An online Technology Review dedicated to Gadgets, Gizmos and Cutting-edge consumer electronics

iPhone 3G & iPod Touch 2G 3.0 Final Official Firmware Release

2009-06-18T00:28:00.000-07:00

INSTRUCTIONS:
1. Download .rar files & Extract to folder.
2. Open iTunes 8.2 (or Download the Latest iTunes 8.2 and install)
3. Connect iPhone, Backup if necessary (contacts, pictures, etc.)
4. Go to summary tab of iPhone, on PC hold shift and click restore button.
5. Select the extracted firmware you downloaded from this post.
6. Done! Sit Back and let it do its thing....

Note: You do not need to be signed under a Developers account. Anyone can upgrade to this 3.0 Firmware.

Note: You cannot use this firmware with quickpwn or any other jailbreak/unlock software yet. So far its not jailbreakable. Soon Very Soon! Stealth and Dev Teams are working on it as this post goes up. This is the official firmware that only updates to 3.0

DOWNLOAD LINKS:

iPhone 3G 3.0 Final Release

http://rapidshare.com/files/245677864/iPhone1_2_3.0_7A341_Restore.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/245680710/iPhone1_2_3.0_7A341_Restore.part2.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/245679104/iPhone1_2_3.0_7A341_Restore.part3.rar

iPod Touch 2G 3.0 Final Release

http://rapidshare.com/files/245670280/iPod2_1_3.0_7A341_Restore.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/245676213/iPod2_1_3.0_7A341_Restore.part2.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/245674709/iPod2_1_3.0_7A341_Restore.part3.rar

If u want 200MB file then Download from below:

iPhone OS 3.0
http://rapidshare.com/files/245627669/iPhone1_1_3.0_7A341_Restore.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/245624795/iPhone1_1_3.0_7A341_Restore.part2.rar


iPhone 3G OS 3.0
http://rapidshare.com/files/245642744/iPhone1_2_3.0_7A341_Restore.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/245639760/iPhone1_2_3.0_7A341_Restore.part2.rar

iPhone 3G S OS 3.0
http://rapidshare.com/files/245643191/iPhone2_1_3.0_7A341_Restore.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/245641385/iPhone2_1_3.0_7A341_Restore.part2.rar

iPod Touch 1G OS 3.0
http://rapidshare.com/files/245644845/iPod1_1_3.0_7A341_Restore.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/245642125/iPod1_1_3.0_7A341_Restore.part2.rar

iPod Touch 2G OS 3.0
http://rapidshare.com/files/245644759/iPod2_1_3.0_7A341_Restore.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/245642423/iPod2_1_3.0_7A341_Restore.part2.rar

Download iPhone OS 3.0 Build 7A341 Software Update Ftp Links:

Download iPhone 2G Firmware 3.0

Download iPhone 3G Firmware 3.0

Download iPod Touch Firmware 3.0

Download iPod Touch 2G Firmware 3.0

Here are the Url's:

iPhone 2G Firmware 3.0

http://appldnld.apple.com.edgesuite.net/content.info.apple.com/iPhone/061-6580.20090617.XsP76/iPhone1,1_3.0_7A341_Restore.ipsw

iPhone 3G Firmware 3.0

http://appldnld.apple.com.edgesuite.net/content.info.apple.com/iPhone/061-6578.20090617.VfgtU/iPhone1,2_3.0_7A341_Restore.ipsw

iPod Touch Firmware 3.0

http://pfd.apple.com/ProtectedAsset/iPodTouch/061-6579.20090527.Xde3T/iPod1,1_3.0_7A341_Restore.ipsw?downloadKey=1245345757_90c89d7c03d1843e05508328bcf51819

iPod Touch 2G Firmware 3.0

http://pfd.apple.com/ProtectedAsset/iPodTouch/061-6581.20090527.PiKu7/iPod2,1_3.0_7A341_Restore.ipsw?downloadKey=1245345757_e359c513da44b53b53f7aa2174319b84

Apple teams up with Adobe for iPhone Flash at long last

2009-02-01T14:49:00.000-08:00

With Android getting all Flash-ey, Apple's "Goldilocks" position on Flash -- the full Flash player is too hefty, Flash Lite is too weak -- seemed pretty untenable. Now Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen has revealed that Apple and Adobe are "collaborating" on making Flash a reality on the iPhone, citing the technical challenge it presents. What's clear is that with all this work to do, it doesn't seem they're going the watered-down Flash Lite route, but we're trying not to hold our breath for a full-on, Hulu-friendly version that will finally help us get that Doogie Howser fix on the go. Naturally, there's no word on when this will hit.

MP3 Mirror has potential, could be so much more

2009-02-01T14:47:00.003-08:00

Given that we've seen mirror TVs and MP3 players designed to emit sound within one's shower, we'd say Antonio Lupi's MP3 Mirror is just one of the gang. In fairness, we do appreciate the sleek design and its reported ability to integrate into any steel frame mirror, but unless we're badly mistaken, the user is still responsible for adding speakers. Our suggestion? Hook up with Emo Labs and concoct an all-in-one device with sound emission baked right into the shiny stuff.

iPhone Customer Sues Apple Over 'Broken Promises'

2009-02-01T14:47:00.002-08:00

A dissatisfied customer has filed yet another lawsuit against Apple concerning the iPhone 3G.

