How rare is this ? I ran into Walt Mossberg, journalist for the Wall Street Journal (and Apple fanboy) outside the Apple store in downtown SFO.

He was gracious and asked me what MacMessiah was as I was wearing a MacMessiah name tag. We had a few minutes to chat about the new Apple products and then we walked down to Moscone together.

You already know the main features of iPhone 1.1.3from the keynote, but there are a few interesting tweaks that got lost in all the other Apple coverage.• The SMS storage has been upped from 1,000 to 75,000, which means you probably won’t need to ever clear a conversation unless you really enjoy texting.
• The keyboard now allows two-finger typing, so holding shift + a key lets you type caps.
• GMail on the phone automatically defaults to IMAP, which means deleting messages on your phone affects stuff server-side.
• Various bugs hit on Bluetooth and email checks, but workarounds have been found.

Meanwhile here is a nifty way to create a photo album using web clips…

Macworld announced their Best of Show awards today for Macworld San Francisco 2008.

- Photoshop Elements 6 – Universal version of Adobe’s consumer photo editor.
- MacBook Air – Apple’s thin laptop
- Guitar Hero III – Aspyre’s rhythm game for Mac.
- BusySync – share iCal calendars (MacRumors writeup)
- Eye Fi card – SD card with Wifi built in
- Flow – organize and track the relationships between files
- Dictate – $99 Dictation / voice command software from MacSpeech
- NEC Multisync LCD3090WQXi – 30 inch display
- Omnifocus – personal task management software (to do’s)
- Parallels Server – virtualize Windows, Linux and Mac OS X Server
- Vector Designer – vector drawing tool

Besides these great products, I will be covering some great little gems in hardware and software that my roving eye picked out amongst the 3000 exhibitors! Watch this blog…

The night ended with a rockin’ party at Minna Gallery sponsored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). There was a little inspirational speech by Brad Templeton and the music then kicked up a notch.

The all female DJ team cranked up the volume and some geeks actually started dancing !

The highlight of the evening was finding a second OLPC owner ! He needed a power adapter since the battery on his XO was dead and sure enough I was carrying mine. So we hooked his XO up with my power adapter and he sure was happy! Only during such geek fests can you find two people carrying their OLPC’s

I am sitting at the Chaat Cafe on 3rd & Folsom behind the Moscone South Hall. Just finished dinner with the 40 or so Mac Small Biz owners who showed up. Thanks to Niall Ferguson for organizing the dinner. Here we (Andrew, Gautam, Billy from SGVMUG, Pasadena) are with the Timbuktu people (they are sporting Motorola shirts because Motorola bought Timbuktu. Who knew ?)

The consensus of the group was that the MacBook Air is the next Apple Cube! It’s priced too high and with very little to show for the $1800 price tag. No firewire ports and a 13 inch screen. Apple completely missed the sub-notebook market.

By the way, I am blogging this from a $200 OLPC XO. Apple needs to make something like this – a 9 inch subnotebook with flash drive only. It is only a question of time…

As usual, Steve took his customary stroll through the halls of MacWorld. And as is customary, I managed to bump into him again. I have been to 2 MacWorld’s so far and as far as getting to meet and talk to Steve I am 2 for 2 !

He did remember me as the ’switcher’ in the 2002 Apple Switcher commercial and actually said “Thank You” !!! And then he was gone…

So after the keynote, the insiders know to hang around, because sure enough after everyone has left, Steve shows up again to ham it for the paparazzi !!

He even took my suggestion to balance the MacBook Air on only one hand!

After he was finally gone I took the chance to take the stage

The Air is quite sleek and light. You have to hold it in your hands to get a true feel of the ‘air-ness’. The usb/dvi/headphone ports are neatly recessed and they actually are on the flap that pulls down rather than in the actual body of the laptop. You have to see it to know what I mean. It does get quite warm on the underneath where the hard drive is located. I really don’t know why they bothered to put in a 1.8″ drive. They should have gone SSHD directly.

The crowds were thick around the Air demo table.

So Steve announces that the iPod Touch will now have Mail, Maps, Notes, Stocks and Weather apps. But he is asking Touch owners to shell out $20 ! Give me a break Steve. Even Scrooge was’nt such a money grubber. Who proposed this price gouge ? Fire him/her…

Just make it free for the Touch owners. I am sure you will do so within 6 months.

So by now everyone on earth knows that we have the world’s thinnest laptop. At 0.16″ thin it is a pretty cool device except for one thing: the price – at $1799 it is only $200 less than the MacBook Pro, the Pro mind you not the entry level Macbook which is only $1099.

I don’t think this price is going to hold for very long. Don’t rush to buy this one yet. Wait for June WWDC. I am sure the price will be down to $1499 by then.

I have a lot of pictures to upload so will do that tonite…