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“Stop me if you’ve seen this.“  – Steve Jobs

An apology was called for at the start of this show, again.  Missed another few weeks, not all my fault this time.  Damn work winning in work/life balance battle yet again.  But we had so many news stories that we just dove right in.

Starting with, what else…..

iPhone 4 - The new uber-gadget from Apple is out to buy.  If you can find one that is.  Queues around the block, pre-orders that melted the system.  They’re as rare as rocking horse pooh at the moment.  It’s not without a few little launch niggles,  but 1.7m people, in 72 hours, can’t be wrong.

iOS 4 – As promised at WWDC, iOS4 is out. Give your 3GS, and to a certain extent, your 3G, a new lease of life. Lots of new features, or tent-poles as his Steveness would have it. One word, MULTITASKING, bring it on!!

New Mac Mini - When we talked about a new Apple TV last time out, this wasn’t what we were expecting. Clever unibody construction and HDMI out, all it needs is a ‘bag of hurt’ Blu-Ray player and it’s the perfect media centre. If anyone is interested in a nearly new Apple TV, contact killingpixels@me.com.

iPad corner – Well we couldn’t let a show go by without mentioning the iPad could we. Two bits of news on that front. Number one 80 days in and 3m sold, and number two, Gareth is one of the 80m, jammie little so and so.

Google dumping Windows – Mountain View employees are being offered the choice of either a Mac or PC running Linux. They’re citing security flaws in Windows for the change in policy, can’t think what they might be. But with the infamous hacking that Google and others have suffered recently. Something like this was just a matter of time, if only my employer was as progressive.

Windows 7, 150m licences in – The most successful launch of an OS in history. A good news story for Redmond for a change, although MS are putting a positive spin on a lot of numbers lately. But, unusually for us, we’re not buying it. Literally and metaphorically.

All these stories and a whole lot more. Like Safari 5, and it’s new ‘Reader’ feature, which Gareth was blown away by. To the HTC Evo 4G and what it means for the future of mobiles.

So what are you waiting for, dive in with us, the water’s lovely.

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“Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.”  -  Niels Bohr

This week we returned after another enforced break, my fault again. And without the usual preamble, there was so much to get through, we launched straight into it.

Starting with….

iPad comes to the rest of us – So it’s out internationally, and proving to be a big hit everywhere. We’ll have to see if it carries on selling by the bucketload, and defines the tablet computer market like the iPhone defined it’s market. On Friday I stood outside the Birmingham Apple store, and then, stood some more. After a while I gave up queueing, and admitted defeat, no way I was getting to play with one on launch day.

The next AppleTV – Gareth being a big AppleTV fan, is stoked by the rumours surrounding the next version, which may or may not be released at WWDC. It is, apparently ‘an iPhone without the screen’. The same internals as an iPhone, A4 chip, 16GB of memory, and graphics up to pumping out 1080p video, from whatever source you want to stream it. It will, apparently, come in a tiny form factor, with an itty-bitty $99 price tag as well. If this turns out to be true Steve will have to get himself a new hobby.

Ballmer’s not going to WWDC – According to the MS twitter feed Steve Ballmer will not be attending the Mac developer conference. So if you were on the verge of cancelling your ticket, you can now go safe, from flying chairs and what not. Other rumours we touched on concerning WWDC include a revised MacBook Air and Mac Pro. As well as a probable release date for the iPhone 4G/HD, plus iPhone OS4. If you feel you’re missing out on anything, just You Tube Ballmer + developers.

OLPC confirms next version to be tablet – It wasn’t long before we were back to tablets, any excuse. And it wasn’t long before we’d covered a range of other tablet stories as well, it was that kind of show. With tablets being the current bandwagon, everybody wants to hitch up to, I suppose this announcement was obvious. How long before its called ‘One Tablet Per Child”.

Chrome browser out of beta – So its a full release for Google’s webkit based browser, for a moment I confused this news with the release of Chrome OS,  I didn’t think I’d been away for that long. Turns out I was right, I hadn’t been away for that long, but it was a surreal moment. Gareth has given it a try and was pretty positive, but it wasn’t game changing enough to get him to swap from Safari. And with Webkit 2 on the way from Cupertino, they might have to do something pretty spectacular to draw people with version 2.

There was all this in the show and more, but I don’t want to bore you with anymore stories. I couldn’t anyway, I forgot to take notes and can’t remember what else we talked about. Go on have a listen, I know you want to.

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“This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning“  – Winston Churchill

I had to apologise this week for or absence over the past few weeks.  Unfortunately having to work for a living really interferes with all the fun stuff I want to do.  I’ve been working so hard that I haven’t had time to do anything even vaguely techie, no software, no hardware, nary a new App has graced my iPhone.  Gareth has had some luck on the hardware side, but we won’t go into that. And App-wise he has succumbed to my recommendation of RSS feed reader, Reeder is a great app, fully endorsed by both of us.

Then it was on to the stories, starting with what else…

iPad international launch May 28th – At last, the rest of the world can enjoy the latest ‘magical and revolutionary’ device from Cupertino. Well nine other countries anyway, the rest of the world can wait, because at last I can get one. If I wanted to, but at these prices I don’t know if I do. I know it’s not called rip-off Britain’ for nothing, and we always have to pay a premium for the latest and greatest from Apple, but come on.  It’ll have to be a pretty damn ‘magical and revolutionary’ to get me to part with that much extra.

HP buys Palm – HP are going to ‘double down’ on webOS, that bit of Palm they paid $1.2bn for. Which most people take to mean it’s going to turn up on more devices, then just a few average phones, most likely the slate that Steve Ballmer held up a few months ago, no Windows 7 there then. That made me laugh almost as much as Bono’s Elevation Partners losing $92m on the deal, so much for piracy costing you millions, hey Bono, you’ll have to dodge a lot more taxes to make that up.

WWDC sells out in 8 days – All the moaning about the lack of focus on Mac OS X hasn’t done a thing to dampen developers enthusiasm for WWDC. It sold out three weeks faster then last year, easily demonstrating that iPhone OS is proving a real draw. Don’t get me wrong, I want Apple to push on with Snow Leopard, and beyond, as much as the next fanboy, but I also know that Infinite Loop is about more then that these days. But as we’re both iPhone users, it’s a win/win for us.

MS Kin, what price ‘normalphone’ – MicroSoft are trying to invent a new niche with these new ‘normalphones’ (well they’re not dumbphones and they’re not smartphones what would you call them). But unfortunately Verizon, the chosen network supplier, hasn’t read the memo and are insisting on a smartphone tariff on these devices. Yeah they sync with all the usual social network suspects, but not a lot else, there aren’t going to be lots of apps for these things, what they come with is what you get. So why charge so much for the phone and service when superior devices, Android and iPhone, are not much further out of reach. Oh well, at least, according to MS, they’re good for sexting.

Cupidtino – If you’re a lonely Mac fanboy there’s a new service available to hook up with a Mac fangirl. You both appreciate good design, easy of use and a well thought out user experience. So that must mean you’re compatible on so many other levels, yeah right. Apart from making tech support simpler, I can’t see it making that much of a difference. But who am I, socially challenged nerd that I am, to say that it’s wrong.

The end of floppies? – Nearly twelve years after the release of the ‘magical and revolutionary’ original iMac G3, Sony have finally caught up. They have announced that they’re finally stopping production of the floppy disk. I have to ask at this point, when was the last time you used a floppy disk, because I haven’t for years. Who are these mysterious consumers of floppies, have they not heard of thumb-drives or email? I wonder if Stringer will save enough money from this to release something decent.