Why the future is in your hands

GPS is starting to appear on more handsets

Sales of smartphones are expected to overtake those of laptops in the next 12 to 18 months as the mobile phone completes its transition from voice communications device to multimedia computer.

Convergence has been the Holy Grail for mobile phone makers, software and hardware partners, as well as consumers, for more than a decade.

And for the first time the rhetoric of companies like Nokia, Samsung and Motorola, who have boasted of putting a multimedia computer in your pocket, no longer seems far fetched.

"Converged devices are always with you and always connected," said Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, Nokia chief executive at last week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Last year Nokia sold almost 200m camera phones and about 146m music phones, making it the world's biggest seller of digital cameras and MP3 players.

In the coming year the firm predicts it will sell 35 million GPS-enabled phones as personal navigation becomes the latest feature to be assimilated into the mobile phone. Form and function

Nigel Clifford, chief executive of Symbian, said: "All of those single use devices - MP3 players, digital camera, GPS - are collapsing onto the phone."

"We are going past the point where this was a phone with a few other things," he said.

Symbian's operating system shipped on 188 million phones last year and a third of those came with GPS.

"We see mobile phones evolving into multi-functional devices that now support consumer electronics, multimedia entertainment and mobile professional enterprise applications; all converging," said Luis Pineda, from mobile phone chip firm Qualcomm.

More and more people are snapping shots with a handset

The first phones powered by a chip running at 1Ghz will hit the market later this year, seven years after the first desktop chip broke the gigahertz barrier.

Qualcomm's 1Ghz Snapdragon chipset will debut inside a number of handsets, including some from Samsung and HTC

"It's a first in the industry for a wireless chipset," said Mr Pineda.

As well as raw horsepower Snapdragon also features a dedicated application processor, as well as the ability to handle 12 megapixel digital photos and up to 720p high definition video imaging.

Mr Clifford from Symbian said the mobile industry had to deliver multi-function devices which did not compromise.

He said: "When we look at what is collapsing on to these devices and people's expectations with their experiences on single-use specialized devices there is going to be rising expectations."

Chip shop

More than 90% of the world's mobile phones are powered by technology created by British firm Arm. It designs chip architectures that it licenses to semiconductors makers such as Qualcomm and Broadcom.

Ian Drew from Arm said future mobile phones demanded ever more processing power.

But building chips with greater processing was not a straightforward, he said.

The future of the internet and computing applications is not going to be in the home or at the office; it's going to be mobile

"It needs to get into your pocket. And there's no fan. It needs to work for days rather than hours."

He added: "When you start adding multi media experiences - such as 3D graphics, video, and games - there are two ways to do that: you can get bigger and bigger processors or you have multi core where you can switch off a processor when you don't need it."

Arm is demonstrating a chip architecture, called Coretex A9, that will offer four cores, or processors, on a single chip.

Symbian has been working with Arm on future uses for multi-core mobile phones.

"You can use massive amounts of processing if you need it. But if you don't you can power down the cores that aren't required," said Mr Clifford.

Symmetrical Multi Processing will drive the next generation of applications on a phone, he added.

"Silicon vendors are looking very seriously at how they integrate SMP."

Mr Clifford added: "The future of the internet and computing applications is not going to be in the home or at the office; it's going to be mobile."

The gaming abilities of handsets are rapidly improving

"That is one of the next single usage devices that will start feeling the pressure from the mobile device," he said.

3D graphics acceleration is becoming standard on many of today's mobile phones and specialists like Nvidia have joined the market.

Mr Clifford said today's most powerful mobile phones, such as Nokia's N96 and NTTDoCoMo's 905 series have the same power as a laptop from 2000.

Nvidia's APX 2500 chip has enough 3D graphics acceleration to handle Quake 3, a PC game from 1999, on a mobile phone.

Handset owners were also beginning to expect the same online experience they have on their desktop PCs on their mobile phones.

"Web 2.0, social networking and video sharing; that's a real driver of horsepower," said Mr Drew from Arm.

He added: "But you need to be able to get data in. The next generation of mobile phones need high performance radios - they will have high data rates that will enable this content to be streamed to you."

