Zack Mahdavi's Blog

Today, Amazon.com launched their ‘important for the industry’ Amazon MP3 download service. This is a big deal…

Why? Amazon is offering 2 million songs for download (Apple offers 6 million through their iTunes Store) that are completely DRM-free. Yes, there is no protection of any kind built into these songs.. so this means you can play the songs on your ‘Plays For Sure’ mp3 player or your iPod or anything else that can play mp3s. In addition, the songs are encoded at a very high quality of 256kbps… Apple encodes their songs in 128 kbps AAC, which is supposed to be equivalent to 192 kbps MP3.

If DRM-free isn’t a big enough selling point for you, then how about this? Amazon guarantees that their top 100 songs will be $0.89 each, and the other songs are in the $0.89 to $0.99 cent range. In addition, full albums are $8.99 or less. A great deal!

When you click “Buy Now” on a song in Amazon, a small program will launch on your computer that will download the song and automatically import the song into iTunes. The process is seamless, although it still doesn’t compare to the absolute ease of use you get out of the iTunes Store.

For a few weeks, I’m going to try to make AmazonMP3 my goto site for music. Let’s see how it goes. For now, I’m jamming away to my new Apples in Stereo album.

Maria linked me to this YouTube video presented at SigGraph. It uses a new algorithm to smart resize images. Instead of just cropping or scaling, the algorithm looks for parts of the image with the ‘least amount of energy’ and smartly clips those portions out as you resize the image. The result is simply amazing.. this is the future of web page resizing and image resizing in general. No wonder Adobe just hired this researcher!

So this will be the first time I’m writing a review on this site. I couldn’t resist though, especially regarding a company that makes such amazing products, Waterfield Designs.

If you’ve never heard of Waterfield, they are known for their amazing SleeveCases. If you have a Mac laptop (or even a PC laptop), you have to check out their sleevecases. They are very well made and offer lots of protection.

Anyway, this review isn’t about the Waterfield sleevecase. It’s about a new product they recently introduced, the iPhone Suede Jacket. Now many other companies are making cases for the iPhone, but most of them are bulky or take away from the pure elegance of the iPhone.

The iPhone Suede jacket is different. It focuses on pure simplicity. This case is really well made, and the suede (it’s actually a very soft microfiber called ultrasuede) is very soft and nice. At first, the case felt a little too tight for the iPhone, but after using it for about a day, it loosened up just the right amount. Also, the suede is a great material because it actually cleans up the smudges from the screen every time you slide the iPhone in and out of the case.

In terms of protection, this little sleeve will not protect the iPhone if you drop it, but it will protect the iPhone from the various objects you have in your pocket or purse (keys, etc).

The cost was $9, but there’s a whopping $7 shipping charge. However, they really listen to their customers, so I’m hoping they’ll drop the shipping charge soon enough.

If you’re looking for some basic protection for your iPhone that adds no bulk, I highly recommend this case!

I’ve had my eye on the beautiful piece of glass and metal known as the iPhone since the day it was announced by Steve Jobs. Unfortunately, the price ($599) was just too much for me to bear. Also, the iPhone was only available on AT&T. Well, two weeks ago, both of those problems disappeared.

It’s only been two weeks since Apple announced the $200 price drop on the iPhone (making the 8GB model $399, and the little sib 4GB model $299 until it’s gone). $299 didn’t seem like a bad price, but it was still a little out of reach since I didn’t really need a new phone. Then again, when do you ever buy an Apple product needing it? Well, Maria helped sweeten the pot by giving me the $100 Apple rebate she got for being an iPhone early adopter! Thanks Maria! So that brought down the price to a sweet $199 (the price of an iPod Nano), which is an amazing deal.

The next problem was that the device was locked to the AT&T network. Luckily, about a week ago, a free software unlock was unleashed on the web, which would allow me to use the iPhone on the T-Mobile network! Woot!

So there you have it… I am now running an unlocked iPhone on the T-Mobile network. Talk about the best of both worlds.

The phone is absolutely amazing. Apple has totally rethought the phone by combining the advanced features of a smartphone into an interface that’s easier to use than most cheap cell phones. I am such a happy camper right now.

And once again, I have succumbed to Steve Jobs’s reality distortion field.

In case you’re interested, I am selling my old T-Mobile Dash on ebay now.

For all of you out there who have iPhones, I have updated my blog to serve you all a delicious iPhone-friendly page. Enjoy!

Bloggers, if you would like to set up your WordPress blog to serve up a specially formatted iPhone site to us Apple lovers, check out the plugin iWPhone.

Boing Boing posted about a prediction made in 1966 regarding the future of computing in 1999. The documentary was sponsored by the Philco-Ford Corporation, and it does a pretty accurate job at predicting the future of computing. For example, they predict that shopping and bill paying will be able to be done via computer.

Boing Boing points out that the video failed to predict we’d still be using keyboards… I argue that keyboards provide a much faster method of text entry than any other input method to date. Try writing a URL in a browser window using a Tablet PC, and you’ll understand how painfully slow handwriting is. However, this doesn’t mean that all input methods have been invented already; for example, I’d like to see a computer “listen” to my internal “voice,” so that the computer just “knows” what I want. That may mark the end of the keyboard, but who knows.

Let’s wait and see what computers are like in 2040.

P.S: The documentary also predicts the kitchen of the future!

Another funny PHD Comic…. It’s so true, unfortunately.