As our warriors move from the beachheads of SF to the trenches of LV, here’s today’s recap, and reminder that the war week is far from over:
The Sharper Image is rebranding itself as a gadget maker here at CES, and now we have our first hands-on with their cheap iPod docks. Welcome to the future!
Skype has always been great for travellers, allowing free (or at the very least cheap) phone calls anywhere in the world via your PC or Mac. The latest beta version for Macs, announced today at Macworld, makes it even more traveller friendly with the ability to connect to Boingo Wi-Fi networks around the world using your Skype credit.
Skype Access, as it’s called, scans for available Boingo wireless networks and presents a pop-up dialog box with the price per minute for using the network. The price is a global flat rate of about 26 cents per minute, which even when coupled with the cost of Skype-out charges, is still a lot cheaper than calling home from your mobile while overseas. Plus, there’s the added convenience of not having to worry about giving your credit card details to a Wi-Fi hotspot provider.
The boys at Crunchgear spotted an intriguing portable Mac-intended “Blu-ray SuperDrive” from Fastmac–and while it’s not swathed in unibody aluminium or glass, it looks like a pretty good get for $US99.
This one slipped even below Jim Goldman’s rumour radar: The Apple Keynote Beer Goggles. Judging from today’s snoringfest, I won’t be surprised if they make them obligatory for every event in 2009.
Aside from the actual speculated products, the big news surrounding the Apple Macworld keynote was that Steve Jobs would be out sick. But as I refreshed the Gizmodo liveblog, I wondered, did it matter?
Liveblogs are great, but nothing beats seeing the last Macworld keynote with your own eyes. Fortunately, Apple has posted the entire event online in QuickTime. [Apple]
Apple’s Macworld announcement that the entire iTunes catalogue is ditching the God-awful DRM that has kept it back is fantastic news for music lovers worldwide. After all, now you can purchase music that you can listen to on whatever device you want, however many times you want, all for the same price (until their new pricing structure kicks in, I guess). But what about the tunes you’ve already purchased, laced with hidden DRM and holding your music collection back?
Well, despite the fact that you can purchase the same tracks for the same price without DRM, if you’ve already purchased a DRM-encoded version, you’ll need to pay Apple 50 cents per track to remove the restrictions, or $1.00 per track for music videos.
We just confirmed with Apple that swapping out the 17″ MacBook Pro’s non-removable battery will cost $US179 including labour. Fortunately, says Apple, the swap might not be needed for a long time:
newVideoPlayer("/imovie_09_giz.flv", 506, 305,"");In this shakey cam tour (sorry) we go over the three most interesting functions in iMovie 09: The globetrotting map animations, an automatic shake stabilizer, and the zoomed in precision editor.
