Hardware-wise, the specs of the device are not mind blowing, but they are not unspectacular either. It has a teflon coated back, a 3.5mm jack, 3.2″ HVGA (480x320) capacitive touchscreen, a Qualcomm® MSM7200A 528 MHz CPU processor, 288 MB of RAM, 5 megapixal autofocus cam, GPS, quad band GSM phone (900/2100 MHz for HSPA), and a digital compass, but lacks a physical keyboard.

Reminiscint of Touch FLO3D for Windows Mobile devices, Sense UI is the new skin created by HTC. Both very slick and stylish, the new UI has the ability to add widgets, HTC’s own or a third party, moves relatively seamless and has highly customizable home screens. HTC also went through the trouble of creating their own virtual keyboard that seems to rival that of the iPhone’s and has haptic feedback. The biggest news is that HTC with the help of Adobe has built a Flash player into the browser and is capable of playing videos straigt from Youtube, though it isn’t 100% yet. Seemless is hard to the describe how Sense UI actually works, so check out the embedded videos below.

Read more here, here, here, here, and here.

Adobe’s Open Screen Project is seeking to fill the void. With an alliance of companies, Palm, Nokia, Google and Microsoft are working to port Flash 10 to their various mobile platforms. So what does it mean to you the user? Well it means that before, where there was no hope of bringing those web applications without significant reduced functionality to your phone, now with the concerted effort of almost all the big guns working together, we’ll most certainly be able to view native youtube, hulu and many of the other applications that run entirely in Flash, mirroring that desktop browsing experience almost 100%. As a word of caution though, bringing Flash to mobile devices almost means bringing those Flash ads you see to mobile devices as well, but I for one would gladly take that punch in the gut to be able to watch my favorite show on hulu on the go.

Read more here and here. Watch Adobe’s press conference here.

iPhone 3GS

There was much speculation on what the new iPhone would have and what would actually change, from having a rubberized/matte back finish to having a front video camera for video conferencing. Sadly, there were no outside cosmetic changes. All the changes dealt with what was inside, both the hardware and software.

Hardware changes:

Unfortunately, Apple wouldn’t reveal the details of the new hardware specifications, just that it was “twice as fast” as the iPhone 3G, leading many people to believe it has double the amount of RAM and, possibly, a slight processor speed bump. We won’t find out until someone gets their hands on this thing come June 19th and does a full teardown.

The much awaited addition of in-house video recording, editing, straight uploads to Youtube will now be standard in the iPhone 3GS, sorry iPhone 3G users this is an iPhone 3GS feature only. The camera will also see an upgrade from the non-autofocus 2 megapixel lens to a 3 megapixel autofocus camera that can record video at a resolution of 640 x 480 at 30 fps. Although, the iPhone 3G is actually capable of recording video (as long as it was jailbroken), for whatever reason, Apple has made it a feature of the iPhone 3GS only. It will also have a special macro mode and the ability to geotag both your video and photos.

The iPhone 3GS can also support a max downspeed of 7.2Mps, as long as the cell provider can support those speeds that is, which AT&T is not one of them. Small changes also include, the support for Bluetooth 2.1, an anti-fingerprint coating, built-in Nike+, voice control, and a slight increase in battery life.

Late addition, I was able to find a detailed article from one of my favorite hardcore tech sites AnandTech on the new CPU/GPU, which is, ironically, the same one in the Palm Pre, an ARM Cortex A8 with a PowerVR SGX GPU with a clock speed of 600 MHz and 256 MB of RAM.

My personal favorite update is the addition of the digital compass. GPS on phones has been a welcomed addition, but I have never been able to tell which direction I would actually need to walk. I would always need to walk a few feet before I knew if I was going the right way. This fixes that, telling you the exact direction of where you would need to walk. Small change, but one that makes this lost soul follow the right path.

Software:

With the announcement of the iPhone 3GS comes the official announcement of iPhone OS X 3.0. I have been using the beta, now in GM, for the past month or so and it brings some nice additions (some that should have been in 1.0), such as universal search, a landscape keyboard, MMS and tethering

Some caveats, although 3.0 finally enables MMS and tethering (it was also available in the betas other than beta 5), that’s going to be up to your cell carrier. So if you’re in the US and on AT&T, it won’t be ready come June 19th. AT&T is blaming it on network limitations and they’re still trying to figure out pricing, both pretty lame excuses seeing as all the other carriers around the world are well prepared for it and both have been available for years now. I’ve been able to send and receive MMS’s on my Bold since I got it, which was at launch on AT&T. Apple is planning on an iPhone 3.0 OS release on June 17th, so be prepared for a software upgrade soon you iPhone owners.

