This morning, at 5:00 am New Zealand time, the main event of the Worldwide Developers Conference took place. This is when Steve Jobs, Apple CEO presents his Keynote. I set my alarm for 4:00 am so I could get up and have plenty of time to do stuff before the keynote, but I ended up sleeping through it and getting up at 5:10 am. At this point, I quickly hopped out of bed to get my laptop and I brought it into bed with me and loaded up many sites so I could see the live happenings, with pictures, of the keynote event.

The whole internet knew what the main parts of the keynote were going to be about, the 3G iPhone, and 3rd Party Applications, as well as the possibility of OS X 10.6. And they were pretty much spot on. It started with a little bit about the next version of OS X but then they moved on and talked a lot about 3rd party applications coming to the iPhone and iPod Touch. At this stage, I was happy I didn’t get up earlier or else I would have been waiting a long time for nothing. I didn’t miss much and there was not much to it. Some developers showed off their apps and games that will be coming to the App Store when it launches.

Towards the end of the keynote, this is when the moment everyone was waiting for came, the announcement of the 3G iPhone. It is basically the same as the original iPhone. The new features are the 3G capabilities, GPS, plastic backing, flushed headphone jack, thinner edges and better battery life. And the price $199 and $299 USD for the 8 and 16 GB versions. This is with a 2-year contract with AT&T. The phone is going to be launching in 22 countries, including Australia and New Zealand on July 11th.

I want this device a lot! And after I watch the video version of the keynote, I am going to want to 100 times more. Reading about it and looking as some pictures of it makes me excited but hearing about it from the Steve Jobs and seeing it on video is going to increase the hype for me by an infinite amount. The only issue I had, was that I was not prepared to get this phone on a contract with Vodafone, but later on in a press release, they announced that it would be available on prepaid and contract plans.

Now this phone is going to be quite expensive in New Zealand. To get an idea of the price it will cost, double the US price and add about 25% on to it, which would make the iPhone cost probably around $500 to $650 NZD, and I assume that is with a 2 year contract with Vodafone. The prepaid version, I would say yu are looking about about $1,000 and $1,200. That is way too much! I am not willing to pay anywhere near that amount, especially for a cellphone I will hardly use as a cellphone.

Since that is the case, I would be better off with an iPod Touch. Although I would really love an iPhone because I don’t carry around a cellphone and an iPod + iPhone would be the idea device and pocket companion for me. At this stage, I would be happy to obtain a original iPhone. I don’t particularly need the 3G and GPS features so a simple iPhone would still be more than ideal for me. I might think about looking for a second hand iPhone but I still like the idea of having the iPhone 3G. We will see how this plays out.

After hearing an Audible advertisement on This Week In Tech over and over again, as well as hearing all the good things they have to say about them, I finally decided to give it a try. What the heck, I had nothing to lose anyway. So I went to the Audible TWiT link and signed up and got a free credit for a book. Signing up is a pretty simple process and requires a credit card but they don’t charge you for the 14 day free trial, and you can cancel before that period is up and not get billed. I had a prepaid card that I used so there was no chance of them taking more money that was on the card, which happened to be about 2 bucks anyway.

I knew which book I wanted to get. Paul Thorrott talked about it during the Windows Weekly Audible ad and when I realized they had Darkly Dreaming Dexter, I thought it was about time to sign up and try out the service. The first season of the television series Dexter is based on this book so I thought it would be interesting to see the similarities and differences these two stories had.

After everything was set up, it was time for me to find the book. To my surprise, it wasn’t there. I knew it was there because I heard them talking about it on the podcast as well as hearing a sample they played on the show. I decided to log out and browser the library without it knowing any of my details. To my surprise, it was there, along with the 2 other books in the series.

I copied the link, logged back in and pasted the link in. They are not allowed to sell this title in my geographical location. That sucks. I signed up to get that book and now I have a credit that I want to spend on a title that I want, and it happened to be that one. I went into my details and edited my address to one in the US and then I was fine to get the book. It was added to my cart and then purchased with the free credit I had.