In a 14-page complaint filed this week, California resident Jason Medway alleges that the iPhone 3G suffers from a defect that makes its connection to the 3G network unstable.

"Thousands of consumers who purchased Apple's iPhone 3G and accompanying 3G service from AT&T have experienced broken promises regarding the phone's transmission speeds," the complaint stated.

Medway's lawsuit follows several others filed last year alleging Apple falsely advertised the iPhone 3G by calling it "twice as fast for half the price" compared with the original handset. In those complaints, customers said their iPhones could hardly maintain a connection on the 3G network and that download speeds were sluggish. The lawsuits followed widespread complaints regarding the iPhone 3G's network performance.

In a written response to one of the lawsuits, Apple said that "no reasonable person ... could have reasonably relied on or misunderstood Apple's statements as claims of fact."

Investigating the issue, Wired.com conducted a global study in August 2008, concluding the iPhone's network problems in the United States are due to AT&T's immature 3G network—not the handset's hardware. However, Medway does not name AT&T in his lawsuit.

Apple's Next iPhone Will Rule at Gaming

2009-02-01T14:47:00.001-08:00

The next upgrade to Apple's iPhone will have a strong focus on gaming, analysts and developers agree.

That's because the gaming market is an increasingly juicy segment of the mobile multimedia space — and it's one that Apple's phenomenally successful iPhone is well-positioned to dominate.

"The iPhone and iPod Touch are becoming a major new handheld gaming platform, and if you look at the App Store and look at what's doing well, that's reflecting," said Bart Decrem, CEO of Tapulous, developer of the popular Tap Tap Revenge iPhone game. "I would look forward to improvements in the device as a gaming platform both for the phone and iPod Touch."

Apple made clear its plans to seize the gaming market in November 2008 when Apple marketing executive Greg Joswiak called the iPhone and iPod Touch "the future of gameplay," posing a serious threat to dedicated gaming consoles such as the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP. The reasons? A few things: The quick, electronic distribution method of games and apps via the iPhone's App Store; the accelerometer and multitouch display, which are introducing new approaches to gameplay; and the iPhone's lighter, more portable form factor compared to its rivals.

Numbers say the iPhone is indeed in a position to assault the gaming market. Analysts predict Apple is on track to sell 40 million iPhones or more per year. By way of comparison, Nintendo sold 42 million DS consoles from January 2007 to June 2008.

Add to that the fact that the iPhone App Store has already got the DS and PSP beat in terms of game titles available: When the App Store was just three months old, it had 1,500 games; the PSP and DS had about 600 and 300 titles, respectively.

There are just a few weaknesses the iPhone needs to address before it's truly acknowledged as a serious game device, said Steve Demeter, developer of the Trism iPhone game: Processing limitations, graphic capabilities and memory management. For example, the PSP's advantage as a dedicated gaming device is that its application programming interface (API) is geared toward loading complex textures — a task the iPhone falls short on.

If Apple is serious about making the iPhone a gaming platform, it's a good bet that the next upgrade to the iPhone will address those limitations.

Tero Kuittinen, a Global Crown Capital analyst, agrees that the next iPhone will have enhanced graphics and more powerful processing capabilities. And those improvements will likely be incorporated in a new ARM chip that Apple is developing in-house. In April 2008, Apple acquired semiconductor company PA Semi to manufacture ARM chips for future iPhones.

Other than introducing graphical improvements it's unlikely the iPhone will see dramatic changes. Kuittinen noted that Apple enjoys keeping its interfaces consistent to ensure software is backward-compatible — so forget about a slide-out keyboard or a screen that's either much smaller or much larger than the current iPhone. Developers Decrem and Demeter agreed that Apple will likely be conservative with changes so as not to require software coders to rewrite applications to be compatible with the next iPhone.

One minor change Apple will likely introduce in the third-generation iPhone is an improved web camera with video-recording capability and a flash. Kuittinen said the camera will have to sport at least a 3.5-megapixel resolution in order to compete with Research In Motion, Samsung, HTC and LG, which are already selling handsets with superior cameras to the iPhone.

When can we expect the next iPhone? Considering the first iPhone launched June 2007 and the second iPhone shipped July 2008, the third-generation iPhone should land no later than summer 2009.

Let's hope this one has copy and paste.

Japanese Have a Better Lifestyle PC Than Americans

2009-02-01T14:46:00.001-08:00

Sony's hottest new netbook appears to be showing more love to Japan than the states.

In the United States, Sony launched the VAIO Series P Lifestyle PC — an 8 inch notebook that weighs 1.5 pounds — at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. At the convention, Sony said the Lifestyle would be shipping with a 1.33GHz Atom processor.

However, Engadget spotted specifications in Sony's Japanese site that list two options for faster processor speeds for the Lifestyle — 1.6GHz and 1.83GHz.

What gives? Are we getting those options here, too? Sony provided the following e-mail statement:

We do not comment on future product roadmaps.... The P Series is the ideal companion PC, allowing users to take it with them anywhere and everywhere for the ultimate computing on-the-go experience. We wanted to make sure the balance between price and performance was fair and after rigorous testing the Intel 1.33Ghz processor seemed to be the ideal candidate.

