Excellent essay collecting insider sources and historical bits, putting iPhone’s development into context. Industry bending to say the least…

If you don’t want to wade through the 3000ish word Wired write up, Valleywag has also provided a handy 300ish word bullet-point summation.

The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry

It was a late morning in the fall of 2006. Almost a year earlier, Steve Jobs had tasked about 200 of Apples top engineers with creating the iPhone. Yet here, in Apples boardroom, it was clear that the prototype was still a disaster. It wasnt just buggy, it flat-out didnt work. The phone dropped calls constantly, the battery stopped charging before it was full, data and applications routinely became corrupted and unusable. The list of problems seemed endless. At the end of the demo, Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, “We dont have a product yet.”

January 10, 2008 - Apple, Cell Phones - Comments (0)

Canadian data rates are getting slightly less extortion-istic ridiculous, but people really need to take some responsibility and read, understand, and comply with the ULA they sign (click-ily or otherwise).

Read The Fine Print: Canadian Hoser Runs Up $85,000 Mobile Phone Bill

How do you manage to run up an $85,000 mobile phone bill you ask? Apparently, 22-year-old Calgary native Piotr Staniaszek was under the impression that his $10 “unlimited browser plan” on Bell Mobility gave him carte blanche to use his cellphone as a PC modem. Unfortunately, when a $60,000 bill arrived in his mailbox for the month of November he learned the hard way that this was not the case. The charges were later upped to $85,000 “because the company was charging him on a per-kilobyte basis.”

December 13, 2007 - Cell Phones - Comments (0)