Timex today unveiled the iControl watches that can wirelessly operate Apple’s iPod and it also works with iPhone when the phone is in airplane mode. According to Vice President of Sports Marketing Timex “iControl offers cutting edge technology and contemporary design, in addition to the functional quality and durability people have come to expect from Timex”. The main features of iControl watch are iPod controls, 50 lap memory, training log, Multi-mode countdown timer, 3 alarms, INDIGLO, 100m water resistance and 3 years of battery life. The watch is offered for $125 in gray, black, blue, pink, orange and green colors.

Intel plans to launch its 45nm quad-core chips few months early, to take out steam from AMD’s recent roadmap announcement. Most likely the new top-of-the-range extreme processor will be clocked at 3.33GHz and will come with 1333MHz front side bus and 12MB of level two cache. Initially only about 2% to 3% of Intel’s desktop chip will be based on 45nm, Intel plans to make this number reach 30% by end of 2008. These new Intel chips will be competing against AMD’s Phenom processors, which will also be released by that time.

Though Apple has never mentioned about enhancements to the iPhone in its documentation ,they have added new features to the iPhone. The first feature is BCC option in mail previously there was just CC option and you had no option to send yourself a copy of the outgoing mail. The other feature is that iPhone now offers up to 1 hour of idle time before asking for Passcode whereas earlier it was up to a minute. The issue of iPhone battery not fully charging has also been solved.

Sony issued a Public Notice to owners of Cyber-shot DSC-T5 camera stating that Sony will offer a free replacement service for the bottom casing of this particular camera. According to Sony, the metal plating on the bottom of the camera unit may warp, causing slight cut or scratch to the skin of the user when it is directly touched.  Totally 416,000 cameras are affected by this recall, out of which 350,000 were sold in United States and 66,000 in rest of the world.

You can check the Public Notice here: Sony's Recall Notice

In a patent filing titled “Audio User Interface for Computing Devices” the iPhone maker said that sometimes using the small screen on handheld devices can cause distractions from critical tasks such as driving and for others it may be difficult to use the small screen for regular everyday use . To end this problem, Apple recommends an audio user interface that generates audio prompts to help a user navigate through different features on the handheld devices. The audio prompt will help the user focus his attention on the critical task on hand. Apple also notes that using the handheld device for text-to-speech conversion gives poor results but if the system is used with a host computer and all the conversions are handled by the host computer the performance of such systems can be improved.

You can read the complete report on: AppleInsider

In the past two years virtualization has been a very strong reason for increased popularity of Intel Macs. First it was Parallels Desktop program that let you run Windows on your Mac and then there was Apple’s Boot Camp. The biggest problem with Boot Camp was that you had to restart the computer to switch into Windows. VMWare will be releasing their Virtualization software named Fusion next week. Like Parallels, Fusion is a virtualization program that will let you run Windows and Windows programs within the Mac operating system. Walt Mossberg compares Parallels and Fusion in his reviews of Fusion. According to Mossberg, Fusion was less system intrinsic program and overall performance was faster than Parallels but Parallels has more features then fusion. So ultimately Mossberg came to the conclusion “You won’t go wrong with either program. Both give the Macintosh a level of versatility that can’t be matched by Windows-only machines”.
You can read the Complete Review here: Fusion Review

ChangeWave published their July 18-20 consumer cell phone survey results today. A total of 3003 ChangeWave Alliance members participated in the survey, which points to an upheaval occurring among cell phone manufacturers and service providers alike. According to the survey 1% of it members were using iPhone and another 16% were likely to buy one in next 6 months, 77% of the current iPhone owners were very satisfied with the Apple products. Among the ChangeWave Alliance members AT&T was the only service provider that saw an increase in market share, all other providers had a decline in market share. According to ChangeWave there is a strong momentum created by iPhone that will affect other cell phone makers and service providers.
You can read the complete report here: ChangeWave

Microsoft today announced that it would be delaying the release of upcoming Office 2008 for Mac until January 2008. The Office 2008 version was supposed to be released in second half of 2007. General Manager  of Microsoft Macintosh business unit said in an interview “It really is just a quality issue across the board”. The switch to Intel processor and the new Office file formats were the other reasons mentioned for the delay caused. So we should expect Office 2008 to be launched at Macworld Expo 2008 or at least demoed there.  

Bluetooth SIG has adopted the latest version 2.1 +EDR. Now you can pair Bluetooth devices in just few seconds instead of minutes, auto-pairing support will be there for some devices and near field communication. There will be improvements to security and power management (up to five times battery life).