Today is Blog Action Day

Although hardly anyone is reading my blog, I just wanted to make sure that I participate in this cool initiative: Blog Action Day.

And what would be a better topic for this occasion than Al Gore's receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize last Friday? There are people who wonder what environmentalism has to do with peace or dealing with worldwide conflict. But since there is no similar prize for helping the environment, I think it's a good idea to use this for giving some credit to people like Al Gore. After all, you could argue that he is helping to promote 'peace' between nature and society.

Anyhow, I just wonder how Al Gore would be as a president of the U.S. Would there be a total shift in environmental policies or would other interests and pressure from lobbyists result in only moderate changes? But I don't believe that we will ever know for sure as he probably will never again run for an office in the White House.

My first blog entry sent from my iPhone

Since this is sent from the iPhone it should also be about this much hyped gadget from Apple.

How does Apple do this? Why can't any of the other cell phone manufacturers come up with such an intuitive UI and sexy design. At least they could copy some ideas and use their experience to make the product even better. It's amazing when you think about the untapped potential of the iPhone. Some of the 3rd party applications available to the iPhone users who hacked their device show how something so cool can be even better.

Unfortunately, Apple's hardline position on hacked phones is not helping the consumers. Steve Jobs wants to limit the abilities of the iPhone to what the manufacturer offers out of the box. In the current version this results in a pretty long wish list of additional features:
- Games. The device with the accellerometer and the amazing touch screen would be perfect for games.
- MMS messages. You can send pictures through email but not through MMS.
- Copy/paste funtionality. My old Palm III had copy/paste abilities.
- Password manager. How can anyone remember all the passwords you need nowadays.
- Flash and Javascript support. However, I love the iPhone's Safari browser, especially with pages that are not optimized for mobile devices.
- Better Bluetooth support. It's an iPod phone with Bluetooth but it doesn't support wireless stereo headsets. Many other newer phones have that feature.
More feature requests: http://iphonewishlist.net

Some people argue that there are better smartphones out there. If only the Nokia N95 was sexier, I would have bought that one instead.