Good news, and just in time for those of you who were planning to dole out one or more iPhones for the holidays, or gift one to yourself: The AT&T Wireless site is now letting you buy iPhone 3Gs online. It’s the first time you’ve been able to do the whole transaction without leaving the house since the original iPhone, which both AT&T and Apple sold online, made way for the 3G.

The 3G’s move to a more traditional carrier subsidy model meant that you needed to get the phone activated in person; AT&T did offer a two-step transaction that involved starting the sale online and then sealing the deal at a store. But now it’s apparently figured out how to do the activation for purely online sales. Which is not surprising considering that it does that for plenty of other phone models.

This isn’t the same unique, exceptionally consumer-friendly situation that existed with the first iPhone, in which you could buy a shrinkwrapped iPhone and then handle the service signup at your leisure (or give the phone to someone else). The phone’s associated with your account as part of the sale process. But hey, it’s a step in the right direction.

As I write, Apple’s Web site is still directing customers to Apple anf AT&T retail outlets to buy an iPhone, but you gotta figure that online sales via the Apple Store are also on their way.

Boy Genius Report, which has a pretty good record for reporting stuff about phones before anybody else, has posted about the possibility of a $99 4GB iPhone to be sold exclusively by Wal-Mart. It does look like Wal-Mart will become the fourth iPhone seller (after Apple itself, AT&T, and Best Buy). But Boy Genius goes to pains to say that the $99 bit is a rumor from a source of unproven reliability. And as I think about it, it seems unlikely.

For one thing, I’m not sure how well the math works: At the moment, an 8GB iPhone is $199 and a 16GB one is $299. That’s a $100 premium for an extra 8GB of memory, so it’s not clear that reducing the memory by 4GB would save Apple and Wal-Mart enough to slash the price of an entry-level iPhone by $100. And a $99 iPhone would be big news and a big hit–I have trouble believing that Apple would allow Wal-Mart to rack up all those sales and deny its own stores, AT&T ones, and Best Buy to get in on the action.

Then there’s the fact that a $99 4GB iPhone would represent a major cutback in the phone’s capability to hit a low price point. That’s certainly a Wal-Marty thing to do, but it sounds out of character for Apple, which stopped selling the 4GB iPhone (which originally sold for $499) as soon as it could.

I’m not saying it won’t happen. I’m just saying I can think of more reasons why it won’t happen than ones why it might. I do think, however, that there will be some sort of sub-$100 iPhone eventually–maybe one that’s a lot like current models, once component prices have come down and Apple has released a true next-generation iPhone or two. But not now. Probably.

We have an iPhone mini-trend on our hands: voice-controlled search. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Google’ clever Mobile App for the iPhone, which lets you perform Web and local searches by lifting the handset to your ear and talking. Today. Vlingo, the developers of a BlackBerry voice app, released a version for the iPhone. It’s both a direct competitor to Google’s offering and one that’s quite different in functionality, pros, and cons.

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Over at Forbes.com, there’s an article on a worthwhile topic: iPhone applications for businessfolk. There are, however, some things about the piece that I just don’t understand. Such as the fact that it seems to argue that buying an iPhone will let you save money on the pens and paper you’d otherwise tote along when you travel. ($200 to $300 for the phone plus two years’ worth of service fees make for a hefty investment to avoid buying a few Bics and memo pads.)

More important, I’m also mystified by this bit:

Gregg Brockway, president of TripIt, a start-up that organizes travel itineraries online and on mobile devices, says iPhones are the greatest gadgets that business travelers don’t know they have. “Smart-phone sales are up 80%, so the whole category is on fire,” Brockway says. “But only a third of business travelers who have a smart phone realize that they can access the Internet. Of the business travelers who do realize, only 50% of them use their phones to actually access the Internet.”

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Everybody has two businesses, the old saying goes: their own business, and show business. It’s the same with technology, except everybody’s two business are their own business…and Apple’s. No other tech company on the planet is followed as avidly, nor is any so routinely second-guessed. And if anything, controversy over Apple’s decisions and dramas intensifies with time: I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if someone, somewhere, still contends that Jobs and Wozniak should have slashed the $666.66 pricetag of 1976′s Apple I to better compete with the $495 Altair.

Apple’s long history is rife with defining moments…and, therefore, with roads not traveled that might have led to radically different places. I call the twenty-five items in this story “unanswerable questions” because none of them have right answers: Nobody knows what would have happened if things had turned out differently. All you can do is speculate. Which is what I do, briefly, for all of the questions below. But mostly, I’m curious what you think. These questions may be unanswerable, but it’s still a blast to try and answer them anyhow, as I hope you’ll do in the comments…

Let’s start at the beginning, shall we? After the jump, that is…

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Apple’s iPhone commercials are running the risk of getting lumped in with herbal Viagra ads. The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has forced the company to pull a commercial that the ASA had proven exaggerated the speed of the iPhone’s 3G network connection.

