The much awaited iPhone 3G has arrived and is considered a huge hit, going by the 1 million handsets sold in the first three days.

According to Apple’s chief executive, Steve Jobs, the new iPhone 3G is off to a great start all around the world, when compared to their original iPhone that had taken 74 days to sell the first 1 million handsets.

However, the huge demand caused unexpected technical difficulties across the U.S. and Europe. Some of the buyers in the U.S. were unable to use their new handsets for many hours after purchasing them, due to the iTunes store grinding to a halt under the burden of the huge number of requests.

These problems are attributed to the unprecedented demand that was not anticipated.

Analysts at RBC Capital Markets are of the opinion that the low price and the demand, along with the distribution across 22 countries and 28 mobile operators may be the cause of issues that caused frustration to buyers, due to limited stock.

They also feel that the target of selling 5.1 million iPhone 3Gs throughout the world, during the third quarter of 2008 will be met by Apple. They are confident that Apple is highly likely to meet its long-term target of launching the 3G handsets in 70 countries and selling about 14 million iPhones in the next year.

As has been mentioned in our previous pre-release article, the iPhone 3G comes in two forms, 8GB and 16GB, with either white or black back. The front is black for both. The 16GB model is available in both these colors, while the 8GB is available only in black and it appears as if most people appear to like the black much more.

The iPhone 3G, bearing a slightly tweaked design, is almost identical to the old iPhone, except may be for a slight difference in the thickness. The old one was 0.46 inches thick, while the new 3G is 0.48 inches; however this is not a visible difference because Apple has slightly refined the shape at the back. The backside seems thinner than the old iPhone when held in hand, in spite of being slightly thicker. The metal back is now in plastic making it look better, less slippery, provides better signal strength and reduces the weight of the iPhone by 2g too without making it feel cheap or shallow. The Wi-Fi reception also seems to be a bit better. Read the rest of this entry »

If you do not know already, there was a format war brewing between electronic companies and movie studios over the next generation media of audio and video. After almost a decade the Toshiba-led HD-DVD consortium blinked, and Sony’s Blu-ray will now be the standard.

The Blu-ray Disc, also known as the BD is an optical disc storage media format that uses high-definition video and data storage. It gets its name from the blue laser that is used to read and write this type of disc, in contrast to the DVD format that uses a red laser. Data storage capacity is much greater on the Blu-ray Disc than on the DVD format, due to its shorter wavelength. A Blu-ray Disc has storage of almost six times the capacity of a dual layer DVD.

Blu-ray Disc was competing with the HD DVD format in the high definition optical disc format war. Recently Toshiba, the company that supports the HD DVD, announced that it will no longer manufacture or market HD DVD players and recorders, giving way to Blu-ray as the winner of this format war.

While Blu-ray discs are still expensive, they can store 50 GB worth of data in a disc that does not look any different from the regular CD or DVD with the same dimensions. This means, users get movie discs with high definition and enhanced picture over DVDs and awesome sound.

The BDU-X10S, which is a read-only player, has a Serial ATA (SATA) interface and a standard 5.25-inch form-factor that makes installation easy and will slot itself into the Windows XP or Vista enabled contemporary desktop PCs. In case the cost of Blu-ray discs seems high, the good news is that it even reads standard CDs and DVDs.

BDU-X10S comes with CyberLink’s PowerDVD BD-Edition software to playback commercial movies, DVD-ROMs, CD-ROMs and Blu-ray disc home videos as well as recordable/rewritable Blu-ray Discs (BD-R/BD-RE.) It also allows playback of Blu-ray discs in H.264 or MPEG-2 format, the standard DVD-Video discs or recorded DVDs in the MPEG-2 or AVCHD formats. It reads almost any disc, except HD-DVD or DVD RAM.

This BD-ROM, being in the $200 price range offers consumers a viable option to discover and enjoy about 500 high-definition Blu-ray Disc titles that have been released as of now.

The BDU-X10S also supports disc-quality scanning and its tray opens and closes perfectly with no problems and the wide tray bezel can be replaced with a skinny one.

The read speed of this BD-ROM is middling among BD drives, which is CD-ROM:24x, DVD-ROM: 8x and BD-ROM: 2x.

Sony also includes SATA data cable, a Molex-to-SATA power adapter, a tray eject tool and a BD-capable version of the Cyberlink PowerDVD, in the box.

The main reason people would want to buy a BD-ROM as of now is to be able to watch Blu-ray movies on a PC, so this requires a fast system with an HDCP-supported (high-bandwidth digital content protection) graphics card and monitor. The recommended resolution is 1920 x 1080 or higher.

For people who are ready for “the Blu’s,” it is time to let the blue-laser revolution flow, by getting the Sony BDU-X10S, which comes with a one-year warranty.

With all the technological advancements that have taken place, all our personal information is exposed to others, whether we like it or not. If there is one thing that we can call our own, it is our mind. We are actually on the verge of losing it too. We are not going harebrained but we are being subjected to mind reading by our own creations – the computers.

Researchers are turning computers into mind readers. They have created a computer that can look at the brain waves or scans and figure out what humans are thinking.

