How The F*ck Did We Get Here? [Image Cache]

Bad GPS maybe?

 

 

via Gizmodo

I'm sure that Philippe Kahn—who has been telling us the adventures of his Pegasus Raceboat—will have a precise and logical answer. The rest of us are allowed to say any stupid thing we want.

John Madden Retires

I'm deeply saddened that John Madden has decided to retire.  John Madden has reached the one word status of pop culture. He was on the same level as Madonna, Cher, Jordan, Tiger, OJ, well you get the picture. All you had to say was Madden. Tuesday through Saturday, Madden simply meant a festive evening with a few of your closest male buddies, a lot of curse words, and sometimes hurt feelings and pockets. On Sunday, Madden was the preacher after church. He was the football gospel like never before. For that, Madden will truly be missed. Mostly, for the great words that he has added to our vocabulary. 
  http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=4073253

Here's to the man that brought us the word Cankle, the phrase "No No Go Go", and excited us with "Boom!"....
Top John Madden quotes:

"When your arm gets hit, the ball is not going to go where you want it to. "
"I think perhaps it's a relationship that's not marked by a great need to interfere with each other all the time, "
"They got to Joey Harrington physically and they got to him mentally."
"If you see a defense team with dirt and mud on their backs they've had a bad day."
"The fewer rules a coach has, the fewer rules there are for players to break."
"Coaches have to watch for what they don't want to see and listen to what they don't want to hear."

Cankle Defined:
An ankle of a fat person in which the the ankle and the calf appear seamless.

No No Go Go Defined:

The term referring to when a football coach initially tells his playmaker player to not do anything stupid (the "no no" part) but when the player does not listen, and ends up making a huge play, the coaches new words are "Go Go!"
Defined as by John Madden, 11-12-06

*player catches ball in the middle of the endzone on a kickoff, starts to run towards the other end of the field*
Coach: Jackson.. NO NO!
*player reaches the 50 yard mark running full speed with 2 opponents behind him*
Coach: GO! GO!
*player scores touchdown*
Coach: I knew he would do that all along, good play call, 'eh? The ol' No No Go Go trick.

Let's just hope they don't slide in somebody stupid like Troy Aikman.

The revolution will be digitized

On the brink of today's historical event in which the United States will elect a non-white citizen to serve as the 44th POTUS, I thought I would reflect from a distance. With the MLK Holiday yesterday, there was a lot of coverage about the comparisons between MLK and Obama, the journey to get to this point and also the road ahead. Up until now, in my opinion the most revered black American in US history may have been Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He was universally loved by white and black, religious and political alike. When I was growing up, you were forced to hear the "I Have A Dream" speech followed by "We Shall Overcome" and other Negro spirituals in the event that one day, things may actually change. I didnt watch the MLK speech yesterday, but I watched alot of the other documentaries yesterday. A lot of perspectives were expressed about the 1st Black POTUS. Obama has a legacy before his term even starts. He also has one of the worst cleanups since the Exxon Valdez. Financially, morality, ethically, and religious issues will surely capture his immediate attention. But ultimately, I believe Obama's true test will be how he restores the image of the US to the world. If Obama rules with an iron first, he is sure to fail, and on the flip side, if he is too cool for school he will be pushed into decisions and take the blame unjustly. I believe Obama has already realized his popularity will possibly never be this high again. After his first hiccup (we all have at least one hiccup), the water cooler talk will be brutal. "I told you he was inexperienced" or "Maybe we weren't ready for a black man" or anything else that can be said, will be said. But as long as true supporters of America give Obama the same benefit of the doubt as past authorities, I think America will be better for it. When you don't have money, fame, food, or the best of health, one thing that you can count on is relationships. America has to build its relationships back, not only with its Allies and Enemies, but from within.

From MLK to Obama, roughly 40 years has passed. This nation has come a long way in a relatively short period of time. I can only imagine what it will be like in another 50 years. Total Recall...maybe. The Matrix....doubt it. But as a wise man once said, "The revolution will be televised."

