Urban legend?

You mean this one? http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/901723.stm

I think that was "something that happened". Slightly different thing. It's like an urban legend, only is based on fact.

So ...

Is amateur hour over yet?

They have to get £1.7M before they then qualify for the big payout?

Was that the Nigerian national lottery fund, perchance?

Volt x Ampera = What?

Sorry.

Oh great - more meaningless speculation

So just weeks after the 'press' was thoroughly disappointed because Apple released an iPhone with the 'wrong name', they are setting themselves up for another fall by guessing the name of the next iPad.

And when it doesn't happen (even though nothing was announced), everyone will bleat about how it's "late".

Idiots.

Amazing

This thing's doomed, isn't it?

Only available in the UK and US stores

As an expat Brit, I would love to be able to subscribe to this, but can not because it is only available in the UK and US stores. Lots of expats read Teh Grauniad, but if we have a 'local' iTunes account then we simply can't buy it.

Bit of an odd restriction, that.

(And yes, I know it's now possible to 'fool' the Store into allowing an account to be opened in another country, but it was not possible when I started buying apps. Back then you needed a credit card whose billing address was in the country of the Store)

Eric?

They could have at least said Patrick :)

And if RIM have to pay a royalty of $5 per unit sold, does this mean they now owe Dolby labs $5?

"I am just going outside"

Surely Oates' last words should have been that he "may be some time", no?

Gorgeous laptop - really fast, but hot

I bought one of these a couple of months ago, and it's FAST. I get 6 hours of light usage from a full battery, or a couple of hours of Handbrake - which tears through files like they weren't there.

One other thing apart from the weight (which I was expecting), is how HOT it gets when it's working hard.

The screen is gorgeous, the trackpad a joy to use. Fantastic machine. Just be aware that if you're doing anything CPU-intensive that your legs will get uncomfortably (almost painfully) hot if you use it on your lap.

Delayed?

How can an unannounced product be delayed?

What he said

In this particular case, it looks like VAT might be making the difference.

That is not to say Apple's prices have not assumed some mythical currency in the UK that is at parity with the USD in the past.

But if the price 'should be' 1.25 GBP and is actually quoted as being 1.50 GBP, that is exactly the kind of 20% increase that you might expect to see if for example VAT were set to 20%.

In the US people are used to seeing prices advertised before any sales tax is added, and since these taxes are local to the State, County and even City in come cases, I suppose this makes sense. But in the UK, prices are always quoted inclusive of all applicable tax (by law, no less).

So in the US you see something on sale as 1.99 USD, but you might pay anywhere between 1.99 USD and 2.25 USD or so for it. In the UK you see something advertised as 1.49 GBP and you will pay 1.49 GBP.

And long may it continue to be so.

Rip-off? Not in this case, I think.

Free market?

First off, this is in theory a free market, and they can charge what they want for their Lanthanides.

Secondly, read a little history to see how Hong Kong came to be British in the 1800s, before you talk about 'unfair practices' ...

Finally, all countries have import/export restrictions to help their local economies.

Apple might not allow spyware on the iPhone (or iPad), but ...

Apple's rules might not allow "spyware" on the iPhone (or iPad), but ... it would not be much use even if it existed, since any app that was downloaded onto an iOS device from the App Store onto the (non-jailbroken) device would not have access to any of the information it would need. Sure, there are APIs to get your location, and there may be one to get contacts and the like - but call logs? SMS message contents? Email? Very unlikely :)

All this means is that the software does exist (see http://www.iphonespyapp.com/ if you want to see some of the scary software you can get!), but it's been driven 'underground' simply by the technical requirements imposed by the iOS 'walled garden'.

This is why Apple don't want people jailbreaking their phones - it opens the phone up to all this kind of software! For the most part, your average customer would not WANT that stuff on their own phone (although a few might want to put it on someone else's!) - and that is exactly the difference between the 'open' (read: unmanaged) Android, and the 'curated' iOS.

And which countries will this be available in?

I live in Thailand, and we can't even buy music (let alone movies) on the iTunes store online. All we get here is iOS apps and that's yer lot.

I can, however, subscribe to MobileMe. This gives me syncing of all my contacts, calendars, bookmarks and wotnot.

So if they are going to can MobileMe and replace it with something that does effectively nothing where I live, then where does that leave me, except up a certain creek without a certain implement?

However, I'm not going to start handwringing just yet. The actual announcement is about 73 hours away, if I counted my time zones correctly. I think I'll wait and see. Then I'll start the handwringing, as appropriate.

