Apple announces new Iphone 3GS--with a price cut

It's the "most powerful, fastest iPhone we've ever made," says Apple SVP Phil Schiller of the 3G S, now with an upgraded three-megapixel camera, voice commands, and picture messaging—all due on June 19. Also: The 8GB version of the iPhone 3G is now just $99.

The news came during Monday's keynote of Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, and the announcements pretty much fell in line with earlier predictions, including a new digital compass, better battery life, laptop tethering, and MMS—although the latter two won't be supported on AT&T just yet, news that was followed by a chorus of groans in the audience.



Price and availability
Look for the iPhone 3G S to arrive in stores June 19, two days after iPhone Software update 3.0 (which adds features such as picture messaging, cut-and-paste support, and stereo Bluetooth) arrives on iTunes. Available in both black and white, the 16GB version of the 3G S will sell for $199 (the same initial price as the old 8GB iPhone 3G), while a 32GB model will go for $299. Meanwhile, we're finally getting a $99 iPhone—the old 8GB 3G, as it turns out.

Look and feel
The iPhone 3G S comes with an impressive set of new features, but you wouldn't know it from looking at the new handset, which looks exactly the same as last year's iPhone 3G.

Better camera
The iPhone's old 2-megapixel camera gets a bump up to three megapixels, at last, along with an auto-focus lens, auto exposure, improved low-light sensitivity, and—here's the big one—video recording, including on-the-fly touch editing and the ability to send video clips via MMS (more on the iPhone's picture messaging features in a moment). Still no LED flash, though.

Speedier performance
Apple claims that the 3G S runs faster than the iPhone 3G—up to twice as fact, to be exact, which means speedier app launching and Web browsing.

Voice commands
In a first for the iPhone, the 3G S will finally be able to make voice-activated calls, as well as play songs and playlists at your command—not bad, although voice commands have long been standard issue on many other existing cell phones.

Improved battery life
Poor battery life has been the bane of many an iPhone owner's existence, but Apple promises that the 3G S will get you three more hours of Web browsing (over Wi-Fi) and six more hours of audio, although talk time on AT&T's 3G network remains five hours.


Digital compass
Finding your way on Google Maps for iPhone can be a chore if you don't know what direction you're facing, but the new 3G S should fix that with it's new digital compass, which will give you your longitude, latitude, and precise direction (not to mention better controls on games that rely on the iPhone's accelerometers).

Picture messaging
As announced back in March, both the iPhone 3G S and the iPhone 3G will finally support MMS—one of the biggest missing features on the iPhone—via the iPhone Software 3.0 update, due to hit iTunes on June 17. That's the good news; the bad news is that AT&T won't support MMS on the iPhone until "later this summer." Ugh.

Laptop tethering
Also included in the iPhone Software 3.0 update: Laptop tethering, which will let you share the iPhone's 3G data connection with your laptop (via USB or Bluetooth) while you're out and about. Pretty cool … but while tethering will be available for iPhone users on several worldwide carriers, we won't be able to tether on AT&T, or at least not for now. Double-ugh.

Other upcoming features in iPhone Software 3.0
Get ready for direct downloads of TV shows and movie rentals/purchases on the iPhone (perfect for grabbing some videos before boarding a flight), stability and speed enhancements for the mobile version of Safari, and a "Find My iPhone" feature (which tracks down your lost iPhone, provided you're subscribed to Apple's MobileMe service).

Source: YahooTech

7 Failed Virtual Reality Technologies

There was a time when people were calling home virtual reality the wave of the future. Now most people just call it goofy and expensive. Here are 7 virtual reality technologies that didn't work, and never will.

The Sensorama

In what may be considered the first case of virtual reality reaching beyond its own limitations, Morton Heilig unveiled the Sensorama in 1962. It was a large box that enclosed the viewer's head and displayed a stereoscopic 3D movie. The seat tilted and the box unleashed wind and smells. And all of this was accomplished mechanically.

It was a costly venture, and beyond the prototype, Heilig was forced to stop development on the Sensorama. His failure then became the model for future virtual reality failures. The device was cool, but it was also large, expensive, and awkward.

Giant Headsets

There are too many examples of this particular item to pick just one. It seemed for years that hard-to-wear headsets were a prerequisite for any virtual reality technology. The earliest virtual reality headsets looked like a giant television strapped to someone's face. The technology has advanced since then, with smaller and more economical displays, but the headsets of the past made virtual reality nothing more than a passing, gawky novelty.