RIAA finds its soul, will stop suing individuals downloading music

 

 

Sent to you by Derrick via Google Reader:

 

 

RIAA finds its soul, will stop suing individuals downloading music

via Engadget by Thomas Ricker on 12/19/08

When you retard fair use with pointless DRM and then sue anonymous children for illegally downloading music while ignoring those of the execs at the top of the music industry, well, you're asking for a public relations nightmare. Now, with more than 35,000 lawsuits to its credit, the RIAA says it will finally end the legal assault against consumers that began back in 2003. The Recording Industry Association of America will instead, focus its anti-piracy efforts with ISPs. Under the new plan, the RIAA will contact ISPs when illegal uploading is detected. The ISP will then contact the customer with a notice that would ultimately be followed by a reduction or cessation of service. As you'd expect, the RIAA is not commenting on which ISPs they are in cahoots with. The RIAA also says that it won't require ISPs to reveal the identities of individuals but could, of course, go after individuals who are heavy uploaders or repeat offenders. For the moment though, it appears that single-mothers are in the clear.

Filed under: Portable Audio

RIAA finds its soul, will stop suing individuals downloading music originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Dec 2008 06:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Tyson vs Ali: Fight Night 4

A Complete Guide to Playing Video Files On Your PS3, Xbox 360 or Wii [How-to]

 

 

If you're here reading Gizmodo, there's a good chance you have a hard drive full of video somewhere. And you also probably have a PS3, Xbox 360 or Wii. If those two things aren't working together for you in beautiful symbiosis, allowing you to watch all of your downloaded or ripped video on your TV instead of hunched over a laptop screen, well, this is the guide for you.

Now there are two general strategies you can take: physically copying your files to a USB drive, memory card or CD/DVD, which is pretty straightforward, or streaming your video over the network, which is where things get more fun and interesting. So let's dive in.

First things first, codecs. Now that you're all learn-ed on the ways of video encoding thanks to Matt's Giz Explains from this week, the issue of codecs will make a lot more sense. Thankfully, it's not something you have to worry too much about here, because all three consoles can handle a large number of the codecs you will find commonly: AVI, MPEG (1, 2 and 4), H.264, DivX/XviD, and WMV—and if a particular format you want to play isn't supported, it's often possible to convert it to work on the fly. The PS3 also supports AVCHD, a format used by many HD camcorders. Not all formats are supported with every streaming method though, especially in the 360's case, which we'll get to in a second. Now, for getting all those files on the TV.

Note: if you need to re-encode a video in a different format because it won't play, nothing beats VLC's transcoding wizard. Here's a guide.

Xbox 360: Streaming (PC)
In typical Microsoft fashion, there are tons of different ways to pull of streaming your video to the Xbox 360—and the only one that's truly comprehensive, in our opinion, comes from a third party. TVersity is a free UPnP media server that can manage your video and music files anywhere on your PC and stream them out to your 360 over the network. It will also kindly transcode just about any video you can throw at it into a codec your console can definitely read. You might have to install some additional codec packs here and there for Windows but for the most part, you can forget about worrying about codecs with TVersity. This also allows TVersity to handle files not officially supported by the 360, like MKV containers.

1. Grab TVersity here and install it.
2. Click the giant plus sign in the top left corner to "Add Your Media Source" - namely, the folder on your PC with all of your videos.
3. Under advanced options, set your transcoding preferences: "When Needed" will make sure most all of your files play.
4. In the main TVersity menu, select "Start Sharing"
5. On the Xbox 360, TVersity will now appear as a source in the Media blade or under My Xbox -> Video Library in NXE.

The other three options via Microsoft's own various software solutions all have their own drawbacks, which we'll cover here briefly. Our advice? Use them only if you already use the Zune software, Windows Media Player or Windows Media Center to manage all of your video.

Windows Media Player 11: WMP 11 can stream out to the Xbox 360 pretty easily. Here is an in-depth guide. Drawbacks? Somewhat clunky format support. In our tests we could not stream Quicktime video at all, and had inconsistent experiences with MP4 files. MPEG-4 and H.264 support are technically supported via third-party WMP codec add-ons, but even with those, we still had trouble—MP4 files tended to play fine on the WMP 11 end, but not show up as browsable on the 360. Somewhat unbelievably, the Xbox 360 team actually recommends you manually rename your unsupported MPEG-4 and H.264 files, adding the ".avi" container extension to fool WMP into playing them. This worked occasionally, but not for every file and was generally inconsistent.

Zune Software 3.0: Zune offers a much nicer interface than WMP (Settings -> Sharing -> Add is the extent of the setup), and thankfully supports MPEG4 and H.264 much more consistently. Drawbacks? No DivX or Xvid support, which means a huge chunk of your Torrented video probably won't work.