Now you have to download special Audible software to download, but it also happens to put it in your music library, in Windows Media Player or iTunes. That is good because I want my audiobook in iTunes so I can hear it on my iPod. After downloading the software and setting it up, which was a simple process, I started downloading the audiobook.

The download was about 200MB so it shouldn’t take too long to download. Boy was I wrong. The download was slow as! I had to leave my laptop on overnight just to download it. If I was able to downloading it myself using my own download manager, I could have had that in less than quarter of an hour, not seven or so hours. The software is horrible and a waste of time. I would rather download it myself and import it into my media player myself. I don’t get why they force the crappy software onto me, there is no reason for it.

After all that nonsense I finally had the audiobook on my computer, although it did import to the wrong iTunes library (story about why I have 2 iTunes libraries one for another day.) Anyway, I easily sorted that out and I could finally listen to my audiobook on my iPod. One of the weird things is that the chapters on the iPod are random, they are not the same as the chapters on the audiobook. This generally shouldn’t be a problem for someone listening to the book from start to finish, even if you you do get out of the book, you can always resume from the place your last stopped.

Anyway, I was pretty happy with the book, and the quality of it. I would definitely consider purchasing the other book from audible even if I am not to happy about suing the software they force you to install. After all the griff graff, for anyone else you is considering giving Audible a try, I would tell them to definitely do it. Although if you live outside the US, make sure you set your country to the US and also everyone should use the TWiT promo site so you can get your free book.

Yesterday was the day that Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, made his yearly MacWorld Keynote about his consumer products. Last year at this event, he announced the revolutionary iPhone, a device that amazed everyone. This year, the amazement was back with the announcement of a new MacBook. I set my alarm to get up in time to get live updates of the goings on in the keynote, but I managed to sleep through my alarm but woke myself up just in time to see the announcement of the MacBook Air.

The MacBook Air, a ultra-slim notebook computer that weights under 1.4kg and at its highest point is under a measly 2cm. It is amazing how slim it is, but what is even more amazing, it all the functionality and power they have put in the tiny package. But if you want one of these, you do pay a premium price of $2999 NZD for the base model. Sure, you can get more powerful computers for a lot less than that, but you won’t find a computer this thin, that still has all this functionality left in.

I do think the MacBook Air looks amazing and would love to own one of these, but in reality, a computer like this would not suit me, I would need something ore powerful. There will be many people in this same boat that don’t care that much about size and wouldn’t get a product with reduced performance than a bigger notebook computer. The computer is nice and would be great for people to carry around everywhere with them in their bag or something. This would suit someone with a more powerful computer and wouldn’t mind a small notebook without a bit of performance and wouldn’t mind something small and can afford the price for this.

Last year, Apple announced their entry onto your television. They admitted that they failed to deliver, but they are going to try again with Apple TV Take 2. Take 2 has a few new features such as viewing photos from .Mac and Flickr and a new interface, but the biggest change is the fact that it is now an independent product, it no longer needs a computer for you to take advantage of it. The store is now accessible from the Apple TV and you can buy music, movies, television shows as well as download podcasts right for the device. And all this, is available to current Apple TV owners in a software update available in a few weeks.

But that’s not all, there are now iTunes Rentals in the store. For a small price of $3.99 USD for new releases of a dollar less for library titles, it is an attractive option to rent movies. There is also HD movies for the Apple TV which cost $1 more and are around 4GB in size for a full, 720p resolution movie. This is a great way of getting movies right when you want to see them, at nice HD resolutions. When you rent the movie, you have 30 days to start watching it, and from when you push play, you have 24 hours to watch the movie, you can also watch the movie as many times as you want in that 24 hours.

I think it is good of Apple to give people the Take 2 software for free and not make a new product. I also hope that they have a huge success with the rentals, because I do think it is a great way to rent movies. I live in New Zealand so the iTunes rental stuff won’t be here for a long while, but when it does come here, it would be a great way for me and my family to get movies, much easier to get movies when we want them and not have to pick them up from a video shop. I do hope that they lower the delay from the DVD release and the iTunes rental release so they can compete with the video rental stores. If I want to see a movie when it comes out on DVD, if I can borrow it cheaper then the video shop, but if it is not there and I really want to see it, I will make that trip to the video shop to watch it now, not in 30 or so days. It is a brilliant start and I hope they roll it out internationally as soon as possible.

