Latest Technology News

I've got a confession to make: I miss Steve Jobs.

Although I don't believe in worshipping at his altar alongside his legions of ardent fans, I can't deny that a Jobs keynote -- or anything he says, thinks or touches -- is more memorable simply because it came from him. While it's fair to say the vast majority of today's wonder-devices and services exist because of visionaries who had the guts to see beyond the here and now, it's also true that these very individuals have traditionally been quiet geniuses, content to drive their companies from behind a wall of corporate secrecy.

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Download Safari 4 for Windows 4.30.17.0 from Fileforum now.

Perhaps the absence of Apple CEO Steve Jobs, or any hint of his existence, will go down as the biggest disappointment of this year's WWDC conference in San Francisco. But it may be on the top of a list of more than one item, and down that list not too far behind Jobs' no-show, there is this news: The final release version of Safari 4 is not the fastest Web browser on Windows, despite what SVP Phil Schiller told attendees today.

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AT&T subscribers who purchased an iPhone 3G and wish to upgrade to the 3GS early can do so by renewing their 2-year agreement and paying $399 or $499 for the 16GB or 32GB for the new device plus an $18 upgrade fee, the mobile operator said today.

In today's WWDC presentation, Apple listed the new handsets as costing $199 and $299, and did not include the unsubsidized price.

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After a lengthy presentation about the free iPhone 3.0 update (which will cost $9.95 for iPod touch users on June 17) and software support from third party companies such as Line6, Planet Waves, Zipcar, ngmoco:), gameloft, Pasco, and TomTom; Apple unveiled its show-closing announcement, the iPhone 3G S, "the fastest iPhone ever made."

The unit will differ from the previous iPhone generations in that it will support 7.2 Mbps HSDPA, include an Autofocus 3 Megapixel camera with a 30 fps video mode, an internal magnetic compass, improved battery life, and hardware encryption and come in 16 GB and 32 GB varieties for $199 and $299 respectively. Outwardly, the device looks identical to its predecessors, and offers a similar 3.5" multi-touchscreen, volume rocker, sleep/wake, and single home button.

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Among today's announcements at Apple's WWDC, iPhone Software Senior Vice President Scott Forstall presented many of the new updates coming with the iPhone 3.0 software upgrade, which will endow the popular iPhone with more than 100 new features. Among these will include the highly demanded support for MMS and bluetooth data tethering, which the popular device has lacked.

Unfortunately, though, the United States' exclusive iPhone carrier AT&T was not listed among the launch partners supporting these updated services, which elicited boos from the audience this morning. The new 3.0-enabled tethering feature was simply listed as being available "later this summer," from 22 carriers worldwide, but with no mention of AT&T.

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Sporting new displays, a new non-removable Lithium Polymer battery with a promised 7-hour charge, an SD card slot in place of ExpressCard slots, and offering a new 13" option, Apple's 2009 notebooks comprise its "most affordable lineup ever."

At the bottom of the revised lineup is the new 13" aluminum unibody MacBook Pro, with a 2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, 2 GB RAM, 160 GB and SD card slot for $1,199. This can be upgraded to a 2.54 GHz Core2 Duo, 4 GB RAM, and 250 GB of storage for $1,499.

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As of about 10:45 am PDT this morning, the "beta" label still appeared on the download page for Safari 4, though we expect the label to be dropped perhaps within the hour.

Betanews will certainly be testing Schiller's claim that Safari 4 is the fastest Web browser on all platforms, but throughout the beta period, it did run circles around Firefox and even bested Google Chrome. The last beta build to be distributed, however, encountered performance problems in the Windows 7 RC that it didn't face in Windows Vista SP2. We'll find out whether Apple corrected those deficiencies in time.

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If last Friday's Release Candidate for Mozilla's Firefox 3.5 is truly indicative of the final release (last week's was not, unfortunately), then how much faster performance will Firefox users expect to see the moment they install it? When the organization first started seriously ramping up the development of its TraceMonkey JavaScript engine last year, we said that speed boost would have to be in the triple-digit range to keep up with competition, as well as to meet the high expectations Mozilla set.

