An Australian pilot program using the iPod touch as a classroom tool has some high school students doing more homework, others puzzling over the device.

Though the small program — eight 14-year-olds — using iPod touches is far from giving a scientific answer of how they might change learning, a few interesting things have cropped up.

One: Louise Duncan, the teacher who started the program at Shepparton High in Victoria, found that some of the kids had trouble using them.

“We assume that 14-year-olds are really technologically savvy, but they’re often not,” she told Perth newspaper Western Australia Today.

Students use the hand-held media players to search the internet, download music, do quizzes, research and submit assignments and work with students in Singapore.

Duncan found that students in the test program were more willing to come to school, did more homework and used their iPods more than laptops or desktop computers.

The iPods are on loan from Apple and run on the Study Wiz platform; the test is part of a global mobile learning project.

Via WA today

You could add this hand sewn iPod Shuffle in felt to your iPhone, a key chain, or otherwise adorn yourself with it, making the cuddly gadget just a bit more useful than the felt version of Apple’s phone that can’t be used even as a dog toy.

Cuter than cute, the 1″ x 1.5″ plush iPods are the handiwork of a woman in the Philippines with, as you might imagine, a declared love of kawaii stuffed toys.

iPod Shuffle charms come in blue, gray, pink, orange, red and green (specify your color pick in advance) at just $4 a pop on Etsy.

Via High Tech Divas

Lost in the verbiage over Apple’s decision to expand the number of DRM-free songs on iTunes was a fee some are calling Apple’s ‘music tax’ potentially worth $1.8 billion to Cupertino.

iTunes users will need to pay $0.30 per track ($0.60 per video and 30 percent of the price of an album) to use Apple’s one-click conversion to DRM-free listening pleasure. While offering copy-protection free iTunes songs is viewed as a ‘win’ for consumers, it may also further enrich Apple’s coffers.

Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch estimates Apple would earn $1.8 billion if each of the 9 billion iTunes sales were converted to non-DRM.

“That’s a music tax, plain and simple,” wrote Schonfeld.

Of course, the fee doesn’t apply to songs you burnt from your own CDs or obtained elsewhere - only from Apple. Still, the conversion could amount to a significant sum both in money and time, another writer discovered.

Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt wrote it cost $50.60 to convert 231 songs he’d originally purchased from Apple. The conversion to the DRM-free iTunes Plus took more than seven hours, he said.

In related news, Apple’s adoption of a three-tiered pricing formula to entice music label’s agreement on the DRM issue may actually cost publishers, analyst firm Needham & Co. said Tuesday. Offering a higher price for more popular songs may push more music lovers to file-sharing, while the lower $0.69 per track price could force publishers to sell 40 percent more songs just to break even.

Fart Studio: “Your all-in-one flatulence solution!” Oh, I see: you get to COMPOSE your fart sounds. Some people might call that feature creep.

Meow: it … meeows.

And finally, True Flirt. The developers say: “This might actually get you a date!”. Hmm. Might.

Among the more interesting things I’ve come across so far at Macworld is an innovative calling application from Freedom Voice, called Newber. Somewhat similar, but with a couple of key differences to Grand Central, Newber lets you route every phone call made to you though a single number and, using GPS location awareness, lets you take the call on any phone that happens to be nearby.

If you’re in the office at your desk, Newber will send calls to your work phone. At home it can ring the house phone. On the road Newber will ring your iPhone, the phone extension in your hotel room, even the payphone at the gas station in the middle of nowhere where you’re getting a flat fixed - if that’s where you want it to ring. Your callers have one number for you and you can receive their calls anywhere.

I saw the app in a demo at a press event on Monday night and spoke further yesterday with David Gerzof, president of Bigfish Communications, the PR firm representing Newber, about the difficulty Freedom Voice has had getting the Newber app approved for distribution in the AppStore. “Newber was submitted in October and Apple authorized the product manager to contact them by phone, which he does every day,” Gerzof told me. “They haven’t said it will be approved or that it won’t be approved, in fact we can’t see from our activity logs where they have even begun testing it. It’s very frustrating.”