$99 iPhone 3G:

In my opinion, this is probably Apple’s most earth shattering announcements of the entire keynote. All speculation was that Apple was going to release a 4 GB lower price model, the $99 iPhone rumor started way back even before last year’s MacWorld. It brings the iPhone to level of affordability to almost anyone who wants it. I’m gonna predict market saturation of iPhones will come rather quickly now.

Other hardware announcements:

New Macbook Pros:

The 13″ aluminum Macbook is probably Apple’s fastest product to go obsolete, announced in October 18, 2008 at MacWorld, only lasting a mere eight months. But all’s good, as Apple decided to up the ante on the specs that were on that Macbook model by adding some extra battery life, though with a non-removable battery, a media card reader, and cut the price a few hundred dollars and dubbing it with the Macbook Pro moniker. Other than the glossy screen and the chicklet style keyboard, I’m pretty psyched to see this model out. It may very well be my next computer purchase. Interesting tidbit, you can apparently boot from a flash card. Oh and Apple is drastically cutting prices on the aluminum Macbook, most likely to clear stock for the new Macbook Pro models.

Other software announcements:

Official announcement of Snow Leopard, but without the cool new Marble UI, as well as a new iLife ‘09 update. The cost is an update edition to Snow Leopard is $29 and $49 for a family pack, down from the $129 cost that was for Leopard. For those who don’t know what Snow Leopard is, it’s one of those dot upgrades Apple has been pushing out since the release of OS X, but 10.6 focuses more on the background enhancements and performance tuning. Enhancements include 45% faster install, a reduction in 6 GB of disk space, more support for 64-bit applications, parallel processing, Microsoft Exchange support, new interface for Quicktime, as well as the use of the hardware acceleration via the GPU, a new dock and expose. Sorry all you PowerPC Mac users, this is for Mactels only. Safari 4.0 finally falls out of beta and into your desktops, all the details here. Some interesting notes on Safari 4, it gets 100/100 from the Acid3 test, has HTML 5 support, CSS 3 web font support, a new Javascript rendering engine, is supposed to be the fastest browser ever, built-in web developer tools and cover flow integration.

What wasn’t announced:

The Apple tablet, why? I honestly don’t think the world is ready for it and it probably wouldn’t be much of a big seller for Apple. Contrary to what most people believe, not all of Apple’s products sell well, take a look at the Apple TV, the Macbook Air or the Newton. Tablets, also, don’t do very well with the mainstream and if Apple is going to make this a multi-touch screen, which they would most likely do, it would render it useless to graphic designers needing more precise pen input from a digitizer a la the Wacom. For all of those who want your own Apple tablet and have that extreme dough to spend, jump over to Axiotron and grab a Modbook, which is essentially a Macbook modded with a digitized Wacom screen sans the keyboard, pricing is $1249 if you would like to mod your existing Macbook or a starting price of $1569 for your very own freshly modded Macbook with very barebones specs.

Matte/rubberized back on the iPhone:

All the rumors and leaks out there centered around one new design, but was ultimate proven wrong with the announcement of the iPhone 3GS. The speculation is that Apple or AT&T put out a “fake” FCC filing and photos to deter or spur on much of the hype and rumors going into WWDC. Others think that this was an early design that Apple scraped for whatever reason. It’s a shame that this one didn’t come true because that matte finish device was starting to win me over.

Front Video Camera:

I’m going to have to say this was AT&T’s fault. Video chatting and streaming is a pretty data intensive application, especially for AT&T extremely spotty service. I have a feeling that this wasn’t even a reasonable feature for AT&T and it was killed very early on.

