Rumours here, rumours there, rumours popping up everywhere – and the latest from AppleInsider is that the iPhone 3G could soon be getting a 2 and a B to become an iPhone 32GB.

iPhone fans were shocked when Apple CEO Steve Jobs failed to bring the iPhone 3G with 32GB storage to life on June 9 at the Moscone Convention Centre in San Francisco alongside the iPhone SDK launch event.

That’s because the iPod Touch was launched in late 2007 with 32GB of storage, so a 32GB iPhone was hardly beyond the realms of possibility.

Although hardly a unique prediction, I immediately suggested that a 32GB iPhone 3G would appear later in 2008, to counter any advances from mobile phone competitors, with the Google Android “GPhone”, due to be the HTC Dream launched next Tuesday being one such big competitor, alongside the Nokia N96 and others.

Well, AppleInsider’s report is hardly confirmation that an iPhone 32GB is on the way, but it once again raises the possibility that it will appear this year, and will greatly annoy anyone who has recently purchased a 16GB iPhone 3G.

It will also be the first time a “phone” has shipped with so much internal storage, and clearly would challenge the Nokia N96 with its 16GB of internal storage (and expandability through an 8GB MicroSD card to 24GB).

The rumour is based on “shortages” of the 8GB iPhone 3G, but AppleInsider cautions this could be because of stocks needed to supply Best Buy, the first non Apple or AT&T store allowed to sell the iPhone in the US retail channel.

If a iPhone 3G 32GB model will come this year, it will certainly cause a flurry of global coverage, and will help Apple to compete for market and mind share at a crucial time – the Christmas / end-of-year / holiday shopping season that all companies love and dearly want to take maximum advantage of.

I’ve personally held off from buying an iPhone 3G for precisely this reason, and because I also have an iPhone 2G with 8GB of storage that I’m very happy with, why rush into an 8GB or 16GB iPhone 3G when a 32GB model seems inevitable?

AppleInsider also reports that AT&T’s systems are showing up a “fifth” option to purchase, entitled “Home”, which suggests that “in-home activation” is on the way.

It also raises the possibility of unlocked iPhone sales in the US, at higher prices, for tourists who want to buy an iPhone 3G and use it back in their home countries, something that currently is not possible with US iPhone purchases.

If Apple and AT&T allow this, it’s also likely because the iPhone Dev Team (and others) still have not figured out how to unofficially unlock the existing iPhone 3G, thus also allowing locked iPhone 3G sales as they must be activated at home via iTunes to be of any use to US consumers.

Apple is known to have worked with Infineon to make the unofficial unlock process exceeding difficult, especially considering it hasn’t yet happened, although iPhone fans do all live in hope. [link]

AMD will launch the ATI Radeon HD 4650 graphics card, adopting its RV730 core with 512MB DDR2 memory, and the HD 4670 in two versions, one with 512MB GDDR3 memory and the other with 1GB DDR3 memory. The cards will be priced between US$69-89.

For the entry-level market, AMD will launch the ATI Radeon HD 4550 in late September. A version with 512MB DDR3 memory will be priced at US$45-55 and a version with 256MB DDR3 memory will cost US$39-49. In mid October, the company will launch the ATI Radeon HD 4350 with 256MB DDR2 memory priced below US$49.

AMD is also planning to mark down the price of all the above products by the first quarter of 2009.

In addition to GPUs, AMD is planning to launch two quad-core 45nm CPUs by the end of this year, however the two CPUs will both adopt its Socket AM2+ instead of the originally planned AM3. The two CPUs will feature core frequencies between 2.6-3GHz and a TDP of 125W. Since they are just transitional products marking AMD’s entrance into 45nm generation production, they will be phased out of the market by May or June next year.

AMD will also launch 45nm triple-core CPUs codenamed Rana in the second quarter of 2009. These chips will not include L3 cache.

45nm AM3-based CPUs will be launched in the early January next year. AMD is planning to launch four quad-core CPUs, two Deneb and two Propus core. In the second quarter next year, the company will launch a quad-core Deneb processor with higher frequency to replace the transitional AM2+-based CPUs.

The company will also launch two energy-efficient 45nm quad-core Propus CPUs mainly targeting the mini PC segment. AMD to launch new GPUs. link

Is the mighty Google slipping or are delays to a potentially world-beating smartphone platform nothing to worry about?
Bluetooth is clearly a major feature of modern mobiles, and the news that Google is delaying what should be an essential initial inclusion is somewhat surprising.

But don’t panic. After all, the first Android handsets will include Bluetooth support for headsets and possibly some other functions. But as Bluetooth will not be accessible by developers, any capabilities must be explicitly programmed in by the team at Google.

