Apple’s new iPod Shuffle now has 4GB of storage for music and it got smaller the the previous generation. The new iPod shuffle looks like a USB memory stick with a clip. A couple of new features of is on the shuffle. First is VoiceOver. The new iPod shuffle now talks upon your command. It says the songs in a playlist, the song being played ….

The second new feature is that the volume and other controls aren’t on the iPod shuffle device anymore. It’s now attached to the earphones. This is great since the controls are now more easily accessible when you have the iPod shuffle in your pocket or backpack. On the other hand it’s not so great cause you won’t be able to use your favorite ordinary 3.5mm headset anymore. Hmmm, wonder if Apple would charge licensing for manufacturing the special earpieces? I hope we’re not seeing a trend here that’s going all the way to the Nano’s, iTouch and the iPhones.

I read a post by John Biggs at Crunchgear this morning about Apple’s possible new hardware. After reading all the possible scenarios I think there’s another scenario that wasn’t mentioned by John.

He has a point about OEM’s keeping their lips close so it makes you wonder why Wintek or Quanta would spill it out — unless Apple has their blessing. This will keep people wondering but not enough to hurt sales but enough to divert everyone’s attention.

Remember Amazon’s new Kindle software on the iPhone? Well if you have used a Kindle and the iPhone equivalent, what would be your first reaction? The display. It’s not as crisp as the Kindle.

So how about a very high resolution colored display that you can use to read all those books, magazines, comics and of course play music, watch videos including full HD videos on a device that’s thin, as small as a pocketbook. On top of that, it has options like maybe HSPA, Wimax but of course wifi would be built-in. Also how about 3D built-in for those games. Here’s another thought — detachable keyboard option. Price range — about the cost of a Mac Mini. Wouldn’t you wait for it if you’re planning to buy your netbook?

Even as the world is experiencing an ecomonic upheaval it looks like that the American smartphone market has experienced a considerable growth in the last quarter of 2008. According to the NPD Group fourth quarter sales survey , smartphones have almost doubled to 23 percent of the US consumer market as compared to only 12 percent in the same quarter of 2007.

Also noteworthy is that half of the smartphones now sold has touch screens and 70 percent offer QWERTY keyboards. Two thirds of the smartphones now use 3G networks as compared to only 46 percent in 2007. Apple’s iPhone, Rim’s Blackberry Storm, the Android G1 phone are some of the top gainers.

It seems Qualcomm is also one of those companies benefitting from all these. The company has just announced that it’s Board of Directors approved an annual dividend increase of 6 percent per share of common stock. This brings the annual dividend to $0.68 per share.

If you’re one of those Apple iPhone users that doesn’t seem to get enough decibels from your mobile phone, here’s a very elegant solution. It won’t even cost you an arm and a leg to get one.

An smart company called Ten One Design has created the equivalent of having to put your hand over the iPhone speaker just to redirect and concentrate the sound coming out from it. A tuned conical deflection chamber designed to make the audio from your iPhone clearer and also slightly louder. Sound waves are reflected toward you, instead of away, so you feel more involved in your game, movie, or music.

SoundClip is said to amplify the iPhone audio by 10dB between 6kH and 20kHz, resulting in a cleaner, more accurate response. Storaging the SoundClip is easily done by a cord-gripping feature that fastens the object to your charge cable during syncing and charging.

This Apple iTouch becomes a sidekick of a sniper. Equipped with an iPhone application for shooting. A US M110 sniper rifle has been mounted with an Apple iPod Touch. The iPod with the Bullet Flight external ballistics calculator. I guess these days military rifles are now mostly painted “desert” colors instead of “greeny” jungle chromas.

You can check out more photos at Woohome.

Looks like the Dell E Slim is still nowhere to be found. Well, MSI has announced it’s 13.4” wide ultra-thin netbook called the X-Slim 320. The X320 ups the ante compared to the Macbook Air. The overall thickness is as small as 1.98 cm (which is about 0.78 inches). The thinnest part is only 6 mm (Wow! even thinner that the slimmest mobile phone that I can remember). It’s not only ultra slim, it’s very light at only 1.3kg!

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When I got the HP Compaq C700 notebook it came with a free Apple iPod. I installed Ubuntu on my Compaq C700 notebook. Since there isn’t any iTunes for Linux, i wanted to know how to be able to rip my audio CD’s, convert them to MP3 files and transfer them to the Apple iPod. When I tried to Google for help, I was able to get bits and pieces of information on how to do it. This weekend, I decided to write a how to about it to provide a step by step procedure on how a Ubuntu user with an iPod can do it.

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Several months after the official launch of the T-Mobile G1, I have yet to see the second commercially available Android-based mobile phone. The title of “Second Android-based mobile phone” is still up for grabs since someone has yet to deliver on their promises and someone has yet to blog about their just delivered Android mobile phone.

As far as I am concerned, all of these articles going around the Net is simply just vaporware and marketing hype. Poised to come out with an Android-based mobile phones next year are companies like Motorola, Asus, Toshiba, Vodafone and Sony Ericsson.

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With the mixed opinions on how well the T-mobile G1 Android based mobile phone performed against the Apple iPhone, it looks like Nokia is sending a loud message — “Watch and learn boys!”

I really love the idea of having an open mobile platform such as Android because of the freedom and possibilities it gives to mobile phone owners but I guess I will have to wait a while before the mobile platform will mature. Apple with its exquisite engineering prowess has always led the world in creating great engineering worksmanships like the iPod, Macbook and the iPhone.

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I guess it will only be a matter of time before we get a full blow Linux (and probably Android) distro for the Apple iPhone. The iPhone-dev people have announced the successul porting of Linux of on the Apple iPhone.

Although this is a basic kernel port with a shell compiled from the Busybox package. This paves the way for a very good future to porting a whole bunch of distros to the iPhone including the new Android open mobile platform.

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