You just know that certain members of the media got an early look at both the iPhone 3.0 software and the iPhone 3G S. As a result you are now reading their reviews. Some are raves, some have justifiable criticisms, while others demonstrate that the reviewer or reviewers were clueless.

Just to put things in perspective, I upgraded my iPhone 3G with the 3.0 software shortly after it became available here in Arizona, which, in the summer, shares Pacific Time with the “left” coast. The upgrade itself went flawlessly; they always do for me. However, when I first ventured beyond my home office and attempted to check my email, it failed to update, and that held true until I restarted the thing. Then everything seemed all right, although it will take a few days to digest all the changes and determine if there are any significant show-stoppers.

When it comes to Internet performance, I failed to notice any significant differences within the range of powerful Wi-Fi connections or even where the 3G bars reflected a strong AT&T signal. This despite the promise from Apple of improved Safari handling of Web pages, particularly those rich with JavaScript content. Again, this will take a little time to parse and see if any of my favorite sites appear in a snappier fashion.

I also have hopes that I might be able to upgrade to a 3G S in short order, because of an important change in AT&T’s policy that I’ll get to in a moment.

In any case, after reading some of the early reviews, I was struck once again by CNET’s utter inability to get their facts correct. Now as some of you know, I wrote for them once, several years back. Though I had a good relationship with some off the editors, I was troubled by the lack of respect of others to the process of ensuring accurate content. I ran into situations where they asked me to insert negatives about a product, for example, even if they were either nonexistent or of little relevance. They wanted to make their cherished Editor’s Choice rating an exceedingly rare achievement I suppose. I’ll leave it to you readers to consider darker motives, such as potential advertiser influence.

Indeed, one of their former editors wrote a review of a printer, a Xerox solid ink model, for another publication that contained so many significant factual errors and unfounded conclusions, I wondered how it escaped the eyes of the editorial staff. Doesn’t anyone check facts anymore?

In their coverage of the iPhone 3G S, CNET seems to give it mostly accurate coverage, however. But they continue to rag on Apple for delivering a product with merely average voice quality on regular phone connections. Now understand that the best mobile phone on the planet — whatever it might be if it’s not the iPhone — will sound bad on a saturated network. CNET, however, seems unable to separate momentary connection conditions from the actual performance of the handset.

In any case, one of my acquaintances, a Mac-loving pharmacy manager at a local discount club, recently switched from the BlackBerry Storm on a Verizon Wireless account to an iPhone 3G on AT&T. He remarked how much voice quality had improved. Indeed, I find it little different from the Motorola RAZR and other devices that I credited with excellent call quality. So I really don’t know where CNET is coming from. Then again, maybe iPhones are so popular in the vicinity of their San Francisco headquarters that few will ever achieve a decent connection.

Their other criticism concerns Apple’s lack of support for true multitasking. Lest we forget, Apple’s explanation — or excuse — for the inability to run more than a single app at a time is the potential impact on battery life. Their solution is push networking, which debuted in iPhone 3.0. This feature uses Apple’s own servers to alert you to a message from another program, such as a waiting instant message from AIM. That will, of course, require support from the app developers, and AOL has confirmed that an updated AIM with that feature will be ready shortly.

CNET compared the iPhone 3G S with the new Palm Pre, and the author of the review made a curious remark that, in order to switch from one application to another on Apple’s smartphone, you had to quit the first app and launch the second.

As most of you know, the act of opening any app serves the function of closing the previous one without you having to search for the non-existent Quit command. I wonder what CNET’s writers are drinking, or maybe that’s just another factual discrepancy that their copy editors and fact checkers failed to catch.

Anyway, enough about CNET. There will be other reviews that will be good or bad in quality depending upon the writer’s dedication to the task. Alas, there are far too many hacks in this business who only navigated to technology because there were no other jobs available, or perhaps they hoped to spend much of their time playing with brand new toys with the added benefit of getting paid for it.

In any case, back to AT&T and their upgrade policies. Right now, if you have an iPhone 3G and a plan that costs you at least $99, you will be eligible to upgrade to the 3G S between 12 and 18 months into the contract. After getting tons and tons of complaints, AT&T has extended that policy to accommodate those who acquired their iPhones when they first went on sale beginning in July 2008. As of June 18th, at least so they say, they’ll be able to upgrade too for a limited period of time.

So it may well be that I’ll have a spanking new iPhone 3G S in my equipment arsenal real soon now. Stay tuned.

