new camera battery

The WWDC keynote is behind us, and you know what that means: scores of bloggers and tech analysts playing Monday Tuesday Morning Pundit. To simplify things, I’ve decided to grade yesterday’s announcements using one of today’s most popular Internet memes—EPIC WIN, WIN, FAIL, and EPIC FAIL. It should be fairly self-evident how this scale works. Enough with the formalities; let’s dig in.

MacBook Pro updates and price drops: WIN. Er, Mostly.

Who doesn’t like price drops and speed bumps? Also, I can’t argue with the addition of Firewire 800 ports and SD Card slots on the new MacBook Pros. I can argue with the removal of the ExpressCard slot on the 15-inch model and the non-removable batteries, though, so this isn’t quite EPIC WIN.

Snow Leopard: WIN.
Snow Leopard is a little thin on end-user features, so it may leave some users disappointed at first, but if Snow Leopard lives up to its billing as being faster and more streamlined, don’t expect that disappointment to last very long.

Snow Leopard pricing: EPIC WIN.
Snow Leopard isn’t as big a release as Leopard was (and arguably not as big as Windows 7, at least from an end-user’s perspective), but at $29 for Mac OS X Leopard users, the upgrade price is hard to beat.

iPhone OS 3.0: WIN.
There’s a lot to like here, although some of it should have been there from the start.. Say it with me now: cut, copy, paste! And notes finally sync back to your computer–what a novel concept!

iPhone 3G S: WIN. But that name?

There are some welcome improvements and new features, but the name will probably cause some confusion, and I’m sure we were all expecting some sort of cosmetic tweaks.

$99 iPhone 3G: EPIC WIN.
An iPhone? For $100? Could it be any clearer that Apple is out for world domination in the smartphone market?

AT&T: EPIC FAIL. Sorry, guys.

AT&T didn’t exactly endear itself to iPhone users yesterday. Confusing pricing scheme for upgrading customers. Lame. No MMS for iPhone customers until later this summer. Even lamer. No tethering support for now. Exceedingly lame. Sure, there may be reasons for AT&T’s inability to deliver tethering and MMS out of the gate, but try telling that to eager iPhone owners.

No Steve Jobs update: FAIL.

Don’t get me wrong, I know that he won’t be back until the end of the month. And I think Jobs’ privacy should be respected. But at least some sort of status update would’ve been good to hear, even if it was a quick opener of “Steve’s feeling great, and he’s looking forward to coming back later this month,” just to reassure Apple-watchers that Jobs’ recovery is on track.

Overall: WIN.
A solid suite of updates, if a little predictable. It would’ve been nice to see Apple pull out something completely unexpected. There’s always the next Apple media event for that, I suppose.

What did you think of this year’s WWDC? What would you like to have seen? Leave a comment below.

It may seem like HP is jumping the gun here. After all, June is a little early for parents to take their kids laptop-shopping for the upcoming school year. But since Hewlett-Packard is focusing on value, value, value with its new series of portables for college and high school kids, now’s a good time to hammer that message home. (Before the bank takes the home — yuk yuk.)

HP’s new notes are lower-cost versions of existing HP portables. In addition, HP also introduced four new “green” printers, some of which use less energy and are made with more recycled plastic than earlier models.

The Pavilion dv2z starts at $599 and is a bargain version of HP’s Pavilion dv2, a mini-laptop that starts at $749. The slimmest and lightest of the new HP notes, the dv2z is less than an inch thick, weighs 3.81 pounds (or more, depending on configuration), and has a 12.1-inch LED widescreen display. Options include Blu-ray support, discreet graphics, an AMD dual-core processor, and a 500GB hard drive.

The Pavilion dv3t is a bit thicker (1.25 inches) and heavier (about 5 pounds) than the dv2z, but still light and small enough for the average backpack. Starting at $649, it’s the Pavilion dv3’s affordable cousin and offers a few more features than the dv2z, including an integrated optical drive. Discreet graphics are still optional, though.

There are two new Pavilion dv6t portables, including the standard model (starting at $649) with a 16-inch LED widescreen display and a separate numeric keypad for number-crunching. The dv6t Artist Edition 2 (starting at $949) features the winning design (see photo) from the 2008 HP MTV Notebook Design Contest, which was “inspired by the sea and sky in Okinawa, Japan,” HP says. Try staring at the design for a few minutes. What do you see?

