Please show me a quote where any one of the three of them said they want
movie downloads on their iPhone.  After all, you say that all three of
them want it.

I rest my case.

Wow- the power!

Then my iDiot label would fit.

Then it has no value.  What an overhyped pice of crap service.

The Financial Times is reporting that Apple and Twentieth Century Fox
have reached a deal to provide movie rentals on the iTunes Store,
likely to be announced at Macworld. While Disney sells a full line of
films on iTunes and other studios provide catalog titles, this is the
first rental arrangement to date. Movies are expected to be
downloadable for a limited-play window. Equally important, the
agreement is expected to include onboarding of iPod-compatible video
files with Fox DVDs, so that iPod users can load and go when the DVD
is purchased (rather than ripping the DVD into MP4 video).

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I think you missed the point.  These movies are supposed to be
either downloading or streaming from some server to iPhoney,
right?  That would work over wifi, but ain't gonna happen over
EDGE in SLOW MOTION...(c;  Movies over EDGE would look more like
a slide show.  Movies over EVDO are BARELY playable in RealVideo
at 320Kbps because streaming needs RELIABLE thruput, not spurts
of speed with unpredictable dead times and highly variable
download rates over a SELLphone circuit.

(Oh, God, this is gonna bring out of the woodwork a whole bunch
of fanbois who get 4Mbps 24/7 over their SELLphones, just watch.)

SELLphone processors, of course, have to deal with being
SELLphones, too.  That's gotta be a lot of CPU cycles wasted
while you're trying to watch a movie.

I can see balks caused by my N800 tablet checking email and such
while the movie is playing, so I shut down the BT or wifi link to
put a stop to it.  Too many interrupt-driven background projects
spoils the smooth delivery of video/audio to the picture.

For these reasons, I quit using the Orb streamer over EVDO and
just easily load a few things I want to watch from the mainframe
to the 8GB SD card before I leave.  Once the net is turned off
and I'm watching something from the External 8GB SD card slot, at
800 pixels wide, it's an incredible movie machine using rplayer,
recently ported to Maemo Linux with its own better codecs for
Divx/Xvid movies.  To get such a picture with Stereo sound,
usually MP3 encoded, just eats the 330MHz TI OMAP 2420 CPU.  It
will still run apps in background without balking unless the
apps, themselves balk, of course.  It's best to shut everything
down you can before starting the movie for best results.

People who have seen them all are amazed at how well the DivX
movies look on the N800 runnin mplayer, which puts it by default
in full screen mode and utilizes all the N800's
buttons....forward/back/pause/play/next/previous/audio
up/down/menu...etc.

mplayer isn't very polished, yet.  I did find I can get back to
the desktop by playing a trick on it....press the power/lock
button as if I'm going to lock it, and the desktop appears while
the movie still runs, then click FULL SCREEN to return to the
movie.  The codecs it runs destroys the usefulness of the app
picker (lowest button on the front) as it comes out two sizes..
(c;  Speed and smooth is much more important....

Thanks for the pointer to PocketDivx encoder.  I ran it on a DivX
movie I couldn't play on the tablet to change it, but it crashed.  
I sent the log of the crash to the author for his use.  I'll play
with it further.  The N800 isn't a selection so I chose one of
the big Archos players.  I'll figure out what optimum is for the
tablet.  Nokia has a converter, too, but it's slow and not very
friendly to the codec mass on my mainframe.  It didn't fix some
of the movies that wouldn't play.  mplayer fixed a lot of them,
but there are still some I can't play on the tablet.  PocketDivx
may be a port to fix that.  Again, thanks.

Larry

Clue less!