This past Friday, Apple said that, in all cases, the iPhones in question were damaged by an "external force," not a faulty battery or glass screen
Ok, so Apple are denying the explosion stories, but there are quite a few of them floating around and, with several million iPhones in circulation, it would be a bit odd if some of them didn't suffer catastrophic manufacturing or component failures.
A HUNDRED years ago, summer day-trippers were lured on to London Underground’s Bakerloo line with the promise that, at a refreshing 15 degrees centigrade, its tunnels were the coolest place in the capital.
It's been a while since the underground was cool. It's fairly chic, I suppose, sometimes, but mostly it's just unpleasantly hot, humid, sweaty and crowded.
I have been waiting for Logos for Mac, the Bible research application suite, for over a year.
What? A Bible research application suite? Does anyone really need this, I wonder, except priests (who, one assumes, would already be fairly familiar with their favourite magic book) and RE teachers? And who would pay $260 for the introductory version, let alone the $1,379 for the Gold licence? Weird stuff.
Engineers say a forest of 100,000 "artificial trees" could be deployed within 10 to 20 years to help soak up the world's carbon emissions.
Fantastic idea. And I like the accompanying image, showing lines of wind turbines and 'trees' at the side of a motorway, a motorway from which lighting appears to have been removed.
Sony has launched a wireless e-reader which allows users to download electronic books on the go.
I haven't been tempted by the current crop of e-book readers; I like printed books and I don't want another electronic device to charge and carry (convergence, that's the thing I'm looking for). That said, Sony's new device does look rather neat, and they've finally implemented a touch screen rather than the rather naff mechanical buttons on earlier incarnations.
There are two remaining impediments to joining this particular technological revolution:
1) Cost. £250 buys a lot of paperbacks and the electronic books aren't much cheaper than their physical counterparts so there's little financial incentive.
2) iPhone. It isn't perfect, but I can (and do) read books on my iPhone, and I don't really want to carry another device just for reading text.
So, basically, I'm lazy and stuck in my ways, and the incentive to change (a little extra convenience) isn't great enough to overcome my objections. Yet. So what would it take? Here's my list:
1) Induction charging; I don't want to have to think about charging my 'book' - make it super-easy so that it ceases to be a problem.
2) Cost. I don't want to pay as much for ebooks as I do for paperbacks. In fact, I want to pay a lot less.
3) Weight. It needs to be forgettably light.
Would that be enough? Possibly, but probably I'll stick with my phone for the rare occasions that I want to read on the move. Also, iPhone does colour.
SiON gate technology is expected to outperform TSMC's current 40nm low-power silicon by being 50% faster or up to 50% less power consuming, and it also packs twice the circuit density.
They're right - this is geeky - but any technology that allows silicon to run 50% faster is also rather sexy, particularly if you can apply it to mobile phones and cameras. TSMC has announced Qualcomm as an early customer, so you never know what might turn up where, and with improved battery life.
At Hot Chips, AMD broke out some more details on its upcoming Magny-Cours server chip. The processor is a dual-die, single package combining two Istanbul dies under the same roof in a highly complex mesh of HT and cache links.
Actually, I'm not sure this is as interesting as I first thought. There are loads of apps, of course, that benefit from shed-loads of power, but I don't really use them. There's only so much fun to be had from watching your Excel sheets recalculate in an even smaller fraction of a second, and after that it's just about the boasting.
IT'S BEEN A LONG TIME COMING, but the wait is now over. The much-anticipated hook-up between satnav giant TomTom and Apple's iconic Iphone has finally come to fruition.
It's a fairly brief review, but The Inquirer seemed to like Tomtom for the iPhone. If I didn't have a standalone Tomtom unit I'd be tempted to splash out but, for the moment, I'll stick with my Go 520. After all, if I'm using my phone to navigate me while I drive, I can't watch TV programmes on it, and that's a sacrifice too far!
They found that "online ad campaigns with an average reach of 40 percent of their target segment successfully grew retail sales of the advertised brands by an average of 9 percent" and, we assume, also made a lot of people very hungry.
This is probably good news for anyone selling ad-serving services (www.betgenius.com, for example) but, dammit, it probably means we're all going to be subjected to ever greater numbers of online adverts.
The UK has signed a breakthrough deal to recover lost tax from Britons holding bank accounts in Liechtenstein.
I'm not a big fan of the Politics of Envy; I tend not to worry about the size of other people's bonuses or the perks that they receive for doing a good job. One area that stretches my otherwise liberal attitudes is the practice of deliberate tax avoidance via offshore tax havens, like Liechtenstein. The fact that HMRC has now done a deal with Liechtenstein, and that avoided tax is to be recovered, seems entirely reasonable and I wish them luck. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that the tax on £3bn over 10 years is probably around £150m; that isn't going to dig the Government out of its current hole, but it's a decent chunk of money and worth chasing, I think.
The device, known as the Air Launch Running Gear Entanglement System, looks like a futuristic bazooka out of the imagination of a Hollywood prop designer.
When you absolutely positively have to stop every speedboat on the river, accept no substitute - you need this little thing.
GOOGLE HAS TRIED to steal thunder from the Microsoft Yahoo search deal by releasing a sandbox preview of its new search engine.
A strange "story", because it sounds like Google haven't really released anything of any interest. More news tomorrow...
A multi-million dollar project that involves building one of the largest concrete arch bridges in the world, in the shadow of the Hoover Dam will reach a major milestone in the next few weeks.
I've only seen the Hoover Dam from above (a long way above, on a flight from Las Vegas to Chicago) and it was a pretty impressive site. I imagine it would be a whole lot more impressive from the mid-point of the bridge, which itself looks like a serious piece of engineering.
Thanks to its posturing politicians, Britain will soon start to run out of electricity. What should it do?
The depressing thing about the Economist is that they always make their arguments in a calm, logical way, and they don't sugar-coat things. I imagine we'll find a way out of the mess our politicians have dumped us in, but it'll be more expensive that it needs to be, and more difficult. I think it is time to get some new politicians, ones that can make decisions, enact policy and deliver results, but to whom do we turn?
Our only real qualm with the product is that it looks like a Kleenex box from Don Johnson's bathroom in 1986.
I have to admit that, if I had $8,000 to spare, a gold-plated PC wouldn't even feature in my top 1,000 must-have items.
A new financial analysis predicts that Apple's yet-to-be-announced tablet will launch in early 2010 and sell about 2 million units in its first year -- and at an estimated $600 each, that would be an additional $1.2 billion in revenue.
So assuming that Apple really do want to flog a tablet PC (and there has been no announcement from them), the sales and price estimates are complete fiction, piling assumption upon assumption to create an "interesting" story from, essentially, a few rumours from unnamed Asian manufacturers. That's pretty thin.
Researchers in Japan have successfully grown replacement teeth in mice, according to a report in PNAS journal.
Interesting stuff. My questions are:
1) Can this be replicated in other mammals (i.e. not rodents), and
2) Can the tooth type be chosen (nobody wants a molar replacing a canine)?
If the answers are "Yes" and "Yes" then this starts to look like a really exciting technique; anyone fancy re-growing teeth that would otherwise be removed or repaired?
Apple has released iPhone OS 3.0.1 for iPhone, iPhone 3G & 3GS, an update that patches the phone to prevent bad actors from taking it over or taking it down with the just-demoed SMS exploit.
You'd have to be pretty unlucky to get caught by the vulnerability fixed in this patch (I think, although don't take my word for it) but it's probably still a good idea to install this one sooner rather than later, unless you like the idea that someone might hijack your phone, of course.
