essjay

Could just be one of the European white iPhone 4s that seem to the doing the rounds. In which case it could legitimately be running on T Mobile.

I had it from about £400 to about £660 when I did a statistical analysis based on current Apple prices a few weeks ago (here: http://www.oakinnovations.co.uk/blog/2010/01/29/uk-apple-ipad-price-cost-pricing-a-statistical-prediction/ ). So a bit cheaper than MacWorld. Although given the fluctuations in exchange rates all around the world, it could be a pretty big swing either way.

I think you've missed the point of 1) what MS are proposing here and 2) what's made the iPhone such a successful gaming platform. As pointed out by other commentators, the MS demo happened to show gaming as an example, but it wasn't the focus of the technology on show, and neither should it be.

The iPhone has blown the other mobile phones out of the water precisely because it offers a unified platform, along with the iPod Touch. The games are designed with it in mind. I don't want a scaled down version of a PC or Xbox Game with botched controls on my phone. They're completely different usage scenarios. On one, I'm sitting down, at home, and I have ample time to focus on the game. When I'm gaming on my phone it's for short bursts, and the games have to be designed with that in mind. Until the iPhone, this point seemed largely lost on most mobile games developers.

Just because something can be done, doesn't mean that it should be done.

I think the perfect title would be something along the lines of "Thinking Differently" or a variation thereof.

Unfortunately, not a Turbo. The Turbo was one hell of a car.

At least you know how much it's going to cost! In the UK we still haven't been given a price. Although I plotted all the UK Vs US Apple product prices on a graph and used the average exchange to work out the possible pricing. It's not pretty if you're a Brit!

I'm calling BS on this. All the major intelligence systems from all the major vendors provide ways to mitigate against slight mis-spellings, regional variations, religious variations, typos etc. For example, IBM have Global Name Recognition (http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/global-name-recognition/) which is for that purpose. And that's far from the best or most comprehensive available.

The trick with all this software though is that it needs to be configured and used correctly. I suspect that's where the problem lies and this is just an excuse.

The best binary-only newsgroup Mac app I've found is NNTP Grab (http://www.nntpgrab.nl/wiki/index.php/Main_Page). It only does one thing, download files from newsgroups from an NZB file. So if you've already got an NZB file for whatever you want to download, just drag it to NNTPGrab and in a few minutes you'll have the file downloaded. Considering how complicated newsgroups can be, I literally can't think of an easier way of doing. Also, NNTP Grab is open source, cross platform and free!

41 pages of comments?!? I suspect I'm late to the game on this one.

Ed, that makes perfect sense, but it's not the way it was described by the Apple rep who certainly makes it seem as if you have to launch Safari first, as pointed out by MacBookOwner.

As for polling a service, the hit would be negligible to say the least. And I don't think anyone would suggest blocking access entirely where the service was unavailable, you would either assume access or go to a fallback. For me, the benefits would outweigh the negatives. For example, always having an up to date list, rather than one that's only as up to date as the last time you charged your phone while connected to a Wi-Fi connection, which for some people may be never.