• iTunes in the Cloud. iTunes now stores your music and TV purchases in iCloud and makes them available on your devices anywhere, any time, at no additional cost.
  • Automatic Downloads. Purchase music from any device or computer and automatically download a copy to your PC and iOS devices.
  • Download Previous Purchases. Download your past music, TV, app, and book purchases again, at no additional cost. Previous purchases may be unavailable if they are no longer on the iTunes Store.
• Sync with your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with iOS 5.
• Wi-Fi Syncing. Automatically sync your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with iTunes any time they’re both on the same Wi-Fi network.

If you have not been notified of the update click on the help menu and click check for updates. It’s a 70MB update thought so beware if you are cap conscious.

Featuring TomTom’s congestion-busting HD Traffic technology, the new satnav will steer drivers through traffic jams and is packed with Top Gear features including start-up and shut-down screens and car icons. Drivers can choose to have The Stig mode, which renders the device instantly silent, or select Jeremy Clarkson’s voice to guide them.

“For Top Gear fans, this limited edition satnav is the ultimate driving companion. Featuring The Stig, Clarkson and TomTom HD Traffic, the GO LIVE Top Gear edition is perfect for drivers who love the open road.” said Daan Henderickx, Country Manager for TomTom South Africa.

At R1 999, the TomTom GO LIVE Top Gear edition includes one year of TomTom’s LIVE Services at no cost. The flagship service is TomTom HD Traffic, which delivers dynamic routing and accurate traffic information every two minutes. HD Traffic gives drivers detailed incident reports, length of delays and reason for them, accurate travel and arrival times and alternative route proposals.
The LIVE Services bundle also includes the Speed Cameras service, providing mobile and fixed speed camera alerts, while TomTom Places local search helps to pinpoint shops and businesses in the area. QuickGPSfix gets you navigating in seconds and TomTom Weather gives local and five-day forecasts.

More information on the TomTom GO LIVE Top Gear edition at www.tomtom.com/topgear

No 3D Glasses required is something both Toshiba and Nintendo have in mind.

Toshiba announced that they will be producing 12″ and 20″ screens by December 2010, and Nintendo announced their new Nintendo 3DS console, both of which can display 3D imagery with no need for the 3D glasses.

In current 3D TVs, images for each eye are displayed rapidly one after the other. Filters in the glasses flash on and off in sync with the TV picture so the right eye sees one image and the left eye sees the next.

Toshiba’s technology uses an integral imaging system called a “light field” display to create 3D without glasses over a thirty degree viewing angle. 3D TVs can simulate depth because they deliver a slightly different image to each eye. Toshiba’s custom developed LCD (over 8 Million pixels) which sits behind a thin sheet of small lenses allow multiple imagery to be sent to each eye and broadcast to 9 “sweetspots” in 720P. This will render the 3D illusion to multiple viewers.

Nintendo uses the same or possibly similar technology in their upcoming console release debuted as Nintendo 3DS on a 3.53-inch widescreen LCD display; with 800×240 pixel resolution (400 pixels are allocated for each eye to enable 3D viewing).

What I am interested in seeing the average mobility for the “sweetspot”. If you, like me, are an avid gamer or are interested in 3D, I’m sure you have played with Nvidia’s 3D Stereoscopic drivers. This allows you with the use of 3D glasses to play games in 3D, however that being said it takes some tweaking of the 3D settings in the drivers or game (if supported) to make this effect really have an impact. Now without the need for glasses it means that the “sweetspot” for viewing the toshiba’s 12″ and 20″ will be limited but how limited remains to be seen.

As for the 3DS console I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on one of those as you will have complete control over the “sweetspot” as its small enough to fit in your hands, allowing you the mobility to control the position of the console in your hands and not of your body/furniture as required by a TV in your house.

Prices after the break.

MTN has various packages available, much better than Vodacom at the moment who only have one.

