Apple’s annual iPod event has come and gone, leaving us with new iPod nanos and cheaper iPod touches. More discoveries about what is (and isn’t) in Snow Leopard popped up this week as well, in addition to iPhone OS 3.1 and an interview with Steve Jobs. Read on for the top Apple news of this week:
A teardown of the just-updated iPod touch reveals that a camera may still be forthcoming, as well as possible 802.11n support in the iPhone OS. iFixit has been quick on the draw at taking Apple’s latest offerings apart, first with a dissection of the new iPod nano and today with the 32GB iPod touch. According to the site’s hardware experts, the new iPod touch supports a newer Broadcom chip that supports 802.11n, though the touch doesn’t make use of it just yet.
A teardown of the just-updated iPod touch reveals that a camera may still be forthcoming, as well as possible 802.11n support in the iPhone OS. iFixit has been quick on the draw at taking Apple’s latest offerings apart, first with a dissection of the new iPod nano and today with the 32GB iPod touch. According to the site’s hardware experts, the new iPod touch supports a newer Broadcom chip that supports 802.11n, though the touch doesn’t make use of it just yet.
A teardown of the just-updated iPod touch reveals that a camera may still be forthcoming, as well as possible 802.11n support in the iPhone OS. iFixit has been quick on the draw at taking Apple’s latest offerings apart, first with a dissection of the new iPod nano and today with the 32GB iPod touch. According to the site’s hardware experts, the new iPod touch supports a newer Broadcom chip that supports 802.11n, though the touch doesn’t make use of it just yet.
AMD unveiled its next-generation GPU architecture at an event today aboard the USS Hornet—2.5 teraFLOPS of floating-point power, or well over twice the company’s current high-end cards. The company also had hardware and software partners on-hand to demonstrate their own applications of AMD’s technology, and one of these partners was OTOY. While AMD gave a number of very impressive demos of their next-generation DirectX 11 part (detailed technical discussion to follow later this month), OTOY’s demo of Crysis running on an iPhone was probably the most profoundly intriguing use of AMD’s upcoming GPU that I saw all evening.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has pulled some crazy stunts in the past. The result is almost always poor publicity for the man and the company he represents. It’s really a pity that someone as bright as Ballmer loses his cool on a regular basis. We can’t say his latest antic tops the rest, but it’s definitely going into the record books (especially if someone managed to film it). Yesterday was Microsoft’s private company meeting at Seattle’s Safeco Field. It was also the day that Ballmer snatched an iPhone from one of his peers (believe it or not, most Microsoft employees we’ve met have an iPhone) and didn’t give it back till he was done trying to be a comedian.
Recent whispers across the blogosphere that Microsoft currently has no plans to launch the Zune HD in France prompted us to prod Redmond impatiently for more information. We got it, but we’re sad to say you probably won’t like it if you live north, south, east, or west of the US border. Not only are there no plans for France, but Microsoft is excluding every single country outside of the US, at least for now.
Here’s something you don’t see every day: companies like Microsoft and the cable industry relaxing content and DRM restrictions. But that’s exactly what happened yesterday at the CEDIA EXPO trade show in Atlanta, where Microsoft announced that home users could now install CableCARD-powered digital TV tuners in their PCs, could use those tuners with switched digital video (SDV) cable systems, and could use recorded content more freely.
Opinions seem somewhat split on the upgrades Apple made to its iPod line yesterday. A particular point of contention, though, is the lack of significant hardware upgrades to the iPod touch line. Expectations were high for the inclusion of a camera in the device, but Steve Jobs says that the camera was left out to make the iPod touch an inexpensive, affordable gaming device.
At the Mobilize conference on Thursday in San Francisco, Motorola CEO Dr. Sanjay Jha unveiled an Android smartphone called CLIQ (all caps in the tradition of the RAZR and ROKR) that will be available soon from T-Mobile. The device features a new service called Blur that Motorola developed to bring deep social networking integration and Web synchronization support to Android handsets.
