In one of the first such studies, 90% of 200 owners said they were “extremely” or “very” satisfied with their phone. […] The findings are “pretty much off the charts,” says Jason Kramer, Interpret’s chief strategy officer.

Also worty of note. It seems from early numbers that nearly half of new iPhone purchasers are switching from other carriers. That’s huge! In one week Apple helped AT-T convert 250,000 users, a third of which paid nearly $150 to break a contract. Imagine how many are waiting for their contracts to end or for a V2 iPhone.

You can save yourself some reading by looking at the image to the right, but this is going to be big. And I called it.

Things aren’t looking so good for other media extenders. They need to hurry.

iTunes 7.2 (iTunes Plus) is now available. Apple will finally sell DRM-free music from the only record company willing to offer it, EMI.

DRM-free tracks will cost $1.29 each, instead of $0.99 per track you normally pay. The extra thirty cents buys you better audio quality than the standard DRM’ed tracks (256 kbps AAC versus 128 kbs AAC). You can expect larger data downloads as your audio files expand to nearly twice the size to accommodate those extra bits. The 256 encodings do sound better and you now have the freedome to do whatever you want, as many times as you want with your purchaced EMI tracks.

And so it begins.

No commercial skipping…I don’t like the way this is looking.

The Wow certainly does start now. With this kind of revenue and these sized pockets, they can afford to sit on unprofitable products (like the XBox and Zune) until Sony or Apple screws up and they are profitable. Good for them.

I appreciate the Zune, the Zen, and the Sansa in the MP3 player marketplace. Although I would never buy one, it forces Apple (and everyone else) to make better products, to innovate ahead of the curve. However, the reason I would never buy one, is the other products offer no real incentive, they are lacking the refinement and development. When you are behind the ball, that’s all you have. They don’t make a better product, and they don’t have anything new.

This point is made loud and clear with Creative Lab’s new Zen Stone.
If it’s not completely obvious, it is a weak, tardy attempt to get a piece of the micro MP3 player market that Apple is nearly alone in. Make no mistakes about it, this is an iPod Shuffle replica, it’s a knockoff, a hack. They try to throw you off the trail by disguising it in a crazy new material and moving the nearly identical navigation circle to the complete opposite side of the device. In my opinion they’re not much different than cheap Korean knock off’s.

The frustrating thing is, having seven months to replicate the Shuffle, Creative Labs still hasn’t been able to improve on it. They weren’t even able to strip it of it’s “smallest MP3 player” title, and it has 2 hrs less battery life. Aesthetics are relative, but we all know it’s not as pretty. It’s better looking than the previous Shuffle, but alas it’s a year and a half late for that. Not to mention you won’t have the array of Shuffle accessories, to keep you from losing your postage stamp player.

If there where any doubts that it is a cheap copy. Creative’s site states:

Choose how you want to listen to your music! Push the dedicated random button for shuffle playback, play your music in the order you like or repeat your favorite song over and over again?

You mean there is a mode that allows me to randomly SHUFFLE the songs on my micro MP3 player? Creative indeed!

Creative chairman and CEO Sim Wong Hoo says (ha-ha “Hoo says”):

The Creative ZEN Stone, at just $39.99, opens up a huge new market for MP3 players. This is an incredible price for everyone to get a superior quality MP3 player capable of holding up to 250 songs.

First of all, please let me know what makes this a superior quality MP3 player. Second, I appreciate the price of MP3 players, and electronics in general dropping. They might as well movie tickets are nearly $10. However Creative hopes to move these not by offering something cooler or different, but by simply underselling the Shuffle. This doesn’t work.

Update:
I forgot to mention that Mr Hoo made this statement In January of 2005 when the Shuffle Debuted.

Speaking of offering alternative Operating Systems to Vista, Dell confirmed that it will offer Linux on select Dell models.

I’m no Linux cheerleader, but I’m glad to see things moving in this direction and Linux (open source alternatives in general) getting more public exposure. For most people, that is non geeks (and even often geeks), Linux is painful. Weather it be lack of software support, mainstream titles, or the 1992 style UI’s. This could help change that.

So what’s the big deal? Linux is already free, what is this this going to change? I’m glad you asked. First of all you can buy a new Dell without Windows which you are otherwise forced to buy with a new machine, lower price. This will give Linux more recognition, press, and interest. Most importantly, it will increase developer (software and driver) support, for an eventually more widely accepted, more usable, Linux. These two factors (depending on it’s popularity through Dell and otherwise) could force Microsoft to both acknowledge and respect the open source community and reflect this in their quality and pricing. Oh yeah, it would also be nice of Apple to release a Linux iTunes, but they don’t want Linux to succeed any more than Microsoft.

A wider adoption of Linux could also forces the open standards issue a little more which is something Microsoft tends to ignore when it’s convenient or when it helps their sales model.

It’s nice to see Dell bucking Microsoft and Intel, it keeps everyone honest.

As a side note according to Dells profile page, Michael Dell’s home laptop runs Ubuntu. It’s okay Mike, you don’t need any street cred.