9to5 Staff

Snow Leopard Beta Testers were greeted with a surprise Friday night.  Instead of having to burn a dual layer DVD and install the newest Snow Leopard build manually, Apple delivered the newest release via a 700MB Software Update. 

We got to playing around with Dock Exposé and found it to be pretty much as advertised (below).

• Activate Dock Exposé by clicking and holding on a running application’s Dock icon
• Click any other running application to switch to that application’s Exposé.
• Preview the window in Exposé by selecting it with the mouse or hitting spacebar.  There is a nice blow up transition between windows.
• When you go into Exposé mode you can click on the different apps to see the windows of that app

Dock Exposé isn’t a going to change the world, but it is certainly a nice addition that can speed up worflows.

As for other stuff, Safari and other GUI elements feel … snappier™.

http://s.wsj.net/media/swf/atd/microPlayer.swf

According to French blog Nowhere Else, a white iPhone 3GS, while under a lot of CPU load, left faded brown streaks on the back plastic cover.  According to the site, the user said:

I did the test several apps warning radars in the car when I was a passenger, the apps using the GPS chip as well as 3G, after a while my iPhone was very hot but not burning hot.

more picts below

The user apparently called Apple customer service who wanted the iPhone to do some "analysis".

Via Engadget

The Inquirer reports that Intel is set to release a new round of SSDs which might bring hard drive replacements into the hands of many more laptop owners. 

We’ve been told that with these new 34nm NAND SSDs, users can expect higher performance, higher capacities, and most importantly, lower prices.  Amongst the 34nm offerings hot off the production line will be a 320GB drive, plus 160GB and 80GB capacities too. But there very well could be more. Our sources tell us there will be drives big enough to replace the HDDs in most, if not all laptops.

That is a pretty bold statement, especially with retail 500GB laptop hard drives falling significantly below the $100 price point.  Currently, the best retail SSD price/GB ratio of SSDs has been $227/128GB.  That is a lot of space and a lot of $ difference.

Did Apple used the feared "kill switch" for the first time on the "Hottest Girls" application?  We have it on authority (we didn’t download the app ourselves – swear!) that when you try to open the app, it now says:

It just shows black screen saying: "This version no longer works. You should delete this version." I downloaded it just to see if it’s true they added nudity and now I got an app doing nothing. Does Apple do refunds??

Apple hasn’t actually killed an app before as far as we recall.  Even the Netshare.app that allows you to tether to AT&T works long after it was removed from the App Store.

Steve Jobs told the Wall St. Journal:

Mr. Jobs confirmed such a capability exists, but argued that Apple needs it in case it inadvertently allows a malicious program — one that stole users’ personal data, for example — to be distributed to iPhones through the App Store. "Hopefully we never have to pull that lever, but we would be irresponsible not to have a lever like that to pull," he says.

Not sure what to say to this one … because yes AT&T is the worst carrier on earth.  This post would have been up 5 hours ago if that weren’t true.  Sprint is hitting Facebook Social advertising network. Via

Apple spokesperson Tom Neumayr told Macworld:

Apple will not distribute applications that contain inappropriate content. The developer of this application added inappropriate content directly from their server after the application had been approved and distributed, and after the developer had subsequently been asked to remove some offensive content. This was a direct violation of the terms of the iPhone Developer Program. The application is no longer available on the App Store.

Oh well, as Macenstein said: Now you’ll only be able to go to the 10 billion different porn "web apps".

Ouch. Those numbers below have to hurt if you are in the market for a new high end MacBook Air.  Macworld tested the new machines and found the high end 2.13GHz MacBook Air didn’t perform as well as the previous high end 1.86Ghz machine with the same 128GB SSD.  In fact, to them, it was noticably slower. 

A lot of things could account for the speed decrease including: battery mangement, cheaper laptop parts, testing methods, etc.  As I said in my Computerworld column when the Air was released, Apple is making significant sacrifices to make this machine razor thin.  If the specs above matter at all to you, you may want to look into a 13-inch MacBook Pro.  That being said, would it be that hard to add a 4GB RAM premium option? 

The iPhone Dev team today released the news that the new iPhone 3GS hardware would be jailbroken and SIM-unlockable at some point in the future.  It seems that the 3GS uses a lot of the same locking technologies that previous iPhones used.  The cat and mouse game continues.

At the end of 2008, we found out through a company filing with the London Stock Exchange that Apple had owned  8.2 million shares of Imagination Technologies.  That’s roughly equivalent to a 3.6 percent stake in the company.  According to Bloomberg, Apple has been buying up shares over the past year and, with a recent 2.2 million share purchase, now has a 9.5% stake in the company. 

Imagination develops intelectual property behind PowerVR portable graphics engines that go into high end mobile devices like the iPhone and iPod touch.  Interestingly, Palm’s Pre and some other higher-end smart phones use Imagination Technologies’ chip designs as well.

Imagination Technologies fell 6.75 pence, or 4.7 percent, to 136 pence at 11:28 a.m. in London after earlier rising 3.7 percent. The stock has risen 118 percent this year, giving the company a market value of 311 million pounds.
 

While the "official" jailbreak for the 3GS is’t quite ready, here’s a little something to whet your whistle. Game emulators for GBA and PSX are running as close to native as you’ve ever seen on a Phone…(via)

Final Fantasy VII for the Playstation runs perfectly -Giz

Gizmodo got their hands on some internal Microsoft docs which have put the launch of the Tegra-powered, OLED-screen having, iPod touch-competing ZuneHD at September 8th.  It will come in the very iPod touch and now iPhone-like 16GB and 32GB varieties

A tipster just dropped off a few internal Microsoft docs that point to a September 8 launch of the Zune HD. In addition to that, the tipster says it’s coming in 16GB and 32GB versions. All pretty logical.

