Okay, this one’s cutting it a bit to fine and exact to be a baseless rumor. ZDNet has this delicious rumor about the new HexaCore Mac Pros that the rumor mill sniffed out last year itself. If their word is corrent, then Apple is getting ready to unveil the new HexCore Mac Pros with the Intel Core-i7980x chip that Intel is supposed to unveil on the same day. The code name for the chip is ‘Gulftown’

Logically that only makes sense if Apple is to really get that exclusive deal that the first rumors talked about. According to those rumors, Apple is supposed to have a temporary exclusivity over this chip, like it has done in the past with Intel. If pressurized, Intel might oblige Apple because after all, Apple’s business means a lot of business to Intel and it goes beyond just chips.

The Gulftown chip is the result of the new 32nm fabircation process and will have six physical cores.  The Core i7-980x will be called the Core-i7x (Extreme Edition). It is going to be the very first dual-socket, six-core processor made by Intel. With its 6 cores, 12 threads and dual configuration, this new Mac Pro with the Core i7-980x will have 24 logical cores that will max out at a high 3.33 GHz. None of this is totally official but it is way too close now to be wrong.

The Mac Pros received a small speed upgrade last December but other than that it hasn’t seen any action since over a year. With rumors suggestiing a Mac Pro refresh on Tuesday and Intel gearing up to unveil Gulftown on Tuesday, it seems like a logical conclusion that they will be Apple’s new Mac Pro. There’s one snag to this dream team though and it has been pointed out by HardMac.

As they point out, Apple usually uses Intel’s special Xeon chips that are meant for servers, on their Mac Pro models. And Intel is also releasing multiple new Xeon 5600-series chips on Tuesday. This includes Intel’s 2010 flagship chip — the Xeon 5680. And now, Tuesday can’t come fast enough.

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And the frenzy has already started. Apple started the pre-order quite early today at 5:30am PT. The store was down as usual before that but this time at least we knew what was going on. There’s isn’t much to report. The shipping date has not changed (thankfully) and when you go to the Apple store now, you will see the iPad right before the iPhone and it has a prominent ‘Pre-order’ sticker above. Shipping seems to be free. WiFi-only models ship on April 3rd and the 3G models ship later the same month. The exact date has not been declared.

Go here for the beauties and enjoy ogling!

According to AppleInsider, Apple is going to enable proper multi-tasking on the iPhone OS 4.0. They have this from sources that have a proven track record for Apple Intelligence. Hence, they are putting a lot of emphasis on this rumor. It’s not that multi-tasking does not exist on the iPhone, it does. But the 4.0 update will finally allow third apps to simultaneously — something that has been sorely missing from the iPhone all this time.

The iPhone OS currently only allows certain apps developed by Apple to run in the background while the user is running another app. However, these a few essential apps and it’s not like all Apple apps are able to run in the background.

According to the said sources, Apple has finally developed a “full-on” solution that will allow multi-tasking on the iPhone without affecting the performance and the battery life — two of the main reasons why true multi-tasking hasn’t been allowed on the iPhone so far. In fact, without a proper solution like the one being touted here, mobile OS’ should not multi-task. The sources say that they have tried it out and deem that it still has some way to go before it goes public. But then will Apple be able to make it to their usual summer release for all things new in the iPhone world? We don’t know yet.

Apple made fun of the cumbersome task manager on the Windows Mobile OS when they were releasing the iPhone OS 2.o. And even though Android ‘boasts’ of true multi-tasking, there are several reports of the phones freezing and crashing due to the poor management of resources when too many apps overwhelmed the system.

In fact, it was earlier this year when Leo Laporte of Twit.tv mentioned live during one of his netcast that his Nexus One Once froze for over 3o minutes, during the course of which he was unable to do anything with it. That means it could not receive calls either. Even though Leo said he loves Android more than the iPhone now and has switched full time, he lamented the fact that users have to pay the cost of being able to multi-task by running out of resources from time to time.

The current restriction on multi-tasking on the iPhone is artificial and there’s nothing preventing Apple from flipping a switch one through an update Nothing except a proper solution like the one being talked about here of course. So technically, the iPhone OS as of 3.0 is capable of multitasking and anyone claiming anything different is wrong.