So what happened? Engineer Nick Pelly explained “we plain ran out of time. The Android Bluetooth API was pretty far along, but needs some clean-up before we can commit to it for the SDK.”

Part of the problem is that Android uses the BlueZ Bluetooth protocol stack developed for Linux, and that software has just undergone a major revision with the arrival of version 4.

“The bluez 4.x change requires us to carefully consider how to structure our API for the future. Again, remember that once we settle on an interface we need to support it for years going forward,” said Pelly.

According to Android developer advocate Dan Morrill, “We absolutely intend to support a Bluetooth API in a future release, although we don’t know exactly when that will be.”

What this likely means is that initial Android handsets will support Bluetooth headsets and handsfree kits for voice calls, but might not allow Bluetooth file transfers or connect to Bluetooth keyboards until an update of the Android software is made available. It definitely means developers won’t be able to create applications that use Bluetooth to talk to peers running on nearby Android handsets. So multi-player games will initially rely on carrier links rather than (free) Bluetooth connectivity.

As for the Google Talk API, The decision to drop GTalkService from the SDK was taken for security reasons. The idea was to use Google Talk as a way of allowing programs such as games running on Android devices to communicate with each other.

Trouble is, the relationship you have with people that you’d put on an IM buddy list is not the same as that with fellow gamers – apart from anything else, there’s no reason to assume that you should know the latter by anything other than their game identities.

Secondly, GTalkService hooked into an Android mechanism originally intended for passing messages within the device, and it was realised that this did not provide adequate protection against someone with malicious intent.

Thirdly, “As originally designed, the GTalkService placed a significant burden on the application developer to avoid security flaws and perform user and relationship management,” said Android security researcher Rich Cannings.

But the idea of allowing applications running on Android devices lives on. “One of our top priorities after the first devices ship is to develop a device-to-device (and possibly device-to-server) RPC mechanism that is fast, reliable, and protective of developers and users alike,” said Morrill.

So Bluetooth and some kind of program-to-program communication service are clearly coming in the future, but just as Rome and its empire wasn’t built in a day, neither will the newest and biggest potential threat to the iPhone, Windows Mobile, LiMo and Symbian platforms: Google Android. link

Nothing to complain about here. The right spine of the player houses a standard 3.5mm headphone jack as well as a standard mini USB port for charging and syncing. The reset button is a little larger and less-recessed than on previous Zens, meaning you can activate it with a ball-point pen or similar device. (Before, you would have needed something even skinnier.)

The top side of the X-Fi features the SD card slot first introduced on the Zen. Unfortunately, Creative did not remedy the integration issue: content stored on the card must be accessed via a separate menu and does not integrate into your main library. There’s also a pinhole mic for making voice recordings, which can be split on the device itself—nifty.

The Wi-Fi XFis include a set of new Creative headphones, a $50 value. The EP-830 earphones will be sold separately through Creative at a later date, for those that want to upgrade the 8GB XFi or other Zen players.

Creative has carried over the lovely screen from the Zen. Photos look vibrant and bright, with excellent color saturation and good detail—and the viewing angle from side to side is excellent. The interface is straightforward and lovely to look at, right down to the transparent icons on the main menu. The X-Fi is noticeably thicker than the Zen, though, no doubt because of the wireless antenna.

The Zen X-Fi photographs really well, but sadly, this is a bit misleading. The player is encased entirely in plastic and the faceplate is not seamlessly wrapped around the edge of the device. As a result, we’ve already begun to experience some warping at the bottom edge of the faceplate. Given the low cost-to-feature ratio, we can forgive Creative somewhat for this, but we’re hoping the warping is only an issue with early models and will be addressed going forward.

Creative includes a nine-digit keypad (like on a phone) to leave room for add-on applications going forward. Still, the control pad is pretty straightforward for basic functions. The surrounding buttons—play/pause, contextual menu, back, and shortcut—have sharp edges, another indicator of the cheap construction in our book. They seem unfinished, but work just fine.

The Zen X-Fi is packed with features, the most exciting of which are the X-Fi Crystalizer and Wi-Fi. The wireless functionality lets you stream music from a media server of your choosing from anywhere that you can get on Wi-Fi. It also allows for a feature that we’ve never seen on an MP3 player: chat.

Creative lets you create a personal profile (if desired) for chat online, but you can design your avatar on the device itself. If you choose not to have a profile, you can log on to chat as a guest.

Just like with an instant-messaging client, you can designate your mood. Cute.

You can send other users “winks,” which are Creative’s emoticons.

