More iPhones and a documentary

iPhone

More information has come out from AT&T about the iPhone release and plans. While I'm not going to dig into the plans for the phone itself, I just want to reiterate the pricing of the phone itself for customers.

Steve Jobs was very quick and loud to announce the 'low price' of the iPhone. Well the prices for the 8GB and 16GB iPhones will different depending on where you fit in. I will be giving the prices in 8GB/16GB format so I don't have to reiterate myself each time.

So, to get an iPhone 3G without any contract at all, you will have to pay $599/$699. For customers who are not 'upgrade eligible' you will have to pay $399/$499. Finally, for customers who are 'upgrade eligible', opening a new account or adding a line will be paying $199/$299 for the iPhone. I do not have any sources that explicitly say that iPhone users will be 'upgrade eligible' when the iPhone 3G is released, but many are touting that they will be. Only time will tell about that for certain. Typically, a customer is 'upgrade eligible' when their contract has expired. Which I would expect AT&T to be money hungry enough to do just that because Apple fanboys would still be willing to pay that premium just to have the iPhone 3G.

Don't get me wrong, the iPhone is a very nice piece of technology and it is starting to have a real impact on mobile phone industry. The multi-touch interface and web browsing capabilities were very innovative. I have qualms about the multi-touch because I have large fingers and had problems typing with the on-screen keys. Plus the lack of feedback when touching the keys or numbers was not very user friendly. LG has the Voyager, which has a touch interface with feedback whenever a touch button is activated, which is very nice.

However, the blackberry still seems to be the corporate phone of choice by many companies. Be it the features it has, the pricing of the phones or their possible avoidance of certain mobile carriers (*cough* AT&T *cough*). Holding a blackberry is very nice and I do very well using the qwerty keypad even with my large fingers.

I want to see the reviews of the iPhone 3G after 2 or 3 months of use by an impartial judge. Even then I will still probably be using my LG 8300 phone because its cheap, good, and has excellent signal.

Voting Documentary

Someone twittered a link to a video online, that originally aired on HBO, being shown at freedomdocumentaries.org called 'hacking democracy' about electronic voting. Its a long video at one hour twenty-one minutes, but something very interesting to watch. They visit a company in Huntsville, Alabama and go through the trash from Diebold (completely legal).

The War in review

There have been countless documentaries, movies and games produced covering World War II but none that I have seen are quite as good as Ken Burns 'The War'. He stated that he did not want to do another war documentary after completing 'The Civil War'. However he changed his stance after many years of people asking him to cover this war. But the deciding factors were two statistics: 1) Every day we are losing 1,000 World War II veterans in the United States every day 2) an unbelievably high number of high school students across the nation believe that the United States fought along side the Germans AGAINST Russia.

This has been an excellent documentary highlighting some of the people involved in the war without focusing on the generals or even the equipment used. The people highlighted were from four small towns in America that were changed forever by the war. One of those towns was Mobile, Alabama. But it wasn't only limited to people who served, it included family members who were affected by their friends and family serving in the armed forces.

The documentary, broken up into a seven part series aired its last episode last night. However they announced it will be reairing on Wednesday nights later this year, so if you missed it the first time around check it out, you will not regret it.

Ken Burns, The War

I attended the free preview of Ken Burns latest documentary entitled 'The War'. They focus on four towns (including Mobile) and how they changed during the course of World War II. But the main focus is the people from those towns. They interviewed many people for the documentary.

It was a very stunning mix of clips that was very touching. At times you had the audience clapping at something in the film, then other times you could see people shaking their heads or drying their eyes. It will be a very poignant series to watch as it airs on PBS. It is a 14.5 hour documentary that will be aired on Sunday nights starting September 23rd. For the schedule you can visit PBS here. For more information about 'The War' at the PBS website, visit the link here.

The DVD of this documentary will be available October 2nd, presumably at Books-A-Million. It will contain 15.5hrs of film plus some extras such as deleted scenes and interview outtakes. You can pre-order it from PBS here which is good because a portion of the proceeds goes to help fund public television.