The Artist Edition comes with a fairly impressive bundle of entertainment and art-oriented apps, including Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2, Video Studio X2, and Painter Sketchpad. The Pavilion dv2z and dv6t Artist Edition 2 and will be available June 10 at HPDirect.com. HP didn’t announce availability dates for the Pavilion dv3t and dv6t.

Eye-Fi on Wednesday introduced the Eye-Fi Pro, a new SDHC memory card for digital cameras. Like Eye-Fi’s other offerings, the Pro card lets users upload images over Wi-Fi without using a Mac or PC; the Pro version also adds raw image support. It’s priced at $149.

The Eye-Fi Pro works with cameras that use SDHC memory cards. It has its own Wi-Fi connection built in, and can connect directly to a Wi-Fi-equipped computer using ad-hoc mode (no router or Internet connection is required).

The Eye-Fi Pro can also connect the camera directly to the Web, so users can upload photos without having to tether the camera using a USB cable or remove the Eye-Fi card. The Eye-Fi Pro works with more than two dozen photo and video sharing sites.

The Eye-Fi Pro supports digital camera raw file formats — the “digital negative” image that presents users with the highest-quality image, free of compression artifacts. It also works with jpeg files.

Selective Transfer is another new feature introduced today — not only for the Eye-Fi Pro, but for all Eye-Fi card users, through the Eye-Fi Manager software. This provides more control over which photos and videos are uploaded.

Monday saw the annual Worldwide Developer’s Conference (WWDC) kick off with a keynote address by various Apple executives. In this edition of Macworld Video, Roman Loyola looks back at some of the highlights from the opening day.

The star of the keynote may very well have been the brand-new iPhone 3G S–boasting higher speeds and added features such as voice control, video capture and a compass. But several other products had their moment in the spotlight as well.

Download Macworld Video #112

* Format: MPEG-4/H.264

* Resolution: 480 x 272 (iPhone & iPod compatible)

* Size: 11.6MB

* Length: 8 minutes

Some of the other products mentioned in the keynote address include:

* A revamped family of laptops. Apple updated almost its entire laptop line, promoting its 13-inch Aluminum unibody Macbooks into the MacBook Pro line, upgrading the existing 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pros, and slashing MacBook Air prices while boosting speeds.

* iPhone 3.0 coming soon. The new iPhone 3.0 OS will be released on June 17, 2009. iPhone 3.0 will be a free release for all iPhone customers–both original iPhone users and iPhone 3G users will be able to download it at no charge once it’s released.

* Snow Leopard slated for release. The next major update to OS X will be available in September. However, OS X 10.6 will only work on Intel-based Macs, leaving the owners of aging PowerPC-based hardware without the ability to upgrade.

* Plus you can read more about the iPhone 3G S in our detailed report.

To subscribe to the Macworld Video Podcast using iTunes 5 or later, click here.

You can also see a complete archive of all our videos on Macworld’s YouTube channel. Subscribe to that channels and you will be notified whenever we post a new video.

Or just point your favorite podcast-savvy RSS reader to: http://feeds.macworld.com/macworld/video/

The WWDC keynote is behind us, and you know what that means: scores of bloggers and tech analysts playing Monday Tuesday Morning Pundit. To simplify things, I’ve decided to grade yesterday’s announcements using one of today’s most popular Internet memes—EPIC WIN, WIN, FAIL, and EPIC FAIL. It should be fairly self-evident how this scale works. Enough with the formalities; let’s dig in.

MacBook Pro updates and price drops: WIN. Er, Mostly.

Who doesn’t like price drops and speed bumps? Also, I can’t argue with the addition of Firewire 800 ports and SD Card slots on the new MacBook Pros. I can argue with the removal of the ExpressCard slot on the 15-inch model and the non-removable batteries, though, so this isn’t quite EPIC WIN.

Snow Leopard: WIN.
Snow Leopard is a little thin on end-user features, so it may leave some users disappointed at first, but if Snow Leopard lives up to its billing as being faster and more streamlined, don’t expect that disappointment to last very long.

Snow Leopard pricing: EPIC WIN.
Snow Leopard isn’t as big a release as Leopard was (and arguably not as big as Windows 7, at least from an end-user’s perspective), but at $29 for Mac OS X Leopard users, the upgrade price is hard to beat.

iPhone OS 3.0: WIN.
There’s a lot to like here, although some of it should have been there from the start.. Say it with me now: cut, copy, paste! And notes finally sync back to your computer–what a novel concept!

iPhone 3G S: WIN. But that name?

