A couple of links to external things I’ve blogged about recently:

• I blogged a link to Amazon’s Holiday Toy List on Geekdad earlier this week, including the must-have Lego Star Wars:  The Complete Saga game. Fun stuff. Check out the post here.
• Thanks to Ubiquitous Thoughts for including my Jan Chipchase post in Carnival of the Mobilists #99. Tip o’ the hat to Mark.

Carnival of the Mobilists #67 is out just in time to revisit (yet again) the iTunes juggernaut. Click here to read some of last week’s best coverage of wireless technology, business, and cultural developments.

My “Apple’s three screens opportunity” got the nod with Wap Review commenting:

Apple has become a content distribution powerhouse with iTunes. Can they leverage that into IPTV and mobile dominance too?

Yesterday’s news that EMI will offer its catalog DRM-free and iTunes will be the first to market with the unlocked EMI music has me wondering if Apple didn’t just ratchet things up yet another big notch. Microsoft and other music services may be forced to respond, pending the EMI-Apple details.

Will this be “the beginning of the end of DRM” as many are claiming? Time will tell. But whether it is or not, it’s definitely more little metal rings in the iTunes-for-everyone armor.

Rafe Blandford has posted Carnival of the Mobilists 66 on All About Symbian. This week’s Carnival includes my “Moto woes” post along with eighteen others.

Another week, another excellent Carnival of the Mobilists. Thanks Rudy for pulling together a great round-up!

And I’m not just saying that because my Multi-touch possibilities post made it into Carnival 64, as there’s always great commentary and deep thinking to be had in each week’s Carnival.

Recommended. Not just this week, but every week. Why not add it to your feeds?

The 61st installment of the Carnival is out. Jan Kuczynski has posted number 61 on Wireless World Japan, complete with a Matsuri theme.

My “Two horse race, soon to be three” post on the mobile handset market made the cut. Thanks Jan!

Xen Mendelsohn has posted The Carnival of the Mobilists no. 59.

My “iPhone week one” was one of the posts picked up for carnival #59. Thanks Xen!

There have been a lot of so-so and a few really great articles on iPhone in the week since it was launched. What follows are my favorite blog posts, articles, and videos covering iPhone in week one.

David Pogue published an early first pass in his “Some Hands-On Time With the iPhone” after spending about an hour hands-on with an iPhone prototype the day Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced it at MacWorld. He followed that up with answers to a wide variety of reader questions in “The Ultimate iPhone FAQ” and “The Ultimate iPhone FAQ list, Part 2“.

Time covered iPhone’s development with “Apple’s New Calling: The iPhone“. Doubt after reading that one that Jobs is a bit paranoid? Read Fortune’s piece on “How Apple kept its iPhone secrets” to assuage yourself of that misgiving. Bogus prototypes to mislead employees and disguised software to hide the interface from development partners. You name it, and Jobs and company probably did it to keep iPhone hush hush the last couple of years. Good thing or bad thing, you be the judge.

What about the negatives of the device itself?

Lack of third generation wireless (3G) has been picked at by Nokians and others. Read my take in “WiFi is more important than HSDPA for early iPhone success“, which was picked for the Carnival of the Mobilists carnival #58.

Alan Reiter did a great job slicing and dicing the (lack of) imaging capabilities in his “Apple iPhone might be revolutionary, but definitely not for wireless imaging“. 2 MPix cellcam support, average at best. No flash or lens cover, argh. No video, OMG! One of my biggest disappointments with the first iPhone model.

And that leads naturally to my other really big disappointment: Lack of developer support.

As Jobs put it to the New York Times:

We define everything that is on the phone

Oh Steve, does your hubris have no end? Wait, I guess it doesn’t, as NYT reports Jobs continued with:

“These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn’t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.”

What about the hundreds of millions of Java ME handsets running mobile apps, Steve? Don’t most of those devices work on a regular basis? Would the mobile Java ecosystem have been possible if it’d been “a more controlled environment”? No way. Open wins in the end.

If you agree, consider signing the iPhone Third-Party Application Support Petition and blog your take far and wide.

Looking for more reasons to dislike iPhone? Check out “10 Ways the Nokia N800 is Better Than Apple’s iPhone“. Or if you’re just looking for more about iPhone and don’t know where to start, visit “All Things iPhone” for a running commentary of what’s known, unknown, and speculated.

Perhaps Stephen Colbert summed up our first week love-hate relationship with iPhone best in giving Apple a “double wag of the finger” while stating:

You can count me out as a customer, until you send me one for free

Watch the video for the true word from week one:

Only one week in, and it’s already been an interesting ride!