Review: Seamless for iPhone

Imagine this scenario, you’re listening to your favorite music track on your Mac and had to leave the house, don’t you wish your iPhone or iPod touch can seamlessly carry on playing the track from where you were at in iTunes on your Mac? Or if you were deeply engaged in a podcast just before you had to head out, so you have to wait for the iPhone or iPod touch to synch using iTunes before you leave. This happens to me often especially the latter.

Fortunately, Five Details, the 2008 Apple Design Awards winners and maker of Flow, has a solution and it is called Seamless.

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Smartone-Vodafone & iPhone Personal Hotspot

After Steve Jobs’ announcement at the “iPad 2 Event” that the Personal Hotspot feature will be available in iOS 4.3, people have been wondering if their mobile carriers will allow the feature to work, and how will these carriers charge for the usage of this feature on their network.

Like these users I wonder about it for my current mobile carrier, Smartone-Vodafone (SMV) in Hong Kong. So right after the iPad 2 Event I posted a question on Smartone-Vodafone’s Facebook Page asking them to comment on the feature’s use on their network and the charges if any. All SMV has to say is “We do not have any information regarding Personal Hotspot at this time, please stay tuned”.

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Apple’s March 2nd iPad 2 Event

After months of speculations from various web sites: iLounge, Fast Company, 9 to 5 Mac, Mashable and The Unofficial Apple Weblog

The day for Apple to review the punch line to their statement in the invitation is finally here.

Come see what 2011 will be the year of.

At 10:00 this morning (US Pacific Time) Steve Jobs reviewed the new “iPad 2”. In short it is faster, lighter and more feature rich than the previous generation. Along with the new iPad Jobs and company also announced the release of Photo Booth, FaceTime, iMovie and GarageBand for the iPad. The latter two will be available at USD4.99 via the iTunes App Store. All of these along with iOS 4.3 will be available March 11th, and the prices of all 6 models remain the same with the new version.
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CSL Asks Hong Kong to Go Beyond

CSL logoOn Thursday (Nov. 25) CSL launched the world’s first LTE/DC-HSPA+ mobile network during their “Go Beyond” event held at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center in Hong Kong.

According to CSL it’s new network is capable of achieving speeds of 100 Mbps downlink and 38 Mbps uplink, with its DC-HSPA component supporting 42 Mbps. It is also Asia’s first commercial LTE network with full digital voice traffic, built in partnership with mainland China’s ZTE.

Although CSL refers to this new network as “4G”, but according to International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Radiocommunication Sector (R).

A 4G network must have target peak data rates of up to approximately 100 Mbit/s for high mobility such as mobile access and up to approximately 1 Gbit/s for low mobility such as nomadic/local wireless access

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Triumph of HTML5

Over the past 3 years Apple Inc. has taken the heat on pushing the adoption of the W3C standard, HTML5, for all web based development. They have even been taken to court for not allowing competitor’s technology (Flash) on their platform (iOS).

Recently to avoid any more blame for flaws in these 3rd party technologies, they have stopped pre-installing them on all hardware products they ship.

Now the companies behind these other technologies are showing signs of support for Apple’s directions. Are Microsoft shifts away from Silverlight and Adobe announcing the HTML5 Video Player widget indications that Apple rivals in the HTML5 war are finally given up?

This recent Microsoft decision is in line with their statement 4 years ago stating that, what they had done with Internet Explorer for the past 6 version were wrong and IE8 is the start of HTML5 compliancy.

Recently Microsoft released beta version of IE9 at PDC, which will be even more compliant with HTML5 than any previous versions of Internet Explorer.

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Triumph of HTML5

Over the past 3 years Apple Inc. has taken the heat on pushing the adoption of the W3C standard, HTML5, for all web based development. They have even been taken to court for not allowing competitor’s technology (Flash) on their platform (iOS).
Recently to avoid any more blame for flaws in these 3rd party technologies, they have stopped pre-installing them on all hardware products they ship.

Now the companies behind these other technologies are showing signs of support for Apple’s directions. Are Microsoft shifts away from Silverlight and Adobe announcing the HTML5 Video Player widget indications that Apple rivals in the HTML5 war are finally given up?

This recent Microsoft decision is in line with their statement 4 years ago stating that, what they had done with Internet Explorer for the past 6 version were wrong and IE8 is the start of HTML5 compliancy.

Recently Microsoft released beta version of IE9 at PDC, which will be even more compliant with HTML5 than any previous versions of Internet Explorer.

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Thoughts on Apple’s “Back to the Mac” Event

On Wednesday, October 20, 10:00 (US PDT) Apple hosted their “Back to the Mac” event in Cupertino, California, USA.

During the event they introduced the new iLife ’11 with the same suite of 5 applications: iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand, iWeb, iDVD. They also gave a sneak peek of the next Mac OS X version 10.7 (aka “Lion”) and FaceTime for Mac. The “one more thing” as this announcement was the brand new MacBook Air (late 2010).
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iTunes 9.2 Now Available


Last night Apple made available Mac OS 10.6.4 Update, now the version of iTunes that supports iOS 4 and all its functions is now available from Apple’s Downloads page or from Software Update on your Mac.

Unless you are using iTunes on Windows platform or that you have an iOS supported device running iOS 4, there is no rush to update your iTunes to this version. For the former type users there are 3 security issues that this version of iTunes fixes as documented in the Knowledge Base article, About the security content of iTunes 9.2.

iOS Firmware Repositories [Updated: April 14, 2011]

Each time you allow iTunes to update your iOS device, iTunes will automatically delete the previous iOS firmware (ipsw) file from your computer. As a result you will not be able to restore your iOS device to one of these older iOS firmware.

I decided to create a place where I list all the iOS firmware Apple ever released in the past. The following are all hyperlinks to Apple’s official repositories, so there are no worries if any of these package contains malware payloads.
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