Apple TV

Today Steve Jobs announced a lineup of new products for consumers to drool over. First Apple announced the updated iPods, followed by the much rumored new Apple TV.

The new and improved Apple TV has been rumored for a couple months now. Features include a much smaller design than the previous version with a black finish, 802.11n Wireless connection, Ethernet connection,  as well as 720p HDMI and Digital Audio output.

The new Apple TV boasts Netflix streaming, $0.99 TV show and $4.99 DVD rental through iTunes. It also houses the ability to wirelessly stream music, pictures, and videos from any computer in your home.

iPod Nano

The new iPod Nano is 100% touch screen and about the same size as the 2nd generation iPod Shuffle. It’s available in 8GB ($149) and 16GB ($179) and it has a clip built onto the back.

iPod Shuffle

The new iPod Shuffle has grown in size from the previous generation and has been retrofitted with the 2nd generation buttons located on the iPod rather than the headphones. The Shuffle is available with a capacity of 2GB for $49.

iPod Touch

The iPod Touch received built in rear facing camera allowing you to record 720p video. It also has a front facing camera with retina display and utilizes FaceTime video calling. It is available in 8GB ($229), 32Gb ($299) and 64GB ($399).

Have you ever sent an email and instantly wished you could ‘un-send’ it? While this may be a rare occurrence for most people, it does happen from time to time.

The ability to un-send an email in Gmail has been available under the ‘Labs’ settings for a while now. Previously, you were allotted 5 seconds to un-send an email. Google has just improved this feature by allowing up to 30 seconds to un-send an email.

If you are a Gmail user, I’d recommend activating this feature for peace of mind.

1) Login to your Gmail account in your web browser

2) Click the green beeker between your login ID and the “Settings” link in the top right of the webpage

3) Scroll all the way down the list until you find “Undo Send” and click the button next to “Enable”

4) Click on “Settings” located at the top right of the webpage

5) Scroll down to the settings for “Undo Send” and set the timing to 30 seconds

6) Scroll to the bottom of the webpage and hit “Save”

Once you follow these steps, Undo Send will be enabled for your Gmail account.

Lets face it, who uses CD’s anymore? Sony’s new car stereo (DSX-S100) says goodbye to yesterday’s technology by permanently remove the CD player from your car.

These days it seems that everyone houses their media on iPods, flash drives and even their phones. Running connection cables under or around your center console to connect these devices can be very annoying and make the interior of a nice car look somewhat trashy.

Sony’s new receiver replaces the disc drive with a padded storage compartment designed to house your media device out of plain site and eliminates the need to run additional cables.

You can easily search by artist, album, genre and playlist through the receiver interface for full control of your music.

While you might expect this receiver to be outrageously priced at $300+ like most other car stereos on the market, the DSX-S100 is reasonably priced at $150 and available at Crutchfield.com and your nearest BestBuy.

PhoneAble is an application available to Windows users who would like to sync their iPhone with multiple iTunes libraries. This application can be very useful as it allows you to sync your iPhone with other computers in your house, at work, or with friends and relatives.

How it works: Sync your iPhone with the iTunes library on your main computer. Then install PhoneAble on any other computers you would like to sync with. Once you run through PhoneAble’s setup process, it will set the library key in each of the iTunes libraries to coincide with the key on your iPhone. Now your iPhone will recognize all of these iTunes libraries as your main library, thus allowing you to have a much wider music collection available on your iPhone.

You can also follow this guide or use programs such as CopyTrans to transfer music you’ve taken from various iTunes libraries with your iPhone and back them up to your main computer.

Personally, I’m hoping PhoneAble will be available for Mac users in the near future. I can see myself using its capabilities regularly.

iPhone 4 Unlock

The iPhone Dev-Team has released a tool called Ultrasn0w which allows iPhone 4 owners to use their phone on other carriers such as T-Mobile. In order to unlock the iPhone 4 you must first jailbreak your phone. A step by step guide to jailbreaking and unlocking your iPhone 4 can be found Here.

Key Ring App

If you’re like me you have loyalty and membership cards to grocery stores, gas stations, retail stores, and the gym. Unfortunately, these cards take up space on car keys or stuffed in your wallet. Because of this I tend to leave these cards at home or in my car and never seem to have them when I actually need them.

