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For Apple fans abroad, the price discrepancy between between the cost of an Apple computer locally and what it would cost in the States is often enough to justify a flight to the States. In first class. On a chartered Gulfstream jet. Loaded as cargo in the belly of an Anatov An-225.

Fine. I’ll cop to the slightest of exaggerations. But as an American living abroad, paid in dollars but doing business in Euros, the 40% premium on the cost of a new MacBook Pro or iMac is enough, sometimes, to make me want to weep. Apple’s not alone in this: across the board, gadget makers releasing their products in the EU set a MSRP assuming a dollar-to-euro exchange rate of 1 to 1…. even when, in reality, the actual exchange rate is 1 to 1.45. There’s optimistic ways to look at it, of course — commit to buying that new MacBook Pro I have my heart set on for its euro price but in the States, and I get a trip home “for free.” But this is meager comfort: in reality, it often feels like the low prices of gadgets in America and Japan are subsidized by the exorbitant markups people pay for their technology in the rest of the world.

Don’t believe me? Check out this helpful infographic over at CMYPlay, which colorfully and informatively breaks down the price discrepancies between the same model of MacBook Pro over a handful of countries. At the end of the day, the average Brazilian spends enough in local currency for one MacBook Pro that he could pick up two of the same model if he bought it in the States. It’s almost enough to make a native Brazilian woe the day he was born in that bright, sunny paradise of plump, bethonged bikini bottoms.

Click through for the full infographic.

As equally tenuous a confirmation of last week’s Wall Street Journal report that the Apple Tablet’s enclosure would be made of a very Mac-conventional material indeed, this Reuters report, which says that the Apple Tablet will be a brushed aluminum unibody affair, and ship in Q2 of 2010.

Apple owns a not-unsubstantial chunk of graphics chip manufacturer Imagination Technologies, which makes their newly announced mobile GPU, the PowerVR SGX545, of interest to me and you, my fellow iPhone droogies. After all, this could be the graphics chip that will pump out the polygons come June’s iPhone 4G.

And what a nice chip it is. The HD-capable PowerVR SGX545 adds full support for OpenGL 3.2 and OpenCL 1.0, and is specced to deliver real-world performance of 40 million polygons per second at 200MHz.

The iPhone is currently at a disadvantage to handsets like the Motorola Droid or the HTC Nexus One, at least as far as screen resolution is concerned. It stands to reason that Apple will attempt to improve the iPhone’s current maximum resolution of 320×480 by incorporating a HD-capable GPU. In fact, given Apple’s tendency to distinguish each new iPhone model with a short acronym, it wouldn’t be surprising if the next iPhone was christened the iPhone HD. A chip as the PowerVR SGX545 would be a perfect fit for such a phone.

In fact, outside of the obvious Apple ownership connection, there’s plenty of reason to believe that upcoming iPhone and iPod Touch hardware refreshes will contain the PowerVR SGX545, given the PowerVR SGX536 chip firing all synapses inside the black plastic brainpan of the iPhone 3Gs.

Then again, Imagination Technologies is doing a lot of boasting about the SGX545’s DirectX 10.1 support, so perhaps, horror of horrors, what we’re really looking at here is a Windows Mobile GPU.

A France Telecom executive Monday suggested Apple’s tablet would be released “in days.” Stephane Richard told also told a radio interviewer the device would include a Webcam.

Richard, deputy CEO of France Telecom, owner of mobile carrier Orange, made the comments in response to questions from journalist Jean-Pierre Elkabbach. When the interviewer asked Richard about a report in the French weekly Le Point that Apple would launch the tablet in a “couple days”, the executive replied “oui,” or yes.

LAS VEGAS — OK, you got your iPhone 3GS. You record your video. It shakes and wobbles and wibbles all over the place, but no-one minds because that’s what they expect from hand-held video recording.

Not any more, though.

I don’t even know where to begin on this one. Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein, the former Apple hardware SVP who oversaw the creation of the iMac and generations worth of iPods (and, it goes without saying, dozens of early prototypes of the iPhone, given that he left Apple only a year before its release), claimed during an interview at CES that he has “never even used an iPhone.”