That's an odd response that conflicts with what Sony told me at CES, where a spokesman said the Lifestyle was powered with a 1.33GHz Atom to address heating issues.

Then again, considering this is a puny 8-inch netbook, I can't imagine customers would care that much about whether they're getting a 1.83GHz or 1.33 GHz CPU. Still, options are always nice, right?

Nicholas Negroponte Talks Up Second Gen OLPC Laptop

2009-02-01T14:45:00.002-08:00

The One Laptop Per Child project has taken a beating in the last few months with problems around scale of production, price and staff cuts.

The first laptop from the project, the XO-1, has mostly been sold through the 'Give One, Get One' program. Now a second generation version is on its way.

The XO-2 will be a $75 dual-screen device that can be held up vertically to resemble a book and turned around to use as a notebook.

The interesting thing here is that the hardware development will be open source in a bid to spur greater adoption, says Nicholas Negroponte, founder of MIT's Media Lab and champion of the OLPC project in an interview with The Guardian.

One important thing about the XO-2 is that we're going to do it as an open source hardware programme. The XO-1 was really designed as if we were Apple. The XO-2 will be designed as if we were Google - we'll want people to copy it. We'll make the constituent parts available. We'll try and get it out there using the exact opposite approach that we did with the XO-1.

Dual display aside, it will be touch-sensitive and have a haptic keyboard available, says Negroponte. Here's a leaked photo of what this dual display device could look like.

With its $75 price point there's also the hope that the XO-2 could potentially be used as a e-book reader in more developed markets. Maybe the OLPC project will be second-time lucky.

SanDisk Changes Strategy On Digital Music Players

2009-02-01T14:45:00.001-08:00

As SanDisk tries to find more ways to be profitable, the company could kill its older flash-memory based Sansa line of music players and instead focus on promoting its storage cards that come pre-loaded with music.

Instead of the iPod competitors that it has built, SanDisk will be pushing its slotMusic cards business. SlotMusic Cards are microSD memory cards that come pre-loaded with music albums. SanDisk's recent music players have been designed to promote the storage cards and those players will continue to be available.

A company spokeswoman confirmed the change. "Sandisk is committed to its digital music players and we have the Sansa Fuze and Clip on retail shelves," she says. "We are just looking at a shift in strategy that goes to the core of the company's focus on flash memory."

SanDisk entered the digital music player in 2005 with the Sansa music player. The inexpensive flash-based players became an iPod alternative for extremely budget conscious buyers.

Yet SanDisk has barely managed to make a dent in iPod's hegemony. Earlier this month, Apple said it sold 22.7 million iPods worldwide in the previous quarter, a three percent growth from the year before.

Recently, SanDisk started promoting its slotMusic cards product extensively. At the Consumer Electronics Show this year, the company introduced a new player called slotRadio and a line of companion music cards.

It's a significant evolution for the Sansa players that was first introduced in 2005 with the e100 series. The devices were initially available in the 512 MB and 1 GB versions and featured an SD card slot to add more storage. The flash-based players supported formats such as MP3 and Windows Media Audio (WMA) and storage was expandable using microSD cards.

Now SanDisk wants to make the microSD cards the centerpiece of its digital music business. In October 2008 the company launched the Sansa slotMusic player. The $20 slotMusic players were created to play slotMusic cards or user-loaded microSD cards.

The idea hasn't been met with great enthusiasm from bloggers. So is SanDisk making the right bet or should it be concede the ring to the iPod and get out of the music player business entirely?

BBC Snakeoil: 'Perfectly Accurate' Voice Recognition Phone 'Too Secret' to See

2009-02-01T14:44:00.002-08:00

"It's a secret world, most of which we can't film, and it operates from an industrial estate in Hereford."

So begins the BBC's coverage of the "The world's first fully accurate voice recognition system for mobile phones", built by a I A technology, company which employs just 40 people and normally supplies ejector seats to the military.

Is your snake-oil sense a-tinglin'? It should be. This video further charts the descent of the Beeb from an internationally respected and neutral reporting machine into a populist tabloid of a TV company.

The phone is called the Zumba, and comes in two parts: a giant, flat plastic ear and a rather retro looking box with a pie-chart shaped set of buttons on the front. Designer Dean McEvoy is dyslexic, and so designed the phone to be used without any typing or reading, ever. Sadly, the handset is too secret to even demonstrate. Or possibly, too not-working to show.

More: The phone is a "cloud" phone. All the heavy lifting is done on the company Web site, along with storage of your address book and presumably text messages. This site is apparently "100% secure", a claim we have heard more than once before. As McEvoy points out though, this does have the advantage of making the handset a dumb terminal -- if lost it's nothing more than a brick, free of personal information. Not that anyone would ever steal such an ugly box.

So what does the phone do? It appears that some super secret sauce lets you touch a single button on the earpiece and then speak. Your intentions are recognized and a text message is send, transcribed from your own spoken words. No mention is made of actual calls, but we'd think that this was just an omission from the film.

