Blogging at the King-of-Prussia Mall Starbucks with Kevin Tofel of jkOnTheRun (right) was really just an excuse to get hands-on with an iPhone at the nearby Apple store. Sum-up of my impression: keyboard is difficult but gets easier to use; something I was doing on the touch screen kept kicking me out of applications; EDGE connection is way too slow for Web browsing (don’t know why the Apple store wasn’t using its own Wi-Fi connection); everything about the interface is really, really pretty.

Here’s something interesting about the Apple store, though. There’s now a whole section dedicated to external hard drives (there was a Western Digital, among others) right beside the section dedicated to photo printers (most, if not all, HP). Clearly Apple wants its gadgets to be multimedia hubs, but doesn’t mind if you offload content to another dedicated device for certain functions, like storage and printing. A wise move in my opinion. Though I wonder what the plan is for .mac…

UPDATE: See this post on iPhone storage and .mac

Ages ago I signed up to be a beta tester for a service called Swaptree. I finally received my invite last month, and at long last signed on last night. (The beta is public as of July 4th, so you can try it out yourself.) The premise of Swaptree is simple. You list books, movies, games and music that you’re willing to trade and then browse for items you’d like to get in exchange.

I set up my Swaptree account by typing in the ISBN numbers of 9 books I have and got a list of 176 items that I could potentially receive in a trade. These included 143 books, 18 CDs, 8 video games and 7 DVDs. Not bad. I initiated one trade and now I’m sitting back to see what happens.

The service is drop-dead simple and I can see how it might get addictive. However, it does have a few quirks.

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Last100 spotted this Hollywood Reporter story over the holiday detailing MGM’s venture into straight-to-download movies. On Tuesday, MGM debuted “A Dog’s Breakfast” on iTunes and Amazon Unbox. The flick is directed by and stars “Stargate Atlantis” actors and is being hyped on YouTube.

The key here is that the movie has a built-in audience of “Stargate Atlantis” watchers. If anything is going to kickstart the straight-to-download distribution model, it’s movies that build off of an existing fan base. I hope we get a lot more of these ventures in the near future. (Joss Whedon hear my prayer…)

While some of us just can’t resist endless iPhone coverage :), there are a few other things in the CE world to keep an eye on. Among them, the DVD Copy Control Association has very quietly approved CSS copy-protection technology for use in movie download services and DVD kiosks. What does this mean? It means that companies can start offering on-demand DVD burning of the movies you buy. Instead of figuring out how to transcode video for a portable media player or how to stream downloaded flicks from a PC to a TV, now you can transport media the old-fashioned way. Just take it with you on a good old DVD.

The one major downside? If you’re consumer at home (i.e. not buying from a kiosk), you’ll need a new DVD burner and a new type of DVD-R disc to burn downloaded movies.

In the endless quest to move media around, we’ve come up with a couple of “alternative” solutions in our household. (more…)

With all of the iPhone hype, AT&T’s taken something of a beating around the quality of its cellular network. Meanwhile, the company’s wireline ventures chug along without much public notice. This week AT&T’s U-verse IPTV service went live in Cleveland and Akron Ohio, bringing the total number of homes passed with U-verse to 3 million. (Compared to Verizon’s 6.8 million locations passed with FiOS fiber)

Additionally, earlier this month AT&T announced it will be moving forward with GPON deployments starting in 2008. What’s GPON you say? It’s a form of optical networking technology that AT&T will use when building out fiber to the home (FTTH). Today AT&T’s U-verse service runs on a fiber-to-the-node (FTTN) architecture, but FTTN has limitations, and those limitations are glaringly obvious when compared to Verizon’s all-fiber approach. In new locations (called greenfield) AT&T has decided it will match Verizon fiber for fiber.

It’s come to this: a day of radio silence. Pandora, AccuRadio, and my own local WXPN among many others are going silent today to protest fee increases from the Copyright Royalty Board that will effectively put them out of business if something is not done before July 15th. We’ve covered this story multiple times in the past, and the mainstream media is finally picking up its cue with coverage today in The Washington Post, The Toronto Globe and Mail, and on Reuters.

What can you do to bring back Internet radio? Call your Congressional representatives, tell your friends, give money to the cause.

A dedicated Apple fanboy I know sent me this link to The Onion with a list of the most anticipated iPhone features. (see below) Sure there’s no keyboard or stylus, but can you beat the Lightsaber sound effects? Click through to read the full Onion post. Trust me, it’s worth it.

iPhone Features:

• Nanotechnology enables it to reassemble itself when thrown against wall
• Exclusive link to Google Street View so you can watch yourself using your iPhone at all times
• Takes Polaroids
• When moved from hand to ear, makes Lightsaber sound effects

More…