News for Tuesday, 11 October 2005

The iPod nano is wonderful, especially in black. Yet as you could have read it already a few times, it will be scratched very quickly. Its size will make you put it the whole day long in your pocket.
So in a matter of days, our nano had many scratches, including deep ones on the screen and even more on the central button.

So it was our pleasure to accept testing the polishing kit called iRenov
It contains a leaflet, two pots of polishing pastes and 3 synthetic clothes.

You'll first use the paste "deep" of higher granulometry, which will take care of deep scratches, and create even more superficial ones.
Our advice is that you first push firmly, then go on softly.

Once the paste fades the iPod nano has many superficial scratches yet the bigger ones will disappear. If not, just go on polishing.
Then, use the finishing paste of thinner granulometry. First rub it strongly, then softly once again. The more you'll stay soft and patient, the best the result.
In 10 mn, we reached this result:

Some thin scratches remain to be seen only by rasing light, and the biggest disappeared. A more elaborated care would undoubtedly give even better results.

Just like in France, majors in Japan wish that a tax be created on audio players, aiming at compensating for losses related to copy operations.
Japanese are quite moderate though in their bidding, as the tax will be related to the player price, and will be between 2 and 5% if its value.
It is a shame though to tax the iPod in a country where it involved a sale of a million tunes over the web in such a record time.
Yet it is probably a trend, as majors wish to have their part of the iPod cake, considering that without them, this product wouldn't have been of any interest at all.
It would be quite interesting to imagine, only a short moment, a world without such tentacular commercial enterprises.

A reader of XLR8Yourmac has reported a problem while trying to install a Western digital WD400KD 400GB SATA HD into his PMG5 dual 1.8GHz
It seems that there is a compatibility issue between this drive and his PMG5, because on most of the test we have performed with large capacity HDs, such as Hitachi 400 and 500GB, we never had any problems.
The QuickBench tests that he as provided do not bring much information regarding the problem with his HDs, since he has only run a small size file test. One will need to repeat the test with a 20MB file to make it informative.

Seagate has announced its new HDs models known as 7200.9. Those HDs have storage capacities ranging from 40 to 500 GB. They are all available in the SATA 2 format and have a 5 years warranty. Cache memory varies from 2MB on the entry level to 16MB from 300GB model.
At the same time,Maxtor has also unveiled its new HDs. There is not much difference with the previous models except the arrival of the SATA 2 format which so far does not bring much, performance wise.

Macfun, who is living in Belgium, have received a Mac mini 1.33GHz instead of the 1.25GHz model he had ordered.
To our knowledge, it is the first new Mac mini shipped in Europe, with a bit of luck Apple might have emptied its stocks of the previous models.

It seems that the iPod success is turning some Apple execs into a crew of "mad guys". Indeed, it seems that Apple is getting ready to ask iPod peripherals manufacturers an impressive and ridiculous 10% license fee for giving access to an iPod port.
Usually such fee or royalties is between 1 to 3%. Apparently Bose and Altec Lansing are not happy, especially that "the proposed fee is excessive by any standards". For sure BMW will also not consider such Apple's move as a sign of a potential long-term collaboration.
Apple has always been good to break the toy for which they have spent some much money to make it a success.
This ridiculous 10% fee will for sure be the "beginning of the end" for the iPod story; knowing how much iPod peripherals and integration devices have boosted iPod adoption in our life-style.
If manufacturers decide to concentrate on other MP3 players, Apple might lose a lot... really a lot...
We seriously hope that such a move was a marketing/managing mistake; otherwise, we think that this decision should strongly be reconsidered. Increasing a fee to increase profits driven by the iPod success is one thing, but by trying to get an even bigger piece of the “iPod cake”, Apple might actually reduce the over size of this cake!

SonyEricsson has unveiled its P 990.

This new smartphone running Symbian 9.1 gains 3G-linked features, while sporting a 2MPixels camera that have already been a success with the K750 et W800.
An additional interesting feature is its Wifi capacities, with the increasing number of free Wifi hotspot, I could be a good way to avoid the huge cost of linked to the use of 3G capabilities.
We will probably have to wait some times before seeing an iSync update making this smartphone compatible with our Macs.

Pangea is proposing for download the beta version 2.0b1 of Nanosaur II. This stable version uses the "Universal binaries" making it compatible for both PPC- and Intel-based Apple computers (MacIntel).
The installer is coming only in the PPC version, so it runs with Rosetta on a MacIntel, but then the software will run natively on a MacIntel.
This is the beginning of numerous "universal binaries"-based software updates.