As a result, despite having already put several hundred thousand dollars into developing the platform for iPhone, Gerzof and Newber aren’t putting all their eggs in Apple’s basket. A Demo application for Blackberry is already operating and the company is also working on one for Android. “We love Apple and began work first with the iPhone SDK because we wanted it to be the launch platform, but if they aren’t interested, we have to move forward with the others,” Gerzof says.

Hackers Tuesday forced MacRumors to halt its live-blogging coverage of Apple marketing exec Phil Schiller’s keynote speech at Macworld Expo. The hack hit MacRumorsLive.com, a domain created for commenting on the annual San Francisco, Calif. Mac-focused tradeshow.

Interspersed with live updates about news of iPhoto upgrades were offensive messages, including one declaring Apple CEO “Steve Jobs just died.”

In a statement posted about an hour after Macworld Expo opening, the site’s founder Arnold Kim apologized to readers for the attack.

The source of the attack is unclear, although some evidence appeared to point to a group known as 4Chan. The phrase “4CHAN FTW” (”for the win”) was often part of the hacked blogging messages, according to CNET’s Caroline McCarthy.

McCarthy cited a Twitter user, writing “4Chan members had been circulating MacRumors passwords” Monday night prior to the keynote.

Another group called Myg0t, may also have been involved, according to the report.

The cost of the hack may go beyond embarrassment to lost advertising revenue.

Although Apple marketing head Phil Schiller announced a 17-inch MacBook Pro and more DRM-free music from iTunes, one analyst believes what wasn’t said is what counts most.

Gene Munster, the Piper Jaffray analyst and Mac-watcher, wrote Tuesday that the lack of many fireworks during Schiller’s talk signaled “Steve Jobs remains primary spokesman and active leader” for Apple.

The question of how active Jobs will be as CEO while he undergoes therapy for a “hormone imbalance” was raised Tuesday when brokerage firm Oppenheimer & Co. wondered if Jobs could fully perform as head of Apple.

In what amounted to a split decision, the Wall Street financial analyst upgraded the Cupertino, Calif.-based company to “outperfrom” from “perform” but lowered its target stock price by $10 to $135.

For his part, Munster told clients while Jobs bypassed his traditional Macworld speaking gig, “we expect him to continue to appear at special events for all major announcements.”

Munster called Tuesday’s Macworld keynote “underwhelming,” confirming lowered expectations analysts voice prior to the tradeshow’s opening. The consensus is that while 2009 is the last Macworld for Apple, the technology player has its retail stores, along with other conferences for major announcements.

Before the December announcement that Jobs would hand over keynote duties to Schiller and Macworld Expo 2009 would be Apple’s last appearance at the tradeshow, analysts expected the CEO would announce a low-cost iPhone. In the aftermath of the withdrawal, expectations were lowered, with any major product introduction happening later this year.

There are is two one great new features in iWeb 09 that went unannounced in yesterday’s keynote, both of which transforms it, in my opinion, from a waste of disk space into a potentially useful tool.

The two changes are is:

→ iWeb can now handle multiple web sites simultaneously; you simply flick from one to another in the sidebar

→ iWeb now lets you publish to any (S)FTP server, rather than tying you in to Mobile Me or restricting you to publishing to a local folder

There have been a few instances in recent years when I’ve briefly toyed with the idea of using iWeb for basic web projects, only to reject it seconds later because of these two this flaws. With iLife 09 installed, I’m going to revisit those projects and think again.

UPDATE: I am an idiot.

Today’s was the first MacWorld keynote I’ve missed in three years, and I have to say, I really didn’t miss anything. But then again, it was quite clear Apple was making a half-hearted showing as it was, revealing none of the products people are most excited about <cough>Mac mini</cough> and announcing several products that are either predictable, uninspiring, or just plain obnoxious toward consumers. Is anyone excited about variable iTunes song pricing who doesn’t work for a record label? Anyone? Or how about the “Indiana Jones” effect for iMovie 09 so you can have a fake plane fly over a fake globe to represent travel? This was worth gathering the world’s technology media?

It’s probably for the best that Steve Jobs didn’t show.

