The keynote itself was something of a let down. No new, non-wussy (as opposed to the Mac Mini), non-sissy (as opposed to the iMac) mid-range desktop, no MacBook EEE, no “one more thing”. I mean, really, after he pulled that stunt and introduced the I-still-want-one-btw G4 Cube back in 2000, he set a bar of expectation he’s not likely to clear or live down any time soon (although he did come close last year).

But it’s the iPhone 3G that’s really got me going, “Ooh, bulk delete. Big. Whoop.”

Sure, there’s more to it than that, but do they really think they’re “taking it to the next level” with this thing?

Seriously, dude, we know 3G is faster. No need to convince us. We’re the choir. In fact, we were the preachers when you were still in the choir.

Yes, the styling still trumps all, but the hardware feature set is woefully previous gen in the mobile phone industry. And while the interaction and integration on the software side have always impressed, I expected more from a company with significant experience in producing a full-fledged, mass-market desktop operating system. It’s not like they’ve never done an address book or an email application before. So why are the little things which make these useful and usable 2.0 features when they could have been – should have been – in 1.0?

GPS, contact search, enterprise support, iWork/Office doc support, image saving, a decent headphone jack… can you honestly tell me no one thought of any of these things in the two and half years they were putting together the first iPhone?

The App Store looks promising, but if they really think “there’s never been anything like it… for getting apps from developers to users” then they weren’t paying attention to the iPhone hacking community which produced something that matches Apple’s offering practically feature for feature. That’s a real shame considering the broad range of innovative and useful applications that community produced.

The integrated experience mobileme is set to offer actually looks pretty cool. Not €99-a-year cool, but I have to admit it was pretty slick. That demo had to be one of the most impressive displays of leveraging Ajax technologies to create a supremely seamless user experience. But OTA syncing isn’t exactly new. And there are providers who offer free Exchange services out there. Although, really, it’s the €99 I’m having trouble with.

Oh, and the “big news”… $199. Thud!

C’mon. The only way you can believe you can pay just that much for an iPhone 3G is if you actually also believe you can get it for just €1 in Germany. A $199 subsidized iPhone 3G doesn’t cost half a $399 iPhone with a pay-as-you-go/prepaid contract.

So, the iPhone 3G, not exactly next-level – some would argue it’s barely entry-level.

… bet you’re ass I’m getting one. But I’m thinking, as with the first one, I’ll hang back and wait a while. Unless, you know, I don’t….

My daily Go Gear’s seen some sophisticated upgrades since I first posted about it. The most significant of which has got to be the MacBook Air which replaced the 2.16GHz black MacBook.

(flickr-noted version)

The Air

Sleek and engineered to new heights of slick, this thing is so light I initially found myself having to repeatedly check I’d packed it at all. The TFT LED back-lit display is absolutely glorious, the solid-state drive feels zippier, and the back-lit keyboard is the perfect balance of springy and squishy — and, you know, it glows.

They did leave out a bunch of features to keep this thing manila-envelope-friendly, but it was mostly stuff I’ve never used on the Blakbook or could easily do without. So I’m actually happy to have traded all that in for the refreshing strap burn relief.

And for all the bum reviews this thing’s been getting, the Air (Amihan on my home network) makes an undeniably great OS X portable for the lightweight Mac work I do away from home. I’m as intrigued by the EEE PC and the competition it’s spawned as the next geek, but for running OS X, this is the one for me.

The Sleeve

Manila Mac’s AirMail Sleeve was a no-brainer. Similar and somewhat slicker sleeves were recently announced (really liking Timbuk2′s Steve Sleeve and definitely getting the Incase Neoprene number eventually) but these guys were first to market with an idea I’m positive occurred to a whole lot of people who saw his Steveness pull the Air out of that envelope (it did to me). For that, they get mad props and my business.

Not a fan of the cheapish, bright red string it came with (I’ll be replacing it with some sort of leather cord once I find one), but it’s perfect for protecting the Air from minor dings and scratches while in transit. And the cleverness doesn’t get old.

The Bag

I had my gear banging around the Timbuk2 Blogger for a while but it seemed ridiculous to carry around a bag that weighs almost as much as the laptop. And there was suddenly all this space I wasn’t using. I switched to the Perry Ellis Full Flap Messenger for a while but, even though it weighed just right, it seemed too formal for every day carry and I’d grown partial to the vertical orientation.

I lucked out on a small Tucano Fina at a local Mac store. Italian leather and nylon with a zippered headphone cable passage on the strap — which I’m sure would have been useful if I was still using a separate player for music (the iPhone stays in my pocket, thanks). It fit the Air + AirMail like a glove and carried incredibly well with minimal hip bounce for such a light bag. Unfortunately, it hardly fit anything else. With the Air’s power adapter and the portable hard drive packed, it was practically bursting at the seams.

Thanks largely to Flickr, I discovered the Tom Bihn line of bags and fell for the Ristretto Messenger. Made for 13-inchers, it’s a narrow bag which fits the Air perfectly in its heavily padded laptop compartment. It features enough pockets to fit and compartmentalize my essentials and has just enough space for the occasional magazine or book. It’s pretty much the bag I’ve been looking for ever since I started toting a laptop.

The Storage

My trusty 3-year old Transcend Storejet finally bought it when I let gravity have its way with it one time too many. But I don’t carry any data that isn’t backed up either at home, at the office, or on the cloud so at least it was a relatively minor hardware loss.

Just so happened that the 250GB Lacie Mobile’s were on sale, so I grabbed one over lunch, brought it home later, and immediately loaded it up with every episode of West Wing ever aired. Hey, you never know when you could use a healthy dose of script-writing awesome. And having gotten used to the 80GB Storejet, I still had space to spare for the data I usually carried.

