I found this to be quite the interesting (and somewhat surprising) choice for 2009’s Person of the Year. What are your thoughts and opinions on TIME’s choice?

Ben Bernanke named Time Person of the Year Read the full story

Verizon Takes on Apple with New iDroid Website

On October 30, Verizon Wireless will roll out its new Android-based Motorola phone, and the new website for the phone takes direct aim at Apple. They don’t even try to hid their contempt for Apple, and the site is full of direct attacks on them. Most notably, the site reads (in an Apple-like font with an Apple-like graphic):

idon’t have a real keyboard
idon’t run simultaneous apps
idon’t take night shots
idon’t allow open development
idon’t customize
idon’t run widgets
idon’t have interchangeable batteries
everything idon’t
droiddoes Read the full story

Flash Player Inches Closer to Smartphones

James Niccolai, IDG News Service

Sunday, October 04, 2009 9:20 PM PDT

Adobe Systems’ Flash Player is getting closer to appearing on smartphones, with Research in Motion adding its BlackBerry to the list of devices that will run the software. Apple’s elusive iPhone remains out of reach, however. Read the full story

Helen Kearns, a spokeswoman for Meglena Kuneva, the consumer protection commissioner, said Apple was cooperating with the commission in examining reports of problems with two iPhones in France and an iPod in Britain.

“At the moment, they said they regard these as isolated incidents and they don’t have evidence of a general problem,” Ms. Kearns said. Read the full story

Have you been craving a way to make music on your iPhone/iPod Touch? I sure have, and I think I have the perfect application for you to use!

GrooveMaker is a revolutionary application that allows you to create electronic, hip-hop, and dance tracks in real time like a professional DJ. I was able to put my own DJ skills to work with this fun app and never realized how exciting it could be to create tracks on a device smaller than the 24 inch screen I have at home. Read the full story

CourseSmart of San Mateo, California, already makes more than 7000 college textbooks from 12 publishers available to its subscribers online via their computers, but now the company has added “eTextbooks for the iPhone,” allowing students to free themselves from even having to lug around their heavy laptop computers.

There are a couple drawbacks — you have to be connected to the Internet to view the books you can access with your CourseSmart subscription on your iPhone or iPod Touch, and the first version of the new app doesn’t allow users to add notes in the margins. Read the full story

Hacking your iPhone to run unofficial, third-party apps may seem unnecessary since Apple hosts its own App Store. But the corporation’s recently enforced prohibitions on some apps, such as the banning of Google Voice, are reviving the incentive for customers to jailbreak their iPhones once again.

Thanks to Cydia, an unauthorized app store open to jailbroken iPhones, consumers can still access some software that Apple won’t allow. Think free text-messaging and cheap international calls thanks to a Google Voice app that Apple banned. Or features that we can’t have yet, such as multimedia messaging and tethering. Here, we round up a list of the most compelling reasons to jailbreak your iPhone. Read the full story

A little Eminem line that just popped into my head when reading the following article…

(Click the link to read the full article)

Why The FCC Wants To Smash Open The iPhone

Right about now, Apple probably wishes it had never rejected Google Voice and related apps from the iPhone. Or maybe it was AT&T who rejected the apps. Nobody really knows. But the FCC launched an investigation last night to find out, sending letters to all three companies (Apple, AT&T, and Google) asking them to explain exactly what happened.

On its face, it might seem odd to some people that the FCC is investigating the rejection of a single iPhone app. After all, iPhone apps are rejected every day. But the Google Voice rejection caused an unusual amount of uproar, and there is nothing like a high-profile case to make an example out of in pursuit of pushing a bigger policy agenda. The FCC investigation is not just about the arbitrary rejection of a single app. It is the FCC’s way of putting a stake in the ground for making the wireless networks controlled by cell phone carriers as open as the Internet.

Today there are two different sets of rules for applications and devices on the Internet. On the wired Internet, we can connect any type of PC or other computing device and use any applications we want on those devices. On the wireless Internet controlled by cellular carriers like AT&T, we can only use the phones they allow on their networks and can only use the applications they approve. This was fine when the wireless networks were used mostly just for voice calls. But now that they are increasingly becoming our mobile connections to the Internet and mobile phones are becoming full-fledged mobile computers, an argument has been growing that the same rules of open access that rule the wired Internet should apply to the wireless Internet.