Those two big announcements were amazing, but the thing that interests me the most was the thing that was under-looked by everyone. The hype of the other announcements overshadowed this, but then again this isn’t anything evolutionary or really anything to be excited about. The product I am talking about is Time Capsule. Basically, all Time Capsule is, is an Airport Express with a hard drive in it. The product was mainly based around the wirelessness of the MacBook Air and the other MacBooks, but also the amazing backup feature in Leopard, Time Machine.

Time Capsule is nice because you get the benefits of the Airport Extreme, with gigabit ethernet and 802.11n, and on top of that, you get Network Attached Storage, with either 500GB or 1TB of storage. At this point, this is the only way to backup using Time Machine to a network drive and makes the backup process just that much more easier, convenient and completely automatic. You are no longer required to plug in a hard drive into a USB port.The price of the product is very competitive and not that expensive, you are not paying much more for having all these features put into one easy package.

There was another thing that was announced, which are new features of the iPhone and iPod touch. They were cool and make me want them, but they are irrelevant to me and I don’t really have much to say on them. I later watched the keynote video and I was interested right through to the end, well except for the performance at the end. Steve’s keynote speeches are always interesting and amazing, even though there weren’t many things that were so innovative that it blew me away. I’m waiting to see refreshes for the two older MacBooks which I am sure we will see sometime during the first half of 2008. I can’t wait for the next Apple Event and a bunch of new announcements.

You may have seen across multiple technology sites over the past month, some stuff on a Apple docking patent. What this does, it is takes a portable computer, like a MacBook, and it goes inside the dock that looks similar to an iMac. This will allow it to be used as a desktop like device with many extra ports and such.

Laptops are becoming more popular and are starting to take over a lot of the desktop market. People are turning to laptops for what they need, except in a portable package with similar and/or sufficient power for their needs. People are turning to laptops to use as desktop replacements and therefore a type of dock is a well welcomed device for the home. This allows for all peripherals such as hard drives, monitors, keyboard and mouse to be on your desk, and you can dock your laptop and use it without having to plug half a dozen plugs into your laptop.

With the Apple dock, the laptop inserts into the device, and there is where the limitations start. First off, you lose the ability to use one screen. It is being wasted inside the computer. For some people, this wouldn’t be an issue but you could use the laptop screen as a secondary monitor to display stuff, such as your iTunes library, or even other applications that you may not use. It would be useful for displaying information that you don’t need to see but it would be nice to have displayed without getting in the way of the apps you are using and without you having to select it. It would be good if it was just there at your side on the laptop screen.

You are also limited to the screen size of the dock, which is dictated by Apple. They could have multiple docks with different screen sizes, but that means you have to pay extra for it, and it probably won’t be cheap. You could even be better off getting an iMac and leaving the dock out of it. It will most likely be cheaper to buy a Dell monitor, or any other brand, for cheaper than the dock is. If the laptop isn’t very powerful, it might struggle with displaying two large resolutions if the dock happened to have a monitor port for a dual setup.

What I would rather have is a dock that can be used with all the Mac notebooks, not just the one that the dock is made for. Also I would like to be able to use a monitor of my choice and have many ports on the dock. It could work similar to how their iPod docks do, you just slide the laptop into it, and it just goes. All peripherals and such connect to the dock and get detected by the computer on insertion. I would also be able to use the screen on my monitor for other applications and not have it wasted.

On the assumption that the new notebook is ultra slim, it might not be as powerful as bigger laptops, in many ways. If so, is it really a good option to use it as a desktop replacement? If people wanted a Mac desktop replacement, they would probably go for a higher end line with higher processor, dedicated graphics and larger screen. A lower powered notebook might not suffice as a desktop machine. In that case, the dock is a waste of space, and probably a waste of money. A port replicator dock would be much better and could also be usable with multiple notebooks, models from now, and in the future.