Symbian is working on technology called Freeway to give phones the ability to move seamlessly between wireless networks, like wi-fi and cell networks like 3G and 4G.

"We don't want people to feel the mobile web is a second class experience."Opposition joy In pictures Battling on

Source from: news.bbc.co.uk

Read More..

Why do we need faster broadband?

Super-fast broadband is a must for gamers

A lot of what has been written about broadband has focused on obsession with speed.

But for most consumers the size of the pipe or the bandwidth is carries is of little importance as long as they can get done all the things they need to get done.

Without the obvious need for more bandwidth it is hard for companies such as BT to justify committing to a multi-billion spend on new networks.

Yet for the services to happen the capacity needs to be there. This chicken and egg dilemma is perhaps the biggest facing the industry as it considers its next move in the broadband sphere.

Ofcom has been proactive in the debate and is currently in the middle of a consultation on the issue but even it admits there is no obvious killer app.

"We are struggling to see new commercial applications. The same old applications are popping up that did when broadband was being talked about- such as video-conferencing and telemedicine," said Clive Carter, principal of strategy and market developments at Ofcom.

Video networking

HD isn't just for wildlife documentaries

Most pundits agree that a new age is dawning where using your broadband connection for a bit of web surfing and sending the odd e-mail has ended in favour of video-dominated applications

Services such as YouTube have proved that consumers want to watch video online and this has gathered pace with offering such as the BBC iPlayer and Channel 4's catch-up service allowing viewers to access on-demand TV.

According to Nielsen Online, some 21 million Britons (63% of those online) visited TV, video and movies sites in September 2007, which is a rise of 28% from the same time last year with the time they spent on these sites up 91%.

"Britons are displaying an increasingly significant appetite for supplementing their viewing habits online," said Nielsen Online analyst Alex Burmeister.

"Whether it's additional content related to a particular TV programme or actually watching episodes or videos through their computer, we are starting to see a significant spread of entertainment consumption form the so-called lean back method of a TV to the lean forward method of the PC," he said.

In a 100Mbps world, pundits expect that the social networking sites that are currently proving so popular with users and virtual worlds such as Second Life will have HD 2-way video conferencing included as standard.

Downloading increase

Is there evidence of pent-up demand for faster services?

"No-one is screaming for 50Mbps now aside from a few geeks who won't really do anything useful with it but at the same time it is remarkable people's ability to use capacity," said Tim Johnson, chief analyst at broadband research firm Point Topic.

For many the case for fast networks is one of "build it and they will come".

UK internet service provider PlusNet has noticed a marked increase in the amount of downloading its users are doing - up to 6.4 gigabytes per month from 5 gigabytes this time last year.

When it upgraded customers to a 8Mbps connection - which is the service 70% of its users now have - it saw a 25% increase in usage.

"Every time we've seen an increase in speed, applications have come along to swallow it up," said Neil Armstrong, product director at PlusNet.

Some of the answers to how consumers will may use future capacity lie in what others are already doing with it. South Korea is often held up as the most technically advanced nation in the world when it comes to broadband. Households in the cities enjoy between 50Mbps and 100Mbps on average.

Much of the demand for bandwidth in South Korea comes from gamers, where video games seem to be a national pastime. It is not just bandwidth that gamers need, it is speed of response, or latency but as a general rule the faster the download speeds, the faster the upload speeds and that is a must for online gaming.

In the UK the gaming market is also growing and for some, such as professional gamer Michael O'Dell, there is a belief that gaming is about to go mass market.

According to a survey conducted by Broadbandchoices.co.uk, nearly half of the online population (48%) play online games. Despite this only 19% said they wanted high definition gaming services from next-generation broadband.

But for Mr O'Dell, who heads up Team Dignitas - a group of professional gamers competing for some serious prize-money - super-fast broadband speed is not a luxury but a necessity if his team wants to compete on the global stage.

Most of his players languish on 2Mbps connections and some are of poor quality making it harder for them to practice.

"It is difficult for people to play competitively online due to their connections. It is well-known in the gaming world that the Swedes have the best connections in Europe, with many getting a 100Mbps for 14 a month. No-one in the UK can get that," he said.