Now, whether or not this was a true statement (interviewer Kara Swisher didn’t believe him, and I’m mostly in her camp), it’s certainly not a terribly smart one. If he’s telling the truth, it means he’s never used the top-selling phone in the U.S. market, a device that has turned the global mobile market on its head and dramatically threatened traditional powers like Motorola and Nokia and, well, Palm. It’s kind of hard to beat what you’ve never tried.

If Rubinstein is lying, it’s almost worse, a passive-aggressive attempt at point-scoring that belies a grudge with his former employer that could get in the way of beating them. All in all, it’s just one of those moments that really makes you appreciate how effortlessly Steve Jobs belittles competitor products — he can actually make you believe he would never use anything but Apple because they’re that much better. When Rubinstein tries to be as dismissive in the other direction, he just sounds bitter.

LAS VEGAS — Most video camera makers concentrate on the video, then poke one (or if you’re really lucky, two) tiny pinholes in it to record sound through. Yeah, like that’s enough.

So Zoom’s approach is to take a honking great, smurf-colored stereo microphone and stick a vidcam, screen and controls on it.

While sound from the mic seemed pretty darn impressive, the $250 Q3’s video capability is bare-bones, recording in 640×480 at 30 fps (but in a Mac-friendly Quicktime format) with only a 2x digital zoom.

But that’s the idea — to put sound first. The guys at the Zoom booth said the idea behind the Q3 was to give sound recordings a little video accompaniment, like say as a way to record what guitar chords sound like for a music student, along with accompanying video of technique.

LAS VEGAS — More on the noise-cancelling front: Sony has taken the trick tech of their award-winning, $400, MDR-NC500D digital noise-cancelling headphones and dropped them into these tiny new buds.

Like its big brother, the MDR-NC300D uses artificial intelligence to sense then adapt to the type of background noise occurring in the user’s environment; Sony claims an impressive 98.7 98.4 percent noise-reduction. Tne control unit also has a switch that adjusts the sound to one of three settings (anyone remember the bright yellow Sony MEGABASS swicthes?): Movie, Bass, or Normal.

While my rather limited experiences with the NC300D’s bigger brother never fails to amaze me whenever I try them on, the jury’s still on the little guys. The noise-cancelling feature didn’t seem as impressive; plus, you have to deal with the unit’s control dongle — which is bigger than some mp3 players out there.

LAS VEGAS — Back in September, we reviewed Audio-Technica‘s outstanding ATH-ANC7b QuietPoint noise-cancelling headphones; had we been doling out ratings at that time (we weren’t, because — at the time — we lamely thought ratings were lame), the ANC7bs would have donned a majestic 4.5 turtlenecks.

Seems Audio-Technica thought it could do better.

I’m not going to use the word “iPhone killer” to describe the Nexus One, such phrasing is trite at best. Not to mention that the only thing that’s going to kill the iPhone will be Apple, and then, only when iPhone 4 or whatever comes out.

That said, of the current crop of pretenders the Nexus One seems to be something special. Follow us after the jump for our first impressions after 48 hours.

Once the most bitter opponents of Cupertino’s allegedly wasteful and polluting ways, environmental advocacy group Greenpeace has awarded Cupertino a four-star rating in their latest environmental survey.

Still, it doesn’t seem like Apple has done all that much to earn the applause. In fact, Apple only gained 0.2 points from its previous 4.9 environmental rating. That said, most of the other companies surveyed by Greenpeace, including Samsung, Sharp and Sony, fell in their rankings this month, automatically elevating Apple to the number five spot.

Greenpeace isn’t entirely happy with Apple: though they applaud Cupertino for eliminating hazardous substances in their product line while other companies make empty promises, they feel that Apple’s re-designed environmental section of their website is actually less informative than it used to be.

Still, it’s nice to see one of Apple’s most vocal and implacable critics recognize the great work Apple has done over the last couple of years in making their products as environmentally friendly as possible.

If you are one of the many iPhone owners frustrated by the camera’s inability to capture images in low-light situations, Apple may have heard your complaints. The Cupertino, Calif. company has ordered “tens of millions” of LED camera flashes, according to a Friday report.

