88: The velocity in miles per hour that Charlie Sheen could throw as a pitcher in high school when he was offered a baseball scholarship to the University of Kansas.

So the numbers are in, and this is a good news / good news / bad news / really bad news story for RIM.

The good news is that they added 1.6 million new users, about 200K more than my guess. Don’t be fooled by the “three million” total they were tossing around. That is “units shipped” – the total number of handhelds the sent out, about half of which are for replacements and/or contract fulfillments with wireless carriers and resellers – and not how much they grew their share of the marketplace. It is a great number to fool brain-dead reporters and analysts with, though.

The other good news is that they are actually gaining a consumer presence, with about 30 percent of those 1.6 million new users being Average Joes instead of Cubicle Hanks. Big kudos for both of those items, especially the latter.

The bad news is that they are steadfastly refusing to admit publicly (even though they are privately working on the problem, sort of) that their so-called user interface needs to be dragged kicking and screaming into the shop for a complete overhaul. Everyone knows that the emperor is naked, so it’s time to fess up and admit that you think that he might need to visit the tailor.

The really bad news is that they still don’t have anything even approaching a plan to deal with the staggeringly huge market in Southeast Asia. Korea, Japan, The Phillipines, Singapore … these are markets that are still closed to RIM because of a combination of poor UI, a lack of local language support, and a complete paucity of cultural understanding. The gang up in Waterloo is making literally no effort at all to understand and address the largest market for smartphones on the entire planet. Which is anything but smart.

101: The velocity in miles per hour of the fastest pitch thrown by Charlie Sheen’s character in the movie Major League.

Earlier this week I made reference to the third-quarter smartphone sales and the fact that, from a standing start, Apple has come from nowhere to surpass the North American sales of all Windows Mobile smartphones combined and is within spitting distance of RIM’s long-standing market lead with the Blackberry. In a single quarter Apple went from zero to 1.1 million phones sold. We wont have RIM’s official numbers until later today, but I am going to guess that their Q3 sales in North America were about 1.4 million units. If that is indeed the case, then Apple has essentially wiped out the advantage of RIM’s 10 year head start in one quarter.

This should be really big news to the mob up in Waterloo, and the way that they report their numbers later today will say a lot about how they see the market and where they plan to go in it. My regular correspondents are of divided mind in this – some say that this is the kick in the pants that RIM has long needed and they are taking note, some are saying that it is business as usual at RIM and nothing will change. If the latter is indeed true, then it means that the idiots are truly running the asylum up there, and in the long term RIM is going to get its silicon ass kicked all over the marketplace. The reason? RIM’s worldwide market share sucks large amounts of ass. They have virtually no presence in the far east, where consumers are far more sophisticated than those in North America. They buy things that work well, not things that are driven by media and mindless corporate buzz, which is why Symbian-based phones outsell the Blackberry by over 100-1 in the EMEA. Check the worldwide smartphone sales numbers for Q3 2007, and compare RIM’s numbers later today to the staggering 20 million that Symbian racked up. By concentrating on the North American enterprise market, they have shut themselves out of the vastly larger consumer-based market in the Japan and southeast Asia.

The best indicator will be whether or not RIM admits to working on a touchscreen when they report their numbers later today. They are definitely working on one right now, but whether or not they admit it will go a long way to determining how they plan on playing this out. The Blackberry does one thing spectacularly well – it gets and receives wireless email better than any other device in the world. But every single other function on the Blackberry – including reading and managing the mail once you get it – is somewhere between dismal and completely fucking useless. A touchscreen, along with a codified and publicly-available set of Human Interface Guidelines, would go along way to correcting that little problem. Apple has already targeted the worldwide market, and specifically the far east, and is firm on their expectation of 10 million iPhones sold worldwide in Q4 2008. Does RIM have the same sort of vision? Or will they pigionhole themselves into the North American enterprise until they are no longer a player at all? If they admit to the touchscreen today, they might still have a chance.

Look for more on this later, as well as further discussion of the Symbian sales facts from the third quarter. There is a really interesting tidbit of information in the “Consumer technology benchmarks” section that everyone in this marketplace should take heed of, and it has nothing at all to do with smartphones. Can you find it? I’ll tell you what it is later today.

This is a pretty common story out there – people who are having problems with Windows Vista are finding relief by upgrading to this newer system called “Windows XP”. This review does a nice job of summing up the experience and lays out some compelling arguments for moving this more advanced OS.

A few months ago there was this fawning interview with Steve Ballmer over at USA Today … it is the usual sort of wankfest (”So, Steve, tell us how great you are!”) but if you were willing to plow through all of the self-congratulations and the blatant licking of Bill Gates’ prostrate, you got to this interesting quote down near the end:

There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance … if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get.

I am not really sure where he got the “60 or 70 or 80″ percent idea, since at the time Windows mobile was – at the time – sitting at about 40 percent of the market, but his 3% assertion is pretty funny in light of the results of the first full quarter of sales since the iPhone hit the shelves. Steve’s much-hoped-for 3% turned out to be 27%, which is more than all of the Windows Mobile phones on the market combined. While the iPhone did take some serious chunks out of the sales of Blackberry and Symbian products it was Windows Mobile that really took it on the chin, losing half of their share to Apple’s “$500 toy”.

Somebody get this man a math lesson. No chance, indeed.

