In a complete surprise move, Apple have announced their tablet, the iPad. Ok, yeah, there was a complete lack of suspense…

The iPad houses a 9.7″ screen in a body that’s just half an inch thick and 1.5 pounds in weight. Does Wi-Fi, 3G, has a 10 hour battery, does the app thing too. Basically, it’s a really big iPhone/iPod Touch, with a bit more grunt behind it, to the point where most of the apps available for the iPhone will work with it already with no further modifications needed by the developers. You’ll also have the ability to dock a keyboard or camera onto it if you really want to replace your laptop.

It comes in 3 main flavours: 16GB for $499, 32GB for $599, 64GB for $699, however that’s just the Wi-Fi version. Add in 3G and you’re talking an extra $130 on each price.

Do I want one? Yes. Do I have a need for one? Not really.

Of course, I may change my mind. Price drop to something small? Next version has extras like a camera or two? Who knows what will make it indespensible to me…

Full PR after the jump

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The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in San Francisco will play host to a meeting of tech journalists summoned by Apple to see their latest creation on the 27th of January. Wild and rife speculation is for a tablet PC (or a “really big iPhone”, to the luddites out there), although no-one at Apple has directly commented on what it would be.

Well, yes, OK, there was that Apple lawyer whom tried to take down Gawker’s contest to find out more information about this fabled and probably true tablet and in the wording seemed to confirm it’s existence, and the massive amount of legitimate news organisations reporting on it too without any word of denial from Apple, but there’s still no guarantees that when whomever (it might not even be a speech by Steve Jobs, even that hasn’t been officially told either) goes on stage to talk to the press does the grand reveal, that it would end up being the tablet.

Side point – If anyone is able to pay our airfare and can get us into the presentation, that would be fantastic. £2.50 and a Rubik’s Cube doesn’t get me to San Fran…

This time of year makes me feel so warm and fuzzy. No, not the proximity to Christmas, I mean MacHeist Bonus Season!

Every year. MacHeist sends thousands of Mac users on a wild goose chase in an effort to win free software and also to get discounts on a fantastic bundle at the end of it, as I’ve said before, but last year there was a Christmas bonus which practically gave software away.

This year: They’re doing it again, and it’s stupidly easy to get freebies, since there’s 7 pieces of software available from the get go.
ShoveBox – Storage for tiny scraps of info you need to remember but a single clipboard won’t do.
WriteRoom – Excellent distraction free word processor that I use already.
Twitterrific – A Twitter client.
TinyGrab – Screenshot grabbing app.
Hordes of Orcs – Tower Defence in 3D.
Mariner Write – A powerful word processor (available when 500,000 people claim the main pack for free)
Virus Barrier – Anti-Virus for your Mac (available when promoting through Facebook)

There’s only 3 days left to claim this, and who knows what fun will happen next…

[MacHeist]

Apple have announced some new stuff. A Macbook, new iMacs, and a Magic Mouse.

The new Macbook’s main feature would be it’s Unibody design. It’s still polycarbonate, but at least it’s a step in the right direction. There are also all of the expected extras (7 hours of battery life, multi-touch etc).

21.5″ and 27″ iMacs were detailed as being fuelled by Intel Core 2 Duo processors from 3.06 GHz, and there’s talk about the Core i5 and i7 quad-core processors too. New edge-to-edge design, the 21.5 having a maximum resolution of 1920×1080 and the 27 getting 2560×1440, wireless keyboard and the newfangled Magic Mouse comes as standard.

Speaking of the Magic Mouse, it’s basically the replacement of the Mighty Mouse that no-one cared about. The main improvement is that you now can do multi-touch commands on the surface of the mouse itself, which sounds like a good idea.

The Press Releases are after the jump…

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According to Apple, they’ve managed to have their 2 billionth application downloaded from their App Store. Just to stress, that’s 2 BILLION. 2,000,000,000. Two and NINE ZEROS!

There’s more than 85,000 of them in the store, and spread over the 50 million iPhone and iPod Touch customers, that works out to be an average of 40 apps per device. Sadly, it’s unknown how much money this has raised for neither Apple nor the development teams involved, but it’s sure to be a high number.
Steve Jobs was quoted by the Apple PR team as saying: “The rate of App Store downloads continues to accelerate with users downloading a staggering two billion apps in just over a year, including more than half a billion apps this quarter alone. The App Store has reinvented what you can do with a mobile handheld device, and our users are clearly loving it”.

Well done Apple. Well done.

We would have told you sooner had the website been working properly, and I’m sure that everyone else on the internet knows this already, but better late than never: Apple released a new iPod Nano.

I know, I know, it’s not really big news at all on the face of it, but it is.

For a start, there’s an FM Radio. Yeah, not too impressive. It’s got a microphone too. That’s vaguely useful.
But it also has a camera, allowing people to take photos, or more likely, to film others doing stupid things and then upload it onto Youtube.

The full Apple press release along with some photos after the jump…

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It’s been 48 hours since Apple at WWDC announced the iPhone 3G S, and people are already complaining. Aside from some people saying that it was all a bit of a letdown in terms of announcements, the large majority of whining comes from iPhone users on O2 that want to upgrade but have a problem.

The issue stems from the fact that when the 3G got released, O2 UK allowed for free upgrades to the new handset. This time, O2 are refusing it. People are unhappy as they don’t want to either be locked into the remaining months on their contract nor pay a large charge to get out of said contract. Granted, it’s a hefty phone bill anyway, but this does seem quite strange behaviour from the consumers.

in the UK, it is extremely rare for the phone provider to allow for a free upgrade before a contract is up (You know, what we call “Normal”). Usually this would be towards the last two months of a contract, but last time O2 were benevolent enough to allow this to be extended. This time, the change in the handset involved is only minor, and in a climate where O2 needs all the money it can get (the economy is “bad”, apparently), I can’t really see O2 actually doing anything wrong here.

I know with my own phone contract that I’m stuck with it for 18 months. I don’t expect the phone company I am with to allow me special dispensation to cut the contract short because I want it to. I paid my money, I made my choice. If I were running the phone company, I would have to be asking serious questions of myself and my staff if this were allowed to happen to everyone.

Seriously, grow up…