The iPhone’s Achilles heel when it comes to such claims is that cellular network speeds are not uniform, and Wi-Fi access is spotty. The “real” Internet that it portrays doesn’t really exist.

The ASA upheld the complaints of 17 individuals who said that they were misled by the advertisement. The ad showed Web pages and Google Map data loading in split second time, bracketed by a disclaimer that network speeds vary by location. The company told the BBC that its claims were, “relative not absolute.”

Apple CEO Steve Jobs may have put his foot in his mouth when he said that the iPhone provided the “real” Internet. That statement was universally panned by pundits and customers alike after they experienced the real iPhone on real networks.

Furthermore, Apple has yet to deliver in its self-imposed deadline for bringing background-processing capabilities to the iPhone, and its e-mail delivery has been more pull than push from the onset–requiring the user to select shorter intervals for checking mail. As much as I enjoy my iPhone, the company would be better served by executing on its promises, and it should stop making make claims that it can’t deliver on.

I haven’t laid eyes on a BlackBerry Storm in person yet. More to the point, I haven’t laid fingers on one–so I have no first-hand impressions of how the first touch-screen BlackBerry compares to traditional BlackBerries, the iPhone, and other alternatives. But a gazillion reviews hit the Web today–so many, in fact, that I can’t read every word of every one.

So I’m doing what I often do: skipping to the last paragraph in hopes that it’s a useful, pithy summary of the review’s buying advice. And I’m finding that almost all of them are at best pretty diffident about this phone. Especially given the fact that BlackBerries tend to get good reviews.

After the jump, a bunch of last paragraphs for your perusal…
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The blogosphere is abuzz over John Markoff’s piece for the New York Times on a new version of Google’s iPhone app that lets you use your voice to search. (It even uses the phone’s accelerometer to let it notice that you’ve lifted the phone to your ear, and therefore switch to voice mode.) As everybody is pointing out, there’s nothing new about voice-powered search–Microsoft’s TellMe, Yahoo’s OneSearch with Voice, and Google’s own GOOG-411 all provide various takes on the idea.

Since voice search itself is no big whoop, the big question is whether Google’s iPhone app does it better than existing options. As far as I can tell, the new app isn’t up in Apple’s iTunes Store just yet–it’s supposedly going to be there any moment now–and I don’t feel like writing about it at any great length until I can tell you how it fared when I tried it.

I am, however, fascinated by one thing about it: The fact that it’s debuting on the iPhone. It’s the second interesting Google app to do so in recent weeks. (Google Earth made its mobile premiere on the iPhone back in late October.) The iPhone is a terrific platform for mobile apps, so there’d be nothing noteworthy about this except for one thing: Google has its own terrific platform for mobile apps, Android. And yet both voice search and Google Earth aren’t available for it. Rather than boosting Android, Google is giving folks more reason to buy an iPhone instead of the Android-powered T-Mobile G1.

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How much does a new cell phone cost? How much do you save by committing to a contract? If there are savings to be had, how substantial are they? These would seem to be simple questions. They should be simple questions. But the strange, sneaky games that phone carriers play make it startlingly tough to get answers.

I was reminded of this when I checked out pricing for the BlackBerry Storm earlier today and found Verizon trumpeting a price that involved filing paperwork and waiting for a $50 debit card to show up in the mail. Rebates and gift card offers should be treated as gravy, not subtracted from the price you pay–they’re a hassle even when you get ‘em, and it’s far too easy to forget to file for them. So I decided to do a little more digging at the sites of major phone purveyors to see just how clearly they say what customers are going to pay.

I picked the BlackBerry Curve for this experiment, since it’s available in similar versions almost everywhere, and checked out how much it would cost at Amazon.com, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon. (I didn’t attempt to factor in the cost of service plans or determine which deal was best–I’m a journalist, not a masochist.) After the jump, the ugly results.

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At the moment, RIM’s BlackBerry Storm reigns as the most intriguing smartphone that hasn’t quite been released yet. That’ll change on November 21st: Verizon Wireless announced today that it’ll begin selling the first touch-screen BlackBerry on that date. Sign up for a two-year contract, and you’ll pay $249.99 for the Storm and get a $50 debit card in the mail, assuming you remember to do the paperwork in time. Which, if I were buying a Storm, I probably wouldn’t.

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Here’s one for the I-Want-to-See-It-in-Action-But-It’s-a-Great-Idea File: A company called PhoneTopp, which launched today at the Under the Radar Conference, promises to let you participate in or even lead a WebEx or Microsoft Live Meeting Web confernce on your iPhone or BlackBerry. The company’s service sits as a middleman beween the Web conferencing system and your phone, squeezing presentation slides and video down into phone-friendly size on the fly:

Would it be hard to read slides on a teensy phone display? Maybe, but PhoneTopp will let you zoom in, zoom out, and pan around. One particularly nifty feature: You don’t even have to log on to get into the conference from your phone. PhoneTopp calls you at the appropriate time; answer the call, and it automatically scoots you into the conference.