Do take a look at the video (non-embeddable -- linked below). McEvoy has the same look of desperate enthusiasm we saw in Sean McCarthy, back at our last snakeoil extravaganza, the Steorn Orbo perpetual motion machine. Maybe these guys should get together and make a hands-free, automatic phone that never needs charging? I'd buy that. You know, if it didn't disappear into obscurity after the first, doe-eyed, non-questioning media frenzy.

Retro Cassette Deck Will Hook Up to Almost Everything

2009-02-01T14:44:00.001-08:00

Back in the dark days before the internet, piracy took one form, whether software or music. It was the cassette tape, able to make hissy recordings of vinyl LPs, CDs and Commodore 64 games alike. My own nerd father used to sit at the "music center" every Sunday night for a couple of hours while the week's Top 40 was played. He wore big headphones, twiddled the analog VU meters and kept one forefinger constantly hovering over the pause button.

Now, of course, we have BitTorrent, Handbrake and all manner of other methods to help us steal bits and bytes. Which is why I'm happily surprised to see the PlusDeck Ex USB Cassette Deck, a cassette recorder which can slurp in almost everything.

It has a built in radio, a phone pre-amp for recording from vinyl turntables and a ridiculous array of inputs: USB, RCA, phono, 7.1 surround (in!), and the mysteriously named "cellphone input" and "adapter input".

There's a timer to control things when you're out and an IR remote to control them when you're in. All of this is pushed to your ears via the 7.1 surround sound output. It'll probably even hook up to an old ZX Spectrum and load Manic Miner for you. The price is a little steep, though, for something now rather niche -- it's $300. And good luck finding the tapes to put in it.

Awesome, Low-Tech Gadget Creates Liters of Fresh Water

2009-02-01T14:36:00.000-08:00

Sometimes the simplest technology is the best. The Watercone, a solar-powered water purifier, is a testament to that.

The cone-shaped device turns salty or dirty water into up to 1.7 liters of fresh water in a matter of hours, according to Watercone.

Here's how it works: You pour the bad water into a black pan, and then you screw on a cone. The black pan absorbs sunlight and heats up the water. Then, the evaporated water condensates into droplets on the cone's inner wall, and the droplets drop into a circular trough at the inner case of the cone. After a few hours, you can unscrew the cap, tip the cone upside down and empty out the clean water into a receptacle.

The Watercone is due out this summer, and it should cost no more than $30. This will be a tremendous help for poorer, developing countries.

Check out a video of the Watercone in action below the jump.

Continue reading "Awesome, Low-Tech Gadget Creates Liters of Fresh Water" »

First Look: MSI's Second Wind Blows Away Its Predecessor

2009-02-01T14:35:00.000-08:00

Here at Gadget Lab we've been blessed with an early test unit of the MSI Wind U120 — the successor to the popular MSI Wind netbook. Our first impressions? We like it plenty. The improvements from the first model are very minor, but they make a significant difference on something as small as a netbook.

Here's a rundown of the MSI Wind U120's features, accompanied by beautiful photography courtesy of Wired.com's Jonathan Snyder.

Bigger, Better Trackpad

First and foremost—the trackpad (above). Almost everybody complained about the crappy trackpad on the first Wind, and MSI listened. The Wind U120's improved trackpad is about two centimeters wider than the previous one, and you'd be amazed at how much easier it is to mouse around with that tiny addition in space. Also, the texture of the trackpad is a bit grainy, which makes navigating less of a slippery experience than it was on the previous model's. Third and most important—the Wind U120 has two silver buttons accompanying the trackpad, which beats the living bejeezus out of the clunky, single mouse button on the original Wind.

Photo Scanning Web Services Save Time, But How Much?

2009-02-01T14:34:00.000-08:00

If you've wanted to scan thousands of family picture prints at a time but never had the time to go through with it, a couple of services are available to do the job on your behalf. ScanDigital and ScanMyPhotos.com both take pictures that you send through snail mail and get back to you in digital versions that you can store in the cloud, safely.

ScanDigital's service scans your photos at 48 cents per print (at 300 dpi) or for 68 cents (at 600 dpi) to an online server where you can download or share them with others. Once they're done, they'll send you back DVDs of the digital pictures and all of the originals. According to the company, you receive task progress emails through the process.

But it's not that easy to send those pictures to them in the first place, according to Yahoo's Christopher Null. He tried the service this month and found that the instructions to send the pics were somewhat confusing and didn’t like that he couldn’t change his dpi scanning requests before the service was practically over. In theory, ScanDigital could set up a live online scanning 'booth' where a customer could check out how his pictures were looking while they were being scanned, and possibly request re-scanning a few for a few more bucks.

ScanMyPhotos.com also offers a similar service and scans hundreds of pictures per minute through an unnamed Kodak machine seen in this video. It's probably similar to this one. Its rate of 5 cents per photo is likely the cheapest out of any similar service on the internet. But you just can't send out a big box with a messy array of pics. You have to separate them all out into small packages with rubber bands and label them in sequence, and they all need the correct orientation. That's annoying. Basically, you're still doing a lot of the work and they're just taking care of the basic scanning.

But are these services any better than buying a good scanner and just doing it yourself?

At the beginning of the year, one of my New Year's resolutions was to scan thousands of photo prints on behalf of my older relatives. I thought it was important to insure their memories (which are also my own) against disasters like earthquakes, theft, and flooding. But one hour after I started scanning prints of the first box out of 15, (with a high-quality flatbed), I just quit. I realized this was going to take forever.