This capability in the iPhone can also be taken as a sign that Apple has been working since the very beginning on providing hassle free multitasking. Multi-tasking on the mobile phones has to be rethought according to the platform and not done in the way Widows Mobile did. So Windows Phone 7 series has actually done the right thing by walking the iPhone way. The main issue here is to let the user know what is running and all the while manage apps intelligently so that important functions like receiving a call still work under heavy load.

After all, what good is a phone that occasionally freezes up so bad that it can’t receive a call. Not to state the obvious but it’s kinda ironical that I can’t take calls on my ‘Phone’ because I was running too many apps on it.

Another reason why Apple doesn’t allow third-party apps to run in the background is because of security. If an app hides in the background without the user knowing about it, it could potentially be working to malicious ends. It could be a trojan or a rootkit or a worm or similar such malware that is up to no good. This is why jail-broken iPhones are the only ones till date to have gotten infected with malware.

If there’s one thing Apple doesn’t need, it’s a malware slipping into the App store and installing something malicious that runs in the background.

There’s also a huge challenge at the UI level. Apple, or any other mobile OS developer for that matter, has to design a solution for switching between running apps and also knowing what apps are running. Currently, the few things that are running on the iPhone OS have a visual cue to clue the user in about what is going on. But there isn’t enough real-estate on the screen to display multiple small apps running together.  This calls for an innovative solution that no one has thought of yet.

Also, efficiently switching between apps while maintaing an intelligent resource allocation is pretty hard. Resource allocation is what really matters when it comes to maintaing a stable OS environment. But making the phone figure that out without the user having to intervene or thinking about it is a real challenge.

In the mean time, there has always been the problem of providing that much horse power for apps. The mobile chips have not been all that powerful and hence running complex things like games have always been a problem on every other mobile platform except the iPhone. Now that Apple has the A4 and more RAM is being pushed in to the mobile devices, the iPhone might finally be ready to handle this kind of load. After all, Apple would never take the risk of the phone getting overloaded from  a few apps running together because the processor and the RAM couldn’t handle it.

So to underline the fundamental things required by Apple to maintain their great user experience after adding multi-tasking — they need to make it easy for the user to switch between apps without a noticeable lag, they have to ensure that the phone knows how to handle resource allocation automatically, they have to make sure that no app can hide in the background and above all — phone calls should always get through.

Apple has the brains in its UI and programming departments to pull something like this off. And with Apple’s obsession over controlling user experience, I will trust Apple to finally solve this problem and show others how it should be done. Now that Android has (almost) finished catching up with iPhone, it is time for Apple to step up the game.

Apple has never been one to jump in to something just because everyone else is doing it and the market craves it. They usually try to get things right before launching into something and this is what has probably kept them from flipping that multi-tasking switch. So if they are doing it now, I can hope that that they have a really innovative solution on their hands. If they don’t, they’ll losing market share that could’ve been theirs but went to Google instead.

There are a lot speculations around the iPhone 4.0. There’s the front-facing camera demand/expectation/rumor and the accompanying video conferencing rumor. Then there’s the navigation question along with mobile ads. But if this one feature is implemented and nothing else is, Apple will still gain a lot of new customers and sell still more iPhones.

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There’s still no answer to the question whether or not Apple will sell the iPad in China any time soon. Just like with the iPhone, there is a lot of demand for the device in China that is fueling the existent cloning attempts made by chinese manufacturers. In addition to that, there is a burgeoning grey and black market that is getting ready to make money off iPads imported from countries where they are officially on sale.

A lot of Chinese shops and outlets are already taking pre-orders for the iPad, who will then import it from countries where it is on sale. But there’s no stopping at that. China, as we know, is a clone makers paradise. You have clone making companies in every nook and cranny of the industrial areas of China and they are always busy making clones of big ticket items. Mostly smartphones and other handhelds and they often add their own special ‘touch’ to the phones, making them so very different from the original that the hilarious results often end up here and elsewhere on the Internet.

You get ‘iPhones’ with dual sim slots, multiple cameras, SD card slots, FM radio tuners and much more! You get ‘Blackberries’ and ‘Nokias’ as well, just name what you want on your phone and you will probably get it. Just don’t expect the UI and OS to be usable and stable.

