It’s the first week of September and everyone is getting back to business and getting their new gear ready for the holiday season. The annual IFA Berlin consumer electronics fair, also known as the Berlin Radio Show, had a whole bunch of new stuff to ogle, including the ultra high definition (and ultra high price) 4K television sets. Mmmm, pixels….
The Web is also filling up with announcements of new smartphones this month.
Nokia? Check.
Motorola Mobility? Check.
HTC? Check.
Apple? (Oh, you finally confirmed that September 12th event?) Let’s say: Check.
If the iPhone 5 does land this month, the reign of Samsung’s Galaxy S3 as the best-selling smartphone will probably come to an end. (Preparing for a big event doesn’t seem to have slowed down Apple from filing more patent infringement complaints against Samsung and trying to get even more of the Galaxy products banned from stores.) And Team Cupertino can bask in the glory of Mac OS X beating at least one version of Windows in market share, even if it is the much-maligned Windows Vista.
Meanwhile, hacking group AntiSec says it’s grabbed 12 million Apple unique device identifier numbers from an FBI computer. (The FBI doesn’t think so.) At any rate, the news that 12 million UDID numbers (and whatever personal information associated with them) have been grabbed up is a tad disturbing.
Looks like that story from the U.K. about actor Bruce Willis suing Apple over the bequeathal rights to his iTunes library was wrong, but as several media organizations pointed out, just who owns your digital media after you’re gone? (Speaking of gone, it sounds like Nicolas Cage is not — from the Kick-Ass movie franchise, anyway — and will be back with Chloe Moretz as Hit Girl and Jim Carrey as The Colonel in a sequel next year.)
Remember webOS? Anybody? (Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?) Even if it doesn’t ring a bell, HP announced it was releasing a beta version of webOS for both a desktop edition and one that runs on mobile devices.
Mobile devices in the Nordic lands will soon be getting something unique: a standalone streaming HBO service that doesn’t require you to have an existing cable subscription to use. Let’s hope Nordic HBO À la carte is a raging success so maybe they’ll do it here in the U.S.
And finally, if Half-Life changed your life back in the late 1990s, set an alarm in your calendar program for September 14th. A new version, dubbed Black Mesa and crafted by fans of the original game for the PC, is due out next late week. Who knows, maybe in a few years, they’ll do a console version that looks killer on a 4K television set.
