3G iPhone? I’m underwhelmed. Steve Jobs was going on about how much faster it is than 2G EDGE and how five hours of battery life is amazing … and while that’d probably wow an American audience, the rest of us have had phones that can beat that for years.

(At least it speaks HSDPA as well as UMTS — which is to say that in places such as, oh, Perth, it’ll work on faster networks like Telstra Next G.)

But that said, GPS that neatly integrates with Google Maps is pretty cool.

• The best news I’ve heard so far this year: Tiger Airways, a Singaporean discount carrier modelled after Air Asia, is starting flights to Perth in March. And just like Air Asia, they have ridiculous discounts: $20 one way to Singapore, plus (obscene) taxes, on selected dates until October. This more than plugs the hole left when Valuair stopped its Perth flights after a merger with Qantas (mutter grumble), and makes it wonderfully cheap to travel around Asia. I’m already planning a trip to relatives in Penang for about $400, less than half the current cost. Hopefully this will also be a good thing for West Australian tourism — the State government had better take advantage of it!
• Who decided that this guy was so important anyway? (Just like Christianity, Islam is divided into different factions and schools of thought, and he’s only one mufti …) I don’t think we should ban him from returning or revoke his citizenship (now that’s a horrid idea: how do you decide who’s a bad citizen?), and he’s entitled to freely travel and express his views. But if I flew overseas and told some people that all Australians are idiots, somehow I doubt there’d be such a swarm of coverage. The media need only stop paying attention in order to transform him into Yet Another Harmless Crackpot.
• The ASEAN summit in Cebu, postponed from last December, has just started. Impressively, our government has used this as a chance to pitch in a $5m donation to combat bird flu, which gives some meat to the rather hollow Declaration from the last East Asia Summit, and fits in nicely with the argument made on page 29 of my thesis
• Finally, after more considered analysis, I’m not sure the iPhone is as awesome as it first seemed. It’s far and away the best phone interface ever, that much is certain, but it won’t be able to run 3rd-party software (perhaps not even Web 2.0 apps), we know little about the camera, and there’s a case to be made that hardware keyboards are better (they’re good for blind people — such as me, when SMSing while half-asleep). Speaking of which, this is an awesome response to everyone’s reactions.

I think every Mac nerd in the world just experienced some form of out-of-body nirvana-like experience.

Steve Jobs’ Macworld keynote (which isn’t even finished) has just confirmed that Apple are releasing a mobile phone, it will indeed be called iPhone, and it is quite literally years ahead of what other phone manufacturers are putting out.

So awesome is iPhone that its announcement will overshadow the even bigger news from MacWorld — the Apple TV set-top box, which is equally game-changing, and Apple’s new partnerships with both Google and Yahoo, which IMHO will mark a big shift in the computing industry.

But back to the phone: it’s tiny! It has 8Gb of storage for music and movies! The reports say it runs OS X! (though it appears to be a mobile version thereof.)

And it has a multi-contact screen, so you can move or zoom or rotate things by touching them!