We already knew that the HD has Nvidia’s Tegra inside, which makes it a high powered, high performance device that can handle HD output and possibly some nice gaming. What we don’t know is what the cost of the OLED screen and the cost of Tegra will make the final price. No word on that yet from the tipster.

Coincidentally, early September is about the time that Apple unleashes its new iPods and this year should be no different.  Among other improvements, many expect this year’s iPod touches to have a camera with video feature.  GPS and compass might also make the cut.

When we saw the 17+ ratings system in the App Store, we knew this day would come.  Dr. Macenstein (who else?) spotted the first iPhone App with nudity, Hottest Girls ($1.99 iTunes Link).  The developer told Macenstein:

“We uploaded nude topless pics today. This is the first app to have nudity,” writes Hottest Girls’ developer Allen Leung, in what can only be described as an announcement rivaling the first transmissions from the moon landing.

Macenstein warns: along with nudity comes a “stiff” 17+ rating…all you innocent young teens will have to get your porn the old fashioned way. Free, from millions of sites all over the web.

Something iSuppli might have missed in the take-apart…

http://www.liveleak.com/e/adf_1245828170

Tres bon Grenouille

Through the lens of CNBC comes this stuff…Can someone at Apple leak some tablet info so we can move on?

http://plus.cnbc.com/rssvideosearch/action/player/id/1162862344/code/cnbcplayershare

Tired of hearing how fast the iPhone 3GS is? Too bad…here’s yet another study of the browsing speed of the new iPhone 3GS and the new iPhone 3 OS.  Medialets ran the SunSpider Javascript tests on three recent iPhones as well as the Palm Pre and the Android G1.  The results are below (shorter bars are better).

This is a pretty clear indication that not only is Apple’s new hardware fast, but the new 3.0 OS is also pretty helpful in speeding up Javascript.

AppleTV just got a somewhat significant update (2.4) allowing for new gesture support.  Flick gestures can now be used to manipulate Apple TV’s menu options. Also, Video and Audio have new flick gestures that can be used to advance, rewind and replay.  No word yet if it breaks your precious Boxee…but you’d be smart to hold off until some sucker finds out for you.  Check the comments.  MacRumors also got a screenshot below. 

We’ll be following along as more information becomes avaialble.  Feel free to add your experiences in the comments.  In the words of a certain someone…cool, but not cool enough.

The iPhone Dev team today officially released ultrasn0w which allows you to SIM-unlock any iPhone3G (not 3GS) running iPhone OS 3.0.  iClarified has a nice tutorial on the installation which we’ve shamelessly pasted below.

These are instructions on how to unlock the iPhone 3G for use with any GSM cellphone carrier using UltraSn0w.

Watch the Video!
For your convenience this unlock tutorial is available in video format also. Click the Watch It button to view the tutorial!

***THANKS: A big thank you to all the members of the iPhone Dev-Team for all their hard work! It is much appreciated by all.

Update: That’s iSuppli tore down the new iPhone today and found that it had 512Mb of some sort of RAM.  That is equivalent to 64MB of RAM.  Anyone know what this is?  Is it VRAM for the PowerVR Graphics chip?  We were under the impression that the iPhone used shared memory.

Thanks Commenter

iSupply worked its magic on the new iPhone 3G? and found it only costs a few bucks more to manufacture than last year’s 8GB iPhone 3G that it replaces.  Interestingly, the iPhone they tore apart contained Flash memory from Toshiba where Apple generally gets its Flash from Samsung (and had a multi-Billion dollar up front deal with the vendor).  The other three biggest changes were the new Arm Cortex Samsung processor, new autofocus 3-Megapixel camera and the Broadcom Corp. single-chip Bluetooth/FM/WLAN module.  The latter replaces two chips.

"The entry-level, 16Gbyte version of Apple Inc.’s new iPhone 3G S carries a Bill of Materials (BOM) cost of $172.46 and a manufacturing expense of $6.50, for a total of $178.96," said Andrew Rassweiler, director and principal analyst, teardown services, for iSuppli. "This is slightly higher than iSuppli’s estimate of $174.33 for the original 8Gbyte iPhone 3G based on pricing in July 2008. Although the retail price of the 16Gbyte iPhone 3G S is $199, the same as for the 8Gbyte version of the original iPhone 3G, the actual price of the phone paid by the service provider is considerably higher, reflecting the common wireless industry practice of subsidizing the upfront cost of a mobile phone and then making a profit on subscriptions."

Breakdown chart below:

Today, Adobe is demonstrating a version of Flash running on the HTC Hero, the recently released Android device on Tmobile.  The demo seems to work fairly well which may be an important benchmark to Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch owners.

As far as capability to run Flash (as opposed to desire), it would appear that the iPhone 3GS has more than the necessary hardware to do so.  The HTC Hero uses an 528MHz ARM 11 based Qualcomm MSM7200A.  This is roughly the same level of processor as the 2nd generation iPod Touch.  As we know, the iPhone 3GS blows the iPod Touch out of the water in terms of performance.  The iPhone 3GS uses the latest ARM Cortex A8 Processor running at 600MHz with a PowerVR graphics core that is also superior to other chipsets.

At a shareholder meeting last year, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that the iPhone doesn’t support Flash because it runs too slowly on the device to be useful.