Changes include

This update contains over 200 new features, including the following:

Notifications
◦ Swipe from the top of any screen to view notifications in one place with Notification Centre
◦ New notifications appear briefly at the top of the screen
◦ View notifications from lock screen
◦ Slide the notification app icon to the right on the lock screen to go directly to the app

iMessage
◦ Send and receive unlimited text, photo and video messages with other iOS 5 users
◦ Track messages with delivery and read receipts
◦ Group messaging and secure encryption
◦ Works over mobile networks and Wi-Fi*

Newsstand
◦ Automatically organises magazine and newspaper subscriptions on Home Screen
◦ Displays the cover of the latest issue
◦ Background downloads of new issues

Reminders for managing to-do lists
◦ Syncs with iCloud, iCal and Outlook
◦ Location-based reminders when you leave or arrive at a location for iPhone 4S and iPhone 4

Built-in support for Twitter
◦ Sign in once in Settings and tweet directly from Camera, Photos, Maps, Safari and YouTube
◦ Add location to any tweet
◦ View Twitter profile pictures and usernames in Contacts

Camera improvements for devices with cameras
◦ Double-click the Home button when device is asleep to bring up a camera shortcut on iPhone 4S, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS and iPod touch (4th generation)
◦ Volume Up button to take a picture
◦ Optional grid lines to line up shots
◦ Pinch to zoom in the preview screen
◦ Swipe to camera roll from preview screen
◦ Tap and hold to lock focus and exposure; iPad 2 and iPod touch (4th generation) only support exposure lock

Photo improvements for devices with cameras
◦ Crop and rotate
◦ Red-eye removal
◦ One-tap enhance
◦ Organise photos into albums

Mail improvements
◦ Format text using bold, italic or underlined fonts
◦ Indentation control
◦ Drag to rearrange names in address fields
◦ Flag messages
◦ Mass mark messages as flagged, read or unread
◦ Customise mail alert sounds
◦ S/MIME

Calendar improvements
◦ Year view on iPad and new Week view for iPhone and iPod touch
◦ Tap to create an event
◦ View and add event attachments

Game Center improvements
◦ Use personal photos for your Game Center account
◦ Compare your overall achievement scores with your friends
◦ Find new Game Center friends with friend recommendations and friends of friends
◦ Discover new games with custom game recommendations

AirPlay Mirroring for iPad 2 and iPhone 4S

Multitasking Gestures for iPad
◦ Use four or five fingers to pinch to the Home Screen
◦ Swipe up to reveal the multitasking bar
◦ Swipe left or right to switch between apps

On-device setup, activation and configuration with Setup Assistant

Software updates available over the air without tethering

iCloud support
◦ iTunes in the Cloud
◦ Photo Stream
◦ Documents in the Cloud
◦ Apps and Books automatic download and purchase history
◦ Backup
◦ Contacts, Calendar and Mail
◦ Find My iPhone

Redesigned Music app for iPad

Hourly weather forecast

Real-time stock quotes

Wireless sync to iTunes

Keyboard improvements
◦ Split keyboard for iPad
◦ Improved auto-correction accuracy
◦ Improved Chinese and Japanese input
◦ New Emoji keyboard
◦ Personal dictionary for auto-correction
◦ Optionally create keyboard shortcuts for frequently used words

Accessibility improvements
◦ Option to light LED flash on incoming calls and alerts for iPhone 4S and iPhone 4
◦ Custom vibration patterns for incoming calls on iPhone
◦ New interface for using iOS with mobility-impairment input devices
◦ Option to speak a selection of text
◦ Custom element labelling for VoiceOver

Exchange ActiveSync improvements
◦ Wirelessly sync tasks
◦ Mark messages as flagged, read or unread
◦ Improved offline support
◦ Save a new contact from a GAL service

More than 1,500 new developer APIs

Bug fixes

Products compatible with this software update:

• iPhone 4S
• iPhone 4
• iPhone 3GS
• iPad 2
• iPad
• iPod touch (4th generation)
• iPod touch (3rd generation)

* Normal carrier data rates may apply. Messages will be sent as SMS when iMessage is unavailable; carrier messaging fees apply.

For information on the security content of this update, please visit this website:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222

About 10 years ago around 2001 which incidentally was pre-SmartPhone days, I was in a hotel using a Compaq iPaq Windows CE based Pocket PC which was at that time the best operating systems and devices to use for a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant). This wasn’t my first one, no I actually had prior to this the Casio E105, E125 and many more other Pocket PC’s after the iPaq.

