New and Noteworthy: Apple quarterly results for the first quarter of 2007; iPhone FAQ; more

Apple quarterly results for the first quarter of 2007 Apple will announce financial results for Q1 2007 on January 17, 2007 at 2:00 p.m. PT. More.

iPhone FAQ David Pogue has published what the claims to be the ultimate iPhone FAQ. The piece addresses a variety of questions regarding the device though, admittedly, doesn't cover much new ground beyond what was explicated by Steve Jobs during the keynote and is stated on Apple's Web site. "My favorite sarcastic comment, which was a response to these responses, which were in response to my last blog entry: "Yeah, yeah, yeah, but can you use it underwater? And can you recharge it using solar power? And does it have an optical scanner that detects your eyeball movements so that you merely have to look at a name in your contacts list and blink in order to choose and call him? Apple, you have a long way to go." More.

Making voicemail more like e-mail A little more than a week ago (before the announcement of Apple's iPhone), the Wall Street Journal published a prophetic guide to making voicemail operate more like e-mail -- i.e. with random accessibility. "This week, I tested Pinger, a free messaging service that tries to make voice mail more usable by emphasizing its strengths and making it a little more like email, or like a cellphone text message. This new service comes from Pinger Inc, a Silicon Valley-based company started by former Palm Inc. employees." More.

BlackJack Beats Out Palm 750, but iPhone May Well Top Both Walt Mossberg reviews the Samsung BlackJack and Palm 750 in-depth, but reserves judgment for the iPhone, which has only been priefly handled by members of the press thus far. "I attended the iPhone launch event, and was able to use one for a little while. That's too brief an encounter to allow me to write a proper review. But I can say that it has the largest and most beautiful screen I've ever seen on a cellphone, even though it's incredibly thin. It felt great in my hand. It has a brilliant new user interface; the handsomest email program and Web browser I've ever seen on a phone; a full-blown iPod music and video player built in; and even a cool new voicemail system. [...] (T)he iPhone made my relatively new Treo 700p seem primitive in many respects when I compared them side by side. And the Apple product isn't Palm's only problem." More.

How Apple kept its iPhone secrets Fortune has an interesting piece on how bogus prototypes, bullying the press and stifling pillow talk helped Apple keep the iPhone under wraps until its January 9th unveiling. "Apple, legendary for the ferocity with which it safeguards new product announcements, had extraordinary challenges in keeping the iPhone under wraps for 30 months. Besides involving Cingular, Google and Yahoo, not to mention the unnamed Asian manufacturer, the project touched nearly every department within Apple itself, Jobs said, more so than in any previous Apple creation." More.

Why Hollywood Snubbed Jobs at Macworld BusinessWeek speculates on why most of the major studios have yet to join Apple's iTunes store. "Most of the rest of Hollywood was conspicuously absent. Only four months back, when Iger announced that Jack Sparrow and the rest of Disney's movie characters could be downloaded to Apple's video iPod, it looked like Jobs was on his way toward taming the beast called Hollywood. A prototype of Apple TV, then code-named iTV, would soon link to the iPod and ship movies from Steve's world to our TVs-or so the whiskered one led us to believe. But no other Hollywood studio has yet joined Disney in giving Jobs their most precious commodity: new-to-the-home-market movies, which continue to be the studios' hottest sellers in the still-robust $32-billion-a-year DVD market. To be fair, Jobs & Co. did manage to lure a second studio, when Paramount Pictures announced it was joining the iPod brigade." More.

Previously on MacFixIt

• Portable Macs waking up from sleep while closed, not going to sleep; "hot laptop in bag" syndrome (cont.)
• Will Apple release standalone 802.11n enablers for applicable Core 2 Duo/Xeon based Macs?
• Symantec LiveUpdate issues resolved
• Office 2004 with Open XML converters may be the most cross-platform compatible edition -- even after Office 2008 ships
• Netgear WPN824 MIMO: Problems connecting, configuring with Macs

Resources