Today, Betanews tests have a preliminary answer, and it's exactly what developers have been looking for: A speed score of 253% that of the Windows 7 RC -- better than two and a half times the speed of version 3.0.10 -- and 222% that of Windows Vista SP2, in tests conducted with the "Beta 99" release candidate build posted last Friday, versus the current stable Firefox release. The general public may get a chance to see that performance improvement later this week, assuming this time Mozilla releases Firefox 3.5 RC to the general public as planned.

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Last March the world got its first look at Opera Mobile 9.7, and its upgraded server-side optimization technology called Opera Turbo working in tandem with the Presto 2.2 rendering engine.

Today, the public beta of Opera Mobile 9.7 has been made available for download for touchscreen Windows Mobile devices.

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One way or the other, Steve Jobs will likely be the story of this year's WWDC. The keynote is to be led by senior marketing VP Phillip Schiller, but if The Jobs is to appear anywhere, our bets would be on the "one more thing' spot about 45 minutes into the presentation. With whispers of his return to health spreading through the usual channels, it's difficult to imagine him not, at the very least, leaving a taped message. If there's no word from him at all, that will still be the story as the faithful will probably speculate about his poor condition. More on WWDC in What's Next, as we move forward on this Monday.

Pre-verts dissect new phone for your amusement

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Although the early reviews were out Thursday, we still learned a few things during Sprint's special invite-only launch event for the Palm Pre Friday. We spoke with Sprint Chief Service Officer Bob Johnson about the new phone and the carrier's rollout plans starting Saturday. Here are the takeaways:

-- Johnson said that data tethering is possible with the Palm Pre and said that Sprint -- unlike Verizon and AT&T which charge extra -- will allow customers to connect it to their laptops in order to surf the Web over Sprint's 3G network. However, this information conflicts with what we have heard elsewhere (Engadget was told the opposite), so we are following up. Sprint initially advertised data tethering as a feature of the Pre in February, but soon removed the reference.

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The Palm Pre officially goes on sale via Sprint at 8am Saturday morning, but the carrier held special invite-only events in 10 cities Friday evening, giving selected Sprint Premier customers early access to the iPhone rival. Only those eligible to upgrade were invited, with around 120 RSVPs at Sprint's Washington, DC store we visited.

Sprint has prepared all of its nationwide stores for the Palm Pre launch tomorrow, with actual phones available for customers to play with and video screens detailing the features. Through its "Ready Now" program it launched last September, Sprint will make sure all buyers have their phones fully setup by the time they leave the store -- a marked difference from the iPhone launch.

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This episode of Recovery is brought to you by Keyboard Cat. Because this week needs played off something fierce.

The responses are in, Scott's wrung the votes out of the staff, and you all know at last the three names dubbed Better Than Bing. (Confidential to csurfer: I do love a math joke; confidential to arq_carlos1, if we had gold stars for individual editors' favorites you'd get mine.) And now that we've got that out of the way, might I ask you people what you'd rename Yahoo and Google?

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BlackBerry maker Research in Motion has reportedly acquired former connected navigation device maker Dash, which left the hardware business in late 2008.

PND maker Garmin showed off its nuvifone concept in the beginning of 2008, and a year later re-announced that it would be launched as a joint project with novitiate smartphone maker Asus. Also in 2008, leading mobile phone maker Nokia completed its acquisition of navigation company Navteq which was announced in 2007.

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After last week's scuffle with filtered image results, we left our two major Web search engines in a tie-up, with the score Bing 3, Google 3 after six heats. For the tie breaker for this week, we're going to throw a curve ball.

A great search engine has to be responsive and helpful and informative for someone who is completely in the dark, not only about the topic he's interested in, but about the nature of the Internet. Some of our comments this week have taken us to task for not using the smartest queries -- for instance, one person asked, why couldn't someone have searched on IMDB.com for Rod Taylor instead of on Google or Bing? The answer there is, IMDB may be no better than either Bing or Google at helping someone locate an actor based on minimal information. We created a "backwards" query for this test because that's the type of query inquisitive folks may very well create for themselves.

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