Good question. Honestly, if the new Asus EeePC 900 was available some months back, it might have tipped the scales against some folk’s choice of the ‘ultraportable’ Macbook Air. (Me included.) The new EeePC gets launched in my neck of the woods this coming Monday, and the Doodler got an advance review unit (a 12GB Windows XP version - ugh) to tinker with.

The new, truly ultraportable version removes some of the bigger complaints about the EeePC (screen and storage) and makes it an even more attractive alternative to the MBA, at a fourth of the price. But then again, different strokes for different folks.

If you’re at all curious, I have an unboxing gallery and a quick-and-dirty-review over at my EeePC blog. (Yes, I have a life outside of Macs.)

Of course the sticking point with the MacBook Air is that it is a closed machine - it is what it is, and that’s it. Well, that’s never really stopped some folk. If there’s a will - plus some dremel tools and a soldering iron - there’s a way.

Take this guy named Jordan Bunnell who added an EVDO broadband wifi card (a USB727 Verizon Aircard) to the innards of his Air, something most people didn’t think possible given the space available. True, he had to sacrifice his wifi and Bluetooth, but he proves it can done. Hm.

Check out the butchery, complete with pictures and discussion here and here.

One of the most tepid, dishwater-weak and featureless of the built-in Apple apps for the iPhone is the barely functional Photos app. Even the cheapest digicam or cam phone has more features than that one.

Well, someone’s finally done something about it and made a somewhat-free and more capable photo app. It’s called Camera PRO for iPhone, and offers a few shoulda-been-in-the-box features for free (and some not so free).

Considering that it’s just a matter of time before Apple beefs up their own software in a future update, these entrepreneurs from Amsterdam are striking while the iron is hot and is charging for additional “Premium” features. Some are in numbered trial mode, and others yet to come (including a send-to-Flickr feature).

Rather than take time explaining the app to you (and because they say a picture is worth a thousand words and I’m still too sleepy to type much), I just screen-capped the welcome screen on my iPhone, because everything’s there anyway:

It works, too. Here’s a shot I took using the default no-choice settings:

And using the zoom feature of Camera PRO where I didn’t move the iPhone:

Focus seems to be a problem still, but hey, anything’s better than what we got now, right?

V. 1.04 now available via Installer.

Leave it to the army of third-party developers, hackers, krackers and programmers to plug the holes and putty-up the seams and cracks in Apple’s line of products. Somehow, somewhere, sometime soon, someone’s going to patch up the good ship Apple, in spite of Steve.

Take the iPhone for example. From a long list, my personal top three missing features are: forwarding SMS, sending contact info and the venerable ability to cut-and-paste text within or among apps.

At least the first two have been taken care of, and nicely too. There have been a few apps that already do these things, if a bit clunkily, one of them being the slow SMSD that can delete specific messages and forward SMS, but often chokes when dealing with a particularly large cache of texts.

My friend Myles turned me onto something called WeTool, from WeiPhone, the “bigest” iPhone forum in China. WeTool does what SMSD does, and does the same thing for call logs as well (as in delete specific items in the call log, something another basic app called CallD does). WeTool also forwards contact info. WeTool puts all these functions in a nice pretty package, and the app works as advertised - it can even forward SMS and contact info to multiple recipients.

To get it just add http://app.weiphone.com/installer to your Source list in Installer, and update. (You know how to do this, right?)

It’s just a bit confusing sometimes because several versions seem to be floating around (there even seems to be one made for the US - WeToolUS - but I’ll be hogtied if I can’t see much difference) and when you update, they all show up. Just get the one with the highest version number and you should be ok. As usual, caveat user; it’s still a 3rd party freebie and comes with no guarantees.

A side note: as some of these things from China often do, the English sometimes gets a bit mangled in the translation, and the About screen on WeTool, for one, is a bit of a hoot.

Hey, it’s free; shut up.

Here’s one of those no-brainer, dead-simple applications that should’ve been in the box - a way to measure lengths using the iPhone. The nice thing about this little feature is that it actually isn’t an app, but merely a calibrated graphic of a ruler that is to accurate and to scale.

Available from a website called, interestingly enough, an error occurred while processing this directive.com, it’s pretty simple to use, and needs no wireless connection whatsover.

Just download the graphic and put it into your photo album, and when the need arises access the photo and measure away. I checked with a physical tape measure and it seems the ruler is apparently spot on and lost nothing in the translation.

A couple of unavoidable and obvious limitations, though. We can only measure three-inch or 7.5 cm objects, and those in a vertical orientation - if you turn the iPhone on its side, the picture adjusts orientation automatically because of the iPhone sensor and renders the scale useless. But hey, it’s free; we can’t really complain.

We’re not quite sure if the iPod Touch’s screen has precisely the same dimensions and resolution as the iPhone in practice so we don’t know if the ruler would be accurate on the iPod, but it shouldn’t be all that different. We’re sure someone will chime in on this soon. (Bernie?)

Nice. Would that we had things like these more often, huh?