The “gold standard” of lazy tech journalism has long been any use of quotes or “research” from Rob Enderle (aka The Lazy Editor’s Best Friend). Sadly, that august benchmark has recently been obliterated by Stephen Vaughn-Nichols (warning! pretentious hyphenated name alert!) over at eWeek who takes press releases from favoured corporations, sticks his byline on top, and reprints them verbatim as his columns. I’m not sure what is more bizarre here – the fact that his editors have never noticed this, or that his hissy-fit response to being outed that boils down to “I don’t see why this would be a problem.”

That is what I call a veritable pinnacle of journalistic integrity.

I have long been a cheerleader for Soma-FM … mostly due to my unabashed love for “Secret Agent Radio” which is my favourite internet radio feed, bar none. The gang at Soma are poster kids for everything that is right about true internet radio – there is no meddling or influence from advertisers, record labels, publicity flacks, sales staff, or any of the other myriad weasels that infect the commercial radio spectrum, so the programming and content is based on one thing and one thing only: The satisfaction of their listeners.

Truly, it is a novel – and in the minds of the traditional broadcasting cartels, wildly dangerous – concept.

More to the point, it is a concept that works for all genre’s of music … including Christmas. If you are tired of or completely fed up with the pap that passes for Christmas music on the average commercial radio outlet, you need to check out Soma’s duo of non-traditional holiday feeds. “Xmas in Frisko” is their “edgier” feed, and you probably wouldn’t want to play it through your speakers at work – or around your parents. “Christmas Lounge” is better suited for all audiences, but is in no way inferior when it comes to the level of musical coolness being imparted. Both are worth a listen, so take some time to tune in and wash that gawd-awful “Kid who buys the shoes for his dying mom on Christmas eve” song out of your head once and for all.

NOTE: Both of the above links are iTunes links, hooking you up to a nice 128k feed. If you don’t want to listen through iTunes or want a thinner stream, head on over to the Soma-FM main page and pick your poison as you see fit. While you are there you can also check out the other channels, including the aforementioned and still-insanely-awesome Secret Agent Radio.

Groovy.

There have been some hits (”PR Lady”, “Podium”) and some misses (”The Boxer”) in the recent crop of Apple ads, but there is no doubt at all that this year’s Christmas ad is 100% awesome. Enjoy.

There are a lot of people out there who want to do occasional and very simple photo editing – a crop or two, a red-eye correction, maybe an image rotation or flip. While the OSX crowd can use iPhoto for these sorts of quick-n-dirty things, the great unwashed Windoze masses are usually stuck with one of three choices:

1 – massive amounts of overkill with Photoshop
2 - a bastard collection of freeware and shareware apps
3 - the horrific editing tools that come bundled with the various digital cameras

None of these really fit the bill. Photoshop works, oh yes indeed, but it also costs annoying amounts of money and is a behemoth to work with. The nine-dozen freeware apps of doom are cheap, but never tend to do exactly what you want. And the third choice? Forget it. Unless you like pain. And truly shitty results.

Luckily, it’s Flickr to the rescue – and believe me, I never thought I would be saying that. They have partnered up with Picnik (ie: given them shitloads of money) and now the entire Picnik editing tools suite is available on Flickr. And the results are, quite frankly, impressive as hell. You should really give it a try. Kudos all around.

1987: The year that the Anglican church most recently reaffirmed that Christianity and Masonry were “incompatible”.

For the past 4 months I have been pimping INdependence as the best tool for unlocking the iPhone. While AppTapp is fine for installing third-party applications, I has pretty much always sucked ass as an activation/unlocking tool. INdependence never had the same feature set, but for jailbreaking and activating it worked every time, a reliability record that AppTapp couldn’t come close to matching. The downside was that after doing the jailbreak, there was a 15-to-20 minute session with SSH and SFTP to wrest your phone from the clutches of the AT&T empire.

That was then, however, and this is now. And yes, I realize that as transition sentences go, the previous one blows big time. But it gets us to the point, which is that INdependence has evolved and is now a one-stop activation and unlocking tool for any iPhone that is packing 1.0.2 or 1.1.1 firmware. Better yet, it is also a fully-featured management tool for those phones, providing functions for everything from the Forbidden 1.1.1 Upgrade to installation of your own ringtones to third-party application management.

In case you missed it there, I said ringtones.

Take a look – even if you question the value of unlocking phones that are now approaching legacy status, you will definitely appreciate the management functions. And remember, it’s a beta – consider yourself warned. But nothing is better at pissing off the people around you than a completely inane ringtone. I am thinking I Think I’m A Clone Now by Weird Al Yankovic, but am open to suggestion. The world is definitely your oyster here.

The iPhones that are in the Apple Stores right now cannot be unlocked to work with the service provider of your choice. The baseband modem firmware that comes with the newest version of the 1.1.2 firmware is currently off-limits for unlocking. The phone itself can be easily activated, and you can use it for everything except an actual phone (iPod, mail, web, anything that uses WiFi) but the phone itself remains – at this point in time – slaved to the evil gnomes at AT&T. Stay tuned for any updates – it shouldn’t take overly long to open up the code.

If you aren’t sure which version of the modem firmware you have, take the phone in question, hit the slider to make an “emergency call” and dial *3001#12345#*. Hit “call” and the then select the “versions” option at the bottom of the diagnostics screen. If the modem version is 04.02.13_G, then you are going to be waiting for a few days – sorry. If your 1.1.2 phone has last week’s (and older) 03.12.06_G modem package, then you are in business.