The Connected Circuit

The iPhone 3GS launch is almost upon us, but before you pack your sleeping bag, lawn chair and a gallon of coffee to wait in line to get Apple’s new cream of the crop gadget, there are a few things you should know.

For those existing customers who are going in expecting to be able to acquire this at the subsidy price at $199 for the 16 GB and $299 for the 32 GB, you had better check to see if you qualify to actually get the iPhone 3GS at the discounted price. You can check by either calling *639# on your existing phone (you should receive a message stating that you do), call AT&T or check your online account. Don’t forget that AT&T will be trying to charge you an $18 “upgrade price”. With some smooth talk, you may be able to get yourself out of it. AT&T is, also, extending the upgrade to customers who have purchased their iPhone 3G in July, August, or September 2008, but be sure to check with the AT&T before you go in and realize that you were not eligible and had to pay the early upgrade price of $399 for the 16 GB or $499 for the 32 GB.

Many Apple and AT&T stores will be opening an hour early to fulfill many of the pre-orders at 7 AM, be sure to call ahead. There will also be many devices on hand for individuals, but at a first come-first serve basis only. Also be aware that the early pre-orders did sell out, so if you are expecting to see one at your doorstep on July 19th when you didn’t jump the gun in time, don’t be surprised if you don’t see it tomorrow. Apple has also requested that carriers hold their shipments until tomorrow for those who have pre-ordered, some may be lucky and have theirs ship a day or two early, but all reports indicate that it won’t. It’ll be a waiting game for that man in the brown tomorrow. With this useful information on hand, be safe and enjoy your shiny new gadget!!

AT&T deets here

Some Reviews below:

Engadget – Josh Topolsky

Gizmodo – Jason Chen

WSJ – Walt Mossberg

NYTimes – Dave Pogue

Wired – Steven Levy

USA Today – Ed Baig

CNET – Kent German

--written by Peter To--

With Apple’s long awaited keynote finally over and the smoke finally clearing from all the hardware/software announcements, it’s time to assess the implications of what they announced. It wouldn’t be much of an assessment without knowing what they actually announced, so here it is:

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.

--written by Peter To--

Apple’s World Wide Developer’s conference is almost upon us and the Interwebs has been swirling with Apple rumors. Here is a round up of the latest rumors people are expecting to see out of Apple’s keynote this afternoon, that’s 1 PM EST.

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.

--written by Peter To--

Last night one of my favorite hosts finally made his triumphant return on the silver screen, Conan O’Brien, on the newly revitalized Tonight Show, but unfortunately I missed it. I don’t have a TiVo and I didn’t want to wait hours to download Conan’s first episode, I just wanted to watch it. So I turned to the source that I knew would have it, Hulu. For those who don’t know Hulu is, it is a collaboration between all the big TV studios, Fox, NBC, ABC and CBS (it first started out with just Fox and NBC) offering the latest episodes, for free, on-demand viewing. The only requirements is that you have a capable browser, Adobe flash player installed, and a fast enough connection to stream the sub-SD/ED quality video. But I had a dilemma, instead of watching it on 24″ LCD monitor, I wanted to watch it on my 42″ Panasonic plasma HDTV that was situated right in my living room. I had a few options, either I bring out all the necessary cables and wires  to hook up my computer to my TV and disabling the use of my computer for the ~45 minutes or I could use something boxee that I installed on my Apple TV, which was already hooked up to my TV, to stream the content direct from Hulu itself. The choice was obvious, I fired up my Apple TV, navigated to the Hulu feeds application in boxee and I was ready to watch the plethora of video made available through Hulu. I was ready to watch Conan completely disconnected from my computer. There are plenty of other uses for my Apple TV with boxee. I can seamlessly stream media within my personal network, connect to Last.FM, pandora, watch or listen my favoritepodcasts or any number of add-on applications that others had created to watch content from Discovery, Youtube, Joost, Vimeo, or the Onion… the list goes on and on.

*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.

--written by Peter To--

So CES is over and after looking at what came out there are some pretty strong themes at this year’s CES. For those who don’t realize, but CES is pretty much the precursor of this year’s trends in products and tech. What happens at CES usually, though not all the time, comes to full fruition in the upcoming year.

