“But Ben, my iPhone already has Bluetooth!”, I’m sure you are saying right now. Thanks to Apple, you can barely use it for anything, and support for A2DP audio streaming and AVRCP is definitely not included. Luckily there are ways around this. Take the wiRevo Stereo Bluetooth Adapter for iPod and iPhone, which you can buy today on Woot.com’s Yahoo partner site, sellout.woot.com. For anyone who has managed to avoid hearing what Woot is, it is the most famous deal-per-day site on the interwebs. They offer one item per day with a limited stock, and when it sells out, it is gone for good (translation: if you want one of these, buy quick!).

The wiRevo Stereo Bluetooth Adapter for iPod and iPhone supports A2DP and AVRCP, which roughly means that you’ll be able to listen to good quality stereo music through a pair of Bluetooth headphones. There is also a pass-through for your power adapter which means that you can charge your iPhone/iPod while the adapter is plugged in. It is sad that Apple couldn’t build this functionality directly into the iPhone’s bluetooth stack, but $9.99 isn’t a bad deal if you want to remedy Apple’s flaws, and an even better deal if you have an iPod that doesn’t have Bluetooth to start with. I’m not sure exactly which generations of iPod this works with so I’ll leave that little mystery up to you before purchasing it. Seems like this same accessory is selling for around $39 elsewhere on the internets.

This weekend brought some relatively nice weather and I thought it would be a good time for a hike. With some friends I went out to a local preserve, hiked up a large hill, and we had a mini picnic and enjoyed the warm weather. On our way back, we decided it would be a good idea to not go back the same way we came (which involved using a bridge to cross a river), but instead walk down the length of the river and find a downed tree or thin gap that we could cross. We came to a ‘good’ crossing point that had a pretty lengthy jump to a lower bank, but it would get us across. A friend leapt across and I tossed him his gear. It was my turn to jump and after a nice running start I was about to go flying through the air to the other side, when the bank gave way. Short story even shorter, most of me ended up in the water. This included my iPhone 3G which was on my belt. My first mistake was not tossing my phone to someone on the other side, and my second mistake was trusting the edge of the bank to be a good jumping point.

Anyway, the iPhone shut itself off immediately and wouldn’t turn back on; I wasn’t surprised. The phone was only submerged for a few seconds, but it was plenty of time to short some important connections. After a wet drive home, I knew what needed to be done. I pulled a bag of rice out and poured it into a bowl, then buried my iPhone in it. The rice quite readily absorbs water, and if there was any hope for the phone, the rice bath would be the thing to bring it back to life. After several hours in the rice spa, the iPhone powered on! This was a good sign, but it wasn’t completely functional yet. The hardware buttons were shorting out, and the phone constantly thought someone was holding the volume down button and the power button. I used the included SIM ejector key to eject the SIM card from the SIM slot on the top of the phone. This was good because there were visible water droplets covering the SIM card which would have caused problems later. I dried the SIM card and SIM card holder separately and put the iPhone back in its rice bath to try to continue to extract water from it, and hopefully get the hardware buttons back to a working state.

By some inconceivable occurrence, there were two grains of rice in the bottom of the SIM slot several hours later when I checked the phone again. I discovered these after the SIM would not go back into the phone. The SIM slot is a very slim space and it was really hard to see inside. I had to close one eye and line it up with an LED flashlight to be able to see the rice down there. The SIM card contact points are springy and jut out into the middle part of the SIM slot, trapping the rice and making it very hard to remove. The slimness of the space made it hard to get tools down there and around the SIM contact points to remove the rice. All-in-all, I spent at least and hour and a half looking into the slot with a flashlight, then trying to get the rice unstuck using a pocket knife and a paper clip. This was not a fun process, but after much toiling, I finally freed both grains of rice from the SIM card slot.

By this point, the phone’s hardware buttons were functioning fine. I did a restore of the software just to be safe, and had to reload all my media, which took a little while, but it was much better than being without a phone for several days and having to buy a new one.

The moral of this story? Rice not only tastes good, but can bring a soaked gadget back to life. If you are ever in a similar situation, get your device into a bowl of rice ASAP and leave it for several days to give it a fighting chance.

So that was my weekend, did any of you do anything fun?

Following Apple’s moves is a complex but fun and stimulating activity so here’s my take on the big, crazy, risky business of predicting where Apple will move. I think they will move up the Ipod chain rather than down the notebook chain and here’s why.

