Get Better Gear!

Premier Sponsors

TechRestore

Other World Computing

Top 5 Free Apps

Release Date: August 05, 2009
Genre: Games
Release Date: May 22, 2009
Genre: Games
Release Date: August 29, 2009
Genre: Games
Release Date: March 27, 2009
Release Date: August 07, 2009

iTunes New Music Releases

Release Date: September 29, 2009
Genre: Rock
Release Date: September 20, 2009
Release Date: September 15, 2009
Release Date: August 25, 2009
Genre: Rock
Release Date: August 25, 2009

Top 5 Paid Apps

Release Date: April 22, 2009
StickWars $0.99
Release Date: March 31, 2009
Genre: Games
Bloons $0.99
Release Date: April 05, 2009
Genre: Games

Discover New Music

  • Kind of Blue

    • 10 out of 10
    • Miles Davis
    • The jazz album to end all jazz albums. Miles Davis and John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderly and the list goes on. The who's who of who's who in jazz have assembled for this monumental record. Get this
  • Suspended Animation

    • 8 out of 10
    • Fantomas
    • Mike Patton may well be one of the hardest working men in showbiz these days, and his latest with Fantômas underscores just about how far out he is willing to travel.

      Suspended Animation

  • Abnormal Anonymous

    • 8 out of 10
    • Congo Norvell
    • Very few albums manage to capture snapshots of a quality of life in the manner that Congo Norvell's sophomore record, "Abnormals Anonymous," does.

      Comparisons to the Velvet Underground are

  • The Wall (Deluxe Packaging Digitally Remastered)

    • 10 out of 10
    • Pink Floyd
    • Okay, someone had to say it, and though others on the iPO staff are more qualified to review this album, I decided the time was now. This is the quintessential concept album. Though others came before
  • Haunted

    • 10 out of 10
    • Poe
    • Dropping like a bomb on some of the blah musical offerings of her contemporaries, Haunted was one of the best albums of 2000, obliterating the competition.

      Ostensibly a tie-in to her brot

Reader Specials

Visit Deals On The Web for the best deals on all consumer electronics, iPods, and more!

News

Wired Reveals the Untold Story of the iPhone

The history of the iPhone begins with the catastrophic demo of an iPhone prototype before Mr. Jobs, according to Wired’s Fred Vogelstein, who tells the untold story of the iPhone. That results of that first demo put a chill through the engineers, had them yelling at each other and slamming doors, and even left them sleepless. Then, as a workable prototype resulted, there were still the long and delicate negotiations with AT&T.

Mr. Jobs had been thinking about an iPhone for a long time. The ROKR fiasco with Motorola convinced him that Apple had to make its own phone. However, early prototypes had problems, dropped calls and the apps became corrupted. After the demo, Mr. Jobs behavior was ominous. "It was one of the few times at Apple when I got a chill," someone who was in the meeting said according to Mr. Vogelstein.

"For those working on the iPhone, the next three months would be the most stressful of their careers," Mr. Vogelstein wrote. "Screaming matches broke out routinely in the hallways. Engineers, frazzled from all-night coding sessions, quit, only to rejoin days later after catching up on their sleep. A product manager slammed the door to her office so hard that the handle bent and locked her in; it took colleagues more than an hour and some well-placed whacks with an aluminum bat to free her."

The internal angst within Apple to build a superb product was equaled by more than a year of negotiations with AT&T. Verizon had refused Mr. Jobs’ pitch. Mr. Jobs was ready to play hardball. "... Apple was also prepared to buy wireless minutes wholesale and become a de facto carrier itself," Mr. Vogelstein wrote, [and that was probably the source of rumors about Apple becoming a MVNO.] In the end, it was the perception of Stan Sigman of what the iPhone could do for AT&T that swung the deal.

"It may appear that the carriers’ nightmares have been realized, that the iPhone has given all the power to consumers, developers, and manufacturers, while turning wireless networks into dumb pipes," Mr Vogelstein noted. "But by fostering more innovation, carriers’ networks could get more valuable, not less. Consumers will spend more time on devices, and thus on networks, racking up bigger bills and generating more revenue for everyone."

As a result, AT&T is thinking about new products and services that could never have happened in the old business model. "In other words, the very development that wireless carriers feared for so long may prove to be exactly what they need. It took Steve Jobs to show them that," Mr Vogelstein concluded.

Post Your Comments

  Remember Me  Forgot your password?

Not a member? Register now. You can post comments without logging in, but they'll show up as a "guest" post.

Commenting is not available in this section entry.