Just a few minutes ago Steve Jobs has finished his keynote speech where he presented us with a few new things. First and foremost we heard about the new version of the iOS! That's right, iOS 4.2 is coming out November 2010 and it will come out not only for the iPhone 4 but also for the.... YES, you guessed right! FOR THE iPAD!

Did I get you curious with the new things announced at this Apple event? Well then, keep on reading to get the rest of the story!The iOS 4.2 will bring your normal improvements that come with every release and it will also include this new feature Apple dubbed as "AirPlay". AirPlay is essentially a way for you to stream any kind of content from your iPhone/iPad into the new Apple TV. So that's all for the iOS 4.2 - AirPlay and finally an iPad version. This means we'll finally get multitasking on our iPads. Ace!

Next up were the iPods. Steve claimed Apple had redesigned their whole iPod line-up and so they did! There's this new iPod shuffle that is smaller and comes in all these neat colours. This is basically just a reiteration of the shuffle design with no screen and a wheel with a few buttons to play, pause and skip tracks. The cheapest version will sport 2Gb of internal memory and it will go for $49. No word if there will be versions with larger memory.

The most amazing revamp they did, however, was with the iPod Nano. They got rid of the wheel below the screen and they've made the screen smaller.... and touch capable! The new iPod Nano is now a cute little square with a touch screen. Quite cool! There are two versions of this, one at 8Gb and the other at 16Gb, which cost $149 and $179 respectively.

Finally on the iPod market, Apple has also made the predicted move. They've released an iPhone-4-esque version of the iPod Touch. It now comes with a 5 megapixel camera on the back, a front-facing camera and you guessed it right: Facetime capabilities. The new iPod Touch will also support the AirPlay, as will all devices with the new iOS4.2.

Along with the news for today also came the new version of iTunes. The new iTunes 10 will come with a new logo, as according to Steve it wouldn't make sense to have the CD on it anymore. Considering that the logo had been designed 10 years ago (according to Mr. Jobs) then I'm compelled to agree with him; not that I find the new logo much more attractive, but hey, it's a matter of taste. The new iTunes also brings a social networking service for music called Ping. Apparently, Ping "is not Facebook, it is not Twitter, it's a social networking service for music". I'm still not entirely sold on the idea but the notion seems to be sharing what you're listening to and what you've downloaded. It seems to me this will be Apple's own last.fm, with direct integration with iOS.

Finally, Uncle Steve introduced the new Apple TV. Their new TV box is much smaller than their previous iteration and it will integrate with the AirPlay present on the iOS. Apparently they got some feedback from their customers and the new service will be more rental-oriented and the prices will go significantly down to compensate for this. With the new service you'll get newly released films for just $4.99 and TV show episodes for $0.99 - a bargain, I say. Makes me wish I was living in the US...

The new Apple TV service will also support Netflix streaming which means that if you're a subscriber, you'll be able to stream contents directly into your television. Still on the streaming front, the new iTunes will also allow people to stream stuff directly into the Apple TV, without much fuss. That's a neat little feature that's been around with the XBOX 360 for a while now and Apple has their own version built right into the Apple TV.

The Apple event had to finish on a high note and as such they invited Chris Martin to put on a small show for the audience. Neat!

I went into an O2 store today. I was merely looking to handle the new iPhone 4, to see how it looked like in person, to see how it felt in my hand and... obviously, to test the death grip, or, more correctly, the death touch. Yes, you don't really have to grip it like Steve J. suggests, you really just have to touch it on that joint point on the bottom left corner of the phone and the signal goes all the way down to just two, and then one bar. You can clearly see the effects of the new firmware though, it no longer goes into no signal, it will still tell you that there's some signal, while in fact it's probably impossible to make any calls at that point. But anyway, I was there, I tested it. I didn't grip the iPhone, I merely pressed my index finger against that tiny little spot and the signal instantly started dropping from the full five bars to two bars and ultimately to just one bar. Similarly, as soon as I raised my finger from that spot, it gained back the signal to full strength. This is why I'm dubbing this issue not "death grip" but "death touch".

Not all is bad about the iPhone 4 though. The screen is amazing, tantalizing, fabulous, ridiculously fantastic and I might just have ran out of adjectives to describe how "real" it feels to look at such a screen. It's like there's no screen at all and you're just looking at something "real". If you've read my blog, you'll know that by now I loathe Steve Jobs. He's an arrogant prick who bullies his employees and he might as well have been the one who gave the order to go ahead with this design, despite having been warned about the issues it could have. Still, the screen of the iPhone 4 is just... fantastic. It's something that has to be seen in person to be wooed by it and trust me, you will be.

