Sleek and Powerful, the New 11-Inch MacBook Air Will Blow You Away, Again [Review]

Apple’s new 11-inch MacBook Air is simply incredible. Of course you probably already knew this puppy was light, and gorgeous, but the power that this tiny machine packs is truly breathtaking. Optimized for speed and portability, the new MacBook Air improves on its predecessor to prove that it’s the best notebook computer Apple’s ever made.

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iOS 5’s New Camera App Will Delight You. Here’s Our In-Depth Preview of the New Features

Apple didn’t announce a new iPhone with a beefed up camera on Monday, but they did inform us that they are making some big improvements to their camera app. With the ability to take pictures from the lockscreen, volume shutter buttons, basic photo editing and much more, Apple’s done a great job of making sure the iPhone will continue to be one of the most popular cameras on the web. Here is our run down of the new features in iOS 5’s camera app.

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iMessage is Going to Be Huge! Here’s Our Hands-on Look at How it Works

Apple’s new iMessage app was one of the biggest surprises at WWDC yesterday. Once I got iOS 5 and Lion installed on my devices, I asked our Twitter followers what they wanted to know about the new OSes and we got a lot of questions about iMessage and how it works. There seems to have been a bit of confusion regarding the new service, so let me help explain how iMessage works on iOS 5.

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The Daily: Not Much Bang for Murdoch’s Buck

The Daily's tech bells and whistles can't save it from empty-calorie content.

The Daily, the made-for-iPad product from Rupert Murdoch and News Corp., made a much-anticipated world debut Wednesday at the Guggenheim in New York. News Corp marketing promised “a package that’s smart, attractive and entertaining.”

Too bad it delivers an experience that’s pedestrian, plain and vaguely creepy. Not to mention prone to crashing.

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Hello Dolly! Put Time Machine Backups in the Cloud with Dolly Drive

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2011 — Dolly Drive, a new cloud-based storage solution specially tailored to Mac specifications, launched Thursday from the Indie Spotlight at Macworld in San Francisco and looks to be one of the smartest plays — and best values — to come out of this year’s show.

Remote storage accessible from anywhere, any time, Dolly Drive is designed to work exclusively and specifically with Apple’s Time Machine, giving Mac users an inexpensive, seamless method for creating secure, redundant (in some cases, perhaps, primary) backups that can be accessed to restore digital files from any location with an Internet connection.

With tri-level security including authentication encryption, data transmission over secure tunnel and multi-leveled, complex authentication protocols for third-party access to data at Dolly data centers, a Mac user can feel confident in the security of data stored for as little as $10 per month for 250GB. Other pricing plans prove Dolly Drive is serious about delivering value for a service that should be attractive to computer users of any sophistication level.

No other remote storage solution we’re aware of is engineered to work directly through Time Machine, nor is any so dedicated to serving Mac users.

This is definitely one of the nicest finds we’ve seen at Macworld 2011 and well worth further exploration.

FaceTime First Look: Simple and Ready to Takeover the World

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We’ve been playing around with the new beta release of FaceTime, and while it’s slim on features, we’re fairly pleased with the app considering it’s still in the beta phase. So far FaceTime for Mac is a simple replication of FaceTime from iOS, but it’s simplicity is what I like about it so far.

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First Impressions of Logitech Revue Google TV Box: It’s Way Too Geeky

This is the controller for Logitech's Revue Google TV box. Minimalist it is not.

SAN FRANCISCO: Google is not to be underestimated, but sitting here watching a demo of the first Google TV, I’m not sure it has mainstream appeal.

Built by Logitech and running Google’s Android software, the Logitech Revue Google TV has definite geek appeal. It does everything: the $299 box connects to satellite and cable TV, compatible DVRs and Web video, as well as other online multimedia. You can search for content using your voice and control it with a smartphone. It has apps, HD videoconferencing, and functions as a universal Harmony remote, controlling all your home theater devices. (For a detailed breakdown of how it compares to Apple TV, see here)

But there’s no way my mother will go for it.

The hardware of Logitech's Revue Google TV box looks good and capable, but search isn't a good UI paradigm for TV. There's too much crap to sift through.

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Sena’s Sarach Flip Is a Classy Leather Case For Your iPhone 3GS [Review]

Case maker Sena designs premium handcrafted cases for leather junkies, myself included. Their cases are all of superior quality and come in plenty of designs to choose from, which makes it a no-brainer choice if you are looking for something classy to protect your iDevice. The $69.99 Sarach Flip Leather is no exception.

What’s Good?: The case itself is a piece of art. As you would expect, a lot of thought has been put into the styling of the case.

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Introducing the Apple Magic Trackpad [First Look]

It only makes sense that the company who brought us the first mouse would try to re-invent the way desktop computers are used. Apple is attempting to bring multi-touch to the masses with its new Magic Trackpad. While this might seem like just a trackpad, this could be a sneak peek on how Apple plans to implement iOS onto OS X. Regardless of their intentions, this is the most exciting input device since the Magic Mouse. Read the rest after the break.

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iOS 4.1 Beta 2 Fixes iPhone 4 Proximity Sensor Issues

Apple appears to have fixed the widely-reported iPhone 4 proximity sensor issue in the latest iOS 4.1 beta 2 update.

The latest beta also includes a baseband update (AT&T 7.1), which seems to fix HSUPA upload speed issues, which slowed video and photo uploads to a crawl.

Despite reports to the contrary, our tests show that the proximity sensor issue appears to be have been fixed. (MacRumors says the issue hasn’t been addressed).

In numerous tests, I couldn’t get my iPhone 4 to hang up a call. Previously, the iPhone was plagued with proximity sensor issues. It would constantly hang up calls when I held the phone next to my cheek.

But after installing the iOS 4.1 beta 2 update this afternoon, I couldn’t force the iPhone to hang up calls when lifting it up to my face, no matter how hard I tried.

I stress that the issue only seems to have been fixed. I could of course be wrong. Apple hasn’t yet documented what is in the latest beta update.

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