ExpanDrive

Some well-respected and some not-so-well-respected weblogs are linking to predictions about Apple’s iPhone OS announcement tomorrow. These predictions are sourced by the same person who said this about the original iPhone:

It’ll be coming out in January …All phone providers… Small as shit… Two batteries… Slide keyboard… Touch screen on the “outside”.

Predictions are valued asymmetrically. If you predict correctly you will treated as prophetic. On the other hand, if you predict incorrectly you will not be held accountable, regardless of how wrong you are.

I resolve to make more public predictions.

Here’s a little iPhone trick that made my life easier: you can charge your iPhone while your Mac is asleep.

You can plug your iPhone into a sleeping Mac and juice up assuming the Mac is plugged in or has a lot of charge remaining on the battery. This is great if you’re traveling and need some extra juice but don’t want to whip out the 15″ laptop.

For Windows users who saw Cosmo’s Turn Your iPhone 3g into a Wireless Hard Drive and were wondering how to do the same thing on Windows, check out a good post from David Learns Games. It describes in detail how to accomplish the same task using SftpDrive on Windows, and also enters quite a bit of detail about how to setup the networking and get your phone configured [ample screenshots]. This could come in useful if you’re having any trouble making Cosmo’s instructions work using your Mac.

The situation with Address Book / Google Contacts sync is completely bizarre. The Google Mac Blog says that OS X 10.5.3 “now lets iPhone users sync their Address Book with Google Contacts.”

Awesome, but what’s up with iPhone requirement? Is there some special technology in the iPhone, a technology that doesn’t exist in full-sized computers, that makes the sync possible? Is this a business ploy to attract gmail users to the iPhone who might otherwise use a Google -> Address Book -> iSync double-bridge to get their gmail contacts on their Razr?

But then you can enable sync, without an iPhone or iPod touch, if you’re willing to brave a simple .plist hack? I’m very confused about what the logic is behind all of this.