One of the main events in the IT world last week was the death of Michael Jackson. More on that later after this week's article in which I give Apple 4 out of 5 for the 3.0 iPhone update.

iPhone 3.0 Update: Four out of Five from me

I was talking about the Find my iPhone feature in Mobile Me when I went into the Studio in Siam Discovery last weekend. One of the things I had looked at was the "wipe" command, which has one of those Apple fail-safe, Are you sure? messages before you lose everything. I did not go all the way, but the iStudio had to try it out. They told me that when they used the restore command in iTunes, it asked for the password to make sure that the device was authorised. That adds a little reassurance should anyone be unfortunate enough to have one stolen.

I was sad to find out this week that the food center in the Siam Center was closing as I had used this for reasonable, inexpensive food when in town for quite a while, having been introduced to it in the first place by Apple's head of operations here. Looks like it is a choice between Mahboonkrong and Siam Paragon. Ugh.

When you go into the iStudio they are often playing Apple videos and a couple on the iPhone feature a guy in regulation black tee-shirt and trousers, and wearing thin framed specs.. That is Bob Borchers who was previously at Nokia, and last week it was reported that he is leaving Apple for a venture capital company who are interested in mobile technologies.

Once again those who know better in Thailand have set the country back even more. Earlier this week it was decided by the Office of the National Telecommunications Commission that the issue of 3G licences should be put back to the first quarter of next year. We wonder here if this is going to be like the Skytrain extensions, or the building of Bangkok Airport which took some 20 or more years.

It is also worth remembering that most other countries have 3G up and running, including close neighbour Vietnam which one would not normally think of as being in the vanguard of technological progress. Actually, they are probably not: in their case it is just keeping up to date. It is Thailand that is falling badly behind mainly because of the legions of old men who do not know when to let go.

Apple TV was updated last week and along with it the iPhone Remote app was also updated and now works with the Apple TV as well as with iTunes.

What I was a bit disappointed about was the non-appearance of the supposed iDisk app for the iPhone and iPod touch. I hadn't seen or heard anything about that but then on Sunday I was looking for something else on the Mobile Me pages and saw that the app was marked by Apple as coming soon, so I was not imagining it after all.

Apple has doubled its shareholding in UK chip-maker Imagination Technologies who make the PowerVR processor and now owns about 14% of the company. The significance is that these chips are used in the iPhone and iPod touch.

Samsung however, are apparently closing down their manufacture of 1.8" hard disks -- the very ones we may well have in our notebook computers -- as they are more interested in solid state drives. So while the lack of a manufacturer -- only Toshiba remains -- might put prices up in the short term, the move to chips as drives may move that commodity down a peg or two. As 250G ones are now available for some of Apple's products, anything in this line that gets them into my hands is good.

The MacBook Air was the first to have these solid state drives and we see that this week Apple released an SMC firmware update for these computers: those, that is that have had the batteries replaced. It should be shown in Software Update if you need it, but it is also on the Downloads pages.

The Register got all indignant about Apple hard drive failures last week. Before we go into panic mode, consider this. One of the reasons we buy Macs, or at least why I do, is that the whole thing works properly. Usually anyway. Not long ago Apple released a firmware update for the hard drives in the new MacBookPro and for most people this worked as it should. However, some, who had changed the hard drives for those not on the list started to complain when things went wrong.

The Register opens with the shock headline, compounds that with the first sentence, then fills in most of the facts on the way.

Now one argument may well be that a hard drive is a hard drive, but that is less the case these days with special chipsets and other parts of the installation: heavens look at the hoops users had to go through with Vista to get their already working hardware to continue, although that was for totally different reasons.

And recently, as I mentioned in the main article, with the 3.0 iPhone update, iTunes did some checking before the installation to make sure the iPhone was fit and proper, which may be why there were some long faces round my department as there were at least 3 there with phones from the US or Mahboonkrong and several students last week were also casting envious eyes in my iPhone's direction.

One of my colleagues has done the right thing. He left his first one in a bathroom (oh for, Find my iPhone), and gave his second one to his wife. The one he uses now is from True; and he was also talking last week about a 13" MacBookPro for a project he is running.

On that MBP, I gave him the number of the lady at EITS, who is very kind to us, partly because she is selling more and more Macs at the Engineering faculty. She wrote on Friday to a colleague, with a copy to me, telling him about a new promotion on the Mac mini - a machine I rate highly having had three.

She tells us EITS are now running a Back To School Campus Roadshow. The theme for this year is to show the new features for Snow Leopard and give students and university staff an Apple special offer with Education Price. I guess that means that when they come round with these, they will have Snow Leopard installed (it is only 2 month to the release) and will be up to speed on it.

There is not too much to notice for most users, apart from QuickTime X. And I checked with Apple. As with OS X, it is QuickTime TEN and not X.

Back to my colleague who got the email. He was a PC man through and through with some wide experience of Unix systems too then decided to go for his first Mac: a 17" iMac with the Intel processor. He thought he would be running Windows most of the time. He is now on his second Mac. carrying the iMac round all the time, including to a conference in Korea, did get a little tiresome, so he went for the 13" Mac Book and he loves it. Like a lot of people who see the sense of Macs, however, he (and the other prof I mentioned earlier) are running smack in the face of others who have zero Mac knowledge and make decisions on that. They would be aghast if I strung a power cable between our two buildings with no consultation on the specifications required, but everyone is a computer expert.