A new app has been released that remedies this issue. Key Ring allows you to scan the barcodes from your loyalty or membership cards and store them in your phone. When you are checking out at the grocery store or walking into the gym, you simply open the Key Ring app, select the appropriate barcode and allow the person/machine to scan it as if it were the actual card. The app is free and available on the iPhone and all Android phones.

Apple Trackpad

Along with the refreshed iMac and Mac Pro lines, today apple also revealed their new Magic Trackpad. The trackpad found on the Macbook Pro provides two-finger scrolling, pinch to zoom, finger tip rotation, and three and four finger swipe functionality. The Magic Trackpad has all of these capabilities as well as 80% more surface area than the trackpad found on the Macbook Pro.

This is a perfect upgrade for iMac and Mac Pro users who want the multitouch functionality that Macbook Pro users experience. You can purchase the Magic Trackpad for $69.

UPDATE: If you are a Windows PC user and the Magic Trackpad appeals to you, follow this step by step guide to get the full functionality of the trackpad on your Windows machine.

iMac

Months ago, the Macbook Pro received an upgrade to Intel’s i3, i5, and i7 processors. Today, the iMac line was finally given an upgrade to the i3 and i5 processors as well as receiving improved graphics cards.

The new iMacs also support dual internal hard drives. Which means you can now have an SSD as your boot drive with a secondary drive of up to 2TB for storage.

iMac

The Mac Pro also received an upgrade to an Intel Xeon 2.66GHz processor available in a Quad-Core ($2,499), 8-Core ($3,299), and a 12-Core ($4,999).

Mac Pro

iPhone 4

Apple held a press conference this morning to discuss signal issues with the iPhone 4. While many people were hoping for a recall, Apple gave its own “solution”. Steve Jobs announced that current iPhone 4 users will receive a free case from Apple. And those who already bought a Bumper can take their receipt back to the nearest Apple store for a full refund.

Steve Jobs spent majority of the press conference defending the signal issues on the new iPhone and stated that “every smart phone has this issue.” He even went as far to say that replicating the “death grip” on the Blackberry Bold, Droid Eris, and Samsung Omnia II causes the same signal issues. As expected, RIM and Nokia have responded to these careless statements.

It’s a bit ridiculous that Steve would make this statement since it’s not a wide scale problem on all of the above mentioned phones like it is on the iPhone 4. And it’s even more absurd that Apple is now comparing the performance of their most “revolutionary phone” to other smartphones that they have previously labeled as lesser quality.

I think it’s safe to say that Apple has lost a lot of credibility with consumers thanks to the way they’ve handled the issues with their latest phone.

Solid-State Drive

Today’s computers have plenty of RAM, video graphics, and processing power to complete even the most demanding tasks. However, there is one component that continues to create a large bottleneck in the performance of even the most high end machines. This component is the standard, platter driven hard drive. But thanks to Sold State Drives (SSD’s), platter driven hard drives are quickly becoming obsolete.

Standard hard drives are built with a “platter” that stores information. In most standard hard drives, the platter spins at either 4200RPM, 5400RPM, or 7200RPM. While the platter is spinning, the “head” scans the platter to retrieve data from the drive as well as write data to it. As you can imagine, the slower the rotational speed the longer it takes to read/write from the drive. The decreased read/write speed can drastically slow the performance of your computer.

Solid State Drives, on the other hand, utilize Flash memory to store data. Since Flash memory does not require a constantly moving platter or a head to read/write the data, the speed at which data can be read from or written to the drive is increased dramatically. Also, unlike platter driven hard drives, SSD’s require a lot less power consumption. In turn, SSD’s allow your computer to run cooler and use less power (increasing battery life in laptops).

After installing an 80GB Intel X25-M SSD in my Macbook Pro I instantly noticed many benefits such as:

- Boot time decreased from ~35 seconds to ~10 seconds
- Photoshop CS5 now launches in ~2 seconds as apposed to ~5 seconds with the standard hard drive
- Absolutely no lag when opening, editing, and saving projects in Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator
- Internal temperature decreased by ~10C on average
- Battery life increased by 30-40 minutes under standard working conditions

While the price per GB on SSD’s remain a bit high, they have already began decreasing quite a bit since their initial release. If you are looking to upgrade your current computer or plan on buying a new computer in the near future, I highly recommend an SSD as a priority upgrade.