Camera Phones Plaza

The latest firmware update of the iPhones brings nothing but trouble: the “unlocked” are rendered useless so that they can be considered as good as bricks. The method applied by Apple is considered to be violating the Californian law of antitrust and fair business practices. The complaint has been filed on Friday at the Santa Clara County Superior Court and it is regarded as a class action against the Cupertino based company. The security update released last month has caused the unlocked iPhone of a user to become locked.

If Apple considers that it is right to punish the customers that were legally allowed to unlock their devices and thus going over the governing law, that could only mean they seek revenge on the customers that did not wish to use it under the AT&T mobile service. It is mostly about what Apple wants, and what the state law says – which are 2 totally opposed things. The monopolistic ideas always caused “fire” that lead to court debates. We are to see yet how this one is going to end.

Google is concentrating on a new operating platform for mobiles which will simplify the way people are accessing Google services while being away from their computers.



For the moment, the company bought Finnish startup Jaiku, a technology that will allow mobile phone users send messages regarding their location and what they are doing in that moment.
Jaiku is in strong relationship with the concept of microblogging, promoted also by San Francisco-based Twitter startup, which consists of posting ideas in short words, on a personal blog, through instant messaging or mobile phone.

On the Jiku’s website, the company posted the message:

“Wonderful Jaiku users,
Exciting news, Jaiku is joining Google!
While it’s too soon to comment on specific plans, we look forward to working with our new friends at Google over the coming months to expand in ways we hope you'll find interesting and useful. Our engineers are excited to be working together and enthusiastic developers lead to great innovation. We look forward to accomplishing great things together. In order to focus on innovation instead of scaling, we have decided to close new user sign-ups for now.
But fear not, all our Jaiku services will stay running the way you are used to and you will be able to invite your friends to Jaiku. We have put together a quick Q&A about the acquisition.
Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen, Jaiku Founders”

Google also had posted the news on the Official Google Blog:

"We wish a hearty Google welcome to Jaiku, and are looking forward to working together on new and innovative ways of keeping people connected."

Furthermore, the terms of the acquisition have not yet been disclosed.

Google expands from its classic text adds to video units, included in the AdSense program.


Later there will be added also audio, games and articles.

With the new AdSense, the websites owners have the options to place static ads on top of the video players or text overlay ads displayed for ten seconds into the video clip, covering this way about 20% of the bottom of the screen, the advertisers being charged per click or per impression.
The latter is not as annoying as it seems because the users can simply minimize the ads.

The dimension of the video players are customizable as well as the colors, so the publishers of these websites have different display options to choose from.

Christian Oestlien, business product manager at Google, said that the program will be made available at first only for the AdSense partners from the US, and later will be expanded to the other countries where YouTube is launched.
Google has been tested video ads since some time and the statistics showed that banners and the text ads worked better than in-stream video ads and in-stream video clips with bundled ads.

As Greg Sterling from Sterling Market Intelligence said, "It's an interesting move for Google to leverage the AdSense network beyond pure advertising. It's an interesting video monetization, as well, with ads being drawn from the normal AdSense pool."

"Your toaster doesn't crash. Your kitchen sink doesn't crash. Why should your computer? Think of the countless hours you would save if your PC worked on your time — not the other way around. Then think about a Mac.", Apple.
Yeah well…



Remember the screen freeze issue of the new iMac?
Well, now the story continues.
And it continues with the MacBook Pro laptops .

The owners of these laptops equipped with the Santa Rosa platform, complained about the fact that these are locking up when they are attached or disconnected to/from an external display like a monitor or projector.
As in the iMacs case, the device must be restarted in order to restart running.

Could this have the same source as the iMacs video driver problem?

A new war in the video cards' realm is going to being with the launch of the new ATI RV670 grapics chipset. The fabrication process is on 55nm and the new VPU will consume 120W less than the actual generations of R600s.

Apparently the card is capable of scoring 11.400 points in 3DMark2006 with a good old AMD FX-62 CPU. It is the prime competitor against Nvidia's G92, who will have no choice but to accept the victory of ATI's RV670 - even the price will be very attractive as the sources mentioned $229-$279 as a price range for a retail package box. It comes quite as a real challenge for those who paid $599 for a 8800 Ultra from Nvidia that brings a score of only about one thousand points more in 3DMark2006.

In the default mode on the above mentioned test, the RV670 has made a big performance progress over the previous generation of R600. As you can see in the board reference image from the begining of the article, the card is muck sleaker and thinner than the actual size of the Radeon HD2900XT. However, the HD2900 were the first to introduce HD video signal and 5.1 sound through the ATI DVI-to-HDMI specially designed adapter.