How do you keep a forthcoming consumer electronics product in the headlines for six solid months? Well, if you’re Apple, you go against the conventional wisdom and surpass expectations with properly-timed press releases.

On Monday, for example, prospective customers of the iPhone learned that it would be a better product than they originally expected. In a press release, Apple CEO Steve Jobs revealed that the iPhone’s battery life would be much longer than originally promised. So instead of getting five hours total talk time, the iPhone would deliver eight hours instead. One figure previously undisclosed, standby time, would amount to an estimated 250 hours.

Compared to the so-called smart phone competition, the iPhone appears better, at least based on Apple’s own figures, although none of this will be at all certain until the thing is actually available and the tech publications put it through its paces.

In another development, fears about getting lots and lots scratches on the screen were reduced by moving to a glass surface. Other phones use plastic. But you have to wonder whether ordinary iPods will also go glass in the near future, since they have also suffered from susceptibility to screen blemishes.

Indeed, it’s always nice to see the specs for a new product actually improve during the final stages of its development. This is almost unique with Apple. Usually features are ditched and specs grow worse from the time of the original announcement until the actual release. Ask Microsoft.

Now our cynical readers — and I count myself as part of that list in this case — might suggest that Apple knew all along that the iPhone’s specs would magically improve. It was all part of a carefully calculated marketing plan that was put in place months ago. As you got closer to the official release date, you’d learn, first, about letting developers build their iPhone apps to open in Safari. Once the dust had settled, you’d discover that the battery would power the iPhone for a much longer period, and the screen would be made of glass.

Of course, it’s easier to believe that these improvements were just a natural part of the development process. Maybe Apple decided to use a higher-capacity battery, or found ways to reduce power consumption. Or perhaps some combination of both.

As to the glass screen, well consider all those potential complaints about scratches, smudges and all the rest, and you can see an incentive to use something that ought to be more resilient to such ills. The question, of course, is just how Apple is going to treat that glass to make it better withstand the daily rigors of use and abuse by all sorts of buyers.

I mean, it’s one thing to just look at the screen. But when fingers — clean or dirty — are touching it on a daily basis, along with whatever lurks on the surface of your ears, you just know that Apple will be confronting issues that it never had to deal with before.

It is quite likely there will be a lucrative market for third party iPhone cleaning clothes and solutions. That assumes, of course, that Apple doesn’t provide something of that sort in the shipping container.

Now I have to tell you that I really didn’t expect to actually write much more copy about the iPhone so early in the game, but it’s just an irresistible subject. Although I’m highly doubtful about wanting to acquire one for myself right away, my wife has been asking lately whether I’ll get an iPhone for review. So maybe I should do a little rethinking here.

Well, there’s always our 31st wedding anniversary in December.

As far as the rest is concerned, I’m reasonably encouraged by Apple’s ongoing improvements to its unreleased gadget. Imagine how the iPhone would fare under the control of Microsoft, for example?

First, you’d see the eight hour battery life reduced to four, a promise that email support would be added at a later date, and assurance that Wi-Fi would function with the first firmware patch, or maybe the second.

I just wonder how many iPhones will be available on opening day, and how many will be sold. Industry analysts are so busy raising projections, that you wonder how Apple will fulfill the demand, not just at the beginning, but for the foreseeable future.

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Do you remember the first great browser war era of the last decade? In this corner, there was Netscape, and in the far corner, coming up faster than anyone expected, was Microsoft. At the time, Microsoft actually did a smart thing. They built a better application, so it wasn’t just a matter of tying it irretrievably to the Windows platform. Even Mac users benefited from the competition.

It didn’t take long before Netscape became big and bloated, something that’s said about Microsoft nowadays. On the other hand, Internet Explorer was the lean and mean fighting machine that justifiably deserved its leadership status.

Of course, none of this takes into account Microsoft’s ruthless marketing tactics that got it at the wrong side of the Department of Justice. But it didn’t hurt having a better product.

However, owning the browser market didn’t serve Microsoft well, as it essentially set its browser development efforts aside, resting on its laurels. That created the vacuum filled by a number of lesser browsers, and then, from the ashes of the failed Netscape company, came Firefox.

