Bangkok Diary

Graham K. Rogers

Apart from the time difference which has confused me just a bitk, the afternoon after the Keynote Speech by Steve Jobs at the MacWorld Conference at the Moscone Center, San Francisco, was interrupted by a lack of Internet at the hotel the journalists from Apple's Asia-Pacific region have been put in. The hotel is nice itself, and the stuff are excruciatingly polite, but the Internet gods were against me and I had to walk down to the Moscone Center again this afternoon so that I could send my tales to the Bangkok Post.

By necessity, this will be short, but we will be back tomorrow as we expect to get our hands on the new toys.

Once back at Moscone Center, I took time to wander around at random and took lots of pictures, some of which can be seen on a related page.

The news of the day of course is in four section, each more dynamic than the previous. We started with a report on Leopard and a new item of hardware, Time Capsule which plugs a hard disk into an Apple Airport Extreme base station allowing wifi backups using Time Machine. Two versions are released: 500GB for $299 and 1 Terabyte for $499. Apple looks to be moving away from Firewire.

The iPhone has new applications and a few new tricks as does the iPod touch. The new touch release is shipping today: probably in the shops in the US in a day or so and in Asia a few days more. The old iPod touch can be updated for $20 and the download comes via the iTunes music store and that means all of us with no online iTunes store are sunk. Never mind, it will probably be in Phantip Plaza in a week or so and Apple will once more encourage the pirates, although (to be fair) they d not engage in this as much as other major companรes. They shouldn't do it at all.

Also usign ITunes is a new movie rental service and Steve has mnanaged to bring on board all of the major movie houses. Again, those of us in Thailand need not apply. What a waste of opportunity here.

And then item four on Steve's list: a lightweight notebook computer, with ridiculously thin dimensions of 0.76" width going down to 0.16" while still having a full keyboard and a 13.3" dieplahy. This is highly desirable.

I had made a note in my list of things to do to check, or even buy, software for speech recognition on the Mac from a company called MacSpeech. Tuesday morning (SF time), I was up fairly early so went to the company's site, only to find a new screen -- reminiscent of how Apple changes their opening screens -- "It's when everything changes for Speech Recognition on the Mac." This was intriguing, particularly in relation to other mysteries that always appear round this time for Apple followers.

I had seen one of the products on the shelf at the Apple shop the afternoon before, but it was older and did not refer to 10.5, Leopard, so I thought the both at the shop would be my best bet anyway, but here was another twist. Not only was there this teaser page, but no other pages were available, suggesting a complete product line revamp.

Later at the company's booth, I saw that indeed, the whole thing had been revamped and would be available in a couple ofweeks: just my luck. Things got worsde when I was told that mailing or using a courirt service to Thailand was fraught with anger and they declined.

As Apple shops in the US and UK and Europe handle this, I handed over the company card to Tony Li, whom we met a couple of times, and asked him to think about it.

Also, while touring round the booths, I saw Alsoft and Disk Warrior and asked the question that must have been asked a hundred times already: when is there a verion for Leopard.

"About one week,: I was told

Back at the hotel some could get online, while others (and I was in the second group) coped. I was given the number of the service provider and caled. The man at the end walked me through several attempts and he finally forced the login as the authorization router or software or both, were misbehaving.

I finally managed to send my photographs to the Post.

Other images here.