This article is based on several assumptions, the main one being that Apple won’t be making any significant changes to the announced Snow Leopard features — I mean refinements — before releasing it in September. As a result, some questionable decisions of long standing will remain unchanged.

With that in mind, I’m inclined to start ragging again on the features that have been missing from Mac OS X since Day One, some of which were actually there in the Classic Mac OS. In other words, the things Apple did at least ten years ago have yet to be duplicated today.

This disparity first came to mind when I read how Apple restored the capability formerly known as Put Away and relabled Put Back. Yes, I know it’s supposedly a refinement and not a feature, but I’ll leave it to you readers to argue over which label is appropriately applied.

But if Apple is going to consider revisiting the past in devising new functions for the next versions of Mac OS X, consider that we really have a long way to go before there’s feature parity with Classic. That becomes all the more annoying now that support for Classic has become an historical event.

Look closely at the Apple menu, for example. In the old days, you could configure it the way you want merely by dropping a file or alias into the Apple Menu Items folder. Within seconds, it would appear in the menu. Nowadays you can certainly do this with a third-party system hack, but the only thing you can otherwise change is the number of listings displayed in the Recent Items menu. That’s done courtesy of the Appearance preference pane.

Short of restoring everything, perhaps Apple could devise a contextual menu command that lets a specific Recent Items listing stick there, regardless of how many entries you want displayed. This is similar in concept to the way it’s done in the Top Sites display in Safari 4. There you click Edit, and then the stick pin icon next to the the site you want to keep.

Don’t assume that the contextual menu is the only way to accomplish this task, but it would be faster than having to, say, invoke a list of Recent Items from a preference pane. Feel free to use your imagination to consider the possibilities.

When it comes to the Print icon that displays in the Dock when a job is being processed, it essentially behaves similar in fashion to PrintMonitor from the Classic days. When the processing portion is complete — even before the document is actually output — the application icon goes away. However, if you click on it, it sticks until it’s closed, which seems a bit of a stretch as far as interface conventions are concerned. Perhaps Apple assumes you might want to look at one of the other functions in the apps toolbar, and therefore it should be up to you to dismiss it. Or perhaps, with no activity after a few minutes, it’ll can be set to go away all by itself.

A controversial issue is the method in which applications close. Single window apps, such as System Preferences, quit when you close the window. Regular apps require choosing Quit from the File menu whether windows are open or not within that program. This is normal behavior on the Mac platform, but it can confuse Windows users, who are accustomed to an application closing down when its last window is dismissed. The concept that the application is still running has to be learned. Logical? Depends on your point of view. Maybe a simple preference setting would allow you to choose which behavior you prefer.

It’s safe to say that a properly behaved application isn’t going to use a whole lot of system resources when you’re not doing anything with it, but on a Mac constrained of RAM, it could present the choice of having to endure virtual memory page swapping or a reasonably snappy user experience. So quitting unused apps is a must.

When it comes to location sensing, Mac OS X is getting smarter, though there are limitations, since Macs don’t ship with GPS — at least not yet. Besides, I wonder if I really want someone — anyone — knowing where I am at any particular point in time, but so long as you can turn off the feature, I suppose I wouldn’t object.

With Snow Leopard, your time zone can be sensed automatically. According to Apple: “Using Core Location technology, Snow Leopard can use known Wi-Fi hotspots to set the time zone — perfect for world travelers.”

I read into that sentence that you must have Wi-Fi enabled for this feature/refinement to work. All well and good. But why not take this location sensing bit a little further. When the operating system knows you’re at your office, for example, based on location and what’s on your network, how about changing your setup to better support the sort of work you do there, compared to the things you might engage in at home?

So, for example, the icons in the Dock would be altered to reflect that difference. Today, your location configuration is strictly limited to what you can do in the Network preference pane and nothing more. In the old days, specifically Classic, you had more options. If Apple wants your Mac to know where you are, perhaps the system can take better advantage of the situation.

Or should we just start our 10.7 wish list?

The conventional wisdom — which is seldom conventional — has it that Apple and Microsoft must tout loads of flashy new features to justify asking their customers to pay for their ongoing operating system upgrades. That may be true, all right, but it only presents part of the picture.

Now as some of you recall, Mac OS X Tiger was sold with the promise of over 200 new features. Most of them were merely enhancements to existing products, but this was the sort of bullet point game that Apple played, and play it well they did. For Leopard, they had to go farther, to justify its prolonged development time, so the promise was inflated to 300 and counting. Again, I’ll leave it to the reader to consider the significance of many of those features.

