Turn Your iPad Into A Laptop By ClamCase

It's not even a month since the launch of iPad and its add on gadgets have started coming. A device called "ClamCase" manufactured by a company of the same name has launched this device which works as an iPad case, stand and keyboard add-on.

One only needs to place the iPad into the case and get started. From there, they can opt to keep it flat on the table or set it up in landscape view. The keyboard can be connected to the iPad via Bluetooth to give them the functionality of a laptop.

However it is a downfall that ClamCase, unlike most other laptops, won't be featuring a trackpad to help people navigate around the iPad screen. That means owners will still need to tap the display to get to where they want to go. The real function of the ClamCase, then, is to improve the typing experience and speed on the iPad and protect the tablet from damage.

ClamCase plans to launch its three-in-one add-on device in the fall. No word on the pricing yet.

iPhone And iPod Touch Capacity Doubled By Apple

The capacity of iPhone and iPod Touch was doubled by Apple on Tuesday for an additional $100.

The iPhone once again comes in two capacities: 8GB for $399 and now 16GB for $499. Apple discontinued the 4GB model after it cut the price of the 8GB model to $399. A reason for this could be that almost 90 percent of all iPhone buyers opted for the 8GB version.

Another blow is that the iPod Touch will now be able to store more music and videos, with 32GB of capacity for $499 only. That device is now available in three versions, with Apple also selling a 16GB model for $399 and an 8GB model for $299.

The new iPhone and iPod Touch appear to be unchanged from their previous versions, though they ship with the new software unveiled at Macworld, which provides the ability to edit the home screen and triangulate your position using Maps.

Finally these changes have increased the chances of me buying an iPhone. :)

Now Get Some Apple Flavor In Your Speakers

Want to have some apple flavor in you speakers ? After all an apple a day keeps the doctor away lol :) Wouldn't it be great if it you had Apple speakers ? These apple look alike speakers consume just 2 watts of power in total and are compatible with mini audio and portable MP3 players.

Here are some specifications:
* Sensible and Characteristic design.
* 2 Channel Multimedia speaker system for PC and Portable audio.
* Easy to control Volume and Power with front control buttons.
* Compatible with Mini audio and Portable MP3 players.
* DC 5Voltage Power through USB port.
* RMS : 1W * 2
* Impedance : 4 ohm
* Drive Unit : 2 inch
* Dimension : 112x104x56mm(WxHxD)-Symmetrical size

They come in two colors- red and green. No info on pricing though. But you can check out this site for more info, it’s in German though.

NBC Universal Unhappy With iTunes Profit

More dirt has emerged regarding the Apple/Universal deal that turned rotten. According to an article in Variety, the deal went south when NBC Universal wanted to raise the price of hot properties like "Heroes" by a dollar, to $2.99, in addition to requesting a cut of Apple's hardware profits. On both counts, Apple refused. And the head honcho of NBC Universal, Jeff Zucker, was none too happy: "Apple sold millions of dollars worth of hardware off the back of our content and made a lot of money."

Less than satisfied with his company's cut of Apple's pie--$15 million in revenue over the last year--NBC Universal opted to pull out of iTunes and spend who-knows-how-much to launch its own online video site called Hulu, which is headed into beta this week. "We don’t want to replace the dollars we were making in the analog world with pennies on the digital side." Hey, anytime someone wants to throw $15 million in pennies my way, please go right ahead.

Porn-Induced Malware Attacks Leopard

Apparently at least some of the Leopard security vulnerabilities have already been exploited, but only through the aid of stupid hornball Mac users. Was that childish of us to call porn-craved Mac users "hornballs" and imply that some of them are stupid? Maybe. And the image of of Justin Long doing the dirty certainly won't fit nicely in our next Mac fantasy, but we're just doing our job here.

Security company Intego discovered that the OSX.RSPlug.A Trojan horse malware is infecting users on certain porn sites who agree to upgrade their video codec. Oh, and it's not a simple button press, either. Users need to agree, download the file, mount the .dmg and install it on their dic- disk. When the malware is setup properly, a computer's DNS settings will change, redirecting browsers to phishing sites and ads for porn.

Cry me a river. This isn't some dangerous Trogan horse, it's pornographic Darwinism. [CNET]

Mac OS X Leopard - The Big Changes

A lot of changes have been made in the new version Mac OS X Leopard.
Here's is a list of the big ones!!!!

1. Create Web Clips As I mentioned, you can now create your own Dashboard widgets from Web pages in Safari. The idea here is that you can use this feature to save yourself needless trips to your browser just to check a specific portion of a Web page for updates-checking sports scores on the right-hand side of this Yahoo page, for example. Just use this feature to turn that section of the Web page into a Dashboard widget, press F12, and you can quickly scan for updates.

The process is quite simple: click on the Open This Page In Dashboard toolbar button in Safari, and the page will dim, except for a white rectangle. Move your mouse until the rectangle is over the area you'd like to make into a Web Clip, then click the mouse button. When you click, you'll see a series of adjustment circles appear on the rectangle; drag these to fine tune the selection area, then click on the Add button.