The brain is not exactly unexplored territory. Philosophers have long before pondered on the nature of thought that pulses through our gray matter and even used several serums, polygraphs, lobotomies and hypnotism to find out what the thoughts are.

However, the past few years have seen an extraordinary and unprecedented promise in the field of neurosciences, with scientists scanning the brain to find patterns of emotion and thought, which are the precursors for behavior and learning.

Brain waves are electrical brain activity patterns. This means, that brain cells communicate with each other by using electricity and neurotransmitters, which are chemicals. These brain waves can be altered by thoughts of different planned actions, such as moving a hand without actually moving the hand. Read the rest of this entry »

Apple’s core calling is “creating the next cool thing for the world’s consumers.” Apple practices what it preaches and succeeds at it too.

The month of March changed a lot of things for Apple, in terms of fading resistance for Mac. Mac sales reported an enormous 51% increase compared to the previous year. This is said to be three times the rate for the personal-computer industry. These figures are excluding that of the iPod and iPhone. Adding them would bring Apple’s sales from $5.2 billion in the year 2002 to $24 billion last year. Even the share prices have seen a rise.

The reason for this is the millions of consumers that are looking at the Mac in a new light. Once only favored by artists and students, today the Mac is fast becoming the first choice of many.

The Mac revolution is also slowly making its way into the corporate world, with employees increasingly insisting that employers provide them Macs to work on. Google is always said to have given its employees the power to choose any system they want. Now even IBM and Cisco are running tests to see if they should allow Macs into their offices. The Mac always had fans who would sing its praises, but now even the mainstream users are learning the song.

There are several reasons why Macs make sense in the corporate world. With Apple’s share jumping to more than 10% in the consumer PC market, and with consumer applications from chat to Facebook entering the office environment, more businesses consider notebook PCs for their personal use as well as for work, and many choose Apple’s MacBooks.

Software evaluation analysts say that Apple’s operating system, the OS x, is superior to Microsoft Windows by many metrics, including its design, efficiency, bug-free operation, and the fact that it is less vulnerable to viruses and hackers. Read the rest of this entry »

“How nice it would be if I could taste that food.” “What if I can touch things through the PC.”

I cannot be the only one who would have thought such things when using the computers as a youngster. The need to feel them is always there, although we know it’s all just virtual.

Carnegie Mellon University developed a controller that allows computer users to use their sense of touch along with the senses of sight and sound, in manipulating three-dimensional images and exploring virtual environments.

This device, created to use mostly for training, industrial purposes and for research, comes very close to the sensitivity of the human hand.

This haptic (devices that convey the sense of touch) device uses magnetic fields to replicate the response a hand has to textures and gravitational forces.

According to Ralph Hollis, a professor at Carnegie Mellon, “We believe this device provides the most realistic sense of touch of any haptic interface in the world today.”

This controller is said to have only one moving part and rests in a bowl like structure connected to the computer. Two controllers can be used simultaneously to pick up more objects (virtual) from the monitor.

Recently, a demonstration was held for the visitors of Hollis’ lab and they were invited to move an image of a pin across a plate of various textures, which caused the controller to bump along ripples, vibrate across fine striations and glide across smooth areas. On one computer, users were amazed that they could actually “feel” the contours of a virtual rabbit.

Hollis said that his researches created 10 such devices, out of which six were sent to other universities across the country and Canada. He said that a new company, Butterfly Haptics would begin marketing the device in June or July of this year.

The cost of this controller is said to be less than $50000, and may perhaps come with a bonus of a virtual surgeon, which allows people to operate on a virtual human organ and feel the tissue texture or even allow a designer to enjoy the feeling of fitting a part into a jet engine that is of course virtual.

Researchers say that this device can provide the most amazing and unbelievable experience, to the extent of users feeling the wind below the wings of military planes.

Hollis and his team did build a prototype of this device in 1997, but later they refined it and made it into a much more advanced system, as well as lowered the cost recently, with the grant from the National Science Foundation.

This technology of haptic devices is already being used in a different form, with cell phones that vibrate as well as in video games that already make users feel the physical sensations.

However, there is a huge difference in the technology created by Carnegie Mellon, as their system relies on a part that floats in a magnetic field rather than on mechanical links and cables.

We may not (yet) be able to taste food, but we can enjoy the feeling of being able touching it.

Apple’s wonder gadget with a wonderful user interface and a great screen has made waves with gadget lovers all around the world.

iPhone, when it went on sale, created a minor sensation, with people waiting in long lines to own it and the media going gaga over this good looking piece of art.

When something as interesting makes it appearance, competition is not far away. This is what is irking Apple’s chief executive, Steve jobs. He is said to be encountering serious resistance in Waterloo.

Waterloo is home to the notorious opponents and the creators of the BlackBerry, Research In Motion (RIM.)

RIM as it is popularly known is the leader of smart phones in North America. Smart phones are more like computers than phones and there are many fans who love them for the easy access to the web, digital music and video.

The Blackberry Curve and Pearl, smartphones that are aimed at the consumer market did very well but RIM faces a challenge, as the entry of the iPhone brought the sales down in the first six months.