I'd scanned 16 pictures, which seemed like a lot to me (maybe that's a pathetic number for scanning pros, but I was trying to be perfect with the framing). I figured that if there were 2,000 pictures in the boxes, it would take me over 156 hours to complete the task. Rats.

Since that's way too much, I'm probably going to use ScanDigital to get them in order. Even if takes me a full afternoon to ship them, I figure I will save a week's worth of hours, at least. 150 big ones. It's not going to be cheap to pay for the service, but nothing is more expensive than wasted time.

Porsche Cayman S sportscar review

2009-02-01T14:32:00.001-08:00

Half a 100 grand, in this financial climate? Yes please.

Life as a Porsche coupe without the ‘911’ badge emblazoned upon your rump is always going to be tough. You’re not one of the cool kids at school; you’re the Z-lister without an invite to the glamorous parties.

Nevertheless, the Cayman has coped the best it can, climbing to the top of its class through sheer ability while tolerating the occasional jibe from the ill informed. Predictably, it remains a relatively rare sight on our roads.

Now, in truly relentless Porsche practice, we have the second generation Cayman: not an all new car as such, but a careful and thorough evolution, even if you’ll need a cagoule and NHS specs to spot the visual differences.

Who cares? It takes just a blast up through the gears to feel the added bite of the new ‘S’ engine, an all-new motor with a trick way of squirting the fuel into the mix. It works, because not only does it sound frisky – as ever, right on your shoulder in the cabin – and use less fuel, but it makes this relatively small and light coupe virtually as fast as a 911 – and that means very exciting indeed.

It’s still freakishly good to drive, with an inspiring chassis that encourages you without turning your knuckles white on the ‘wheel. And now you can order one with Porsche’s amazing twin clutch seven-speed transmission - even if stirring a good old-fashioned gear lever remains the most exciting way to drive your Cayman. This might just be the best real-world sports car on sale.

If you fancy owning one, it will set you back £44,108.

Apple iLife 2009 review

2009-02-01T14:26:00.000-08:00

Upgrade your iLife

Perhaps the biggest news of the last Macworld Expo was the unveiling of the two new updates for iLife and iWork. Both applications get around 90 major changes but the main show-stopper was iLife's iPhoto, with handy new features such as face recognition and the ability to plot your snaps on a Google map and send them directly to your Facebook pals. As it all sounds terribly exciting, does it really work? Read on...

iPhoto

iPhoto has become the champion application for iLife ’09, in acknowledgment of the fact that everyone and their dog now has a digital camera. It gets the biggest push this time with heaps of really quite impressive new tricks.

Faces joins Events as a new way of sorting your library, but it’s much cleverer. Using face detection technology, Faces automatically scans your photo collection to identify the same person throughout your library, so that you can label that person in one hit. When you label one person, Faces suggests other pictures of people that look similar.

It’s not perfect and sometimes you might find iPhoto asking you if this is your nephew, when it’s actually a slightly blurry picture of your nan, and sadly it doesn’t work at all with profiles of animals. You can of course label your pets manually. Now, when you make a new smart album, iPhoto can find and group your friends for you and suggest pictures you might have forgotten about.

Alongside Mobile Me, Facebook and Flickr buttons have been added to the iPhoto main screen. Anyone who's addicted to Facebook knows what a chore it is, tagging photos of all your chums - Faces makes the process a lot easier. Once you've tagged everyone on Faces, it will sync with your Facebook profile, so photos are not only uploaded straight to your photo album on the social networking site, but the tags will match Facebook tags. Also, when your Facebook friend labels someone you didn’t know, their profile name is added to your photo.

Places is powered by Google and shows you a world map. When you use your cursor to drop a pin in it, you’ll be shown a list of all the photos you have from that location. If your camera has geo-tagging, then iPhoto will do all of this for you, otherwise, you’ll need to label each photo first. A bit of a hassle but well worth it. Apple has enhanced the Google map to recognize actual addresses or landmarks too.

You can also add maps to your photo book too. When you label a photo, a small picture of the world map, showing that location will appear on the page if you so choose. And for the inside cover, you could plot lines on the Google map to show where all the photos were taken.

Another update is that red-eye removal is now automatic, like the face recognition feature, and the retouch function has inherited some features from Apple’s professional Apperture software. Now it is much more effective at airbrushing and brightening your blurrier snaps - we had great fun playing around with this on the slightly less favourable photos.

Once you’re done airbrushing you can export your slideshows in a resolution to suit your iPhone or iPod Nano or any other fruit flavoured companion you may own. To spice up the slide shows you can add Apple licensed slide shows and even movies.

iMovie

iMovie gets around 40 new tricks including an impressive stabilization feature that turns a shaky handheld camcorder clip into a steady movie-like shot. After you’ve imported your clip iMovie analyses the footage frame by frame first and then smoothes out the wobbles to a degree that you select yourself.

A brilliant Spielberg-esque feature is you can add an animation that presents, as a line on a globe, where your film was shot. Just think about the in-between bits in the Indian Jones films when Indy boards a plane that flies to the next scene.

Another cool animation starts your home made film as a camera zoom into the cover of a photo album which becomes the opening scene.