Of course, even that is changing, thanks to Android. Here’s a great free OS which is actually rivaling the iPhone and growing constantly. So why not use it?

However, when it comes to the iPad clones, most of run full or modified versions of Windows. Many run Windows 7 That is probably because they want to flaunt marketing pitches along the lines of “can the iPad do this?”. After all, a lot of people think that a full fledged OS is far better than what they see as a blown up mobile OS on a tablet. This perception will probably change once more people start using these so called iPad competitors running full OS’.

But come what may, the chinese clone makers will keep on cloning whatever catches their fancy. To think that the iPad and most of its clones will be made within miles of each other in some cases! That’s China for you!

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ARM is a company that is in a very good position to know and guess exactly how many tablet devices are coming out globally. Since most of these devices use ARM-designed low-power, high performance chips, it is easy for ARM to keep a track of these things. Even Apple’s iPad uses what is suspected to be a modified ARM Cortex A8/A9 chip (we are actually quite sure about it being an ARM chip, we’re just waiting for the tear down reports). So ARM has spilled the beans — it expects over 50 different tablet devices to come out globally by the end of this year.

An ARM executive remarked today that the total count of tablet PC devices produced this year might be over 50 individual models all over the world. According to this ARM official, the coming of Apple’s iPad has inspired this wave of tablet devices that are suddenly coming out of the woodwork and claiming to be better than the iPad.

Intel is of course not too happy about this. The entire industry is extremely excited about tablets and other low power mobile devices like smartphones. The larger, more powerful computing devices have become old news and are mostly being ignored. And this scenario, Intel is hardly getting any coverage because Intel is hardly present in the area that interests most of the tech industry right now. The most mention of Intel comes from Atom, which is one of Intel’s step towards reaching ARM’s territory. Of course, the chip-maker is far from achieving that any time soon.

ARM’s Worldwide Mobile Computing ODM manager, Roy Chen, said that the first wave of these mobile tablet devices will be launched by mobile carriers in the second quarter of this year. That means will get to see a lot of new tablets in the coming month and the two that follow. Chen said this while attending a press meeting in Taipei. He also said that the months following the Q2 2010, i.e. Q3 2010, will see a even more tablets.

Of course, that’s because the bulk of companies that are working on tablets have started doing so only last year and they are mostly looking at taking a full year to bring out something viable. The others, who had started early last year or late 2008, are going to bring out their tablet devices through April and May.

Chen added that even though a lot of tablets will be launched within China itself, companies everywhere are planning to launch tablets. So this wave won’t be restricted to certain tech savvy pockets of the world. According to him, the top 10 telecom operators are all looking at carrying tablets. He did not mention any names though, so we are left to make guesses. However, all major operators in countries like the US and the UK are going to want in on the action. Just like they are all carrying some kind of internet-ready netbook and the iPhone or its competitors, they are going to want in on the tablet wave. For them, it is yet another point of entry into their service that won’t replace the other points. That way, they can expect to generate more revenue and sustain the growth.

ARM showed off two tablet devices at the Taipei event to aid in its talk of the tablet revolution. Both were Android based tablets. One was made by a company from within Taiwan itself — Compal. They are the world’s second largest contract laptop manufacturers. Their device is 7inch in size and is powered by NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 SoC (which uses ARM Cores). Compal has two versions of this device on offer — one running Windows CE and the other running Android.

The other tablet is nothing much spec wise. It is smaller than the Compal tablet, is called Armadillo and uses ARM core chips from Freescale Semiconductors. This too runs the Android OS. The device itself was just there so that a Japanese software company could show off their instant booting OS. The company is called Ubiquitous and their OS is called QuickBoot. Uninspired naming aside, the reports say that the os managed to boot the device almost instantly to running conditions. That is seriously impressive.

As tablet makers continue to multiply like bunnies on Viagra, Android is achieving a ubiquity like never before. Being free, open source and well supported, it is the most logical choice for any manufacturer who has experience and inclination to design and build hardware but does not have the inclination/money/man power to build a superb OS to compliment it.

