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Neigther the iPhone nor the N95 are any really good value for the crazy expensive prices that they cost.

Nokia is 750$ (+ subscription?)
iPhone is 500-600$ (+ 1440$ - 2400$ 24-month subscription contract)

Given the fact that neigther are going to last any more than a few months, those are both not to recommend anyone else than someone who has no problems paying a lot of money for a product that is not going to last.

In my opinion the revolutionary effect in portable consumer electronics, which will be usefull in the longer term, provide the good reason to invest more than into a 10$ pre-paid phone, that’s when the Archos 605 WiFi (200$) or the N800 (400$) will be comming with VOIP on WiFi, HSDPA and later WiMax.

If your device comes with 2G data service, then you might as well get a 10$ pre-paid clamshell phone with virginmobile or something like that which will give you the same use.

Though when there will be 800×480 4″ screen products with PC-like Opera browser experience, with full Flash and Javascript support, and providing free unlimited worldwide VOIP and IM using all of WiFi, HSDPA and WiMax, then those are gonna be the revolutionnary product.

Thus far iPhone and N95 are not revolutionary, they are simply temporary flashy bricks for rich kids and misguided early adopters.

Free Iliad has launched the TV Perso service, what this does is it provides its 2 million broadband ADSL2+ subscribers in France access to a special channel on their TV with user generated Live and On-Demand content.

User-generated On-Demand content is captured by the Freebox HD’s analog Composite or S-video line-in, is encoded at 3.5mbit/s Mpeg4 and uploaded slowly using 1mbit/s and can be made available to the public or to a limited amount of friends.

User-generated Live content is also captured the same way but encoded at 800kbit/s Mpeg4 and is streamed directly to an unlimited amount of Freebox users in France. For Freebox HD users in certain areas of France with Fiber to the home, they can broadcast 3.5mbit/s quality video live.

For now the user-generated content can only be captured from the Freebox HD’s composite or s-video input thus it is only SD resolution for now. But Free has said it could become HD quality using HD-capable webcam or video-cameras on the USB-host connection.

This is definately more impressive than Youtube since it’s 3.5mbit/s for user-generated content at DVD resolution in Mpeg4. And the Live video is more impressive than mogulus, ustream, justin since it’s broadcasted directly to people’s TV.

The TV Perso service has been online only for a few days, and http://www.universfreebox.com/article3553.html and http://freenews.fr are already reporting of very fun and awesome user-generated Live and On-Demand content.

Just as I saw awesome live iPhone launch coverage a couple of days ago made by Mogulus at http://iphonelaunch.tv, the French are using participatory tactics on their Live user-generated TV channels, chatting with viewers live on Skype, answering questions on chat channels and more.

I expect a French made Archos TV+ would be able to sell this service and feature to the rest of the world. Such as VOD to the TV, and using the recording ability and the Internet upload connection to upload user-generated live and On-Demand high quality Mpeg4 video.

This is a video in french by a french technology magazine SVM showing the interface of this service:

Click Read More to watch more videos about this service:
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