9to5 Staff

So AT&T mobility workers might be going on strike at any moment.  If you’ve ever had to deal with any AT&T reps about iPhone issues, you know these aren’t very happy, well compensated folks (by and large).

The Communications Workers of America (CWA) union has voted, with a huge 85 percent yes vote, to authorize a strike for over 20,000 unionized AT&T Mobility employees. If union leaders do not come to terms with AT&T, the strike could begin as soon as today in 37 states where contracts are set to expire at 12:01 am tomorrow, February 8th.

On the other side of the fence, you have the Verizon crew, who seem a bit happier.  Anyone else wish that Verizon had accepted Apple’s initial offer to put the iPhone on their network?  OK, ok, we hate AT&T but know all mobile companies suck.

Poor Verizon.  Even with their superior network, they almost have to give away the poorly-rated Blackberry Storms ($99 at Amazon right now). 

According to Seeking Alpha, Canaccord Adams analyst Peter Misek thinks there is going to be a pretty big shakeup in the iPhone line this year.

Three new iPhones could be coming in 2009. The first is a 32G iPhone in multiple colours that is likely to arrive during the next six months. Next up is a lower-cost handset based on the 2.5G iPhone, which is targeted for China and India. Third is a smaller version – about one-third the size of the 3G iPhone – that costs 40% less and is also likely before year-end.

He quotes carriers who believe the smaller iPhone could have a $99 price point.  But he doesn’t believe there will be a voice only version.  We’re not sure where he came up with the colors idea even though the 32GB size is a gimme.

Do we buy it?  Nope.  Will Apple ever use these colors?->

Double nope.

(image via Colorware)

We’re sticking to the new ARM processor, expanded features, new 3.0 software, better form factor route.  How bout you?

meh…

From 9to5mac.com/Toys: Amazon is one of the first vendors to have (pre-order) the new  $374 Eee PC 1000HE 10-Inch Netbook.  This new product from ASUS contains Intel’s next generation 1.66GHz N280 Atom processor running a much faster front side bus speed of 667MHz.  This means you can watch video without the jerkiness – even some hi-def.  While it tests significantly faster than previous Netooks, the biggest change in this model is the 6 cell, high density battery pack which allows the EEE to run for a whopping 9.5 hours (your mileage will of course vary).

ASUS also upped the Wireless to N and it has a 160GB Hard Drive, 3 USB ports (on both sides), Bluetooth and a spring-loaded Plug-and-Play MMC/SDHC/Memory Stick/MS-Pro flash card slot is also provided to let you easily access your digital photos and videos and expand your system storage.  They also upped the video camera resolution to 1.3 Megapixels.  It has a 1024 x 600 pixel, 10 inch screen with VGA out for external monitor and 10GB of free online storage from EEE.

The best part? Amazon has it $25 off with free shipping.  Oh, and while it comes with XP Home (blech – could I exchange for 2GB of RAM and Linux?) it makes a great Hackintosh until Apple releases theirs this summer (guessing here).  It comes in black or blue (don’t you miss the black MacBook option?)

Technical Details

What happens when some radiologists get bored/stoned? Everything goes into the CT Scanner. Including an iPhone.

We went on a Google News strike yesterday (every day more Apple-Google news!!) but this one is a bit too good to pass up.  Google Mobile Book search is now available for iPhone (and Android).  We’ll let Google go from here:

Over 1.5 million public domain books in the US (and over half a million outside the US) are now available for perusing on iPhone and Android devices. Just go to books.google.com/m in your mobile browser. You can search for a title, author, or subject. Or you can browse the list of "Featured books" and various categories like business and economics, the classics, science and math, travel, and more. Once you’ve picked out a book or two, you can easily get back to your selections by clicking on the "Recently viewed books" under the "My books" section.

Read more about the launch and Optical Character Recognition from the Book Search team on the Inside Google Book Search blog.  We wish there was a place that covered all of this Google news…

The news these days seems to go back and forth.  Adobe says they are moving on Flash for the iPhone.  Meanwhile Apple’s Webkit team are working on ways around Flash using new CSS standards. 

Apple, of course, has been silent on the matter.  Last we heard, Steve Jobs said last year that Flash in its current form doesn’t run well on the iPhone hardware and Flash Lite wasn’t a compelling offer.  Adobe plans to have Flash running at full speed on newer ARM hardware in the second half of this year, about the same time everyone expects some new iPhone hardware to come out.  That means Android and Windows Mobile will probably support Flash.  Maybe Blackberry and Palm Pre too.  Can Apple afford to wait on the very new CSS/HTML standards to develop?  So, what do you think?  Will iPhone 3.0 allow Flash?

