Gassee on Maps in iOS 6

Jean-Louis Gassee takes a look at Maps and wonders why Apple isn’t more honest about its shortcomings.

Verizon CFO: “Unlimited is just a word”

Mashable:

Verizon believes unlimited data plans are on their way out, the company’s CFO told investors at a Goldman Sachs conference on Friday.“The good news here though is the dilution is not as much as we expected,” said Fran Shammo, explaining how the company hasn’t seen much attrition after dropping its unlimited data plan in May.Shammo added that “Unlimited is just a word. It doesn’t mean anything…”

No – it doesn’t. Mostly because you cell phone providers have made it meaningless. You used it to sucker in customers and once you got your hooks into them, you removed or “redefined” the word to suit your needs – but not the needs of the customers.

So you’re right, it doesn’t mean anything – when weasels like you use it.

Here’s where to get LTE on your iPhone 5

The Verge:

Want to test your iPhone 5’s latest and greatest network technology right now? Here’s our full list of live LTE markets working off the latest official data provided by the carriers.

The list shows Verizon has many more LTE capable locations than AT&T and Sprint.

25 dead presidents to follow on Twitter

Mashable:

Traditionally, people keep dead presidents in their hearts, history books and wallets. Here’s a new place to look for fallen leaders of the free world: your Twitter feed.

Twitter is great for keeping in touch with family and friends, chatting with people about the day’s events and now – you can converse with (fake) dead presidents.

Hey Samsung, don’t be a dick

Samsung’s new ad for its Galaxy S III smartphone spends more time being dickish to iPhone 5 customers than explaining the phone’s features.

Boeing adding cell phone compatibility to some of its airliners by 2013

Yahoo! Tech:

Could the days of having to turn your cell phone off when flying be nearing an end? Aircraft manufacturer Boeing seem to think so. It’s begun the process of outfitting new models of its 747, 777, and 787 airliners with hardware to allow incoming and outgoing calls, with the aim of making them available to airlines by 2013.While this technology sounds like a boon for air travelers who’ve long awaited the ability to make calls while flying, they shouldn’t start celebrating just yet. Whether or not you’ll be able to fire up your phone in-flight still depends on the approval of government agencies such as the FAA who’ll have the final call on, well, calls from 30,000 feet.

Please Boeing, I’m begging you – don’t do this to us.

Want to stand out? Do what Alton Brown does – hand write tweets

Wired:

Alton Brown of Food Network had strong feelings against Twitter, but an even greater aversion to Facebook. When his agent demanded he choose one, he picked what he felt was the lesser of two evils and began tweeting.To spice up his twittering, he began hand-writing notes, then posting pictures of them. Sometimes he’d doodle a message in Morse code. Or draw a sketch. Or set half of a paper message on fire, then tweet a photo of the remnants.

You gotta love Alton Brown.

The Honor System

Esquire:

Stealing magic has become a commonplace crime. Teller, a man of infinite delicacy and deceit, decided to do something about it.

Fascinating story about the magic of Penn & Teller and how magicians protect their secrets.

WhatsApp is broken, really broken

Fileperms:

WhatsApp, the extremely popular instant messaging service for smartphones that delivers more than ~1billion messages per day has some serious security problems. I will try to give a detailed analysis on some of the issues.

I’m not smart enough to be able to tell if this article is correct so it’s passed along for your information.

Why every gadget unboxing is weird, creepy, pervy

Gizmodo:

Nothing screams more “forever alone” than an unboxing video. There are no more surprises. I’ll tell you what’s going to be inside the iPhone 5 box: an iPhone 5.

I rarely agree with Gizmodo but in this case, they’re right. Gadget unboxing pictures and videos are beyond lame. Now, a motorcycle unboxing – that’s cool!

Apple product features are no longer a mystery, and that’s OK

TIME:

The fact that yesterday’s bash wasn’t full of startling twists presumably helps explain why it prompted lots of stories declaring the event, and even the iPhone 5 itself, to be a disappointment.Product rollouts aren’t action movies. Surprises are nice, but they aren’t the ultimate goal — at least if the idea is to sell lots and lots of gadgets and make lots and lots of money.Surprise has no inherent relation to quality or popularity.

It will be interesting to see if this “lack of secrecy” regarding the details of the iPhone 5 are an anomaly or the new standard operating procedure for Apple.