I was in the hotel and I wanted to connect to the Internet to check my personal email, so I got out my Nokia phone, lined the IR (Infrared) port up on the Nokia phone with the IR port on the Pocket PC, allowed the Pocket PC software to then dial out and connect using the phone as a modem. From recollection I think I was getting around 3 kbps, one thing I remember is it was slow, very slow. It did the job and providing I didn’t knock the Pocket PC or Phone, and the IR beam didn’t get interrupted in any way, and the phone signal didn’t drop, I could eventually download my email to read it off-line.

I also had a keyboard dock that I could place the iPaq into, the keyboard worked great and it enabled me to not have to use a stylus on-screen. It allowed me to type large amounts of text without having to use the 1 tap stylus. Of course, I’d have to then reconnect the modem and then it would take an age to upload it.

Looking back, those were the days where technology was a painful experience getting on-line.

Fast forward 10 years, and now every phone has a built-in modem, it’s capable of broadband speeds (up to 7.2mbps) and most of them have a built-in on-screen keyboard you can use without a stylus (aka your fingers are the stylus). The phones are always connected, so you don’t have to wait a good 60+ seconds for it to connect to the Internet, it’s always connected.

Now if I want to connect to the Internet, I just open up my email icon and it’s already checked using push email seconds to a minute before, so I don’t even have to hit a send/receive button. If I need to send an email, I just type out the email, hit send, and it’s gone within seconds. Likewise there’s Internet apps, which allow me to check where my friends and family are, interact with them, share things like my location, what I’m doing, even play a game on-line, all done within seconds.

Technology is a big part of our lives now, whether we like it or not. Gone are the days of not being connected to the Internet for the most of us (unless we leave our phone at home) and that’s a tough pill to swallow. What if someone wants to contact you? What happens if you need to make an emergency phone call? What if you’re lost? Picking up our Internet connected SmartPhone now is simply like picking up our car keys or house keys, basically you wouldn’t leave your keys at home as much as you wouldn’t leave your SmartPhone at home.

Many of the younger generation won’t have had to have gone through the painful experience, very similar to playing with pixel clashing 8kb ZX Spectrum. Now we can play console games on our phones and even beam them to our large screen TV’s.

It’s strange to see how far technology has come, for the most it’s even harder seeing what technology will be like in another 10 years. One thing I can tell you is the hover boots and flying cars still won’t be available, nor will living on the moon. These things take a lot longer to accomplish, but our every day technology moves so fast that it’s easy to forget how painful using technology once was.

Going back even further to 1993 I remember when I purchased my first modem, I connected for 25 mins to the University of Berkeley’s FTP Server, and was amazed that my computer was actually talking to another computer the other side of the world (quite literally) and that was on a 9k modem connected to my PC. Now I have a 7,372.8k modem built into my phone and it’s always connected (and not costing me a penny until I download something).

Technology is a funny thing, sometimes we love it and sometimes we loath it, but it’s now apart of our every day life and it’s here to stay.

Many millions of people worldwide were looking out for the announcement of the iPhone 5 and were left a bit deflated when there was no iPhone 5 but a newer iPhone 4 modeled on the same design of the iPhone 4.

Apple didn’t re-design the iPhone 4 because quite frankly, the iPhone 4 is the best looking and designed iPhone to date. It’s so good that Samsung and other companies are copying the design of the iPhone 4, like they did with the iPad and iPad 2 to increase their sales.

For anyone thinking there isn’t a lot of new features in the iPhone 4S, the iPhone 4S is evolutionary not revolutionary, here is a breakdown of the new features…

• iOS 5 – greatly overhauled to enhance speed, enhance notifications and a lot more
• Dual-Core  A5 chip, making the device much faster
• All new 8 megapixel camera with better CMOS (almost double the pixels over the iPhone 4′s 5 megapixel camera), f/2.4 aperture and face detection
• 1080P HD Video Recording as standard
• New Notification Message Center and iMessage
• iCloud support allowing you to have all your data in the cloud
• iTunes Match allowing you to have all your music in the cloud
• Siri. The intelligent assistant that helps you get things done. All you have to do is ask
• iPhone 4S supports ALL networks GSM and CDMA in a single phone
• AirPlay as standard
• iPhone 4S is the first phone to intelligently switch between two antennas to transmit and receive, so call quality is better. It also doubles the maximum HSDPA data speeds from 7Mbps to 14.4 Mbps. Which means faster connections, faster loading and reloading, and faster downloads.