But all of the above was apparent to anyone watching. What was left implicit, though it was communicated loud and clear, is the fact that Apple now has to put its money where its mouth is, having dismissed MacWorld’s trade show atmosphere, and put together some truly special product launch events very quickly. The biggest advantage to not making the first Tuesday of January the holy grail of Apple announcements is that Apple can announce products when they’re ready and as it suits them, instead of forcing stuff to be ready ahead of time for MacWorld (and to beat out the CES news cycle). In other words, Apple should let the rest of the month pass, and then make a major hardware introduction on every Tuesday in February, culminating in a press event on the last Tuesday of the month to unveil the much-anticipated new Mac mini (and with the 32-gig iPhone coming somewhere beforehand).

At the end of the day, Apple is probably logically right that MacWorld doesn’t make sense for them anymore. I think it’s ungrateful, given how much the enthusiast community saved Apple during the mid-’90s, but it probably is the right thing from a business standpoint. But it also feels like they deliberately left a lot out of today’s announcements, as if to emphasize their rejection of the trade show model. It just felt cheap, you know?

Online bookseller Books on Board brings some 20,000 e-book titles to your iPod Touch or iPhone.

From Clive Cussler to “Do-It-Yourself Hedge Funds,” there’s bound to be something for everyone. Prices range from about $14-19.

The nice thing: instead of a dedicated app that you can only use at Books on Board, the service piggybacks on free app Stanza.

If you want to try before you buy, they offer a few sample downloads gratis, mostly romance novels.

Via Textually

The media and the public trickled onto the Macworld exhibit floor in the wake of Phil Schiller’s Keynote speech Tuesday in San Francisco with a collective yawn, casting a sad and listless pall over Apple’s final year at the seminal trade show dedicated to Mac and Macintosh innovation. Gone was the excitement generated in recent years by the introduction of revolutionary new products such as iPod and iPhone. Gone was the sense that Steve Jobs contagious’ enthusiasm and obsessive secrecy could somehow reward us with ever more new, beautiful, elegantly designed products that would change our relationship to technology and with each other.

Instead, Schiller left the Apple community pondering battery life and notebook aftermarket resale values, wondering how a little face paint and eye shadow applied to iWork and iLife is going to drive increasing revenue to One Infinite Loop between the end of Macworld on Thursday and the next Cupertino Town Hall event sometime later this year.

One the surface of things, a mood that I might liken to one in a household where the divorce has been agreed to but not yet finalized, is curiously appropriate to the uncertain economic horizon each and every one of the hundreds of Macworld exhibitors - as well as, of course, the show’s anchor tenant - is facing.

Sure it would have been exhilarating for Phil Schiller to have whipped out a thoroughbred upgrade to the Mac mini today, or a revamped Apple TV that might challenge the assumptions of what an interface between the office and the living room could look like. But I talked to several long time Mac addicts on the floor this afternoon, who confided they were relieved not to be tempted by any groundbreaking hardware innovations from Apple - because big ticket expenditures of every stripe are on hold until further notice.

In its way, then, Apple proved it still has the pulse of its audience well in hand - why offer revolutionary new products that would require hundreds or thousands of dollars in new investment (not to mention the huge investment in manufacturing required to roll out new hardware) when the company can let its legions of loyal consumers who have already bought Macs and iMacs over the years try on new software outfits at $50 - $80 a pop? Lean times may be coming for everyone but by golly you can spend your downtime learning how to play guitar with John Fogarty and marvel at the face recognition amazements of new iPhoto software.

Some of the busier booths on the exhibit floor this afternoon were ones hawking accessory items costing well under $100. Big gear manufacturers with shiny new products costing in the hundreds and thousands of dollars, not so much. And the reps of a couple of those exhibitors told me some of the newest stuff they have at the show are just prototypes, with no big production commitments coming into place until the economy and consumer spending shows signs of taking an upturn.

Compared to recent years, Day 1 attendance was significantly lower, something I could tell in the sparse lines at the concession stands and in the reliability of the WiFi connections available throughout the hall. But fewer people were here today because Steve Jobs was not here today. Tomorrow, when you’d expect the attendees interested in Macworld regardless of Steve Jobs’ presence, we’ll get a better idea of just how deflated the Mac community is over Apple’s final Macworld appearance and a sense of how much air has gone out of what was until pretty recently a high-flying market for computer technology.

For me, the most interesting part of that keynote was the stuff about batteries. I think it’s safe to predict that similar long-life, non-replacable custom batteries will be appearing in the smaller Apple notebook computers in coming months.

