iPad – iDisappointed

I fail to be wowed by Steve Jobs latest product announcement, the all new iPad, which is supposedly so revolutionary that it creates a new product category. I guess it still does deserve its own product category, but it is nowhere so revolutionary that the media had hyped it out to be. The name itself doesn’t even sound interesting. In fact, I’m already reading a bunch of jokes about the name even before I finished watching Steve Job’s keynote video.

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The Long Awaited Apple Tablet

In less than 24 hours, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Apple is expected to unveil a new hardware product category at their special Media Event. It’ll be a product announcement so major that it is being compared to the likes if the iPhone launch in 2007 and Macintoshes moving to Intel processors in 2005. We’re talking about a new product category rather than simply another new product, and it has been reported that Steve Jobs was heard…

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Apple Wins Judgement Against Mac Cloner Pystar

Apple has won a decisive victory over Pystar, the clone computer maker which sells Mac OS X preloaded on non-Apple hardware. The summary judgement won by Apple ruled that Pystar had violated copyright laws and violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). It sounds like the road is ending for Pystar. It sounds like this should be the obvious outcome, but I think many of us are simply shocked at Pystar’s vigorous attacks against Apple and wondered if they…

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Apple Magic Mouse Review

The new Apple Magic Mouse announced earlier in October has started shipping. It’s a pretty, clean, smooth, button-less and seamless mouse just like the Mighty Mouse it replaces. It is even more so, because there’s not even the tiny scroll ball anymore from the Mighty Mouse. The Magic Mouse looks like just a piece of curved acrylic topped white plastic, and an aluminum bottom. It’s possible that people unfamiliar with Apple’s mice might not believe that this device actually functions…

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The Plastic MacBook Lives On

Even though Apple has progressively upgraded all its MacBooks to aluminum unibody designs and rebranded them MacBook Pros, the white plastic wasn’t expected to die just yet. This has been reaffirmed by it’s latest upgrade in yesterday’s surprise product announcement from Apple. The plastic MacBook now features a polycarbonate unibody design, LED backlight screen, glass multitouch trackpad and a built-in battery pushing battery life to 7 hours.

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Apple Launches New iPods

At Apple’s special media event yesterday, Apple announced the immediate availability of entirely refreshed family of iPod devices. The new generation of iPod nano received the biggest upgrade, which includes a new video camera, FM radio tuner with live pausing (think Hub Station) and iTunes tagging capability. My 4th generation iPod Nano has become feature-obsolete.

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Apple iTunes vs Nokia Music

The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic I got last weekend enabled me to try out Nokia’s Comes with Music for the first time, and also to explore more of the Nokia Music Store than I did before. I’m also quite familiar with Apple’s iTunes Store, which does a lot more than selling music. The two stores are used primarily to support and push the sales of products from their respective companies. What do I think of the two stores?

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Mac OS X Snow Leopard and other Updates

The cat is out of the bag. The latest version of Apple’s Mac OS X operating system, code named Snow Leopard, will be launched in September. Current Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) users can upgrade to Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) for just US$29. That seems like a very reasonable upgrade price to pay.

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Variable Pricing at iTunes

Just as Apple had said at MacWorld, variable pricing for music sold at the iTunes store has started. What used to be a flat rate US$0.99 per song, is now spread across three price tiers at US$1.29, US$0.99, and US$0.69. Economically this makes sense, but I’m sure many customers would rather just continue to have the US$0.99 flat rate because, obviously, now all the popular songs are going to cost more.

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