Category: General Tech

This is from iLounge’s review of the new Shuffle:

There is, however, something that many users will care about: the new shuffle doesn’t fully work with any headphones except Apple’s. Because of what Apple has done here—something sneaky and arguably terrible for consumers, especially if it continues with other iPod and iPhone products in 2009—if you plug your old third-party headphones of any sort into the new shuffle, you’ll find that you can’t do anything with the device other than have it continuously play music, without volume controls or interruption, unless of course of you turn it off. Surprise: the only third-party headphones that will work are ones that haven’t even entered manufacturing yet, because they’ll need to contain yet another new Apple authentication chip, which will add to their price. Your only alternatives will be third-party remote control adapters—also not yet available, as Apple’s not even making one—and using Apple’s earphones. The prices for the third-party adapters will be no less than $19, and quite possibly more like $29; compatible headphones announced thus far start at $49.

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I recently wrote about putting OS X on the HP Mini 1000. It was a fun project, but the thing had a few fundamental problems:

1. The OS X install wasn’t a true OS X install. It was a cracked version of Leopard that has been customized for the hardware 2. Updates were impossible to run because of this. 3. It was unstable.

So I put the HP (which I still regard as the nicest netbook out there) up for sale, sold it, and bought a Dell Mini 9. The Dell Mini 9 is super easy to install OS X on. Gizmodo and others have great guides on how to get it done. The process uses a retail 10.5 install disc, which I purchased outright. Since it is a retail copy, updates are no issue.

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Good grief. iFixit has pulled apart the new iPod Shuffle:

Is this the future? A single IC, a battery, and some user interface components. Amazingly, at least on our scale, both halves weighed 5 grams. That means the entire functional half of the iPod weighs only about 10% more than a single sheet of letter size paper.

Hit the link for some photos. Spoiler: Most of the parts are dime-sized.

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Ars Technica:

The mother of a kid living in Cincinnati, Ohio is suing Apple and 10 unnamed retail employees from the Apple Store in Kenwood over an iPod touch that allegedly exploded in the child’s pocket. According to the complaint filed yesterday in the Southern District of Ohio, the plaintiff had the “iTouch” (as the lawsuit refers to it) in his pocket during school when the unfortunate accident happened, resulting in hospital bills and other monetary losses thanks to the disintegration of the iPod touch and, well, the kid’s clothes.

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Adium has been a long-time favorite of many Mac users. While the free program started as a basic AIM client several years ago, the program now can connect you to not only your AIM buddies, but Google Talk contacts, MSN and Yahoo! chat buddies, and Facebook friends. Add all that to an interface that allows endless customization, and you get one slick app.

But there has been one hole in Adium for a long time: Twitter support. That’s changing:

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iLounge has posted some photos of the new iPod Shuffle - in the box, out of the box, and out in the real world. My first impression: the new Shuffle is tiny. The photo with it side-by-side with Apple’s Bluetooth headset shows just how small it really is.

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Apple Insider:

CBS Sports announced Thursday plans to stream NCAA March Madness basketball games live to Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch through a new application, but with a WiFi-only requirement and price tag of $4.99, many fans may choose to watch tournament for free on their Mac, PC, or big TV.

The app will feature a real-time graphical bracket with game match-ups, regions, and scores. Upon the completion of each game, video highlights will be available available on demand. Meanwhile, stat junkies might enjoy the CBSSports.com Edge Matchup game previews with full team-by-team analysis and matchup comparisons. Breaking tournament news will also be available through the app along with the standard box scores, game recaps, and team stats.

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Engadget:

We just got the announcement, iPhone OS 3.0 is coming. Set your clocks, mark your calendars. It’s going down March 17th. Apparently, we’ll get a sneak peak at the new OS, as well as a look at a brand new version of the SDK. Exciting stuff indeed, and we’ll be there live at 10am PST (1pm EST) with the liveblog. Apple’s calling this an “advance preview of what we’re building,” so we’re not expecting anything ready to go as of the 17th, but hopefully this will allow developers to start building toward future functionality (hey, how about some push notifications?), and presumably users won’t have too many months to wait after that for the real deal.

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Apple has updated the iPod Shuffle this morning, and boy, is it tiny. And it has no buttons for navigation. And it can talk. And clocks in at 4GB. Here’s some Apple PR to go with your coffee this morning:

iPod shuffle is based on Apple’s incredibly popular shuffle feature, which randomly selects songs from your music library. And now, when you can’t remember the name of a song or an artist playing, with the press of a button iPod shuffle tells you the name of the song and artist. iPod shuffle can even tell you status information, such as battery life. With the ability to hold up to 1,000 songs and the VoiceOver feature, you can now easily switch between multiple playlists on your iPod shuffle. iPod shuffle can speak 14 languages including English, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

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As popular as netbooks are, they have some fundamental flaws (small keyboards, etc), but one of the biggest problems is their operating system.

Most netbooks come with Windows XP, which is fine for most users, but there are not a lot of good alternatives. Of course, Microsoft requires XP-powered netbooks to be limited to 1GB of RAM, which irks many users, Vista is pretty much out of the question due to the under-powered nature of netbooks - even with 2GB of RAM. Windows 7 looks promising, but is still in beta.

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After one of their investors slammed the iPhone last week, Palm has published a paper retracting the statements with such comments like:

With respect to the statements in the tenth paragraph of the transcript that the Palm Pre is “going to be a million times – well, not a million times – several times faster” than Apple, Inc.’s iPhone products and is “going to run rings around them on the web,” the Palm Pre is still under development and it is premature to state the speed at which the device accesses the web or the relative speed of the Palm Pre compared to the smartphone products of competitors.

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Mac Rumors and others are reporting that a Chinese manufacturer is building “touch panels” for a rumored Apple netbook.

I don’t think that the information is outright wrong, but I think it may be for something entirely different from the netbooks we’ve seen up to this point.

Netbooks are small, underpowered notebooks that are affordable. Many place $500 as the ceiling.

I don’t see Apple moving into that market. They’ve said over and over that they won’t be moving into that market.

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