Afterthoughts:

Before Apple officially announced that they were going to create a phone, many of your traditional phone companies waved them away, saying how this PC vendor doesn’t understand the mobile phone market. Two years later, the iPhone is quickly becoming as synonymous as its iPod is. Mobile computing is drastically changing the way we go about our day to day lives. Apple understood that and knew that the traditional form factors wasn’t really cutting it and threw everything out and started from scratch. With a melding of fresh UI design paradigms and Apple’s own view of simplicity and slick designs, Apple won over many converts, including myself. Apple’s game changer mentality is forcing all those around them to innovate or die and pushing manufacturers to one up each other. I’m hoping to see that many manufacturers don’t falter and fail under the pressure and create truly innovative devices. Palm is the first one to actually create a device/OS that rivals Apple’s own, I’m hoping I’ll see other manufacturers follow. The future in the mobile computing world is at its beginning stages and is one to watch.

Read more here, here and here.

Of course, everyone is expecting the announcement of a brand new iPhone. The leaked pictures is supposedly of an iPhone with a matte back finish, looks slightly thinner, has a faster processor, twice the RAM, with twice the amount of storage at  16 GB and 32 GB capacities. The new iPhone is supposed to feature a front camera with the ability to record video, a feature that was not available on either the iPhone 2G or 3G models. It’s also rumored that with the launch of the new iPhone will come the official annoucement of the iPhone 3.0 OS, which has been in beta stages for developers since last year. Features of the 3.0 OS will include universal search, push notifications, Internet tethering, MMS and video/voice recording.

Other rumors include, Apple releasing a smaller 4 GB capacity iPhone for those who do not need the extra storage space, lowering the cost for those who have wanted an iPhone, but could not afford one.

As far as non-iPhone rumors go, Snow Leopard is expected to have its official announcement, but the Marble UI is not expected to be included in this announcement.

There are, also, rumors of Apple finally releasing an official tablet with multi-touch, so think of it as a much larger iPhone.

The Macbook Pro line is to get a slight refresh to its line with the possibility of a built-in 3G modem and flash card slots.

Finally, Steve Jobs is supposed to make his triumphant return back to Apple.

With the recent launch of the Palm Pre, you can’t help but think that Apple will be stealing much of Sprint’s and Palm’s thunder come 1 PM today. I am decidedly pretty excited in whatever Apple will be announcing this afternoon.

Read more here, here, here, and here.

Plenty of sites are live blogging the keynote. If you would like to follow along , go here, here, here or here.

*Image cred to Lifehacker

If there’s so much free content, why aren’t more people using boxee? Well, a few reasons, installing boxee on the Apple TV isn’t the most seamless and easiest thing to do and if you’re expecting to get HD content streamed to your Apple TV, don’t be. The Apple TV is simply not powerful enough, it can barely handle 480p streams (video can be choppy at times), but that’s a limitation on how Adobe Flash works.

The Apple TV never makes use of the GPU because of its proprietary nature, reverse engineering the thing would be one heck of a trial. However, that’s all going to change with the recent announcement that Adobe is working hard with other companies, such as Nvidia and Broadcom, to develop a way for it to offload some of the video decoding to the GPU, resulting in a less choppy, HD video playback.

Another thing holding boxee back is that fact that the bandwidth speeds in the US required for these streams is simply not there, you can blame that on those ISPs implementing speed caps and metering. Video steams would be hit with much buffering to the point where it would keep you waiting for minutes at a time, which is not very seamless.

Let’s, also, not forget that Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3 has media streaming/extending capabilities as well. Those two devices double as gaming consoles and media devices and features are constantly getting added. Just this Monday, Microsoft announced that the Xbox 360 is to have advanced Netflix queue integration, taking the computer part out of the equation and letting you browse Netflix’s watch instantly movie catalog, as well as, last.fm integration. It’s a pretty big deal, where in the past, you’d have to go to a computer, log into your Netflix account, find stuff you want to watch and then add it to your queue. This cuts having a computer out, giving you access to browse straight from the 360.

However, with the popularity and interest of all the individuals in the development of boxee, which can be installed on just about any platform (right now you can get it for the Apple TV, Mac OS X, and Linux and a Windows build is coming as early as the end of June). With the recent release of a developer API, it has limitless potential. If you have the know how and the drive to build an application, the tools are these for you to use to build your own application, kudos to the openness that is boxee. What’s most exciting is the operating system-agnostic behavior of boxee, it doesn’t have to be confined to a particular set of hardware, since it was originally a fork of the the very popular XMBC, which gave whomever had an original Xbox the ability to turn it into a multimedia powerhouse. Boxee is making the experience of watching on-demand content as easy as turning on your TV. For those proclaiming the death of mediastreamers, you couldn’t be more wrong, they aren’t dead but just taking a different form. I did eventually end up watching Conan using boxee and it was almost as seamless as watching it on TV.

