Wednesday, January 21, 2009

MacWorld, Windows 7, Palm

The week started off with MacWorld 2009, in San Fransisco, the last MacWorld attended by Apple. The company had already announced that instead of Steve Jobs, it would be Phil Schiller delivering the keynote. Various rumours had made their way onto the internet, but in the end, none of the extravagant ones had an bearing in reality. apple delivered new versions of iLife, iWork, and also updated their 17" MacBook Pro offering to match the new features of the cheaper MacBooks and MacBook Pros, such as the aluminium unibody design. In addition, Apple claims a battery life of 7-8 hours, which is, by any standard, quite long for such a large and powerful laptop.

Some wondered why Apple didn't make any statements regarding Snow Leopard, although I personally thought that it made sense for Apple to remain mum on the subject for now.

Moving on from MacWorld, we go to Las Vegas to join in on the gadget orgy known as the Consumer Electronics Show, where two important announcements were made: Microsoft launched the first beta for Windows 7, and Palm surprised everyone by showing off their new mobile operating system and phone.

The beta to Windows 7 was launched during Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's first keynote presentation at CES, a task which was previously performed by Bill Gates. During his keynote, Ballmer launched the Windows 7 beta to TechNet/MSDN/Connect, and promised a public beta by next Friday. The public beta arrived, but due to the fact that Microsoft announced a download cap of 2.5 million, the download servers were mashed into oblivion, and the company was forced to delay the public beta by about a day. Microsoft: BitTorrent, BitTorrent: Microsoft. I hope you can become friends.

MacWorld and Windows 7 were expected, but no one really foresaw the positive impact Palm's new webOS and pre mobile phone would make in the media. Especially the card-based interface was met with positive responses from media outlets. Palm remained silent on some details, however, but Ars did dig up some information regarding the device and its SDK that Palm didn't give out.

Apart from the above, Google's Chrome also made the headlines with information regarding Chrome 2.0. Creative's Zii platform barely made any ripples on other websites, but we found it pretty interesting nonetheless.

Something that didn't make it to OSNews this week was the barrage of submissions regarding gOS 3.1 (SP1). I've ordered a set of parts to build a brand new computer from, allowing me to turn my current machine into a nice test rig. I promise to take a look at gOS 3.1 as soon as the new machine is assembled, and I free up my current machine.

Next up is My Take, which, as I already mentioned, will be a completely random musing about a random subject. It can be about music, television, film, or just plain ol' technology.


from : http://www.osnews.com/story/20752/MacWorld_Windows_7_Palm

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