A screenshot from the not-yet-launched store seems designed to appeal to wonky coders, not the mass market of non-technical buyers Google will need to attract. My guess: Google will fall all over themselves insisting it's all about developers and Freedom, until the store is ready for launch. Then they'll shove ZeDev Tools and Murderdrome aside for Bingo and FlipBook. At least with a YouTube-like rating system, there's a chance of surprise hits that aren't chosen by app store curators with a canned idea of what a smartphone is for.

When I spoke to each of you about Tapulous, whether I recruited you, or inherited you from GoGoApps, I spoke of an engineering paradise where smart people would come together to ship beautiful applications, to lead a computing revolution, and to become a real force for world change.

It's a blustery start, yes: app development is world-changingly romantic, but romance rarely pays the bills. Still, it's not as silly as when he starts to channel Steve Jobs:

So what now? I’m going to work on my autobiography and come to terms with being ejected from the company I helped build. I’m going to spend time with my wife, and continue to fret over Madagascar. Then, when the next interesting project comes along, you’ll hear about it here. So in closing, my team, my friends, I must leave you to the fight.

Who can resist a tease about their next act when they're headed out the door, right? But Lee doesn't stop there. No, his new project comes pitched in his very next post:

Yesterday I said I was going to hang out and write and figure out what I want to do, but it's kind of obvious what I want to do... Forget professional CEOs. I'm an engineer, and a company is a just a project with formal ownership. Let's engineer a better company... Here's an idea — I could take my newly minted Silicon Valley Veteran badge and appeal to investors who are personal heroes, like Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Guy Kawasaki, Paul Graham, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Alison Jolly, Richard Dawkins, and Wil Shipley.

As iPhone developer (and former Apple developer) Buzz Andersen points out as a friendly counterpoint, Lee isn't doing anything all that revolutionary by taking a comparatively stupid amount of money to make iPhone apps.

But that's what developers really want, to be the celebrities in their own rockstar scene. And that requires the kind of ineffable "indie cred" taking VC cash could tarnish.

But do they want to put out a good product, or just a product that makes themselves feel good? Maybe "doing it punk rock-style," as Andersen suggests, isn't just a glamorous way to frame bootstrapping. It also allows coders like Lee to pose as uncompromising revolutionaries. Right: Uncompromising revolutionaries who help Steve Jobs sell millions of iPhones out of the kindness of their hearts.

2.0.2 gives almost full access to the iPhone even while under password protection...

Steps to Reproduce

Set iPhone to use passcode lock, have contacts marked as Favorites with links, phone numbers, addresses, etc in address book entry.

Tap "Emergency Call" keypad from passcode entry screen.

Double-tap home button.

Tap blue arrow next to contact's name. You now have full access to applications such as Safari, complete Contacts list, SMS, Maps, "full" Phone access, and Mail by accessing various entries on the Favorite's page, i.e. tapping their home page brings up a full, unrestricted Safari.

(Photo by Getty Images/Sean Gallup)

Heavy data users have two new options: pay $120 per month for 100 megabytes of international data use or $200 for 200 megabytes. Previously, AT&T announced a 20-megabyte plan for $25 and 50-megabyte plan for $60 plan. A word of caution: Those fees are in addition to what customers already pay to use the phone in the United States.

AT&T says customers can cancel whenever they want, but there are caveats. If you are overseas for only a week, you still have to pay for the whole month — an AT&T spokesman said the company doesn’t prorate the fees. And if you forget to cancel the plan after you get home, you will continue to be charged. AT&T won’t let you specify ahead of time when you want the international plan to end.

(Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma)

Publisher Hal Goldstein says that despite 20 million Windows Mobile phones sold in the past year, there's not enough of an ad market for Windows Mobile. Microsoft and cell-phone companies aren't willing to spend on ads in the mag. Moreover, he says, today's smartphone makers aren't like the old PDA companies — think HP — who were willing to bundle a magazine with their products. Goldstein has obviously sniffed out an iPhone accessories ad market to replace his no-longer-subsidized Pocket PC coverage.

And hey look, Craig Newmark! And Digg is there, too, suggesting Google might have been serious about buying them when they planned this event. Upload your video to YouTube with this "YouTube Upload Station. The YouTube Upload Station is so much more than a MacBook with a T1 connection because it is a democracy engine.

Go, Google. Go, Barack. Go, getting praise in all the papers for reaching out with social media. But please, massages from a company that misspells iPhone? Save that for the Republicans.

(Photos by Steve Rhodes)

But because Worthen writes about "business technology," he looks at the numbers and concludes that "the growth is impressive" — because a month ago, there were zero iPhone business apps. A month ago, there were zero frivolous iPhone apps, too, and they've outgrown business apps 30 to 1. Why not just admit the obvious? People mostly buy iPhones because they're fun. And they install apps for the same reason.

But I disagree with my esteemed colleague Kit Eaton at Gizmodo on one thing: AT&T's network is indeed the iPhone's weak spot. At least 50 percent of the U.S. population lives in an area not served by AT&T 3G. Even David Pogue's iPhone musical called out AT&T service quality as a minus. Verizon's EVDO network — which reaches 80 percent of Americans, per the cheat sheet — would be a much better match. Someday.

I was born and raised in Alabama. Went to school there. I know these people, I have lived among them, I am one of them, and let me tell you something...they're assholes.

