Gadget & Tech

Cingular is confirming that the release date will be June 11. A customer service manager at Cingular gave us that date late Thursday, but, alas, said he didn’t have any additional information beyond that.

That date is no coincidence. It’s the first day of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, scheduled to be held in San Francisco from June 11 through June 15. (Incidentally, the agenda includes a focus on Leopard, the next generation of OS X that’s supposed to be released sometime in the second quarter of 2007.)

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AT&T Inc.’s wireless division is testing an upgrade to its HSDPA network that the carrier says will dramatically increase uplink speeds.

According to Kris Rinne, AT&T’s executive vice president of network planning and architecture, the company will be rolling out the software upgrade over the course of 2007 and will likely begin offering compatible PC cards by mid-year.

HSDPA focuses on downlink speeds, and the HSUPA upgrade speeds the uplink from the device to the network; AT&T’s wireless network would then be considered HSPA. Rinne said that from current uplink peak speeds of 384 kilobits per second and averages of 150 to 200 kbps, the HSUPA upgrade will put uplink peak speeds in the range of 1.5 megabits per second.

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The company that popularized selling songs online for 99 cents apiece, now hopes to buy interest in albums, giving customers credit for purchases of full albums from which they have bought individual tracks.

Apple introduced the “Complete My Album” feature Thursday on its iTunes Store. It now gives a full credit of 99 cents for every track the user previously purchased and applies it toward the purchase of the complete album.

For instance, most albums on iTunes cost $9.99 so a customer who already bought three tracks can download the rest of the album for $7.02.

Previously, users who bought singles and later opted to buy the album had to pay the full price of the album and ended up with duplicates of those songs.

The album price reduction is good for only 180 days after the initial purchase of individual tracks.

Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of iTunes, said the new feature should help eliminate the resistance that customers, including himself, may have felt in buying an album after they had already bought a single from it.

“Once we bought a song, we wondered why we had to buy it again if we wanted the album,” Cue said. “We hope it helps us sell more songs ultimately, and from the customer point of the view, we think it’s the right thing to do.”
About 45 percent of the nearly 2.5 billion songs sold on iTunes were purchased as albums, Cue said.

For a limited period of 90 days, Apple said it will make the “Complete My Album” offer retroactive to users who purchased tracks dating back to the launch of the iTunes Store four years ago.

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Yahoo plans to remove any limitation concerning storage space for e-mails, allowing users to keep all of their messages forever.

All restrictions have now been eliminated by Yahoo, which is allegedly planning to offer to all of its e-mail subscribers unlimited storage space, starting May 2007.

“We are giving them no reason to ever have to delete old e-mails,” Yahoo co-founder David Filo said in a phone interview with Reuters. “You can keep stuff forever.”

According to Reuters, officials said the decision to remove e-mail storage limits reflects the plunging cost of storage as new personal computers store up to a trillion bytes of data and owners of 80-gigabyte iPods can carry 100 hours of video in their pockets.

“People should think about e-mail as something where they are archiving their lives,” said Filo, who is still active in managing technical operations at the Sunnyvale, California-based company and carries the honorific title of Chief Yahoo.

Yahoo is aiming to have all of its e-mail subscribers “upgraded” within a month, except for China and Japan. “We will continue working with these markets on their storage plans,” John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail, said.

“We have been closely monitoring average usage. We are comfortable that our users are far under 1 gig(abyte), on average,” Kremer told Reuters by phone . “What we see are an increasing number of rich media files as consumers send more photos.”

The Terms of Use will be renewed with this occasion, forbidding any regular user to offer Yahoo space for business purposes, as it is intended only for personal use only.

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A start-up called ZenZui is leaning on Microsoft’s research labs to try to find a better way to view Web content on mobile devices.

Seattle-based ZenZui has licensed a “zoomable user interface” aimed at creating prime real estate on the phone that can help connect road warriors with the information they’re seeking.
In this approach, Web content is broken into tiles. At a distance, users just see the logos of the sites they are interested in. As they zoom in, they can get more detailed information, until finally they are viewing information from a single source. Because the phone already knows which tiles a user is interested in, the information can be downloaded and cached on the device, helping eliminate some of the latency associated with today’s mobile Internet.