It is in great contrast to the public gaming tournaments they attend, such as the recent i32 event hosted at Newbury racecourse, where speeds of up to 100Mbps are easily attainable thanks to the use of so-called local area networks.

At these LAN parties, conditions for gaming are perfect, said Mr O'Dell.

"We have a super high-speed network which allows up to a thousand people to play without any performance issues. That is the ideal situation," he said.

While gaming is likely to play a role in hoovering up next-generation capacity, few think it will be the killer application for the mass market.

It seems likely that the real bandwidth basher will come from a service yet to be thought of and one that may only come about when the extra capacity is there to serve it.No refuge Ice scream Roma ruin

Source from: news.bbc.co.uk

Read More..

Mac's Leopard an elegant upgrade

(CNET.com) -- Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is Apple's first major operating system upgrade since Tiger more than two years ago. The changes include more than 300 new features, which, while not earth-shattering, further streamline the experience of using a Mac.

Should you pay for Leopard? If you're happy with the way Tiger works, then maybe not. If you need Bootcamp, however, then you must have Leopard. And if you're considering the purchase of a new computer, Leopard makes Macs more enticing than Tiger did.

Plus, Leopard makes it far easier to find documents and applications than Windows Vista. Leopard's interface niceties made the daily mechanics of using the computer more pleasurable. Mundane chores, such as finding files and backing up data, become a visual treat.

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard costs $129 out of the box, or $199 for up to five users. Those who bought Macs after October 1 must pay $9.95 to have Leopard shipped to them.

Setup and installation It took us about 40 minutes to install Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard on an Intel-based MacBook. That's a bit longer than it took to install than Windows Vista, but not by much. However, installation didn't run so smoothly on some systems. Leopard took a painfully long hour or so to install on an iBook G4, the 933 Mhz processor just grazing the minimum requirements.

You should proceed carefully when migrating the files and applications you'll need. Apple steps you through the process, but take your time to avoid overwriting valuable data. Leopard changed the personal desktop image during one migration from Tiger, while leaving the desktop photo alone in other cases. After installing Leopard on MacBook Pro 2.33 Core 2 Duo with 2GB of RAM, there were problems with various applications, including Parallels and GroupCal.

Leopard ran bug-free on a 2Ghz Core 2 Duo Macbook. Some users, however, reported the fabled "blue screen of death" historically associated with Microsoft Windows; Apple addressed the issue.

To run Leopard, you'll need an Intel or PowerPC G5 Mac. A PowerPC-based G4 Mac with an 867MHz or better processor will work, as well. Apple suggests having 512MB of RAM. Additionally, you'll need a USB or FireWire external backup drive (or a file-sharing volume on a network) to use Time Machine. Features on iChat require a Webcam.

Interface The new look and feel of Leopard is different without demanding that you relearn the layout. The Dock organizing applications and files becomes a bit more transparent. Bump it over to one side, and the Dock looks a bit flatter. A drop shadow now highlights the active window, and all windows share a unified visual design.

Click on an icon on the Dock and related items fan out in the order you last accessed them. New Stacks help to unclutter your desktop by showing icons of items in the order they were last accessed. This is especially helpful for keeping downloads in one place, although you can't resize the icons. If the Stack is packed with items, you can display them as a grid.

The souped-up Finder introduces a sidebar that allows you to rearrange items in the Places section, while Search For submenus can locate files based on type and when you last worked on them. Click on Today, for instance, and you'll see everything you've touched lately in chronological order. If you work on a network, checking out another person's desktop starts with the simple Share Screen option.

Spotlight scours through files in shared folders on a network, as well as within Safari's Web History (which you should regularly dump to fend off snoops). It gets smarter, reading "Not" and "Or," dates and phrases, and even serving as a calculator for trig equations.

Many new design elements reflect what you've already seen in iTunes and iPhone. Cover Flow, for instance, shuffles through folders as you hold down an arrow key. This makes perfect sense for browsing files. Plus, you can peek at most documents instantly. Quick Look provides previews that can pop up files from iWork, iLife, Microsoft Office, PDFs, as well as popular image and video formats. In each instance appear relevant options, such as Full Screen view or Add to iPhoto. Select several files, double-click them, and you've got a custom slide show.

