Month: June 2009

iPhone 3gs overheating rumours?

It seems rumours are circulating of the iPhone 3gs overheating while in use.

Will they become like the MacBook Pros, no longer for use on a lap (to quote the manual), and become a desk phone instead of a handheld one? Then you could have a portable desk to take hiking with you… Or maybe an add-on battery pack with built in fan…

Steve Jobs’ Liver 2.0

The Wall Street Journal has what passes for an article (despite not indicating any sources) that indicates that Steve Jobs had a liver transplant in Tennessee two months ago. Tennessee has the shortest waiting list for donor organs and no residency requirement (Sometimes that private jet does come in handy). The Wall Street Journal has previously pressured Apple to (illegally in California at least) reveal confidential medical information about its employees (namely, Steve Jobs). CNBC claims it was confirmed by two sources (but doesn’t say who they are). CNN’s blogs have a picture of the mansion where he may be recovering. And a list of questions about the coverage (Nobody in Tennessee is covering it!). There are also rumours of the iPhone release being moved up to happen before information about the transplant being released.

If he did have the transplant, then we wish Steve all the best for a speedy recovery and hope he won’t meet up with Elvis. If not, well then I’ll be cancelling the WSJ subscription.

via MDJ via Daring Fireball (with much rumination)

iPhone 3GS

From WWDC:

40 million iPhones + iPod Touches have already been sold, 1 Billion apps downloaded in 9 months.

iPhone 3GS – S=Speed, some 2-3x faster, looks like it has the same form factor.

  • Supports OpenGL|ES 2.0 and 7.2Mbps HSPDA
  • 3 megapixel autofocus camera, tap to tell it where to focus, Macro mode to 10cm, better low light sensitivity
  • Also captures video! 30fps, VGA with audio, auto-focus/white-balance/exposure
  • Edit video and send it to YouTube, MobileMe, MMS or e-mail
  • Voice control – “Play songs like this”, “Call Scott”
  • Digital compass
  • Accessibility – VoiceOver, color inversion, zooming
  • Nike+ support
  • Data encryption
  • Instant remote wipe, encrypted iTunes backups
  • Improved battery life, 9 hours of net, 10 hours of video, 30 hours of audio, 12 hours of 2G talk, 5 hours of 3G talk
  • Eco-friendly construction, arsenic free glass, BFR free, mercury free LCD
  • US$199 for 16Gb, US$299 for 32Gb, US$99 for 8Gb iPhone!
  • Available June 19th in US, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, UK
  • Progressive roll out to another 6 countries a week later, no Australian dates yet

iPhone 3.0

  • cut/copy/paste/undo
  • MMS support (later this year for AT&T customers)
  • Search, Spotlight
  • iTunes U now on iPhone iTMS
  • Rent and purchase movies from phone
  • Finer grained parental controls
  • Bluetooth tethering to share connection “Requires carrier support” (ie presumably they just need to allow it!)
  • Safari Javascript 3x faster
  • Support for HTTP streaming audio and video, automatically determine best quality (what codecs I wonder?)
  • HTML5 support
  • Software based keyboard in portrait and landscape
  • Find my iPhone, for MobileMe users shows last known location of the phone, lets you play a sound and send a message, and remote wipe the phone if necessary (to be restored from backup if you find it later).

iPhone Demos

  • Asphalt 5 – car racing game
  • Airstrip
  • Critical Care – Monitor patient vitals via Push
  • ScrollMotion – create digital books for the App Store, download them from inside the app
  • TomTom – turn by turn direction app, and car accessory kit via the Accessory framework
  • Star Defense
  • Plus Network
  • Pasco – sensors for iPhone
  • Zipcar – lets you find a zipcar and remotely honk the horn and unlock the car so you know which one is yours!

WWDC 2009 keynote releases

  • New 15″ MacBook Pro has built in battery lasts up to 7 hours, 1000 charges, approx. 5 years. 60% better colour gamut, 3.06 Dual Core CPU, 8Gb RAM max, 500Gbx7200RPM drive, or 256Gb SSD. Starts at US$1699 through US$2229
  • SD card slots added to models except 17″
  • 13″ Macbook is now a MacBook Pro
  • MacBook Air updated to up to 2.13GHz CPU

Snow Leopard 10.6:

  • Mail, iCal and Address book now support Exchange, with auto-discovery of Exchange Servers
  • QuickLook can preview Microsoft Office documents in Mail without MS Office being installed
  • Preview 2x faster, better PDF text selection
  • Exposé integration with Dock (“Dock Exposé”) for displaying an App’s windows
  • Chinese character input on trackpad
  • Mail up to 2.3x faster
  • Final version of Safari 4 released for Leopard, Tiger and Windows
  • Safari now sandboxes plugins to prevent them crashing the browser (IMHO this means you, Google 🙂
  • Stacks now have scrolling
  • Page through, magnify PDF thumbnails and movies
  • QuickTime X focuses on the content, overlays controls, lets you select from a visual timeline more easily and share it on YouTube, MobileMe or iTunes.
  • All Snow Leopard applications are 64-bit
  • Grand Central Dispatch supports multicore across all of Snow Leopard
  • Open CL (Computing Language) has been open sourced and allows for hardware abstraction of the video hardware for use in processing or display
  • Upgrade cost US$29 or US$49 for upgrading the Leopard family pack

There were some 16593 viewers watching the ustream live stream.

WWDC 2009 live coverage

MacRumors are providing MacRumorsLive, @macrumors on twitter, and a spoiler free keynote stream to notify you when the keynote video coverage is up (ie not live).

John C. Welch will be twittering the keynote for MacJournals magazines (MWJ, MDJ).

For Aussies, MacTalk are offering

  • IRC – irc.foonetic.net #mactalk
  • Live audio commentary – iPhone and iPod Touch users install the fstream app and go to http://mactalk.serverroom.us:7920/listen.pls
  • Live text updates

Coverage starts at 2:30am Melbourne time (UTC/GMT+10) for all those up late with Swine Flu.