Depending on whom you ask, Firefox today has 15% of the browser market and maybe as high as 20%. Apple’s Safari, while restricted to a single minority computing platform, garners 5%. Opera, which is available on several operating systems, doesn’t come close.

Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter.

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As much as some people have been busy yawning at the WWDC keynote, I regard some of the developments as particularly significant, even though this particular 90-minute Steve Jobs address is regarded as a one of his worst in recent years. But isn’t that what they said last year?

No, it’s not Time Machine. We heard about all that last year, and little new was revealed about it. Spaces? I’ve never become enamored with multiple desktops largely because I use a utility, HideItControl, which only keeps the application I’m using visible. That’s sufficient for me.

I suppose I might warm up to the improvements in Apple Mail, although I switched to Microsoft Entourage 2004 a long time ago because of its superior handling of IMAP. iChat? Well, the promise of improved sound quality is encouraging, but wouldn’t it be nice to be able to make and receive phone calls, just as you can now with Skype? Just asking.

No, none of this gets my blood flowing, and since I don’t write software for a living or any other purpose, having better 64-bit support and all the rest are of academic interest. If these features help deliver better applications, allowing me to get my work done more efficiently and with greater flair, fine and dandy. Otherwise, I just don’t care.

However, having a better Finder does impress me quite a bit. Yes, having it resemble iTunes is certainly useful, particularly for Mac switchers and those who are obsessive about interface consistency. But my main concern is being able to organize my stuff, and not to suffer from the blatant slowdowns of the previous Finder. As I’m writing this article, for example, I’m simply backing up a couple of folders in simultaneous operations to a pair of backup drives. That’s all. Yet routine Finder functions, such as displaying a small folder of files, or even invoking an Open dialog box, have slowed to a crawl. And this is on a vintage Power Mac G5 Quad, with loads and loads of RAM.

Yes, the Finder can be snappier on a MacIntel, but not to a large degree.

So even if Apple left the Finder’s interface alone, repairing its performance lapses would be a huge plus for me. In fact, that would rate well ahead of any interface changes, but having the promise of both is particularly impressive. If the promise of the new desktop and Finder are largely realized, that’s almost enough to convince me to pay $129 for the Leopard upgrade.

Stacks? Well, those are fancy folders that simply display a few animated tricks when you click on them and they open before your eyes. I suppose that’s better than simply clicking on a folder in the Dock, and, while the mouse key is pressed, have the contents pop open. It might even encourage developers to harness the power of Core Animation since Apple has put it on display wherever possible.

Of course, there are supposed to be over 300 new features in Leopard, which ought to be enough to justify the two-and-a-half year wait, although only a small number of those enhancements have been revealed so far.

So I suppose there’s reason to hope that there are other goodies that only developers under nondisclosure agreements are just discovering, but might appear at Apple’s site before long. I’m still optimistic that the tired Open and Save dialog boxes will be enhanced for easier navigation and maybe even the ability to deliver an expanded list of recent stuff, including the files you’ve been accessing.

Being able to create my own Dashboard widget by taking a clip from Safari 3 sounds interesting, but it’s not my number one priority.

However, it’s good to know that Apple has decided to revert to its original 1984 concept of consistency, by consolidating all the interface variants into that single shaded-gray look. It’s about time.

Of course, the most important things about a new operating system are often not the features that are most appealing to marketing people. You want speed and stability, for example, but that doesn’t sound terribly sexy. And it is true that each version of Mac OS X has been more reliable and snappier than its predecessor, although the difference between Panther and Tiger wasn’t huge.

I would hope that, after packing on all the eye candy, Apple has done something to make Leopard run faster, and, with all that extra development time, there won’t be so many point-zero bugs this time out. In fact, some folks weren’t happy with Tiger until a few of the most serious initial defects were eradicated. Let’s really hope that things are different this time.

For now, I’ll just remain ever-optimistic that we won’t need that inevitable 10.5.1 right away, although it will eventually appear.

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