*scottstuff*

Apple announced a handful of product upgrades and price cuts today, including:

• Faster Xserves, now standard with 1 GB RAM and available with 2.3 GHz CPUs.
• Lower prices on all of their LCD displays, including their monster 30” model.
• Xsan, their long-delayed shared-disk filesystem (like GFS on Linux) is finally shipping.

Taken as a set, that’s a fairly impressive number of announcements from Apple. They didn’t make many changes to their computer lineup in the second half of 2004, which makes today’s announcements a bit more noteworthy. Especially when you consider that MWSF is happening next week, and Apple traditionally uses the keynote at MWSF to announce a pile of new products. Given that, today’s announcements suggest that Apple is going to be busy next week–if they were short of new things to talk about, then they’d have kept the Xserve announcements for a week and used them for keynote filler.

So, enquiring minds want to know, what is Apple going to announce next week? So far, the rumor mill has given us 4 items:

• iLife 2005, including a new iMovie with HD abilities and upgrades to the rest of their $50 home media tool pack. iMovie is the oldest of their iTools, and has always been kind of flaky for me; hopefully this will be the big upgrade that its been needing.
• iWork. No one’s completely sure what this will include, besides an upgrade to their Keynote presentation software, but most rumors feature a program named “Pages” or “Notes”; presumably a word processor. There are also rumors of some sort of Keynote-companion program, maybe a simple drawing/sketch program? This is supposed to replace Apple’s ancient AppleWorks package, which hasn’t been updated in years, but none of the rumors mention a spreadsheet, without which iWork won’t be very useful.
• The “headless iMac.” Thinksecret swears up and down that Apple will finally be selling a cheap ($500-$600) computer without a monitor. It’s been years since Apple’s sold low-end computers without an integrated monitor. I’d love to see this; I’ll probably buy a couple of them if they show up without any bizarre problems. Conventional wisdom suggests that Apple’s going to spin this with a “you love our iPod, wait till you see our computers” angle, aiming to make it cheap enough for Windows users to add a Mac to their collection without needing a $2,000 commitment. The downside, of course, is that tons of Mac people will buy these instead of Apple’s much more profitable iMac and Power Mac systems.
• Tiger. Apple announced the next generation of OS X last summer, but didn’t give us a shipping date other then a vague suggestion of 1H2005. I’ve heard rumors of late March the whole time; presumably Apple will actually give us a date next week. They’ll probably also show off a bunch of new features and abilities, including a better view of Spotlight and some new widgets for Dashboard. Personally, I think Dashboard might be the most important addition to Tiger, because it’s going to turn lightweight application development on its head–Dashboard widgets are really just web pages with Javascript attached, but Apple has added a handful of additional widgets and the ability to talk to more system services. Spotlight is cool, but Dashboard may just be cooler.

That looks like more then enough content for a 2-hour presentation. Odds are, there are a few fascinating little details missing, like a new feature for Tiger or a cool take on the iMac, or maybe the missing spreadsheet in iWork.

On the spreadsheet front–there’s no real reason to assume that Apple is building yet another Powerpoint/Word/Excel clone set. Frankly, given Apple’s usual history, it’s probably better to assume that they’re doing things a bit differently. The two names floating around–“Pages” and “Notes” suggest something more akin to a DTP program and a free-form organizational package then a real word processor. I’d really love to see something more innovative–none of the tools that I have today are really ideal for me, and Apple’s as good as anyone when it comes to finding unscratched itches in the market.

Apple announced a handful of product upgrades and price cuts today, including:

• Faster Xserves, now standard with 1 GB RAM and available with 2.3 GHz CPUs.
• Lower prices on all of their LCD displays, including their monster 30” model.
• Xsan, their long-delayed shared-disk filesystem (like GFS on Linux) is finally shipping.

Taken as a set, that’s a fairly impressive number of announcements from Apple. They didn’t make many changes to their computer lineup in the second half of 2004, which makes today’s announcements a bit more noteworthy. Especially when you consider that MWSF is happening next week, and Apple traditionally uses the keynote at MWSF to announce a pile of new products. Given that, today’s announcements suggest that Apple is going to be busy next week–if they were short of new things to talk about, then they’d have kept the Xserve announcements for a week and used them for keynote filler.