However, Alabama is notorious for having the kind of civil litigation environment that makes tort reform advocates scream about "jackpot justice." So she probably thinks she can make this thing pay out like a Biloxi slot machine, and given the right sort of jurors, she probably can. Until the massive award gets knocked down to nubbins on appeal.

Please, somebody from Mississippi - do something stupid in public, quick!

I opened myself to my iPhone 3G epiphany during a seven-hour road trip (it should have been five, but that's another story) to AMD's headquarters in Austin, Texas. I spent that trip with a BlackBerry 8800 and an iPhone 3G resting on my passenger seat, playing "anything you can do, I can do better" with each other the whole way. It was a delight. I was not a paragon of highway safety that night, but I learned more from that trip than I did from a solid week of lab testing. During the trip, the handsets' attention, and mine, were divided primarily among email, browser (news.yahoo.com and phone bandwidth tests on dslreports.com), and real-time navigation.

According to Iminlikewithyou's Charles Forman, who's working on porting his startup's copycat games to the iPhone, there's not much in common between the platforms besides the word "app."

A Facebook app is easy. It's a Web app. The hard part is all the viral "mutherfuckery" that they do. iPhone is like writing a program. Theres a big upfront learning curve. It's a totally different ballgame. A shit developer can make some Web app. But you have to be a good developer to make an iPhone app.

Forman couldn't deliver a cogent explanation of the differences — something to do with the "real-time" nature of iPhone apps. So we asked our favorite developer with a heart of gold and a tongue of acid, former Uncov blogger and Pressflip cofounder Ted Dziuba, to elaborate. The best he could do, below.

• You're going to have to figure out how to store data without MySQL. Years of PHP development has warped your mind to think that everything must be object relational. There's no 12-step program yet, Apple will release it with the next firmware update.
• We know you like to live a life free of authority and rules, but there's one rule you're going to have to follow: Objective C syntax, and the compiler will taser your ass if you get out of line.
• Information wants to be free, right? Well, not Apple's. Especially the developer documentation: that will cost you $99. But you already own more than $8,000 worth of Apple equipment, what's another few bucks? Anyway, since I'm not forking over $100 to look at documentation, that's really as far as I can go.

Specifically, the "3G" part of "iPhone 3G." Patrizio writes that "on disabling 3G, service improved immediately. There were no more dropped calls. Audio quality was fine. Battery life was much better." An analyst tells Patrizio a chip inside the phone is the problem: "We believe that these issues are typical of an immature chipset and radio protocol stack where we are almost certain Infineon is the 3G supplier." Patrizio's three other problems with the iPhone:

• Steve Jobs's kill switch:
  

  Jobs confirmed if you install applications unapproved by Apple, the app will be removed as soon as you plug it in to synch and recharge. What would happen if Microsoft did this?

• Cracking cases. After The Unofficial Apple Weblog reported "Cracks 'appearing' in new iPhone 3Gs," they updated their story to write:
  

  Commenters are literally pouring in to tell us that as careful as they've been with their iPhone 3Gs, even the most babied devices are showing cracks.

• App developers are angry over NDAs. Developers building apps for the iPhone have a hard time helping each other out because Apple forces them to sign strict non-disclosure agreements. The response? FuckingNDA.com.

I recently purchased the HTC Dash, right before the California Supreme Court struck down as illegal early contract termination fees — otherwise, I might have gone and signed up for an iPhone myself. But I love the Dash since it, too, has real buttons and is slim enough not to disrupt the hang of a jacket. Even at over a year old (which is about 35 in Hollywood actress years), it's still selling well despite two major drawbacks: Windows Mobile and T-Mobile.

Similarly, the iPhone is locked to Apple and AT&T. Want an application? You'll have to buy it from the App Store via iTunes. Want a different carrier? Tough noogies. Apple didn't so much break the lock between handset manufacturers and carriers as much as they inserted themselves as a third gatekeeper. While HTC has close ties to Microsoft — its U.S. offices are based in Seattle, and veteran Windows Mobile developers work at the company — the phone maker won't be leaving Microsoft country. It's just applying for dual citizenship in Mountain View.

Dream buyers will be locked to buying T-Mobile voice and data plans, regardless. While customers wait, the current release is likely off in Germany somewhere being larded up with crappy default applications from Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile's parent, which clings to a desperate Teutonic hope you might be dumb enough to continue using its T-Zones wireless services, baked into every T-Mobile phone.

Google's and Apple's entry into wireless just means that lock-in is getting extended from our phones to the desktop. Getting Windows Mobile to sync with my iTunes on my MacBook and Google Calendar and email was a project that took an entire evening. It still doesn't work over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. My father, who took one look at my phone after losing his own and bought one, had no difficulty synching his Outlook contacts and Hotmail account with his Windows PC. Any bets on how easy it will be to sync a phone running Android with Yahoo Mail or iTunes?

So if you dream of buying a handset based on its hardware features, then picking an operating system to run on it, and then choosing a wireless carrier which works well in your neighborhood, keep dreaming. Google would rather join the wireless club, and lock you into its own set of services. The Googlephone promised to set us free, and the Dream looks beautiful — but it's just another cell phone.

It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store. We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence.

[Ars Technica] (Photo by Getty Images)