The Creative Zen X-Fi also includes the usual array of features we’ve come to expect from the line: FM radio with autoscan and presets, bookmarking, voice recording, and support for Audible and subscription music.

[link]

iTunes 7.7.1 is available for Mac OS X and Windows. As usual, Apple is being coy about what the update delivers, saying only that it “includes fixes to improve stability and performance.”

Version 7.7 added support for the App Store and for the Remote application for the iPhone and iPod touch.

Some users reported various problems after installing iTunes 7.7. Complaints included corruption of data stored on iPods as well as a long stall (as in several minutes) occurring after connecting iPods.

Such negative reports came from users of both the Mac and Windows versions of the music software, though the problems did not appear to be widespread.

At the time of writing, the update had not appeared at Apple Downloads, and was only available via Software Update (Mac) or Apple Software Update (Windows). itwire

So, What Does Apple Have in Store?

Apple’s CFO, Peter Oppenheimer, apparently said during Apple’s earnings call today that the company will soon introduce a new product at a price point that rivals could not come close to matching. He then said this new gizmo (or revamped old gizmo) would be so competitively priced that it would drive Apple’s gross profit margin  down from about 35 percent last quarter to about 30 percent.

These comments, naturally, have created rampant speculation across the Web.

Apple is expected to update its laptops, iPods and Mac Mini toward the end of this summer. Many folks also expect it to introduce some sort of table device that’s larger than an iPhone but smaller than any of its other computers.

If one of these products is the mystery device — and it’s not an iCar electric vehicle or something else completely unexpected.

Apple sold about 2.5 million Macs in the year’s second quarter (which, oddly, is Apple’s third quarter) and most of them were laptops. If it did something very aggressive there, that would get the margins down. Its laptop sales have been growing more than 20 percent a year without any aggressive moves and Apple has been raking in the profits. It made more than $1 billion last quarter. Unless the folks at Apple believe that Vista is so weak that they can take over the consumer market (and a good chunk of the business market) with a really aggressive move, there’s no reason for them to make it.

On the other hand, any unexpected product carries the tablet-sales-volume problem: you can’t really expect to sell enough units of a brand new product to drive your margins down.

In a tale of sales success breeding resentment, computer companies are wary of the new breed of computers because their low price could threaten PC makers’ already thin profit margins.

The new computers, often called netbooks, have scant onboard memory. They use energy-sipping computer chips. They are intended largely for surfing Web sites and checking e-mail. The price is small too, with some selling for as little as $300.

The companies that pioneered the category were small too, like Asus and Everex, both of Taiwan.

Despite their wariness of these slim machines, Dell and Acer, two of the biggest PC manufacturers, are not about to let the upstarts have this market to themselves. Hewlett-Packard, the world’s biggest PC maker, recently sidled into the market with a hybrid of a notebook and netbook that it calls the Mini-Note.

Several makers are taking the low-powered PCs one step further. In the coming months, they are expected to introduce “net-tops,” low-cost versions of desktop computers intended for Internet access.

A Silicon Valley start-up called CherryPal says it will challenge the idea that big onboard power is required to allow basic computing functions in the Internet age. On Monday it plans to introduce a $300 desktop PC that is the size of a paperback and uses two watts of power compared with the 100 watts of some desktops.

It wants to take advantage of the trend toward “cloud computing,” in which data is managed and stored in distant servers, not on the actual machine.

Industry analysts say that the emergence of this new class of low-cost, cloud-centric machines could threaten titans like Microsoft and Intel, or even H.P. and Dell, because the giants have built their companies on the notion that consumers want more power and functions built into their next computer.

Some of the big computer companies put a positive spin on the low-cost machines, saying they welcome new categories. But they would just as soon this niche did not take off, given the relatively low profit margins.

“When I talk to PC vendors, the No. 1 question I get is, how do I compete with these netbooks when what we really want to do is sell PCs that cost a lot more money?” said J. P. Gownder, an analyst with Forrester Research.

Even as some PC vendors are jumping into the fray, others say they are resisting. Fujitsu, one of the world’s top 10 personal computer makers, said that it believes the low-cost netbook trend is a dangerous one for the bottom line.

“We’re sitting on the sidelines not because we’re lazy. We’re sitting on the sidelines because even if this category takes off, and we get our piece of the pie, it doesn’t add up,” said Paul Moore, senior director of mobile product management for Fujitsu. “It’s a product that essentially has no margin.”

Stan Glasgow, chief executive of Sony Electronics, said, “We are not looking at competing with Asus.” But he said the company is investigating what consumers want in a second PC.

It is a market that caught the major computer companies — both hardware and software — by surprise after Asus, entered the market last year with the $300 Eee PC. The company thought the device would essentially appeal to the education market, or as a starter laptop for adolescents, but the interest has turned out to be broader.

