So. Very. Exciting. The Australian MacTalk Forums are reporting that Apple Australia has begun informing Apple resellers about their iPhone rollout plans.
The good news is that we’re looking at a 3G iPhone launched in the last week of June across multiple carriers and with no contract. Current resellers will also be able to sell the device, completely breaking with how the deal has been done in every other part of the world.
Now that Apple’s entered the battle for your online photo printing business, HP’s Snapfish Service has upped the ante by offering 6 x 4-inch prints for the bargain basement price of 15 cents each. Apple charges 26 cents for the same size.
Snapfish is also offering a larger range of photo.gifts, adding teddy bears and handbags to the range that includes jigsaws, stubbie holders and mousemats. Not sure about the whole handbag thing, but I guess I’m not really their target demographic there.
[Snapfish]
B&W make some awesome sounding speakers. Awesome sounding and awesome looking. So when the email saying their Zeppelin iPod dock was getting an Australian release, there was a certain amount of nervous excitement at the possibility of owning one.
All that came crashing to the ground in a pile of burnt hopes and tattered dreams when I saw the price, though. It will cost you $999.95 to own one of these docks. That’s a grand of your hard-earned cash. Or put another way, the same amount of money could buy you 15 iPod Shuffles, five iPod Nanos, three iPod Classics or two iPod Touches.
What makes this more offensive is that our American cousins can pick up the same product for US$599.95 on Amazon. That’s about $645 at current exchange rates.
If you’re an Australian B&W fan, you have every right to feel ripped off here. Of course, if you are an Australian B&W fan, you could probably afford the grand without batting an eyelid.
[Conexus]
This is either the best or worst iPhone review ever. Wendy Cheng is apparently the most popular blogger in Singapore. Before giving her the real iPhone, her producers tricked her into reviewing a Chinese knockoff. But she actually liked the fake, saying it’s “not bad for a shitass China phone.” The real iPhone? Only “mediocre,” and “I really don’t like the touchscreen…it’s fucking shitty.” Oh, that’s just the tip of this iceberg of awesome. [ClickNetwork.TV via Fake Steve]
Yep, someone spent US$300 on a Keyport just to break it apart. Sadly, there’s nothing supernatural inside, like a portal to an alternate dimension that houses your keys until you need one. Just cut-down keys with some notches. But! Apparently Chen’s keys have fallen into a wormhole of sorts—he sent them in to get a Keyport made back in December, and he still hasn’t gotten one. He’s been locked out of his house ever since.
[NOTCOT]
The Gadget: The Philips Photo Alarm Clock Radio, which wakes you up to the joys of singing birds, crashing waves or your favourite FM radio shock-jocks, plus greets you with a smiling photo of a loved one, presumably to put you in a good mood early in the morning.
The iPhone SDK Beta 3 has barely been out for a few hours and Zibri, maker of the ZiPhone iPhone tool, has found references to a future 3G chip inside the new firmware. The chipset is the SGOLD3, which follows up the current S-GOLD2 in today’s iPhone. Here’s what the S-GOLD3 has support for, not all of which will make it into the next-gen iPhone: HSDPA category 8 (7.2 Mbps), cameras of up to 5-megapixels, MPEG4/H.263 hardware acceleration and “video telephony, streaming, recording and playback.” Again, Apple might not enable all these features in the actual 3G iPhone, but at least we know that they’re theoretically possible. [ZiPhone]
The US team gave the 1030SW from Olympus a lightning review earlier this week, and although I agreed with what they said for the most part, I had the benefit of taking this baby snorkelling with me in Fiji, and so had a better test of the camera’s underwater skills than Benny’s bathtime hijinks.
Best Buy is selling the Windows XP Eee PC for $399, same as the Linux version. What a deal! Except that you’re actually missing a couple things, like the memory card slot, according to Best Buy’s specs—which is kind of a big deal, given that the XP install will eat up a lot more of the Eee PC’s 4GB of storage than Linux. Topping it off, your warranty only lasts for a year, though the Linux model gets two years of warranty snugglage. Guess they had to trim somewhere. [Mobile Mag]
For some reason, Spanish designer Jaime Hayon decided to put the weirdest elements he could find in this aeroplane concept, made of white gold and fiberglass tiles for a ceramics company called Bisazza: the nose looks like a F-18 Hornet, then it has an Y-Wing cockpit, wings with propeller wings and love missiles, a B-52ish tail, and – the best part – open-air seats.