The company says that it’ll begin offering the service in the first quarter of next year, for $8 to $10 a month. I got a sneak peek yesterday, but it was in video form, and therefore looked flawless; as someone who sits in on more than my share of conferences from odd spots like my car or an airport lounge, I’d love to see it live. And I’ll bet a lot of other WebEx and Live Meeting users would be tickled to have access via their phone, if it worked halfway decently.

As a company, PhoneTopp sounds like it may not have an infinite shelf life: You gotta think that WebEx, Microsoft, and every other company that does conferencing will build their own phone versions eventually. (PhoneTopp told me that Citrix is already at work on a phone version of GoToMeeting, which is why PhoneTopp isn’t planning to support it.) The company says that it knows that there may not be a need for its conferencing service forever, so it’s planning to roll out other collaboration tools that make the Web more mobile over time.

You’ve just spent two grand on Motorola’s Aura, the cell phone that thinks it’s a Swiss watch. You suffer sudden buyer’s remorse. No problem–you can just put it on eBay and recoup at least part of your dough, right?

Um, problem. According to the blogosphere, the Aura comes with a contract that forbids you from dumping the phone on eBay. Instead, you can sell the phone back to Motorola. Supposedly, the company thinks it would tarnish the Aura’s image if it were available on the second-hand market.

It reminds me of the contract that Oscar winners need to sign to get their statuettes. That one mandates that before they can sell their trophy, they must offer to sell it back to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences–for $1. I don’t know what Motorola’s buyback price is–I assume it’s more than a buck, but less than $2000.

Anyhow, it seems damned presumptuous of Moto to tell Aura buyers what they can with an Aura once they’ve plunked down their money. You also gotta wonder why a company that’s laying off thousands of people and trying to get out of the phone business altogether is devoting energy to the idiosyncratic Aura. I’m guessing that Aura will be short-lived–kind of like Sony’s equally preposterous Qualia line of a few years back, which included stuff like a $4000 2-megapixel digital camera. Which, as far as I know, you could do whatever you wanted with once you’d lost interest in it…

Last week, I wrote about a New York Times story that reported that Opera has written a version of its browser for the iPhone but had it rejected by Apple. Daring Fireball’s John Gruber has a good follow-up post in which he combines reporting, technical analysis, and some scuttlebutt from an informed source to theorize that Opera’s browser–and in this case, as he notes, it’s Opera Mini rather than the fancier Opera Mobile–may not actually have been rejected by Apple, and that its issues on the iPhone may have to do with the fact that it’s a Java app, and the iPhone doesn’t do Java.

Like much relating to iPhone development, this is all pretty murky–but Gruber’s post is illuminating even if his parsing of what may have happened isn’t 100% correct. Go read.

I persist in the belief that iPhone owners shouldn’t have to worry about issues of Java and software interepreters and SDKs and NDAs and such: There’s surely an audience for Opera on the iPhone, and there oughta be a way for Opera to satisfy that audience. And Apple should err on the side of making it possible for third parties to quickly ramp up the catalog of iPhone apps rather than putting obstacles in their way.

I also persist in suspecting that even if the iPhone is less than completely open right now, it will open up over time–competition with other platforms such as Google’s Android will leave Apple with no choice. It’s mainly a question of whether that opening up will happen really quickly or will drag on forever. I hope…

Have a hankering to unlock your iPhone 3G so you can run it on any network? You may be in luck before too long.

The iPhone Dev Team–the group of hackers who figured out how to unlock the first-generation iPhone–has cracked the iPhone’s baseband processor and can run applications on it. That’s a critical step–maybe the critical step–in figuring out how to unlock the phone, since the software that does the job will run on the baseband processor.

I’d love to have an unlocked iPhone 3G, partially for practical reasons (I’d like to be able to buy a cheap prepaid SIM when I travel internationally) and partially on the principle of the matter (when a phone is locked, it’s been intentionally crippled). And you gotta admire the technical chops of the iPhone Dev Team. But I’m not all that excited by its progress in unlocking the iPhone 3G. In the past, Apple has showed itself to be completely willing to foil people who do things to its products that it doesn’t want done. And it doesn’t want you to unlock your iPhone. So me, I’m not going to risk it.

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In introducing its new $2000 Aura cell phone today, Motorola repeated comparisons to luxury watches. So contrasting it to an iPhone or a BlackBerry or even the Prada phone may not do it justice. How about facing it off against one of the most famous mobile status symbols of them all, Rolex’s eternally popular Oyster Perpetual Submariner? I did just that for this T-Grid, and found that it’s a close contest–the two gadgets have much in common, but both sport some attractive features that the other doesn’t. Bottom line: If you’ve got a spare $8K, you might want them both!

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