The biggest enhancement that everyone will see on a daily usage is the A5 processor as Apple explain “Two cores in the A5 chip deliver up to two times more power and up to seven times faster graphics.2 And you’ll feel the effects. Fast. iPhone 4S is quick and responsive, which makes all the difference when you’re launching apps, browsing the web, gaming and doing just about everything. And no matter what you’re doing, you can keep on doing it. Because the A5 chip is so power-efficient, iPhone 4S has outstanding battery life.“

If you still doubt the A5 chip will enhance the iPhone 4S then “The dual-core A5 chip delivers up to two times more processing power, which makes iPhone 4S even more responsive. Pages load quicker. Gameplay is better. And everything just feels faster.“

So there might not be an iPhone 5 available this year, but these are significant enhancements over the iPhone 4, very similar to the enhancements seen from the iPad 2 over the original iPad.

To compare some of the iPhone 4S features, see the table below

Will many previous iPhone customers upgrade?  I think it will be similar to how many iPad 1 customers upgraded to iPad 2.  Eventually when your mobile phone contracts are up for renewal then many will go for the iPhone 4S.  The die-hard Apple fans will undoubtedly upgrade within the first 3 months of launch.  For anyone upgrading the main enhancements will be the Speed of the dual core processor, the enhanced camera and video recording and perhaps Siri.

Steve, R.I.P and enjoy your time looking down at us all from the great iCloud in the sky.

I have 2x New Trent 5000mAh battery chargers and 2x Philips SCE4430/05 battery chargers.

The New Trent 5000mAh will give me about 40% extra power on my iPad (which already enjoys a massive 10 hours battery power), or I can get around 3x full charges of my iPhone 4.

The Philips SCE4430/05 which I have previously mentioned here and here, will give me around 1x full charge of an iPhone 4. I actually do have 3x of these and not 2, although one requires a reverse adapter (which I conveniently forget) so I tend to not use this one so much.

So in essence if I take all 4x battery chargers out I can get a massive 8x full charges of an iPhone. For the most part I never usually have to charge up my iPad as I’m never away for more than 10 hours from an electrical plug socket, but it’s nice to know I have some power on tap if I need it.

For the most part if I’m only out and about for a few hours then I’ll take my Philips SCE4430/05 with me, or if I’m out for 5+ hours then I’ll carry around the New Trent 5000mAh charger. I usually keep at least one in the car, so if I need to I can run back to the car to get additional juice.

The great thing I like about both of these battery chargers is they have a standard USB socket on them, so pretty much any USB cable you have for a phone or gadget will connect into these devices. So no real need for these attachment bits that some chargers come with (and that you always happen to lose).

The Philips SCE4430/05 is great for putting into your shirt pocket with ease, the New Trent will fit into your shirt pocket and it’s the same dimensions of the iPhone 4, but a little heavier, so although you could put your iPhone 4 and New Trent charger into the same shirt pocket, it does look a bit on the bulky side.

I always pack at least one of the New Trent 5000mAh battery chargers into a bag I carry whether it’s an iPad bag, gadget bag or even my Messenger (over the shoulder) Laptop bag or rucksack. That way I always have something available fully charged and ready to go just in case I ever need it. You’d be surprised the amount of times you think, I’m running low on battery or I need a quick top-up. Whether it’s in meetings where you might have plug sockets but no charger plug lead to being out in the street, out on location photographing something or at a friends house.

For the most part the Mac is a good platform, it’s not that disimilar to say Windows.  Both Mac and Windows have evolved leading with innovation as well as taking features from each other.  The big question that I had to ask like most people was, will most of the applications I use be available on the Mac, and if not, is there a suitable alternative?  For me, a good handful of apps were available (and of course being a different platform you have to purchase these again), for the ones that weren’t (like Jasc PaintShop Pro that I use a lot) there’s other applications like Pixelmator and other free alternatives.