So, enquiring minds want to know, what is Apple going to announce next week? So far, the rumor mill has given us 4 items:

• iLife 2005, including a new iMovie with HD abilities and upgrades to the rest of their $50 home media tool pack. iMovie is the oldest of their iTools, and has always been kind of flaky for me; hopefully this will be the big upgrade that its been needing.
• iWork. No one’s completely sure what this will include, besides an upgrade to their Keynote presentation software, but most rumors feature a program named “Pages” or “Notes”; presumably a word processor. There are also rumors of some sort of Keynote-companion program, maybe a simple drawing/sketch program? This is supposed to replace Apple’s ancient AppleWorks package, which hasn’t been updated in years, but none of the rumors mention a spreadsheet, without which iWork won’t be very useful.
• The “headless iMac.” Thinksecret swears up and down that Apple will finally be selling a cheap ($500-$600) computer without a monitor. It’s been years since Apple’s sold low-end computers without an integrated monitor. I’d love to see this; I’ll probably buy a couple of them if they show up without any bizarre problems. Conventional wisdom suggests that Apple’s going to spin this with a “you love our iPod, wait till you see our computers” angle, aiming to make it cheap enough for Windows users to add a Mac to their collection without needing a $2,000 commitment. The downside, of course, is that tons of Mac people will buy these instead of Apple’s much more profitable iMac and Power Mac systems.
• Tiger. Apple announced the next generation of OS X last summer, but didn’t give us a shipping date other then a vague suggestion of 1H2005. I’ve heard rumors of late March the whole time; presumably Apple will actually give us a date next week. They’ll probably also show off a bunch of new features and abilities, including a better view of Spotlight and some new widgets for Dashboard. Personally, I think Dashboard might be the most important addition to Tiger, because it’s going to turn lightweight application development on its head–Dashboard widgets are really just web pages with Javascript attached, but Apple has added a handful of additional widgets and the ability to talk to more system services. Spotlight is cool, but Dashboard may just be cooler.

That looks like more then enough content for a 2-hour presentation. Odds are, there are a few fascinating little details missing, like a new feature for Tiger or a cool take on the iMac, or maybe the missing spreadsheet in iWork.

On the spreadsheet front–there’s no real reason to assume that Apple is building yet another Powerpoint/Word/Excel clone set. Frankly, given Apple’s usual history, it’s probably better to assume that they’re doing things a bit differently. The two names floating around–“Pages” and “Notes” suggest something more akin to a DTP program and a free-form organizational package then a real word processor. I’d really love to see something more innovative–none of the tools that I have today are really ideal for me, and Apple’s as good as anyone when it comes to finding unscratched itches in the market.

Engadget reports that Amazon is taking pre-orders for OS X 10.4 (“Tiger”), claiming that it’ll ship on March 31st, 2005.

Apple hasn’t officially announced anything, so odds are this is an Amazon snafu.

Well, PalmOne has announced the Tungsten T5. Here’s a quick summary, compared to the Tungsten T3:

• 16 MHz faster (400 vs 416)
• Includes 160 MB of usable flash without a SD card (worth around $30 or so)
• Automatically backs itself up on power failure (BackupBuddy VFS works for me, $15)
• No slider, so the T5 is slightly larger.
• Still no WiFi (although Palm’s WiFi SD card works)
• Same OS

That’s pretty much it. It’s amazing what Palm can do with a year’s worth of R&D, isn’t it.

The only good news out of this whole debacle is that we have an official release date for the Treo 650: October 25th.

Okay, almost everyone agrees that the Tungsten T5 will be released on either Friday, Monday, or Tuesday. As Brighthand points out, Amazon has almost certainly leaked a picture of the T5, but there’s still no real consensus on the specs. It’ll most likely have 32 MB of RAM and 256 MB of memory-mapped flash, bluetooth, and no WiFi, but even that’s in doubt. Even the OS load is up for debate–early rumors suggested that this was the first PalmOS Cobalt (6.0) handheld, but none of the more recent rumors have addressed it. Given that, it’s probably still running 5.2.

That’s all fine and interesting and all, but I’m much more interested in the Treo 650. The rumored specs haven’t changed at all in months, and it’s clear that at least one carrier will be selling it by the end of November, but the actual announcement date is still unclear. Brighthand thinks it’s due out the same time as the T5. The Register disagrees.

There are only Treo 650 three questions left unanswered:

1. Which wireless data specs will it support? Current rumors suggest it’ll do EDGE on GSM networks, but that’s unclear.
2. Will it support the Palm WiFi SD card? Since the Treo 650’s specs are very close to the Zire 72, and the 72 supports Palm’s WiFi card, the prevailing opinion is yes, but it’s a close thing.
3. When will it ship, and which carriers will be first? As mentioned, I’m trapped with AT&T Wireless right now; they’ve claimed that they’ll ship a Palm-based EDGE-capable smartphone this year, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the Treo 650. Sprint is rumored to be the first carrier to ship it, but Verizon is also generating a lot of rumors. I find that kind of odd-it took them 9 months to ship the Treo 600, and they don’t have a good record with Bluetooth phones (to put it mildly). T-Mobile will probably be late to the party–it took them 3 months to ship the Treo 600, and they’ve been spending a lot of effort pushing other high-end phones lately, like the iPaq 6300 and the Sidekick II.

Update: More rumors. First, it looks like the T5 and Treo 650 share a docking connector. It’s already been established that the Treo 650 uses a different connector from the Treo 600. It’s also been rumored that the Tungsten T5 uses a new connector–neither the old “Universal Connector” nor the mini-USB plug that new low-end Palms have used. According to Palm Infocenter, J&R.com has added a few T5/Treo 650 accessories to their database already. Amazon also has a few items, and they all list next Tuesday as the availability date. So, at this point, it looks like they’ll probably both show up on Tuesday.

