So those who queued for days for an iPhone before its launch on June 29 have now been made to look double doofuses by Apple.

Not only did they wait needlessly when there were plentiful supplies, but a price cut just 10 weeks later means they paid $200 more than necessary.

For those that didn’t really want the phone, but the elements that made it the “best iPod ever” ( Steve Jobs’ description), it’s even worse. They could have saved $300 and got the new 8Gb iPod touch for $299.

The touch looks a winner with its touch-screen and wi-fi that brings internet browsing to a media player.

The new nano also sees Apple finally get it right with its most popular model – it can now play videos, sophisticated games, has more storage, a much better display, a full-metal jacket, better interface, cooler colours and 24-hour battery life for playing music.

The original iPod was renamed the “classic” today, but it is looking more like the “prehistoric” squeezed between the nano and the touch. The only thing in its favour seems to be storage – 160Gb for $349. Jobs emphasised you could store 40,000 songs on it, but who has 40,000 they need to carry around with them?

The only other disappointment in the presentation was the lack of any content announcements – the anticipated availability of the Beatles catalogue failed to materialise.

There were also no new video deals to accompany the nano’s empowerment, only a bitch from Jobs about his row with NBC, which is moving its content to Amazon.

Making an individual ringtone for his iPhone out of John Lennon’s “Give Peace A Chance”, he said: “That’s for when NBC calls.”

Intel’s cosy relationship with Apple, supplying the microprocessors for its computer range, does not extend to the iPhone yet. But there may be a way into the hottest cell phone through Intel’s WiMAX technology.

The applications processor in the iPhone is supplied by Samsung and uses a core based on the ARM architecture for small devices, rather than Intel’s x86 architecture, which dominates the PC world.

Sriram Viswanathan, a vice president at Intel Capital, its venture arm, and head of its WiMAX programme, says the ARM processor limits internet access such as unfettered viewing of YouTube videos.

In an interview, he spoke about bringing the x86 world to smaller gadgets - mobile internet devices, as Intel describes them. This will be enabled by its ultra-low power, small form-factor Silverthorne chip, which will eventually have a WiMAX chip attached.

AT&T, the exclusive carrier for the iPhone in the US, is bidding for new spectrum here and could well choose to run a WiMAX next-generation network on it if successful, he says.

Although he did not make the connection, this could open the way for Intel to at least supply a WiMAX chip, and perhaps a Silverthorne microprocessor for future generations of the iPhone.

Intel’s WiMAX chips, which offer broadband connectivity over wide areas, will definitely be featuring alongside regular Wi-Fi chips in new high-end notebooks from the second half of next year - about the time that new WiMAX networks around the world will be going live.

Intel appears to have been behind the deal this month that saw Sprint and Clearwire team up in the US to create a national network, although Mr Viswanathan would only say: “We were very actively involved…it was obvious to us that there was tremendous benefit in them working together.”

Intel owns about 30 per cent of Clearwire, after putting more than $600m into the wireless provider, its biggest ever venture-capital investment.

“We are not investing just enough anymore, we are investing as much as we can to meet our strategic objectives,” he says of Intel Capital’s new tactics to open up fresh markets for the company’s chips.

“If we think we can drive the market, it makes sense to put as much money as we can into that area.”

SpinVox, the leading UK speech-to-text voicemail service, is setting up shop here in San Francisco as it expands into converting the social conversations of the Web 2.0 crowd into the written word.

SpinVox started out using its speech-recognition technology to offer a time-saving conversion of voicemails into text transcripts, which are emailed to its users.

In May, it announced a deal with San Francisco’s Six Apart that allows its 12m LiveJournal members to post by voice over the phone to their blogs.

Now it is voice-enabling SMS messages and email, helping Twitter users to post by voice. Further development work is taking place in unified messaging for the corporate market.

Christina Domecq, chief executive, who was in the city this week to open the new offices, describes SpinVox as a “global managed service provider” that is now working with five carriers in the US to deploy “voice-to-screen” voicemail services.