The launch of the Palm Pre is just around the corner, but reviews were out in full force tonight. Before you dish out that cash, be sure to check out all the reviews for the Palm Pre to get the real low-down on whether or not it lives up to all the hype (from all indications it does). Here are the reviews, in no particular order. I will add more reviews as I see them, but so far the reviews have been glowingly positive. Some caveats of the Pre are the software is extremely nice and fluid, contacts management is an all or nothing affair, the device feels like a toy at times, and the keyboard is so-so. However, for a first generation device, it performs surprisingly well. Reviewers have also noted that it being on Sprint’s network could hold this device back from selling even more and the device doesn’t seem as sturdy as it could be. Looks like I may switch to Sprint after all.

Engadget

Gizmodo

WSJ/All Things Digital – Walt Mossberg

NYTimes – Dave Pogue

Wired’s Gadget Lab

SlashGear

MyPre

Boy Genius Report (Only Part 1)

GigaOM (Quick Review)

PCWorld

PCMag

Laptop Mag

CNET

Phonescoop

UberGizmo (mini-)review

Reuters

AP

BusinessWeek

USA Today

PreCenral - Epic Review

A little history of facebook…

Facebook almost four years ago was limited to a small subset of colleges and universities in the US, to be able to register you needed to have an email address that reflected you were a student of one of the these. Luckily for me, my school was one of those. Literally overnight all my freshman cohorts on my floor were scrambling to find the best looking pictures of themselves, whether it be from a scan of their high school senior portrait or some semi-nice looking high school pic. I choose to go the more anonymous route of the now-extinct question mark. Registration was simple: enter some nice information about yourself, your gender, name, birthdate, sexual orientation and you’d be all set. It’s odd to think that the facebook in 2004 reflected more of your webpages back in the 90s than your twitter like pages of today. Fast forward two years to 2006 and facebook abruptly introduces one of the most controversial features to date, it’s news feed. Live and detailed information on all your friend’s updates, what they’ve removed, what they added, if they’re online, the works. It caused the biggest up uproar in facebook history. Many of people’s concerns were because of the lack of privacy controls and complete lack of informing it’s users of a sudden and mass change of user interaction. My memory of the event was just working away at my work study job at 8 AM, logging into facebook and saying to myself… “hmmm that’s different”. To be perfectly honest, I really liked the implementation of the news feeds. I wasn’t an avid user of facebook like some of my other peers at the time, but I would check it maybe once a day, I didn’t have a picture for my profile for a solid six months, never made any profile changes or additions and it showed.

Fast forward again to 2009 and here we are at the brink of another drastic design change, gone are the the live feed and tabbed views of information, but just a set of defined filters and an interface very much akin to that other social networking darling twitter. Complete with the analagous “What’s on your mind?” and a sole box to let all your friends know, very much like twitter’s now imfamous “What are you doing?”. The backlash erupted in many users, although notified for weeks of the impending redesign right as they visited the site, hating the new design. With the latest poll showing 94% of voters saying nay to the new design (94% of less than half a percent of facebook’s user base that is) facebook was poised to not listen again, with a few being facebook’s own employees . Being as reponsive as it was, facebook listened to many of it’s users cries and modifications were a foot, less than two weeks later, the designs were changed and more filtering mechanisms were put in place and things have quieted significantly.

So why the quiet all of a sudden, why no new polls and petitions for reversions of the site? Well being the cynic that I am I think it was all a plan to garner much news and bring facebook back to relevance to all it’s users that have been lost to twitter. Twitter has gained quickly gained popularity and relevance into the eyes of the mainstream, even surpasing the now gaudy and superficial digg.com . It’s crazy how fast twitter has grown over the past three months. Something so simple and accessible as letting all your friends know that your going to the bathroom or sharing your thought on something you saw online in 140 characters or less is mind boggling to me. I guess in all that simplicity lies a wealth of depth and with twitter’s extremely open API, anyone has access to what their mind limits them to.