Anyway, enough beating the dead horse with a stick and moving on to more serious matters. I've had my eye on the Samsung Galaxy S for a while now and based on the reviews and videos I saw of it, I was pretty much convinced on getting one. I had a few deals on eBay that I was keeping track of  and I was just waiting for my own phone to sell to then buy the Galaxy. However, what was not my surprise when on the O2 store, I saw the Samsung Galaxy S for sale and it had actually been one of the motives for me to go up to the store: I wanted to try the phone in person just to get the feel of it. I asked the lady if she had one other than that one on display as it had no battery and she went to get one, a BNIB handset, just for me to try. I was impressed with her amiability with this and I had the chance to take a glance at the price tag - £319 it read. I thought to myself that it was a really nice price but it was probably locked to O2, which isn't desirable at all for me. I'm at a point in my life that I might have to move to God knows where and having a phone that's locked to a British network is anything but ideal for me.

The lady came back with the handset and she let me mess around with it a bit. I tried (and failed) to enable Swype, and on a casual chit chat with the O2 lady, I asked her whether the phone was locked and she told me she didn't actually know. Those phones were supposed to be sold on contracts and those are usually unlocked, but she didn't know. She also told me that she was fairly sure they were unlocked, as the box had no O2 branding whatsoever, but she didn't know for sure. After asking a few of her colleagues, none of them seemed to be sure either but at some point, one of them assured me it was unlocked to all networks, and I just knew it: I have to buy this phone. And I did. I made an excellent deal, better than any of the deals on eBay because I get 1 year warranty and in the end it's actually cheaper than anything on eBay.

So, to everyone who's wanting to buy a Samsung Galaxy S, I say try your local O2 shop. Maybe they have a few units like this!

Alright so I know everyone has been talking about this and it has been debated and criticized ad nauseum but this latest press conference was nothing short of a joke. For those of you who are unaware of what happened, let me start from the beginning.

Apple released the iPhone 4 and dubbed it as the best smartphone ever. It was the best smartphone Apple had ever built, it was the best smartphone on Earth and... "there's one more thing... look at the rim. This is also the antenna and is part of some brilliant engineering." (this is more or less what Steve Jobs preached at the iPhone launch). When making this presentation, little did Jobs know (or didn't he?) that this antenna design was going to backfire so gracefully, like a Russian Roulette player who's about to fire the gun against his head for the sixth time in a row. And it did fire.

Jobs can bullshit us all he likes, with statistics and with supposed facts that the iPhone 4 only drops 1/100th more calls than the 3GS but fact remains: the iPhone 4 has a massive flaw that was overlooked by Apple's engineers. This flaw hit all sorts of media. It was on technology websites, on mainstream newspapers and it even hit some TV channels like CNN. Moreover, Consumer Reports in the US went from recommending the iPhone 4 to NOT recommending it at all when they found out (and tested for themselves) about this issue with the reception. After all this bad publicity, after AAPL's shares dropping roughly $30 per share, Jobs knew something had to be done. And so he did, he called for a press conference and they approached the issue of the antenna... in one of the worst ways possible.

At the conference, Jobs' claim was that all smartphones have this issue. Conveniently, they played videos of other phones being grasped firmly in a hand and of how the bars would go all the way down. Conveniently, they were videos. They weren't showing it live, the tests weren't even being done in one of the anechoic chambers that Jobs' claimed to have spent $100 million on to test their phones; it was just someone, holding a series of phones, connected to God knows what operator, and showing how the bars go down. What Apple failed to address however, was the fact that you don't need the so-called 'death grip' to get the bars to drop. All you need to do is bridge the two antennas on the bottom-left corner of the phone. Place your finger on top of it and your call quality will drop dramatically, to a point where the call might disconnect and to a point where you'll have no reception at all. Apple's response, in sum, was: all phones have this problem, the iPhone is not perfect, but here's a bumper anyway to keep you quiet.

Jobs. If you are so confident that the iPhone 4 has no problem at all, why are you giving your customers bumpers that fix the problem? What, wait. But there is no problem, is there? Is there a problem that affects all phones and thus you are appeasing the customers with a solution or is there no problem at all. I'm confused now.

In any case Jobs, I understand you. After the shit's been done you really can't admit to it anymore. You'd take another massive hit to the shares of AAPL and that's bad for business. You also can't do a global recall because that would mean replacing every single iPhone 4 by new models without the issue and that would mean catastrophic losses plus a massive stain on Apple's history. So all in all Jobs, well done. You took the sensible way out. Not the way out that truly has your customers at heart but the way out that is best for everybody.