There are some welcome improvements and new features, but the name will probably cause some confusion, and I’m sure we were all expecting some sort of cosmetic tweaks.

$99 iPhone 3G: EPIC WIN.
An iPhone? For $100? Could it be any clearer that Apple is out for world domination in the smartphone market?

AT&T: EPIC FAIL. Sorry, guys.

AT&T didn’t exactly endear itself to iPhone users yesterday. Confusing pricing scheme for upgrading customers. Lame. No MMS for iPhone customers until later this summer. Even lamer. No tethering support for now. Exceedingly lame. Sure, there may be reasons for AT&T’s inability to deliver tethering and MMS out of the gate, but try telling that to eager iPhone owners.

No Steve Jobs update: FAIL.

Don’t get me wrong, I know that he won’t be back until the end of the month. And I think Jobs’ privacy should be respected. But at least some sort of status update would’ve been good to hear, even if it was a quick opener of “Steve’s feeling great, and he’s looking forward to coming back later this month,” just to reassure Apple-watchers that Jobs’ recovery is on track.

Overall: WIN.
A solid suite of updates, if a little predictable. It would’ve been nice to see Apple pull out something completely unexpected. There’s always the next Apple media event for that, I suppose.

What did you think of this year’s WWDC? What would you like to have seen? Leave a comment below.

Monday saw the annual Worldwide Developer’s Conference (WWDC) kick off with a keynote address by various Apple executives. In this edition of Macworld Video, Roman Loyola looks back at some of the highlights from the opening day.

The star of the keynote may very well have been the brand-new iPhone 3G S–boasting higher speeds and added features such as voice control, video capture and a compass. But several other products had their moment in the spotlight as well.

Download Macworld Video #112

* Format: MPEG-4/H.264

* Resolution: 480 x 272 (iPhone & iPod compatible)

* Size: 11.6MB

* Length: 8 minutes

Some of the other products mentioned in the keynote address include:

* A revamped family of laptops. Apple updated almost its entire laptop line, promoting its 13-inch Aluminum unibody Macbooks into the MacBook Pro line, upgrading the existing 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pros, and slashing MacBook Air prices while boosting speeds.

* iPhone 3.0 coming soon. The new iPhone 3.0 OS will be released on June 17, 2009. iPhone 3.0 will be a free release for all iPhone customers–both original iPhone users and iPhone 3G users will be able to download it at no charge once it’s released.

* Snow Leopard slated for release. The next major update to OS X will be available in September. However, OS X 10.6 will only work on Intel-based Macs, leaving the owners of aging PowerPC-based hardware without the ability to upgrade.

* Plus you can read more about the iPhone 3G S in our detailed report.

To subscribe to the Macworld Video Podcast using iTunes 5 or later, click here.

You can also see a complete archive of all our videos on Macworld’s YouTube channel. Subscribe to that channels and you will be notified whenever we post a new video.

Or just point your favorite podcast-savvy RSS reader to: http://feeds.macworld.com/macworld/video/

Today at Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco, the Cupertino computer maker announced a host of new products before an audience of developers and media. Among other announcements, the company has updated its MacBook Pro product line, launched a new version of its Safari Web browser, offered a preview of its upcoming Snow Leopard operating system, and readied iPhone 3.0 for market.
New Notebooks

First up in its presentation, Apple showed off new MacBook Pro laptops, including a new version of the 15-inch MacBook Pro. With a longer-lasting battery (similar to that featured in the existing 17-inch model), the new machine will have a battery life of up to seven hours, two hours longer than its predecessor. It also features a nicer display, an SD card slot in place of the former Express Card slot, and support for up to 8GB of RAM. It will be available with processor speeds up to 3.06GHz abd 6MB L2 cache, making it the fastest notebook Apple has made to date.

The 17-inch MacBook Pro has also been refreshed with a 2.8GHz processor and a 500GB hard drive.

The 13-inch unibody aluminum MacBook has received a bump up in status, making it a MacBook Pro. Unlike its predecessors, it will now feature support for 8GB of RAM and 500GB of storage, with the option of a 256GB SSD drive.