Besides, any new OS will be seriously behind in the race, thanks to the severe lack of third party action that it will very likely face. There are three giants in the mobile market right now — Apple, Google and Microsoft and only one makes hardware. So Android is surely going to continue on this path, especially if Micrososft disallows the use of Windows Phone 7 Series on tablet devices. That way, almost any tablet that is not Apple-made will be running Android, except the few that run Windows 7.

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I have covered the Entourage eDGe dualbook several times on this blog. It has almost been a charting of growth as the company moved from alpha to beta to final release. Now they have acquired a content deal with PressDisplay which allows eDGe users to received select newspapers on their Dualbooks.

This service is based on the PressDisplay.com website, which currently has 1,500 titles to choose from You can read papers like The Daily Mail and The Washington Post on you eDGe if you so choose. It is a great resource for sports news from across the world and it is no coincidence that this deal happened during the Fifa World Cup season. Entourage wants its customers to use this service like crazy whilst the season is on.

But the subscription for unlimited content is quite expensive — $30 per month. As is usual with digital content, the perceived value of the content is not high enough to vindicate paying that subscription fee. Besides who has the time to read so much news except the retired and the bed-ridden?

That is probably why you have another option where you get to pay per issue you purchase. At $0.99 per issue, it is a lot cheaper that buying it from a news stand and it is much more convenient as well. There’s another plan where you pay $9.95 for a fixed number of issues each month of one newspaper. That last one is probably going to be the most popular for now because most people are used to subscribing to only one or two newspapers that they like to read.

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Yes, that is what you should do when you legal notices bring you nothing but a tiny bit of media coverage that calls your bluff anyway. The Great Loong brother, China, is a manufacturer of Tablet devices. They had issued a legal notice against Apple with the claim that Apple copied their design with the iPad. What actually happened is that they basically made a tablet that carried the iPhone aesthetics very accurately and released it before Apple launched the iPad.

Of course, if anyone has claim over something that looks like an iPhone, it is the company that made the iPhone. So that legal notice did nothing for the Great Long Brother except draw some ridicule from the tech community in general. So the company has decided that it is payback time. They have taken the OS X aesthetics almost exact to the pixel (almost) and applied it over Windows. This news was uncovered and covered by The Register and Giz-China.

The resultant UI, as you can see in the images, is pretty accurate and believable. In fact, I thought they were going to pull another PsyStar on us by making the OS X run on non-Apple hardware. That much stupidity is rare though because what the Great Loong Brother has done is essentially put a skin over Windows to make it look like OS X. That has happened time and time again in the Windows customization community and is perfectly okay with Apple, even though many use its logo, including the Great Loong Brother Tablet. But that’s mainly because it’s the best form of flattery that a PC user can bestow upon Apple.

Of course, now that they have done this — there device looks more like a OS X tablet that a lot of people have wanted and some modders have achieved in the past and present. I don’t think they are going to issue any more legal threats in the near future. They have succeeded in what they set out to do — gain coverage through mocking blog posts, like the one you are reading right now.

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Of course, this is not much to get excited over, just that Apple has released a new beta version of the iPad SDK and there are a few significant omissions. And as you might know — omissions are extremely important when it comes to causing rumors and telling us things without telling us.

9to5 Mac has pointed out Apple has removed references to the camera and video conferencing that were found in the SDK when it was first released. This removal can mean two things — Apple is going to surprise us or Apple is going to ship exactly what Steve showed during the keynote. In all probabilities, the camera is being reserved for the 2nd-generation iPad and the iPads that will will grace us with their presence soon will not have cameras. If there is at all camera on the iPad at any time, it will have to be a front facing one for video conferencing and not one on the back for capturing photos like the iPhone.

My guess is that since the iPad SDK is basically an enhanced iPhone SDK, the front facing camera references are there because the new iPhone will have that, along with video conferencing. These features have long been missing on the iPhone and it is as good a time as any to add them. AT&T has softened up, Apple has a new chip to make a superfast mobile handheld devices and the competition is just waiting to tear Apple apart if given a sliver of a chance.