“The electronics maker is seeking allotments of LED camera flash components in the tens of millions for delivery during the 2010 calendar year,” writes AppleInsider, citing people familiar with Apple’s intentions. Amsterdam-based Philips Lumileds Lighting is said to have won the contract.

Another day, another Apple patent… perhaps one even describing technology that could perhaps be nebulously related to the much anticipated Apple Tablet coming later this month.

Today’s? A new Apple touch display patent spotted by the usual gang of scourers over at Patently Apple. The patent describes a thinner and brighter touchscreen display that works by combining both the touch and pixel displaying elements into the same hardware.

It’s possible we’ll see just such technology in the Tablet, although it’s worth noting that this technology could be used in pretty much any touchscreen device. It feels, right now, more conceptual than technology to be thrust into our hands later this month as an integral part of the Apple Tablet, but only time will tell.

The Google Chrome Beta for Mac has a lot of holes in its feature set compared to the more mature Windows and Linux ports. The biggest omission is probably extension support, which allows Chrome’s functionality to be broadened similarly to Firefox thanks to small code plugins.

Extensions still aren’t live in the Google Chrome for Mac beta, but if you’re willing to test drive the Chrome for Mac developer channel, you can start expanding your Chrome experience now.

In my experience the developer channel has been pretty stable, and I was actually playing with Chrome for Mac for months before the beta, but if you’re not interested in the risk, the Chrome for Mac developers are insistent extensions will roll out to the beta soon.

If it walks like an App Store and quacks like an App Store, it’ll succeed like an App Store, right? Well, that’s certainly Intel’s hope as it unveils AppUp, a site promoting applications built around the Atom processor for the growing number of netbooks.

The beta version was introduced Thursday, during the first day of CES in Las Vegas. AppUp is a ‘white label’ version of Apple’s App Store, which recently celebrated topping 3 billion downloads for the iPhone and iPod touch. Although Intel introduced AppUp, we’re likely to see customized versions from Dell, Acer, Samsung and other makers of netbooks powered by Intel’s Atom processor.

Apple has gained initial approval to build a ‘prototype’ retail location which puts education and customers ahead of products, according to Friday reports. The concept could replace Apple’s first store in Palo Alto, Calif. with a transparent design complete with trees growing indoors.

“Fully half the function of the store serves to provide education and service to business as well as customer patrons in addition to product sales,” according to the proposal approved unanimously by the city’s architectural review board.

LAS VEGAS — Peter Sisson is the CEO of Toktumi, a San Francisco company with a cool app that adds a second phone number to your iPhone. He kinda looks like Roger Sterling, the silver-haired, hard-drinking, hard smoking character from Mad Men.

Except Peter isn’t smoking, and he isn’t drinking. But he’s certainly got the same moxie. Sisson borrowed someone’s badge to gain entrance to an exclusive, invite-only CES event so that he could pitch a new version of his iPhone app to some of the hundreds of press in attendance. I’m glad he did, because it’s a doozie.

Gadget producers seem to have gotten the message that more bang-for-buck is what sells products in the current economic climate. In keeping with this philosophy, Altec Lansing are showing off three new/refreshed budget-minded offerings at CES.

Left: Altec Lansing says its InMotion Compact is the most compact yet in its line of portable docks. The slim little system was designed with some impressive traits: it’s GSM shielded (so no annoying iPhone buzz), runs on AC or four AA batteries and is faux-leather wrapped. Available for $80, Feb.

Center: The Octane Plus 2.1, a three-piece speaker set with a 6.5-inch subwoofer and 3-inch down-firing mid-range speakers. It’s also much prettier than the VS4121 speaker system it replaces. The set runs $80 and will be available this Spring.

Right: Portable sound from Altec Lansing for a Jackson? Yup. Altec Lansing will offer three versions of their neatly designed, $20 MUZX earbuds, including one with pivoting earpieces. Available March.

UPDATE: My apologies, this story is incorrect. I followed up with Buffalo Technologies, who now say Apple had only an advisory role in the inclusion of Firewire. The decision was not an Apple mandate, and not all portable drives sold in the Apple Store have Firewire as well as USB, as readers have noted. In an email, Buffalo’s Brian Verenkoff says:

“Apple never insisted we do anything, nor can they force any company to do something they don’t want to. Obviously given the nature of this product, we designed it for the iPod/iPhone user base and did have ongoing dialog with Apple to make sure we developed a product that was compatible with their store and their customers. At the end of the day, every decision was made by Buffalo as to the product features.”