The Other Stuff

The rest is pretty much standard fare:

• a large-size squared Moleskine for wireframing and doodling
• a pocket-size ruled reporter Moleskine for notes and looking busy in meetings
• the requisite Apple doodads: video adapter, Apple remote, iPhone cable
• a Sandisk MobileMate SD+ because it’s proven to come in handy
• some USB drives
• some stuff to write with
• various keys for getting into places
• a Wacom Bamboo tablet comes along every so often too

Go Gear 2.0

So, there you have it, 2.0. Light enough for every day carry, more than enough juice for meetings, conferences and presentations, and everything I need for doing low-end work away from work or home.

I imagine my muggability profile has gone a level up.

Last week, Cisco let it be known that he was ready to give up his Mac Mini in exchange for a Windows PC. It’s what his friends have, it’s what his school runs, and, well, he’s seven.

Still, going from OS X to Windows? Giving up the slick ‘stack-of-six-CDs’ form factor for a mini-tower’s worth of eyesore? Apple to MS? The boy needed some serious talking-to. Two days I geared up for it, simplifying my reasoning to elementary school level. But in so doing, I completely defeated my own arguments. And, well, he’s seven.

So I spent the weekend putting together a decent XP-class P4 out of my previous two rigs. An upper-end core solo from right before the duos took over, a couple of gigs of RAM, an 80 gig drive for the OS and a 320 for his growing collection of, uh, ripped media, etc.

Now, I’m pretty handy with XP. I managed and was the technical lead in two projects that migrated whole critical networks of hundreds of workstations over to the platform from NT. I designed the Active Directory configuration for the severs and developed tightly locked down, closely managed workstation configurations for a variety of user types and requirements. I took full advantage and squeezed every bit of functionality I could from global/local policies, user profiles, and everything the Zero Admin initiatives could give me to come up with a solid, reliable, and relatively secure XP-based workstation build.

So no bot-net-bait on this home network. This little guy’s machine will be locked up tight as a drum. But after a relatively blissful year on the OS X security bubble (which is fast approaching critical mass as the Mac market share does the same — inevitably attracting the ne’er do wells and popping this lickable aqua-themed bubble) and all that vaunted XP experience, I still can’t help but feel like I’m handing the kid a loaded gun. Or a thermolyte explosive charge with remote detonators scattered all over the Internet.

I’m not an Apple elitist by any means — I run Vista on my primary desktop mostly by choice, and I’m learning to love my media-serving, torrent-leeching ‘buntu box — but this has got me asking, how responsible is this?

And, more importantly, is there a special circle in hell for those who give XP boxes to their kids?

(flickr-noted version)

Coming home to a couple of 17-inch panels after working with a pair of 24-inchers at the office all day just got far too depressing. So after the requisite geek due diligence the web has made far simpler but no less tedious, I found myself an S panel equipped Samsung 226BW and augmented the lair with another 1,746,000 pixels of display awesome.

I did wind up having to reposition the keyboard drawer though. And there’s still a good deal of re-cabling to do to once more achieve cordless zen (the recent addition of the KPC45 didn’t help there).

Pretty happy with the result overall. In fact, I’m finding myself preferring the three panel set up over the dual 24s at work. Yeah, the total pixel count’s pretty close, but the three panel division fits my work habits perfectly, the balance speaks to me, and the altarpiece-like surround experience just feels right.

Not that I’d kick a couple of Dell 2407WFPs outta bed, mind you.

He wasn’t due to arrive for a few days so I had time to think it over. And think I really had to, considering the BlakBook was all of three months old and still had that “little bit of plastic bag with a hint of lindenberry followed by a rush of Styrofoam” smell new Macs are known for.

After agonizing over it, as I do all things shiny, gadgety, and oh-so-slightly unnecessary, I pretty much decided I needed it (as I do all things shiny, gadgety, and oh-so-slightly unnecessary). But only if he brought home one of the more affordable 1.6GHz lower-end models (which in my heart of hearts, I knew was more likely).

Imagine my surprise and heartache when the day arrived and he pulled out a 1.8GHz sliver of absolute gorgeous with a 64GB solid-state drive. Imagine the surprise yet? What about the heartache? Here’s something to help you along: it costs over a grand more than the model I had decided I was going to take. Dammit, dammit.

Sigh.

So I call home to share this, my tale of woe and utter suck. But instead of commiserating, my wife goes, “Cool! Even better! Now you really have to get it!”

Most. Awesome. Wife. Ever.

And, yeah, the MacBook Air packs some awesome too.

So, my go gear:

(flickr-noted version)

The matte black Macbook 2.1 is the first notebook I’ve ever personally owned. Not a lightweight by any means, but a hell of a lot lighter than the company issue desktop-replacement type laptops I’ve always avoided having to tote around. With the recent move to Intel processors and after playing around with OSX86 extensively, I figured it was time to give the platform some serious consideration and check out the cult (I own other Macs but none of them for primary use).

I scored the all-black Timbuk2 Blogger bag at the Glorietta branch of the Travel Club (with the help of local distributor Jols Tañada). The Timbuk2s always tend to be bigger than they seem online and this was no exception. But it’s slimmer than most of their other models, feels incredibly robust, and has this cool quick-adjust strap which I’ve found to be extremely useful. Oh, and once you’ve tried vertical-carry messengers, it’s hard to go back.

The rest of the gear’s nothing special: an 80GB USB bus-powered hard drive (surprisingly fast for a 2.5-incher), a Moleskine reporter, a card reader, USB drives, the requisite cables, adapters, keys, etc.

Low-level-geek, urban carry gear.

Showed you mine. What’s in yours?