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The iPhone Unboxed By Legos!July 22

Oh god this is good. A Flickr set of the iPhone being unboxed...by Lego characters. Too bad it's not an iPhone 3G. Those Legos, so out of touch technology-wise.

See the rest of the pictures here.

[via Pocket-link via FriendFeed photos:

Dear Hollywood, Please Count Tickets Sold Not Money MadeJuly 20

Wow. The Dark Knight made $155.34 million this weekend to set the all-time record for a movie opening beating Spider-Man 3's $151.1 million mark set in May 2007. It's impressive, but there's one little problem: Spider-Man 3 probably still sold more tickets.

People may not like to hear that because The Dark Knight is an awesome movie, clearly much better than Spider-Man 3, but I think it's important to note lest Hollywod keep raising ticket prices ridiculous amounts every year.

The average price of a movie ticket in 2007 (just last year) was $6.88. This year, it's up 30 cents to $7.08. Piping those numbers into the weekend data, you get 21.96 million tickets sold for Spider-Man 3 versus 21.94 million for The Dark Knight,

Microsoft Winning Digital Living Room War on Paper, but Failing to Lock It Up in PracticeJuly 19

Few people wrote as bullishly as I did this past week about Netflix partnering with Microsoft to bring its "Watch Instantly" service to the Xbox 360. I think it could be a game changer and makes Microsoft the favorite to win the battle for the digital living room.

But that is on paper. In practice, there's a different story. As I found out last night.

I haven't rented a movie over Xbox Live in a long while, but seeing as I'm all excited for the Netflix titles to come to the console this Fall, I figured I'd start getting into it more. Last night I sat down to download The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. I figured it would take 5-10 minutes to get enough information to start playing and then go. Wrong.

2 hours later I was still waiting as the download pushed past 40%. Fucking ridiculous. I shut it off and went to bed.

How exactly Microsoft plans to use any service called "Watch Instantly" with wait times like this is entirely unclear to me. Why can you rent a movie on Apple TV and have it start playing within a few minutes, but on the 360 it takes several hours?

I just went from bullish about the 360 to extremely bearish. I'm tempted to sell my 360 and just get an Apple TV and a Roku box instead. In fact, I think I would if I didn't mind having 700 goddamn boxes in my living room.

To me, waiting several hours before you can start watching a digital movie is utterly ridiculous. I mean, I may as well have gone to Blockbuster. It would have been MUCH quicker.

The fact that movies rented over the Apple TV start almost right away AND are cheaper than ones over Xbox Live, makes me wonder what on Earth I am paying for with Xbox Live's $50 a year price. I don't play games all that often and I like every Wii game better than any 360 game I own, so maybe I should just dump it.

Naturally, Apple TV's interface runs laps around the 360s as well. It's hard to find movies on Xbox Live, though a revamp is coming for it.

I'm sorry Microsoft, I tried to give you love for the great things you are doing with the Xbox 360, but like I said, that's on paper. In practice it's a much different story, and an extremely frustrating one. I'll stick it out until the Fall to see if these issues improve any, but if not, I'm done with you.

I know that's harsh, but that's the way it is. Either you work, or you're gone. And the current digital download offerings on the Xbox 360 just don't work for me. Roku is faster and cheaper. Apple TV is faster, cheaper and offers a better experience. BitTorrent is faster and free.

These next few months will be a critical time for determining who can get the first real foothold for digital distribution in the living room. As John tells Jeremy in Wedding Crashers, "you better lock it up."

The Knight is Always Darkest...July 19

It's been over 24 hours since I've seen The Dark Knight (I saw an early screening last night) and I still find myself thinking about it. I think it's one of those movies that I like so much because it goes outside its genre. It's like a psychological drama that just happens to have Batman in it.

I've heard people describe it as being like Michael Mann's Heat, which is one of my favorite films, and I think that is pretty fair in some ways. But it's also different.

Really, you could argue that The Dark Knight isn't even about Batman. Instead it's about a white knight's fall from grace - since after all...

**********SPOILER ALERT BEYOND THIS POINT***********

...Harvey Dent's story both begins and ends in this film, while Batman's story started before and will continue after.

I think that's a good way to frame superhero films, have a sub-story that is interesting to follow rather than just having a hero chase down a villain. That gets old after one film.

Something else I like to see in a superhero film is a bad guy that persists. That's one reason why I like the X-Men films so much, Magneto is always there, he's not so easy to kill off. The Joker could have been the equivalent in the

So Twitter, About That Rug...July 18

I know I promised Twitter a rug if it bought Summize ASAP, but seeing as they took my exact idea to buy Summize and point it to search.twitter.com, we'll call it even.

I'm really happy they bought Summize, it's a great service that makes Twitter a richer experience. I'd still love to see search integrated into the site itself, but that will come. For now, search.twitter.com is the right move.