LAS VEGAS – Here’s something I bet you didn’t know. Every portable hard drive sold in Apple’s retail stores must include a Firewire port.

I found this out while getting a demo of Buffalo Technology’s Dualie, a combination iPhone/iPod dock and 500-Gbyte dockable hard drive.

LAS VEGAS — Camera snobs are up in arms about Samsung’s brand new NX10 compact DSLR, which is built on a proprietary lens format, making it incompatible with thousands of lenses out there.

But the NX10 isn’t aimed at lens junkies. It’s meant for soccer moms looking to step up from point-and-shoots, who could give two-hoots that the NX10 is incompatible with other cameras’ lenses.

A quick hands-on at CES gives the impression that Samsung hit the sweet spot. Wifey and I have 30,000 digital pictures of the kids, most of them terrible because they were taken with point-and-shoots. The NX10 is the kind of camera we might like: easy to use, easy to carry around and capable of taking damn fine pictures.

Playing around with it, I can say the NX10 is a well-built, fast and responsive camera that promises the quality pictures of a DSLR without the bulk or complexity.

LAS VEGAS — Businesses must have a mobile app. That was the message from a CES panel discussion of iPhone apps and their impact on culture, technology, advertising and entertainment.

At the session — iPhone Apps-Change Agents-App Breakthroughs, Video, Games, Mobile Engagement and Advertising — panelists urged companies to get working on mobile apps. Not just for the iPhone, but Android and Palm as well.

“It’s like 10 years ago when the debate was: ‘do I have to get a website or not?’” said Walker Fenton, GM of NewsGator’s Media & Consumer Products. “People were unsure, but these days, the answer is obvious: if you’re not on the Web, it’s like you don’t exist.”

Fenton added that companies must be on the iPhone.

“It’s almost a requirement,” he said. “You’ve got to be on the iPhone; same as you’ve got to be on the Web.”

He concluded: “If you are wondering about whether or not to get on the mobile, the answer is ‘yes’.’ Get on the mobile now.”

LAS VEGAS — The movie ticketing website Fandango is adding paperless movie ticketing to its iPhone app, an executive said at CES.

Fandango is currently testing an app upgrade that shows Fandango’s ticketing barcode on the screen of the iPhone, instead of having to print it out.

“We’re testing it now,” said Darren Cross of Fandango at a session on iPhone apps. “It’s not too far away. We’ll have it pretty soon.”

An iPhone app that could get you into movie theaters is a big step towards the long-promised ticketless future.

Right now, tickets purchased through Fandango’s site must be printed out at home, and the ticket’s barcode scanned at the theater. It’s pretty painless, but it would be much easier to simply display the barcode on screen.

However, tickets purchased through Fandango’s iPhone app (which is actually easier to use than the website) must be picked up physically at will call. It’s a minor inconvenience, but undermines the electronic nature of the transaction.

Here’s a good idea for virally marketing apps that Apple should think about — wirelessly beaming apps to other iPhones like the Zune’s music sharing feature.

Microsoft’s Zune is mostly a me-too product, but it’s one great feature is being able to lend music to friends Zune-to-Zune via Wi-Fi. Shared tracks can be played three times, after which they must be purchased from the Zune marketplace. It’s a great idea but tragically underused because there are so few Zunes out there.

LAS VEGAS — It was too early for most hungover CES attendees, but the brilliant computer scientist and former Apple Fellow Alan Kay explained the basis of all knowledge at a 9AM keynote speech here.

Canada’s Cignius Thursday unveiled a free iPhone app to control its NAO Symphony and NAO Symphony Noir Music Stations. The products let you wirelessly stream music from your iPod, controlled by your iPhone or iPod touch.

“We all know the iPhone and iPod touch are some of the most elegant music players on the planet, but getting that music to play on home speakers can be cumbersome,” Cignias CEO Shawn Saleem said.