Great comprehensive iOS 4 review from Ars.

9 to 5 Mac scoops the release and the right place to go to get your iOS 4 download fast.

Now that we’ve been treated to an incredible new Mac mini release, I can’t get this old AppleInsider post out of my head.

Here’s the final sentence: “Ladies and gentlemen, AppleInsider believes in all sincerity that the Mac mini is dead.”

I completely lost trust for AppleInsider as an Apple news and information source when I read this.  ”Believes in all sincerity”?  Interesting language when you’re holding yourself up as a vital source of information.

Perhaps I wouldn’t have lost trust – now I just laugh about it, in case you’re wondering if it had some big long term impact – had they not reported around the same time that the hard drive based iPod would be forever discontinued (last I checked, it’s still around).

The lesson: don’t write crap that lacks truth and/or substance.  That’s called propaganda.

If you’re one of those people that thinks more megapixels mean better photos, that’s not accurate at all.  More megapixels mean more data, but more data doesn’t mean good data.

It’s like wanting a local phonebook and instead getting one with some numbers from your neighborhood and some others from a neighborhood in Zimbabwe – and none of them are correctly matched to their owners.

If you missed it we’ve seen this movie before (or should I have said ‘photo’?). DSLR manufacturers have finally stopped the megapixel war in favor of getting quality from the megapixels their sensors process, and even the current iPhone came out well ahead of the higher megapixel Droid in recent shootouts.

The entire Apple blogosphere is going to report this translated article from the Czech Republic as significant because some guy’s got his hands on an iPhone 4 before its release, but they’re missing the real news here.  This is arguably the first time we’ve seen photos taken by the iPhone 4 that were not Apple-sourced.

What do they reveal?  Apple iPhone 4 is the first ever phone based point-and-shoot camera for the rest of us, and that means the end of the non-DSLR camera segment as we know it.

ActiveSync for Hotmail is starting to be enabled!  And once iOS4 comes out you’ll be able to have several ActiveSync accounts on your Apple mobile device at once. Awesome.

More from WMExperts.

So why did you click through to read it anyway? There’s nothing new to say about the iPhone possibly coming to every single carrier not named AT&T. Or for that matter there’s nothing that hasn’t been said whining about AT&T’s service.

Two things we can promise:

(1.) If you’re looking for news regarding who else is going to carry the iPhone (especially you Verizon lovers out there who are pretending to love that Android device so your iPhone-toting friends don’t laugh at your cobbled-together Frankenphone) wait until Apple tells you it’s coming because none of the rest of us can be trusted to ‘scoop the truth’ at this point.

(2.) If you haven’t had another carrier besides AT&T in the past few years, you’re missing far less than you think. Carriers generally suck badly at one or more very important aspects of their business, be it customer service, locking out or delaying features, finding ways to shaft potential defectors, the service itself, or a combination of these.

People generally love blaming the phone for crappy service or crappy service for the phone, and often don’t get it right either way. But one thing’s for sure: your world isn’t going to change the minute the iPhone becomes available from a new carrier. Bliss will end. The grass only looks greener.

But when you finally break down and buy the iPhone, your world will change – especially if the important, yet subtle details of how things work (and work together) are important to you. Your mistake was letting the last three years pass you by because someone or something convinced you that any one of the American wireless carriers comes close to being good enough to lock your business. And trust me, even an occasional dropped call is worth suffering in exchange for most every one of the other crap handsets out there.

If you think your time is wasted calling someone back, consider all the time you waste trying to do the simple things you can only do with the right equipment. You won’t get this until you start using an iPhone.

Now back to dreaming of a life without [insert AT&T, your boring lover, your horrible life, or whatever soothes your dramatic flair here].

9To5 Mac reports MobileMe impending scheduled maintenance, which will begin tonight and end within two hours of its start.

Loads of rumors began to surface regarding the inclusion of Lala, a new free tier of service, and even a massive bucket in the cloud which would give MobileMe users a place to store all their media for streaming while providing theoretically unlimited backup space.  The sync features will be there – the patent’s there and we’ve already heard about it.

We’re not sure what to expect – this could simply be a cutover to that enormous Carolina datacenter and nothing else.  But the timing suggests at least part of the impetus for the downtime is to enable iOS4 features like the aforementioned syncing features revealed in last week’s WWDC Stevenote.

Stay tuned.

Simple and elegant.

Peter Bregman of Harvard Business Review says he returned his iPad because, essentially, it’s too doggone good at doing what it does.  I can see that.  You’ve got the iPad and all of a sudden you can watch, read, whatever as fast as blazes.  It’s all there, and it’s all easy to get to when you get the urge.

So I’m bought in.  But there’s only one problem here: every device we’ve added to our lives, from laptops to the current crop of exceptional mobile devices – all of which Apple has made exceptionally easy to access and use – does this.  It’s really up to us to device where, when and how much we let this devices intervene.

I guess he’s saying the iPad’s basically his version of crack.  At the same time, I’d hate to see anyone forego the efficiency advances these awesome devices create in sacrifice of the time they actually give back.

We’re posting this as a warning to anyone expecting to just drop in to an Apple Store and grab a new iPhone.  If you haven’t already figured it out, iPhone 4 is going to be the biggest selling phone in history and even Apple didn’t anticipate the months and months of catch-up they’ll be doing to meet demand.

Don’t say you weren’t armed with the info!