Paris, just ... because.

Spyware

Is this even news? There is a plethora of spyware out there for almost every smartphone platform, and even some for dumbphones (which are apparently called 'feature phones' these days?).

See http://www.iphonespyapp.com/ and others like it, for a taste.

There are legitimate uses for this kind of software, including keeping track of kids or employees - most parents would probably love to know where heir kids are, when it's after midnight and they said they'd be back before 10PM, and companies whose employees spend a lot of time away from the office would surely be interested in tracking the location of a company-provided mobe.

Paris because ... I'm sure there were times when she would have liked to have known where her phone was :)

As good as an iPhone 4?

The iPhone 4 got a score of 75%, and so did this phone.

Therefore this Nokia-with-a-horrible-OS is as good as an iPhone 4?

Corporate iPhones probably want to know if they are jailbroken

There are some pretty scary iPhone apps out there - see http://www.iphonespyapp.com/ for some examples.

If you ran a business, you could be in one of two camps:

1. You might want to make sure that the iPhones you gave to your employees do not have such spyware installed on them, or else all corporate emails sent to/from the phone could be read by an unknown third party.

2. You might actually want to install such spyware on the iPhone yourself! You might want to see that the company iPhone is not being misused (or simply used for personal stuff when it shouldn't be), or that the employee is not down the pub when he says he's feeling sick.

For people in the first camp, how are you supposed to be able to tell if a device has been compromised, if the OS can't tell you? Given that the kind of checks you would need to do would be the sort of thing you can't do from a standard app's sandbox, you are pretty much buggered.

Conversely, the author is 100% correct in saying that once the phone is jailbroken, you can't trust anything the OS tells you, because the nice brightly-lit safe walled environment just became a large dark wide open space.

The only way you (as an employer handing out iPhones) can be sure that you know what state the iPhone is in, is to jailbreak it and put spyware on it yourself. I am sure that installing TWO bits of spyware on an iPhone would break something!

It's a bit like carrying your own bomb onto a plane because the chances of having *two* bombs on a plane are miniscule ...

Reducing the score because of the price is not fair

I read all the points made in this review, and after having said how great it is as well as how beautiful and portable it is, it then got marked down in it's score (to 75%) because of it's price?

This is not fair, because if you look at all the netbooks as well as the MacBook Air, your first reaction would be "woah - that machine scored less *and* it's more expensive?" when in fact it should have scored higher, as well as being more expensive.

Also I agree with the poster above that the battery tests should have been performed while doing similar tasks on every machine. Scoring a huge score on a PC benchmark which strongly favours a GPU is going to suck the batteries a LOT faster than say browsing the Internet or running Office or similar.

Having said all this, I am surprised that the MacBook Air performed quite as well as it did. Perhaps a real CPU and a real GPU actually do make a big difference - which is why comparing the MacBook Air with a range of netbooks is probably not fair. To the netbooks.

Paris, because ... just because.

Newspapers are probably drooling at the prospect

Perhaps this will breathe life back into the almost-dead newspapers?

It's been well documented (especially of late) that newspapers are basically all going down the toilet - and fast.

If Apple bring out an iTunes/podcast subscription-based (or micro-payment based) model to this tablet thingy, the newspaper companies will all be gagging to get their content onto it. Fair frothing, in fact.

In fact - in order for them to stay alive, this could be their last chance.

@Andy 70, re: price of RAM

Round these parts (downtown Bangkok) there are some very well-known (nay, notorious) IT emporiums that sell just about every kind of hardware imaginable (apart from the very latest or top-of-the-line kit, unfortunately). I noticed a few years ago that many of the shops had hoards of "old stuff" like P3 and P4 CPUs (not the recent ones), as well as SD-RAM and DDR1. Five years ago the prices were pretty reasonable, but recently I have seen that the prices of the old stuff has rocketed.

I guess they offset the ever-reducing margins on the new stuff by keeping their stocks of the old kit and raising the prices as the demand keeps ahead of an ever-shrinking supply. If you really need it, then you really need it! And it's still usually cheaper to buy a couple of sticks of overpriced RAM than to replace a computer.

To get ON topic, if your machine is running slow then buy more RAM. You are never going to need less in the future, and it's cheap enough right now.

As for the software being reviewed, I never saw the point. A few simple steps (mostly outlined above) will save you some cash and time.

@Chris 12

African or European?

(*Someone* had to ask!)

@AC 14:40 GMT

Probably on Safari's other platform, at a guess. Can't work it out? Here's a hint: it's small, and can also be used as a phone.

