Life As It Comes

IBM has released Lotus Symphony for free to the masses today. This is huge news in the office suite front. Lotus Symphony will compete directly with Microsoft Office (since it is enterprise-quality). Office lost a huge battle last week when Microsoft’s efforts to fast-track OOXML were voted down at ISO, and this, coupled with today’s launch of Google Presentations, is like a 1-2 punch.

Hooray for openness, innovation, and moving away from Microsoft’s propriety lock-down in yet another arena!

It looks as though I chose wisely as far as timing my iPhone purchase.

A couple weeks back, Apple chopped $200 off the price of their new flagship handheld device. This was an exciting move, but it made me consider a few things which I had written about earlier.

1) Storage - Apple canceled the 4 GB iPhone but positioned the 8 GB next to the new iPod Touch at 16 GB. I think this means they will be unlikely to “up” the storage on the iPhone lest they steal consumers from this new iPod (since the only reason not to get an iPhone then would be if you didn’t want to switch cell carriers).

2) 3G Wireless - Steve Jobs is quoted today as saying: “[3G] chipsets work well apart from power. They’re real power hogs. Most phones now have battery lives of 2 to 3 hours and that’s due to these very power-hungry 3G chipsets … [iPhone] has 8 hours of talktime life. That’s really important when you start to use the Internet and want to use the phone to listen to music. We’ve got to see the battery lives for 3G get back up into the 5+ hour range. Hopefully we’ll see that late next year.” This statement was made at the announcement for iPhone availability in the UK just this morning.

So, it looks as though I can take comfort (for now) in the choice to buy my new iPhone when I did.

Cory will like this one:

Due to fierce protesting, I’ll keep the blog up while I write/design the new site, since it may be slow-going anyway. You may get to see it live, or maybe I’ll just post sneak-peeks now and again.