This is really all based on speculation, and not a real product. Maybe in less than 12 hours, we find out what this really is and if it is plausible. I may end up eating my words, but some of my points may still be valid. It is a neat idea just sliding in your portable computer into a monitor/iMac like device and use it as my desktop. It can be two units in one, a slim portable computer for when i need the portability, and then a desktop like computer with a bigger monitor and more ports and such for when I need that functionality. I would have to get some real information about the notebook and the dock, before I can have real opinions about the actual product, and I would have to use it for a personal opinion of the actual product. We shall wait and see.

Yesterday was Christmas Day. I finally got to play with the iPod that was purchased in September. I wasn’t really looking forward to it that much because all the hype had gone and I had moved onto other things. When that day finally came, I had a quick play and put it aside to return to the internet. I did take the uttermost care to not leave a fingerprint on her by wearing gloves. Shes in a case now and not getting fingered anytime soon.

There was not much else to do on it other than listen to music, but in the short time I was playing with it, my first impressions are not that great. I am pretty disappointed with this product and I think I should thank higher powers for not giving this to me earlier, before the patchs because that could have been torture. I have to say, I enjoy listening to music on this. Other than the “nothing special, generic” earbuds, it sounds pretty good, but its elsewhere where the flaws lie.

It looks great, I do have to point that out. Apple always has brilliant design in their products, more so now than ever, and this this is beautiful. I just with that it wasn’t so fingerprint prone. I accidentally touched the screen before I put the protector on but lucky I had wet and dry wipes to clean it away. I know how bad the back scratches and marks, its the same as it has been since the start of the iPod. Its pretty and shiny but I do with they could use a more resistant metal.

I have never been a fan of the nearly endangered scroll wheel. It has always given me problems on older iPods. I always either under scroll or over scroll and I have always found it slightly tricky to get it in the exact location first try. This iPod’s scroll wheel it absolute torture and the worst thing about the classic I have found so far. It is so unresponsive that is it frustrating. Even worse is that it doesn’t work very well with my iPod sleve, so much that I will most likely have to resort to self modification and sergically remove the scrool wheel cover from it just so I can get a little funtionality back. It is not prefect and I wish they had this sorted before they released it. If there is anything worse I hate about iPods than over scrolling, its having it not scroll at all.

One of the most hyped features about the new iPods was Coverflow. I never really use it on the PC because it is painfully slow and I feel no compelling reason to use it. I was hoping that would be different with this, because I lovethe idea of flicking through album art to play an album. I generally pick an album to play, rather than use playlists so this feature is for me. I do have to say, it is generally an okay experience, as long as you don’t jump ahead and scroll too far and end up with a bunch of question marked albums that eventually load. Yes, there could be many reason that it does that but I don’t really care, it bothers me little.

What does bother me is when an album art is duplicated. It is one album, but because there is a variation with one of the artist names, it thinks they are seperate. iTunes is smart enough to realise that it is the same album and to group it together, so I have no idea why the iPod cannot do the same. Its really slack of them to not have it work right. Don’t go telling me about workarounds because they have their own flaws, it should be done rightand not have people working around it.

This thing is a little slower compared to older iPod but since this is my “first” iPod, I can’t really comment on that. My overall opinion is if you have a iPod video, there is no need to upgrade. If you want a iPod Classic, see if you can get an iPod Video first, or if a Nano suffices your music collection, get that instead. There is always the touch for the big spender that like pretty things and lots of features, but then again, I have never played with a Nano or Touch so I can’t give an honest opinion. I am a little displeased and disappointed with this product, but because it has the Apple Logo on it, I have to let it slide and say its a good product. Well done Apple! Well done Steve Jobs!

I watch a lot of TV shows. Some TV shows are good, other are average, some are utter crap, but I’m not going to discuss the quality of television that is currently airing, that is for another post. I don’t watch my TV shows the way that typical people do. You would expect typical people to watch television shows, well on a television. Don’t sound obserd, does it? Well I am not like these people, I am not a typical person, for many reasons, but in particular for the way I obtain my television shows and watch them.