Editing photos with the Ken Burns effect to the beat of a tune is particularly satisfying. Just press edit on the beat while you listen to the music and then drag photos, or video clips, to each change.

GarageBand

The best new feature in GarageBand is a guitar lesson that shows you an instruction video along with a fret board graphic that shows you where to put your fingers. For $4.99, you can download a Sting tutorial, for example, from the iTunes store, or Nora Jones if it’s the Piano that you want to learn.

We're no guitarist, but after a lesson with Sting, we were feeling more confident about our guitar prowess, although we'd like to see some more well-known musicians featured in the Artist Lessons.

Nintendo DSi heading to UK ahead of schedule

2009-02-01T14:23:00.000-08:00

It was unveiled back in October of last year, but wasn't expected on these shores until the latter part of this year. But now it looks like the Nintendo DSi is heading to the UK much sooner.

According to a document spotted on Nintendo's website, the new launch date for Europe is 'Spring-Summer 2009', which could in theory be only weeks away. Take our advice, get saving and brush the dust off that sleeping bag, we suspect stocks will be severely limited.

If you want a low-down on Nintendo's new handheld, check out our guide to the device. But if you want the brief highlights, the DSi offers an integrated 3 megapixel camera, an additional camera for gameplay, a slightly larger screen, enhanced multimedia features including media player, photo viewer and web browser, plus an SD card slot for storage.

In Japan, you can pick up the DSi for the equivalent of £116. Whether that's the case for the UK remains to be seen.

iTunes Plus now lets you upgrade individual tracks

2009-02-01T14:15:00.000-08:00

Pick whichever tracks you want to upgrade and leave out the ones you don't

Apple has made a welcome, if belated, change to its iTunes Plus policies. You can now choose to upgrade tracks on an individual basis, so you can gun for higher bit rate versions of the ones you love and stick to the low quality for the ones you don’t listen to as much.

Previously, if you wanted to take advantage of the higher bit rate options available through iTunes Plus, you had to commit to upgrading your entire library. That wasn’t a huge problem if you’ve only bought a handful of tracks from iTunes, but if you’ve been building a sizeable music collection, the complete upgrade might cost a sizeable amount of cash.

Another problem is that if you’ve been buying albums, you probably don’t really want to spend money on upgrading the quality of rubbish filler tracks that you’ll never listen to again.

All that has now been solved by Apple granting iTunes users the ability to upgrade on a per-song basis. You don’t have to pay for the whole lot at once and you can upgrade overtime, counting out those tracks that don’t warrant the 256kbps treatement.

The price to upgrade your tracks to iTunes Plus are 20p for an individual song or £2 for a whole album. If you’re reading this having already bitten the bullet and paid for the whole shebang, you have our sympathies.

Samsung NP-X460

2008-12-17T06:35:00.000-08:00

Samsung Notebook Brings a Touch of Class to the Privileged

It's a good thing you took all of your money out of stocks in August and invested heavily in wheat futures, because now all those Wall Street schmucks are lining up for your bread, and you're making a killing. Because now, rather than trampling an octogenarian at Walmart for a $350 Daewoo laptop, you can kick down a little more for a luxury notebook. In everything but name, the Samsung X460 is just that: a bourgeois piece of tech for the upper crust. It looks good, performs well, has nice battery life, and it's a lighter than many 14.1-inch widescreens. But people are just going to have difficulty coughing up 1,600 smackers for one — except maybe you, Rockefeller.

This swanky machine has a velvety black and crimson styling befitting a smoking jacket, so it'll go well with yours — and looks good in the study sitting on your virgin teak and gorilla-skin laptop table. Its 2.26-GHz Core 2 Duo is speedy and its 320-GB drive roomy, so you'll have no problem editing your photos or video from your latest safari or night out with Clooney and Pitt. The Nvidia GeForce 9200M GS offers pleasing game performance, especially for a borderline ultralight. The keyboard is reminiscent of the MacBook Air's, and it's quite solid and comfortable, so you needn't worry about the RSI that often afflicts the working class. And the card reader can accommodate not only SD but also Memory Stick and xD, so you use the cards directly from your Canon, Sony or Olympus — no cables are necessary (not that you can't afford a cable).

Regretfully, if Samsung is going to go all out, it should pull out the stops. If you are going to pay a premium price for a laptop, you should at least get Blu-ray, but it's not even offered as an option here. And while 3-plus hours of battery life is decent, one cannot expect civilized people to plug in midflight, even if the servant in first class will do it for you.

In reality, most of us are wiping the still-wet ramen noodles from our beards, as we scour Craigslist for our next gig while our severance or unemployment rapidly dwindles. This is just not the economic climate to throw money around on a notebook that almost gets there. The Samsung is a good notebook, but it's not great, it's way overpriced, and it doesn't even have a big brand to artificially inflate its worth. If you're loaded, shouldn't your notebook be, too?

WIRED Impeccable elegance gives you coffeeshop je ne sais quoi. Support for SD, Memory Stick and xD is rare and cool. Overall high performance marks for a thin and light notebook.

TIRED Price: This is a great deal in a $900 machine. $1,600? Not so much. Lack of Blu-ray is puzzling, especially considering the HDMI-out.

