Geeky goodness

Poll: How long will it be before I give in to the urge to jailbreak my iPhone?

1. less than 24 hours
2. 24 to 72 hours
3. 72 hours to one week
4. three weeks
5. months

Put your poll choice in comments :-).

In other geeky news, Palm just demonstrated its new Palm Pre smartphone, which looks like it's going to be an iPhone killer with a totally new smartphone OS based on Linux and designed for touchscreens from the beginning, but with Palm's well-known attention to easy-to-use interface design (something forced upon them due to the limitations of the original Palm Pilot hardware, but which they've turned into a virtue over the years). Palm has fixed numerous problems with the iPhone's user interface. Palm knows that thumb-boards are much faster to enter text on than the on-screen keyboard of the iPhone, so made a slide-out thumb-board -- in the *vertical* direction rather than a horizontal one like everybody else does. Some other iPhone problems fixed: a) cut-and-paste between applications, b) non-evil policies for writing applications that allow applications to extend internal Pre functionality rather than requiring all apps to run in a "sandbox" where they cannot interact with anybody, c) real multi-tasking, handled via "cards" similar to the way that iPhone Safari handles multiple web pages, d) one-handed operation. Operate the iPhone one-handed. I dare you. It'll slip out of your hand like a bar of soap as you try to tap things that are above where your thumb can naturally reach.

Only bummer: It isn't available until May at the earliest. And it's only available on Splint. Sigh. Oh well, maybe Apple will fix some of these issues in their upcoming iPhone 3.0 software... I can hope, anyhow!

-- Badtux the Geeky Penguin