Apple has dropped the prices of its notebook line as well. The 13-inch MacBook pro will range from $1,199 to $1,499, the 15-inch model will range from $1,699 to $2,299, and the 17-inch model will cost $2,499. All models begin shipping today.
Snow Leopard

The long-anticipated update to Apple’s OS X Leopard operating system, dubbed Snow Leopard, made an appearance in the demo. Coming in September, Snow Leopard will run faster than the current operating system, and will include updates to all of its apps. Mail will run faster, as will Preview and other integrated apps.

Business users will be able to use Microsoft Exchange servers with Mail, iCal, and Address Book. In a demo of the new features, Apple Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Bertrand Serlet explained that the three built-in contact, scheduling, and e-mail apps will now feature Exchange configuration as a standard option. Users can simply enter their Exchange e-mail address and password, and Snow Leopard will automatically configure all three apps at once.

Snow Leopard will also include updates to Expose, Quicktime, and its underlying graphics technology, which will be based on the OpenCL standard.

Come September, Snow Leopard will sell for $129, with an upgrade for existing Leopard users available for $29.

Apple’s Web browser, Safari, has also received a refresh, and ships today in version 4 for Leopard, Tiger, and Windows. Safari 4 includes better handling of browser plug-ins, which will allow the browser to continue functioning if a plug-in such as Flash crashes while viewing a page.
iPhone 3.0

The most talked-about bunch of updates Apple unveiled at WWDC came from its iPhone 3.0 software upgrade, which purportedly adds 100 new features to the iPhone. Critics have long stressed the need for cut, copy, and paste features across the iPhone OS, and those features are now built in. Also, all key apps in the iPhone now feature landscape mode to maximize screen width. And in the U.S., iPhones on the AT&T network will finally feature MMS support later this summer.

Search features have also been enhanced in iPhone 3.0 with the addition of Spotlight. This will enable users to search not only their contacts, but also calendar entries, notes, e-mail, and even apps on the device.

iTunes will now allow iPhone users to purchase or rent movies directly from the device, and Apple has added parental controls that will restrict the kinds of movies, shows, and apps that children can run on the phone or iPod touch.

For Mobile Me customers, Apple will offer a service called Find My iPhone, which will locate a lost or stolen device (if it’s turned on).

As promised in a previous iPhone announcement, iPhone 3.0 includes push notification for instant messaging and other applications.

Perhaps the most exciting update for iPhone 3.0 is the addition of tethering capabilities. At last, users who are away from their Wi-Fi network will be able to use the iPhone’s cellular broadband connections to connect their laptop to the Internet. This feature will work via USB or Bluetooth, and is supported by 22 carriers in 44 countries.Unfortunately, AT&T is not one of the carriers supporting this feature, which leaves U.S. iPhone customers wanting.

The iPhone 3.0 software is available to developers today, and ships to customers next Wednesday.

Along with the updates iPhone software, Apple is releasing new iPhone hardware. The iPhone 3GS will sell for $199 in a 16GB version and $299 in a 32GB version. The existing iPhone 3G will continue to be available at a price of $99. (All prices with a 2-year AT&T contract.)

The iPhone 3GS will be faster than the iPhone 3G, and will include video capture, voice control, built-in support for Nike+ accessories, hardware encryption for Exchange users, and improved battery life. The phone will be available on June 19.

China will require that Web filtering software be included with all computers sold in the country, another step up in its efforts to control pornography and other content on the Internet.

The move follows a government crackdown on online smut that has led to the closure of thousands of Web sites this year, and concern that such campaigns could expand to target content that is political rather than pornographic.

PC makers will be required to pre-install the Web site-blocking program or offer it on a CD-ROM included with all PCs sold in China after July 1, according to a translation of a Ministry of Industry and Information Technology notification seen by IDG News Service.

The move is meant to protect youth from “unhealthy” information online, according to the statement.

The program, called Green Dam Youth Escort in Chinese, blocks only sites with pornographic content, and parents can turn it off, said Bryan Zhang, general manager of Jinhui Computer System Engineering, which designed the software.

But the measure triggered concern about wider censorship.

China blocked access to Web sites including Microsoft’s Bing search engine last week, adding to a list of previously banned sites including YouTube and some blog services. Twitter and Hotmail were also blocked ahead of the 20th anniversary last week of Beijing’s bloody crackdown on democracy protests, though those Web sites could load again on Monday.

Dell will consider including the software with new PCs only if its purpose is to block pornographic content from children, and only if it can be disabled, said Amit Midha, Dell’s president for Greater China.