Style: Thin and light
Operating System: MS Vista
Manufacturer: Samsung
Price: $1,600 (as tested)

Sharp To Unveil TVs With Integrated Blu-ray Players Next Month

2008-12-17T06:32:00.000-08:00

The Blu-ray format has yet to blow up in a wave of success, but Sharp Electronics is betting that a Blu-ray-TV combo design will boost its sales and bring the company some needed buzz.

According to Sharp executive Mike Troetti, the company will release two Aquos LCD HDTVs with embedded Blu-ray players next month, right after they're unveiled during CES 2009.

The TVs will come in 32 inches and 42 inches, and the latter will have 1080p HD resolution and a 120Hz frame-rate processing. Both sizes will feature a multiple slot loading rig for easy transitions between Blu-rays, DVDs and CDs. For the moment, there's no word on whether the TV will be able to play the full suite of Blu-ray disc profiles.

Here in the Gadget Lab, we're big fans of the All-in-One rig, whether it's a touchscreen PC, or a quality iMac, but we're a bit skeptical of this one because of the nightmares of recent history.

In the early 1990s, if you remember, TVs with embedded VCRs were some of the most popular consumer electronic designs and flew out of Costcos in a hurry. It was easy and you didn't have to deal with any of that darn complicated cord pluggin', video input crap. But it wasn't especially fun when the VCR head inevitably coughed up half-eaten bricks or when you realized that they added a good 30% to its overall area. And very often, the quality of the video playback just wasn't as good as you could find it in separate set-top boxes.

This video quality disparity was less of a problem with embedded DVDs, but it is likely to come up again with the Blu-ray format, which still hasn't settled because manufacturers keep improving upon the players (although that's mostly a good thing). We'll take a look at this disparity when the TVs are released.

The early rumor is that the 42-inch Sharp HDTV/Blu-ray will be priced at about $2,000 or so.

What do you guys think? Will the convenience of the all-in-one rig prove enough of an incentive to buy, or is buying separate always the better TV option?

Unlocked Taiwanese iPhones Could Cause Gray Import Surge

2008-12-17T06:31:00.004-08:00

At $800 and $900 for the 8GB and 16GB models respectively, these iPhones aren't cheap. But the official Thai iPhone is, along with the Hong Kong version, the only way you'll be able to get your hands on an unlocked 3G.

While freeing the original iPhone from its carrier is a simple one or two click process, the 3G still hasn't seen a baseband unlock (you can jailbreak, or hack them to run unofficial software but you're still tied to the contract you bought it with). And with Euro telcos asking for some ridiculously high monthly charges, the lure of a non-tied handset is strong.

We'll see if these things make it onto the gray market, but our suspicion is that demand will be strong, especially in those countries which don't even have an iPhone yet. But remember, those prices are what you pay direct to Chunghwa Telecom (CHT) for the phone. Any Ebayer offering them up will certainly be putting a hefty percentage on top.

RAZR Re-Incarnated as Knock-Off Baby Toy

2008-12-17T06:31:00.003-08:00

It might not have the cachet of the iPhone, but the sheer ubiquity of Motorola's hate-it-or-hate-it RAZR means it has achieved an altogether higher form of immortality. It has been made into a toy for babies.

Here we see the plastic representation of Moto's iconic, hard-to-use clamshell handset. It has all the features needed to entertain an eighteen-month-old: chewy plastic corners, annoying sounds (just like the real thing!) and a rubberized, spittle-proof keypad.

In fact, this toy is so suited to the partially developed human that BoingBoingGadget's John Brownlee, who visited my temporary Berlin apartment last night to beg for companionship (it appears that even his paedokeet pet, Humbert Humbird, has grown tired of him) dropped his iPhone and picked up the Baby RAZR.

"I can't believe you still use one of these," he scoffed, brandishing his (old, first-gen) iPhone. "You're a professional gadget blogger," he continued, "you should be setting an example!"

Ah, the irony. I believe Brownlee returned to his lonely home still chuckling, unaware that the toy was in fact a toy. A toy that, incidentally, doesn't even fool its owner, a real baby that only two days ago mistook the Lady's furry hat for a potty and attempted to make a deposit.

Price, unknown. Availability: your local dime-store. More pictures below.

Hackers Successfully Unlock the iPhone 3G

2008-12-17T06:31:00.001-08:00

A team of hackers announced Tuesday that it has unlocked the iPhone 3G.

Codenamed "yellowsn0w," the hack will enable the iPhone 3G to work with 3G networks other than those sanctioned by Apple. (For example, the unlock hack would make the iPhone 3G work on the T-Mobile network in the United States.) The iPhone Dev-Team, famous for unlocking the original iPhone, said the hack will be ready for release by Dec. 31.

This, of course, will undoubtedly lead to another game of cat and mouse. When the Dev-Team unlocked the first iPhone in 2007, Apple released software updates that effectively bricked (i.e., rendered useless) any unlocked handset.

"It's a cat-and-mouse game," said Jobs, when asked about unlocked iPhones in November 2007. "We try to stay ahead. People will try to break in, and it's our job to stop them breaking in."