Apple’s gone to great lengths to push this battery idea. Witness the expensively-produced video on the MacBook Pro page, that spends a lot of time explaining why it had to be this way. This shows that Apple expected some backlash.

The negative feelings on this issue runs deeper, though, thanks to a problem that’s industry-wide, not just confined to Infinite Loop.

That issue is that, for years and years now, computer users have not been able to trust the battery claims by computer manufacturers.

You know what it’s like when you go shopping for a notebook. If you read “up to five hours battery life”, you know that the most important words are “up to” and that, in reality, they change the meaning of the sentence to “about three hours - four if you’re lucky - and you’re not doing anything terribly disk- or CPU-intensive”.

We’ve all become so used to this that we take it for granted. We KNOW that we should knock a huge percentage off the battery life claims of the manufacturers. Worse, THEY know that we know. And they still keep doing it. The only way to get a good appreciation of a machine’s actual average battery life is to buy one and use it; or wait for others to do so, and post their reviews on retail web sites.

What I hope - very much - is that with this expensive video and marketing campaign, Apple is finally doing the right thing and giving ACCURATE, RELIABLE figures for the battery life.

If you didn’t see the keynote, or follow it on the zillions of blogs and Twitter streams, it’s really worth having a look at that video. This battery design and manufacturing process is a big deal.

Who knows, maybe in the lab they’ve been able to squeeze out 10 or 12 hours on the prototypes, and they’ve gone for 8 as the “official” figure because it will be achievable by real people doing real computing, and that it will therefore mean something.

What I fear, however, is that 8 hours is the lab maximum, that this expensive video production has been a waste of time, and that the claimed 8 hours will be hard to reproduce by the likes of you and I.

You might think that’s needlessly skeptical, but the skepticism is only because my mind’s been indoctrinated by years of overblown battery claims. I hope I’m wrong, and that the early adopters of this new 17-incher are able to confirm Apple’s claims.

And I also hope that, within a year or so, I can buy a new 15-inch unibody MacBook with the same battery inside. I don’t mind it being sealed up, as long as it lives up to claims Apple makes of it.

(Photo used under CC license, thanks to moria.)

The big hardware news from Macworld 2009 was not a new Mac mini, but rather an update to the 17″ MacBook Pro featuring the same precision aluminum unibody enclosure introduced on the MacBook and MacBook Pros unveiled in October. This new notebook features a built-in battery that Apple claims will deliver up to eight hours of use and up to 1,000 recharges, for more than three times the lifespan of conventional notebook batteries. This design innovation is sure to have people lining up in short order on either side of the Apple is Awesome / Apple is Evil divide.

The new 17-inch MacBook Pro has a high resolution LED-backlit display and the same large glass Multi-Touch™ trackpad introduced with the new MacBook family in October. In addition, the new 17-inch MacBook Pro includes state of the art NVIDIA graphics and the latest generation Intel Core 2 Duo mobile processors.

As part of what the company calls “the industry’s greenest notebook family”, the new 17-inch MacBook Pro is made of highly recyclable materials, meets stringent energy efficiency standards and is made without many of the harmful toxins found in other computers.

Follow the jump for availability, pricing and full feature information on the new 17″ MacBook Pro.

The new 17-inch MacBook Pro will be shipping at the end of January and will be available through the Apple Store® (www.apple.com), Apple’s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers for a suggested retail price of $2,799 (US), and includes:

* 17-inch widescreen LED-backlit 1920 x 1200, glossy display;
* 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 6MB shared L2 cache;
* 1066 MHz front-side bus;
* 4GB 1066 MHz DDR3 SDRAM;
* NVIDIA GeForce 9400M integrated graphics;
* NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT discrete graphics with 512MB GDDR3 video memory;
* 320GB Serial ATA hard drive running at 5400 rpm, with Sudden Motion Sensor;
* a slot-load 8X SuperDrive with double-layer support (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW) optical drive;
* Mini DisplayPort for video output (adapters sold separately);
* built-in AirPort Extreme® 802.11n wireless networking and Bluetooth 2.1+EDR;
* Gigabit Ethernet port;
* built-in iSight video camera;
* three USB 2.0 ports;
* one FireWire® 800 port (FireWire 400 compatible);
* ExpressCard/34 expansion card slot;
* one audio line in and one audio line out port, each supporting both optical digital and analog;
* glass Multi-Touch trackpad and illuminated keyboard;
* built-in, 95WHr lithium polymer battery; and
* 85 Watt MagSafe® Power Adapter.

