Two of nature’s most unstoppable forces — Starbucks and iTunes — continued their hand-in-hand march to total global saturation. You may recall that, last month, Starbucks stores in Seattle and New York began offering special iTunes Wi-Fi Store connections as part of the partnership twixt the coffee retailer and Apple. Well, Wednesday, it was San Francisco’s turn to join in the frappuccino-soaked fun, as my colleague Jonathan Seff reports over at Macworld.

The 350 stores in the greater San Francisco Bay Area join the 600 in New York and Seattle. And according to Jon’s report, that’ll just about do it for Wi-Fi Store-equipped Starbucks in 2007 — look for Apple and Starbucks to resume rolling out the service to L.A. and Chicago next February.

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The iPhone and iPod touch are definitely the best video-watching portable devices that Apple—possibly anybody—has ever created, but they still have their shortcomings. For example, while the touch ships with a plastic stand that lets you prop up the iPod for longterm watching, poor iPhone users are condemned to a life of hand cramps from holding their iPhone on that transatlantic flight.

The PED3 rotating stand is here to save you that trouble. It can hold the iPhone vertically or horizontally, and rotate three hundred sixty degrees so that you have your choice of viewing angles. And should you want to connect the iPhone to your computer or a power source while watching, the PED3 also helps control cable clutter.

Sure, you could make your own stand out of a spare business card, but come on: if you’ve already spent the hundreds of dollars on a portable video player, you can probably afford $40 more for the quality of plastic, right?

[via Gizmodo]

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Despite the fact that I did live in the UK for a little while, I won’t incur your wrath and raucous laughter by attempting to write the following post like I have a British accent. That’s your second reason for celebration this week: the first is that on Friday the iPhone arrives on your shores—consider it our gift to you, in return for all that you’ve given us Americans (by which we mean, of course, Beatlemania).

Apple’s announced some details of the UK launch: as we know, the iPhone will be available from Apple Stores, O2 Stores, and Carphone Warehouse (which has to be possibly my favorite name for a retail store, ever). As in the US, the iPhone goes on sale in the evening, though Apple says that doors open at the rather bizarre time of 6:02PM. Genius Bars will be ready to offer support, and starting Saturday morning, you can go into the Apple Store for training.

You’ll be able to purchase up to two iPhones per person, which you can activate via iTunes later. Activation will require a new 18-month contract with O2; presumably current O2 customers will be able to extend their current contracts. Data use will be truly unlimited, despite previous claims to the contrary.

So there you go, UK folks—get ready for iPhonemania starting on Friday. Oh, and, one more thing: can you please take the Beckhams back? Thanks.

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iPhone updates come in three sizes: wee, not so wee, and—well, you get the idea. While iTunes 7.5 (also for Windows) and QuickTime 7.3 are probably worth upgrading to simply for the bug fixes, it’s worth nothing that they do include some iPhone-specific functionality. Let’s go to iTunes first:

iTunes 7.5 features the ability to activate iPhone wherever service is offered

Not terribly cryptic: we know that the iPhone’s coming to the UK and Germany on Friday, so 7.5 includes the code for activating via O2 and T-Mobile respectively (perhaps even the code for Orange if they’re looking ahead to the end of the month, though we might expect a 7.5.1 by then).

As for QuickTime 7.3 (which comes in versions for Panther, Tiger, Leopard, and Windows), we find an iPhone addition that will primarily interest developers:

Updated support for creating iPhone-compatible web content

Huzzah. Not sure precisely where they’re going with that, but seems like they’re throwing a bone to the iPhone web app developers. I know—my deductive skills are unrivaled.

You can grab the updates at the links above or just wait for Software Update to prompt you.

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Seems like everybody wants to get into the phone business. With Apple’s iPhone out and about, eyes have recently turned to the question of whether frequent Apple ally and purported do-gooder Google would deliver their own handset. Today, the Goog announced its plans, not for a handset, but rather for a mobile platform, banding together with more than thirty technology companies to create the Open Handset Alliance.

The platform largely stems from an acquisition that Google made several years ago for a company called Android Inc, headed by ex-Apple employee Andy Rubin, who formerly founded Danger and WebTV. The platform, also called Android, is based on the Linux kernel and designed to be completely open from the ground up. Players in the alliance include handset heavyweights like Motorola, Samsung, HTC, and LG; carriers like Sprint and T-Mobile; hardware makers like Intel, Marvell, Broadcom, and nVidia; and software makers like eBay (owners, we may remind you, of Skype), and, well, Google.

It sounds promising, but in business alliances are cheap; it’s the product that will make or break the so-called “gPhone.” All of these vendors know their businesses, the question is whether or not the product will be greater than the sum of its parts. The approach of the Open Handset Alliance is diametrically opposed to Apple’s own methodology, which enforces a top-down view of the design of a device, and I wonder if the “gPhone” platform will essentially end up relegated to a particular type of enthusiast user. Will too many cooks spoil the gPhone, which is, after all, intended to be targeted at consumers, or will Google’s presence keep everything in line?

We’ll know sometime next year as partners begin delivering Android-powered handsets. A software development kit for the platform is due next week, on November 12th.

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