Five Years of Walt Mossberg’s iPhone Reviews

As the iPhone turns five years old today, here’s a look back at WSJ columnist Walt Mossberg’s reviews of each iPhone over the years. Click on the links for the full reviews:

Testing Out the iPhone (6/27/2007) Our verdict is that, despite some flaws and feature omissions, the iPhone is, on balance, a beautiful and breakthrough handheld computer. Its software, especially, sets a new bar for the smart-phone industry, and its clever finger-touch interface, which dispenses with a stylus and most buttons, works well, though it sometimes adds steps to common functions.

Read Yahoo’s Memo About Top Lawyer’s Departure

Yahoo’s top lawyer, Mike Callahan, is departing after more than a decade at the company. Here’s Yahoo interim CEO Ross Levinsohn’s memo to employees:

Yahoos:

I’m writing to let you know about a change in our executive ranks and to wish a long time Yahoo goodbye. After twelve and a half years with Yahoo!, and almost nine years as our General Counsel, Mike Callahan has notified me of his decision to leave Yahoo! so that he can move on to new opportunities.  We would like to thank ….

Apple’s iPhone Turns 5 – Watch Steve Jobs Unveil It

An iPod. A Phone. And an Internet communicator.

Do you remember that chant from Steve Jobs in 2007? Ever the showman, Jobs introduced the iPhone to the world touting features that would soon make it the envy of the smartphone world.

The iPhone, which hit the market five years ago today, transformed the way we communicate and in the process helped turn Apple into the most valuable company in the world, while destroying competitors in its wake.

Google Exec Explains Android Shift, Online Sales Effort

Google is moving to provide a more level playing field for hardware manufacturers that build smartphones and tablets using Google’s Android software by giving all of them earlier access to software updates.

The move–elements of which had been anticipated–is a shift from Google’s practice of making most manufacturers wait until after the latest version is publicly released–often at the same time that Google launches a “lead device” to showcase the software’s latest features.

Manufacturers that didn’t get to produce a lead device–which is done in close collaboration with Google and often branded as a “Nexus” product–previously have complained privately that this practice requires them to play months of catch-up after a lead device is unveiled, Google said.

Google’s Pichai: We Want to Be the Web’s Utility

After announcing a new service that lets businesses tap Google’s data centers to run their websites and applications, Senior Vice President Sundar Pichai tried to answer what he called the obvious question: Why hadn’t Google done this before?

In truth, he said, “the idea has been around internally for so long” that he can’t remember when the company actually began to take concrete steps to make it happen.

“It always seemed natural to us,” he said, but “with things like data centers you can’t do it on a whim, you need much deeper planning.”

The initiative, led by Urs Holzle, one of the first Google employees, aims to appeal to businesses as they increasingly shift to using Web-based services, or cloud computing, and also find it easier to outsource the management of servers and software needed to run their operations.

SCOTUSblog Sees Traffic Surge With Health-Law Ruling

By Keach Hagey

Breaking big Supreme Court news isn’t easy.

Just ask CNN and Fox News, which got their initial reports wrong Thursday morning, announcing that the individual mandate had been struck down when in fact the high court’s complex decision amounted to upholding the law. (CNN later apologized and Fox said it was just reporting the news as it came out.)

The difficulty of making sense of complex court decisions at lightning speed makes it all the more impressive that one news organization that roughly tied with Bloomberg and the Associated Press in breaking the news correctly at 10:07 a.m. was SCOTUSblog, a small Supreme Court blog normally read by lawyers and other hardcore law enthusiasts.

WSJ Live Blog: Blackberry Maker RIM’s Earnings Call

• • 4:49 pm
  • Will Connors

  Just when RIM watchers thought it couldn't get any worse, the company announces today that its next line of phones won't be launched until after the holiday season, in the first quarter 2013.
  
  This is potentially devastating news for RIM, which has pinned much of its turnaround hopes on a successful launch of the phones, called BlackBerry 10.

Early Facebook Employee Katherine Losse Tells All

Katherine Losse, Facebook employee #51, rose through the ranks from customer support to Mark Zuckerberg’s ghostwriter.

She visited WSJ’s Digits show today to discuss her new book, “The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network.” In the book, she characterizes the early days at Facebook as something of a frat-like boys club.

Startup Jammit Moves to Reach More Jammers

Tech companies keep adding aids for aspiring musicians. But few go to the lengths of Jammit.

The Los Angeles startup–founded by Scott Humphrey, a veteran record producer, mix engineer and musician–spent years in negotiations to license the master recordings of popular songs so it can deconstruct them for analysis. Jammit uses digitized versions of those recordings along with software and an online service that allows music students to download and study songs by heir individual parts, like specific guitar and bass lines.

Say, for example, you want to learn the distinctive strumming of “Everlong” by the Foo Fighters. Jammit’s app comes with on-screen sliders, like those on a studio recording deck, that can fade up or down either of the major guitar lines or silence the rest of the band so you can better hear each picker.

Practice Fusion Nabs $34 Million

Practice Fusion, a San Francisco start-up that provides an online electronic medical record platform, said it has raised a new $34 million round of funding.

The funding values Practice Fusion at close to $500 million, up from around $100 million in its previous financing round, according to a person familiar with the situation. The new funding–which is a Series C, or third round of financing–is led by Artis Ventures, with participation from existing investors such as Founders Fund, Morgenthaler Ventures and Felicis Ventures. Overall, Practice Fusion has raised a total of about $75 million in financing since its 2007 inception.