Tuesday Tech Talk #49

Hello folks and welcome to another edition of Tuesday Tech Talk. In this edition it is going to be an all Apple blog post with the WWDC keynote yesterday. So lets dive right into things.

iPhone 4

So obviously the biggest announcement is the new iPhone 4. It has a whole new design. Gone is the curved back, replaced with a flat backing to it like the iPad has. It also has a glass backing too.

Another feature, front facing camera and an LED flash on the back for the rear camera. Oh, and it now has a 5 megapixel camera. With the front facing camera, the iPhone has a new feature called FaceTime which if your on WiFi allows you to view face to face with the person you are talking to providing they are on an iPhone 4 and have WiFi as well.

On the inside is the A4 chip, the same chip found in the iPad, a larger battery while at the same time presenting a thinner iPhone (0.37”). The battery allows for 7 hours of 3G talk time, 6 hours of 3G data use and 10 hours on the WiFi side with video playback of 10 hours and audio playback of 40 hours and standby time of 300 hours!

The specs and pricing remain the same as the previous model. 16GB will be $199 and the 32GB will be $299 (That is with a 2 year contract with AT&T of course). Oh, and they now offer a white model both front and back now as well.

Safari 5

Though not mentioned in the keynote, Apple did release Safari 5 today. I’ve been using it for a couple of hours now and one feature that is much welcomed is that when I click on a link now it will open in a new tab instead of a new window and I don’t have to press the Command button when clicking on the link either. This was a huge pet peeve of mine with Safari that has been resolved. It also seems noticeably faster than Google Chrome and a heck of a lot quicker than Firefox. It also has an updated RSS Reader but for now I will stick with Google Reader for my RSS feeds. I will use Safari 5 for a week and decide from there. Another feature is they have added Microsoft’s Bing as a search engine option in addition to Google (my choice) and Yahoo (my choice when Bill Clinton was in the Oval Office).

iBooks market share growth

Apple also announced its iBooks app on the iPad has grabbed a 22% market share of the ebook market. With that in mind, iBooks is headed for the iPhone as well. It also announced a new iBooks update will allow for PDF document support.

Netflix and FarmVille come to the iPhone

If your like me, you know keeping up with the “farm” can be a constant thing. Unfortunately up until this point, it has been only on a computer but that us about to change with Zynga bringing the popular game to the iPhone (I assume a iPad app is not too far behind either.) In addition, Netflix is bringing its popular iPad app to the iPhone too.

AT&T making it easier for current iPhone users to upgrade to iPhone 4 and changes data plan but brings tethering

AT&T is making it easier for current iPhone owners to upgrade to the newest iPhone. My upgrade date went from November to well, now! Your mileage may vary depending on when you bought your iPhone as my friend Dave found out since he is a relatively new iPhone user. More news from the blue stripped Death Star, they are getting rid of the unlimited data plan for new users (luckily if you are a current AT&T user you are grandfathered in even if you upgrade to a new iPhone.) The new data plan offers a 200MB DataPlus plan for $15 and a 2GB DataPro plan for $25. Also tethering will be $20 a month (you can’t tether the iPad though). A lot of people hate this new plan but looking at my data use I could lower my bill by $5 a month as I tend to be in the 300-400MB per month range.

Well that is going to do it for this weeks edition of Triple T. Stay tuned for #50 next week! Can you believe it? 50 editions of Triple T!