Christmas in June meets the Day After

You can’t always get what you want
And if you try sometime you find
You get what you need

                        The Rolling Stones


Once again Santa Steve has made his deliveries. Now the house is a mess with the remains of wrapping paper. The guests are still there, but have spread out into smaller groups. The glow of the keynote is beginning to darken. Now comes the inevitable discussion of the gifts. Was it what we wanted, or needed? Did it come in the right size? Are there any plans to return or exchange it for something else? Like some proverbial Christmas gifts, we don’t get to play with them for a while. We have to wait with anticipation. Not of anticipation of last week, not knowing what we were getting, rather the anticipation of getting to finally take it out of the box.

Gift number one was obviously all the new things we can soon do or buy for our iPhones...if we have iPhones. Santa Steve decided to only deliver that to the good little boys and girls who buy phone service from ATT. The rest of us got to watch as they joyfully got to play with the new toy we couldn’t have. That’s still the case with the 3G phones. Any question about Apple losing their edge compared to the other smart phone makers proved to be false. It’s now going to be tougher for them to battle Apple in the smart phone wars. The rest of us can still get a taste of some of the toys if we have an iPod Touch and want to spend the extra $9.99 for the 2.0 package.

I think the App Store may be one of the biggest stories from the Stevenote. Looking at the quality of some of the apps, you have to wonder about all the unannounced apps over the horizon. The games look amazing, with big name developers like Sega coming to the table, you have to wonder about Nintendo and the other handheld game makers. Will the iPod/iPhone become a major player in the handheld game market? Will there even be a market after what Santa Steve has delivered? We won’t even talk about the Zune, the little toy who couldn’t.

Will all the fuss over the iPhone 3G, it was easy to miss that OS X 10.6 was announced. The details were...that OS X 10.6 was announced. All we really know is that Snow Leopard will be kind of like a Service Pack One, but with a sexier name. It will fix or enhance what is in 10.5 without adding much. That’s probably a good idea since Leopard has not been quite as smooth as Tiger. I love all of Leopard’s features, but it lacks the feeling of brute strength that Tiger had. Hopefully, Snow Leopard with bring back that feeling of strength from Tiger.

Last but not least, was a gift for me. Actually, it was a gift named ME. Santa Steve finally killed the remains of iTools. MobileMe takes online services to the next level. We will still have the email and iDisk, but a lot has changed. No more iCards, no they didn’t make the jump to the cloud. I was disappointed initially, but then stopped to consider when the last time I sent one. Plaxo also does online cards, but they remind you to send them. Apple could have added that, but it would have been small potatoes compared to what they did. MobileMe is going to be a wonderful service, and it seems to be mandatory if you want all you can get out of the iPhone. It appears that Santa Steve has drawn the line in the sand and dares RIM to step across. It will be interesting to see how the battle of the fruits plays out. RIM has their new phone, and now Apple has the iPhone 3G. My money will be on Apple because of the App Store.

My plans? I guess I need an iPod Touch. That works since they are giving them away as part of the college back to school promotion. I can’t wait to see how MobileMe works with my Nokia E62. The old system worked pretty well. I suspect I won’t have all the nice push features, but that’s where the iPod will come in. I will have my two devices to make up for not being an ATT customer, but that’s OK. At least my data plan didn’t go up in price.