The so much awaited Apple Tablet has finally been announced by good ole Steve Jobs. My first impression? Meh. Put it this way, I was very very excited about the Apple Tablet, I was amused that the name could have gone the iSlate way (is late, get it?), but even the name is a total and uttermost failure. iPad... what's with the easy iPod pun?!

Those of us who read Gizmodo and other technology-oriented websites have been showering in mockups of how the iPad would look like and truth to be told, most of them look better than this chunky piece of an eBook reader. What's this supposed to be anyway? A phone? But it has no 3G... An eBook reader? But it costs $1000... An MP3/video player? BUT IT COSTS $1000!

Come on guys, who does not sincerely believe that Apple has just shot themselves in the foot please raise your hands and drop me a comment with sound reasoning. As for me, if I had Apple stock I'd be hitting the sell button as hard as I could right now... poor move Jobs, poor move...

Photos after the break (courtesy of Gizmodo).

UPDATE: Alright, alright, it only costs $500 after all. My point still remains: it is ugly and it only allows one app running at a time... $500 for a giant iPhone? Meh.

Oh oh! No, not Santa, this is actually a juicy story. Mark Wilson at Gizmodo brings us an issue with the latest Apple's iMacs. According to said person, some of the latest iMacs randomly display a yellow tinted screen, turning the whites into... well... yellow. Manufacturing issues like this happen you say, and I would agree; that's not really the issue in this case.

The issue is the fact that Mark's iMac was exchanged but the replacement computer is also icteric. So what's the deal? Well, I'm not a fan boy for either side, I'm not fanatic so this brings me no special joy; despite that, I share Mark's opinion on the issue: multi-thousand dollar computers, computers that are known for being overpriced for their specifications, shouldn't have issues like this. Moreso, the issue should never happen again on a replacement computer. This can only mean one of two things - either the issue is happening on a large percentage of iMacs or Mark has just been extremely unlucky. Considering Apple's previous rapport with manufacturing issues and faulty parts, I would go with the former.

Right now Apple has been creepy and resorted to shady backstage data mining to flag Mark's Apple account to disallow any other exchanges; apparently his computer will now be repaired instead. Mark isn't happy and he's trying to spread the word; this is my attempt to help him and to get Apple to change this behavior. This would be acceptable from a cheap computer brand but not from Apple, THE most expensive computer brand, whose flagship is to produce computers with above-par quality. This sure as hell isn't above-par.

[via Gizmodo]

Well, for some weird reason, Apple refuses to give in and have Adobe port Flash over to the iPhone. It would be a massive advantage if we could see an iPhone with a full blown version of Flash, as opposed to Flash Lite. But... Apple won't bend. So what does Apple do? The best it can do right now: get people angry at Apple.

Below is the image that people will see when they try to download Flash on their iPhones (courtesy of Engadget):

The good silly folks over at AppleInsider are reporting on a flaw that might open the iPhone OS 3.0 to mass spam. While there is some truth to their claims, they are also being unnecessarily alarmist and making false claims.

The specifics of this exploit is that when you hacktivate an iPhone (i.e. activate it using Jailbreak), your iPhone will be using a private/public key pair to register with Apple's PNS (Push Notification Service) that already exists, in other words, it will be using a key that was not generated to your iPhone but that will be common to everyone who hacktivates their iPhone.

As a result, when a notification comes addressed to that key, all of the iPhones in the world that have been hacktivated would in theory receive that message.

Still, at AppleInsider they claim:

Destroying the application security layer of the iPhone does not itself automatically break PNS, but (when combined with an "unofficial activation" required to use it with unofficial service providers) results in the system having no legitimate certificates to use in performing push notifications. Essentially, if the phone is not properly activated as intended through iTunes, the user's credentials for signing into Apple's PNS messaging servers (which are generated by the device itself in normal conditions) are broken along with the application security layer.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, little Timmy! Let's debunk this, shall we?

1. An unofficial activation (read, hacktivation) is NOT required to use it with unofficial service providers. If an iPhone is already officially activated, the jailbreak will not reactivate it.
2. Jailbreaking does NOT necessarily mean that you want to use your iPhone with unofficial service providers. Jailbreaking simply allows you to install third-party applications, such that aren't installed through the regular AppStore.
3. You need to jailbreak to use the iPhone with an unofficial service provider, but jailbreaking does not have only that purpose. You can for instance jailbreak to run cracked games. Sure, it doesn't make it any more legitimate or legal, but it is not the same thing.

