Ok, I know this article (courtesy of Gizmodo) is a bit long-winded, but it really is worth a read if you have a few minutes. I find it humorous that someone can “misplace” a phone of such secrecy and still maintain their employment (at Apple of all companies) after such a blunder. Read it and decide for yourself if this is an honest and drunken mistake, or if it’s a clever rouse to spread the word of the next generation of iPhones to the world.

-Lazy Idiot-

How Apple Lost the Next iPhone-

The Gourmet Haus Staudt. A nice place to enjoy good German lagers. And if you are an Apple Software Engineer named Gray Powell, it’s also a nice place to make the honest mistake of losing the next-generation iPhone

Gray Powell—a North Carolina State University 2006 graduate and talented amateur photographer—is an Apple Software Engineer working on the iPhone Baseband Software, the little program that enables the iPhone to make calls. A dream job for a talented engineer like Powell, an Apple fan who always wanted to meet Steve Jobs.

On the night of March 18, he was enjoying the fine imported ales at Gourmet Haus Staudt, a nice German beer garden in Redwood City, California. He was happy.  After all, it was his birthday. He was turning 27 that very same day, and he was celebrating. The place was great. The beer was excellent. “I underestimated how good German beer is,” he typed into the next-generation iPhone he was testing on the field, cleverly disguised as an iPhone 3GS. It was his last Facebook update from the secret iPhone. It was the last time he ever saw the iPhone, right before he abandoned it on bar stool, leaving to go home.  It’s a simple, honest mistake in the middle of celebration. Something that anyone, from Steve Jobs to Jonathan Ive, could have done. Knowing how ferocious and ruthless Apple is about product leaks, those beers may have turned out to be the bitterest of his life.

(Almost) Impenetrable Security-

Until now, Apple’s legendary security has always worked perfectly. Perhaps there was a blurry factory photo here, or some last-minute information strategically whispered to some friendly media there. But when it comes to the big stuff, everything is airtight. At their Cupertino campus, any gadget or computer that is worth protecting is behind armored doors, with security locks with codes that change every few minutes. Prototypes are bolted to desks. Hidden in these labs, hardware, software and industrial-design elves toil separately on the same devices, without really having the complete picture of the final product.  And hidden in every corner, the Apple secret police, a team of people with a single mission: To make sure nobody speaks. And if there’s a leak, hunt down the traitor, and escort him out of the building. Using lock downs and other fear tactics, these men in black are the last line of defense against any sneaky eyes. The Gran Jefe Steve trusts them to avoid Apple’s worst nightmare: The leak of a strategic product that could cost them millions of dollars in free marketing promotion. One that would make them lose control of the product news cycle.

But the fact is that there’s no perfect security. Not when humans are involved. Humans that can lose things. You know, like the next generation iPhone.

Lost and Found-

Apple security’s mighty walls fell on the midnight of Thursday, March 18. At that time, Powell was at Gourmet Haus Staudt, just 20 miles from the company’s Infinite Loop headquarters, having his fun. Around him, other groups of people were sharing the jolly atmosphere, and plenty of the golden liquid.
The person who eventually ended up with the lost iPhone was sitting next to Powell. He was drinking with a friend too. He noticed Powell on the stool next to him but didn’t think twice about him at the time. Not until Powell had already left the bar, and a random really drunk guy—who’d been sitting on the other side of Powell—returned from the bathroom to his own stool.

The Random Really Drunk Guy pointed at the iPhone sitting on the stool, the precious prototype left by the young Apple engineer.

“Hey man, is that your iPhone?” asked Random Really Drunk Guy.

“Hmmm, what?” replied the person who ended up with the iPhone. “No, no, it isn’t mine.”

“Ooooh, I guess it’s your friend’s then,” referring to a friend who at the time was in the bathroom. “Here, take it,” said the Random Really Drunk Guy, handing it to him. “You don’t want to lose it.” After that, the Random Really Drunk Guy also left the bar.

The person who ended up with the iPhone asked around, but nobody claimed it. He thought about that young guy sitting next to him, so he and his friend stayed there for some time, waiting. Powell never came back.

During that time, he played with it. It seemed like a normal iPhone. “I thought it was just an iPhone 3GS,” he told me in a telephone interview. “It just looked like one. I tried the camera, but it crashed three times.” The iPhone didn’t seem to have any special features, just two bar codes stuck on its back: 8800601pex1 and N90_DVT_GE4X_0493. Next to the volume keys there was another sticker: iPhone SWE-L200221. Apart from that, just six pages of applications. One of them was Facebook. And there, on the Facebook screen, was the Apple engineer, Gray Powell.

Thinking about returning the phone the next day, he left. When he woke up after the hazy night, the phone was dead. Bricked remotely, through MobileMe, the service Apple provides to track and wipe out lost iPhones. It was only then that he realized that there was something strange that iPhone. The exterior didn’t feel right and there was a camera on the front. After tinkering with it, he managed to open the fake 3GS.  There it was, a shiny thing, completely different from everything that came before.  He reached for a phone and called a lot of Apple numbers and tried to find someone who was at least willing to transfer his call to the right person, but no luck. No one took him seriously and all he got for his troubles was a ticket number.  He thought that eventually the ticket would move up high enough and that he would receive a call back, but his phone never rang. What should he be expected to do then? Walk into an Apple store and give the shiny, new device to a 20-year-old who might just end up selling it on eBay?