For Snow Leopard, Apple confessed that they would take a pause in the action to clean up the system, and focus on a handful of significant features that were designed to make 10.6 run faster, more efficiently, with greater stability and freedom from potential malware.

All well and good, and certainly the $29 upgrade price is a trivial matter, assuming it’s near as good as they claim. As far as those orphaned PowerPC users are concerned, well I suppose Apple will continue to support the standard version of Leopard for a while yet, particularly when it comes to security matters. That, too, is the conventional wisdom, but also the result of past experience.

Where that leaves the Tiger user, however, is another story entirely. If you want to stay put at 10.5, it’s still $129 for the upgrade package. If you have an Intel-based Mac and prefer to jump direct to 10.6, the cost is $169, but you also get iLife ’09 and iWork ’09 in the package. Since these two sell separately for $79 each, you are essentially paying $11 for Snow Leopard. If you have these two application suites already, well that’s how it goes. Apple is going into this assuming that most Snow Leopard adopters already have Leopard installed, and the rest will probably just consider buying new Macs at the appointed time. That’s what it’s really all about anyway.

What gets even more fascinating is the fact that Snow Leopard has a lot more going for it than you’d expect at first blush. Aside from the few items touted as new features, such as Microsoft Exchange support, there are actually some 100 “refinements” in Snow Leopard, according to Apple.

When you look at the list, you’ll find lots of stuff that would have previously ended up in the new feature column, such as a Finder rewritten in Cocoa and offering a lot better performance. This is where playing the name game can yield some fascinating possibilities, particularly when you consider that one person’s feature is another person’s refinement.

It is, in fact, really nice to find so much in the way of meat and potatoes from a system upgrade that was meant mostly as a clean-up. I wonder how Microsoft will react when it begins to market Windows 7 heavily, since it appears to be basically a Vista refinement with a few visual alterations in an apparent bid to justify a decent upgrade price.

Among the new capabilities, features, refinements or whatever in Snow Leopard is the return of a lost Classic Mac OS feature, known as Put Back. It’s function is simply to let you take an item in the Trash and send it back to its original folder. In Classic, it was known as Put Away, and since it is something that was not previously restored, it would seem to me that calling it a new feature is a better fit.

Just the other day, I was talking with someone who ranted about messiness of the Leopard Finder’s sidebar. You could remove, for example, all the items in a particular category, such as Places or Search, and the label itself would stick. Apple made the sensible decision to have the sidebar behave in a logical fashion for Snow Leopard. You uncheck or remove the contents of a category, and the label itself is history. Why didn’t they think of this before?

As you move through the bill of particulars, you will no doubt find lots of stuff that will really help reduce your list of Leopard complaints. Refinements they may be, but they are surely compelling enough to make you want to upgrade. How can you miss?

Now I realize that Snow Leopard is not in final release shape. Apple has given developers and computer book authors, under strict confidentiality agreements, access to copies of a near-final beta. Sure, some people are breaking those agreements and publicizing their experiences, and I suppose they can get away with it so long as they do not reveal anything that hasn’t already been made public.

However, with roughly three months left before Snow Leopard is released, I expect that any comments on its performance and reliability are premature. While Apple claims this is the final feature set, and it would make sense not to keep developers in the dark at this point, I suppose they could unleash a few last-minute surprises on us.

Having moved to all Intel Macs a couple of years ago, I am anxious to get ahold of the final version. Since my birth date is September 9th, which falls on a Wednesday this year, I could always hope for Apple to deliver my $29 birthday present by then. However, they usually push out releases of this sort on a Friday, but September 11th is the sort of anniversary we all want to forget. So I’ll accept September 18th as a suitable compromise. What say you Apple?

Two events that may seem unrelated have converged this week to paint a picture about one company on the ascendancy and another company that’s faltering and seems to only understand how to damage its tarnished reputation even further.

First came Apple’s surprising announcement that some 11 million copies of Safari 4.0 were downloaded during the first three days it was available. Even more intriguing is the fact that six million of those downloads came from Windows users.

Now as you might recall, Apple’s first foray into building a Windows version brought force a Mac-like interface in all its glory. In a sense, the Windows user was being transported to another operating system universe. I can see, in part, this being a good thing, or just doing to that platform what some Windows developers have done to the Mac over the years by delivering apps that failed to follow Mac OS conventions. My first reaction was “serves them right.”

On the other hand, if Apple is serious about its cross-platform intentions, they really had to build a Windows app that can seamlessly integrate itself into that operating system. That has been done with Safari 4.0, which even uses the Windows font rendering system.

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