One of my favourite sites is The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) and they had an item this week on a photographer who is doing great things with his iPhone camera. I must admit, in good light conditions, the results are rather good and can be enlarged quite well.

TUAW remind us of the New Yorker cover that had me buying Brushes, and we had also discussed David Hockney. Now they bring in Steve Turner who won an award for a photo he took on his iPhone.

That article links to an earlier one they had on the software, which is called Camerabag which is now also on my iPhone.

What this does is to take an image one takes with the camera, or one of the images in the iPhoto libraries on the device, and applies filters to the image, creating a new one. There are several filters including Helga, Lolo, a fisheye one, and a couple of black and white effects. This makes for some more interesting interpretations of the basic photos we can take with this inbuilt camera.

Everyone and his friend had a take on the death of Michael Jackson last week with interpretations and anecdotes; while the internet almost ground to a halt in some places with the number of searches and pages loaded on the late star. For all his personal weaknesses, he was a performer. In the 80s, the opening bars of Billie Jean or Thriller, along with a particular Lionel Ritchie number were guaranteed to get all those at a club or bar on their feet and headed for the dance floor. They still get the feet tapping. Remember that Fred Astaire said of him, "That boy can dance."

Many news programs world wide were given over to his death which was still high in the bulletins even four or five days later.

A side-effect of his death was that on Friday he became the most downloaded artist at the iTunes store. There was "an unprecedented . . . 9 albums in the Top 10, 14 in the Top 20, 16 in the Top 40, and 21 in the Top 100."

The phenomenal spike in searches made Google think it was under attack. Have a look at the graph on the CNET page I link to, where we an see part of the record for unique visitors in a single day with 16.4 million visitors.

Among the oddities that came out was the information that Jackson was the holder of United States Patent 5,255,452 for anti-gravity shoes. That was how he and some other dancers leaned over at impossible angles in the Smooth Criminal video.

On my way into Bangkok on Tuesday morning, I was listening to a podcast that was recorded at the Glastonbury festival, an event that focuses on modern music, although the headliner on one of the stages was Bruce Springsteen who went down really well with his 2 hour 40 minutes set and was described by one commentator as "a steaming rock ox."

There were also comments on Jackson from many of the acts, themselves popular performers and many mentioned what a phenomenal influence he had been on so much modern music. I think the nicest comment concerning this was that, once we heard about the death, all the bad stuff was forgotten.

With Snow Leopard expected in two months, I heard on Saturday that the update cost for those who buy Macs now will be 390 baht. They will not get the disk until after the release, of course, but nor will they have to pay full price for the upgrade which I expect to be about 1,000 baht.

In the meantime, those of us with Leopard can begin to look forward to the last 10.5 update as 10.5.8 has been newly seeded to developers. The usual security and compatibility fixes, but this one also contains some lead ins to Snow Leopard with some fine tuning. Also we hear that Apple may be giving these updates nicknames, using names of gods, with this one being Loki. Anyone remember Jim Carrey in The Mask?

On the other hand, some people will be eagerly awaiting Windows 7 (or perhaps dreading it) and its many flavours which are due out a month after Snow Leopard. October is what we have been told but I am not putting any money on it: but it may be time to invest in repair shops. Ina Fried has an article on CNET News titled Making sense of the Windows 7 upgrade options. It is aimed at those buying new computers with certain versions of Vista; and to be honest, once I got past One, which is all Snow Leopard is, she lost me.

I despair when I see my students using hotmail accounts, and I worry even more when company representatives and even government officials here have cards that show they also have only hotmail accounts: don't they realise what this says about them?

I have been following a story in the US this week in which a governor of the state of S. Carolina, one Mr Sanford, allegedly went missing and then was found to have been with an affair in Argentina. Within hours, emails from the two were on the internet and, surprise, they had been obtained from a hacked Hotmail account.

Late News

It is 102.3MB and is available through Software Update.

Initially would not let me do it until I plugged in the power cord.

LoopRumors tell us this morning that while Steve Jobs is rumoured to be back at work, there is a chance he will appear at an Apple Special Event that is being suggested for August. Chances then are that this could be iPods or even an iMac update; but this is Apple. . . .

This week, CNET's Dong Ngo takes a trip home to H Chi Minh City and discovers an Aladdin's cave of techno goodies which sounds like a cross between Mahbbonkrong, Phantip Plaza and Chatuchak.

Apple have apparently released the iPhone 3.1 beta update to developers as well as the 3.1 SDK. I wonder what will be fixed or changed when we eventually get it.

And while Michael Jackson may have caused a spike n searches and certain downloads, this month we are told by Lance Whitney that Apple tops the number of people visiting the site, with HP a distant second.

I mentioned in the main item troubles with apps. This week I had some troubles with calendars but only on the iPhone: a double set. When I looked there was a Mac set and a Mobile Me set and a set for all, which gave me two entries for some calendars. Although the iPod touch did not show this, the iPhone was not indicating in iTunes that it was synchronising with Mobile Me, when it clearly was. As I was checking things out, I also saw I had a double set of Contact details.

I took the bull by the horns and wiped the iPhone -- not too hard really - then set it all up again. First OS 3.0 goes on, then the calendars and contacts. When I started to set up the Mobile Me push settings, it warned me that there was data already on the phone and gave me the option to merge or to run two sets of data. I may well have missed that before: Merge gave me the correct display. I really should pay attention.

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