Reg hardware is quoting  AmTech Research’s Doug Freedman (who happens to follow NVIDIA) when they say there is a good chance that Apple’s upcoming iPhone 3.0 will contain an ARM System on a Chip from NVIDIA called Tegra.  While the specs on this thing are pretty sweet:

Tegra was launched in June 2008. The Tegra 650 can support 1080p HD output using the H.264 codec – another Apple favorite, we note – and can encode video at 720p. It supports cameras with sensors of up to 12Mp.

An on-board Ultra-low Power (ULP) GeForce graphics core provides 3D graphics through the OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics API. The 650’s ARM 11 core runs at 750MHz, though Nvidia also offers a lesser part, the 600, which runs at 650MHz.

..and Apple has been real chummy with NVIDIA of late:

Apple has certainly been cozying up to Nvidia a lot of late, in particular buying in the chip maker’s GeForce 9400M integrated chipset for MacBook laptops. It’s also been claimed – though not confirmed by either Apple or Nvidia – that the next Apple TV could be based on Nvidia’s Ion platform. Ditto a revamped Mac Mini.

There is one little problem.  Apple’s PA Semi crew hasn’t been sitting on their laurels for the past couple years.  They’ve most likely been working on a SoC with integrated Imagination chips.  Unless they screw up.  Then NVIDIA can swoop in we guess.  Don’t bet the farm on this one however.

So you’ve probably heard of Samsung’s line of USB bus monitors. It is a pretty cool technology without much of an application (slow, overpriced monitors at regular sizes) – until now. The SyncMaster U70 is a small, photo frame styled display that plugs directly into the USB port of the computer.  No other wires necessary, it is also powered through USB.  The SyncMaster U70 is just 7-inches, running at 800 x 480 resolution. 

Need a little extra monitor space off of your laptop to watch a movie while you work?  Boom!  When can us Mac users has one?  You can pick one up for €99  (about $127 US) not in the US.

Mas

IntoMobile really, really believes  there is a big future in multi-core iPhones.  We agree, but just aren’t sure the battery technology is there yet (for June iPhones that are running around South San Francisco).  One of ARM’s strengths is the ability to idle at incredibly low power rates then step up the power usage incrementally based on the CPU needed.

PowerVR Chip Design

Would you give up a few hours of battery time to be able to play graphic-intensive video games on your iPhone? – That’s what you’d get with Multi-core.  With a solid single core Cortex A8 architecture (Like the Pre) Apple’s browsing and gaming experience would improve without cost to the battery life.

For those of you that can’t get by on the current limit of 120Gb of music or the former iPod’s 160GB of space, we have some great news for you.  You can now get an aftermarket (damn!) 240Gb iPod Classic 5G from Rapid Repair. 

The science isn’t really that hard.  Toshiba has a 240Gb drive that fits into a former generation 5G iPod’s 160GB drive bay.  Bada bing, bada boom, 240GB iPod.  The price for the new drive will be $295.  DIYer?  You won’t have to send it in, they’ll just send you the drive with these instructions.

Rapid Repair will upgrade the drive for you at no cost, or you can crack open your iPod and install the drive yourself. To help you out, the company has published a guide to replacing the drive on its site. “It’s not very difficult, you just need a reasonable mechanical aptitude,” Mr. Vronko says. “But if, when you were a kid, you took things apart and ended up with a lot of extra pieces when you put it back together, this might not be for you.”

Indeed, if the guide makes you queasy, you might want to just send your iPod in for a professional install. The turn-around time should be less than a week, according to Mr. Vronko.

Of course this voids your warranty….if you still have one on a two year old iPod. 

A really good trick would be a 240GB iPod Touch.  We can dream can’t we?

via Gadgetwise

From OSXHints comes a very interesting patch for those of you rolling with G4s.  This one allows you to (slowly) run iMovie ’09 on your elder hardware.

To patch iMovie ’09 so that it will run on a PowerPC G4, Control-click on iMovie and pick Show Package Contents from the pop-up menu. In the new window that appears, navigate into Contents » MacOS. Now you’ll need a hex editor such as the free HexEdit; once you have that, edit the file iMovie in the MacOS folder.

Use the File » Go To Address function in HexEdit to go to the following addresses, and replace each existing entry at those addresses (7C 08 02 A6) with 4E 80 00 20. The addresses are 15fb9c, 15fc7c, and 15fe00.

What you’re doing here is replacing the PowerPC instruction for mflr r0, which basically initializes the stack for the called function, with blr, which essentially causes the called function to always return, voiding the purpose of the function. So when the function is the PowerPC check, you’ve essentially patched your way around it.

When done, save the file and quit HexEdit, and iMovie ’09 should launch on your G4.

