Well maybe not. I know everyone is sick of hearing about the Jesus phone, I know I most certainly am. But I wanted to touch on a topic that is driving me insane. I see new articles about it everyday. Its driving me crazy. Now all of you are saying, “What is driving you crazy?”, all the articles about people finally UNLOCKING THE iPhone! I have read hundreds of claims that people have unlocked the iPhone. But the thing is that is all we ever hear are claims. I know some people have actually done it, but to what extent are you prepared to go to unlock that ironclad device. In the end you might find yourself spending more on unlocking it then actually ponying up the cash for AT&T.

I understand the people that don’t want to give into the system, and that’s neat and all. But really why waste your time, energy, and hard earned money on simply unlocking a phone that might or might not work with your carrier. Plus what happens when your phone dies, or has a malfunction. Do you take it back to Apple? I don’t think that will really work. Granted most of the people that are trying to unlock these things are pretty savy with the gadgets, so I assume they would probably be able to fix most issues on their own, and that’s the rub, not everyone is savy with the gadgets. Its a glass half full type of situation.

Now some people are claiming they unlocked the phone monkeying around with the internal hardware, and some claim the TurboSim card unlocks the phone via blocking it from getting any AT&T info, and a recent one I heard today about people doing it via a firmware hack. Once again I reiterate that this is not a bad thing. This is how people discover things about technology and how innovations are created in the marketplace, simply by taking a device apart and seeing how it works. That’s how technology evolves, which is a great thing. But as these shenanigans keep on progressing I really do not see one true process to unlock these devious devices. So I say this once and once only, that the Apple iPhone is the most secure smart-phone to date. If the Apple iPhone was a building it would be Fort Knox, but I think it would be even more secure then Fort Knox. You see Fort Knox is not open to the public, which the iPhone is, and if Fort Knox was open to the public for 2 months people would have already found a way into the safes. But their are many claims of partially unlocked iPhones as well (Thats like partially stealing the gold then getting shot on the way out by the tower guards).

When I say secure, I don’t mean secure software, or secure from software exploits, I mean it is locked down to the mother-ship and the tractor beam is strong. Their are thousands of some of the best PDA/Smart-phone crackers in the world working on this, and no one has came out with a true unlock method for the masses. The funny thing is that whenever if ever their is one Golden Key to unlock the palace, Apple and AT&T will sit and watch as people start unlocking the phones. Now this is the painful part, they will watch, but they wont be upset. They will be sitting over a tech’s pc telling him to deploy the new firmware that will brick every single one. ONE KEYSTROKE. Then the process begins all over again.

My point to all of this is that the masses will not go along. Once they have touched that glassy interface they will not be able to go back to any other smart-phone. So they will eventually cough up the cash for the AT&T service, and it will come with another rush of profits for the two companies.

Like I wrote about last week, these companies thrive off control. They want to control the influx of information, they want to control your hardware and software. Frustrating at best, but what can we do? Except not buy there hardware and software. This is why I have taken a stand. I would love to have that gorgeous phone, but it does not work with my carrier. So I am waiting for the revised version of the HTC Touch.  To me its as close to an iPhone as any other device.

I guess I have not been struck with the Jesus phone syndrome yet?

Here are some examples of the claims I have been talking about:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

I think ten example are enough, I could link to different stories all day.

What can I say about SkyDrive that has not already been touched on?

Well first off this is really a great service that is free. Their is a lot of competition in this sector of “Cloud Storage” but the majority of them are clunky and are not that easy to use for the everyday user. The best site I have found for online storage is BOX.net. But that is not the greatest either. You have to pay quite a bit for monthly and yearly service, and you really don’t get that much storage for what you pay.

So I do have a couple qualms about this it so far. I do understand it is still obviously under beta. But I thought I would criticize it anyway, not to be a jerk, but just some suggestions on which directions they should head for.

1. MORE STORAGE!

2. Ability to map your SkyDrive as a mapped drive.

3. Allow users to connect via ODBC. (or just me:))

4. KEEP IT FREE!!!

I obviously don’t think this service will continue to be free. If they do intend to keep a portion of it free I hope they at least give the user 1GB of free space. I am already starting to use the SkyDrive around the office, loading smaller utilities and other work oriented documents on it. So far so good, no hang ups at all.

Once I read Brandon Leblanc’s post over at the Windows Vista Team Blog about the new change over from the “Live Spaces” name to “SkyDrive” it got me really excited. As I was reading through his post it got my little brain running with ideas on what I could use SkyDrive for. To me “Cloud Storage” is the future. So many small businesses’ use similar services already because of the easy and worry free way to backup all data. But at the same time these services can get very expensive. Hopefully MS notices this, and they act on it. It’s so hard for the small business owner or even home user to find out what company and service is reliable and trustworthy when it comes to virtual storage. Everyone knows MS and the MS brand. I think if they were able to work themselves slowly into this market of small business it could really spark a lot more interest with SkyDrive. But I think as of now they are more directed at the everyday user rather then small business and mid grade enterprise, which is fine for now.

I see a lot of potential with SkyDrive, a lot. Hopefully Microsoft pays attention to the all of the customer reviews and criticisms of the service and changes them to suit their user base.

The two most important features I would like to see are more storage and a way to connect via ODBC connection. Other then that I probably would not mind paying a small monthly fee of lets say $8.00- $15.00 for 7-15GB of storage, as long as I was able to map the drive and connect via ODBC. Obviously not everyone is as picky as I am. This program has a wonderful future, and I hope this is not a project that gets left on the back burner of Live Labs.

Gina Trapani over on Lifehacker pointed out that Google had accidentally deleted its company’s Custom Search Blog. You can read about the whole thing on Yahoo! News. Apparently Blogger’s spam detection flagged their Custom Search Blog as a spam blog and decided to do away with it.

While the incident is quite amusing, it does showcase Google’s investment in keeping their Blogger blogging service clean and free of spam blogs and what not. However I certainly hope the accidental deletion of blogs is something that doesn’t occur too often because if I was a user of Blogger and found my blog had been flagged as spam and deleted - I’d be pissed.

This is why I prefer owning my own domain and running the blog myself versus depending on someone else to do it.