The Aftermath-

Weeks later, Gizmodo got it for $5,000 in cash. At the time, we didn’t know if it was the real thing or not. It didn’t even get past the Apple logo screen. Once we saw it inside and out, however, there was no doubt about it. It was the real thing, so we started to work on documenting it before returning it to Apple. We had the phone, but we didn’t know the owner. Later, we learned about this story, but we didn’t know for sure it was Powell’s phone until today, when we contacted him via his phone.

To read the rest of the transcripts and article, visit:

http://m.gizmodo.com/site?sid=gizmodoip&pid=JuicerHub&targetUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fgizmodo.com%2F5520479%2Fa-letter-apple-wants-its-secret-iphone-back%3Fop%3Dpost%26refId%3D5520479

With the latest iteration of its mobile operating system, Windows Phone 7 Series aims to narrow the gap between its OS, the iPhone OS and Android.

Built to focus on consumers, Windows Phone 7 Series — or WinPho7 — was designed from the ground up. “We made a very big decision to re-examine everything because the industries surrounding mobile are at an inflection point,” said Andy Lees, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Mobile Communications Business, about the operating system.

A core concept for the design was building a broad platform of software that works across whatever device each user is on at any time.

WinPho7 is tightly integrated with other Microsoft apps, ranging from Xbox Live games to Zune music and video to Bing search to the software giant’s Office productivity software.

-Many Apps Make WinPho7 Work-

That tight integration may well boost WinPho7 ahead of its predecessors in the Windows Mobile 6 series.

“The one thing I thought was really cool about the product was that Microsoft had finally nailed the fact that it’s got all these properties — SharePoint, an email client, document integration — and managed to integrate them all together,” Maribel Lopez, principal analyst and founder of Lopez Research, told TechNewsWorld.

“Microsoft’s existing operating system wasn’t going to cut it any more; it needed a total refresh,” she said.

-Taking On the iPhone and Android?-

WinPho7 has been a long time coming, and its launch has been repeatedly delayed over the years. That delay, was due to the mobile operating system’s overhaul.

Like the iPhone operating system and Android, WinPho7 has strong links to social networks like facebook and Twitter and features a multi-touch screen. It also offers users live updates on their friends’ status.

“Microsoft took a look at both Android and the iPhone OS, figured out what the next generation might be and built it,” Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group, told TechNewsWorld. “It’s both simple and elegant; it’s kind of hard to believe it came from Microsoft.”

“They’re targeting the holiday season, which means that other people still have another six months to announce their updates,” she pointed out. “For example, we’ll probably see an update for the iPhone around June. So, Microsoft’s operating system refresh looks caught up today, but we don’t know where it’ll be in six months.”
Random Thoughts About WinPho7

Microsoft may well need those six months to shore up the weaknesses in WinPho7. “The solution isn’t complete yet, and there are still a number of things that needs to be done before it hits the shelves,” Enderle said.

For one thing, Microsoft’s application store is light on apps, although it’s well executed, Enderle pointed out. For another, this is going to be the first run of a brand-new platform, so there probably will be some teething problems, he said.

However, the platform may be less buggy than feared. “Microsoft does better beta tests than Apple or Google, so you would expect its new platform to have fewer problems than the initial iPhone or Android versions have historically had,” Enderle said.

More enterprise apps should be announced during and after the Microsoft MIX10 conference, which will be held Mar. 15 to 17 in Las Vegas, Enderle said. MIX10 attendees will be introduced to the platform, shown how to work with the WinPho7 development tools, and be given a tour of the Windows Marketplace. MIX10 attendees will also get free developer support for the WinPho7 development tools.

Whether or not WinPho7 will be on par with Android and the iPhone when it’s launched later this year is still an open issue.

(Source: TechNewsWorld).

- I like to try to keep myself up to date with cell phones for the most part, sometimes thinking I may even be a “Cell Snob” as I call it, but I’m not sure I’m going to go back to a windows based OS phone, EVER. I have been using an Android phone for about a year now, and I am relatively pleased with what Android has done. There are certain things I would like (Flash 10) but overall they have taken a good idea from the iPhone’s platform and made it better (in my opinion), but is Microsoft trying to do the same here? Don’t get me wrong, I do like the iPhone for it’s own reasons, but the Droid (which I have previously posted) is promoted for open-source developing, which is a huge advantage to the consumer when it comes to Market apps. Microsoft however, has stated that there will be no customizations from users, carriers, or phone manufacturers. What a mistake, it’s always going to look the same no matter where you buy it or who you buy it from (just like the iPhone). Essentially, these phones will be clones, even if a person owns one from AT&T and another person from Verizon they will look identical.  Apple can get way with this, because it is the Apple iPhone, so it’s always going to be the same no matter the carrier, but it’s slated that WinPho7 phones could all look the same even if built by different manufacturers like HTC, Samsung, or LG. Basically, if you’ve seen one, you’ve pretty much seen them all. LAME! That is where Android still has the edge over Apple and Microsoft, they are totally open to innovation, new design, and new UI’s, as to where Apple and Microsoft have failed and left their phones so proprietary that they just simply cannot be altered, and there is no freedom with expression.  That is very limiting as to what can be done in the future with those phones in terms of development.

It sounds like the only real standout points for this OS is that it has integrated Xbox Live services and seems to be integrated with some pretty cool PC functions, but that all remains to be seen later this year I guess. The WinPho7 OS based phones should be available just in time for X-mas, but I don’t forsee them doing so well. No idea on starting prices for these devices just yet, but my guess is around $300-$500 to start out. Not sure who will be carrying them either, but I assume it’ll be most of the same carriers that are currently selling Windows 6 phones now.

-Lazy idiot-