With the iPhone's debut date--June 29th--no longer an
open question, we're officially in the period known as
The Last Days of iPhone Pre-Release Speculation, Rumor,
and Gossip. And there's been a lot of it today. A quick
recap:
--9 to 5 Mac
is reporting that the iPhone won't have anyplace for
a SIM card, that it won't have iChat, and that its
version of Safari will have tabbed browsing. I kinda
doubt that the first nugget is true, hope that the
second is false (although the iChat that Steve Jobs has
talked about is an SMS program, not true IM), and would
be tickled if the third is true.
--An evil genius named Dr. Macenstein
believes, based on the placement of icons seen in
the
new iPhone ads, that there's a mysterious twelfth
iPhone application we don't know about. It could be
something miraculous. Or it could be a screen calibrator
or something. We just don't know.
--The Unofficial Apple Weblog has
noted that the icon for Google Maps appears to show
a location near, but not quite at, Apple's headquarters
at One Infinite Loop in Cupertino--and that Pacific
Catch, a restaurant mentioned in one of the ads,
actually exists.
--John Markoff of the New York Times
reports that a source is saying that the Mac
developers who attend Apple's upcoming Worldwide
Developers' Conference will learn about a plan to let
them easily convert "small programs" (ie, Dashboard
widgets, maybe?) to run on the iPhone.
In three and a half weeks, we'll have the chance to
verify what the iPhone is, and isn't, in way that'll be
both reliable and entertaining: By using the damn thing.
Stay tuned...