Let’s start with the what stole the entire show away, Palm. Palm’s press event was by and the large the runaway hit of the show. Weeks ago, Palm queitly invited some of the top tech heads to a conference they were holding at CES with a teaser ad for the “newness” of Palm. Not many people knew what it was going to be, but many people expected that this was going to be the make or break for Palm; if they didn’t do something amazing here, they would never have the chance to do it again EVER. There was much speculation of what they were going to do, but it was for sure that this was going to be their big reveal of their five year in the making redo of their dated Garnet OS. Low and behold, Palm pulled it off. They not only pulled it off by stunning people with a marvelously slick OS, but an equally slick device to complement the very polished, though still in alpha, OS. I am definitely looking forward to the Palm pre come June and may jump away from crappy AT&T and back into the arms of Sprint.

It seems as if companies are finally embracing the cloud with Apple putting their iLife suite into the cloud, Microsoft realizing that having all your information in a common place does matter to people and Palm having their entire platform revolve around premonition and the notion that your information does not only live on your phone. The year 2009 will definitely be the year of the cloud.

What was decidedly absent at the show was the number of android phones. Although CES was never known for great phone releases, I was surprised to not see even one phone from any manufacturer. The lone android phone that was supposed to be roaming the show floor, the Kogan Agora. Apparently Google went to the man behind the effort to push this phone out and asked him to not release the phone as there were features that the phone lacked that would gimp compatibility of applications. We did see one android device, the Giinii Movit, which is essentially the Nokia N800 with android instead of Maemo. From what I saw, it seems like a sweet little MID that I would gladly trade my N800 for. Hopefully, now that Google released the full source code of android to the masses, we’ll start seeing more android devices start to trickle down.

--written by Peter To--

One of the biggest consumer electronics show (CES in Las Vegas from January 7th-January 11th) is going down this week, which also happens to overlap with another, the Macworld expo (January 5th-January 9th in San Fran). Don’t ask me why they decided to pick conflicting, making people choose to going to one or the other, which essentially hurts both parties. But enough of that, in this post I’ll be laying out some predictions of what I think will go down at each.

Since Macworld is here first:
There is also mounds of speculation for what Apple is going to do at Macworld, this being their last (for those who don’t know Macworld isn’t a creation of Apple, but rather Macworld Magazine) and all. So rumor has it Apple will be announcing new Mac Minis, Apple TVs and iPhone Nanos. Hardware-wise Apple will finally introduce new Mac Minis, Apple TVs and cinema displays or cinema displays equiped with the Apple TV hardware. But what I think will happen is that Apple is going to do a more software centric keynote, which will inevitably focus on its own iWork suite. They are going to take it into the cloud or create a system where you have the ability to, think about this. What is you have the ability to install on a corporate server a collaborative software suite, where all users within the network can work and access documents easily. Apple’s aim is mainly to infiltrate into the corporate environment, which Microsoft has them beat by a wide and large margin. With the impending exit of Steve Jobs as the face of Apple, they have to do something to push into new territories and I think this is what they are going to do.

CES:
CES is a whole ‘nother monster that encompasses such a wide range of consumer electronics that I’ll just keep it to general themes. The biggest theme for this show will probably be entertainment media in the living room, which will mean bridging online content, such as from Hulu, Netflix, Youtube and what have you to your TV. There is going to be a plethora of video streaming devices out there, since there isn’t really a great all-in-one out there yet. I have an Apple TV loaded with boxee, as well as an Xbox 360 setup to stream content from my computer through my personal network in my apartment. Both have their downsides and upsides, but neither is the be all end all of streaming devices. Having both work in unison achieves something close, but it still isn’t there yet, everyone always ultimately either asks me how to do what on the thing to get it to watch something or just plain gives up and goes back to the god awful Scientific Atlanta box that Time Warner has provided to watch absolute garbage on cable TV. The dream video device would do something very similar to my beloved Squeezebox Boom, but for Video, easy to use UI and just plain works, as well as be very modular in device, both in hardware and software. Apple’s closed ecosystem has led to no one wanting the Apple TV other than your enthusiasts, such as myself who will take the time and effort to soft/hard mod it to get it to do more for which boxee is a great example.

To complement all these devices, I see a plethora of content moving away from your traditional methods of broadcasting quickly. You can see it already happening with Hulu and all the contracts the major studios are considering with Youtube/Hulu and Sling Media. But what needs to happen is that these services need to be easily accessible. After seeing the success of Apple in the digital music market I’ve learned one thing, if you create something that is easy to use and at a reasonable cost people would be willing to not pirate and proceed in ways that are much easy to obtain the content they want. Apple hasn’t been as successful in the video market as they were in the audio, but that could all change if they open up and create a subscription based model. Think about the possibilities if they were to license out an API of their software and let people go at it with Apple’s name recognition the reach for digital video nirvana could be here within months. Sadly, I do not think Apple will ever adopt either.

