Well, it's not quite the phone that's a health aid, but a new service launched today called Wellphone, promises to help you keep your fitness quest on track when you're on the go.

Nothing to download, you just register at the Wellsphere Web site. Once registered, you can get text message reminders, daily tips, local health-related resources and log progress toward fitness goals from your mobile phone.

Wellsphere quotes a Stanford Prevention Center study that tracked a group of people's workout habits over eight weeks. The results? Those who received mobile reminders worked out for five hours per week on average, three hours more than the control group. But no real surprise there, we all know nagging  works -- except when it comes to my teenage son.

I poked around Wellsphere's Web site and saw they have quite a few resources including how-to videos and plenty of community entries. There's also an Enterprise Solutions area for companies that want to get their employees doing a few squat thrusts in between trips to the snack room.

"Wellthy employees make healthy companies" is their slogan -- interesting play on words. Here in Silicon Valley I think there are plenty of gym rats, but the overriding corporate philosophy is more like "healthy companies make wealthy employees". Perhaps the two aren't mutually exclusive.

For many years, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has complained and put tight restrictions on photography during his appearances. More recently, the once total ban on flash photography has been lifted at his Macworld Expo keynote to allow the pool of media photogs to snap away during the first several minutes of the event. Any further flashes were met with stern warnings from Apple personnel to knock it off.

Now it appears Jobs & Company want to further micromanage the media's behavior. Ahead of Thursday morning's iPhone SDK event on the Apple campus, I received a call from an Apple PR guy wanting to make sure I was clear on the logistics for the event and asking if I would be covering it for news. When I said I would be, he said Apple's going to have power outlets in the back of the small auditorium for all the reporters with notebooks. When I said, I didn't need the power outlet he said all the people with notebooks we're going to be asked to sit in the back, rather than up front, so the "clickety-clack of typing" won't be a distraction.

Which of course brought back memories of Hal Glatzer. Hal who? Hal was one of the first reporters to use the Tandy Model 100 portable computer at press events. We're talking Wayback Machine here, the 1980s. Everyone else was still using paper notebooks or tape recorders.

But Hal soon tired of the stares and glares in response to the clickety-clack of his typing at these events. So he came up with an ingenious idea. Hal inserted those tiny rubber elastic bands used in braces, under the keys on the Model 100 to soften the sound.

Worked like a charm, though portable computers soon became so common at press events the sound of typing ceased to bother anyone.

The MacFaithful breathed a collective sigh of relief when Apple CEO announced in 2004 the bad news/good news that he had faced a life-threatening illness, but was cured. Jobs had been given the usually fatal diagnosis he had pancreatic cancer, but it turned out to be a rare treatable form of the disease. And luckily for Jobs, the surgery was a success.

But an in-depth article in Fortune article reveals Jobs kept important details tightly under wraps. Jobs left the impression he acted on the diagnosis and had the surgery quickly, when in fact, Fortune reports, he waited some nine months while he tried "alternative methods" including an unspecified special diet, to try and cure himself. Finally, after being urged by members of Apple's Board of Directors and others, Jobs had the surgery on July 31, 2004 at Stanford University Medical Center in Palo Alto near his home.

Jobs' illness was the subject of much discussion among Apple's Board, which wrestled with how much responsibility it had to go public given the importance of the CEO at Apple. In the end, and on the advise of counsel, it said nothing publicly on the matter. The Fortune article notes that Jobs' Buddhist and vegetarian beliefs left him skeptical of mainstream medicine.

While no one wants to hear they have cancer, Jobs is one lucky fellow under the circumstances and the risk he took in delaying surgery. 

Dr. Roderich Schwarz, chairman of surgical oncology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, who has performed the procedure more than 150 times (but who was not involved in Jobs' case), told Fortune that waiting more than a few weeks with this diagnosis "makes no sense because you don't know what the potential for growth or spread is." Schwarz said he knows of no evidence that diet can be helpful, but that it's up to the patient to decide how he or she wants to be treated.

Apparently Jobs really does live by the credo of an earlier Apple ad campaign: Think Different.

Notebooks keep getting sleeker but that’s not holding back the storage folks. Today Samsung Electronics announced what it said is the world’s first half-terabyte (500 GB) mobile hard drive. The SpinPoint M6 consists of three 167GB platters in a 2.5-inch hard drive frame measuring just 9.5mm in height. These dimensions are no coincidence as they give notebook PC makers enough room to integrate the SpinPoint M6 in the tens of millions of standard PC notebooks that ship each quarter.

Notebook PC manufacturers can also double user’s pleasure (and Samsung’s) by opting for two Spinpoint M6 drives for a total capacity of one terabyte.

Tech specs on the Spinpoint M6 500GB include: a 5400rpm spindle speed, a 8MB cache, and 3.0Gbps SATA interface with a Free-Fall-Sensor available as an optional feature. Samsung said its use of “Perpendicular Magnetic Recording” technology enables the 500GB drive to store 160,000 digital images, 125 hours of DVD movies, or 60 hours of high definition video images.

The drive also features Samsung’s Flying-on-Demand head technology that improves recording stability over changing temperature ranges. Look for notebook makers to start featuring the new drive this year. The drive has a list price of $299.