The other things that have been added to the SDK are ‘3Tap’ and ‘Long Press’ gestures. These are by themselves nothing new and Apple has been using them on  the iPhone/iPod Touch for quite some time now. But their addition in the SDK makes it easier for developers to use these features.

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Razer has finally gotten around to making Mac drivers for all its upcoming accessories. They announced this at the ongoing GDC (Games Developer Conference). Existing customers won’t be left out in the cold either. They have also committed to making OS X drivers all their existing accessories so that they can be used as easily on Macs as on PCs. And this announcement comes only days after Valve announced that Steam will be available for Macs, along with all the gaming goodness that Steam is known for.

These two announcement show that the Mac platform is coming of age when it comes to gaming. The only reason I and most of the Mac users I know have wanted to have Windows on a Mac is to play games. Windows has ruled the roost so far when it comes to high-end games that market chartbusters. But that is changing fast.

When companies like Razer and Valve decide that OS X is  a platform worth sloggin for, it is tie for Macs to hit the gaming prime time. And if you want more proof that Cupertino is taking the right steps when it comes to gaming on its platforms  — the GDC has dedicated an entire summit to the iPhone.

After all, there is a lot to be liked about Macs in general. There’s much less hardware-software compatibility issues to deal. In fact, there’s almost no such thing to deal with because Apple controls both ends. Developers can thus spend more time on making the game than bug testing it. There are only a handful of components to support and the combinations are well-defined as opposed to the multiplicity seen on Windows.

Over all, stability-wise, Macs are the systems to go for. However, Apple doesn’t always jump on to the bandwagon when it comes to the latest in technology. Also, they are not dedicated to gaming as such. They can’t afford to cater to one niche to much if they want to increase their marketshare.

But now that such positive announcements have been made, we can look forward to some nice fraggin action on MacBooks and iMacs soon enough.

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As with the iPhone, Apple debuted it’s iPad Ad during the Oscars this Sunday. Everyone saw it and everyone thought what they did. But a lot of people took the pains to go through the entire ad frame by frame and uncover hitherto unknown tid bits. TUAW even analyzed the air time that each feature got and made a pie chart out of it! We are lucky to be surrounded by such people.

Looking at the aired AD frame by frame, the observers have caught a glimpse of a ‘My Document’ folder where — you guessed it — the user generated documents are likely to be stored. We are all guessing that this folder will show up as a mount point on iTunes and you can then copy over the files to Finder and then do whatever you want with them. Photos, videos, existing music — everything will be synced through iTunes, there’s simply no two ways about it.

The choice of the ‘My Documents’ may be to make PC users comfortable. Besides, it is a logical thing to name a folder that has documents on a ersonal device ‘My Documents’. There’s a ‘My Documents’ tab shown during the ad at one point, suggesting may be a drag and drop functionality in certain scenarios?

While the ad showed the iBook Store, the pricing was briefly shown. So when the frame is frozen, we get to see pricing that starts seriously low. It ranges between $7.99 – $14.99.  Of course, Apple has not said anything about it and it is unlikely that any comment will be made before the 3rd of April when it is slated to launch.

And then comes a major speculation — the ads show suspicious looking round depression/smudge/something that looks suspiciously like a camera or a proximity sensor. Since the iPad is not expected to be hugged or kissed, a proximity sensor doesn’t make much sense. So the rumor mill is leaning towards a camera. You will have to watch very closely though.

TUAW did an analysis of the total air time divided according to what feature was shown for how long. Turns out that Photo, iBook, Mail and Movie are the 5 main things shown in the ad with respectively 26%, 20%, 22% and 15% time dedicated to them. Safari showing NY Times follows at 9%, followed by Pages and Calendar at 4% and 2% respectively. Maps and Music each get about 1% of the total play time.

This highlights the fact that Apple is selling this device as meant for doing things like Mailing and consuming massive visual content (Photo, Movie, Book, Web). Content creation, navigation and music come in much lower on the priority list. If you look at the amount dedicated to showing off visual content, it becomes clear that Apple is emphasizing on its ability to display all that in a personal, non-netbook/non-iPhone like way.

Apple made it clear that this thing can do a lot of things and is not a niche device that will do one thing well. This is meant to become your comapnion through out the day and this Ad shows why.

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