She sees competition emerging from the big players such as Microsoft, which bought Tellme in March, Google, which is working on speech recognition for mobile search and has bought GrandCentral, and Nuance.

There are also smaller players already offering a similar service to SpinVox in the shape of SimulScribe, CallWave and Jott.

Daniel Doulton, vice president of strategy and development, claims SpinVox has a superior technology, protected now by over 40 patents, which delivers more accurate transcripts whether the language is English, French, German or Spanish.

SpinVox earns revenues “per event” from carriers – whenever a voicemail is converted to text by a premium service. But with messages being literally spelt out, the possibility of contextual ads being included is also being explored.

So what if you don’t want to use the iPhone as a phone?

A perverse notion perhaps, until you add up the cost of the minimum $60 a month voice and data plan that is provided by AT&T.

It comes to more than $1,400 over the two-year minimum period, meaning buying an iPhone can be a $2,000 commitment.

Hence, some iPhone owners are talking about ways round activating their phones, from bent paper clips to hackers’ code.

The bent paper clip method involves removing the SIM card from a friend’s activated iPhone by pushing the clip in a small hole to spring the SIM card. This is then put in your phone to be resynced and activated again on iTunes. The SIM card can then be returned and you will have an iPhone that cannot make regular calls but will have a wi-fi connection for surfing and iPod functionality. Eventually, someone may come up with a solution for Voice over IP calls using the wi-fi connection.

The hacker’s way in was discovered by DVD Jon, who earned his moniker after cracking the copy-protection codes on DVDs. He posted details on his blog this week and commenters reported success using his method.

I wonder if a third, even easier, way is to cancel your AT&T contract within the 30-day grace period. The phone line may be deactivated, but you will still have the SIM and hopefully an unlocked iPhone, although syncing it with iTunes could alert Apple to its deactivated status.

Most people will stick with AT&T, but Jajah is touting how you can avoid expensive international roaming charges by signing up for its service through the Safari browser.

Meanwhile, many people have had the same problem as me in connecting to their wi-fi networks. Reading Apple forums, the iPhone appears to have a problem resolving DNS addresses in many cases. I followed advice to manually change my DNS address to 4.2.2.2 and am now surfing at broadband speeds.

I counted exactly 99 people in the queue in front of me when I arrived outside the Apple store in Corte Madera, California at around 7.15pm on Friday. There were more queuing inside past security, while others were steadily emerging with their special iPhone bags, most of them carrying the maximum-allowed two.

I’m not a queue jumper but I did happen to meet John Paczkowski, who blogs at All Things Digital and was halfway along the line. He was only buying one and offered to get me mine. By 8pm, I too was walking away with an iPhone bag.

John had arrived at 6pm when they first went on sale, finding a much longer line. But the Apple operation was impressive, buyers were processed quickly with no need to activate the phone instore and emails being sent out rather than paper receipts issued.

It was so organised and there were enough iPhones in stock to make anyone who had been queuing long before 6pm look foolish. The profiteers may feel even more so if the iPhone fails to sell out and they are unable to double their money selling theirs on eBay.

The iPhone comes in a stylish black box, the kind you expect to open and find a Fabergé egg nestling inside. Everything about the packaging oozes class, matching the phone it encases. You feel you are holding a thing of beauty: sleek, black and silver, a heft to it that lends substance and a display that lights up to reveal an interface unmatched by any other handheld device, let alone cellphones.

Activating it was a cinch online once I had downloaded the latest version of iTunes. It also synced right off the bat with my iTunes library and allowed me to import contacts and diary items from Outlook and bookmarks from Internet Explorer.

The iPhone likes to be stroked. A lot. This is probably a feature intended to engender pet-like attachment from its owner. Apple could have made it purr, but that could have made it too Furbie like. You stroke the iPhone to unlock, scroll through lists and flick through photo slideshows and iTunes record sleeves.