Windows Media Center Extender: If you already have a Media Center setup honking on your network, there's a good chance you won't need this guide, but the Xbox 360 can of course stream your MCE content to your TV seamlessly (a complete guide is here). The interface is really fantastic. Drawbacks? The gimpiest codec support of the bunch: only MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and WMV are supported. So unless you're converting everything you have into those formats, you'll still need something like TVersity to play most files you'll find up for download.

So, in the end, TVersity wins hands down as the easiest and most elegant streaming setup for the 360. But do keep in mind—if you're playing a format that your Xbox can't handle (MKV being the most common of these you'll find), TVersity will have to transcode, which means you will lose a bit of quality.

Xbox 360: Streaming (Mac): UPnP support—the networking standard used by both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 in various flavors to play network-streamed video, music and photos—is not natively supported by OS X yet. And unfortunately, there isn't a stellar all-in-one free package like Windows' TVersity.

Nullriver, however, makes an incredibly slick piece of software called Connect360, which easily streams all of your iLife libraries or any folder full of video on your Mac to the 360. Unfortunately, it'll cost you $20. There is a free trial version that supposedly shuts off after 30 minutes of sharing, but sometimes it seems to forget and lets you play longer. But even so, $20 isn't bad for the convenience factor here. No transcoding, but it will handle every codec the console itself can play back.

1. Download and install the Connect360 preference pane.
2. In System Preferences, start up Connect360 sharing. Here you can also add folders for more sharing.
3. Access the Connect360 source on your Xbox in the usual way. Done.

Xbox 360: Physical Media
1. If streaming isn't for you, and you don't mind hauling a storage device back and forth between your computer and Xbox, then this is super easy: Insert Flash disk/USB/CD/DVD and browse it with the Media blade or the Video Library section of NXE (under "My Xbox"). Enjoy.

Playstation 3: Streaming (PC)
TVersity: Again, Tversity is your friend. It works just as well for the PS3 as it does for Xbox 360 (see above for setup).

1. With Tversity set up and sharing turned on, just browse to COMPUTERNAME: TVersity in the XMB and you'll see a listing of all your shared files.

Windows Media Player 11: Just like for Xbox 360, you can use WMP11's built-in DLNA/UPnP serving capabilities to stream to the PS3, too—but with the same codec funkiness as noted above.

1. In the Media Sharing preference box with your PS3 powered on and connected to the network, select "Unknown Device"—that's your PS3.
2. Your library should now show up in XMB.

Playstation 3: Streaming (MAC)
Mac: Nullriver didn't just hook up 360 owners—Media Link is the version especially for PS3. It costs 20 bucks, but will give you totally seamless and painless streaming of all of your iLife libraries (photos and music too) as well as files in any folder you can access with your Mac, whether it's on a network or local.

1. Operation is just like Connect360—with sharing enabled in the Media Link preference pane, just browse through all your files under the "Media Link" source in XMB.

Playstation 3: Physical Media
1. Easy as pie. If you're using a USB flash or hard disc or an SD or CF card, just dump all of your videos into a folder named VIDEO on the root of the drive and they'll show up automatically in the XMB.
2. You can also browse the entire drive or disc by pressing triangle and choosing "Display All" to find videos that aren't in the VIDEO folder.

Wii: Physical Media
For playing video on your Wii, physical media is the way to go, which is easy to pull off with some homebrew hacking. There are lots of services that will transcode your video and ouput it in a Flash player that you can view through the Wii's Opera browser (like Orb), but you'll take a hit quality-wise and it's not as easy as just playing the source files directly with Mplayer.

1. Install the Homebrew Channel and Mplayer on your Wii. We've got you covered here with our complete Wii homebrew guide—but hopefully you haven't installed the latest System Menu update. In that case, you'll have to wait for a workaround, but it probably won't be long.

2. Install Mplayer via the Homebrew Browser (also covered in our guide).

3. Now, you can use Mplayer to play files off or even an attached USB drive (as long as its formatted in FAT16 or FAT32, which most are). The interface is not nearly as nice, but it gets the job done.

4. Mplayer for the Wii covers a ton of codecs, but sadly, the Wii's processor chokes on HD content. If you've got HD files, you'll need to transcode them into a lower resolution with VLC.

And that's about it. Now, no more huddling around your laptop screen or fiddling with TV and audio-out cables. Welcome to the good life.