It will not install software that helps censor other Internet sites, Midha said. Midha also said Dell had not heard of any Chinese government notification ordering the program’s use.

Dell is the third-biggest PC vendor in China, according to research company IDC.

Lenovo and Hewlett-Packard, China’s number one and two PC vendors, declined to comment.

Image recognition technology lets Jinhui’s program block individual images in addition to Web sites when they resemble sample pornographic images in a database, said Zhang, the company’s manager. Users are notified when updates are available for download, he said.

Jinhui’s Web sites says its program also prevents the use of proxy servers or circumvention software to visit banned sites, measures often used by savvy Internet users in China.

China’s government will pay for the first year of the program’s use for all PC buyers, after which they can buy the program from Jinhui, Zhang said.

Jinhui has previously worked with a research institute under China’s public security ministry on a blocking system for “harmful” online video clips, and has “long-term technical cooperation” with the army’s Information Engineering University, according to its Web site.

Jinhui won a government tender to distribute its software with PCs about a year ago, and has since worked with PC vendors to ensure compatibility and proficiency with the software, said Zhang.

The company has also worked with the government to put its software on PCs in schools, and hopes to market the product abroad, he said.

Freescale Semiconductor displayed a number of devices containing its chips at Computex Taipei 2009 this year, including an e-book reader made by an Asustek Computer subsidiary, and a smartphone and two handheld computers with Google’s Android software on board.

The U.S. chip maker is one of a group of mobile phone chip makers promoting handheld computers and a new kind of device they call smartbooks, which look and feel like mini-laptops, or netbooks, but are made using mobile phone parts and chips with ARM processing cores instead of PC components.

The handheld computers fit the profile of the mobile Internet devices (MIDs) the PC industry is peddling as devices with slightly bigger screens than smartphones. At its office, Freescale had a MID from Inventec Appliances with a 6-inch touchscreen running Android that allowed Web surfing and doubled as an e-book reader.

A prototype of a device from Kinpo with a 7-inch touchscreen and also running Android sat by the Inventec device. Both machines use chips from Freescale and are designed to be constantly linked to wireless networks the same way as mobile phones.

Freescale also had a smartphone from Inventec designed for the Chinese market with a 4.3-inch touchscreen, also running Android. The device sported a QWERTY keypad that slid out from beneath the screen.

The devices show Inventec has jumped on the Android bandwagon, along with Acer, Asustek, HTC and Samsung Electronics, among others, with devices running Google’s Android smartphone operating system. The software is meant to make communications and Web browsing easy, especially on Google sites such as Docs, Gmail and Google Maps.

E-books were also on display at Freescale’s office, including Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader Digital Book, which use Freescale’s i.MX31 low-power chips.

These devices sat next to a new e-book made by Unihan, a division of Asustek that develops non-PC products. Unihan won’t market the device itself because it’s a contract manufacturer. It will sell the design to a customer and then take care of the manufacturing.

Freescale also displayed several smartbooks, which with their 10-inch screens and full keyboards look a lot like netbooks, but work somewhat differently. Since they’re built from mobile phone parts designed for power efficiency, smartbooks should run much longer than netbooks on a single charge.

Glen Burchers, director of global marketing at Freescale, said a smartbook with Freescale chips inside can run for eight hours on a three-cell battery, much longer than comparable netbooks, which can only last two or three hours with such a battery. Most netbooks are sold with a heavier six-cell battery and can run for around six hours before needing a recharge.

Smartbooks from Pegatron, another contract manufacturing spin-off from Asustek, were on show at Freescale’s office. They will cost around US$199 each if they’re made for Wi-Fi wireless Internet access. Adding a 3.5G module would increase the cost by around $50 but would also subject the device to a completely different marketing plan because it would then likely be sold by a mobile service provider and could be free with a signed contract.

Netbooks with 10-inch screens and Wi-Fi connectivity generally cost between $300 and $400.

The Pegatron smartbooks were first displayed at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas early this year, but Freescale showed off some new smartbooks made using its i.MX51 chips, including the N900Z from Wistron, the former contract manufacturing arm of Acer. The Wistron device used Ubuntu Linux as its operating system, while the Pegatron smartbooks on display carried a variety of Linux OSs.

Smartbooks made using chips by Qualcomm and Texas Instruments were also on show at Computex