“If you try using the Web on a mobile phone, you would probably agree it’s, at best, a painful experience,” said ZenZui CEO Eric Hertz. Combine the slow data speeds with a tiny screen and the need to constantly scroll and it’s a recipe for slow adoption, he said.

One of the biggest challenges for ZenZui will be to line up willing partners, particularly carriers that are used to controlling the real estate on their phones. ZenZui is launching an early trial of its service, but isn’t identifying the carrier it is using.

Hertz said the company does have agreements with several companies to let them use their content in the trial, including Amazon.com, ABC News and Wired magazine. In a couple of other cases, such as Yahoo’s Flickr, ZenZui is using publicly available feeds to create a custom tile.

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The breakthrough could transform how data is accessed, shared and used across the Web for corporate and consumer networks. The transceiver is fast enough to reduce the download time for a typical high definition feature-length film to a single second compared to 30 minutes or more.

The ability to move information at blazing speeds of 160 Gigabits — or 160 billion bits of information in a single second — provides a glimpse of a new era of high-speed connectivity that will transform communications, computing and entertainment. Optical networking offers the potential to dramatically improve data transfer rates by speeding the flow of data using light pulses, instead of sending electrons over wires.

“The explosion in the amount of data being transferred, when downloading movies, TV shows, music or photos, is creating demand for greater bandwidth and higher speeds in connectivity,” said Dr. T.C. Chen, vice president, Science & Technology, IBM Research. “Greater use of optical communications is needed to address this issue. We believe our optical transceiver technology may provide the answer.”

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Apple is expected to launch its next generation Leopard operating system (OS) in April, but according to industry sources, the release of the new OS will be postponed to October to allow Apple to make Leopard support Windows Vista through an integrated version of its Boot Camp software.

Personally, I don’t think Apple will postpone the launch date because of Vista support, I think they can fix the Vista support issue latter on with just an update, that is if the launch date is in April and they can’t fix the Windows Vista “issue” by then.

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The Apple TV has already been hacked to run non-supported video formats, according to a pair of forum users. Confirming Walt Mossberg’s claim that the media hub runs a custom version of Mac OS X, the technique involves removing the hard drive and mounting it on a Mac, where it appears as a native HFS volume. Installing the SSH server Dropbear, the video container Perian, and a custom script lets the Apple TV play files outside of its normal MPEG-4 and H.264 standards.

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The guys in Engadget Unscrewed the Apple TV to see what makes it shine. They found that Apple TV has a standard IDE laptop hard drive, a removable WiFi radio, Nvidia GPU, and an indeterminate Intel processor. The case acts as an antenna for the WiFi and as part of a interesting ventilation system to keep things cool and quiet.

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Microsoft is investigating possible fraud on its Xbox Live online gaming service. The investigation comes after gamers reported having their Xbox Live accounts hijacked and their credit cards used to buy “Microsoft Points,” the virtual currency on Xbox Live, which has more than 6 million users.

“Recently, there have been reports of fraudulent activity and account theft taking place on the Xbox Live network,” a Microsoft representative said in a statement provided to CNET News.com. “Security is a top priority for Xbox Live, and we are actively investigating all reports of fraudulent behavior and theft.”

Gamers have been reporting the incidents for some time in online forums–including on Xbox.com–and to Microsoft’s Xbox help desk. Many users of the Microsoft console have been frustrated with the software giant’s response to date.

“My Xbox Live account was hacked and all credit card info was stolen and used to run up points…Microsoft says: ‘Oh, well, better call your credit card companies, nothing we can do,’” one user wrote on the Xbox Web site last month.

Microsoft asks any Xbox user with a question about the security of their Xbox Live account to call in. “An Xbox customer service representative will help them understand our security policies and procedures,” the representative said.

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