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Rory Cellan-Jones who writes a blog on the BBC ¦ News website has taken a bashing from the ‘Cult of Mac’ over his coverage of the iPhone. His post ‘Style or Substance‘ documents some of the responses to his news broadcast for the BBC covering the launch of Apple’s new ‘reinvented phone’.

Much in the same way as Rory I try to be objective in my views about products from any vendor of software or hardware. I use both PC’s and Mac’s, Windows and MacOS. I use Google, Windows Live, Yahoo! and .Mac. I use an Xbox, Xbox 360 and Gamecube (never owned a Playstation). I use a Sony PSP and a Nintendo DS. I use, and love, Windows Media Center, I use FrontRow on a Mac.

I know a good few people like this too. As Dan mentioned on his posting about Steve Job’s MacWorld ‘07 keynote, he, Ashleigh, Mark, and myself watched the progress of the keynote with interest. As is always the case on ‘Apple day’, as Mark calls it, there is mixed reaction to Apple’s announcements. Dan and I, being fans of what Apple do, tend to ackowledge that Apple don’t invent anything these days they simply do a good job of packaging the solution for people. Ashleigh and Mark (especially Mark :-)) tend to poo-poo everything that Apple announce saying that it’s been done before and potentially better by Microsoft. Actually, that’s strictly not true as Ashleigh just prefers to bash Yahoo! than anyone else. [I was annoyed that Yahoo! is the default search engine in Flock for Windows].

Anyway, what I’m getting at is that we’ve all got our favourites but we all acknowledge who is good at what. Mark owns an iPod for instance and for someone who drools over Windows Powershell that’s probably saying something. I couldn’t imagine using a Mac in my place of work for anything other than testing that applications designed for the Web run on it. The iPhone I see as primarily a consumer device and not something for the enterprise. Will DirectPush email from Exchange work on an iPhone? I imagine some software house or individual somewhere will write the plugin at some point.

With the iPhone I think Apple are really going back to their roots. Maybe that’s why there were lots of pictures of Woz and Jobs drifting across the screen towards the end of the MacWorld keynote. This is a time of change for Apple, Inc. They’ve moved from Apple Computer, Inc. vendor and markerter of high class, desireable home and business computing into Apple, Inc. vendor of high class, desireable media, communications and computing solutions. The transistion has taken a few years with the iPod and iTunes paving the way.

Both Microsoft and Apple produce excellent products. Some of them are better than others but neither of them has got everything 100% right in terms of design, features, price and cool.

After much speculation, rumour and hype Steve Jobs announced Apple’s iPhone in his keynote speech at Macworld 2007. How on Earth can such a device live up to all of this expectation? Apple would need to pull out all the stops. Steve and co. (now Apple, Inc. rather than Apple Computer Inc.) have worked long and hard, by the looks of his reactions to his family after the keynote.

So amidst the, now minor, announcement that is Apple TV Steve tried once again to create his reality distortion field as he introduced a product that was phone, widescreen ipod and Internet device all in one. I must admit the device looks stunning. Jony Ive was called on an iPhone by Steve during the keynote, Steve asking him “I have to get back to my keynote… Jony, do you have anything to say on the first phone call?” Jony responded “It’s not too shabby, is it?”. There are bags of picture of the iPhone on Engadget. The Apple design team appear to have done a great job.

Remember that Apple, until recently it appears, did not own the brand name that is iPhone. Linksys released a product called the iPhone quite recently. A quick look at the cached copy of iphone.com on Google reveals the original website owned by Nuvio. Now iphone.com redirects to the Apple website.

It will be the middle of the year before the US public can get their hands on one of these new phones. At the moment it looks as though they’re bound in to the AT&T Cingular network. The question begs what will be the situation for us Europeans? Well we have to, once again, wait for nearly a whole year before we can get our hands on the iPhone. Will Vodafone have the exclusive contract? Will it be Orange (currently the only UK carrier to offer GPSesque positioning using their network)? Will it be O2? Who knows? It’s interesting that Apple announced partnerships with classic Web companies like Google and Yahoo! rather than focusing on their own .Mac service. I was looking forward to a boost to .Mac, it’s been very neglected of late.

So nothing about Leopard, no larger or faster iMacs, no new iPods. The keynote was all about iPhone. But at $499 for a 4GB and $599 for an 8GB model how many people are going to plumb for that? Especially as it ties you in to a 2 year contract with.. well Cingular. But they have no presence in the UK. Five hours of talk time is reasonable for a device of this calibre (comparable with Windows Mobile 5 smartphones) and 16 hours of audio playback is comparable with a current iPod.

Can an amazing design carry the iPhone? At that price it has begun to price itself out of the range of kids who have iPods. Christmas or birthday present? Possibly. Will I be getting one? Most likely.

The announcement appears to have done wonders for Apple’s stock price.

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I use performancing.com to provide the stats for menori.com. Just seeing what people are looking and and what search terms drive them to menori.com is fascinating.

The top five search terms that lead people to menori.com over the last two years have been ‘Windows Live Writer’ (no surprise as menori.com was the first blog on the Web to cover it! :-)), ‘maria sansome’, ‘”windows live writer”‘ (in quotes), ‘oblivion gates’ and ‘oblivion blog’. Just outside of the top 5 are ‘menori’, ‘troop tracksuit’, ‘Dougie McFly’ and ‘Xploder media center torrent’.

Top of the search engines is Google (US) with 2648 referrals (48% of all referrals) and Google (UK) with 1008 (16%). Next is Technorati with 316 (5%) and then MSN (US) with 308. All fun stuff.

Ashleigh and Dan have begun a terrific new blog called 3 word reviews which everyone in the world must digg now.

My 3 word review of 3 word review. Simple yet insightful.

I wish.

But Microsoft have been doing the equivalent by giving key, influential bloggers a Acer Ferrari notebook pre-loaded with Vista. News.com reported a few days ago that people such as Michael Arrington of TechCrunch fame had received the gift. Is it tax deductable?

Then again this sort of thing happens in many industries. Just look at how many cars Jeremy Clarkson must have been offered to drive (not given though) in order to say what he wants about them. Some times it backfires though. In Microsoft’s case I’d be surprised if anyone has any bad words to say about Vista and the Acer Ferrari notebook it runs on.

In similar circumstances I’ve been loaned a HP notebook running Vista (a monster 1.83Ghz Core 2 Duo with 2GB of RAM) by Microsoft. Have I raved about how great Vista is? No. It’s ‘average’ in my eyes. Why can’t Microsoft get it right when it comes to notebook computing. Shutting the lid on my ageing 12″ Powerbook causes the Mac to go to sleep instantly. Opening the lid causes it to start up instantly. There’s no such feature in Vista and I’m forced to wait a good few seconds while Vista looks around, brushes its self off and then thinks “right, I need to do something now”… “ah that’s it.. start working again”.

And to sum things up here’s a post that I was going to make a while back, I saved it for a special occasion like this:

“So I downloaded the first alpha release of Firefox 3 this weekend just to see what major stuff has changed. Gran Paradiso

And the information about how to uninstall the application points out why I love Apple Macs so much:

Windows
From the Start menu, choose Control Panel. When the Control Panel appears, double click Add/Remove Programs. Find “Gran Paradiso (3.0a1)” in the list and click Remove to uninstall.

Mac OS X
Drag the GranParadiso application to the Trash.

So the Macbook Pro is in the post then Apple?