For the most part I’m very happy with Mac OS X Lion (and Snow Leopard before that), it’s a good OS.  There’s a lot of good innovation like the gestures on the trackpad that Windows still doesn’t have, dashboard, mission control and more.  I use the Mac primarily for Blogging, Facebook, Google+, Gmail, internet Surfing, Photo Editing and it works extremely well.

What should you look at when buying a Mac?  Don’t go for the entry level model.  When you look at prices you’ll say “£1000+ for a laptop?  I can get a PC Laptop for £399!”.  Yes you can, but it’s an entry level laptop.  It might be a 15″ or 17″ laptop but it’s running a slower processor, less RAM and the build quality is probably pretty plastic.  MacBook Air’s and MacBook Pro’s are much more robust, build quality is superb in a single aluminium unibody (single block of metal hollowed out).  Take a look at a windows based laptop for around £1000-£1300 and then compare those specs to the Mac’s.  If you’re not looking to pay £1000 then quite simply you’re not looking at a high-end laptop, so the Mac’s may not be for you (likewise the better higher-end Windows laptops aren’t for you either).  If you’re okay with paying this amount of money for a laptop then you’re going to get a good laptop.  Get the best processor and RAM you can afford, ensure you get a laptop with an SSD (Solid State Drive) and one that’s the largest your an afford (yes you will need it).

The Mac’s with Snow Leopard have the AppStore as a download, Lion now has the Mac AppStore integrated fully into the Operating System. The Mac AppStore is similar to what you would see on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, which offers a lot of inexpensive applications (and games), and is a good first check to kitting out your Mac’s.  Apple do take 30% cut from developers through the AppStore, so you some developers still prefer to do a slightly cheaper version outside of the AppStore and to make a little more revenue per sale. However then you have to know how to install DMG files (which the Mac AppStore is just plug and play), tap on something, purchase it, it downloads and installs automatically without having to do anything else).

So if you think you’re ready, there’s no better time to make the switch or to at least try out a Mac with the Mac AppStore making it so easy.

1. The street I’m on managed to somehow get driven down by the Google Street View Car but thankfully 5 houses either side of my house (and including my house) managed to avoid being shown on Google Street View maps.  I’m not entirely sure why, what happened, maybe the radiation being omitted from my house  or perhaps the gun turrets in the front garden, or the sign that says “Google CEO lives here, do NOT photograph).  Actually I don’t have any of the above in the front garden, but it was my first strike at avoiding the Google Street View Car.

 

2. The  second one came at driving through my home town, I noticed the Google Street View car coming up quickly in my rear view mirror, thankfully the car in front of me managed to get out of the way quickly.  I’m not sure if it was due to the excessive waving and flashing of the headlights or whether he planned to take the turn, I managed to put my foot down and make a few left and right turns to avoid the Google Car getting too close (and to this day on the same stretch of road it doesn’t show my car).

 

3. The third came driving in Kings Langley one time in the last year, I came out of a side road to only see the Google Street View car to the right on a main road (already had passed the junction I was at before I managed to reach the junction) – another great escape!

 

4. The fourth came driving counter-clockwise around the M25 this year, I managed to see the Google Street View Car going in the opposite direction too quickly to make my car a complete blur.

More recently on a trip up into the Highlands in Scotland, unfortunately I wasn’t able to escape the evil grasps of the Google Street View car.  I was traveling up through GlenCoe and low and behold what appeared coming towards me at lightening speed was the Google Street View Car….DARN!  It got me!

These past couple of years I felt that Google was trying it’s best to follow me around and capture me.

Some of you might be asking, what’s the problem?  Well I particularly don’t want to be photographed by the Google Street View Car, or any other photo nabbing system that might be out there.  It’s not that I’m doing anything wrong, I’m not skiving off work, speeding or driving illegally.

It’s bad enough with all the CCTV where in London the average person is photographed around 50 times a day as they walk around the streets, on the underground, train networks, on buses, in shops etc, you don’t really want your face blurred out on a street for 10 years do you?

Hard Disk drives you may not know have been around since 1956 and introduced by IBM.  Hard Drives have grown in both strength and size.  They now have shock protection, parking of heads all built-in but also incorporate imminent failure warning systems.  The sizes have grown massively over the years, and we’re now into terrabytes for some users or gigabytes for most users.

SSD’s are the newt way forward, they’re Solid State Drives, e.g. no moving parts.  No latency on having to spin the disk up to speed, e.g. 7200 rpm (revs per minute) and then having to have a head (needle) touch the disk (which can sometimes scratch the surface and damage it under movement/shock).

