News for Monday, 5 March 2007

Adobe will launch the third version of its Creative Suite, aka CS3, on March, 27th during a Special Event taking place in New York.
According to Adobe, the CS3 will mark the most important software release of the company (already 25 years!). The advertising campaign will be entitled "What's In The Box" and one can already watch it on YouTube:

For sure this release will boost sales of MacPro models if expected performance gain turn to be true.
[update] from our Adobe Expert
As usual, Adobe will announce (and show) the product line with pricing, but the availability will be 2 months after (which is exactly just before Adobe Live in Europe)

If most of Apple-branded hardware is manufactured in China, market shares for Cupertino products in this country remain lower than in the rest of the world. However, as reported by Pter, Apple might be preparing a business move to the Chinese consumer electronic market.

I am living in China, and I received a mail from Apple China inviting me to be part of a poll. If China is known for being the kingdom of counterfeited products, Cupertino sold a lot of iPods (original ones), and is rumored to look closely at the Chinese market. There is also a rumor of a Chinese iTunes Store in preparation.

Adobe intends to offer a set of some of its application via a Web interface for free. Revenues would be generated by embedded ads displayed on the webpage on this online service.
Adobe expects to be ready in 6 months, and to focus mostly on functions currently available with Photoshop and Lightroom. Of course Adobe can not offer a full Creative Suite for free online, so those free web-based applications will probably include functions or capabilities that will be useful for most non-Pro consumers, while giving the best introduction or incentive to move on to the full version. Adobe also wants to avoid problems linked to low network speed, so they will have to work out a system allowing the minimal data transfer between hosted applications servers and consumer computers.
One can easily determine which companies will be interested in advertising of such Adobe free online applications websites: online photo printing service, photo album design, poster, etc.

Geektechnique gives us a step-by-step explaining how to upgrade your 1G iPod mini using a 4GB Compact Flash card to replace the original Microdrive.

What's the point? you'll ask:
- Better batterie life, flash memory being more power-savvy than the microdrives
- Faster transfers (microdrives are slower)
- Resurrect an iPod mini that died of HDD failure
- Make your iPod mini more resistant (no moving parts in Flash memory
- ...

It seems quite obvious that Notebook batteries have not been manufactured with a lot of care in the past years.
After Sony and its over 10 millions units recalled, it is now Sanyo that is facing a serious issue concerning its batteries.
Lenovo just launched a recall for 208,000 batteries manufactured between November 2005 and February 2007, for the same reason as Sony's units: overheating and associated risks of explosion.
We do not know is Apple has been using Sanyo's batteries in PowerBook or iBook, however, MacBook and MacBook Pro are not using such models.
We have learned from our sources, that MB Pro batteries with serial number not included in original Apple's recall are also defective, and Cupertino might be extending further its recall in the future if numbers of reports keeps going up.