As always, an interesting article from Robert Cringely. All about Steve and the iPhone price drop.

I was surprised when talking to random friends to hear how many of them thought that the price drop was a “desperate” move by Apple to sell their excess inventory of iPhones. My take on it is that it’s an aggressive and totally calculated move to outdo the 1 million units sold benchmark by the end of this year. Apple needs to secure a good chunk of the cell phone market this Christmas to be a credible force next year. This is a good way to do it and it also doesn’t hurt to charge early adopters extra money.

Cringely also has a good take on the gift certificates. I didn’t think about it at first, but it’s quite true that many of the customers that will be getting these gift certificates are not current purchasers of other Apple products. This is a great way to make them buy more stuff and Apple is still going to make a profit on that 100$.

Today, Steve announced that Apple will be giving out 100$ rebate to early iPhone customers since the iPhone was discounted yesterday by 200$.

Pretty nice! Normally, people should expect that electronics that they purchase will get cheaper but this was a sizable drop so it makes sense to thank early adopters.

Oh, and since the discount I’ve ordered mine now. I was hoping that the iPod touch would have Mail, but it doesn’t. The iPhone makes more sense then and I’m still hoping that it will be unlocked soonish.

When the new iMacs were announced, I was in Cupertino and tried out one of the new keyboards just for a few quick moments. It seemed pretty good at the time so when I got back to work, I pouted until they ordered me one…

Well yesterday, it had finally arrived and it’s awesome! I find it to be way more comfortable and easier to type on than anything I’ve used before. I’ve heard some bad reviews which made me doubt my original order but they couldn’t be more wrong in my case. I know that it’s a matter of personal taste to a large degree, so it’s probably not the perfect keyboard for everybody but if you’re dissatisfied with your current one, you should try this one out.

My previous keyboard was the Macally IceKey which now seems bulky and weird to me. Funny how a few seconds turns the tide and sets a new standard!

Ars Technica has a great very in-depth review of the iPhone. I don’t have my hands on one yet since they’re not available in Canada but one of my US co-workers brought the toy over and I love it.

It’s hard to describe just how nicely polished the interface is. Everything is animated but not in an overly obnoxious way. Even ignoring the phone features, this is a kick-ass PDA/iPod. The screen is great for watching movies, crisp, bright! Being able to connect to any open wireless, check your email, iCal, Safari, Address Book is amazing. I think those features alone make the product worth having.

It’s definitely going to set the bar higher for other cell phones. And that’s a good thing considering what’s out there right now.

Bandwagon is giving away free tryouts to bloggers. So, I figured that I’d write a short review of the service and give it a spin once it ships.

The idea behind the service is simple: to backup people’s entire music collection online. It doesn’t seem like they have limits for how many GB of data they store but the service is 99$/year which will probably have a limited customer base. Online music backup has been discussed by other people in the past so there is definitely a market for it.

Bandwagon posted some screenshots of their interface as well which looks simple and nicely organized.

The one weird thing about the product that I can’t figure out is why they don’t aim for a more general backup platform. For instance, I could see the need for similar backup functionality for iPhoto. It would make it more enticing to customers to have a more complete online backup solution, rather than a bunch of unique specialized ones. Something like “iLife Backup”?

Anyway, all of this is speculation at this time, since I haven’t tried the actual service. They’re shipping on February 22nd; after that, I’ll write a fuller review.

Update: Well the service ended up being a dud. They’ve dropped it and started one where the user provides their own storage online. Pretty lame!