IPhone and OS X 10.5.6

The doctor's office calls and the lady tells me the appt has to change. I ask for a sec to pull up iCall and adjust it with her on the phone so I know I have it right. All set with that, I want to know how long it will take for it to get to the iPhone. I screwed off for a bit to give it a fighting chance but it was definitely less than a minute. Sure enough, the change was already there and the iPhone is not docked.

The improvement in synchronization time comes with the upgrade released yesterday to OS X 10.5.6. I've upgraded on a MacBook Pro and two Mac desktop machines. There was no trouble with the upgrade on any of them and the benefit in performance to iPhone synchronization is obvious.

This will be an interesting evolution and one result is a computer of iPhone's size that has the power of a desktop but there are some tiny problems with that. The first is that it would be so hot that it would turn your hand into a steak. The second is that the only thing that would save your hand is that the batteries wouldn't be strong enough to keep it running past getting you medium rare. There's also the minor problem of making it so radioactive that we all metamorphose into salamanders.

They'll solve all those problems but there's still getting the screen big enough to see it and typing easy enough that you don't mind doing it. I'm not going to get all pundit on you as it seems self-evident to me that these things will happen. Computers get faster. The iPhone is a computer. It will get faster.

What's interesting to me is what people will do with the power. No-one wants to carry a laptop even if only because they're a drag for going through airport security. Carrying a cell is still geeky but it's not too physically unpleasant.

Consider if the iPhone had the compute power of my MacBook Pro. I'd load all my tunes onto it and all I'd want would be a Firewire plug and it's jammin'. Except....that teeny tiny screen. So I need a video out as well. The batteries aren't going to die because it'll be docked to some power source. Can't expect batteries to lift Mt Everest.

There's still the problem of a keyboard and you don't want to plug yet another cable into it or you'd have it looking like a porcupine. Maybe that's ok but it doesn't have Apple elegance. I don't know if maybe it'll get all "Minority Report" with much waving of hands and doing special gestures but I really don't want to be asking myself if I scratch my ear or poke myself in the eye to get the computer to open a file. So, who knows...

Anyway, interesting to watch evolution. Apple's easily got the smartest operating system for a cell but who's to say the quintillions of dollars in all this won't generate a better one from someone else. It's all very well to look at Web pages but when you talk don't you want to see the person. I do and I don't see anything about that kind of phone. If you really want to get all sci-fi, why can't the damn phone give you a hologram of the caller. Yeah, and press a button to teleport. Right, that's how they're supposed to work.