According to The Register, the Treo 650 should start shipping in October. They claim that the contract manufacturer has started shipping them to PalmOne in volume. Treonauts says that media previews have started already, and the official announcement is only a few weeks away.

Assuming that the specs that everyone has been quoting for the past three months are correct, and the price is similar to the current Treo 600, I’ll probably order one as soon as they’re available.

Rumors are swirling about the next Tungsten-series PDA from PalmOne.

I like Engadget’s rumor. Their T5 is a 320x480 tablet, similar to the Clie TH55, but with PalmOS “Cobalt”, 128 MB of RAM, a 520 MHz CPU, Bluetooth, and WiFi. They have a photo, but you can’t really trust fuzzy pictures these days. It does look right, though.

Brighthand has a different rumor. Their T5 has 256 MB RAM, a 400 MHz CPU, and (probably) just Bluetooth.

Brighthand’s specs seem kind of unlikely to me–the 400 MHz CPU means that it’s not using Intel’s current generation of XScale CPUs, and 256 MB of RAM is probably excessive–none of their current models ship with more then 64 MB.

Either way, we should know in a couple months. All of Palm’s high-end PDA are getting long in the tooth.

Personally, I don’t think I can buy a model without a keyboard. The current Tungsten C is okay-looking, but I need bluetooth to talk to my GPS receiver, and no one really expects Palm to update the C anytime soon, if ever. That leaves the Treo 650 as the most likely contender for Scott’s New Palm Budget.

Update: The one that I liked is a hoax. Nothing to see here, keep moving.

Engadget has pictures of the “Treo Ace,” apparently called the Treo 650. Still no hard data on release dates or capabilities (although I did find some newer rumors earlier this week).

There have been rumors going around that it has some sort of built-in backup memory, similar to what Sony put into the Clie UX-50. That makes a lot of sense in a cellphone–as it is, you need to completely reinstall it if you lose power for very long. The Palm Desktop backup conduit helps, and BackupBuddyVFS helps even more, but designing the device to auto-save when power gets low is a great improvement.

Unfortunately, no one is predicting that the device will have more then 32 MB of RAM, and odds are only 24 MB or so will be usable. That’s barely better then my current PalmOS 4-based Clie T615C. Combined with a fast-ish SD card, it’ll probably be usable.

Here’s Engadget’s picture:

Update: It appears that all of this came from the TreoCentral forums. In addition to the details that Engadget first posted, they’re also claiming:

• No compatibility with Treo 600 accessories
• Video recording
• 1.3 MP camera (we knew this)
• Removable battery
• Push-to-talk (who’s system, which network?)

Still no release dates, but other rumors suggest late October.

There are a couple of “Treo Ace” rumor threads going on treocentral’s discussion forum. As usual, it’s hard to tell fact from fiction, but a couple things keep popping up over and over again:

• It’s supposed to ship in October, but it might slip to November.
• Cellular vendors are starting to talk about it internally.

People have claimed to talk to Sprint, Cingular, and T-Mobile reps with some internal knowledge of the device, and they’re all saying roughly the same thing. One of the Cingular reports mentioned WiFi as an option, but it’s not at all clear what that means (two models? SD/IO support?), even if it is true.

Oh, and the prevailing name is now “Treo 650.”

Here are the discussion threads:

• http://discussion.treocentral.com/showthread.php?t=56351
• http://discussion.treocentral.com/showthread.php?t=55167

It looks like Canon is just about to announce a new DSLR. I can’t find the specs on their website yet, but they’ve posted a press kit full of pictures. There are some specs floating around on the net:

• EOS-20D
• 8.2 MegaPixels
• DIGIC II
• 1:1.6x Crop
• 9 Point focusing
• 1/8000s Max Shutter speed
• 5fps Continuous speed
• 25 frame buffer
• EF-s support
• E-TTL II support
• 0.2sec startup time
• 50g lighter than 10D

I’m not sure what’s up with the AF system, but the rest of the specs look just about right to me. I’d love a camera with a slightly faster frame rate then my D60, about twice the buffer capacity, and faster startup times, and that’s about what this provides. They even threw in a couple extra pixels, not that it really matters. The rumored price is $1,600 MSRP, $1,300 street, which is pretty good. The official announcement is due on Friday.

There’s also a rumor of a 10-22 EF-S zoom. EF-S lenses only work with the 300D (“Digital Rebel”) and the new 20D, so the new lens isn’t very useful on my D60, but wow–10mm is wide. Sigma and Nikon both make 12-24mm zooms, but 10mm is a new record, at least on a 35mm-like body. Unfortunately, since the Nikon 12mm zoom is over $1,000 and the Sigma is up around $700, the Canon lens will probably be kind of pricey.