Technically Incorrect

The more Verizon and AT&T trade unseasonal greetings over their respective 3G networks, the more collateral damage seems to be inflicted on the iPhone. Yes, Verizon has itself made jokes about the iPhone being a "misfit toy". However, on Saturday, Seth Meyers of "Saturday Night Live" dedicated 16 seconds of his Weekend Update to a joke about, yes, truly, the iPhone.

Here is the precise text: "It was reported this week that Google would soon launch its own cell phone as a challenge to the iPhone. Also a challenge to the iPhone? Making phone calls." Cue much laughter.

Before Apple devotees could regain their breath, the 16-second clip soared around the Web as if it were new evidence of global warming. More than 140,000 people viewed it on YouTube before NBC Universal mentioned that it, um, owned the rights to the clip.

I have therefore embedded the whole of Saturday night's live extravaganza, which I obtained from NBC's own site. The 16-second iPhone bombshell hits just after the 37-minute mark.

I know many will be distressed that Meyers makes no mention of AT&T. Save for some folks at AT&T, where they are still allegedly mulling what to do about the company's sponsorship of alleged serial sexter, Tiger Woods.

Many people I know are frightfully attached to their iPhones. They treat them as if they were a peculiar and exotic lover, one they can hardly believe they have managed to seduce.

The finely calibrated minds at Strand Consult have taken this analysis to a particularly simple conclusion: iPhone users are, the consultants say, really quite nuts.

The Strand thinkers released an opinion entitled "How will psychologists describe the iPhone syndrome in the future?." It focuses on the sorts of people who buy into Apple's great success.

Here's a flavor of the somewhat-skeptical nature of Strand's feelings: "Apple has launched a beautiful phone with a fantastic user interface that has had a number of technological shortcomings that many iPhone users have accepted and defended, despite those shortcomings resulting in limitations in iPhone users' daily lives."

The consultants' likening of iPhone buyers to kidnapped hostages may raise more than the eyebrows of many an Apple fanboy (fanperson?). Indeed, it already has the Mac world aflutter.

Is this evidence of an iPhone hypnotising a user?

(Credit: CC Gonzalo Baeza Hernandez/Flickr)

"When we examine the iPhone users' arguments defending the iPhone, it reminds us of the famous Stockholm Syndrome--a term invented by psychologists after a hostage drama in Stockholm. Here, hostages reacted to the psychological pressure they were experiencing by defending the people that had held them hostage for six days," Strand declared.

The implication is surely that Apple has mugged millions of people with its beauty, dragged them off to a very dark cellar in some barren land, turned them into slightly bonkers Barbarellas, and then recruited them as soldiers for the cause.

This is the sort of thing of which the Church of Scientology is normally accused. But for some strange reason, it's a rather chilling but pleasant shower to read something that isn't mere worship.

Strand claims that it closely analyzes the financials of mobile operators. And if you also happen to order its wonderfully free report "The Moment of Truth, a portrait of the iPhone," you will discover the 10 great myths about the iPhone. Here are just two: it doesn't attract new business for operators, and it is not a technologically advanced mobile phone.

I know you'll be rushing to read these fine tracts, and I feel sure that a couple of you might wish to drop Strand Consult a note. To encourage you a little, I'll warn you that Strand also seems to believe that some of you Apple customers are, well, liars.

The consultants put it quite sweetly: "In reality, the iPhone is surrounded by a multitude of people, media, and companies that are happy to bend the truth to defend the product they have purchased from Apple."

Apple customers are liars? The media too? Surely not.

If you were watching Florida impersonate a headless chicken against Alabama Saturday, you might have been aware that Luke Wilson, AT&T's disarming new pitchman, had also lost his head.

For the game was interrupted by Wilson's need to talk, with his filmic features and without.

The battle between AT&T and Verizon has been peppered by startling doses of objectivity. So to demonstrate the clear, obvious, incontrovertible fact that Verizon's 3G is but a Wendy's-stuffing, cake-loving, 15-beers-a-night slob when compared with AT&T's Usain Bolt, Wilson performs a side-by-side that would put the Pepsi Challenge to shame.

On AT&T's 3G, Wilson, finally not dressed in a painful shade of tree bark, downloads himself with the speed of an unfaithful, burglarizing vicar fleeing from the press.

When he tries using the Verizon 3G, which AT&T declares is very much slower, Wilson is up to his neck in it. There is no time to bring his head into the picture.

Naturally, AT&T's hope is that Wilson's charm will encourage people to use their hearts at least as much as their heads. No one using the latter will really believe he is using Verizon's 3G to materialize his headless self.