MS could learn a thing or two

I think Microsoft should have done exactly the same thing with Windows XP SP2.

When they released SP2 for XP, it was pretty much a rewrite of the kernel to implement the NX (no-execute) bit, thereby rendering buffer-overrun errors harmless. Among other things - but that was the headline change.

So they had gone to all the trouble of rewriting the core of the OS, and then released it as a free service pack.

The perception by all users was therefore that XP SP2 was a mere service pack, and not a 'new OS'. So when they released Vista at the end of 2007, everyone was screaming about how it was the first update to Windows for over six years.

If MS had instead charged a nominal fee for "Windows XP v2" and lauded it as a better Windows than Windows XP, then they would have probably been able to delay Vista until it was ready. Because lets face it - it wasn't.

And everyone knows (unfortunately) ... perception is everything.

"You wouldn't steal a car" etc.

The irony that the pirates are the only ones who DON'T see those ads surely can not have been lost on the execs of these huge movie-making companies, and yet they make the people who BOUGHT the DVD sit through them. It's like they hate their customers or something.

And it's like they think their customers are stupid, too. Piracy is NOT theft. Hell, it's not even piracy! It's copyright infringement, pure and simple. You do not have the right to make a copy, and yet you made a copy. Or you paid for a copy that someone else made, without paying the required licensing fee.

They like to use emotive words to make it SOUND like we are performing something akin to treason or murder - when really all you did was downloaded a file.

I call to everyone who has any clue, to STOP using the word "piracy" to describe copyright infringement. Perception is everything, and if you can equate a harmless small crime with a heinous abuse of property and life, you are going to be able to win the hearts of the feeble-minded who don't know a keyboard from a kilobyte.

Ironically (again), the only people who would actually believe them are the people who would probably not know where to start downloading such things from, and have never heard of TheMiniISOPirateNovaHuntBay.

These people treat their customers with contempt, and try to frighten people. I dislike them.

Fortunately, they have regular anti-"piracy" crackdowns where I live, so I should be safe from being exposed to such content at all times. Right?

Scott, Bangkok.

Oh dear, oh dear

"without loosing its clean sound". Fail.

Go sit in the naughty chair with the big pointy "D" hat on.

Define creativity

I would say that the kind of creativity in a computer programmer of the 80s and the kind of creativity in a programmer these days are put to use in different areas.

In the 80s you generally had 400K of RAM to play with (after the OS overheads, etc.), and a 4-8MHz CPU or so. 20MHz at the end of the decade, but I was using XTs and ATs in the mid-late 80s.

We did some amazing things in a few K of RAM, and frankly you had to. You had to think hard about how you could cut back on memory usage and clock cycles. My own opinion at the time was that removing the limitations removed the incentive for programmers to *think*.

After that, I would say that programmers tended to think very little about how their software will work, and spent more time thinking about how it would look.

Of course, it's all a matter of perspective. For the most part, the software created today works as well as software of its day ever did. These days it's all web-driven, with a slick UI - but even those come out of a box now. So where's the creativity now?

See, in the 'old days' people had to come up with fiendish algorithms to make their stuff run at all. After computers became more powerful with more available resources, programs started to look better (but remember Word 6 against Word 2? The UI was 'improved' but it was not a snappy application - it sort of lumbered into existence when you double-clicked on it, like the behemoth it was), and people concentrated more on appearance because they could.

But nowadays, where's the focus of this creativity? You get algorithms coming out of your ears in the frameworks of today. UIs are bought off-the-shelf, for native apps or websites.

So where to now? Show me where this 'creativity' is going? I don't see it myself.

(No Paris Hilton angle?)

Why do they still use the large bit of plastic?

I have not seen any piece of tech that requires the larger 'credit card'-sized SIM card for well over a decade now. If there are SIM readers out there that require it, isn't it high time they were replaced with newer ones, for the sake of the millions (billions?) of other pieces of equipment on whose behalf the much larger extra plastic is simply discarded?

What's green about using that plastic for something of dubious benefit, when it should not be there in the first place?

And when will people stop riding on the 'green' bandwagon just to try to sell a crap idea?

Re: Ray Winstone is a brilliant actor

Evil Graham is exactly correct - Ray Winstone plays a superb Ray Winstone. Sometimes you *do* want a character like that, and when he's being Ray Winstone, Ray Winstone is truly excellent.

Amazingly, I am not kidding too - I rate him highly as a psychopath. Actor! I mean an actor who plays an excellent psycopath.