When you click Add, Dashboard will open, displaying your newly-created widget. You can then click on the widget's info ("i") button to choose a theme for your widget.

And that's all there is to it-as long as you leave your widget open. Unfortunately, there's no way to save a user-created widget, so if you close the widget (by clicking on its "x" indicator), you'll have to start the whole process again.

2. Improved Search: Searching in Safari is now dynamic. Instead of searching after entering your entire search term, Safari searches as you type (after you press Command-F). As you type characters, Safari highlights all the matching terms on the page, reducing the list of matches as you type more characters. It also shows you all instances of your search term instead of making you cycle through them.

3. Bookmark Groups of Tabs: You can now create a bookmark from a group of tabs, as you can with Firefox. For example, assume you've been browsing the Web for a couple hours, and realize it'd be great to have your current assortment of tabs (say six of them) available as a group for future use. All you need to do is select Bookmarks -> Add Bookmark For These 6 Tabs, and then name the bookmark.

4. Recover From Mistakes: Safari's History menu now includes an Reopen Last Closed Window menu item. You'll say thank you for this handy feature every time you get overly aggressive with Command-W-no longer will you have to retrace your steps to get back to the page you were viewing. Instead, just use History -> Reopen Last Closed Window, and your last-viewed page will open up again.

Need to go even further back in time? Safari 3 also adds a Reopen All Windows From Last Session item as well. And yes, it does exactly what it claims to do-reopening all windows (and tabs) that you had open when you last quit Safari.

5. Prevent Mistakes: Safari has a new feature aimed at stopping you from doing something silly: It will now warn you if you click the red close box when you have more than one tab open. (It will also warn you if you try to close a tab or window with text entered in a Web form.)

6. Make History Disappear: If you don't like the thought that every page you've visited is saved indefinitely, you'll love the new settings in Safari, which adds the ability to auto-expire your browsing history over time via its preferences. You can choose to clear entries from the history file after a day, a week, two weeks, a month, a year, or manually.

Time Machine's Simplicity Compels You

If you're running Leopard and you've got an external hard drive, you will back up your data, even if that wasn't your intention when you bought the drive or plugged it into your Mac. That's because Leopard's system snapshot mechanism, Time Machine, is dead simple to enable—and Leopard prompts you to turn it on the moment you plug in your FireWire drive. You'll think, "why not?" and why not indeed.

In System Preferences, Time Machine has exactly two settings: the On/Off switch, and what backup drive it should use. Once it's on, it creates hourly, daily, and weekly snapshots of your Mac, and automatically deletes the oldest ones when you run out of space on your drive—no user configuration required (or even possible, as far as I can see).

That terrible day you delete a file you need, to restore a past snapshot you'll use Time Machine's overwrought interface to fly back through space and time to that happy day when your file did exist. Gimmicky? Sure. But Mac guy John Gruber says that's a good thing:

Apple has made something so effect-laden and so extraordinary that users want to see it in action—the fact that that something is backups, which, let's face it, is effectively a chore, is a noteworthy achievement. Making backup software that people can't wait to try, and which, once activated, just automatically kicks in and does its thing on a regular schedule, is like making people want to go ahead and sign up for life insurance.

In short, Apple's used the best productivity trick in the world: to make the right thing to do the easy thing to do. Leopard's release will no doubt bring on an uptick of Mac users who diligently back up their system and data without even thinking about it.

Apple To Release Unlocked iPhone In France

Apple is releasing an unlocked version of the iPhone that will allow users to run it on various cellular networks. But you have to live in France to get it.

Under a just-announced deal, the European mobile carrier Orange will be the exclusive source for the iPhone in the French market. The unlocked phone is concession to a French law that forbids companies to bundle a cell phone to a specific mobile operator.

According to a report in the International Herald Tribune, Orange will offer both a locked version for its French net for about $560 and an unlocked version for a higher, but undisclosed price. Both are expected to be unveiled in November.

Apple recently signed exclusive deals, similar to the one with U.S.-based AT&T, with Britain's O2, the wireless division of Spain's Telefonica, and with Germany's T-Mobile, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom.

According to the Tribune report, Orange wouldn't say whether it had agreed to give Apple a share of the service revenues generated by iPhone users. This is one of the most striking features of Apple's move into the mobile phone market. The Tribune quoted a Nortel executive on how revolutionary this change is: 'For operators, having an handset maker suddenly demand a slice of their revenues is like being asked to change your religion,' said Gerry Collins, the director of strategic marketing at Nortel Networks, a Canadian company that makes wireless phone networks. "This is really a significant change for the industry.

From the outset, Apple's decision has come under concerted attack by hackers trying to unlock the phone's SIM card, thereby allowing the phone to run on a network other than AT&T. Apple has made a just-as-concerted counter-attack to undo those hacks.