I also predict that we will finally see a sub-100 bluray player for the masses to just buy that Dark Knight Bluray and watch it in all its 1080p glory.

To sum it up:
Macworld: Taking applications into the cloud and the corporate workspace
CES: Convergence video devices, bluray player on the cheap

--written by Peter To--

So roughly using the Bold for almost two months, what do I think of it? My first issue is with the Bold or BB OS’s issue of not being able to install applications outside of the alloted 128 MB of RAM space. RIM really either needs to do 1. either give their devices a lot more RAM or 2. give their devices to install apps into either external storage cards or the internal memory space. I know they do this for security purposes, but their smart they should be able to figure out a secure solution, I mean what harm can one really do by installing applications into the internal memory (don’t answer that). Now don’t get me wrong the Bold is probably one of the best devices I have ever used cause things just work on it and things are real zippy, but I’m a pretty heavy user of the Bold and after having multiple applications open using newsgator, google maps, email… the RAM gets eaten worse the Firefox before version 3.0. There is no way to view a running processes to see which one if the hog and stop it, all you have is just clearing the browser cache and this memory cleaning thing, that I have no clue what it does and does not seem to work (Options -> Security Options -> Memory Cleaning). At times it feels like *gasp* using a Windows Mobile device, yes, you heard me right, Windows “slower than a snail, terrible memory management” Mobile. I have done many battery pulls to try to relinquish the lost memory more times now than I can count and waiting 3+ minutes for a phone to start back up is ri-dic-u-lous.

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.

--written by Peter To--

Apple TV is one of the greatest things to have in a living, that is if you soft-mod it with boxee, the open source media plugin based on the code of the wildly popular (well at least with the geek crowd) XMBC. The Apple TV has always piqued my interest, which is strange it being the least popular Apple product, but back about two months ago when I heard that someone created a way to watch Hulu (albeit a bit chuggy) and other internet content easily on your TV with the Apple TV, I knew it would be the perfect addition to a home entertainment setup that I was planning to create for months. When I found out that I had a friend that had an Apple TV that he wanted to sell, I promptly took it off his hands at the going eBay street price. First thing I did was upgrade it to the latest firmware (Take 2.2) I created a patchstick for it using the ATV-creator with boxee/xmbc preloaded and in minutes (link here for video tutorial on how to make a patchstick with boxee) I was off and running. So what do I think of the Apple TV and boxee? In short, I think both are a almost-killer app and with the recent $4 million in funding this project received, it will only be get better from here on out.

Note: When I initially wrote this review, I had the Take 2.2 firmware on it and not the new 2.3 firmware that Apple pushed out. But when I restarted my Apple TV this weekend, it updated automatically with the 2.3 and effectively killed boxee, but there is already a fix to get it back up and running, which I did today. The new atv-creator patchstick now works under a Windows environment, so I do not have to use my roommate’s Macbook to create a patchstick. One caveat was that I had to use the USB drive image tool from the command line, which was really simple. Link here is to a team boxee member showing how to get boxee back on your ATV.

--written by Peter To--

Collection of April Fool’s jokes for today, they range from somewhat believable to totally outlandish:

• Go Back in Time with Gmail, have you ever wanted to write that email dated a week ago, well with Gmail you can do just that.
• Downloadsquad equates Apple to LSD.
• Here is another from the guys and gals over at Cerulean taking some time off coding the next Trillian, which has been amazing so far.
• Quite possibly one of my favorite, just go to Youtube and click on any of the top videos.
• Woot has another “Wootoff”, if you were a bit impulsive, enjoy your batteries.
• For all you Blizzard fans, check out the Tauran Marine. How about the new Bard Class in WoW, which Rocks out a la Guitar Hero style to destroy its enemies.
• The most elaborate one yet.
• Richard Dawkins would be Happy to see this.
• I don’t think this is an April Fool’s joke, but it is hilarious.
• Another non-April Fool’s prank, but it’s Engadget sticking it to Deutsche TeleKom for this ridiculous claim to the color of magenta, that’s #ed008c, for all you HTML nerds.
• Here are two really good round ups from 1UP and another from Joystiq.

--written by Peter To--