Netbooks are cheap and in my head, I just can’t get past that simple thought. Apple can’t make a netbook as it would seriously risk de-valuing every other product in their portfolio and, due to the required sales numbers and relative complexity of OS X, could screw their global support operations.  An $899 10″ mini-note is possible, I agree, but despite sizing similarities, it wouldn’t be a netbook would it. Mind you, you can guarantee that every netbook web site will cover it like there’s no tomorrow! I will end that argument against netbooks there but they do play a part as I get to the details of my prediction below.

There are three other options that I see for Apple. The first is one of incremental change. Small improvements all-round. The problem with that is that the last Apple event felt like just the same and losing momentum right now could be an issue. Then again, major production-line investment for a new product could also be risky but given the fact that Apple have plenty of cash and that there are probably production lines out there just begging for a large production run, maybe that’s not the risk it could be.

The second option is some sort of 7″ notebook or tablet. While I, and many of you, like this style of device, we have to be honest and say that the productive ultra-mobility market is probably too niche for Apple. There’s a chance of a simple, slim 7″ iPod touch and a push into e-books, sofa surfing, sofa-gaming and turn-by-turn navigation on the existing iPod Touch hardware and software engine but while interesting and, to me, quite exciting, I don’t see a 7″ Apple tablet happening as again, it could be too niche.

The third option, and more likely in my opinion is a 5″ iPod Plus

Filling the hole that will eventually be left by dwindling MP3 player sales [Yes, Christmas iPod sales are buzzing along but in general, I see the dedicated MP3 player market dropping away over the next few years] providing some of the features of the above, 7″ device, retaining mobility and building on the money-making app audio and video-store is the key which indicates to me that a slightly larger iPod touch with better storage, video, navigation, ebook, web experience and perhaps data-only 3G would be a more attractive and solid base to build on for the future.

Read the full story

Qualcomm demonstrated a Snapdragon based netbook in London last week and gave us a few hints as to how netbook-style devices based on it might turn out. Silicon.com, who published images and information from the event, asks if it’s the next-gen netbook.

‘Alternative-gen’ is more like it in my opinion.

We probably won’t see many of these in the western world as we like our processing power (way) too much but I do expect these to be a success in 2009 and 2010 in other markets. Markets that haven’t really had the chance to use laptops and who’s main form of communication is a GSM phone could benefit from this.

We could see one or two ultra-light, ultra-thin devices here but for them to be a success, they are going to have to offer levels of portability, user interfaces and battery life that only a few companies are in the position to be able to achieve.

As for battery life, in normal Internet-connected scenarios, there won’t be much advantage as screens and radios take the lions-share of the battery. There’s a lot of talk about multi-day battery life but the people that talk about this fail to mention that it’s standby life. Once you start switching those transistors on and off to decode today’s intensive web pages, power drain rises into the same ballpark as ultra low power X86-based devices. Even Qualcomm themselves are being honest about this.

Snapdragon will enable mini laptop style devices – with screens of between nine and 12 inches – to run for between four to six hours without needing to be charged, according to a spokesman.

The last time I spoke to Texas Instruments, they were talking about similar figures too. The 3-4W total power drain range is about the limit of technology for 8-12″ screens in the short term.

Personally, I think the more interesting market, is the mobile Internet device market where 5″ screens enable the best balance between size, portability and quality for video, navigation and our old friend, the world wide web. It’s here, where screen power drain is much smaller, that the new ARM-based platforms could make a bigger impact. Those ARM-based devices were supposed to be in the market already but appear to have been delayed. According to word-of-mouth reports that i’m hearing though, devices are on their way. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Apple putting out a larger, more powerful iPod web and video-focused device on these architectures in 2009. ComputerWorld thinks so too. Unless Apple have something up their sleeve with PA-Semi

Word has been spreading around lately that the second-gen iPod Touch [Portal page] has a faster CPU than any of the previous Touch devices (including the iPhones). This was a bit strange when I first read it because I own an iPhone 3G, and it was easy to see that in comparison, a friends second-gen iPod Touch was visibly faster when there were on-screen GUI actions. I thought that because it was so clear that it was just a known fact that the second-gen iPod Touch was faster. And yet here I am writing this post to let people know that in fact, the second-gen iPod Touch has a faster clock speed than the original iPod Touch, as well as the iPhone EDGE, and iPhone 3G.