MTN Pricing:

Apple iPhone 4 16 GB
MTN AnyTime TopUp - R200 included airtime with a 150 MB internet bundle – R379
MTN AnyTime TopUp - R200 included airtime with a 300 MB internet bundle – R429

Apple iPhone 4 32 GB
MTN AnyTime TopUp- R200 included airtime with a 150 MB internet bundle – R429
MTN AnyTime TopUp - R200 included airtime with a 300 MB internet bundle – R479

That’s for a 24 month contract. Vodacom offer only one bumper deal which seems to be aimed at a higher market although they only offer the iPhone 4 16GB at present.

Vodacom

iPhone Talk 500 – 500 minutes talk time with 250MB data bundle and 100 SMSs – R925

This is also subject to a 24 month contract. It makes you wonder how much profit Vodacom will be making from this with the 32GB most likely heading over the R1000 a month mark or close to it. I would go with MTN for now.

I’ll let you decide though. More videos after the break.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2AP3VMAkpA

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hsov0jRvrU

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdlaQTS76VU

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcaNkuQhEis

MTN and Vodacom could be releasing the iPhone to subscribers as soon as today. We expected the phone to arrive in October but because of recent hype we thank that the network operators are planning to release it a little earlier.

According to the MTN website, the phone will be available from them from midnight tonight (21 September). Vodacom has not confirmed anything on their website but there are rumours going around that the party happening tonight at Vodaworld is the official launch of the iPhone 4.

This means that by tomorrow South Africans will be able to legitimately get their hands on the new iPhone 4.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2TTA-V58Tk

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIpD7hfffQo

Microsoft are being consistent and have released the latest Internet Explorer in BETA. The latest release will be known as Internet Explorer 9 and will hopefully rectify issues that almost every developer has with Internet Explorer.

One of the major issues with Internet Explorer has always been compliance but they are speaking a different tune this time and actually were involved in the development of HTML5 and CSS3. This is what they say on their site:

Through our investments in standards and interoperability, we hope to help bring predictability to web programming. Because when you can spend less time rewriting your sites to work across browsers, you can spend more time creating amazing experiences.

It does look promising, although it still appears (to me at least) that Microsoft are playing catch up with Internet Explorer and not really innovating. Many of the new features have been available in Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox for a few months now.

Here is a complete breakdown of the new features:

• Pinned sites. With pinned sites, a user’s favourite websites can be accessed directly from the Windows taskbar with having to first open the browser, making it quick and easy to get to the content you care about.
• One Box. Whether you want to search or enter a web address, the One Box provides a single simple place to start and minimises the space the browser takes up keeping the focus on your sites.
• Enhanced tabs. Internet Explorer 9 provides improvements to the New Tab page, and the ability to “tear off” a tab from within a browsing session allows you to easily comparison-shop online or watch a video while scanning the news.
• Download manager. This integrated Download Manager includes a streamlined user interface and provides security for downloaded content.
• Reliability features. Tab isolation, automatic crash recovery, hang recovery, and Add-ons Advisor help ensure your information isn’t lost and keep you browsing when a website isn’t working correctly.
• Automatic Updates. Getting the latest browser updates helps keep users protected over time. After Internet Explorer 9 is installed, users can choose to have important updates installed automatically, once they are made available.

I’m not holding thumbs for Internet Explorer 9 and I don’t think I will make the move just yet but I do hope that this removes the hate some people have for Internet Explorer.

To get a taste of Internet Explorer 9 BETA and to actually download it, click here.

The topic of browser preference appears to only be debated between computing professionals or high end users. What is it that makes the average person in the workplace use Internet Explorer over any other browser. The usage statistics from Wikipedia speak for themselves.

I, as a computing professional, find this very interesting. Why does the browser with the worst performance receive the most adoration, is it pure blindness from the end users part or cleverly integrated marketing from Microsoft through including IE as the default browser in their Operating system. I’ll let you decide, but if you are one of those typical end users you may want to take a look at a post made by six revisions with regard to the overall browser performance.

For those of you wanting the summary here it is. Four browsers were tested:

Google Chrome – http://www.google.com/chrome

Firefox – http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/firefox.html

Safari – http://www.apple.com/safari/download/

Internet Explorer

The results are in, first place goes to Google Chrome, second place to FireFox, third place to Safari and the final contender Internet explorer pulling in last position. Why not ease your browsing experience lessen your frustration, try something other than IE. There will be no looking back.