Free software advocate and GNU creator Richard Stallman has blogged that he’s glad Steve Jobs is gone. That’s, um, gauche. But it’s not why I bring up his post. He also calls Jobs “the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom.”

Apple products? Jails. Cool ones. Apple fans? Jailbirds. Foolish ones. Got that?

Eric S. Raymond, also a free software advocate, has also written about Jobs’ passing. He’s more dignified about it, but the gist is similar. He says:

What’s really troubling is that Jobs made the walled garden seem cool. He created a huge following that is not merely resigned to having their choices limited, but willing to praise the prison bars because they have pretty window treatments.

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Having trouble <a href="pre-ordering an iPhone from AT&T, Verizon, or Sprint Hop on a plane and head to Tokyo. I'm still here, and the iPhone 4S, as in the U.S., has gone on preorder. It's available from wireless carrier SoftBank, and as I strolled around Harajuku and Shibuyu this past evening, the hoopla was underway and the crowds were forming, presumably to place orders in person.

A few photos after the jump. (The signs are hard to read, but they all make reference to the 4S.)

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Twelve hours from now, someone–most likely new Apple CEO Tim Cook–will be standing on a stage in Cupertino, well into the company’s “Let’s Talk iPhone” event. Normally at this point, it feels like we have a pretty decent sense of what the company is about to announce. Not all the details–which is fine with me, since I like surprises–but two-thirds of the broad strokes.

This time? Things are surprisingly blurry. If there’s no Sprint iPhone of some sort, and no iPhone with ambitious voice commands based on the Siri technology Apple acquired, I’ll be startled. But we don’t really know whether there will be one iPhone or two. We don’t know if there will be a radically new iPhone 5 or one that’s a near-twin of the iPhone 4. We’re not sure if the screen size will change. Basically, most of scuttlebutt of the past few months is still in play.

So here’s a roundup of some of the major rumors. In each case, I’m linking to an article that spreads a rumor–and one which quashed it. If you need to refresh your memory, read any or all of ‘em. And then–assuming you’re reading this before 10am PT on Tuesday–vote in our silly little poll. (I’ll report on the results once the news is out.

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I’m not going to be at Apple’s iPhone event on Tuesday at 10am PT. (I’m in Tokyo attending CEATAC and participating in one of the keynote sessions.) But I will be tuning into Macword’s live coverage–and the Macworld folks were nice enough let me embed it on Technologizer at technologizer.com/iphone5.

Sooner or later, Apple rumors narrow in on the truth. Apple is indeed holding its iPhone event next Tuesday, October 4th. It is indeed doing so at its Town Hall auditorium on its own campus rather than in San Francisco. (That’s understandable: Oracle’s Open World conference will be pretty much commandeering the entire city that day.)

Apple isn’t bring too coy this time around: Invites for the event say “Let’s talk iPhone.” One big question is whether that’s iPhone singular or iPhones plural. We’ll know soon enough.

I won’t be there in person this time, but I have a good excuse: I’ll be on a long-planned journey to Tokyo to cover CEATEC, the big consumer-electronics conference. But I’ll be watching from afar–and I suspect I’ll be back in the States before the phone (phones?) hits store shelves. More thoughts to come…

Back in April of last year, Apple bought a very young, very neat startup named Siri. 9to5 Mac’s Mark Gurman says that Siri’s voice-controlled semantic search features are going to be built right into the iPhone 5:

Assistant taps into many aspects of the iPhone, according to people familiar with the feature and SDK findings. For example, one can say make appointment with Mark Gurman for 7:30 PM and Assistant will create the appointment in the user’s calendar. On noting events, Assistant also allows users to set reminders for the iOS 5 Reminders application. For example, a user could say “remind me to buy milk when I arrive at the market.” Another example would be integration with the iOS Maps application. A user could ask: “how do I get to Staples Center?” and Assistant will use the user’s current location via GPS and provide directions.

What’s a day without an iPhone 5 rumor? What your looking at here is one of the images of apparent iPhone 5 cases that was posted to accessory maker Case-Mate’s site briefly on Thursday before being pulled.

The company says its “inside resources” claim Apple would indeed be launching two phones in early October, the iPhone 4S and the iPhone 5. I don’t know why Case-Mate is jumping into the rumors game, as that’s our job, but I do digress…

BGR reports though that the page we’ve linked to here is different from a page they saw, which included a gallery of case images that has since disappeared. Either way, the now ever-more rumored tapered design akin to the iPad 2 seems to what Case-Mate is basing their case designs on, and it does appear noticeably wider.

Now this just could be Case-Mate reacting to the increasingly more frequent rumors of a wider and thinner iPhone 5, or they actually could have inside information. Personally, I’m hoping that either way, they’re right.

I’m no fan of the iPhone 4 design, and I remember in the days after that infamous Gizmodo leak saying “I hope this isn’t it.” But alas it was, despite my (and some others’) belief that this was way too utilitarian in design to come out of Apple. Thus, I’m happy to see Apple return to a sleeker design with the iPhone 5.

Either way Apple, could you hurry up? This iPhone 3GS is getting long in the tooth, and I’m getting impatient. If I have to wait any longer I may have to go to the dark side (Android, that is)! Perish the thought.