Nintendo Virtual Boy

The continuing pathway to the holy grail of devices marketed for home virtual reality gaming is littered with failures. One of the more reviled, more abject of these failures came from an otherwise reliable company. I'm referring to Nintendo's Virtual Boy.

Nintendo's foray into the virtual reality world promised a few things it couldn't deliver. It promised true 3D graphics on a portable console. What it delivered was a red-tinged, blurry, semi-3D picture and a clunky headset that needed a stand to operate. Games came with the option of automatically pausing every 15 minutes for a break, which sounds more like a difficult shift at work than a fun afternoon of virtual reality gaming.

The Virtual Reality Glove

Speaking of Nintendo, it seems every time the company digs into the virtual reality market, they miscalculate. You may remember the Power Glove from such cinema classics as The Wizard. The Power Glove recreated the motions of a user wearing it on screen, but the motion tracking was imprecise and the glove was clunky. The company sold about 100,000 of the gloves in the U.S. Compare that with a more successful technology descended from the Power Glove, the Wii; Nintendo has sold over 13 million of those so far.

That didn't stop other companies from trying to market similar technologies, though. The P5 glove for PC gaming required specially designed games and therefore never caught on and the CyberGlove proved too expensive for home use. As a result, the era of virtual reality gloves quietly ended.

VRML

Turning more to the tech side, VRML was billed as a 3-D alternative to HTML. The idea was that users could interact freely with 3-D worlds on the internet, described by text and interpreted by modeling software. VRML's creators envisioned virtual spaces where people could wander in and chat with each other. The reality was closer to slow-loading, blocky graphic snippets, hardly worth the dial-up bandwidth needed at the time. In time, Second Life would crop up, and while it wasn't as customizable and programmable as VRML, it did offer a similar experience, but with better graphics.

Omnidirectional Treadmills

Beyond the display, control, and coding problems of virtual reality, there's still the problem of mobility. When you virtually move forward, you also move forward in the real world, so designers had to find a way of allowing people to walk around while staying in place.

The most common solution is the omnidirectional treadmill. This device does exactly what it sounds like it would do: it lets users move in any direction on a treadmill. It's a good idea in theory, and as early as 1997 working prototypes were created. But these treadmills are also very expensive and very large. It's hard to imagine cramming something like the device pictured here into your living room.

The Virtusphere

Enter the Virtusphere. Users strap on their VR gear and enter a large translucent sphere. The experience is something like a large stationary hamster ball: as an individual wanders about, the ball freely rotates to allow the user to wander around in the virtual world. While the device clearly does what it claims to do, the average home user seems hesitant to play their games trapped inside something that looks like it just popped out of the water and is trying to bring you back to a prison village.

There have, of course, been pretty big advances in virtual reality technology since these failures, but now that the technology has caught up with the vision, it seems like people have bigger visions. Technologies like internet and personal computers survived their awkward teenage years. Virtual reality didn't.

Source: iO9

Google Releases Chrome For Mac and Linux

Google released Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux Thursday--but only in rough developer preview versions that the company warns are works in progress.

"In order to get more feedback from developers, we have early developer channel versions of Google Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux, but whatever you do, please DON'T DOWNLOAD THEM," Google product managers Mike Smith and Karen Grunberg said in a blog post, evidently trying to employ a little reverse psychology. "Unless of course you are a developer or take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software."

Until now, Google's open-source browser has been a Windows-only product, and some Mac and Linux users have been clamoring for their own version. Google coders have been working to rebuild some Chrome components, such as its graphical interface and its sandbox that isolates different processes from each other, to move beyond just Windows.

Google offers three versions of Chrome: stable, beta, and developer preview. The Mac OS X and Linux versions fall into this last, category, the most buggy and least tested and complete.

Source: Webware

LG Introduces the World's first flexible e-paper

LG has shown off the next generation of e-book at a conference in the US by bringing an 11.5-inch touchscreen e-paper display.

It has been on display at the Society for Information Display (SID) International Symposium, where users have been able to try out the new technology.

It only works in black and white and appears to have a limited level of flexibility, so it's not quite at the level of being able to roll it up and stick it in your pocket when not in use.

Source: TechRadar