My first impression is that this is a design statement and entertainment device rather than a useful business tool I would carry around for work. Too much functionality is hidden for the sake of clean design in both the interface and the number of buttons available. The Edge network is painfully slow for web browsing, I find the keyboard far too small and practically impossible to use at the moment and I cannot imagine my IT department delivering company emails to me on this device.

Watching videos, listening to music and viewing photos is a dream though. My kids loved it, but could not figure out why this was the only phone they’d ever encountered without any games on it.

I’ve only had the iPhone a few hours, so these are first thoughts and there’s a first look on video below.

T-Mobile has become the first US wireless carrier to offer a wi-fi option for users to replace their landlines, but, like other operators around the world, it is not handing its calls completely over to the internet.

T-Mobile launches Hotspot @ Home today with two new “Hotspot” cellphones from Samsung and Nokia and calling plans that allow unlimited nationwide calls over wi-fi at home or any open wi-fi hotspot for as low as $9.99 a month initially.

This would be in addition to a regular calling plan, but T-Mobile points out the savings could still be substantial if consumers are spending the industry average of $48 a month on their landline at home and can now replace it.

Of course, they could anyway with their regular cellphones, without the need for the new service, but T-Mobile says poor reception at home is the biggest barrier to landline replacement.

The new phones solve this by using the home internet connection to improve the GSM mobile experience. Calls made in the home are not like Voice-over-Internet Protocol Skype calls, but are instead GSM calls wrapped in IP.

This allows mobile carriers to maintain their billing systems on calls and ensure a reliable hand-off to the cellular system if someone walks out of their house or hotspot and carries on a conversation.

The UMA (unlicensed mobile access) technology has been used successfully by operators including Orange, BT and Telecom Italia in Europe. T-Mobile is the natural operator to launch it first in the US – it has set up a nationwide network of 8,500 wi-fi hotspots and it has no landline business here it could risk cannibalising.

The company is also offering a wireless router, free after a mail-in rebate, that will give better voice quality and prioritise voice traffic over data traffic, as well as improving the battery life of the phones.

One disappointment – you can’t surf for free to your heart’s content on the new wi-fi phones. Talk is cheap, but anything else requires a separate data plan.

UPDATE. Michael Gartenberg, Jupiter Research analyst, has a full review of the service here.

Qualcomm’s fight with Broadcom has echoes of Research in Motion’s battle with NTP, settled in March 2006 after four years of legal action.

Rim paid $612m to end a patent infringement dispute with NTP that threatened to shut down its Blackberry service in the US.

Qualcomm is now under pressure itself to settle with Broadcom, over infringing its patent for power management in 3G mobile phones.

The International Trade Commission has ordered that the guilty chips in future phone models should be excluded from the US. However, the importation ban would hit not just Qualcomm, but handset makers such as Motorola and carriers such as AT&T, as well as consumers.

Qualcomm is hoping President Bush will step in. It admitted on an analyst conference call today that a presidential veto of an ITC exclusion order is rare, but argued that a situation where so many third parties would be impacted was equally unusual.

The San Diego chipmaker could spin this out longer with an appeal, but analysts asked why Qualcomm could not just reach a settlement now and put to bed its two-year dispute.

“They are seeking terms that would be destructive to our business model, they are terms that we just cannot accept,” said Louis Lupin, general counsel.

So it is not just about money, it seems. Rather, Broadcom brought the patent dispute in part to give itself leverage with Qualcomm on licensing its rival’s patents.

Broadcom needs to licence Qualcomm’s W-CDMA technology to make its own 3G chips. Like others in the industry, notably Nokia, it has complained at the royalty rates charged by Qualcomm.

It may want to tie a settlement over its power-management patent to a deal on lower W-CDMA royalties.

But that would set a precedent Qualcomm would feel it could never afford.

Despite the proliferation of desktop and embedded video cams, video messaging/video email has not really taken off.