Apple’s noisy appearance in the smartphone market has increased the visibility of the smartphones and even enhanced the visibility of its rivals too. In the last few months, the sales of smartphones all over the world increased by 60%.

Apple announced in March, that they would most likely be licensing the corporate email technology from Microsoft, which makes it possible for iPhones to directly connect to business computers. In Apple’s quarterly conference, it was revealed that one-third of the Fortune 500 companies showed interest in giving their employees iPhones. Read the rest of this entry »

You worked on a project all night and have a power point presentation ready on your computer. You rush to work for that all important online presentation for a client and switch on your most trusted device, only to find it apologizing that it is not able to boot properly and asking if you want to boot in safe mode.

This is not an enjoyable situation to be in. In spite of being most needed and most used, computers have their own issues.

What would we not do to have a computer that does not need booting and starts immediately the minute it is switched on? It took scientists at Hewlett-Packard to eventually find a solution to this problem.

The solution is a simple basic electrical circuit that has the potential to possibly alleviate the need of booting a computer ever again.

The theory of electronics teaches that there are three basic elements of a passive circuit – resistors, capacitors and inductors. Inductors are found in all sorts of electronic circuits, particularly in combination with resistors and capacitors and commonly found in PCs. Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft has the reputation of fading out the old products on the release of a new one, in order to create a demand for the new product. Sometimes, after getting used to something, it hurts to see it go, as it happened with their operating systems. The general consensus is that XP is far better than Vista, but the fading out of XP has begun.

But the same cannot be said about their service packs. Windows XP Service Pack 3 has been recently released to manufacturers on April 21, 2008 and to the web on May 6, 2008, after a long delay. It the latest and last entry of XP service packs, and is a much awaited product that comes with all the updates for the operating system, that have been released earlier, as well as some new functionalities. Since the release of the XP, Microsoft has brought out several fixes for the operating system and according to Microsoft, a total of 1174 fixes are packaged in Windows XP Service Pack 3.

This service pack supports many operating systems, including Windows XP, Windows XP Home Edition, Windows XP Professional, Windows XP Professional N, Windows XP Starter Edition, any version of Windows XP Media Center Edition and any version of Tablet PC Edition, but cannot be used with x64 version of Windows XP.

The new functionalities that Microsoft talks about are nothing major and are features that improve the security and reliability of the system. Read the rest of this entry »

It only happens in movies like “Time Machine,” where scientist Alex Hartdegen moves on to the year 2037, only to find the moon showering the earth with huge chunks of rock.

Time to travel back to the present to Apple’s Time Capsule, which takes people into the future with its advanced technology!
Most computer users face the dread of losing important data. People more often than not forget or put off backing up their data, since it is a cumbersome process of using either CDs, DVDs or even an external hard drive.

Apple was the first to come up with a solution earlier, with the creation of Time Machine, which comes with MAC OS X Leopard. Time Machine makes backing up data easy and painless; however, there is still the requirement of either having an external hard disk connected to the MAC through a USB or cable. This proves to be a problem with MACBook users.

Apple decided to do something about it and created “Time Capsule,” which automatically backs up a computer, offering constant protection – and the best part is that it is wireless.

Time Capsule has been designed to be compatible with Time Machine in MAC OS X Leopard.

Time Capsule comes with a wireless 500GB or 1TB hard drive, which is excellent and has the potential to handle all the backup needs. It provides plenty of room for storing huge amounts of data and there is no issue of running out of space.

Apple says, users of MAC OS X Leopard will have to set the Time Capsule as the backup drive for Time Machine and forget about it. The first time it is used, the time taken may be overnight or a little more, to complete the backup, depending on the size of the data. However, since the next time only involves backing up the updated files, it happens quietly through wireless in the background, without any sort of user intervention whatsoever. Read the rest of this entry »

Get used to one operating system and begin loving it for what it offers and suddenly, it’s gone. A new operating system releases into the market, takes its place not only in the millions of computers throughout the globe but also in the hearts of passionate users. History repeats itself. That’s the biography of an operating system.

Microsoft, said to be the world’s number one IT brand, does it time and again. Their operating systems are very popular and used world-wide. They bring in huge uncountable dollars for the company. The company allows their operating systems to run for a few years and on releasing a new operating system, fade the older version out, making it vanish from the shop shelves.

With the release of Windows Vista, Microsoft initially wanted to stop all the Windows XP sales as of June 30, 2008, in spite of the lukewarm response that Vista received on its launch or the numerous protests made by people that they prefer XP to Vista. Most people are of the opinion that XP is the best piece of software ever produced by them. Microsoft tried to woo XP users to welcome Vista, but to no avail. They complain about Vista’s bad performance, its incompatibility with other software and everything else about Vista, including its security warning pop ups.

Talking about passion for operating systems, Galen Gruman, a technology journalist started a save XP web petition and collected more than 100000 thousand signature and comments from diehard XP fans, insisting that Windows keep selling XP until the next version is released in 2010. Grumen also wanted to meet up with Microsoft heads about the petition and was declined. Read the rest of this entry »