Finally, I must stress the notion: if you have an officially activated iPhone and if you jailbroke it afterwards, YOU ARE SAFE. Actually, I am not sure about the status of redsn0w right now, but when it was first released the push notifications would not even work for hacktivated iPhones! Still, if you would activate your iPhone normally and then jailbreak it, you would get your push notifications working. In a nutshell, if you have it officially activated, jailbreak will not put you at risk of being spammed.

As for hacktivated iPhones... well, tough luck guys. It seems like you are better off turning of the push notifications if you don't want to be spammed in a near future.

[via Engadget]

Howdy everyone,

I was thinking the other day (yes, this does happen every now and then) and something hit me: what is the big issue with developing any kind of software these days? Optimization, right? This is truer on a special case and I am refering to the operating systems. Windows, Mac OS, Linux-based... you know the drill.

Optimization is by nature, a very herculean task, especially when you are developing a piece of software to run on a wide variety of platforms and environments. Sure, some of the most recent computers come with dual-core CPUs, but pretty much all operating systems must still be able to operate on single-core processors, just as they have to be able to handle 4 or 8 cores effectively. This is not only true in the case of processors but also on RAM. If an operating system is running on 256Mb of RAM, it must certainly behave differently resource-wise than it will behave on a system with 4Gb of available RAM. More to the point, what is the use of having 4Gb of RAM, if 3Gb stay unused at all times? One could argue that having available memory is good because it allows the applications to use more as they need it, without resorting to swap files, but for the most part it is wasted memory, a precious resource in our computers.

With this said, for companies like Microsoft, it certainly is hard to develop an operating system that will efficiently handle old and new, resource-limited and resource-boasted platforms, simply because they create Windows for a variety of hardware. Windows will run on AMD, Intel and VIA and although they all are x86-based, there are certain instructions, that could be used to optimize but are not, because if my Core 2 Duo has SSE4, my friend's Athlon XP 3000+ hasn't got this set of instructions and therefore an application optimized for my CPU won't actually run on his.

This is, to some extent, the story of Windows Vista. Windows Vista brought quite a few innovations when compared to XP but it had a problem: if your resources are on the lower end, your computer will feel like a sloth on a lazy day and XP feels like cool breeze when compared to Vista. However, if you have ever had the chance to try out Vista on a powerful system, you'll be in awe simply because it will feel as fast as XP and you have all the goodies. Windows 7 by the way, is set to change this, but let us keep that to a different post as that is off-subject.

So, what is the main characteristic of a Macintosh computer? Until very recently, they used hardware unlike that of PCs but not anymore, their hardware is now similar and compatible with PC hardware. Actually, its parts are normal PC parts, with Intel CPUs and Intel/Nvidia/ATI graphics cards so what is really different? It's simple: they come assembled and are not meant to be disassembled at the risk of getting your warranty voided.

My point is that if Apple keeps such a high-standard on their computers and keeps them so expensive, why not turn the competition knob a notch? Pack their computers with like 8Gb of RAM at least and with 1Tb hard drives. In a way, Apple has started optimizing since Mac OS 10.5 will only run on at least the Core 2 Duo platform and this is a good thing, but I still think that RAM is a major factor in computers that is being systematically (and wrongly) left behind. However, if you have 8Gb of RAM, you could almost reserve 4Gb just for pre-fetching most used applications before the user needs them, and still have plenty of RAM for the average user to mess with. Maybe we need to go big and supersize and make a break with the past of computing.

What is the real problem? Not knowing in advance when and how much RAM the user will need. So if an operating system starts using all the available (free) memory to pre-fetch applications, if at some point the user needs an application that requires, say, 512Mb of RAM and that program wasn't pre-fetched, the OS will have to quickly ditch 512Mb of that pre-fetch RAM and quickly load that program into memory. The problem? This can't happen quickly because the program will be loaded from the hard drive and the hard drive is inherently slow.

Effectively, the memory allocation algorithm has to have something like a behaviour analysis module. Something that records the user behaviour and finds patterns, and even then it has to give room for the unexpected. A good memory allocation algorithm isn't the key to all of the problems though, if for instance there isn't enough RAM available, then an algorithm can't make miracles no matter how good it is.

To finish my post: Apple can control both their software and hardware, as the Portuguese saying goes "they have the knife and the cheese" so I sincerely feel that they can do way much more for their users in terms of performance. I do reckon that Mac OS users do not typically complain about performance, but what is also true on a computer is that it can always be faster.

No, it's not a typo at all. Apparently, Apple forgot the "B" key in their new Macbook laptops. So much for your high quality standards Steve Jobs...