Eyejot, one of the startups showing their technology at the Demo 2007 conference, plans to change that with a simple to use video messaging service that uses flash technology and requires no complicated downloads, enabling anyone with a video cam to create video messages.

To create a video email, you go to Eyejot’s webpage www.eyejot.com, log on, record a video and press send. The intended recipient is alerted via an email message that a message is waiting and logs onto the Eyejot site to view it. Eyejot messages can also be viewed on any email and browser-equipped mobile device. The service is free initially but Eyejot plans to launch an enhanced $30-a-year service shortly.

Interestingly, users can also send video messages from a blog or embed them in a MySpace home page. Consumers can also view their Eyejot mailbox using Apple’s iTunes or via an RSS reader. Overall, Eyejot is impressive and could just be the service to turn video email into a mainstream service.

Meanwhile Brevient Technologies’ free voice and SMS messaging service dubbed Jyngle, combines real-time mobile technology and online social networking to facilitate group communication. Jyngle users create, send and receive mass messages using either a Web interface or their cell phones and, by joining public groups or creating their own, they can remain up to date on social activities and business information while on the go.

Sign me up! Jyngle looks like a cool way to stay in touch with family, friends and potentially colleagues.

We prize mobile phones for their slim lines and portability, while generally accepting the trade-offs of small screens, cramped keyboards and minimal storage.

There are ways round their limitations – mini-projector link-ups that can expand displays and a similar technology that can cast a full-sized usable keyboard image onto any surface.

Seagate, the leading maker of hard drives, has come up with a storage solution, unveiled at the Demo ’07 conference in Palm Desert, California.

Originally codenamed Crickett, its Dave (Digital Audio Video Experience) technology delivers 10 to 20 gigabytes of wireless storage in a form factor slimmer than most cell phones.

Dave (on the right of the picture) is about the size of a centimetre-thick credit card and can stay in a pocket, communicating digital files to the handset via either wi-fi or Bluetooth. Battery life is 14 days on standby and allows 10 hours of data streaming.

“We’re going after the phone business from an external drive position,” Bill Watkins, Seagate chief executive, told us, explaining that handset makers want to keep onboard storage to a minimum to lower the cost of phones.

Dave will allow consumers to combine storage of content downloaded through their mobiles, and pictures taken with camera phones, with multimedia transferred from their PCs.

Upgrading to a new phone should also be easier with data backed up to the hard drive. Dave will be available in the second quarter, just before you upgrade to that 8Gb iPhone.

The Nintendo Wii’s motion-sensing controller helped create a new market for accelerometers, most commonly used to deploy airbags and part of the product group known as Mems (microelectricalmechanical systems).

STMicroelectronics, Europe’s biggest chipmaker, has just created a standalone division for Mems for what its director, Benedetto Vigna, describes as an era of consumerisation of the technology.

He told us today he expects the success story to continue with the gyroscope – not that large spinning wheel on an axis, but a silicon chip version, activated electrically and disturbed in a range of only 10 to 100 atoms to detect side-to-side movement and orientation.

The PlayStation 3’s controller has an accelerometer and a gyroscope, making it more sophisticated than the Wii, but Sony has yet to exploit all the possibilities through software.

STMicro sees a big market in mobile phones for these Mems devices. Camera phones that need image stabilisation can benefit from accelerometers and gyroscopes combined. STMicro says its solution can be just 1mm thick, much smaller than standard piezoelectric sensors, while being cheaper and consuming less power.

Other applications include scrolling through Web pages or maps by just tipping the phone, location-based services and even a pedometer application that calculates distances walked and calories used.

Pictures on a handset can switch from portrait to landscape mode automatically as it’s rotated and silencing the phone in a meeting can be as simple as turning it face down and tapping it.

STMicro’s biggest market right now is computers, with around 30m laptop hard drives equipped with “free-fall” technology that “parks” them to avoid data loss if the notebook is dropped.