It’s deja vu all over again: Cnet is reporting that Apple is trying to get back a prototype iPhone that was lost in a San Francisco bar.

Meanwhile, my friend Seth Weintraub of 9to5Mac has a screenshot that might–emphasis on might–be a representation of the iPhone 5.

The Wall Street Journal–one of the few sources with a close-to-spotless record when it comes to Apple rumors–says that Sprint will get the iPhone 5 (and iPhone 4) in October.

Good news for Sprint, Sprint customers, and Apple.

Apple doesn’t buy big companies. And of all the big companies it doesn’t buy, the big U.S. wireless carriers feel like the ones it’s least likely to want to purchase. But it’s still fun to play with the idea, as Jean Louis Gassée has done.

[UPDATE: Upon further reflection, this seems to be a student project created for the class, not research by Galletta himself. And as I said, it's not clear how serious a test it was or what the methodology was. (I do note that the end credits list a "cast." My bad for jumping to conclusions after reading this story.]

Professor Dennis Galletta has been teaching a summer course at Harvard on Human Factors in Information Systems Design. As part of it, he conducted some usability testing of the iPhone 4, Samsung’s Windows Phone 7-based Focus, HTC’s Android-based Thunderbolt, and RIM’s BlackBerry Storm. He had people who hadn’t used any of the phones try to make a call, add a contact, and send a text message, and videotaped their attempts to do so.

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“Adobe Quietly Surrenders to Steve Jobs, Builds Flash Alternative.” That’s the headline on Adam Clark Estes’s article over at the Atlantic on Edge, Adobe’s new HTML5 authoring tool. It captures the tone of a lot of coverage I’ve seen. Edge supposedly represents a capitulation on Adobe’s part. And it’s supposedly a product that Adobe might never have come up with if Steve Jobs hadn’t kept Flash off of the iPhone and iPad and been bluntly public about his reasoning.

Well, maybe. It’s true that the inability of Flash to run natively on iOS gives Adobe a powerful incentive to get on the HTML5 bandwagon. I tend to think, however, that this take gives Apple too much credit, and Adobe too little. Edge isn’t about Adobe bowing to Steve Jobs; it’s about it acknowledging reality. And Adobe shouldn’t be building this product in a grudging, grumbly fashion. If Edge is a great HTML5 tool, there’s no reason why it can’t be an enormously popular and profitable component of the company’s portfolio. It would be nuts for Adobe not to do it.

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Curious about when the next iPhone will come out? You can pretty much pick your month and find someone who says it’ll come out then–there’s probably somebody somewhere confidently reporting that a reliable source is saying the phone will come out in March, 2037. But All Things D’s John Paczkowski isn’t a guy who trades in rumors that are flimsy or just plain flim-flams. So when he says that the iPhone 5 will come out in October, I pay attention, at least.

Back in April I told you about Uber–the luxury transportation service that got its start in San Francisco–appearing in New York City. Well, the company is expanding again, this time into Seattle. As in the Big Apple, test cars are limited, and they’re not ready for prime time just yet. In other words, be a little patient.

Here’s how it works: your reservation for a car is placed through Uber’s iPhone app. You’ll then receive a text message when the Uber is expected to arrive, and when it is about to arrive at your location. No money exchanges hands because the payment (with tip included) is done via credit card stored with Uber. Fast and easy.

I can tell you from personal experience during CE Week back in June that the service is nice. In addition to the text, I received calls from the driver confirming my location on his way there, as well as also letting me know he was there in case I might have missed the text message. Pretty good customer service!

I was happy to share the ride with Mrs. McCracken herself (aka Marie Domingo) and we were both impressed with the ride. Yes, it’s more expensive than a cab. But sometimes you’ve got to step it up, you know?

The company is staying pretty tight lipped about its future expansion plans, but it’s obviously taking its time in expanding. If I could make a suggestion, I’d love to see Ubers in Philadelphia (hint, hint).

Apple’s new App Store policies–the ones I worried about when they were announced months ago–have kicked in. From now on, app makers who sell content such as books and music have two ways of making it available. They can use Apple’s In-App Purchase system to sell content within the app (giving Apple a 30 percent commission). Or they can sell it directly to consumers through their own venues, such as Web-based stores–but can include no mentions or links relating to that fact in the iOS app itself.

Many third-party developers are choosing one route or the other without any public fuss. Canadian e-book purveyor Kobo is being a tad more prickly. It’s updated its iOS app with a new version that meets the new rules–it lets you read books you’ve purchased, but provides no way to buy them or register for a Kobo account, nor any explanation of how to do so. But it’s also announcing plans to build an HTML5 e-reading app which will work in the iOS browser–and which it’ll control itself, with no requirement that it follow Apple’s rules. And the company’s chief iOS architect is detailing the Byzantine approval process which the Kobo app had to go through before Apple would finally approve it. (The essentially similar Borders app wasn’t forced to jump through as many hoops, a reminder of the biggest problem with App Store rules: they’re sometimes applied in an inconsistent, apparently arbitrary fashion.)

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PCMag.com’s Sascha Segan has a simple plea: “Stop the iPhone 5 Rumor Insanity.”