I thought they were getting all cozy with Intel over Lightpeek, which I'm sure will be available to consumers in no more than ten years...

Matt, I thought the same thing. I also thought they might have had something to do with its development.

Apple would still need to adopt USB 3. Lightpeak is just a common cable connector and setup for sending data around, it however doesn't specify a protocol. You would still need to send USB, or DisplayPort, or whatever signals down the cable to the devices. One possible use for this is a computer that only has a single power plug and lightpeak plug. That lightpeak connection could run into a monitor, that then the monitor provides USB, eSATA and audio plugs for devices, and a downstream lightpeak port for extra monitors or other devices.

Apple hasn't adopted USB 3 yet because Intel and NVidia haven't. Apple only uses Intel chipsets in their higher end systems with Core i series processors, and NVidia ones in their Core 2 Duo based systems.

Any motherboard that does support USB 3 today is doing so using a 3rd party USB controller currently. Intel is supposed to have support added to their core chipsets in 2011.

Doh! That's right. Forgot that Apple is no longer producing their own IO chips and therefore has to move at least as slow as Intel.

Frustratingly, Facetime still isn't open as promised.

I tried yesterday to find a common way to do video chat to a Nexus S user, and ended up unsuccessful. Below is what we looked at based on what we could think of on each platform:

iPhone 4:
Facetime
Skype
Tango

Nexus S:
Google Talk
Skype
Tango

Facetime is only Apple, and video support for Google Talk is only Android, so both of those are out. Skype seems to be ideal, until it was discovered the Android version lacks video support, so it too is out. Tango also seemed promising, but it's a pretty bad app, and doesn't support the front facing camera on the Nexus S.

Fring

Apparently the Facetime engineers found out it was supposed to be an open standard during Steve's WWDC keynote. Oops. I expect we'll see some news about this at the next WWDC.

Ahh, right, we forgot about Fring. Initially it didn't support the Nexus S front camera either when he initially got the phone, but it appears to now.

Also found Qik still exists as a separate app, even though Skype bought them in January.

Seems strange to me that Android apps aren't seeing multiple cameras properly. On the iOS side, every app I tried that could use the camera automatically had support for the front and rear cameras without needing a specific update.

I was going to make an open platform joke, but I can't think of anything really really funny right now. It's just another example of how Android software, for the most part, sucks a bit worse than the majority of iOS software. Which is pretty painful because there's a lot of really bad iOS software out there.

Here's where I threadjack and say that I love Facetime. It's the only video/voip software that I've found to work great over both my high latency satellite and my abysmally slow (128k?) DSL connections. Sometimes there's a short delay, but video stays good and audio doesn't get choppy or break up.

I really wish they'd spend some time making it a bit more robust. At minimum, I'd like to have a way to see a user's status. Also, for the Mac version, a quicker way to add users than going and starting address book and adding a new entry.