The Oyster’s Garter

The safety razor is a classic example of business marketing: Sell people the handle cheap, and they’ll keep coming back for the pricey blades. Thanks to a series of posts over at Apple Insider, we can see that’s exactly what AT&T is doing to the iPhone. Sure, the the hotter-then-hot iPhone price has been dropped to a wallet-pleasing $199. But even as they lowered the price of the handset, they raised the price of calling plans. Now an iPhone calling plan with unlimited data costs $70 a month, and they took away the free 200 text messages (I’m not a text messager, but I’m told that they’re all the rage with the whippersnapper set), which costs an extra 5 bucks.

So that’s $15 a month more per month than it was with the first generation iPhone, plus you have to pay a $36 upgrade fee. Given the mandatory 2-year contract, that means the plan costs $396 more then it used to own an iPhone ($276 if you think text messaging is unhealthy). So the savings from the 8GB iPhone price cut from $399 to $199? Poof, they’re gone.

Dogs, small children, and outdoor kitties beware: The makers of the Roomba, iRobot, are working on a robot lawnmower. The Roomba, for those lacking in gadgeteer friends, is a robot vacuum cleaner. If R2D2 were squashed into a 6-inch- tall disc, you’d know what a Roomba looks like. Once activated, the Roomba drives itself around a room, vacuuming as it goes. When it hits a wall, or a chair, it will try to change course, or back up and set off in a  new direction. Supposedly, given time, it will vacuum the whole room. I have friends who love theirs, so I’m guess it’s actually pretty successful at sucking dirt. But the real fun is when you get some Roomba-pet interaction going on. As a rule, cats do NOT like vacuum cleaners, and self-propelled vacuum cleaners are simply more than their walnut-sized brains can handle. Oh the hissing I’ve seen! Oh the crazed attempts to chew the Roomba to bits! Good times all around.

Now imagine the same device, but bigger, and armed with blades spinning at high speed. Now you’ve got the iMower, which iRobot just filed a patent for, and you’ll understand why Scruffy had best put on his sprinting shoes. Well, maybe Scruffy better already have those shoes, since it turns out there are already a couple of automated lawn mowers: RoboMower, from an Israeli firm (pictured above) and LawnBott from Kyodo America. Who knew?

Addition: They also come in the solar powered variety. (Thanks Greg)

[Via Engadget and Robotstocknews]

I downloaded the new Firefox last night. Truly, it is the fastest browser since…well, since Firefox 1.0. I timed it against the heaviest sites I use: ESPN, CNN, and Google Reader and it beat Firefox 2 and Safari by a mile. Since both of those beat Internet Explorer, at least on the Mac side, I think by the transitive property Firefox can claim superiority. I haven’t yet run across any of the functional improvements. Mostly seems to work the same, to me.

Oh, and the upgrade is really easy, too. I installed the new Firefox and it kept all my bookmarks, all my settings, and my cache. It’s early yet, but thumbs up so far.

I was so hoping I’d never have to run again. Unfortunately, although playing Nintendo Wii games does burn 50% more calories than playing regular console games, it doesn’t even approach the calories burnt by normal exercise. It’s not so much that I’m surprised by this result as I have the sense of a million teenage voices hoping to get a Wii suddenly silenced.

Microsoft is issuing a patch for the troubled latest version of the windows operating system, Vista, to “address issues of reliability, performance, and stability.” Really? Is that all?

No doubt they’re worried now that Apple has released their latest OS, Leopard, to rave reviews.

Nothing makes a Mac person more smug than the woes of a Microsoft product. And man does it sure look like Windows Vista is a turkey. A short summary of the problems: It won’t let you make Firefox your default browser, the pre-installed backup software doesn’t work properly, software makers aren’t jumping to upgrade their software to use Vista functionality, and it will check “the legitimacy” of software on your computer and even delete stuff it doesn’t like. Actually, that last one is a doozy. Here’s what how a reviewer form the Toronto Star described the pre-installed anti-virus software Windows Defender:

Once operational, the agreement warns that Windows Defender will, by default, automatically remove software rated “high” or “severe,” even though that may result in other software ceasing to work or mistakenly result in the removal of software that is not unwanted.

Really? It will just delete stuff? That’s so not OK.  And those are just a few of the myriad reasons not to use Vista that the Internet provided. No wonder a C-Net blogger is calling for Microsoft to just abandon the whole project.