Additional reporting and testing by Seung Lee. See more Giz how-to guides here. And as always, if you have anything to add to our findings, please let us know in the comments.

 

 

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PlayStation addict diagnosed with 'mental detachment'

An Italian 13 year-old boy was rushed to the hospital after his father found him in a shocked stupor. The kid, one Lorenzo Amato, didn't seem to respond to anything around him - he couldn't even speak. Cue panicked father, sound the sirens.

Once rushed to the emergency room, the doctors first thought that the kid must have suffered from a stroke or some other serious brain impairment.

Eventually, the father described to the doctors that he discovered Lorenzo in this way after a PlayStation (not specified which kind of PlayStation) marathon for hours on end.

Antonio Buccoliero, a local politician in Italy, commented on the matter:

They eventually managed to take care of him once they understood that this was a strange kind of mental detachment connected to his PlayStation.

Again, they didn't seem to specify which kind of PlayStation.

From all indications, it seems that Lorenzo Amato has recovered from whatever mental shock he's been through (man, I wonder what he was playing at that time?). However, that doesn't mean he's on the greenlight. Apparently, he's scarred and traumatized for life.

The report explains that he asked his father to get rid of his PlayStation, saying that "I feel like throwing up if I even have to think about it."



I only have two questions: 1. What game was this kid player that is almost killed him (literally and figuratively)? 2. What's wrong with today's youth where you can cause so much stress on yourself from a video game?

I have been playing games since about 1990. I have never been in a drunken stupor to the point were I was rushed to a hospital unless it involved a fight after a Madden tournament or NBA Live. Wow - they just dont make kids like they used too.

Directions to Mercury's neighborhood

I hope Mercury Morris breaks out another freestyle if the Titans can get closer to the perfect season.

3rd Down 4 to Go: NFC Review

NFC East
1. Dallas (6-4) - If Tony Romo rights the ship and steers the Boys to a 11-5 record, could he oust Kurt Warner from the MVP throne. Highly unlikely that Romo does this, but it appears they will catch fire now that they most desperately need it.
2. Philadelphia (5-4) - Playoffs? We're talking about playoffs. Can you smell the last onion on the cheesesteak we call the Andy Reid-McNabb era in Philly? Expect an Iversonesque fire sale from the Eagles soon.
3. Washington (6-4) - It appears the Skins are wearing down Portis and his knee is riding metal to metal. Say hello to the NBA version of the Phoenix Suns, the best team for periods of the time of the season that can't catch a good break.
4. New York Giants (9-1) - Does losing Brandon Jacobs make this team better? Ward is better out of the backfield for the air game (not to mention 500 yards on the ground) and Bradshaw is a bruiser in his own right.

NFC South
1. New Orleans (5-5) - With 3 division games to end the season, there is hope. Yes, a small amount. Like the amount of hope gas prices will drop to high school prices of $1.09/gallon. I believe in miracles.
2. Carolina (8-2) - The running game has been superb as of late. But wat up Jake? Look likes he needs a mid-season emergency Tommy John surgery.
3. Atlanta (6-4) - When was the last time a team had all of the following: Coach of the Year, Rookie of the Year, Most Improved (Roddy White) and the Rushing Champ? Arthur Blank is crying himself purple right now.
4. Tampa Bay (7-3) - How can a team continue to rack up these ugly wins? Shouldn't last year set the precedent for being good enough to get to the playoffs and lose be enough to enact a rule that Tampa shouldn't be allowed in unless they score more than 24 pts in 3 of their last 6 games? Sorta how the Flint Tropics had to sell out their games for the rest of the season with stunts like this to make it to the NBA. I love this sexy movie.
NFC West

1. Seattle (2-8) - I didn't even have to update this section all season, it reads the same: It's not that the Seahawks are that good, but more of saying that this could be the weakest division in football. Seattle may struggle early with a number of receivers out, but it should be better after the return of Branch and Engram. Man this division sucks.
2. St. Louis (2-8) - The Haslett era started with about as much promise as Charlie Weis and the Irish. Let's see if the Rams clean house after this or let the team move back to LA.
3. Arizona (7-3) - This team may be in line for the Tampa Bay curse of locking up your division too early, not playing down the stretch, and then stinking it out the first round. I hope not, this team can pass on anyway. As long as the Giants don't rough up Kurt Warner, they will be ok.
4. San Francisco (3-7) - Although the jury is still out on the Martz/Singletary era, this team is playing better so far.

