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…and boy have we patented it!

…we filed for over 200 patents for all the inventions in iPhone and we intend to protect them.

Steve Jobs about the new iPhone™, @Macworld 2007

UPDATE 20070119

Well, everybody and their little sisters are blabbering about the iPhone, so I feel obliged to take my turn to say something at least as earth-shattering.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of things have been said about the little that’s been shown. Of course I drool over the technical side of it, as much as the next geek, and maybe a little more. But I couldn’t help but find the patent reference at least worrisome.

I won’t say Apple doesn’t look like they’ve come up with yet another revolutionary piece of tech, or that they don’t deserve credit and reward for doing that. It’s a shame they think they have to rely on patents to get them, but I won’t say this is their fault, rather than a fault in the System (well… let’s put it this way). But what I think is their fault, and incredibly lame, is that they’re stressing on the patents issue like that.

Anyway, I’ve already been asked if I intend to buy the phone. The full answer is probably quite complex, for a change, and I think I’ll elaborate here sooner or later. For now, suffice to say that I’m stuck between desperately wanting a device like that and hoping that they choke themselves to oblivion with their two hundred patents shoved down their throat (and yes, I had to resist the temptation to rephrase).

Moreover, anybody remember this? Now, who’s claiming what again?

All in all, I think I can live without this ultra-cool device, playing music and videos on its (almost) widescreen display, surfing the web on WiFi, running OS X widgets, all through a touch screen interface, that also happens to be a phone…

…or can I?

By the way, iPhone™ is a trademark of… your guess is as good as mine

UPDATE 20070119:

Looks like I’m not the only one to notice: here’s some juice and Jeff’s (very bland) remarks.

External links:

• Jeff Han @TEDTalks demoes mindblowing multi-touch interface
• Engadget - MacWorld 2007 live coverage
• Geek and Poke - Holy Steve
• Geek and Poke - We Want This Phone

Trolltech, maker of Qt, the framework upon which KDE is based, and its lightweight counterpart Qtopia, after entering the smartphone software business with its QTopia Phone Edition, is now aiming at hardware with this Qtopia Greenphone.

Do you mean I’d finally be able to sync my Kontact data with my phone, and be officially welcomed to the 1990s?

The feature set is by no means impressive, and at US$700 you can’t say it’s cheap, though the price is for a development device, to be bundled with SDK licenses, and may or may not reflect actual street prices. There’s no indication that the device will eventually be marketed.

But the worst news is there is no WiFi.

I sincerely hope this is just a development device. Otherwise, see you next time.

I just took a glance at my SIP ATA’s statistics (a Grandstream HandyTone 286, I think it deserves the plug):

Product Model: HT286 REV 3.0
System Up Time: 77 day(s) 22 hour(s) 5 minute(s)
Total Inbound Calls: 111
Total Outbound Calls: 7
Total Missed Calls: 83
Total Call Time (in minutes): 57039
Total SIP Message Sent: 5436
Total SIP Message Received: 5037
Total RTP Packet Sent: 1685994
Total RTP Packet Received: 930233
Total RTP Packet Loss: 115590

Not bad for a chunk of plastic worth €60, isn’t it?

Eat this, Skype.

Even the RTP Packet Loss seems more than reasonable, given that my telephony provider is not the same as my broadband service provider.

Something must be wrong with the outbound calls counter, though; we’ve dialed a lot more than 7. Still no phone bill and less than €10 worth of voice traffic for the last three months.

Eat this, Telecoms.

UPDATE: The ATA stopped working properly a few hours after I wrote this. Way to go!

UPDATE: I came back home and, needless to say, just power-cycling the ATA fixed everything.

The fact is I couldn’t receive or dial calls from/to PSTN. To be honest, I’m quite convinced the culprit was my telephony provider rather than the ATA itself, since I still got a tone from it; but I can’t be sure now.

I was away from home so several hours passed before I was able to fix the issue. In hindsight, I could have done it remotely, if only I remembered there is a “reboot” button in the web-based configuration interface. In addition, I’m sure there is a way to do this from the analog phone’s keypad; I just need to check the manual for the correct code and instruct my parents in case this happens again while I’m away.

Thanks and see you in 77 days.

UPDATE: ***-99-9. Neat!