Editorial

Rumors of a less expensive iPhone, in one form or another, certainly aren't new. Rumors follow want. We want iPhones, the less expensive iPhones are the more of them we can have an more often we can have them. Apple knows that too. The original iPhone was Ballmer-laugh inducing expensive, and Apple and Steve Jobs adjusted the price down, and then changed course to a subsidized model for the iPhone 3G starting at only $199. The next year, when Apple introduced the the iPhone 3GS, they kept a lower-capacity version of the iPhone 3G around, starting at only $99. In 2010, when Apple introduced the iPhone 4, the iPhone 3GS went to $99. And in 2011, when Apple introduced the iPhone 4S, the iPhone 4 became the $99 iPhone, and the iPhone 3GS was positioned at $0 on contract. With the 2012 introduction of the iPhone 5, the iPhone 4 has become to $0 iPhone.

It's not difficult to imagine a second line of thinking at Apple, one where they also tossed around the idea of secondary line of iPhones, designed to be less expensive from the start. Rumors of that "budget iPhone" or "iPhone nano" have been around every bit as long. But if that was the case, if Apple has such a device in the planning stages for 2010 or even earlier, they chose not to go that way, not to introduce more than one new model a year. At least not then...

With Google's latest generation of better designed iOS apps, including Google+, Gmail, YouTube, Google Search, Google Maps, Chrome, and more, the iPhone 5 is once again among the very best Google phones on the planet. iOS may not enjoy the deep integration into everything Google that Android does, but for most things, the overall performance of the iPhone, and the ability to use the best of Google alongside the best of Apple, all on one device, makes for an incredibly compelling experience.

And it's been a while since any Apple or Google user could attest to that with anything approaching conviction.

Christmas Day is a huge day for mobile device activations, obviously. Once we finish unwrapping our gifts and scarfing down a big breakfast, we all become children and want to immediately play with our gifts. For smartphones and tablets, that means activating your device on a network, and downloading a slew of apps. Once we install these apps (like Twitter), we start telling followers about our new device. Two pieces of research hit my radar today. They’re both quite fascinating and paint a picture of Apple dominating the scene.

A while back I joked on Twitter that if Apple put filters and tilt shift into the built-in Photos app, I'd never use Instagram again. A lot of people maintain Instagram isn't about the filters or effects, but the community, but frankly there are already way too many communities for me to keep track of, and I'd just as soon make as many as possible as redundant as possible.