"making iPhones last as long as possible is an important part of that." ... Then I suggest that you do something unheard of and really stretch Johnny Ives to come up with the unthinkable, nearly impossible, design task....an easily replaceable battery.
It's a change for Australia to export something that hasn't simply been fed grass or dug out of the ground. Hopefully we'll make lots of money making money :-) And btw, the notes work really well, can't imagine using tatty bits of green paper after 20 years with the new technology.
Another use is for obtaining an async redis connection using async http frameworks that may not include a redis client, e.g. tornado. I'm doing something like this at the moment using tornado's async http client talking to a nodejs http server that is basically proxy'ing some simple redis commands.
Thanks for the great example. I'm already using Backbone.js in a project, it's a beautiful piece of code (along with underscore.js). One small thing, wouldn't it be better to create a new application specific namespace instead of adding so many globals ?