Think of SSD’s like a memory chip in terms of Solid State, they’re efficient, their quick, there’s no need to spin up a disc, there’s no need to have a head touch the surface.  If you try to access it, it’s there and ready.  When you take an average laptop that can take easily 45 seconds to 1 minute to boot up to the Operating System, be it Mac OS X or Windows 7, swap the Hard Disk Drive out with a Solid State Drive, and you’ll then see speeds of around 13 seconds boot time to the Operating System.  That’s about 3x times faster than a manual Hard Disk Drive.

The speed gain isn’t only seen on boot up, try to run any large weight application like Word, Excel, PowerPoint on Windows and you’ll find that it loads in <1 second.  If you try to do anything that does very heavy Hard Disk Drive access then this is really where you will see great improvements in reduced wait times.

SSD’s aren’t all that rosy though.  They’re still new for one thing, there’s still no average as they’re new on how long they’ll last.  Most manufacturers of SSD’s claim that they will most likely last less than a regular Hard Disk Drive.  Likewise if they start to die, the suggestion is they will die quickly as opposed to a spinning Hard Disk Drive, although I’m not too sure of that.  On average I find my hard drives in laptops last around 2 years or less, so if an SSD were to last 18 months, then I would still be happy if I could get the speed gain that I really crave as a power user.

The other problem with SSD’s is both price and size.  As they’re new, prices are still high although SSD costs are coming down.  Likewise 256gb SSD’s are within the grasp of most end users but if you want something larger than that, they start to get really expensive.

Which manufacturers make Solid State Drives?  Well there’s a good article over at WikiPedia that shows a comparison of which manufacturers make Hard Disk Drives vs Solid State Drives.

Now both my MacBook Air run an SSD and my Toshiba Windows 7 based SSD laptop, and I’m seeing huge amounts of speed enhancement over regular Hard Disk Drives.  I’ve been running the Macbook Air for around 9 months and the Toshiba for about 1 month.  I simply couldn’t go back to a conventional spinning Hard Disk Drive.  The only problem with costs still being high is that both the MacBook Air and the Toshiba both only have 128gb SSD’s and not 256gb SSD’s.  This really isn’t enough and for a lot of my ‘other’ documents that I tend to have in archive as well as mail PST backups, I tend to still have to plug in a removable 512gb Removable USB Hard Disk Drive, but at least most of my programs are running directly from the SSD speeding up the disk access times.

Before I get flamed by a bunch of Android users, let me say that I have both iOS and Android devices. The first reason is that Apple had a head start. Apple is an innovator and although it wasn’t the first to create a tablet, it was most certainly the first to create a tablet that just worked out of the box, with a complete ecosystem.

Apple have the right ecosystem, they have 400,000+ apps at time of writing this, Android have around 200,000 apps and Apple had a head start in the tablet arena over Google.

The biggest thing after talking to both Apple and Google fans that everyone seems to want is a device that’s upgradable. This is one thing that Apple gives all customers for a good 3-4 years. If you take a look at the iPhone 3G it’s still popular and upgraded to iOS 3, iOS 4. Okay, maybe it won’t be supported by iOS 5 perhaps, but there’s a good 3 years usage out of the device. Now take a look at Android. Samsung botched most of their upgrades for the Samsung Galaxy S, most customers couldn’t upgrade their devices because you had to connect it to Samsung Kies PC software, which just didn’t work properly.

Take a look at Sony Xperia devices, most of these wouldn’t see the light of day for an upgrade. Likewise some HTC devices although more lately have been upgradable, it’s only been because of customer pressure. HTC weren’t going to upgrade some of their phones to Gingerbread until customers forced them.

People want a device that isn’t going to be a brick or die of death in a year or two. Although people change their devices they still want to be able to use them or sell them and get a good return. This is the big problem so far with Android, it’s down to the manufacturer and sometimes not even the manufacturer, sometimes it’s down to both the manufacturer and the mobile operator. Where some customers see upgrades in some countries for a given device but not in others, or sometimes some in the same country get an update where others on another network don’t.

