Even though the first iPhone model isn’t out on the market yet, Apple is already thinking of the future and it’s preparing a wireless 3G iPhone version. Rumors say that a Swedish firm received assurances that the first version of iPhone would arrive in September and the 3G version will be on the market January 2008, the earliest.

However this is not shocking news, since Steve Jobs already discussed and announced his long term 3G plans with the iPhone.

“Most cellular-based Internet access in the world today, including the AT&T EDGE network which the iPhone will first use, is considered second-generation (2G). Few would mistake 2G-level wireless for a truly fast connection. Downloads typically crest at a few hundred kilobits per second even under ideal conditions; uploads are regularly far worse, frequently hovering around just above dial-up access. 3G ultimately amounts to the addition of extra channels on a cellphone network to boost those anemic speeds, particularly in terms of uploads. Where downstream access rarely exceeds 800Kbps on present 3G networks, upstream levels are a much healthier 400Kbps. The technology smoothes out wrinkles in mobile Internet access that make some tasks impractical or even impossible on 2G networks, such as uploading large photos in e-mail attachments or video messaging.”

Apple Insider

Featured Tags 3g, apple, iphone, wireless


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Yahoo recently launched a suggestion site that uses the Digg mechanism and resembles graphically with the well known news promoting website. However I don’t understand all the fuss around this, since Yahoo initially credited Digg for this in a post on the official blog.

“We call it a Suggestion Board — you can browse suggestions from other site visitors or post your own. Digg-style voting means we can quickly discover what’s most important to users. In addition to reading feedback from other users, you’ll find responses from Yahoo! employees about the issues. Product teams regularly read and take action on your feedback. Though we aren’t always going to immediately act on it, it’s incredibly helpful to us in making the best sites we can… and we’ve even been known to reward great suggestions with some Yahoo! schwag.”

Featured Tags digg, yahoo


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While most of us ( including me) were focusing on Vista’s new features it looks that some were concentrating on the more boring but nonetheless important end user licensing agreement. You all know about it, it’s that big screen of text you never read but you have to agree to in order to install any software.

As I was saying there are some that read the fine print and think about it. And they should, for that agreement contains lots of information you bound yourself to when you use a certain software. In our case the software is Windows Vista and it seems that the new Vista EULA contains serious limitations and privacy issues.

As you can read here, the agreement allows Microsoft to check the legitimacy of software on a machine and to delete programs considered as dangerous without asking the user. Besides, when you activate Vista on a device the software is associated with that specific piece of hardware and it sends automatically information about your hardware to Microsoft.

This all might be a false alarm but I strongly advice that you read the ‘fine prints’ in ALL your software, and specially the Vista EULA as it might take from you the control over your own computer.

Featured Tags licensing_agreement, microsoft, privacy_issues, windows_vista


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After several discussions of Mozilla’s developers, during last week, the features for Firefox 3 were gathered and sorted out.

Gecko, the rendering engine upon which all of the Mozilla applications rely will be tweaked for better standards and support. What worths mentioning is the ability of saving documents as PDFs. Since the PDF should and maybe will remain the main format used in exchanging documents for the upcoming years, all of us will be monitoring the development progress for this feature.

Another important feature would be the enhancing of the navigation while going back to a form using the POST function. That annoying warning message won’t be visible anymore.

The guys at Mozilla are implementing a possibility for us to use a theme or a plugin without restarting Firefox. They might even implement a plugin manager, so things can get easier as it goes.

Since security is one of the most discussed topics related to browsers, Firefox 3 will have a EV certificate support, even if limited to accepting and/or displaying them. EV certificates are more reliable and have an extended validation.

On the other hand, Mozilla is planning to get rid of the browser crashes caused by not responsive plugins (I often get that when trying to display a PDF document within the browser window), but unfortunately that got scheduled for the Firefox 4. The feature would require major code re-writing, and that would delay Firefox 3′s release date.

Last but not least, they considered implementing a crash reporting tool called “Airbag” meant to replace Talkback, and they are going to release the MSI version of the installer as well for the whole package.

We’re looking forward to try the final version of what’s supposed to be the best browser out there.

Featured Tags browser, firefox, gecko, mozilla


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Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.

Using the Pipes editor, you can fetch any data source via its RSS, Atom or other XML feed, extract the data you want, combine it with data from another source, apply various built-in filters (sort, unique (with the “ue” this time:-), count, truncate, union, join, as well as user-defined filters), and apply simple programming tools like for loops. In short, it’s a good start on the Unix shell for mash ups. It can extract dates and locations and what it considers to be “text entities.

It’s something different than the Google Reader we’ve all got used to, and it’s worth a try.

Featured Tags pipes, yahoo


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After a while where subscriptions were only possible in certain countries, GMail has recently announced that it opened registrations for users from across the globe. It has even posted a “Sign up” link on their front page. This comes after GMail experienced problems with German and British domains. Get your address for free, here.

Featured Tags gmail, subscriptions


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Along with the iPhone came a new trend that has taken over just about everything. First, there was the “How’s it going to be like?” stage, when no details were revealed to anyone, and dozens of mockups (some closer to reality, some purely fictional) hit the internet, powered by curiosity. Earlier this year, everyone tuned in to MacWorld, where Steve Jobs presented the long-awaited product. Every detail, every photo and every single aspect of the long-awaited “iPod phone” (as Jobs himself says, iPhone is the best iPod they ever made) was covered in thousands of newspaper articles, tv shows, blog posts and so on.

The iPhone hasn’t reached the marked by now, and still there are a couple of rumours regarding (virtual) competitors. Driven by the media attention that the iPhone is getting, rival companies have started work on their own “iPhone”.

The first one sounds more like a joke than a real thing. It seems that, with some 4 months before the iPhone’s release to the masses, the japanese guys from Meizu created a phone that is almost a hundred percent identical to the iPhone. The photos show a smaller phone, with the icons placed in the same way (one icon has the Windows symbol on it, but the writing is in Chinese, so I can’t understand anything from it), with strikingly similar features (except from what looks like a small secondary camera on top).

This is said to be the Meizu M8, and it’s, in my opinion, just an attempt to get some spotlight from the real thing.

Another “would-be” product that caught my eye is the Asus Asura, which is still in a concept phase. Azura has a design which is similar to the iPhone’s design, but in the same time it manages to bring something different to the table. It appears to be a normal, sliding phone (Although I’m not quite sure how this slidin mechanism will look like - it isn’t very clear from the photos), but what it has new is a QWERTY-type keyboard that popsout from one side, allowing the user of the phone to type a lot easier. Between the two models, I would say the latter has a real shot of success, but unfortunately it’s still in a design stage.

As I’ve said, the iPhone hasn’t even been launched to the general public, and already companies are rushing to copy its design and features. This might make it the best selling phone so far, or it might mean that users will get bored of it even before its launch.

Featured Tags iphone, ipod, macworld, rumours, steve_jobs


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