News for Wednesday, 13 October 2004

Virgin will launch at the end of the month a portable music player to compete with the iPod mini.
This portable will be priced 249$, and sport a 5GB HD, battery half-life 8hours, as well as a FM tuner and 2 headphones output. When you look at the market share numbers for such music devices, one can easily understand why competitors enter the fight against Apple products (iPod and iPod mini).

Here's Guillaume talking.

Student in Rouen university, this morning, getting out of my classes, what do I see??? An Apple stand in the university hall and **** from MGS Promotion, demoing the Powerbook 15" to students. Neraby, a generalist stand about the [governmental initiated] loan offer "a laptop for a coffee a day" and another of the Crédit Agricole [a French bank].
To sum up: Apple was the only brand to demonstrate their offer, which made me quite glad:)

Apple seem to have understood the full potential of this offer:)

Thx to Albespi for his testimony

I went to the Mac area of the Paris Saint-Lazare FNAC this week-end and I really got the feeling Apple got a huge hit with their iMac G5, with the fabulous symbol of the total integration of the computer in a screen.
In the Mac corner(deprived of any G5 iMac, the only demo unitt being hidden in a corner of the computer area, sound off so it won't disturb anyone) an Apple Cinema Display 20" was to be seen, on which a sales guy, seemingly quite upset with the public unending questions, would stick a Post-It on which you'd read: "THIS IS NO G5 IMAC!!!" [see the pic in the other news : this is quite an hommage to Magritte actually :) ]
This lets me think that people, even not well informed about Apple hardware, learnt of the new iMac and were driven to the nearest FNAC so they could get to see it, but would then make the confusion with the displays...

Perhaps Apple's adds came a bit early as compared to the product's real availability schedule.

Many of you report they couldn't see any iMac G5 in the FNAC, nor even find one hidden in a corner. We tried to find out the reason for that.
With Apple's agreement (though they had to insist), the FNAC [huge French reseller for those who'd still don't know !] wouldn't display much G5 iMacs just because they don't have enough of them, nor can they give delivery dates.
The gap is such as for 1,600 preordered machines, they only got 150 delivered configurations.
As some readers told us, the ad motto "where did the computrer go?" never sounded so appropriate :)
Laurent took some pictures of the famous Post-It of the Fnac St Lazare [read the other news].

The biggest grief about having to use Entourage on Mac OS X is that the Microsoft program is not using the system-wide Address Book nor the iCal databases.
Well, there is some hope in that area now.
e2sync will offer a software solution (in beta for now) starting October 19th that will allegedly bridge the gap once and for all, in the form of a conduit for iSync

You can sign up for the beta test on their website.

Now that all manufacturers have products that can burn DVDs at 16x, and knowing that this is a physical limit, the war has shifted to DVD+R9 capabilities and speeds.
The initial 2.4x quickly went up to 4x. Now it's been announced that 8x speed will be reached in early 2005.
However, one problem remains : the DL medias are far too expensive to convince consumers to use them instead of "boring" DVD-R.

A regular ofXLR8yourmac finally got his hands on his dual 2.5 GHz G5...equipped with a Geforce 6800 Ultra ! To back up his statement, he took a few shots and published them on his .Mac page.

It is as deep as initially believed :)
He forgot to mention the noise level of the card. Although, it might not be that bad, otherwise he would probably have written about it.

iGlasses, a $8 shareware from the coder of iChatUSB, gives access to finer settings of your iChat video : colors, contrast, brightness...
http://www.ecamm.com/mac/iglasses/

The Mac Business Unit has announced the immediate availability of the first Service Pack for Microsoft Office 2004. It squashes many bugs and patches a few security holes. You'll be able to fetch it through Office's AutoUpdate function and/or as separate download here.