But Edge of Darkness? The original was so good, it should be left alone.

Thinks: Remember "Wings of Desire"? Remade into "City of Angels" with Nicholas Fucking Cage, and relocated to Los Angeles. Remember "The Italian Job"? Set in Italy, of all places. Remade and reolcated.

Hollywood: Give it a rest, will you? There are some good films out there that do not involve California. You don't need to remake and enshiten them just so you can make cash out of more people.

And what is the Paris Hilton angle, anyway?

Funny to non-Americans?

I am non-American and have never yet found the alleged Otto Z. Stern remotely amusing.

Agree with those not seeing the point of this review

I understand that it's still a 'current' model, in that they have not yet stopped selling it - but you use that as justification for the review in the first place, and then give it a 75% score!

If you're going to review it as 'older tech' then the score should reflect the rest of its field, and not show how it compares against the newer models. Hell, even comparing it against the 450D and you would expect it to come a pretty poor second.

On top of that, the reviewer does not seem that comfortable writing the review, as he does not seem familiar with the subject. But this is The Register, not DP Review - everyone who knows anything about digital cameras has already read the review (and that for the 450D) on DP Review anyway. So we would be expecting The Register to be taking the review from a different 'angle', and unfortunately they don't. It's a re-hash of some technical specs and some uninformed comment (as seen by the other comments in here).

Reviews like this, we can frankly do without.

@ Mike Re: Re: Enough April fools rubbish

Before using the time-honoured "takes one to know one" argument, or the even more concise "no, you!", I have to agree with Andrew Thomas on this one. I mean seriously ... just what is the point?

Spaghetti trees were a classic, and I thought the flying penguins were quite special, but overall it gets pretty tired pretty quickly.

As my esteemed brother pointed out on http://www.23x.net/ yesterday, "If you post a hoax on the internet, can you remember Google will index it and it's only funny one day a year? The rest of the year, you're just a lying twat."

Wise words indeed.

The other 17% 'unknown'

A couple of people have mentioned Creative, and I have not seen a good driver escape their codemills for a good few years (Maybe Audigy was the last?). I hereby nominate them as a strong candidate for the title 'unknown', and am surprised at the Ars for not hinting at it themselves. 'heystoopid' said they should be 'top of the list' ... looks like they are a strong contender for sitting in fourth place :)

Can anyone remember the last *good* Creative product? I had an AWE64 Gold that was pretty damn good in its day. SoundBlaster Live! was pretty good, too.

@John

It's funny - I was thinking the same thing. I don't understand why the RealPlayer is so 'streamlined' on OSX when it's such a piece of bloated crapware on Windows. I have a feeling that it's because they think there aren't enough Mac users out there for it to be worth them writing another set of steaming shiteware to 'bundle' with the player.

Anyone remember 'Comet Cursor' that used to be bundled with RealPlayer? The software that was practically impossible to remove? And would sometimes reinstall itself spontaneously? Those really *were* the Bad Old Days.

The OSX version of RealPlayer is small, quick, and not a resource hog. Now that more people are using (or at least aware of) the Mac and OSX, how long before that changes?

@ No one gives a crap about your Mac

I would be less concerned about the comment by someone you refer to as 'a Mac zealot' pointing out that Apple have had a computer available with 8 cores for about six months (or more?), and more concerned about how ... if this is the case, why is it suddenly *news* when HP have such a machine for sale?

I mean, a news headline to announce an 8-core machine, when such things have been on the market for over half a year? Since when did El Reg become HP's marketing wing?

Ant Colonel Zander, who pissed on your cornflakes? Since Macs are basically PCs these days anyway, it's not all about iTunes and Leopard. I imagine Vista runs with almost acceptable performance on an 8-core Mac ... as long as you're not copying files to a thumbdrive, and you turn UAC off.

@Raider Nation

Paper size, and it's all back to WW-II. I am glad that history is taught so well in the US. I guess that the larger the nation, the better the propaganda machine.

And while you're looking back 60 years, try a little further ... if it wasn't for the Brits, you'd be speaking Dutch. And if it wasn't for the French, you'd be speaking ... umm ... English ;)

We're talking about the US's inability to admit the existence of any other form of measurement than its own - Fahrenheit (nobody else uses it - give it up already!) ... silly pints with only 16 fl oz in them ... Letter and other paper sizes ...

The rest of the world is either already metric, or understands it - except the US (Seen their attempts to use the metric system? Mars Climate Orbiter anyone?)

When you can elect a president who is not a baboon (twice!) ... get back to us.