Software utilities

Some news report that an Apple service center would have refused to repair an unlocked iPhone. The doubt that Apple would accept this kind of software (or hardware) modification was an important point of discussion in many technology blogs and newsgroups. Now it seems that any iPhone modification, included the “unlocking”, could void the warranty, exposing users to very expensive repair costs.

A related funny news is that a T-Mobile shop in Newport Beach, California, is advertising the possibility of iPhone unlocking with a self-explanatory ad: We unlock iPhones! (source iPhone Matters)

Giorgio Armani and Samsung presented a new co-branded phone, called (guess??) Giorgio Armani-Samsung. This will be the first of a series of products, from Giorgio Armani, Emporio Armani and Armani Casa, which will couple the fashion design of Armani, one of the biggest companies in fashion world, with Samsung technological skills and know-how.

The phone, available from November 2007, has a big 2.6 inches QVGA TFT LCD display touch screen. Despite its compactnes, the phone will be packaged with a 3 Megapixels video camera, a music player and a full internet browser. Its internal memory can be expanded with a microSD slot and it’s shipped with a stereo Bluetooth® earphone.

Here it come another iPhone competitor!! 

I was reading SEOmoz, and found out a very interesting post about keyword data analysis. Have a look at that, it’s worth it!

IBM s ging to launch the Lotus Symphony, a desktop product based on the OpenOffice code, which offers documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Its name is the same of another Lotus product, folliwing the famous Lotus 1-2-3; in the original 1985 version it integrated a spreadsaheet, a word editor, a graph editor and more. This new product can be downloaded for free from the official Lotus website (while the simpler Office version is 120 $). In IBM’s plans, this free tool should encourage users to buy other IBM products. Well another Microsoft Office competitor is on the road, apart from OpenOffice and the Google tools.

Apple iPod have a lock that prevents iPod owners to upload music which is not downloaded from iTunes, the official Apple music store, which sells MP3’s DRM-locked, Now a few guys managed to remove these limitations, so now people who legally downloaded music from other online music stores, such as Amazon or the new coming Nokia store, can download their favourite music to their iPod. It must be noted that these locks have nothing to do with piracy prevention: this is only for protecting the iTunes store from competitors (legal ones). Also, with this hack also Linux users can use their iPod without limitations.