With an emphasis not in on-board applications (like word processing), but Internet-based ones like Google Docs, the Linux-based Eee PC sold out its 350,000 global inventory. It has been in short supply ever since, said Jackie Hsu, president of the American division of Asus. Everex has sold around 20,000 of its CloudBook, which sells for about $350.

The sales are a veritable drop in the bucket compared with the 271 million desktop and laptop PCs shipped globally last year. But there is an intensifying debate about how big the category can become, and what segment of the market finds these computers appealing.

IDC, a market research firm, is predicting that the category could grow from fewer than 500,000 in 2007 to nine million in 2012 as the market for second computers expands in developed economies.

Intel is projecting that by 2011, the market for the netbooks will be 40 million units a year, which is why Intel is jumping in with low-powered chips that would be used in the netbooks and the net-tops.

With its new Atom chip, Intel is competing against upstarts including Via, a Taiwanese company that has a chip called the C7. The C7 is showing up in netbooks and, indeed, is being used in the Everex models and in H.P.’s $500 Mini-Note.

William Calder, an Intel spokesman, said that the cost of the Atom for PC makers is around $44, compared with $100 for a state-of-the-art chip. He said that Intel executives think the market for low-cost PCs is too big to pass up, though it does raise a potential threat to more powerful and more profitable computing lines.

Microsoft has been a reluctant participant too. Even though it is no longer selling its Windows XP operating system software, it made an exception for makers of these low-cost laptops and desktops. Microsoft said it was responding to a groundswell of consumer interest in the low-cost machines, but some makers of those machines say Microsoft did so reluctantly because it did not want to lose market share to Linux.

Tim Bajarin, an industry analyst with Creative Strategies, a technology consulting firm, said that while the big computer companies have been caught off guard by the market’s potential, they are finding little choice but to dive in.

“H.P., Dell and these other PC makers have learned that if there’s consumer interest, you can’t just sit back and let someone else steal all the thunder,” he said.

Hewlett-Packard thinks consumers want more than a mobile Internet terminal. “Our competitors proved there is a pretty good market,” Robert Baker, a notebook product manager at Hewlett-Packard conceded.

Dell has not been specific about the price or features of its entry, but Michael Tatelman, vice president for marketing at Dell, said he believed that the category would have limited consumer appeal.

They are useful for someone on the go at an airport or on a commuting trip on a bus, but not for a more intense computing experience, he said. “It’s a good 30- to 90-minute experience.” nytimes

In other words, like the original SIM card hacks for the iPhone classic, this method forges the International Mobile Subscriber Identity, making the phone believe it’s working in the network in which it’s supposed to work. There’s no word yet on the availability of this hack, but we will keep all of those who don’t want to pay roaming charges updated. TechGuru

The vulnerability, which could allow the excevution of arbitrary code, was reported to TippingPoint’s Zero Day Initiative just five hours after the open source browser was released on Tuesday. The Zero Day Initiative pays researchers for finding vulnerabilities in software, then provides the information to the vendor concerned.

The timing has led to allegations that the researcher concerned had discovered the flaw prior to the release of Firefox 3 but delayed notification to gain the maximum publicity. The fact that the flaw also affects Firefox 2 is thought to support this theory.

Since the researcher has chosen to remain anonymous, he or she will gain little kudos from being the first to discover a flaw in Firefox 3, leading to speculation that the researcher is in some way associated with another browser.

But enough of the conspiracy theories – what’s to be done by the 12 million plus users that have already downloaded Firefox 3, let alone the 140 million or so that Mozilla says are using its predecessors?

Practically nothing is known about the nature of the flaw. All TippingPoint is saying is that “Not unlike most browser based vulnerabilities that we see these days, user interaction is required such as clicking on a link in email or visiting a malicious web page.”

So the usual warnings about being careful about visiting shady sites and avoiding links in dodgy email would seem to apply until an update is released.

There’s not even any indication of whether the flaw is specific to Firefox on a particular platform, or if all supported operating systems are equally affected.

Mozilla security chief Window Snyder said “This issue is currently under investigation. To protect our users, the details of the issue will remain closed until a patch is made available. There is no public exploit, the details are private, and so the risk to users is minimal.”

When TippingPoint receives details of unpatched vulnerabilities, it confirms the issue and may offer a cash payment for exclusive rights. If accepted, the software vendor is notified. If the vendor fails to respond or to provide a fix in “a reasonable period of time”, TippingPoint makes a public disclosure.

Meanwhile, it uses the information in its own security products and may share it with other security vendors.  via itwire