Build-to-order options for the 17-inch MacBook Pro include a 2.93 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 8GB 1066 MHz DDR 3 memory, 320GB 7200 rpm hard drive, a 128GB or 256GB solid state drive, anti-glare display for $50 (US), Mini DisplayPort to DVI Adapter, Mini DisplayPort to Dual-Link DVI Adapter (for 30-inch DVI display), Mini DisplayPort to VGA Adapter, Apple Remote, Apple MagSafe Airline Adapter and the AppleCare Protection Plan.

Apple announced several changes to the iTunes Store today. All four major music labels—Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, Warner Music Group and EMI, along with thousands of independent labels, now offer their music in iTunes Plus, Apple’s DRM-free format with higher-quality 256 kbps AAC encoding for audio quality, which the cmpany claims is virtually indistinguishable from the original recordings.

iTunes customers can also choose to download their favorite songs from what it calls the world’s largest music catalog directly onto their iPhone™ 3G over the 3G network just as they do with Wi-Fi today, for the same price as downloading to their computer.

And beginning in April, based on what the music labels charge Apple, songs on iTunes will be available at one of three price points: 69 cents, 99 cents and $1.29, with most albums still priced at $9.99.

None of this is earthshattering or unexpected, in fact, these changes have been rumored to be in the works for months. Still, it’s always good to see movement onward and upward.

Who says Apple has to roll out groundbreaking new hardware products to keep life interesting? Though the tweaks to its 17″ MacBook Pro (described in a post above) are noteworthy, upgrades to iLife, iWork and iTunes may end up having more relevance for more Mac users than any hardware introduction could.

Well, at least until we finally get that Mac Tablet, but that’s a story for another day.

Follow after the jump for details on the software upgrades rolled out today.

Apple’s two main productivity suites, iWork and iLife, both received updates for 2009, with iWork’s Keynote presentation software continuing to evolve leaps and bounds ahead of Microsoft’s Powerpoint as a robust and interesting presentation tool.

Magic Move, a new Keynote feature, allows you to apply a simple transition to automatically animate the position, scale, rotation and opacity of any image, graphic or text that is repeated on consecutive slides. New text transitions morph text from one slide to the next. New advanced object transitions animate objects off one slide while simultaneously animating objects onto the next slide with a choice of effects. 3D charts now include cylinder shapes, beveled-edge pie charts, new textures and four new 3D build effects. With these enhancements, Apple continues to distinguish itself as a formidable sylistic competitor to that bigger software company based in Redwood, WA, inviting Keynote users to live in a much more richly textured, 3D world than the primitive, 2D existence Powerpoint people toil under.

Pages, iWork’s word and document processing application now boasts a Full Screen view that lets you focus on your document alone, revealing the menus, format bar and page navigator only when needed. A new Outline mode includes templates to build the framework for your document quickly and allows you to collapse, expand and rearrange elements, even inline graphics, with ease. MathType 6 support lets engineers, mathematicians and students easily add sophisticated equations to their documents and EndNote X2 integration lets users add and edit comprehensive bibliographic references. Pages ’09 also includes 40 new Apple-designed templates, including newsletters, posters, certificates and coordinated stationery.

Apple’s spreadsheet software, Numbers, continues to evolve, with easier function writing, an enhanced function browser which includes built-in help for over 250 functions, and visual placeholders with tool tips that explain each variable in a formula. A new Formula List lets you view all formulas in your entire spreadsheet and jump directly to any formula cell with a single click. Expanded chart options include mixed chart types, two-axis charts, and the ability to apply trend lines and error bars. Numbers charts pasted into Pages or Keynote are linked, and can be updated with a single click. I will look forward to taking Numbers 09 for a test drive, since I’ve long felt the spreadsheet realm was the only one in which Apple’s office-oriented solutions did not clearly outstrip Microsoft’s.