In addition to making it easier to find your work, interface additions are intended to make multitasking less stressful. Virtual desktops, called Spaces, cluster open windows into categories or boxes.

This can cut the number of windows you may otherwise stack around your desktop, especially helpful for tiny monitors. For example, you could move everything you need to edit a vacation video into one space, and in another Space place the files and apps needed to write a dissertation. Spaces were a cinch to set up (such as drawing a chart in a word processor), but a tad awkward for us to master until we learned the keyboard shortcuts. You can also use the mouse to drag items between Spaces, and to drag the Spaces themselves around.

If you rarely back up your work because the process is too boring or confusing, Time Machine is likely to change that.

The spaced-out interface is about as sexy as backup can get, displaying a dynamic timeline alongside snapshots of selected folders and files throughout their history.

To restore a file you lost, just go to an earlier time, click the Restore button, and you'll zoom back to your present Desktop. For a current period of 24 hours, Time Machine backs up automatically every hour. It backs up each day for the past month and each week for content updated earlier than that.

Time Machine immediately detected our external hard drive via two USB ports and we started backing up within a few minutes. You cannot back up to your Mac's hard drive.

You can check out the drives of fellow Leopard users with Time Machine, too. However, Apple doesn't offer password-protection and encryption options upfront showing you how to lock that drive from curious outsiders. Only longtime Mac users are likely to know to explore such options within Leopard's Security settings.

iChat lets you and Leopard-using buddies share files and control each others' desktops, expanding the tool's potential professional use. And you can record iChat sessions as AAC audio or MPEG video files ready for an iPod, which is a great feature for podcasters.

iChat Theater's silly effects can distort your face like you're looking in a fun-house mirror. Green-screen backgrounds within iChat Theater let your talking head appear in a video conference in front of, say, included images of the moon or your own pictures. (We still wish the "Star Wars R2D2" theme were included.)

Other chat buddies can see these, whether they're using an older iteration of OS X or they're using AIM on a Windows PC. iChat enables you to share files as you gab via video, so you and a friend can watch the same movie clip or flip through the same PowerPoint presentation. Photo Booth integrates with iChat, letting you record videos and show off full-screen slide shows.

Mac's new Mail application integrates rich note-taking into e-mail. These notes can serve as scrapbooks containing images. Some 32 e-mail templates enable you to drop in pictures and resize them with a built-in photo browser. Mail's RSS feeds tie into those in Safari.

The e-mail application also detects addresses for mapping via Google, as well as contacts for a quick save. Natural language capabilities, similar to those within Gmail, recognize phrases such as "next Saturday" for scheduling. Changes are synchronized between Mail and iCal. Setting up Mail is less complicated than Outlook, and it works with accounts from 27 services, including Yahoo, AOL, and Gmail.

However, we wish we could access RSS feeds from Mail without signing into our e-mail account. We encountered delays with several different Gmail accounts. In one case, the most current Gmail message that loaded in Mail--15 minutes after we had logged in--was from December 2006. We kept leaning on the Get Mail button for an unsatisfactory, slow and incomplete refresh.

Finally, the Safari browser default is tabbed without making you turn on the feature. Safari's cool new Web Clips tool lets you turn any snippet from a Web page into a widget for your Dashboard. Potential plug-ins from third parties that would be nice to have already include the Web Clips feature for the popular Mozilla Firefox browser.

Leopard offers many tie-ins to Web-based content (see the Webware video). Among them is Wikipedia as a new companion to the Dictionary. Although you can access the open-source encyclopedia from the Desktop, no entries are saved locally.

Geotagging is a cool addition to Leopard, enabling you to tie photos to latitude and longitude through built-in GPS on digital cameras so you can put picture galleries on a map.

Leopard offers 17 new features. There's support for Braille output devices as well as contracted and non-contracted Braille. It's the first operating system that can use a Braille display during installation.

