http://www.youtube.com/v/Se12y9hSOM0?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0

• I can set any song as a ringtone, just by selecting it – for free
• I can control my TV’s, Live
• I can show photos from my phone on my TV just by flicking them on there – for free
• I can get turn-by-turn navigation with Google Maps – for free
• I get visual AND transcribed voicemails with Google Voice – for free
• Those little App icons on the screen, I can put them anywhere I want – top, bottom, right, left – wherever
• AT&T network – not any more
• I can load apps from anywhere – without having to hack my phone

Apple posted another video showing another smartphone, this time the Droid X, losing bars when held in the death grip. Problem is other people can’t recreate this, even Engadget can’t do it. The other thing is Apple made a big deal about the media blowing this “Antennagate” thing up. We know Apple, some smartphones lose bars if held just right. Move on.

I would just like to point out that Bungie hasn’t released a game outside the Halo world since 2001. That is all.

My girlfriend got a Palm Pre when they were first released. While I think the Pre makes a better paper weight then a phone, I really like the OS and the way it does multitasking. If you put it on a more power phone or even better a touch screen tablet, you might have something that can go head to head with the iPad.

It seems more clear now why Google made the Nexus One: it’s hard to get a phone with the default Android OS. It also seems clear that Android’s openness is largely about being open to the carriers’ ability to customize the user experience.

This is one thing that I agree with John on. There should be more phones with stock Android. As much as I like my HTC Evo I wish it had, at least, Android 2.1 and I could install 2.2 later. And its not the the Sense UI is bad, it really is pretty good, I just would like to run what Google released or be able to pick what I want on the phone, Sense or stock Android, at the time I get the phone.

Jobs is Apple’s spokesperson, and he usually does a terrific job. But in this case, his anger and his defensiveness got the better of him. Apple is now a dominant player in the consumer technology market and it can’t afford this kind of ham-fisted performance. Jobs should remove himself from the lineup and let someone else take over. Or he should get over himself and cheer up. But Friday’s press conference was not good corporate PR.

Steve Jobs’s Disastrous iPhone 4 Press Conference – The Conversation – Harvard Business Review

But that is not the real problem at all. We all know now that most phones will lose signal if held in just the right place and I say most phone because nobody has test every phone out there. I didn’t know anything about attenuation till this all got started but the real problem with the iPhone is the one thing that Apple prides itself on the most, the design. They took a chance and put the antenna on the outside, something that I am sure other cell phone manufacturers have tested, and it didn’t work as good as they would of liked. Now if Steve Jobs said that last week then this would all be behind them but they decided to point fingers like a teenager. But you could always do like Jobs says and “just avoid holding it in that way“. Or just wait for one of the free bumpers to fix the non-problem that the iPhone 4 doesn’t have.

The first thing to clear up is the wording. I hear people all the time say “Mac” when they mean “Apple”. So everyone knows Microsoft and the operating system (OS) they make is called Windows. The newest version of Windows is “7″. Apple is the name of the company and the operating system they make is called Mac OS X (pronounced /mæk oʊ ɛs tɛn/ mak oh es ten). Apple numbers the release of each OS and the current version is Mac OS 10.6. They also name each version of there OS after cats so to quote Wikipedia, “Releases of Mac OS X are named after big cats: for example, Mac OS X v10.6 is usually referred to by Apple and users as “Snow Leopard” 10.5 is called Leopard, 10.4 Tiger, and 10.3 Panther.

Now that we have that cleared up we can move to the correct usage of “Mac”. The term Mac is short for Macintosh, the first personal computer that Apple made. Since then they have used “Mac” in the naming of there hardware. For example, the name of there laptops are the MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air. There desktop system is called the iMac and there workstation-level tower is called the Mac Pro.

