Your Thoughts: Should Jailbreaking an iPhone be illegal?

Apple is taking its first steps to declaring jailbreaking an iPhone illegal. Essentially their argument is that jailbreaking violates the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) due to the reverse-engineering aspect of jailbreaking. Let's sift through this, and establish what we mean by "jailbreak" and "illegal."

As the DMCA is written, Apple is probably right: jailbreaking, that is to say, to circumvent included hardware or software to use the device with apps outside the Apple iTunes universe would most likely be a violation. That doesn't mean it should be though. We're not talking about unlocking. Unlocking, or making your device work on networks it was not intended for is a different ball game. The main reason I can cut Apple some slack on unlocking is the fact that carriers are subsidizing the purchase in many markets. I don't think it is fair (which should be a measure of law, one would think) for AT&T to pay Apple for half the price of a phone for someone to then use that phone elsewhere. That's a discussion for another day.

Some people have floated the idea of a Mac App Store. A one-stop shop for applications for your Mac. Imagine if Apple did that, then only allowed you to buy apps through that store. And, if you bought apps elsewhere, not only would it be frowned upon, but you would be doing something illegal. That doesn't make much sense. Does anyone remember the great cell outage of 2005? You know, the one where the guy ran an unauthorized app on his Palm and the network came crashing down? No? That's because it didn't happen, and it won't happen, and if it could happen, it wouldn't be stopped by the app store. To hide behind this shield of keeping customers and the network safe, is ridiculous.

Innovation comes from open systems. A company basing its OS on UNIX should know that.

That's my opinion. What's yours? Let's have a lively dialog in the comments.

The Weather Channel iPhone and iPod App Review

There's no shortage of applications to give you weather info on the iPhone and iPod Touch. But look out lightweights, here comes one of the most well-known names in the weather biz. Enter There's no shortage of applications to give you weather info on the iPhone and iPod Touch. But look out lightweights, here comes one of the most well-known names in the weather biz. Enter The Weather Channel App for the iPhone.

This app, and the Weatherbug app are the top of the heap for weather apps, although both serve slightly different purposes. The Weather Channel app is focused on weather forecasting, while Weatherbug is far superior at telling you weather conditions (wind speed, rain, temp, live webcams, etc.) 

My favorite Weather Channel feature is the most recent video forecast for your city. If you get a local video forecast on the Weather Channel, now you can see it on your iPhone as well.

So if you're looking for more weather info than the included Apple weather app supplies, The Weather Channel offers a solid option:

Forget Flash, How About Quicktime on the iPhone

I know it sounds crazy at first... After all, can't the iPhone play QuickTime. Well, yes, some of it. If you navigate to websites with embedded Quicktime (A small portion of sites, but that's for another blog entry) you'll find some that have QuickTime that plays fine. As a matter of fact, for awhile, a site I previously worked on had functioning QuickTime clips, despite me not doing anything to them. Meanwhile sites like lynda.com cannot currently have their QT clips played on the phone.

Yes, they can tweak some settings to make it work on their end, but it makes a lot more sense to have Apple make Quicktime playback ubiquitous on the iPhone. It's their own technology after all! Even the Apple website isn't immune. As I tuned into the quarterly results conference call, I had to go on the road. So I thought, maybe, just maybe, the iPhone would be able to stream that QT content. Nope. The above message stating the iPhone version would be available later via iTunes. Apple, do you want QuickTime/h.264 to be a standard, or not? 

The iPhone's QuickTime playback capability could be more accurately described as iTunes paid content playback. Is that by accident?

ABC News App for the iPhone and iPod Touch

There are plenty of ways to get local and national news on your iPhone. Kudos to ABC News for their ABC News iPhone App. Sure, it gives you headlines like most news/RSS sites, but the real advantage to this application is the video capability. Same day clips are available from several ABC shows, and I'm partial to the Tech Bytes segments. The app also gives you local weather and news/emergency alerts. Take a look:

TDL Live This week: (1/26-2/6)

It was another raucous edition of TDL Live last night. We talked about breastfeeding photos, Palm Pre, femtocell, and of course all things Apple. First, a quick reminder, you can subscribe through iTunes to never miss an episode. Or you can hope its one of the weeks we remember to post it here in the blog. Don't risk it.