So where is facebook headed next? I’m pretty sure facebook will steal more features to the growing, yet small userbase of friendfeed and become a true life streaming application. Although friendfeed has been very innovative in features and with its recent launch of their beta, I’m afraid I’m gonna have to agree with Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and say it is one of the coolest applications that will go nowhere. Facebook runs very loyal bounds, I’ve found that users of facebook are more interested in connecting with people they’ve met in real life rather than meeting people in the online world. It’s very much a traditional way for people to interact covered up in the shinyness that is technology. Friendfeed on the other hand will stay very niche and only cater to the techies. Twitter has some hope in it’s simplicity, but friendfeed is just too overwhelming for new users. It’s essentially a silo of information coming at you hard and fast and only quick minds need apply.

Read more here on facebook redesigning efforts of people in the industry.

Other issues:

IMAP is pretty much broken, I don’t know if it is an issue with Gmail IMAP or just IMAP email handling in general (I’ve only used IMAP with my gmail account), but it is broken like no other. I don’t receive all my email and it tends to lag when marking an email as read, if it even marks it as read and I had no way to access all my folders. I have since reverted back to general default email settings, which is POP I believe, cause I actually get emails that way.

No fun applications at all. Don’t expect an iPhone like experience on this thing cause it really is great for managing your data and such, but other than brickbreaker or wordmole, don’t expect to be playing Metal Gear on this thing. Another thing is there is no easy way to install applications to this thing, don’t go expecting to simply load up an app store and simply search and install what you’d like from your phone. You are gonna have to search on a desktop to find an application that suites your needs, then you can either connect your BB to your computer or use the god-awful web browser to enter in the url and manage to navigate to it somehow. The impending app store may solve all these problems, but I have a feeling it probably won’t.

Approximately 1/2 of my lock ups, freezes and slow downs can be attributed to one thing, the web browser. It isn’t as bad as say Pocket IE, but its pretty bad. I mean on the surface it renders pages like its original pretty well, that’s if you manage to load a page without it locking up. But you can install Opera Mini on the Bold, so there is an alternative. I am really just waiting for Mozilla to release Fennec, the mobile Firefox browser.

The last issue, which some may or may not consider an issue is (I hate to say it), but the Bold just isn’t “fun” enough. I look at all the cool apps for the iPhone and I get pretty jealous, over the past year or so the iPhone/iPod Touch has really become an amazing platform for development. As much as I dislike some of the choices that Apple has made (ummm… Copy/Paste anyone) it is the phone everyone wants because of its applications and usability. I know plenty of people that have trouble getting around the BB, but know very few that have the same issues of usability on Apple’s mobile platform.

What I think RIM needs to do is throw out the book and create an OS along with great hardware that encompasses modern day techniques of UI. I’m not saying that they should scratch what they have with their current iterations, afterall they are the venerable email workhorse, but they should consider putting the effort into crafting a new platform that will herald in new users that would actually wow them not confuse. We’ll see what 2009 brings, CES next week is only that start of what I predict to be a very interesting year in regards to the common man.

Styling and Shortcuts:
So shortcuts are all generally the same as Firefox, which is a great thing, since I’m just about a shortcut freak. I’ve been known to stop using applications if they don’t have shortcuts. The clean fullscreen style look is really nice, it gives it this strange inverted fresh feel that has been lacking in many browsers.

Performance:
I thought this multi-process thing was a great paradigm when I first read about it, but I have some reservations about it. Right now I have about 15 tabs open in one window and bringing up the task manager I seek 10 “chrome.exe” processes running. I’m not sure where the other 5 are, but it takes up roughly 215 MB of ram. Opera with 17 tabs, takes up roughly 96 MB. Firefox with a whooping 32 tabs across two windows and 14 plugins installed eats up 457 MB. Granted, these aren’t true benchmarks, I’m just making a note of all this so do with it what you will. Chrome hasn’t really chugged along on my machine, but my thinkpad is handling it all (all browsers at the same time) pretty well.

I currently have version 0.2.149.27, so it has a ways to go. If Google keeps this thing on track, it has a wealth of possibilities. But my prediction now is that everyone and their mother is gonna create a competing browser now, which could be a disastrous thing.