Another good reason as to why Apple have such a good run at the tablet market is if you take a look at other manufacturers, Microsoft still after all these years haven’t produced a single tablet (well if you exclude the WinCe devices), and look at HP, they’ve been in this market space several times in the last decade and pulled out. Palm although they weren’t yet competing in the tablet market, were in the mobile market with WebOS which was then bought up by HP, HP then decided to take part in the tablet industry (again), and have now recently decided it’s going to pull out of the tablet market.

Customers also want a device that’s going to work out of the box, not be complicated to use. Apple have this down to a tee. Likewise if you have previously owned an iPod Touch or iPhone then there’s a zero learning curve if you go to the iPad. With Android however, although it works out of the box, there’s a lot of customisation that can be done, things that can be accidentally turned on and off, or from a user perspective (broken) and that also puts off the non-technical users.

Apple have aimed their sales not at the technical user, but the non-technical user, where Android manufacturers seem a lot of the time to be targeting their products at the self confessed techy.

The other thing to think about is it’s fine to provide a device for every single kind of person out there, but this creates massive fragmentation in the operating system. That in turn makes games and apps break, not just once or twice but regularly. Bad news spreads quicker than good news, and although Apple don’t provide things like flash, the average person out there believes the devices tend to be more stable.

It’s also interesting to see how tablet manufacturer’s try to advertise their product. I have to smile when I keep seeing this advert for the Asus Eee Transformer where they actually show the tablet on the TV advert running out of battery. No worry, just plug it into the keyboard to restore some power. If you have a tablet that is capable of something like 10 hours battery power like the iPad, why would you even want to think about advertising that it WILL run out of battery power? That immediately puts me off buying the Asus tablets and I’m sure it puts off a lot of other people too.

At some point the eco seesaw will change, and it may tip in Googles favour or other manufacturers favour, but currently it’s still tipped towards Apple.

Multi-touch Gestures

• Tons more multi-touch gestures available in Lion

Dual-Core Processor
It’s rumoured that the iPad 2 may be going dual-core. There’s been a lot of talk about Dual-Core mobile processors around CES this year. Currently both the iPhone 4 and iPad have a single-core Cortex A8-based A4 processor. Some suggestions are that the new dual-core chip to boost processing power will be called the A5 and some calling it the A8. It’s certainly likely that Apple will try to utilise the new processor technology that’s coming out and that Apple have also been asking developers some time to consider writing their apps for multi-processor support.

Increased Graphics
Apple’s next generation mobile processor is believed to be getting a GPU by incorporating the latest PowerVR SGX core from Imagination Technologies. Apple have previously used a Single PowerVR SGX 535 core in the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 but the suggestion is the newer SGX 543 GPU will be in the newer Dual-Core processor boosting additional power. The new drivers are currentl added to the iOS 4.3 Beta so it’s likely this will be a certainty. The SGX 543 GPU is supposed to provide 1080p video that is extremely fast.

Retina Display
We saw Retina display introduced on the iPhone 4 and everyone are hoping that Retina display will make it to the iPad 2. The ability to double the resolution height and double the resolution width (effectively quadrupling the pixel display) is a desirable one, although can it be carried out on a large display is the question? The suggestion is that the iPad 2 will get a Retina style display at 2048×1536 pixels (doubled) over 1024×768 that the iPad currently sports. However that would only give the iPad a 260ppi where as the iPhone 4 currently sports a 326ppi. The reasons why it’s believed the resolution will be 2048×1536 is that it’s already been found in iBooks 1.2 in the iOS 4.3 Beta that there are some double pixeled images that lead this to suggest that will be the ultimate resolution for the iPad 2.

SD card
There’s also been some suggestion that there may be an incorporated SD card slot which makes it more easier for photographers to get images onto the iPad quickly. Currently photographers have to use the after market Apple iPad Camera Connection Kit, and although that lines Apple’s pockets further you have to plug it into the charger port to insert an SD card and it’s a little bit clunky. The suggestion in some of the newer Apple iPad 2 cases that have popped up at CES is that there’s an additional rectangular cut-out on the cases which suggest it could be to support a full-size SD card. If Apple would put an SD card slot directly into the iPad then they would prefer to put a MicroSD card slot not he iPad 2, however many Digital SLR’s still only support the full-size SDHC cards and not MicroSD’s so if Apple were to do this they would be forced to put a full-size SD card slot not the iPad 2.

