A thought occurred to me after reading this Twitter from Mark Littlewood.

What if Cambridge based Plastic Logic’s new screen is going to be the display for the often rumoured Apple Tablet?

With investors pumping 250 million dollars or so it would seem to me that they might have a big company ready to start taking their production and the display is certainly sexy enough:-

Here is a youtube video of the display in action!

It would certainly kill all other Netbook devices on the market!

Oh dear my 3G IPhone is starting to crack up:-

3G IPhone Crack

The crack is about 12mm (1/2″ long) starting from the 3.5mm headphone connector.

I have an appointment to see a Genius in the Cambridge Apple store in a short while….

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Update: Apple replaced the phone FOC – Excellent service from the Cambridge UK store

A few notes from my walk around Cambridge today. The guy I know who runs a tiling warehouse store (I was his first customer 15 years ago) said the bottom just fell out of his market 3 weeks ago. He is a loyal Barclays customer with a 40K overdraft, without warning or for any reason they suddenly decided they want him to pay 11% for his overdraft! Impossible for him to change banks, the other banks are not taking on new business customers!

The gym I joined , to get a decent clean swimming pool, gave me 15months membership for the price of 11 plus I got loads of visitor passes for Sally to use. The gym seemed very busy.

The queues at the tills in White Stuff for their midseason sale where humungous and the shop was heaving.

The outdoor shop Open Air was totally deserted…

The Apple store was packed, as usual.

The streets were busy with the new students and it is a glorious autumnal day.

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MacBook Oct 2008

In the beautifully illustrated tear down of the new MacBook at iFixit there is the discovery that the new MacBook contains an astounding 96 screws of which 56 hold down the keyboard. It must be an assemblers / BOM nightmare with 13 different types of screw mentioned in the break down. Plus it must add to the machining costs all those blind tapped holes in the casing. Lets hope the poor Chinese women don’t strike for better wages

Just had a play with one in the Apple store here in Cambridge. I found the new mouse pad quite hard to use as the downwards force to activate the switch seems quite hard, obviously designed that way to stop inadverent pressing when using the glide pad.

The machine does look beautiful though.

Tomorrow is the big day for trialling my new external iPhone battery pack, that I recently purchased with the gift voucher that Euan gave me for loaning him my old iPhone

iPhone with external battery pack

I will be at Be2Camp 2008 during the day and then, hopefully, meeting up with Annie Mole at the Photography.Book.Now London Meet-up in the evening plus the rail journey both ways. An impossible challenge for the standard iPhone, especially with all the calls and emails going on about the office and house sales

The story so far is that the pack makes the iPhone increase in weight from 134gm to 246gm and in size from 115 X 60 X 10mm to 130 X 65 X 26mm.

The pack is rated at 2200mAH the internal battery appears to be 1400mAH

Worst problem so far is that the external battery total blocks the camera! So, to take pictures I will have to remove it from the pack. The pack doesn’t seem to charge the iPhone on its own, charging only takes place when the unit is plugged in.

Lets hope the phone doesn’t get into its toasting mode, where the internal battery is depleted in 30mins or so, with the pack in place it will probably burn an hole in my trousers!

Update:

The unit worked well, once I had discovered the small button next to the LED I survived a whole 12 hours of intensive surfing, twittering, picture taking (alas no music as I had lost the earpods) in London and still had some power left once home. It can work as a iPhone mini base station charger so you can still use the iPhone as normal then just plug in to recharge or use it in the battery pack. Seemingly a good buy! so far

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iPhone front screen

I created myself a simple & neat ‘if found’ or ICE (In case of emergency) front screen on the iphone.

I used a regular photo which I over printed with my details using Skitch. I then uploaded it to the iphone by creating an album for the image which I synchronized . Once on the iPhone selecting the Use as Wallpaper option (the little arrow in the left corner when you click on the image), converts the image for the front screen. Seems to work quite well

MegaPhone from Ecamm networks is a very neat little application for the Mac and iPhone. You can now store and read all yout sms texts on the MAC as well as storing all your call data. A big plus for us ex Treo users is that at last you can store, create  and add memo’s (notes) on the iPhone. Another useful facility is that you can use the iPhone as a memory stick. (As long as you have megaphone on all your computers).

On the screenshot you can see that I have kept 544 text messages since I got the phone on the 10th Nov 2007.

A very handy bit of software for a tenner.

I upgraded my 24″ iMac to Leopard (OSX10.5) all went smoothly. Except for my brand new Lexmark X4580 printer/scanner/reader. The printer refuses to print and even worse crashes the programme that is sending the print. Looking up in Google I found the Apple users forums where another user was having similar problems. Emails to Lexmark were met with such comments as:- From Rathna “Please accept my heartfelt apologies for the problems you are experiencing with your Lexmark product. To the best of my knowledge, there are currently no plans to develop Mac drivers to support this model” & from Ben “Unfortunately we do not have any Leopard drivers available for your printer at this moment in time. We are currently developing them, but I do not have a timescale as to when they will be ready”

Question is whether Ellee’s friends at PC World will honour their PC Performance guarantee and replace the printer with an Epson CX8400 or Canon MX700 which apparently work with Leopard.

Update 2 Nov – I’ve just learnt from the Apple Forums that trashing the printers PDE folder gets the printer working and it did