Google is not building a phone; it's building its vision of the future. A consortium of companies, many of them competitors, are backing a free, open-source cell phone platform that could be customized at will, providing unprecedented options for consumers. We'll see.

Are we shallow for enjoying Apple's new Get a Mac ads, or just enjoying having the obvious pointed out on national TV for a change? Also see a leaked Saturday Night Live sketch about the iPhone that never aired.

In a brief power outage, I discovered the joy of continuous Internet connectivity with my iPhone. I express outrage at the outage reporting, too.

iPhone users travelling abroad often returned home to sky-high bills for data usage. That may be a thing of the past, thanks to AT&T's new international iPhone data plans, which provide either 20 MB of 50 MB of usage.

Apple fixes security-related bugs in QuickTime 7.3 and adds support for multi-country iPhone activation in iTunes 7.5.

The UK carrier O2 lifts undefined "fair usage" limit from iPhone service plans in advance of Friday's launch.

AppSnapp allows third-party software installation on an iPhone with 1.1.1 software installed. But it makes use of a software flaw that Apple will surely fix.

Last week, Google announced Gmail now supports IMAP connections, making their free Web-based mail client even more useful for Mac users and iPhone users on the go.

Apple ended the fourth fiscal quarter of 2007 with a profit of $904 million on revenue of $6.22 billion, led by record sales of 2,164,000 Macs, 10.2 million iPods, and 1.1 million iPhones.

Turns out that an iPhone is interoperable with plastic baggies.

Steve Jobs writes a short note assuring his interest in allowing third-party development of programs for the iPhone (and, by the way, iPod touch), reminding us sternly of how dangerous mobile phone viruses and malware are, and setting a date for release of the software toolkit: February 2008.

For the record, here's Steve Jobs's letter announcing the iPhone SDK.

Apple chooses Orange as the French carrier for the iPhone, but interesting questions remain.

Broadcom announces new third-generation cell chip that could be the core of a next-generation iPhone. Kitchen sink? You bet. Couple 3G with ARM processors, Bluetooth, stereo audio, and FM radio - and the fastest GSM-based 3G data protocols on the market.

Many people claim they want the iPhone without the phone part, but the iPod touch seems to have a few too many limitations. What about Nokia's N800 Internet Tablet, which provides a full-featured Web browser on a Linux-based platform? Travis Butler looks deep into the N800 to see how it stacks up.