Is Apple's rumored "mediapad" entertainment device a threat to Amazon's Kindle e-book reader? I think it is, but the only people who may care are current Kindle owners, some of whom may end up wishing they had waited on their purchase.
Here's a selection of favorite forbidden -- but useful and fun -- iPhone applications on Apple's banned list.
It's human nature to get on the bandwagon of a "good thing." Take the screaming hype that is the netbook phenomenon, for example.
Google Ventures Rich Miner recently predicted at a conference in Cambridge, Mass., that a significant number of people will disconnect from the wired Internet in 2 to 3 years, abandoning their computers for mobile devices.
Apple unveiled <a href="http://www.pcworld.com/article/161255/live_update_iphone_software_30.html">iPhone OS 3.0</a> which boasts over <a href="http://www.pcworld.com/article/161433/our_iphone_30_scorecard.html">100 new features</a>. Unfortunately, we will have to wait until the summer to get our hands on the new iPhone operating system. To tide you over until then, take a look at 10 iPhone 3.0 features that look the most promising.
The evolution of mini-laptops
In the most recent update to its iPhoto application, Apple offered up a relatively noninformative description of the changes it had made: better "overall stability" and fixes for "minor issues in a number of areas, including Faces, Places, photo sharing, and slideshows."
Ah, the Apple App Store. Since July 2008, the month when Apple opened its wildly popular library of applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch, the world has been treated to more than 20,000 apps, with some 500 million downloaded as of February 2009.
Apple's iPod has been outrageously successful and slyly prolific. In the seven-plus years since Apple introduced the iPod, the company has created 17 versions.
Apple's iLife suite has long been a cornerstone of the company's "digital hub" strategy for organizing, managing and creatively using the array of digital media available today. In the latest version, iLife '09, the suite received major updates to almost all of its five applications. The only application that didn't gain any revolutionary new features was iDVD, Apple's tool for creating DVDs of movies and photos edited with the other iLife apps.
There's no doubt that Apple's iPhone has changed the landscape of the smart-phone industry, and indeed the mobile phone business as a whole. But one of the most revolutionary advances that Apple offered up isn't in the iPhone itself: It's the mechanism the company developed to distribute non-Apple applications to iPhone and iPod Touch users.
The Mac has been the flagship product for Apple since it was introduced in 1984 and continues to be so today, despite the fawning over the iPhone platform. From the time the Apple IIGS died out in the early '90s until the introduction of the iPod in 2001, the Mac was the one product line that Apple kept running.
Apple today announced an upgrade to its flagship notebook, the 17in MacBook Pro. The notebook boasts the same unibody enclosure found in the new MacBook line-up and the 15in MacBook Pro, as well as overhauled hardware specifications.
Steve Jobs may [[artid:919734384|not be coming to MacWorld Expo]]in San Francisco next week, but that hasn't stopped the Apple rumor-rama from charging ahead at full speed.
Countless people are trying to predict what 2009 could hold for the world of technology. Of course, it's all just guesswork -- these pundits aren't working with a crystal ball. So we decided to find someone who was.