Apple Wraps Up Leopard . . . or Does It?

Apple-centric sites are offering conflicting reports about whether Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X, has been finished and is being prepared for release later this month.

According to AppleInsider, Apple Inc. finalized Leopard this week and has begun preparing training materials for its technical support staff based on the gold master.

Rival site MacRumors, however, claimed late Tuesday that its sources reported that the latest Leopard builds are "still progressing" within Apple, and that the operating system has not been officially declared done.

Most Web sites and blogs that have cited unnamed sources in the last few days have pegged Leopard's release date as Oct. 26, the last Friday of the month. To bolster that date, pundits pointed out that Apple also rolled out the iPhone on the last Friday of June, and launched the previous Mac OS X, Tiger, on the last Friday in April 2005.

Analysts remain confident that Apple will meet the October deadline it set for Leopard's launch when it announced in mid-April it had to delay the operating system to shift programmers to iPhone development.

Although it's not slated to ship until later this month, Leopard can be pre-ordered at resellers such as Amazon, which has priced the OS at $129. Buyers take note: Amazon lists the release date for Leopard as Oct. 31.

As for the company itself, it's been mum on a release date so far.

Unbricked iPhones Now Fully Working, Calls Included

Today we have discovered that you can send and receive calls, SMS and mails too, as well as surf the Web with it. You just have to use a TurboSIM card (like I did) and, according to the iPhone Sim Free people, any restored iPhone with their paid software installed (we have been unable to test this.) [Original article: Sunday September 30 11:56AM. Updated Monday October 3:26AM: it calls with iPhone Sim Free unlock too. Check the details after the jump]

[UPDATE Monday October 3:26AM: Since my iPhone was unlocked with IPSF's paid unlock, yesterday I tried with the Vodafone SIM alone. It didn't work, reporting a wrong SIM. However, after talking with IPSF people, I ran iNdependence again to reactivate the iPhone with only the Vodafone card in and now it works perfectly. Now my iPhone is fully working without TurboSIM, just the software unlock.

If you have an iPhone unlocked with IPSF and the cell is reporting wrong SIM inserted, you have to activate the iPhone again with your non-AT&T SIM inside using Independence or iBrickr]

I was too tired to think about trying this yesterday, but today I put my TurboSIM card with the Vodafone SIM and, as you can see in the video, it works great. The iPhone is now exactly in the same state as it was for me before the software update: it can send and receive calls, SMS and mails, as well as surf the Web.

The iPhone Sim Free people, who previously said their paid software unlock will work despite firmware updates, is claiming now that if you downgrade to firmware 1.0.2 your non-AT&T SIM will work just fine. I've tried this but couldn't get it to work. We are talking to them to see what may be happening.

Meanwhile, iPhone Dev Team is working full speed ahead on two things:

• Downgrading the baseband so they can unlock again the iPhones restored to version 1.0.2 from 1.1.1.

• Creating another free unlock that will work for version 1.1.1 of the software. According to them, both may be very near--now testing-- and they have put it forward to people with bricked phones to "be patient and hold on until we come with a full solution for 1.1.1 firmware."

Frm-
@shish {Cool Wizard}

Iamhuman Gives Your MacBook Wood

Is your MacBook/MacBook Pro having an identity crisis? Would you like to use it as an expensive, inconspicuous bookend? Well, Iamhuman have you covered, their unconventional vinyl skins should do just the trick.

There are a few different deigns to choose from, the zebra skin and the wood veneer finishes are pictured above, but if designer wool editions get your blood pumping, checkout the online store. The prices range from $30—$45 and the creative works are available across the current MacBook range. Now my MacBook can double up as game when I play safari with all my plastic toy animals... oh, that's not normal.

[Product Page via Technabob]

Skype Comes To iPhone

Shape Services on Monday announced IM+ for Skype for iPhone, a Web application that enables iPhone users to access the Skype messaging and Voice over IP (VoIP) network.

IM+ for Skype for iPhone follows the release of similar software for other mobile platforms like BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Palm OS, Symbian and J2ME devices. The software taps in to your Skype account, enabling you to make voice calls using SkypeOut credits.

The application works on any network, according to Shape, and doesn't specifically require Wi-Fi.

Frm-
@shish {Cool Wizard}

MacBook Pro Updated To Santa Rosa

The MacBook Pro has been updated with the new Santa Rosa Intel chipsets. The setup will now come with a centrino with 800Mhz Front side bus speed which improves RAM performance as well as reduce power usage. The 17 inch MacBook Pro will come with a 1920 x 1200 display resolution and it also has a new graphics card to show off. The new ones will come with the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT card.

The 15-inch Macbook Pro will come with LED backlighting but wont come with the 17 inch version! The lowest starting price for the Macbook Pros is at $1,999. Some pesimists say they could have added a Blu-ray drive to this but we will have wait for another update from the guys at Apple for that change.

Frm-
@shish {Cool Wizard}