NFC North
1. Green Bay (5-5) - Very mediocre division. Since we are past week 10, ladies and gentleman, meet Ryan Grant. This guy is like a bat, only comes out in November/December.
2. Minnesota (5-5) - Adrian Peterson. Adrian Peterson. Adrian Peterson. Adrian Peterson. Adrian Peterson. Thats all that comes to mind with the Vikes. That and how would Vick look running the wildcat with Peterson....hmmm?
3. Detroit (0-10) - At least you have Allen Iverson across town right? And you are not the Wolverines.
4. Chicago (5-5) - This team is one Kyle Orton ankle break away from out of the race. Devin Hester needs to break a kickoff back soon.

Original Playoffs Picks
Dallas, Green Bay, Seattle, New Orleans, WC - Philadelphia, Minnesota
Revised Playoff Picks
New York, Green Bay, Arizona, Carolina, WC - Dallas, Atlanta

The ultimate phone breakdown

Before 2007, using the internet on your phone would make you want to kill yourself, if you were dumb enough to believe the crap splattered across that tiny screen even was the "internet." But the combination of increased bandwidth and better mobile software means that more phones really are promising to deliver the real internet, in living color. We tested eight different browsers, and while some put smiles on our faces, others proved that rendering HTML correctly is a far cry from actually giving you an awesome web experience. And what about 3G vs. Wi-Fi? Everything the carriers have told you is a lie. This is the true state of mobile web.

Before we give you the rundown of each of the most prevalent mobile browsers, here's how they all stacked up in a timed test of how fast (and how well) they could render websites, chosen for their diversity and particular challenges:

This second chart runs through the same procedure with all of the phones that had Wi-Fi options:

It's a pretty daunting pile of numbers, so let's break it down into standard prose, rating each browser as we go:
Android
A fast, smart mobile browser based on WebKit. It tackles most sites with (almost) unrivaled grace and speed. Panning and zooming could be smoother and more responsive, but with a ton of options for getting around a page—various touch methods and the trackball—few sites will be challenging to zip around. The only thing we really miss is multitouch for zoom. Buttons just aren't a very elegant or precise solution, and while the whole-page magnifying glass technique is nice, we'd love something a bit more refined. Overall though, we're happy campers on Android's browser. Grade: B+

BlackBerry Bold
Leaps and bounds ahead of the browser BlackBerry users have put up with for years, it renders most pages correctly, even if scripts give it a conniption fit (hence its long load times for Wikipedia and the WSJ). It uses the standard "click to zoom" metaphor, which works well enough, though getting around a page with the trackball can be kind of a work out for you thumb. The Column View, which squeezes a whole page into a single column, is fairly convenient and makes it easier to get around wider pages, even if it doesn't work equally as well on every site (nice on Wikipedia, ugly on Giz). Hopefully they fix the script performance in the Storm, which is using an updated version of the Bold's browser. We humbly suggest they ditch their home-baked browser for one based on WebKit, which would help out there. Grade: B-/C+

iPhone
What can we say? It's still got the best mobile browser around. It crushes basically everything but Android's browser—which is also based on WebKit—in speed and outclasses its still classy brother-from-another-mother (and everyone else) with the ease and elegance of its multitouch zooming. Some pages still give it fits, and it's missing Flash support, but it really does deliver an unrivaled mobile web experience. We love it, but make no mistake we're eagerly waiting for something better. (Mobile Firefox? Is it you?) Grade: A-

Nokia E71 Symbian S60
Hey look, another web browser with WebKit guts! It doesn't perform quite as well as Android's or iPhone's iteration where speed or render accuracy are concerned (can any Symbian nuts explain why?), but it does a serviceable job. The big thing it has going for it is Flash Lite 3 support, though performance there is kinda assy and memory intensive. Navigation is tougher with the E71's d-pad than with a trackball, but the whole page magnifying approach makes it easy enough to get around (too bad you have to dig through a menu or two to get to it). Not bad, but short of excellent. Grade: B-

Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile
Jesus Christ. This is a joke, right Microsoft? Hahaha. No really, this is the worst smartphone browser on the planet. It couldn't render its way out of an ASCII-art paper bag. It totally screwed up every single test page, except for Wikipedia, which it only mostly screwed up. Good luck navigating a page if you're granted the miraculous occurrence of it being rendered in a state that's usable. Grade: F-