I am not going to get into the full in and outs of Mac OS X because I think that one of the fun things about getting a Mac is learning. At its core it is the same as Windows. There are still user accounts and user folders and system setting you can change. One of the first things you are going to want to know is how to install programs. In Windows you would download a .exe or .msi file, run it and click thru the menus and it would install the program. Mac OS X makes things easier, somewhat. To use Firefox as a example, you get a file called Firefox 3.6.dmg Files with the .dmg extension are like .exe files in Windows. Just double click on them and do what it says to do. Sometimes might download a file with the extension of .app. There is nothing to install here because the whatever.app file you downloaded is the program itself. If you double click on it, it would just run so what you want to do is drag the .app file into your Applications folder.

Now that you know how to install stuff, what do you install? There are a few that I wish I knew about from day one of get my MacBook but now that I know about them I can tell you. The first is by far the most used app on my Mac other then the web browser. It is called 1Password and it is a password and identity manager. Password and identity managers are not that big in the Windows world but after using it for almost two years now I will never have a Mac without it.

Any time you log into a website or signup, 1Password will ask if you want to save it so you will never have to do it again. The best feature is the Strong Password Generator that will do just as it says and make strong passwords that will be very hard to crack. 1Password will also save any software licensees for apps you buy, save your banking, credit card, and personal info so that you can add them anytime you need to with just one click. 1Password is $39.95 (there is a free to try version) right now and there is also a version for the iPhone and iPad that will sync with the version on the Mac. It is just full of awesomeness.

LaunchBar

The next app that I find that I can not live without is called LaunchBar. It is what called a productivity application. You make a keyboard shortcut to bring up the app and then start typing the name of the whatever you are tring to find. Say that you want to launch iMovie and it is not in your dock. Hit the keyboard shortcut (in my case I have it set as Command+Spacebar), then start typing, i+m+o. With each letter you type the list will get shorter till you get to the file or app your looking for. If you just type i+m and iMovie is 2nd or 3rd one down, just arrow down to it and hit enter. The next time you want to launch iMovie and type i+m it will remember and be the first one in the list. If you would like to know more you should really check out this podcast by Mac Power Users. They do a really good job of covering what Launchbar can do.

There are three productivity applications that you should know about. Of these three apps, LaunchBar is in the middle when it come to everything that you can do with it and it is the only one that you have to pay for ($35.00 at the time of this post). The next is Google’s own Desktop. It is the least powerful but it is also free.

Quicksliver

The third is called Quicksilver. Someone once said that Quicksilver can destroy nations and launch the Space Shuttle. It is by far the most powerful productivity app but the learning curve for the really powerful features can be steep. But there is good and bad side to using Quicksilver. The bad is that the devloper, Nicholas Jitkoff, stopped working on it and went to work for Google to make Google Desktop. The good is that before he left for Google he open source the code and the Mac community has picked it up. Its also good that it is free. So if you want to get deep into Quicksliver you better set some time to check out the follow links but first you can get the latest version from here.

Howard Melman’s wonderful user guide for Quicksilver (PDF file)

Lifehacker’s post having to do with Quicksliver

A Beginner’s Guide to Quicksliver

A great list from Merlin Mann of 43 Folders

Just as a side note, there is another productivity app that you might want to try and it is called Alfred. I just saw a post about it but have never used it but it is free and in beta.

What I think is that by having there own OS, Google can get a lot of info on how people use there systems. The better reason is that every app that Google has runs on the web. There are desktop versions of some of them like Earth and Picasa but it is pretty much web based. If you also remember from a few years ago Google paid for a ton of the dark fiber around the country. My guess would be that they might have there own open or low priced WiFi.

Over all I fell that not many people are going to be using Chrome OS for the simple reason that we like having our files, be it music, apps, or pictures on our systems. We like having it with us and doing what we want with it without needing to be on the web. I know I do. But I just can’t get my head around why Google would make a OS that does less then what I can do right now. Over the next year maybe I will understand but right now I just don’t get it because there is nothing that Chrome OS does that I can’t do right now.

If you would like to try out Google Chrome OS you can get a VMDK image over at GDGT.com. You are going to need VMWare or VirtualBox. But if you just want some pictures of it running I uploaded just about everything you can see to Flickr and Emberapp.com.

If you have a better idea why Google Chrome OS is so light weight please post a comment. I would love to hear what other people think.