Haptic feedback
The iPhone 4 has what is called haptic feedback, effectively a motor that allows the phone to vibrate. This is good for phone calls because you can have the phone vibrate, but it’s also used more for gaming feedback. The iPad currently lacks this and there’s some suggestion that Apple will be trying to provide haptic feedback into the iPad 2.

iPad thickness
Steve Jobs always wants to make the newer models thinner in some way so it’s possible that the newer iPad 2 will be thinner than the original iPad shipped in 2010.

iPad weight
Steve Jobs always wants to make the newer models lighter, and if the device is thinner in design then that would also bring less weight.  Steve seems to be obsessed by both thickness and weight.

Qualcomm have recently provided the Qualcomm chipset to support the Verizon CDMA iPhone 4 and Qualcomm do have a chipset that works both with CDMA and GSM in one chip and it’s rumoured that rather than having two different iPhone’s one for 3G (GSM) and one for CDMA – this could be likely that the iPhone 5 when released around June/July 2011 will have a dual GSM and CDMA chip at least for North America and maybe for all iPhones.

Also recently with the Verizon CMDA iPhone 4, we’ve seen a slight change in the case structure moving the mute button slightly.  Apple do like to change the design of the iPhones because it then brings them additional revenue in cases through the Apple Stores where Apple take a 30% cut on iPhone approved products, and it’s possible that this might be the new design for the iPhone 5 although the design could change even further.  The iPhone 4 design is a much better design over the iPhone 3GS and I for one am hoping the flat and square look of the iPhone 4 with the glass on the back stays for some time.

There have also been some suggestions that Apple might be ditching the Apple connector for a Micro-USB connector.  Although this is becoming the standard in Europe I still can’t see Apple going away from their standard connector unless they can do everything they can currently do in a much smaller footprint.

Although there are a number of tablets out there running Android OS 2.1 Eclair or Android OS 2.2 Froyo, they’re not designed to be run on a larger screen and have a maximum limit of a 7″ screen. Android is basically stretched to fit which creates all sorts of performance issues. Android 3.0 Honeycomb should overcome that.

The first look at the LG T-Mobile G-Slate although looks promising looks very slow in it’s transitions between screens, but time will tell whether this will compete with the iPad.

Freecom are getting more stylish and are now launching a drive that would go well with the MacBook Air and any ultra-thin laptops that need additional disk space. The new Freecom Hard Disk Drive is only 10mm thick and most possibly the thinnest Hard Drive in an external enclosure.

The new drive comes in a number of different sizes, the most expensive being $199.95 for the 750GB model but also sports USB 2.0 which will be forward compatible to USB 3.0 and Firewire 800. If you don’t need Firewire then you will be able to get the 320GB model for $69.95 and the 750GB model for $109.95.

I’ve been finding Dropbox a very good system until today, and I’d like to explain why suddenly I’m reconsidering cloud computing.

Last week I received a new credit card and I did what usually do and that’s update the information into my secure eWallet. The eWallet file is now on Dropbox and when I save this, it should then replicate it to my MacBook Air, which in turn when I sync eWallet to my MacBook Air from the iPhone and iPad, then transfers to these devices and all should be great. A perfect experience! Well I updated the credit card details including my PIN as it’s a new pin and I couldn’t remember what it was, synced my iPhone and iPad to the MacBook Air this morning then went out to do some shopping.

I did my shopping and reached the checkout and was ready to pay for the products I was buying, whipped out my iPhone and opened up my secure eWallet and……CRAP! The Credit Card isn’t showing in eWallet! What happened?! I know it was there because I checked it over several days on my PC. Thankfully I had another Credit Card I could use and was able to remember that PIN but it seriously made me think about how I synchronise between computers to the cloud.

I remember I made a whole host of other changes last week to my eWallet and needless to say these changes aren’t there either. Unfortunately I can’t remember what all the changes were, so now I’m in trouble. I checked Time Machine and these changes weren’t on the Mac, so it looks like either:-

1. The PC didn’t write the eWallet file to Dropbox
2. The PC did write the eWallet file to Dropbox but at some point when I opened it on the Mac it took that as a newer file and overwrote it without downloading the update to the Mac

Either way it’s not good. Looking at the Dropbox Events I see that the eWallet file was modified but unfortunately unlike Windows Live Sync, DropBox doesn’t have detailed logs on which computer modified the file.

I’m going to have to scrutinise Dropbox more carefully now when saving files as it looks like it isn’t synchronising as I would have hoped between devices.