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Journalists Cover Microsoft, Using Macs

It’s not an easy time for Microsoft — with Steve Ballmer having to field questions about being “buffoons” and an “evil empire”  at the shareholder’s meeting (.doc) — so when they get together “the world’s most influential technology pundits and online writers” (nb: we weren’t invited) for Mobius to discuss super-secret mobile tech you’d think [...]

Guide To Black Friday Apple Bargains: Cheap MacBooks, iPods and Accessories Galore

Here’s a guide for finding the best bargains on Apple-related gear during the infamous Black Friday sales on November 27. We’ve compiled a comprehensive list of gear from leaked photos of sales flyers and descriptions of sales.
The bargains include a 2.26 GHz MacBook + $150 gift card at Best Buy for $999.99 ; a 32GB [...]

Review: Voices Is Today’s Best Thing Ever, Grab It Now While It’s Cheap

New on the App Store is Voices from the clever folk at Tap Tap Tap. You can guess what it does.

Open it up, pick a silly voice. Helium is pretty silly. A microphone appears and the app even clears your throat for you (try it, you’ll see what I mean). Now speak your brains, and [...]

Review: Sony Walkman S540 Series Video MP3 Player

Press releases, you will hardly be surprised to hear, are rarely very interesting. But one arrived in my inbox a couple of weeks ago that made me double-take.
“Sony’s S Series Walkman,” it chattered, “is a serious challenger to the iPod Nano.” Gosh, really? Perhaps the Cult had better have a look at one, then, despite [...]

iPhone Meltdown Update

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Here’s an update on the iPhone meltdown we wrote about awhile back. Tim Colbourne in Rome plugged in his iPhone 3G to his computer’s USB port and left it to charge. Three hours later, it caught fire. The above is an aftermath pic.

About two and a half weeks after his post, a replacement iPhone arrived. Holburne returned the flambè phone so that Apple’s engineers could pick it apart to figure out what happened.

On his blog, Colbourne notes:

“I won’t say it was the easiest process. Apple’s European headquarters in Ireland explained that ordinarily this would be classed as ‘accidental damage,’ and would not be under warranty. Apparently, iPhone fires are so rare that the company assumes that faulty parts are not to blame and that it must be in some way connected to user error…In my case I was lucky that the Apple engineers had seen the story, checked out the photo, and wanted to get their hands on the phone in return for a new one.

The takeaway here seems to be, yes, iPhone fires are perhaps a fluke but if anything happens to your iPhone or Apple product, blogging about it helps get some satisfaction –  though Colbourne says his first post was just to see whether anyone else had encountered the same problem.

Via A Roman Thought

About the author

nicole_martinelli

Nicole Martinelli was born in San Francisco and has lived in Milan and Florence, Italy. Cultish tendencies and love for DIY increased while living on the Old Continent, where tech came late and cost more in Big Mac index terms. She's written for Wired.com, The New York Times and Newsweek, and since 1999 on her site, Zoomata. If you're so inclined, friend her on Facebook or connect on Linked in.

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One comment

    good for you…that was kool of them to actually replace it

    I had a nightmare happen with an iphone…my 17 year old sister begged and begged for an iphone and with my support my mother got her one for her birthday last October…then in January the upset hit…she had dropped it…and was hysterical, crying…

    and I was like…well it can be fixed…at the time didn’t know how to but knew with my experience with taking apart and fixing Macs that it could be done…and since the warranty was void from it being broken…I ordered the digitizer on ebay…and foolishly used PDAparts.com’s YouTube video to replace it…well that was a big mistake…should have used iFixit.com’s instructions but I didn’t…and because it just said to use the case opener tool by where I had removed the screws from by the dock…well I pried it from the black back and the silver frame…instead of just lifting the glass out of the silver frame…and ended up tearing up the speaker, headset assembly and the wifi…and in turn broke the LCD too…and that was all she wrote because my sister hated me for sure…we were all in tears…and PDAparts.com didn’t want to take any responsibility for their erroneous directions…

    well I said we can take a chance at our local Apple store (Boca Raton, FL)
    they took pity on me for what I had done to the phone and was gracious enough to sell us a new one at the $199 price instead of the without a contract price

    so there is so much good that comes from Apple…great products and amazing customer service…I plan to take my macbook back in to them because of the cracking top case…

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