Macworld

The largest tradeshow for Macintosh devotees is held during this week in San Francisco and so I went. (I was an original Macintosh Evangelista and so go every year.) This year's show was a bit of an anti-climax. There were two new products (discussed below). One thing seems to have changed - a lot of the product booths did a web fulfillment process - so to get the deal from the show you log into a website - that is smart. I did not see anything outside of the iPhone that was a must although I did get a new program which allows you to take PDF documents back into another format. That software which is called PDF office (from a company called Recosoft which is an Osaka company) is simple and really does what it says it will - which is to allow a person to translate back an Adobe Portable Document Format document back to another form. That is very useful in a lot of ways. For me, that was the killer application of the show.

In Steve Jobs' Keynote address on Tuesday he released the long anticipated iPhone (Name subject to lawsuit from Cisco) and something called Apple TV. If you watch Jobs for for any amount of time you understand how much of a showman he is but in this case the sizzle and the substance were both there.

Apple TV is a 40 Gig hard drive with wireless to allow you to integrate all of your digital content through your TV. It is pretty neat although I might have wanted something like this to have a larger storage capacity - the integration with wireless may actually solve that problem - available in February.

The real news-story was the iPhone. The device integrates a phone with an iPod and a real web browser. I have resisted getting a crackberry because I do not like the way it does email - but since the Apple Newton I have wanted something which was light and useful and this seems to be the device. The Crackberries and the Treos both have tiny little keyboards that seem clumsy to me. The iPhone is cool - integrating a series of functions that I am surprised no other phone maker has done. You can dial easily. You can conference in a snap. It integrates all of your contacts and a bunch of other functions like calendar. And it does not use a stylus - which my current Palm TX does. As they keep repeating the pointer you use is the one you have with you always - your finger.

I think I probably will not use the iPod part of the phone - I carry an iPod with me so this will be a phone for me and as a personal data manager but its integration of real web-browsing with things like Google maps and linkages to the phone is wonderful. As you would expect from Apple it has the functions a phone needs - GSM (quad band so usable anywhere), bluetooth and WIFI (including the new N standard). They say this has a 5 hour talk time - which I hope is accurate. This is Apple's usual mix of form and function (great engineering and cool looking design).

The phone is integrated into Cingular- which is my current carrier, and I have found them to be very reliable. This new phone will be ready in June and I have already tried to get into the queue for it. By linking to Edge, it will mean I will have to carry one less device.