So smartphone seekers will be left trying to decide between a network that is allegedly everywhere, but is slow, and one which, according to critics, isn't remotely everywhere, but is faster and, oh, has that supposed digitally clueless pageant queen of an iPhone.

It's not quite George Clooney vs. Brad Pitt, is it? It's more, well, Luke Wilson vs. Owen Wilson.

Perhaps you have already become used to Verizon's Droid tossing names at the iPhone like an 8-year-old boy behind his teacher's back.

However, the latest ill feelings directed at Apple's little cutey seem beyond even anything heard in an elementary school.

In a new TV spot, Droid asks an important question: "Should a phone be pretty?" To which many sane people would say "yes," and many emotionally challenged beings made of metal would say, "Huh? What?"

Its answer--the latest in its presentation of the Droid as a robotphone--is to hurl metallic-tasting custard pies as if the Apple store was a state fair.

"Should it be a tiara-wearing digitally clueless beauty pageant queen?" belches the ad's rhetoric, clearly referencing the iPhone, while wrapping the pie in a question.

I know many Socratically-inclined Apple fanpersons will object to the notion that beauty is only skin deep. But they will surely rail against the mere suggestion that the iPhone is digitally clueless.

Of course, this ad implicitly suggests that the Droid is, well, one of Cinderella's sisters, which might well affect its abilities to entice certain sectors of the populace.

Actually, the suggestion is more than implicit, for the deeply hirsute voice declares: "Is it a precious porcelain figurine of a phone? In truth, no."

So do you wait for a design that is pretty and is, as this ad so elegantly puts it, "racehorse duct-taped to a Scud missile fast" or do you have to compromise?

I know they say you can't have everything in life, but surely there must be some very attractive engineer out there who can give us everything in a few square inches of cell phone.

If you thought that all wireless carriers know just how good their competitors' networks are, you might be suffering from a dropped conception.

In a recent speech to the Association of National Advertisers, posted on the AdAge Web site, Verizon Chief Marketing Officer John Stratton explained that his company couldn't get hold of any good data on just how reliable AT&T's network is. So it commissioned a third-party survey, one that seems to have sent it giddy with joy.

"What we saw, we sort of suspected, but it was almost astounding," he said.

So almost astounding, in fact, that Stratton said the company canned its fourth-quarter holiday campaign, which had already been produced but not yet aired (and presumably did not mention AT&T), and began mapping out its besmirchment of its rival's alleged network deficiencies.

"There was a bit of fact here that needed to be expressed aggressively to the marketplace," he added.

The bit of fact, which AT&T feels has been stretched into the part of the bookstore entitled "fiction," revolved around the accusation that AT&T's network has more holes than your average chunk of emmental.

The new Verizon ads seem certainly to have stirred a girding of loins in the marketplace and perhaps helped sales of the Droid, which are approaching 1 million.

Stratton added that because people are using cell phones in so many more ways, the strength of a company's network will be an increasingly important factor in consumer choice.

Strangely, he said nothing about Verizon one day offering the iPhone on its network.

There again, with the agility the company showed in producing the anti-AT&T ads so quickly, perhaps they're already shooting some happy Verizon iPhone ads. You know, just in case. You know, somewhere in Fiji, perhaps. You know, with the money they're saving now that AT&T has dropped its lawsuit against the map ads.

(Credit: Phandroid)

Oh, you knew someone was going to do this. So let's just get it over with. And though some might think of this as a battle between the Droid and the iPhone for the nation's morality, let's be open-source about it: someone's trying to make a lot of money from cell phone porn.

A company with the obtusely childlike name MiKandi has launched a mobile app store that will exclusively cater to adults whose brain food consists of content that reflects their age. Yes, the sort of stuff some prefer to refer to as porn.

MiKandi's publicity material naturally avoids this term, referring to the more PC phrase "adult only." However, there is a little kink in its offering. According to Android fanperson site, Phandroid, the MiKandi Market apps only work with Android phones and not with Apple's more morally minded handsets.

Cupertino steadfastly sticks to its policy of refusing to allow apps filled purely with adult content, though some might dispute whether its definition of "adult" isn't occasionally a little idiosyncratic.

Not for a moment would one suggest that Verizon or Motorola or the deities at Google are necessarily in favor of porn apps. However, MiKandi is attempting to take advantage of the fact that the Android system is more open than the iPhone's.

So while the Android Market itself doesn't offer porn, nothing on your Droid phone prevents you from using MiKandi's services. The wise people at Phandroid do, however, offer stern warnings about MiKandi's workings.

Despite attempting to use MiKandi's services, purely for scientific purposes, Phandroid failed to actually secure access to any mature content. Remember, children, this sort of thing will always be a somewhat risky business.