Opera Mobile on Windows Mobile
Microsoft's own intentions notwithstanding, you can use the internet on a Windows Mobile phone. You just need Opera Mobile. It's kind of hobbled by Windows Mobile's assy performance, but it usually gets the job done. Not as quickly or always as accurately as its WebKit rivals, but it's definitely usable. Interestingly, it benefits more from the extra bandwidth offered by Wi-Fi than the WebKit browsers do. Menu-based zoom is annoying and imprecise. Touch-based panning worked okay, though a little laggy. We mostly navigated with the Samsung Epix's optical cursor, which worked pretty well, somewhere in between a d-pad and a trackball. Grade: C

Sprint Instinct
Holy CRAP. This is not the painfully lousy browser the Instinct shipped with not by a long shot. The original was slow and fairly feeble, even if it was the head of its (dumbphone) class. The new 1.1 browser really is a life-changing upgrade. It suffers in the chart because it's much slower than most other browsers, and zooming is still clumsy, but once the page loads, it's much smoother to pan and actually move around. I got a bit annoyed that it lied about pageload time, hanging at the last 2 percent of the status bar for half the load, but it usually gets things right. This is the best non-smartphone browser you can get. Grade: C+

LG Dare
Like the Instinct, the Dare proves you can actually get a usable browsing experience on a feature phone. It's a little nimbler at loading pages than its Korean blood rival, but the reason it ultimately posts lower marks than the Instinct is that it buckles way more easily under a moderate to heavy pageload, turning it into an unresponsive picture of the website you were trying to look at. Still, it renders most pages fairly accurately, and we like the sliding zoom scroll bar, at least in theory, since it seems like an intuitive way to deal with the zoom issue. Unfortunately, it works more like a glorified pair of buttons. (Note: I don't think the speed was actually a piddly 300 Kbps—I think it just had a problem dealing with DSL Reports' mobile speedtest, even though it's text-based for the dumbest of phones.) Grade: C

Methodology
We tested every browser only using the full—not mobile—versions of selected sites, over 3G and, whenever possible, Wi-Fi. All scripts were turned on, and the cache was cleared before each round of testing. We took the average of a series of five sequential speedtests to give us an idea of the bandwidth we're dealing with, and timed how long it took to completely load a site according to each browser's progress bar. We assessed whether or not it rendered the page correctly, on a scale ranging from "excellent" to "good" (a couple things out of place) to "utter fail" (I've seen prettier train wrecks).

A few additional issues to note: Internet Explorer would not work on Wi-Fi. Opera yes, our Skyfire install, yes, Internet Exploder, no. (Samsung suggested it might be because of Opera.) We didn't pursue the matter because of how IE did in the 3G tests: A page that looks like a pile of blended dog poo is going to look like that no matter how much faster it loads. Sprint's updated Instinct and Verizon's Dare, which we included as best-of-class examples of feature phones, don't have Wi-Fi capabilities. We left out Opera Mini and Skyfire, since they both leave most of the hard work to servers which essentially spit out a kind of image file—besides, we don't think this kind of internet-by-proxy browser will be around for much longer.

The Big Gulp
Remember our mantra it's code that counts? It's true for mobile internet too. An awesome browser can make up for a mediocre network, but a terrible browser delivers a crappy experience no matter how great the network is. It's all about the browser. As it stands, WebKit is clearly the best thing going, but even then, software implementation matters, or Nokia would deliver as good a performance as Android and iPhone. Proving the point, it's striking how little Wi-Fi actually boosted speed beyond 3G—hell, WebKit browsers on 3G slid past some of the others that were running on Wi-Fi.

Another thing to note is that the zoom metaphor is a tricky thing to nail. Buttons are too brutish, the magnifying glass is imprecise. Multitouch seems to be the best way to handle zooming in and out in a way that's intuitive and precise. Hopefully we'll see other developers start to use multitouch interfaces in touchscreen phones (*cough*ANDROID!*cough*).

As much as this blow-by-blow battlemodo shows you all the problems we encountered, the big picture is that really, mobile web is pretty dandy right now, and getting dandier. It could be more reliable, faster, maybe a little more versatile, but for the most part, yes, you can access the internet on your phone. Compared to just two years ago, that's really saying something. We can't wait to see what it'll look like in two years. Maybe Internet Exploder will actually work. Nah, that's a little too sci-fi.