Although there’s no official word from Apple as yet, in Walt Mossberg’s column at the Wall Street Journal he states

Also, some early iPod Touch units have had defective screens, where images appeared too dark. Apple says this problem affected a small number of units and is being remedied. My two test units displayed beautiful images.

during his review of the Apple iPod touch. Elsewhere there are many complaints regarding the iPods screen not displaying dark images and videos very well, the view is that they appear as if you are looking at the screen from an acute angle when in fact you are viewing it face on.

In fact the issue was highlighted over at iLounge in their own review and according to them some customers are being charged up to US$40 when attempting to return defective units along with the usual store staff attempts to blame the problem on customer high expectation or poor video encoding by the customer! Oh how I pine for the days when the customer was always right.

Come on Apple, sort this fiasco out, it was only a couple of weeks ago that you slashed the iPhone price by 33% in the US and had to placate the early-adopters with a $100 credit. Now you are trying to charge customers to get a faulty unit working. What’s the story?

Featured tags: apple ipod ipod touch

Sphere this entry»

The boffins at Toshiba have done it again, they’ve managed to squeeze more zeroes and ones onto a HDD through Discrete Track Recording (DTR) technology. Here’s the techie blurb and a pretty picture from Toshiba that for once made sense to me!

So what does this mean to you and me. Well for some reason DTR is best applied to small form factor HDDs, namely the 1.8 and 2.5 inch variations so it means more disk space for your iPod and laptop. Currently the 1.8 inch HDDs max out at 60 GB - Apple slap two of these platters together to make their 160 GB iPod - but with DTR the platters will reach a 120GB capacity allowing Apple to come out with a 240 GB iPod with the same physical size as the 120 GB model. Cool, eh?

1.8 inch HDDs are also used in other devices such mobile PCs, digital vid cams and car nav units, so their capacities should be increased as well. And for those of use who are keeping track of the score Toshiba now squeeze in 333 Gb per square inch on these new drives.

The downside? Well Toshiba doesn’t plan to start mass production of drives boasting the new DTR tech until 2009, so it’ll be a while before a bigger capapcity iPod appears, but at least it’s on the horizon.

Source: Toshiba

Featured tags: hdd ipod laptop hard drives toshiba

Sphere this entry»

With a design style that wouldn’t look out of place on an alien space craft, Bowers & Wilkins have come up with the high performance Zeppelin speakers. Just plug your iPod into the system and you’ll be able to appreciate B&W’s ‘40-plus years of experience and know-how in speaker design in a single package’.

There’s not much in the way of numbers on the B&W website about these suckers apart from the depressingly large price tag of US$599. But is that too much to pay for the first step in converting your lounge into the bridge of some sort alien space craft? I thought not ;)

Source: enGadget

Featured tags: bowers & wilkins ipod zeppelin

Sphere this entry»

Apple is trying to persuade film studios to allow then to offer movies for rent via iTunes. The rental service would be a direct challenge to cable and satellite TV operators.

Apple already has deals with Walt Disney and Paramount to sell their movies via a download, but other studios are reluctant to strike similar deals due to the negative impact on DVD sales the downloads may have. However they may be more open to the prospect of movies rentals via the internet.

It is suggested that movies would cost US$3 for a 30-day rental, with the ability to transfer the movie to another device such as an iPod. Software would prevent the movie from being copied.

Another shrewd move by Apple if they pull it off. With a lot of people using PCs as a home entertainment unit, what could be easier than downloading your movie rentals straight to the unit. However how long would it be before a hacker breaks the software? ;)

Source: Mac Rumours

Featured tags: apple ipod itunes movies

Sphere this entry»

As reported by InfoWorld it appears as if someone in the Zune team is having a bit of joke by setting up an amnesty bin for team member’s to deposit their iPods! This image was posted on flickr supposedly taken at Zune HQ. The bin’s probably a bit of a joke as Matt Rosoff, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, points out

“Most of the people [working on] Zune would want to have an iPod to keep track of the competition,” he said. “On that team, they’re all into digital music, so all of them probably have a bunch of players.”

Nice to see a sense of humour in the workplace!

Source: InfoWorld

Featured tags: flickr ipod microsoft zune

Sphere this entry»

Not a new concept, having a sex toy hooked up to an iPod, but Ann Summers’ iGasm has certainly ruffled some feathers at Apple if only for the ads. The promotional posters for the iGasm are similar in style to the iconic iPod adverts, with a silhouetted character and bright background. According to the British newspaper News of the World this has caused Apple to send a letter to Ann Summers demanding the posters be removed or else.

“We hope this request to remove it immediately will prevent us having to consider further action.”

The response from Ann Summers CEO Jacqueline Gold is playful to say the least!

“Perhaps I can send them an iGasm to put a smile back on their faces!”

Hopefully Apple will see the funny side of this and lighten up a little bit, and anyway you have to have bought an iPod to use the iGasm. I would have thought that was a win-win situation for all concerned. Oh well, here’s the ad to brighten up your day.

Source: Top Tech News

Featured tags: ann summers apple igasm ipod

Sphere this entry»

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

Sphere this entry»