In its attempt to redress the imbalance created by the latest Verizon ads, AT&T has hurriedly cobbled together not just one Luke Wilson ad, but several.

Curiously, one ad features precisely the same strategy as that of the latest iPhone advertising: reminding those who might still be on the fence, on the phone, or even on the lam that you can't simultaneously enjoy voice and Web surfing on the Verizon 3G network--and hence on the Motorola Droid.

So here we have Luke Wilson, still looking a little peaky and dressed in a difficult brown. Behind Luke, we have a man trying to use two phones (by implication, Verizon phones) to perform a task the iPhone will manage alone.

Some might find it entertaining that as his friend attempts to download something on one of his Verizon phones, he complains that it's all going rather slowly. Others might find this both true and funny.

AT&T hasn't merely paid Wilson a little more than 3G to make this comparison. Someone, somewhere, has, perhaps even wisely, said, "We need a map to counter Verizon's map."

So the writers hit upon the idea of a two-part extravaganza (this already aired during Tuesday's "Dancing with the Stars" finale), in which Wilson produces postcards from all the different American towns that really do--no, really--have AT&T 3G coverage.

Wilson says his job is to set the record straight, with respect to Verizon's vicious besmirching of the AT&T network. He tries his best. He tells us that AT&T covers 97 percent of all Americans--yes, 300 million people.

The AT&T map also seems far more filled-in and far more colorful than it appears in Verizon spots, though one suspects that local word of mouth might be rather stronger, in this instance, than national advertising. If you live in Spokane, Wash., for example, and you know someone there who has spotty 3G service on a particular network, that is far more powerful an influencer than any number of Wilson's postcards or Verizon's barbs.

It's enlightening, however, to discover that Wilson once dated someone in Tulsa, Okla., and it didn't work out. Did she catch him simultaneously calling and Web surfing? Perhaps we will never know.

It seems that Apple doesn't respect Verizon's Droid phone quite as much as it does Microsoft's PCs. But two new ad spots, launching Monday evening, come as close as Apple has done thus far to directly attack the allegedly do-it-all robotphone.

The Droid, you see, went after Apple in its teaser campaign with some telling remarks and the hearty claim that Droid does what the iPhone doesn't. Then Verizon decided it would be fun to knock both the iPhone and AT&T's spotty 3G coverage with its "Misfit Toys" concept.

AT&T has already replied by hustling a hastily-dressed Luke Wilson into directing a few resentful pins at Verizon's effigy. However these new ads, while entirely in keeping with the iPhone tone and style, end with a line that expressly assaults the doings of Droid--or rather, its alleged non-doings.

Both ads focus on the iPhone's ability to allow you to use voice and data capabilities simultaneously over the AT&T network. By asking gently at the end of each spot "Can your phone and your network do that?" Apple is bursting what it sees as the inflated stealth bombing that accompanied the launch of the Droid.

Apple iPhone Ad - Did You See My Email? from Arik Hesseldahl on Vimeo.

Apple iPhone Ad - What Time's The Movie? from Arik Hesseldahl on Vimeo.

These ads don't mention the Droid or Verizon by name. But the fact that Apple has decided to address its rivals, however obliquely, suggests that one can look forward to more accusations, more bickering, and more attempted one-upmanship.

'Tis the season of goodwill, after all.

I have nothing against smoking, save for the difficult odor that emanates from every part, breath, and piece of clothing belonging to a smoker. I could no more live with a smoker than I could live with a third ear perched off the end of my nose.

However, I am embalmed in a curious sympathy after reading a report from The Consumerist concerning two Mac users whose AppleCare warranties appear to have been voided due to the presence of cigarette smoke in their homes.

One, named Derek, recounts the tale of his overheating black MacBook. He took it into the Apple store in Jordan Creek, West Des Moines.

He told The Consumerist: "Today, April, 28, 2008, the Apple store called and informed me that due to the computer having been used in a house where there was smoking, that has voided the warranty and they refuse to work on the machine, due to 'health risks of secondhand smoke.'"

He continued: "Nowhere in your AppleCare terms of service can I find anything mentioning being used in a smoking environment as voiding the warranty."

Will a Marlboro Lights habit makes this cute thing inoperable?

(Credit: CC Galaygobi/Flickr)

Derek's resulting appeal to the office of Steve Jobs bore him no joy, so he resorted to blowing some compressed air at the machine, leading it to restart its wondrous functions.

Then along came Ruth, who took her son's iMac to an authorized repair center. After five days, they apparently told her they couldn't work on it because it was contaminated with cigarette smoke and was therefore a bio-hazard.