VoiceOver makes it easier to jump to sections on a Web page, and its preferences can be transported to other Macs. However, for people with repetitive stress injuries, Leopard supports voice-activated commands only--not dictation.

There are updates to less glamorous elements such as Automator and Dashcode, and Network Preferences has been streamlined. Developers can enjoy full 64-bit support, and get to tinker with fun extras, which we wish were integrated already within iChat Theater.

ColorSync reads EXIF sRGB data from cameras, and there's support for connecting more cameras via cable or Wi-Fi, and for other gadgets via Bluetooth.

Security More firewall controls are among several security enhancements to Leopard. Yet the firewall isn't turned on by default, and we consider it vulnerable to outside threats. To fend off Trojans and spoofing attempts, you'll be grilled more when downloading materials.

A mechanism called Sandboxing is supposed to prevent potential external threats from hijacking your applications. Parental controls are now featured more prominently in the System and offer content filters, time limits, and Internet activity loggers to keep tabs on young Web surfers.

We saw only a 1 percent to 3 percent improvement with Leopard over Tiger on our performance tests. As this falls within our typical margin of error (5 percent), we saw no significant difference with application performance when moving from Tiger to Leopard.

We were unable to complete our Photoshop CS3 test because our automation routine tests, which typically run fine under Tiger, had problems with Leopard.

Adobe's Web site indicates that Photoshop CS3 should be compatible with Leopard--other than the automation snafu, Photoshop CS3 appears to operate normally.

This underlies the point that some applications might not be 100 percent compatible yet with Leopard. For instance, Adobe is rolling out updates to various CS3 image, video and audio editing applications within the next four months.

FileMaker is warning users of FileMaker Pro 9 that there are some compatibility problems with Leopard. However, FileMaker expects to have an update available by November 19.

Service and support Support options remain the same as in the Tiger version. You get 90 days of help free by telephone, as with other products from Apple.

Phone support thereafter costs $49 per incident. AppleCare support lasts a year after you buy Leopard. For extra peace of mind, you should consider extended warranties.

Apple also tweaked the Help menus within OS X 10.5. These are arranged well, although they didn't always provide an instant answer. Many items are better explained on Apple's Web site via message boards, user forums, and a well-organized knowledge base.

Source from: edition.cnn.com

Read More..

Mac's Leopard an elegant upgrade

(CNET.com) -- Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is Apple's first major operating system upgrade since Tiger more than two years ago. The changes include more than 300 new features, which, while not earth-shattering, further streamline the experience of using a Mac.

Should you pay for Leopard? If you're happy with the way Tiger works, then maybe not. If you need Bootcamp, however, then you must have Leopard. And if you're considering the purchase of a new computer, Leopard makes Macs more enticing than Tiger did.

Plus, Leopard makes it far easier to find documents and applications than Windows Vista. Leopard's interface niceties made the daily mechanics of using the computer more pleasurable. Mundane chores, such as finding files and backing up data, become a visual treat.

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard costs $129 out of the box, or $199 for up to five users. Those who bought Macs after October 1 must pay $9.95 to have Leopard shipped to them.

Setup and installation It took us about 40 minutes to install Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard on an Intel-based MacBook. That's a bit longer than it took to install than Windows Vista, but not by much. However, installation didn't run so smoothly on some systems. Leopard took a painfully long hour or so to install on an iBook G4, the 933 Mhz processor just grazing the minimum requirements.

You should proceed carefully when migrating the files and applications you'll need. Apple steps you through the process, but take your time to avoid overwriting valuable data. Leopard changed the personal desktop image during one migration from Tiger, while leaving the desktop photo alone in other cases. After installing Leopard on MacBook Pro 2.33 Core 2 Duo with 2GB of RAM, there were problems with various applications, including Parallels and GroupCal.

Leopard ran bug-free on a 2Ghz Core 2 Duo Macbook. Some users, however, reported the fabled "blue screen of death" historically associated with Microsoft Windows; Apple addressed the issue.

