I’ve never felt right about the rumors saying there will be a 4-inch iPhone. Mostly because it would mean an iPhone with a lesser pixel density or a new screen resolution. Neither of those seem likely in my book.

But Dustin Curtis points out another reason why a 4-inch iPhone is not probable: the practical issue of easily using the phone with one hand.

James Duncan Davidson regarding tomorrow’s iPhone announcement:

Whatever it looks like, the hardware released tomorrow is tactical. Every improvement is designed to address the needs of the next 12-18 months. iCloud, on the other hand, is strategic. It’s going to be the lynchpin of Apple’s entire ecosystem for the next ten years, just as the core of Mac OS X was for the last ten years.

Yes and yes.

My thanks to Periodicity for sponsoring the RSS feed this week.

Periodicity is an iPhone app built for managing all of your event reminders. It can handle daily events or to-do items, weekly meetings, annual events (such as birthdays and anniversaries), and everything in between.

Periodicity is not so much an app that you work in or launch on a regular basis. Rather it is more or less a utility app that runs in the background. Once you’ve set a reminder in Periodicity you don’t really need to launch the app again unless you’re setting another reminder or if you want to preview your list of reminders for the upcoming day or week. Periodicity will alert you via a notification on your iPhone when an event reminder becomes due.

Though you can use the app for one-off events, its strong suit is with repeating events (such as daily or weekly meetings, classes, birthdays, etc.). And there is one thing in particular about the way Periodicity lets you set up repeating events that I would love to see in more apps like this.

If you’ve ever had a bi-weekly meeting on Tuesdays and Thursdays you’ll know that in iCal you have to set that up as two different meetings — one that is every Tuesday and another that is every Thursday — even if the time, location, and attendees are all the same. Periodicity has one of the more robust sets of scheduling options I have seen, and allows you to set up a repeating reminder for just about any increment of time you can think of:

Then, when those event reminders do come up, you can check them off, dismiss them, or postpone them to remind you again at a later time.

And right now, Periodicity is just a buck in the App Store.

He cancelled his pre-order of the Kindle Touch to get the $79 plain Kindle instead. And he likes it.

(I also pre-ordered a Kindle Touch., and it will be my first Kindle ever. Not only have I never owned a Kindle, I’ve never even held one. The closest I’ve ever come to reading on a Kindle is glancing at the Kindle in use by someone who’s sitting on an airplane seat next to me.

I do not read books all that often, and when I do the iPad is fine. I think if this Kindle purchase were me finally caving in and buying a Kindle then I would likely go with the plain one. Because, like I’ve said, I doubt I would use it all that often and so I might as well get the smallest, lightest, and cheapest one possible. But I’m sticking with the Kindle Touch because that’s the one I want to use and review.)

Marco Arment joined Ben and I this week to talk about the new Amazon Kindles. And of course, Marco and I hijacked the last part of the show to talk about coffee, home roasting, brewing, and etc. I’m not sure, but I think Ben took a nap during that portion.

Yesterday I wrote that the only two Kindles which matter are the Kindle Touch and the Kindle Fire. Michael Laccheo argues that there is a place for the “plain” Kindle, and he put his money where his mouth is by ordering one already.

Laccheo bought the plain Kindle because he wanted the smallest, lightest, cheapest, model possible:

I’m looking for a throw away device. […]

The Kindle will let me have a cheap device that won’t heat up in the blistering summer sun, is light enough to hold and read one handed, won’t be affected by glare from the sun, and I won’t mind reading while standing in the pool because for 80 bucks it’s relatively replaceable.

I think Laccheo’s point is completely fair and valid — there is a market for the plain Kindle. And likewise, I would say there is also a market for the Kindle Keyboard and the Kindle DX. But the size of the market for these other three devices is significantly smaller than the two new flagship Kindles.

Think about this: if someone were to ask you what has changed about the new Kindles, would you say they ditched the keyboard, or would you say it now has a touch screen?

Lukas Mathis:

So how would you design a piece of hardware that is only used for reading? One where people do a very specific thing — turn a book’s page — hundreds of times a day? Would you remove the physical button for turning the page?

I was also a bit surprised to see the page-turning buttons removed from the Kindle Touch. It seems to me that those two buttons would still be quite useful even though the screen now accepts touch input.

Marco Arment articulates much better than I did on why the Kindle Fire likely won’t affect iPad sales:

What we’ll see with the iPad depends on why people buy iPads. My theory is that there’s an iPad market, not a “tablet market” — that people want the iPad and specifically seek it out without comparing it to other tablets.

A “tablet market” suggests that people first decide they want a tablet, then they comparison-shop and choose the one that best fits their needs and budget, like buying a dishwasher. I don’t think we’ve seen any plausible evidence that a meaningful number of customers think of tablets generically like that.

But if anything’s going to prove me wrong, it’s the Kindle Fire.

Level-headed financial advice from The Art of Manliness.

Writing lesson of the day. (Via Coudal.)