From what I’m looking at, it appears as though the ARM CPU in the second-gen iPod Touch is different than those in the other Touch family devices (at first I thought it was simply a change in clock speed). Second-gen iPod Touch: 523MHz, up from 412MHz in the rest of the family of devices. Regardless of the slightly updated CPU, I think it is possible for Apple to turn up the clocks on the other devices to reach the same speed, however there are other important factors to consider before doing that, the biggest of which is battery life. It seems as though the second-gen iPod Touch’s hardware is quite a bit more efficient than the original iPod Touch. Even with the more powerful CPU, the second-gen iPod Touch has better battery life than the original. Here is a list from greatest speed to least for the Touch family:

1. second-gen iPod Touch
2. iPhone 3G
3. iPhone EDGE
4. first-gen iPod Touch

In my personal experience with all of these devices I would say that the speed differences between the iPhone 3G, iPhone EDGE, and first-gen iPod Touch are entirely unnoticeable. Only when you compare these devices to the second-gen iPod Touch can you see a difference.

The real question is why didn’t Apple mention this increased CPU speed (they didn’t mention it IIRC) especially if they managed faster speed with improved battery life? Maybe they meant to limit the CPU to the same clock as the rest of the devices but it slipped by them? Hopefully we won’t see games that cater to the second-gen iPod Touch’s faster CPU. At this point, every piece of software is interoperable across the entire Touch family, it would be a shame to see software that ‘works’ on the other three devices, but is really meant to be run on the second-gen iPod Touch.

Many others have written about it. NYTimes. ARS Technica, Liliputing, GearLog are just a few. This taken direct the article at Small-Laptops.

Jobs on netbooks: “As we look at the netbook category, that’s a nascent category. As best as we can tell, there’s not a lot of them being sold. You know, one of our entrants into that category if you will is the iPhone, for browsing the Internet, and doing email and all the other things that a netbook lets you do. And being connected via the cellular network wherever you are, an iPhone is a pretty good solution for that, and it fits in your pocket.

I love that attitude. He’s effectively saying that MIDs are where it’s at isn’t he. Isn’t he? The ‘Not a lot being sold’ part is probably a nod towards their 7 million iPhone sales.

I agree with Jobs and believe the Netbooks segment is a dangerous segment to be playing in right now. I believe that the action will start to take place in other segments soon. It will only take one well-executed MID/PMP product to make heads turn and for people to realise that most of what they do on their netbooks (surfing, reading emails, IM, videos) can be done by a device that fits in the pocket. Yes I know some of you use netbooks as laptops for inputting text but to be honest, I don’t think that inputting reams of text is what most people are doing with their netbooks. When that special product comes out and when those heads turn, people like Samsung, Toshiba, ASUS could get caught out with big zero-margin netbook stocks. In fact the whole Intel Atom ecosystem could get caught out if that device turns out to be based on an ARM core and gets followed up by a raft of cool ARM-based devices from established players.

Jobs will need a product to replace the iPod in the next 18 months and a combined video and Internet device is perfect for that. There’s almost no question that Apple will do a 4-6" device and that the technology and software is there to be able to do it but the question is, when will the market and carriers be ready? End of 2009? Beginning of 2010? Apple must have tens of prototypes in the lab ready to choose from and they’re probably doing the sensible business thing by waiting.

Fear not, ultra mobile PC Portal isn’t going to start reporting on audio player news, instead we’re just mentioning the iPod Touch refresh as it pertains to the MID category.

That being said: Some of you may have followed the Apple event today. In a nutshell, they dropped some new iPods, iPod Nanos, refreshed the iPod Touch, and released iTunes 8. I’m actually pretty disappointed at the minimal updates to the iPod Touch. Oh well, if it aint’ broke, don’t fix it, right? The new iPod Touch is very similar aesthetically to its predecessor. The back is rounded and it is ever so slightly thinner. Nike+ receiver is built in (this is the accessory that you put in your shoe and it feeds running info to your iPod). Probably the biggest change is the built in speaker, and volume buttons on the side (just like the iPhone), no silent switch though.

On a related note, Apple also mentioned the latest 2.1 iPod Touch/iPhone firmware, which will come on the new iPod Touch, is currently available for old iPod Touchs, and will be rolled out to iPhones on Friday. Apple is apparently charging $10 for the update (if you are an iPod Touch owner), unless you are already running 2.0+, in which case the update will be free.

Thanks to Engadget’s live coverage of the event for the info.
Image courtesy of Gizmodo.com

Update: Full review now available.

Remember this winning rendering from the WWJD 3 competition at Engadget? I loved it!

I think the technology is almost ready Mr Jobs. If you could just give it the magic Apple-dust it would be much appreciated I’m sure.

Click image for specifications.

Full review on Monday.