It should be clarified that "Jailbreaking" the iPhone is not the same as unlocking it -- though there is some confusion over this term. The term Jailbreak refers to a process that hacks the iPhone to run unauthorized software -- apps that likely would never be approved in Apple's iPhone App Store. The iPhone Dev-Team released the Jailbreak tool for iPhone 3G -- called Pwnage 2.0 -- just days after the iPhone 3G's launch in July.

Tilt-Shift Comes to the iPhone

2008-12-17T06:26:00.002-08:00

Tilt-Shift photography (and the faking thereof) is so hot right now. In fact, it will probably date the photography of today in the same way the tobacco-graduated filter dates the pictures of the 1980s.

Now, the technique is set to swarm onto iPhones everywhere with the application TiltShift, enabling casual snappers to turn their surroundings into tiny models, with little people and matchbox-sized buildings.

What is tilt-shift? As you can see from the name, it comprises two parts, the tilt and the shift. Both of these involve moving the lens in relation to the film plane. The main historical use was for architectural photography -- the lens could be tilted to also tilt the focal plane, meaning that the photographer could have things both near and far in focus at the same time.

The lens could also be shifted (usually up) to capture the top of a building without tilting the camera back and inducing "converging verticals", a big no-no in the starchy world of architects. Interestingly, converging horizontals (railway lines that appear to touch in the distance) have never been so ostracized, presumably because you'd need a mile-high tripod to fix them.

The modern day use of tilt-shift lenses has been to simulate the effect of tiny models. If you take a picture of a train set, say, then you'll have a tiny area of focus, quickly blurring in front of and behind the subject. It turns out that this visual cue is wired tightly to our perception of size and therefore reducing the depth of field with a tilt lens makes things look tiny to us.

The lenses are a pain to use, though, so software stepped in. And now that software is available to do in-phone processing on the iPhone. TitlShift is a $2 app which allows some basic but powerful manipulation. You choose the area you want to keep in focus and "feather" the edges of that selection. The software then adds the lens blur. Easy.

The one thing we'd ask for would be to control the tilt effect by actually tilting the iPhone. That would be sweet. As it is, you have to use sliders on screen -- way more accurate, but way less fun.

IPod Touch owners aren't left out. The app comes with a small library of photos to play with, and can process anything already in your film-roll.

Pentax' Special Edition K2000 Dials the FFFFFF Up to Eleven

2008-12-17T06:26:00.001-08:00

Pentax has announced a white, special edition of its 10.2 MP DSLR beginner-cam, the K2000 (or K-m, depending where in the world you are). Other than color, it differs not a jot from the black K2000 launched in September.

The white body will come in a kit, bundled with two lenses, also lacking in pigmentation -- the DA L 18-55mm F3.5-5.6 AL and the DA L 50-200mm F4-5.6 AL. It doesn't look like there is a white version of the Pentax flashgun that was included in the original kit, though, which is a cryin' Christmas shame.

Today's news seems to be developing something of a theme. First, there is a movie reference in every post (go count 'em) and now, along with the snowball launcher, we have a snow white camera. We'd stick to the snowball fights for now, though. The white K2000 kit will hit stores in February 2009, too late to make it under the Christmas tree. Officially, the price is yet to be decided, but the reliable DP Review says this:

£449 [$701] with 18-55mm kit lens, £549 [$857] with both 18-55mm and 50-200mm lenses

Cowon S9 review

2008-12-17T06:24:00.001-08:00

Cowon 'ave a go...

The latest personal media player from Cowon clearly wants to be an iPod Touch when it grows up. It’s almost – but not quite – the Touch’s equal on so many points. It has a 3.3-inch display compared to the Touch’s 3.5-incher, for example. It comes in 8GB and 16GB sizes, whereas the Touch now goes up to 32GB. And, in place of the Touch’s built-in wi-fi is the S9’s much less useful Bluetooth support.

In some areas, however, the S9 actually manages to pip its rival at the post. Audio quality, particularly, is a strong suit for Cowon’s young whipper snapper. The BBE+ sound field system really manages to put some punch into compressed music files. A selection of additional JetEffect enhancements and EQ settings lets you tweak sound settings to your preference too, helping in some situations to compensate for weaker headphones. Speaking of which, you’ll need to avail yourself of a decent pair of cans forthwith, as the buds supplied here really don’t do the S9 justice.

To carry on the comparison, Cowon’s S9 is also a great deal lighter than the iPod and a little smaller in all proportions other than its depth. Its AMOLED (that’s Active Matrix Organic Light-emitting Diode, acronym fans) screen is noticeably brighter and more colour-rich than the standard LCD screen on the ‘Pod, too. Movies look stunning, and a familiar motion sensor-based feature means that flipping the device on its side lets you view your cinematic gems in all their widescreen glory.

Additional bonuses include an FM radio and an audio recording facility. Battery life isn’t bad, either, and A/V output lets you plug the little chap into a big, grown-up telly if you want to.

The only real letdown, in fact, is the S9’s slightly disappointing control system – a combination of touch-screen interface and physical buttons. It’s obviously supposed to work a bit like Apple’s equivalent but it doesn’t. Having a choice of ‘skins’ is all well and good, but using the S9 just isn’t as intuitive as it should be. The fact that pressing the awkwardly positioned ‘home’ button is actually slightly painful to use doesn’t help matters much.