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Items of Note: Welcome to 2007. Today is coverage of all the new goodies announced at MacWorld 2007.
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Tech news:
Mozilla brings in $53M in 2005. In 2005 the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation combined, had revenue from all sources of $52.9M. The huge numbers were broken down into the following: The bulk of this revenue was related to search engine relationships, with the remainder coming from a combination of contributions, sales from the Mozilla store, and more. These figures compare with 2003 and 2004 revenues of $2.4M and $5.8M respectively.
Skype unveils yearly long distance package. When Skype announced free long distance Skype-to-phone calls for the US and Canada in May of 2006, the result was an explosion of new Skype users. Even though the promotion would end at the end of the calendar year, seven months of free long distance was enough to entice scores of people to sign up. Skype has begun a month-long promotion of $14.95 for one year of long distance. The promotion will also include 100 minutes of SkypeOut for International calls and over $50 worth of coupons for purchasing Skype-certified hardware products. After January 31, the yearly fee will increase to $29.95.
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MacWorld 2007 Coverage:
Hardware Announcements:
iTV will be called Apple TV. The unit features a 40 gb hdd, 802.11 b/g/n wireless, 720p, usb2, ethernet, wifi, component, and hdmi outputs. The unit will stream music, movies and picture from up to 5 computers. You can also use iTunes to sync movies from your Mac to Apple TV on its local disk. It uses the apple remote, which is becoming more common in Apple products. You can stream trailers directly from Apple’s website as well, which has potential for expandability. Apple TV will retail for $299 and ships in February. You can pre-order one beginning today.
iPhone is announced. The iPhone was announced, which is the long-rumored phone. This is also the long rumored widescreen iPod that has been talked about for over two years. The iPhone has a full screen touch interface with ‘finger gestures’. By moving your finger in certain directions or patterns, the iPhone will know what you want to do while not accepting and accidental input from being in your pocket. The iPhone will run OsX instead of a watered down version of an OS and will not use a stylus or have any buttons. The iPhone will sync with iTunes just like an iPod would.
The iPhone sports a 3.5 inch screen with 160 pixels per inch and the device is 11/16″ thin. The only button on the device is the “home button” on the front. There is also a 2 megapixel camera, headphone jack, sim card slot, microphone, bottom speaker, ambient light detector and iPod connector. One innovative feature is that the iPhone has a proximity sensor so when you hold it to your ear, the display and sound turn off. The device will know if it’s being held in landscape or portrait and automatically changes.
The phone portion’s main feature is visual voice mail. Visual voicemail allows you to go directly to the messages you want to hear, where they are in a list. This allows you to not have to listen to messages just to get to the one you want. The phone specs are GSM + Edge connections. Wifi & bluetooth, and quad band.
The internet communicator side will use Safari, feature widgets google maps, and a full IMAP & POP email client. It will switch automatically between edge and wifi. Apple also announced a partnership with Yahoo, so all iPhone customers where they will get free IMAP e-mail, which will be a push system just like on a blackberry.
The iPhone will retail for $499 for the 4gb version and $599 for the 8gb model and it will ship in june. The price includes a 2 year agreement and the only US carrier will be Cingular.
Software Announcements: There were no software announcements during MacWorld ‘07
Other Announcements:
Apple is changing their name from Apple Computer, Inc to Apple, inc.
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Test a geek: Three questions, three answers. Enjoy a brand new edition of our quiz segment.
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How To: How to back up your media in iTunes
iTunes 7 offers a new way to back up your iTunes library, playlists, and iTunes Store purchases for safekeeping. The Back Up to Disc feature saves your media to a blank disc and once backed up, iTunes can use your backup disc(s) to automatically restore your iTunes library. To reduce the number of discs needed for a backup, iTunes can perform incremental backups (only items added or changed since the last backup).
To create your backup disc do the following:
1. From the File menu, choose Back Up to Disc.
2. Select the option you want from the resulting dialog and click Back Up.
3. The two options you can select from are:
• Back up entire iTunes library and playlists
• Back up only iTunes Store purchases
4. Whichever of these two options you choose, note that you can also choose “Only back up items added or changed since last backup” to perform an incremental backup.
7. Insert a blank disc (CD or DVD) into your computer’s optical drive. iTunes will scan the disc and begin burning.
8. Note: If the disc you insert does not have enough space to hold all of the media you will be backing up, a dialog will appear asking whether you wish to backup to multiple discs. You can click Data Discs to continue.
iTunes burns the number of items that fit on one disc and then asks you to insert subsequent discs to continue burning the remaining files. Don’t eject a disc while a backup is in progress.
Spoken programs purchased from the Audible.com website are not backed up.
Discs you create using the iTunes backup feature can be used only to restore; they can’t be played in a CD or DVD player.
Restoring from a backup disc
1. Open iTunes.
2. Insert your backup disc.
3. iTunes will ask whether you want to restore from this disc. Click Restore.
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Ask A Geek: This segment will return on a future episode of The Geekcast.
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Hack: This segment will return on a future episode of The Geekcast.
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The geek’s view: This segment will return on a future episode of The Geekcast.
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Related Episodes:
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