone to yourself, there’s no way this one will be any different. It’s cheaper. Additionally, you get 3G and GPS, making for a nicely rounded-out feature set. I don’t think there are too many GPS-enabled phones out there for $199. The new firmware brings third-party apps to the party, which should be fun. Jobs was smart to feature lots of free stuff that will be available in the App Store.

MobileMe sounds very nice indeed, but my data is increasingly—or near-totally—on the Google cloud now, and I wouldn’t want to pay money to move out from a free, and perfectly workable suite of services. I’d like to believe that Google will put out a syncing app for their services as well, but it may be wishful thinking, given the evident conflict of interest.

While GPS and all the possibilities that follow are nice, they won’t really make a big difference for us in the 2.5th world, i.e, no routing in Google Maps.

So it boils down to price. For the amount you’d pay for a typical feature-phone, you’ll soon be able to buy an iPhone. I’m curious about how Apple will enforce a single global price, given that in markets like India, carrier subsidies are not as big as they are in the USA. Both Vodafone and Airtel have announced their intent to bring the device to India.

the iPhone changed mobile web browsing forever. As soon as I read the rumours of the new one sporting a front-facing camera, I knew this would be big. So here’s a somewhat obvious prediction: iPhone 2 will actually make video calling happen. There are millions of phones with front-facing cameras and 3G, but I’ve never seen a video call personally, or demonstrated. I think the new iPhone will make it happen just like it made the regular web accessible when out and about.

I couldn’t care less about Flash support, but GPS is going to be huge. Location-based coolness is the new cool. I just hope I can get a decent trade-in for old faithful.

Part of the fun of being in a booming/bubbling industry is the constant rumour-mongering. The most fun is when the rumours are about you, which is what happened to me some minutes ago. Apparently, I am leaving my current employer to join CMP. The deal is done. Such irresponsible chatter must be dealt with, and I enclose my official response below.

This talk of my leaving my current employer for CMP is totally inaccurate and fueled by irresponsible reportage. I am fond of CMP and we remain good friends.

Many moons ago, the Nikon D200 was the shit, at least for those who needed pro features for less. It’s a rugged, bad-ass brick of a camera, and captures pictures much better than my newer, but far less sophisticated D40x. My brother-in-law owns one of these, and he would like to stop owning it due—in no small part—to the fact that he has bought the new, more bad-ass D300.

Now I know what all six of you are thinking: “with the raw charisma and devastating bone structure that this man commands, he should be able to sell ice-cream to an ice-cream addict!” This may well be true, but time has caught up with me and my funky faculties may take some time to recover. I’m in that in-between stage—not quite Joey McIntyre, not yet George Clooney—making for an all-round bad salesman. And I can’t fucking figure out eBay.

So here’s the deal: one night only! Or till it’s sold. Mint condition Nikon D200. Well-used, but well cared-for. Brand new rubber outside, brand new lens mount, brand new shutter. Save for the shell, everything important is brand new, courtesy Nikon USA. Comes with a vertical battery grip as well. Asking price: Rs 40,000. The camera is in Mumbai, so cash-n-carry is ideal. Gorge on these tasty pics. You may need a tissue later.

I have been admittedly less than discreet in my exposure to the Internet in recent years. I tend to sign up for any service that looks mildly useful. The fact that GMail filters spam as efficiently as it does, has a lot to do with it. My thoughts on security and transparency must wait. Anyway…

So we have a lot of social networking sites now. For me, it actually started with early players like Ryze, LinkedIn and Multiply—all of which I found worthless for my needs (if I had any driving need for social interaction on the Web to begin with)

Then came Orkut, which was interesting, but ugly. I have a MySpace account, which I signed up for just to see what all the fuss was about. I didn’t get it. Still don’t. I finally settled on Facebook, which is my current social network of choice. It serves little, if any purpose in my life, save for linking me to some distant acquaintances who I would otherwise be completely disconnected from. The apps are disgusting, their default behaviour is to spam, and the whole thing seems to bring out the idiot in everyone. I think there’s a vast population of Web users out there that seem to have adopted a completely retarded, obnoxious view on how to conduct relationships and interactions online. I also think that this population will eventually be the majority. That is when I will put my fountain pen to better use. Anyway…

So there’s a bunch of other sites I’m registered with as well (Flickr, Twitter, Jaiku, Digg, etc)—all of which have some ‘social’ play. Unsurprisingly, there are now services that help you keep up with or update these sites in one place. Some that I’ve tried include:

Pownce: This was supposed to aggregate Twitter, Jaiku etc. My expected behaviour is to aggregate my ‘feeds’ from those accounts for a single view, as well as a one-to-many publish option. I don’t get any of this, which leads me to just not get it.

Friendfeed: Same as above. What I find is that it behaves just like another stand-alone service. What exactly does it do?

At this point, I think I will begin deleting my accounts from these services, if they allow it.

One bright spot recently was the announcement of the new Evernote closed beta. After several sign-up requests, I finally got an invitation. This service, I believe, has the most potential to make an impact. The premise is simple: much like Google’s Notebook service, Evernote allows you to ‘clip’ pieces of web pages, images, whatever, and store them in an online archive. Where Evernote differs is in it’s more powerful off-line, native clients—currently available for Mac OSX, Windows and Windows Mobile.

But that’s not why I signed up. Evernote also does mobile really well. They publish your online notebooks as IMAP accounts, allowing me to access my notes from the iPhone’s own email client. There’s no search in this way, but tags show up as folders. Useful. There’s also a reasonable mobile web interface, which works as advertised. The killer app, in my opinion, is Evernote’s smart image recognition. You can take a picture of a label, billboard, business card or whatever, and just email it to your account. If the picture is not horrid, Evernote will recognize the text within it, index and enable search. Very cool!

So far, I’ve had mixed results with the recognition feature. A full-size 2MP image of a business card in low light just gave me a name, while a VGA snap of an ad-flex in good light worked better. The bookmarklet used to clip webpages is also spotty, but works for the most part. The potential is there though, and I’m hoping the service gets even better in this regard.