Well, there’s about an hour to go before the iPhone is unleashed on the world, well the east coast of the US at any rate. Rather than bang on how good or bad the latest toy is, I thought I’d list some iPhone reviews to help you make up your own mind.

• MacRumors – user reviews, obviously none posted yet ;)
• CNET
• NY Times – David Pogue enthusing over the toy
• PC Magazine – get to play with it for ten minutes
• USA Today – a good video review

Hopefully that should help you sort out whether you spend your Friday evening standing outside your local AT&T store or down the local pub as usual. For those of you choosing the AT&T option have a great weekend playing with your toy!

Featured Tags iphone


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Obviously slashing prices has not worked, so now the Blu-Ray Disc Association has decided to bundle five ‘top’ movies with their players as of the 1st of July until the end of September. The package applies to all Blu-ray players and the PlayStation 3.

Unfortunately it’s not a free for all when it comes to choosing your movies, you have to select your five freebies from a list including Chicken Little, The Omen (2006), Resident Evil: Apocalypse, and The Italian Job. Not exactly blockbusters plus you have to mail off a coupon prior to getting your mits on the discs.

It’s also a copy cat technique with Toshiba offering a similar deal just before Christmas last year with their HD-DVD player, but it is a well known and successful technique sure to boost sales … for a while.

I’m not convinced it will be the killer blow that Blu-Ray manufacturers are looking for, but it’s great for the consumer!

Source: Ars Technica

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Whilst the US Apple fans gear up for the release of the iPhone on Friday, their compatriots in Europe are still twiddling their thumbs and wondering when they’ll be able to get their grubby little mits on the new toy. Well Apple have still to announce a distributor for the iPhone in Europe but the favourite is currently British firm Vodafone.

According to Reuters both companies are deep in conference on an agreement, but Apple require a guaranteed sales volume for the iPhone and Vodafone want to have control of its price.

Deutsche Telecom and Orange have also been touted as possible partners for the iPhone but Vodafone would be an obvious choice for Apple. Watch this space for an announcement soon!

Source: Reuters

Featured Tags apple, iphone, vodafone


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Not only have the IBM boffins come up with a faster super computer which can operate at speeds over 3 Petaflops but it uses less power than it’s predecessor. The latest generation of IBM super computer, the Blue Gene/P, was announced on Tuesday and here’s the blurb from IBM

It [The Blue Gene/P] enables science and commercial supercomputing to attack vital problems in ways never before possible — modeling an entire human organ to determine drug interactions, for example. Drug researchers could run simulated clinical trials on 27 million patients in one afternoon using just a sliver of the machine’s full power.

Apparently it’s 100,000 times more powerful than a home PC and can process more operations in a second than a pile of laptops over a mile high – I hoped they physically checked that last stat :)

And it’s nice to see the boffins being a bit green too by making the computer ‘at least seven times more energy efficient than any other supercomputer’. Although they don’t go into details on this I’m guessing I won’t be able to run it using a solar panel!

In case you’re wondering ‘what ever next?’, it’s the Blue Gene/Q which will run at up to 10 PetaFlops.

Source: DailyTech

Featured Tags blue-gene, ibm, supercomputer


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Three days out and Apple and AT&T have finally announced their call plans and rates for the iPhone. The cheapest option at US$59.99 a month gives you 450 minutes call time plus 5000 off peak, unlimited data transfer and 200 text messages. So for a 4GB iPhone (US$499), US$36 activation fee and two year contract (24 x US$59.99), your total spend will be US$1,974.76. A small price to pay to look super cool with your funky new toy. Of course, that’s until the latest new ‘must have’ gizmo appears, probably just before Christmas I’m guessing.

I must admit the deal doesn’t sound bad over a two year period as long as you’re happy tied in for that time. Around $80 a month for a single gadget to make calls, play music/vids and handle emails, oh yes, and to look super cool too.

I’m sure there are a group of people who will rush out and buy one regardless of the cost, in fact they’ve already started queuing. But I don’t think the appeal will stretch much beyond exisitng AT&T customers after the initial hub bub has died down. Then again I’ve been known to be wrong in the past :)

Featured Tags iphone, rates


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Back in January we showed you the World’s Smallest PC. Well now we may have another contender for the title. Calao, a small French firm based in the Alps, is about to launch a USB based Linux single-board computer, the USB-9260. It measures a cute 3.3 by 1.4 inches and runs at 190MHz. Not exactly speedy but what do you expect from a ‘puter you could lose in your laptop bag!

As for memory, it has 64MB of SDRAM and 256MB of flash, and there’s an ethernet port with a couple of USB 2.0 ports as well. These little puppies will probably be of more use for industrial or manufacturing purposes but could still be a status symbol at the next Linux users convention.

Source: Linux Devices

Featured Tags pc, small, usb


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More hard drive news today with Seagate announcing its very own 1TB internal desktop drives, the Barracuda 7200.11 and ES.2. Both boast a SATA rate of 3GB/s with the ES.2 offering an SAS interface option, and have transfer rates of 105 MB/s with a 32MB cache, 4.16 msec latency and they’ll spin you right around at 7200 rpm.

The 7200.11 (aimed at desktop users) will retail for US$400 and will be available in the third quarter of the year. The price and the spec practically match the 7200.11′s main competitor the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000. This launch smacks of ‘if they’ve got one out there we have to have one too’ kind of mentality as the drive really offers nothing new. But competition is always good in the computer hardware arena.

Featured Tags 7200.11, barracuda, hard-drive, seagate


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