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Microsoft’s My Documents Folder Makes Triumphant Return – On iPad

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Earlier today, I was reading Infoworld’s article, The iPad questions Apple won’t answer. The first question they listed was “Can you save and transfer documents to the iPad?”, and their assumed answer was “No”; they suggested that the only way to do this would be to open a document from an email message.
I read that [...]

Top 5 Things To Check Out at Macworld 2010

Macworld 2010 opens today. It is the 25th annual gathering of Mac users. That’s right, 25 years!
But thanks to the absence of Apple this year, this “Mecca for Mac Heads” may be the last. So check it out while you can.

The show runs for 5 days. The Expo showfloor opens on Thursday at noon.
For the [...]

Opinion: MacBook, or iMac + iPad?

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The announcement of the iPad has done a lot of things: it’s stoked up excitement in the Mac using community, it’s got a bunch of developers feverishly coding exciting new stuff, and it’s got retailers and cell phone companies the world over drooling over the money they can make from it.
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In Depth: 30 Days with the Nexus One

It’s been a month since my review of Google’s “SuperPhone”, the Nexus One. Since that time, we’ve surfed, updated facebook, navigated, called, played endless hands of cribbage and even tried to freeze it to death on a trip to Dayton Ohio. Follow me after the jump to find out does the “SuperPhone” stand the [...]

Two Intesting iPhone 2 Tidbits

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I heard two interesting tidbits about the possible design of the iPhone 2 at the weekend:

Better Battery Thanks To Better Software

3G is generally assumed to be a drain on battery life because of the hardware, which sucks down juice, but it is actually the iPhone’s software that is the problem, according to engineers working on Google’s Android phone. According to a conversation reported to me by a colleague at Wired.com, Google’s engineers say the first iPhone OS was basically a hack. It was adapted from the desktop OS and had none of the advanced power-management features necessary to properly run the networking chips. But the iPhone 2 will have not only better integrated circuits, it will have proper power-management software also.

The iPhone 2 Won’t Have an All-Plastic Case

There are several rumors speculating that the iPhone 2 will have an all-plastic case, replacing the metal back of the current design. But an engineer I talked to last year said the metal cases of the iPod and the iPhone were probably designed to dissipate heat from inside the device . They were likely big heat sinks. And that’s why I doubt the iPhone will have a plastic back, because plastic doesn’t conduct heat as a well as metal.

About the author

Leander Kahney

Leander Kahney is the editor of Cult of Mac, and author of three books about technology culture: Inside Steve’s Brain, the New York Times bestseller about Steve Jobs; Cult of Mac; and Cult of iPod. Leander has written for Wired, MacWeek, Scientific American, and The Guardian in London. Follow Leander on Twitter @lkahney and Facebook.

Email the author | Read more posts by Leander Kahney.

6 comments

    Can’t wait to find out.

    Two “Intesting” iPhone 2 Tidbits… getting an upset stomach over this are you?

    A metal heat sink that people carry around in their pockets?

    Well you were half right!!! ;-)

    Here’s a serious question… is the back panel of the iPhone 1.0 already plastic? Sure, it *looks* like metal. But is it?

    Originally I thought it was metal… but that illusion shattered when my first iPhone had an hard skidding fall onto some rough pavement. The resulting mess of scratches seemed to be in something less like metal and whole lot more like… PLASTIC! I tapped the back and sure enough… it SOUNDED like plastic too.

    Right around that time I ran into this engadget article about laser etching the iPhone, and it seemed to confirm what I’d discovered — the aluminum back is just “really nice plastic”

    http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/17/laser-etching-the-iphone/

    Has anyone cracked open their iPhone and know for sure? Is the “metal” really plastic?

    FWIW, the iPhone case is made from the magnesium alloy, AZ91D. It is electroplated with a tin alloy for corrosion and scuff resistance. Magnesium has good heat conductivity (hence its use as a heat sink) and electrical conductivity and thus doubles as a EMI shield.

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