Not to harp, but I’ve enjoyed reading one particular aspect of the conversation surrounding the most anticipated phone of the year, as follows:
A Trade-Off on iPhone Data Speed (John Markoff, NYT): “On the eve of the Apple iPhone’s debut, the top executives of Apple and AT&T today defended their decision to rely upon AT&T’s slow Edge wireless data network, rather than a faster network that is less widely available. Early reviews of the iPhone, while positive, have faulted the slower network because it will limit the palm-sized wireless computer’s utility in making the Internet easily accessible on the go.”
iPhone Blindness (Scott Karp, Publishing 2.0): “Buying an iPhone is like buying a MacBook that only supports dial-up access. [...] How can iPhone reviewers tout the web browser as the “real dazzler” and the “closest thing to the real Internet” when it crawls along like a 1400 baud modem?”
iPhone ‘Surfing’ On AT&T Network Isn’t Fast, Jobs Concedes (WSJ): “Mr. Jobs acknowledged that the company’s new iPhone won’t surf the Internet as fast as he would like on the network, called ‘Edge,’ but added that the device’s ability to connect to Wi-Fi hotspots would give consumers a speedier alternative for Web browsing.”
I think it’s clear that the reviewers equate the utility of mobile browsing with speed. If only there were some free mobile proxy web service that would compensate for the EDGE network’s lower speed without requiring a download and installation. I guess we’ll just have to wait until some enterprising company builds such a thing, or we could wait until all of our favorite websites make cunning little mobile versions. Until then, nobody should buy an iPhone, or any other AT&T phones that surf the so-called mobile Internet! That will teach them.
There has been some complaining about the iPhone’s reliance on AT&T’s EDGE network. Here’s an example from Forbes.com, in sidebar to the article “
(Oops, forgot to post this. Moving from “draft” to “published”. Sigh…) One of my high school teachers once told me that he didn’t plan on teaching his son how to type because it would only be a year or two before we’d be interacting with computers by speech and they’d stop including keyboards. In his opinion, typing would shortly become a quaint anachronistic skill. Oh well for that.
Visiting Bloglines mobile through Skweezer has been awesome for quite a while, but at long last the reverse is now true: visiting Skweezer through Bloglines mobile is also awesome. As of last week, Bloglines Mobile uses a 