I don’t know whether or not it is true to assume, that more people are not watching television on their television. With computers being able to play video and being great to use as media centers, some people watch video content on there. Also with the huge growth of portable media players, there is another place that people are watching video content. People are watching video, not just on their television, but on other devices. I myself watch most, if not all, of my video content on my computer. But why do I watch it there? Why do I watch my TV shows on my computer, rather than on my television?

There are many reasons behind this. I do not live in America, the place where “all” television comes from. I do not get to see Heroes, Prison Break, or even Lost, when it gets released over there. No, if I want to see it on my television, I have to wait half a year to a year. But the thing is, I can access this stuff freely on the internet. It is so simple for me to just click a few buttons here and there and in no time, I have this television show, hot off the press, on my hard drive ready for me to watch.

Its not only the waiting times, it is also the quality. Over in America, they have had High Definition channels for quite some time now. Over here, nope, no HD channels till next year! So this pretty much means, by the time it does get over here, we get it in average standard definition. Back a couple of years ago, that would have been nothing we could do about it, but things have change, because there is something we can do about it. We can get these shows, in high resolution, 720p, off the internet. They may not want us to but we can do it! I don’t have to put up with second best because I can get better.

There are many other advantages that come with downloading your television shows. One of them is freedom. You aren’t being told when to watch it and where. You can watch it at anytime, as long as you have it with you. You can also watch it anywhere, your computer, your iPod, even your TV. You’ve had your HD television for a while now and you are watching standard definition on it? Well why don’t you play those 720p TV shows on it. Finally, something else you have to take advantage of the full capacity of your television.

There are many ways of obtaining these shows, some legal, and some questionable. If it is available in your country, or you have a way of accessing a store that has TV Show downloads, you can get the shows that way. The problem is, they generally either have ads, are overpriced, and if you save them to your hard drive, the most likely have some for of Digital Rights Management. Another way of obtaining them it through bittorrent, or any other p2p program, or other file sharing sites. This way you can always guarantee free, ad-less, DRM free, high quality video. This is alway the best video and far surpasses any other methods of obtaining television shows.

It is a game of cat and mouse. Networks want you to pay for their shows but they give us a crap deal. We can get it for free, and much better doing other means. If they want me to watch television shows on my television, I should get them the same time as the rest of the world, and in the same quality. I understand that there are issues and it is not necessarily the networks fault that they cannot provide this, but the least they could do is give it to me online to download, legally and without overpricing it and giving me worse quality than I can get illegally. If you wanna beat it, you have to do just as good, if not one up from what is already available to me. I am going to get my television shows in a way convenient to me by all means necessary.

Music, it is powerful. Everyone listens to music, everyone connects to music. Music is a very effective tool that the media use to hook us. It recently struck me and got me thinking about this that a familiar tune or song can trigger something in the brain to make us think about something else.

One thing is a theme song of a television series. Yesterday, a song that is the theme of a television show my family watch, except me, was on television and it instantly grabbed their attention. They though there was something on television about the show but really it was just a song being used over the top of something else. I found it strange that something as simple as a familiar piece of music can grab someone like that.

After thinking about it, it clicked that I myself do something similar. Whenever I hear a song that has been on one of Apple’s iPod advertisements, I instantly think about the iPod. This is similar for other products but Apple really has me. This is the whole point, they want their product stuck in your head and by using popular, catch music to a greatly done advertisement, they have you hooked.

This also applies of my favourite television show, Heroes. They played a song on the advertisement with a song I hear regularly on the radio and whenever it plays, I always think about Heroes. I don’t care about the song, I don’t listen to the song, but the song triggers my thought, which happen to be my favourite show, Heroes.

Music is a very powerful tool, especially in the media and marketing of products. It can trigger a thought or a memory of something we have seen. Used in a smart way, can really sell a product, whether it be an iPod, a movie, or a television show. This is the media.