AAPL – 146.69*

and counting. If you haven’t heard this already. Apple Inc declared an alltime high Q3 results riding high on the iPhone wave. Rumors that the iPhone might not have done as well in the market as it was touted brought down the stock 6% earlier. When confirmation came that Apple sold 270,000 pieces of the Jesus Phone in less than one and half days before the quarter, the thing really took off.

Love it or hate it but you cant just ignore the iPhone phenomenon. The way the release has been handled is a lesson in management. Right from the keynote, to the commercials, to the no leakage of any information, to the carefully planted news everything was spot on. It was a gamble to take, Raise the expectations too high on a non deserving product and your credibility is in serious danger, Underadvertise and lose your audience. And boy, did the gamble pay off ! It is estimated that the iPhone got 400 Million Dollar worth publicity for free! People who followed the countdown to the release of the iPhone will never be able to forget the lead up. The feeds from the 3 day queues, the never ending buzz , the skeptics shouting in frustration to shut up about the iphone already saying Hitler’s invasion of Poland didn’t get so much publicity, the joy of the first customers to lay hands on this beauty , Fake Steve’s post 29 June 2007: The Day the World Changed , the news after the release that the iphone actually lives up to the hype. It is the rare sight of a virtuso giving his perfectly orchestrated masterpiece. Steve Jobs, take a bow! It definitely restored a sense of childlike wonder in us.

* as of 02:49 am

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Safari

I had been planning to use Safari from the day of its release. Now that i have come to windows to win back my BMW GT3 that sucker Razor stole from me(err… that was long back when NFS Most Wanted got out), I gave it a try. The buzzword behind the Safari marketing is ‘speed’. The interesting claim is that of a 2x speed of IE7 and 1.6x speed of FF. What better way to test the speed of a browser than to write a blog in it! Till now, the browser looks sleek. It loads page real fast. A new feature that ships with Safari is SnapBack. Safari understands that when surfing the net, we are prone to lose track and follow the random surfer model :). SnapBack remembers checkpoints in your session like the google search page from which you started digressing and provides a one click icon to get you back on your track. The inline find does a much better job than its counterparts in other browsers. You need to check it out to find out what innovation is possible in something as simple as inline find. I now understand why it is said that Apple has some of the world’s best UI engineers.

It delivers what it promises but loses out on the other features. I have begun to miss my mouse gestures and content blocking already! That coupled with the fact that there is no support for third party plugins or widgets means that Safari users will have to be content with a pretty primitive browser. Safari is said to be buggy and is usually not the first choice of Mac Users. I am sure I would return to good old Opera when i am done ogling at the cool UI of the browser.So the bottomline is if it is raw speed and a simple UI that you are after, then Safari is the one for you. But while you are at it, why dont you try out the latest Opera 9.21 😀

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