With a nod to the growing popularity of so-called “cloud computing,” Apple also announced today the public beta of iWork.com a new document collaboration service that lets you share iWork ’09 documents online. Using your Apple ID, just click the iWork.com icon in the Keynote, Pages or Numbers toolbar to upload your document and invite others to view it online. Viewers can provide comments and notes, and download a copy of your document in iWork, Microsoft Office or PDF formats. A consolidated online list of all your shared documents indicates when your viewers have posted comments.

iWork ’09 is now available online through the Apple Store, and at Apple’s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers for a suggested retail price of $79 (US). iWork ’09 is available for $49 (US) with the purchase of any Mac through the Apple Store, Apple’s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers.

“iLife continues to be one of the biggest reasons our customers choose to get a Mac,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO in a press release accompanying the Macworld Keynote. “With iLife ’09, we’ve made working with photos, making movies and learning to play music a lot more fun, and iMovie users are especially going to love the advanced but easy-to-use new features.”

Calling the upgrades to iLife apps “major,” Apple introduces facial recognition and location-aware grouping and sorting functionality for your photos in iPhoto, which also lets you easily publish photos to Facebook or Flickr. Photos published to Facebook include assigned names, and name tags added on Facebook sync back to iPhoto. You can also share photos by creating a themed slideshow to play on your Mac, iPhone or iPod®, or create a beautiful travel book, complete with customized maps of your journey.

iMovie gets a new Precision Editing function that lets you click on a magnified filmstrip to view clips up close and fine tune any edit, use sound from one clip with video from another and more. iMovie ’09 analyzes video and reduces camera shake in clips when added to your project. New titles, transitions, cinematic effects, speed changes and animated travel maps add professional polish to your movie.

Garage Band’s new Basic Lessons let you learn the fundamentals of piano or guitar at your own pace with Apple instructors in beautiful HD video synchronized to animated instruments and notation. A potential new money maker for the company, called Artist Lessons, features original artists showing how to play their hit songs with everything from finger positions and techniques to the story behind the song. Some of the artists whose lessons you can buy separately from a new Lesson Store accessible from within Garage Band include Sara Bareilles, Colbie Caillat, John Fogerty, Ben Folds, Norah Jones, Sarah McLachlan, Fall Out Boy’s Patrick Stump, OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder and Sting. GarageBand ’09 also includes new guitar amp and stomp-box effects, and Magic GarageBand Jam that lets you play along with a virtual band that you create.

iWeb, Apple’s method for authoring custom websites, and iDVD, for creating DVDs, both get new iWeb Widgets, such as iSight® video and photos, a countdown timer, YouTube video and RSS feeds. New integrated FTP publishing allows you to publish your website to virtually any hosting service and updates to your site can now be automatically added to your Facebook profile.

Pricing for iWeb 09 is $79 (US) through the online Apple Store, Apple’s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers. The iLife Up-To-Date upgrade package is available to all customers who purchased a qualifying new Mac system from Apple or an Apple Authorized Reseller on or after January 6, 2009, for a shipping and handling fee of $9.95 (US). Artist Lessons are available through the GarageBand Lesson Store for $4.99 (US) each. These products are set for availability this month, according to Apple’s press release.

Well, there we have it: Phil Schiller’s delivered Apple’s final Macworld keynote while Jobs recuperates, and since Apple didn’t present a new iMac for $5, an iPhone the size of a window (and another the size of an SD card) and world peace, we can be sure its stock price will plummet accordingly.

If you took the sensible approach and didn’t have crazy expectations, this wasn’t a bad keynote, although it’s hardly going to go down as a particularly memorable one, which is a shame since it’s Apple’s last. Some of the new features in iLife ‘09 (facial recognition in iPhoto, improved interface components in iMovie) and iWork ‘09 look pretty good (although the full-screen view on Pages won’t wrench me away from WriteRoom any time soon), the online iWork demo seemed decent enough, and the 17″ MacBook Pro even throws pros a bone by offering a matte option. (Note, though, how the 24″ display you can hook it up to is glossy-only! Clearly, someone at Apple has a warped sense of humour, and I’ll bet it’s Mr. Jobs.)