TUAW points us to another great iPhone app called TimeLapse ($.99 iTunes Link) that uses your iPhone camera to take a picture every few second and stores them in your iPhoto library.  Then yo ucan put it all together in a movie making application like Quicktime or iMovie.  Nice work!  More videos below.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=2932665&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

From the developer:

TimeLapse is an iPhone app that automates the operation of the iPhone’s camera to help create time lapse photo sequences. TimeLapse stores the photos in the iPhone photo library so you can easily download them to your computer and create a movie using applications such as Apple QuickTime Pro, Windows Movie Maker or ffmpeg.  TimeLapse is flexible enough to be used for time lapse photography, as a single shot delay timer and even as an ad-hoc surveillance camera (finally catch the person at work who keeps taking your lunch!)

MacBlogz thinks they have an idea of the design of next Mac Pro. We like!

From 9to5mac/Toys (we think this flick might be a little tooo fanboy but who are we to judge?):

Amazon Video on Demand offers downloads of Kobi and Ron Shelly’s "MacHEADS" for $9.99 or $2.99 to rent. That’s the best deal we could find for this documentary which, "explores what makes Apple products a "cultural phenomenon", rather than just consumer electronics". (iTunes charges $14.99 or $3.99 to rent)

A preview can be seen at Amazon or below:

Another day, another Google product for iPhone.  This is another interesting one too.  Google Latitude pulls your GPS data and allows you to share it with friends in a convenient map form.  Potential for abuse?  Possibly big.  Potential to ruin teenagers lives, even bigger.  No more of the ol’ staying at the friends house while the friend is staying at yours but really you are both hangin’ out at the lake.  Sucks to be you kids!

Yes you can manually set your location or turn it off (see below)- but don’t think you won’t be able to tell the difference between movement and manual settings.

According to Slashdot, that iTunes EULA aggreement that you just agreed to without reading contained some big changes for those of us who travel and live abroad:

"I just accepted the new terms of service for iTunes and found that I will no longer be allowed to access US iTunes outside of the United States. This may seem like no big deal but, I am a US citizen living abroad and I regularly purchase and view TV and movies from AppleTV. Not to mention US citizens just traveling abroad. Does anyone know if this has been enforced or have themselves been affected by this?"

Obviously, Apple wants to sell as much media as possible and doesn’t care if you are in St. Petersburg Florida or St. Petersburg, Russia.  This has the entertainment industry written all over it.  Perhaps this had something to do with the recent deals made for DRM-Free Music. 

They just don’t get it do they?

Jeez Google, give us a day without some Mac news?  Today Google Tasks, fresh off its introduction as a Labs feature in GMail is now at home on the iPhone.

Today’s 9to5mac.com/Toys deal is a two parter.  First:

Amazon.com offers the D-Link 2-Bay External Network Storage Enclosure, model no. DNS-321, for $130.20. This $30 mail-in rebate cuts it to $100.20. With free shipping, that’s $12 under our December mention and the lowest total price we could find by $20. (A mail-in rebate made it a buck less in September, since expired.) This Gigabit Ethernet NAS enclosure can hold two Serial ATA hard drives of any capacity and supports RAID 1, 0, and JBOD. Rebate expires February 28.

Then continue shopping at Amazon for the $129 1.5 TB (with updated firmware) Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM Hard drive.  You’ll need two.

Put them together easily at home.  We recommend JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks – spanning) because if one drive fails, you’ll still have the data on the other – and the speed of RAID 0 won’t help because of other bottlenecks in the system.  But don’t worry, the system is plenty fast to play HD Movies to numerous computers/set top boxes at the same time.  It is also an FTP server and iTunes music server built-in.

For those with irreplaceable data, of course mirroring is your best bet but cuts the capacity in half.  Remember, this is a low cost way to have tons of data avaialble to you at home.  It is by no means a corporate data solution.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=thepartim-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B00066IJPQ&md=10FE9736YVPPT7A0FBG2&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=thepartim-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B0019OZ3OO&md=10FE9736YVPPT7A0FBG2&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Product Description
The D-Link 2-Bay Network Storage Enclosure – DNS-321 – is the perfect way to store, share, and safeguard your documents, music, videos, and photos. With the D-Link tool-less installation, easily insert up to two (3.5") SATA drives without any tools or attaching any cables. Additionally, the built-in UPnP AV media server enables streaming of digital content to compatible network media players (such as those found in the D-Link MediaLounge product line) as well as popular media player applications used in computers.
With the included feature-rich Memeo software, you can create schedules and rules including real-time full or incremental backups. The Web-based configuration software allows users to establish storage quotas for specific users and groups. The DNS-321 can automatically back up your data regardless of the Operating System (OS) of your computer (Windows, Mac, or Linux). The DNS-321 also features a built-in FTP server to access files through the Internet. With its sleek design and quiet cooling fans, the DNS-321 can be easily placed on your desk at home or in the office. Utilizing SATA hard drives and gigabit connectivity, the 2-Bay Network Storage Enclosure (DNS-321) is a high performance, cost-effective solution for your home or small office data storage needs.