I’m really curious if they can make video injection of ads cost effective.

It feels like mangeling video streams into one, potentially re-encoding the video as they go… sounds expensive

I think it’s far more likely there’s some sales goal and or performance indicator at play here.

An ipod with a much larger screen (320×240 vs 480x320), a camera, and could take phone calls, browse the internet, and do email.

I think people love to hate Steve. The one thing people love more than a great figurehead, is hating one. I think that Steve had a great internal model of how to combine form/function.

iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone, but it may as well have been. It brought the smartphone to the mass market.

Part of it was a great advertising campaign, which unlike the smartphones at the time, pitched it as a luxury good as opposed to an executive enterprise one. You owned a blackberry to answer emails wherever and whenever you were, you owned an iphone so you can check Google Maps. A large part of it was redefining both the form factor, and use case of a smartphone.