We waited for the "unlocked" piece that would, rest assured, hit the Indian grey market a few days after the iPhone launch in the US. It never came! All that chest thumping in the newspapers from the Palika bazaar and Nehru Place wheeler dealers proved to be an empty boast. This baby was secure and unbreakable. There was only one way to do it - the legal way. We called up TV18's New York bureau chief, Indira Kannan and asked her if she would buy one, activate it and send it across to us. Luckily Indira's existing plan was coming to an end and she wanted to switch operators anyway. In the US they have number portability which means she could retain her number even if she changed to AT&T. So she bought it, got it up and running, routed her calls to voicemail and set up a cheap international roaming and dialing plan on it. She packed it, shipped it...

A recent article in Forbes magazine had me a bit startled when it claimed that India, along with the UK barely accounts for 2% of the world's cybercrime. "No way", was my first thought! On examining the article carefully, I came across a sentence that, in my opinion, shredded the hack-job hypothesis - "Researchers at Sophos Labs say they ... can roughly identify the host country of malicious software by tracing the default language of the computer on which it was programmed." That has to be the most flimsy basis ever for such a study! A quick survey of all the computers in my immediate vicinity in office proved me right - almost no one in India, irrespective of operating system used, bothers to change his or her default language from US English to UK. I have no numbers to support this (does anyone?) but overwhelming personal, anecdotal and logical evidence suggests that the Queen's dialect isn't the default option on even a fraction on...

Ok, so the launch has happened and while we at Tech 2.0 wait for some friends in the US to ship one across so that we can use it on international roaming and give you guys a REAL review, here are the funniest three iPhone pieces floating on the interweb. Text: Churumuri for their hilarious post "11 similarities between the iPhone and Rajni" The only one I didn't quite agree with was: ""6) College dropout Rajni is in the safe hands of Shankar who has not known failure at all as a director. The iPhone is in the safe hands of college dropout Steve Jobs who has not known failure at all as a tech visionary." As Steve Jobs himself said in his famous Stanford speech, he's failed badly once and picked himself up to even greater heights. Not to mention, the string of flopped Apple products over the years! Nevertheless, superb piece! ...

The first reviews from some of the lucky journalists (insert professional jealousy expletive here!) to get an early-review Apple iPhone model are out in the US media! The overall impression is that the "Jesus Phone" may actually live up to the hype after all. Minus the blood to wine conversion of course, though, I'm told there's a nifty app for the phone that actually lets you .... anyway, lol, here are some quick links: Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal: "Our verdict is that, despite some flaws and feature omissions, the iPhone is, on balance, a beautiful and breakthrough handheld computer." More David Pogue, New York Times: "... so sleek and thin, it makes Treos and BlackBerrys look obese." More Stephen Levy, Newsweek: "The iPhone is the rare convergence device where things actually converge." More Edward Baig, USA Today: "Apple's iPhone isn't perfect, but it's worthy of...