There was one somewhat worrying aspect to the keynote, however, and that’s the way in which Apple was playing catch-up in the key area of music. Incredibly, the iTunes portion of the keynote was saved for Apple’s usual showstopping ‘last thing’. What we got: Apple canning its pricing structure to offer tiered pricing (boo!), but providing DRM-free tracks (hurrah!). In other words, it’s now the labels that have Apple by the short and curlies, finally forcing the Cupertino giant’s hand.

Being able to buy via cellular networks via iPhone is a nice touch, though, and could become a key differentiator in the long run, although that tiny slice of Apple won’t be enough to tempt me back from Amazon and Play.com just yet.

Minus a million points, though, for not getting Tony Bennett to sing out the keynote with: We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when, but I’m sure we’ll meet again some sunny day!

(Oh, and it’s now business as usual if you’re in the UK: with Sterling getting a kicking, Apple’s now seriously hedging its bets. The $169 Mac Box Set translates to a whopping £149 in the UK—I was hoping for £135, but then I’ve decided to be an optimistic sort this year.)

Five bright, whimsical designs from Paul Frank Industries are now iPhone 3G ready. Many feature Julius the monkey whose quirky mug bears a slight resemblance to designer Paul Frank Sunich, who founded the Southern California brand in 1995.

While the monkey will make it hard to get your iPhone confused with someone else’s, that funny face will cost you the Apple logo.

The silicone Paul Frank cases run about $30 online at the Apple store, where you can also find his regular iPhone cases and iPod cases, too.

Via Into mobile

A 27-year-old Aussie has turned iPhone fixing into a full-time job, but he finds his over 650 “patients” very demanding.

In an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, Rob Jacobs, who used to have a day job as a video editor, painted the picture of the weeping iPhone owner, desperate for a fix:

“The amount of phone calls I get after 10 o’clock at night. I have people coming from Newcastle waiting outside from 6.30am. People just turn up at the door, often in tears, saying ‘Please fix my phone.’ We are all iAddicted.”

Jacobs, who has been a full-time iDoc who also repairs iPods for nine months now, added that many iPhone owners were tied to phone contracts where service providers would not replace their phones once damaged.

Time for some iPhone DIY repairs? Maybe.

Via the Sydney Morning Herald

Geek blogger Chris Pirillo now has an iPhone application dedicated to him and all his prolific output: Follow Chris (iTunes Store link) is a single-person feed scraper and aggregator that pulls together content from Pirillo stuff posted on his personal site, Twitter, Lockergnome and the Geeks forum. That’s a lot of Pirillo.

But why?

I contacted developer Peter Birch (who, coincidentally, is based not far from me in Bristol) and asked him.

He told me it was just to make it easier to read all the Pirillo content that’s out there.

“I’ve been following Chris and his writing for about 12 months now. I like his stuff. Every day I wanted to see what was new and that meant checking a bunch of feeds or web sites. I just wanted to make it quicker and easier.”

So, for his very first iPhone app, Peter (normally a designer created something that aggregates a selection of feeds and puts them all together in an attractive app.

Sensibly, Peter did tell Chris what he was doing.

“I’ve told Chris about it and he thought it was a good idea. He’s given me some interesting suggestions for other apps.”

Indeed. It strikes me that this kind of single-subject or single-person aggregator might become very popular on the App Store. It would be trivially easy to build something for the internet superstar of your choice. A-list bloggers, this would be the perfect way to further inflate your already over-large egos.

Like I said, I rather think this kind of “ego app” will be very popular. If we’re lucky, it might even put the fart apps in the shade. Let’s hope so.

Google has entered the Mac side of free photo manipulation with the Monday release of Picasa for Mac. Although officially a beta version, the application previously limited to PC users is drawing positive comments from Apple iPhoto fans.

“Even though this early build of Picasa is missing some features, I’m going to use it and not iPhoto,” writes CNET’s Rafe Needleman. The reviewer said Picasa’s features makes it the best option for day-to-day use.

Along with the usual ability to remove red-eye and basic photo editing, Picasa for the Mac integrates with Google’s free Web Albums, allowing photos to be easily shared. Apple requires the $99 annual Mobile Me online service, according to CNET.

Some features, such as geotagging and photos from your Webcam aren’t included in this beta version.

Google’s Picasa for Mac requires Mac OS 10.4 and an Intel-based system.