[by Carleen Hawn] David Pogue’s schmaltzy Macworld talk show always plays to a packed house and this morning’s was no different. This year the skit hit was a spoof on cellphone service – ever worse since manufacturers “got rid of the antenna,” Pogue claims. We saw Pogue hammer-out a tinfoil helmet which he donned to bring his network coverage to satisfaction. It was cute but you’ll only see it on Youtube because Pogue’s partners at the Discovery Network thought viewers wouldn’t get that it was a joke.
And hey, was it an iPhone in that spoof we saw? No, but it should have been, as much of the fierce criticism of Apple’s iPhone following yesterday’s debut has, astutely, focused on the exclusive carrier agreement CEO Jobs signed with AT&T/Cingular, a network long-known for dropped calls and shoddy service. (“Raising the bar,” my foot).
So why did Apple team up with Cingular? And why did Jobs announce the iPhone six months before he can deliver it? I had hoped Pogue would devote one of his souped-up songs to the intrigue but that might be like biting the hand…
Instead Pogue offered a ballad to YouTube set to Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe” and a biting tune about DRM rewritten to the Village People’s YMCA : “You Just Got Sued by the R-I-A-A!!”
And then Pogue introduced us to an 18-year-old Dartmouth student named Phillip Ryu. The kid ran a competition called Mydreamapp.com, where amateurs competed to design their fantasy Mac application. The winner, a product Atmosphere (“an ambient way to see your weather”) is now being built. Ryu and friends also produced something called MacHeist where they bundled shareware applications and sold them for $49, donating 25% of proceeds to the buyer’s charity of choice. MacHeist raised $200,000.Pogue got it right when he said the future of the tech looks good if it is in the hands of kids like Phillip Ryu. This is reason enough to be at Macworld 2007.