To run Leopard, you'll need an Intel or PowerPC G5 Mac. A PowerPC-based G4 Mac with an 867MHz or better processor will work, as well. Apple suggests having 512MB of RAM. Additionally, you'll need a USB or FireWire external backup drive (or a file-sharing volume on a network) to use Time Machine. Features on iChat require a Webcam.

Interface The new look and feel of Leopard is different without demanding that you relearn the layout. The Dock organizing applications and files becomes a bit more transparent. Bump it over to one side, and the Dock looks a bit flatter. A drop shadow now highlights the active window, and all windows share a unified visual design.

Click on an icon on the Dock and related items fan out in the order you last accessed them. New Stacks help to unclutter your desktop by showing icons of items in the order they were last accessed. This is especially helpful for keeping downloads in one place, although you can't resize the icons. If the Stack is packed with items, you can display them as a grid.

The souped-up Finder introduces a sidebar that allows you to rearrange items in the Places section, while Search For submenus can locate files based on type and when you last worked on them. Click on Today, for instance, and you'll see everything you've touched lately in chronological order. If you work on a network, checking out another person's desktop starts with the simple Share Screen option.

Spotlight scours through files in shared folders on a network, as well as within Safari's Web History (which you should regularly dump to fend off snoops). It gets smarter, reading "Not" and "Or," dates and phrases, and even serving as a calculator for trig equations.

Many new design elements reflect what you've already seen in iTunes and iPhone. Cover Flow, for instance, shuffles through folders as you hold down an arrow key. This makes perfect sense for browsing files. Plus, you can peek at most documents instantly. Quick Look provides previews that can pop up files from iWork, iLife, Microsoft Office, PDFs, as well as popular image and video formats. In each instance appear relevant options, such as Full Screen view or Add to iPhoto. Select several files, double-click them, and you've got a custom slide show.

In addition to making it easier to find your work, interface additions are intended to make multitasking less stressful. Virtual desktops, called Spaces, cluster open windows into categories or boxes.

This can cut the number of windows you may otherwise stack around your desktop, especially helpful for tiny monitors. For example, you could move everything you need to edit a vacation video into one space, and in another Space place the files and apps needed to write a dissertation. Spaces were a cinch to set up (such as drawing a chart in a word processor), but a tad awkward for us to master until we learned the keyboard shortcuts. You can also use the mouse to drag items between Spaces, and to drag the Spaces themselves around.

If you rarely back up your work because the process is too boring or confusing, Time Machine is likely to change that.

The spaced-out interface is about as sexy as backup can get, displaying a dynamic timeline alongside snapshots of selected folders and files throughout their history.

To restore a file you lost, just go to an earlier time, click the Restore button, and you'll zoom back to your present Desktop. For a current period of 24 hours, Time Machine backs up automatically every hour. It backs up each day for the past month and each week for content updated earlier than that.

Time Machine immediately detected our external hard drive via two USB ports and we started backing up within a few minutes. You cannot back up to your Mac's hard drive.

You can check out the drives of fellow Leopard users with Time Machine, too. However, Apple doesn't offer password-protection and encryption options upfront showing you how to lock that drive from curious outsiders. Only longtime Mac users are likely to know to explore such options within Leopard's Security settings.

iChat lets you and Leopard-using buddies share files and control each others' desktops, expanding the tool's potential professional use. And you can record iChat sessions as AAC audio or MPEG video files ready for an iPod, which is a great feature for podcasters.

iChat Theater's silly effects can distort your face like you're looking in a fun-house mirror. Green-screen backgrounds within iChat Theater let your talking head appear in a video conference in front of, say, included images of the moon or your own pictures. (We still wish the "Star Wars R2D2" theme were included.)

Other chat buddies can see these, whether they're using an older iteration of OS X or they're using AIM on a Windows PC. iChat enables you to share files as you gab via video, so you and a friend can watch the same movie clip or flip through the same PowerPoint presentation. Photo Booth integrates with iChat, letting you record videos and show off full-screen slide shows.

Mac's new Mail application integrates rich note-taking into e-mail. These notes can serve as scrapbooks containing images. Some 32 e-mail templates enable you to drop in pictures and resize them with a built-in photo browser. Mail's RSS feeds tie into those in Safari.

The e-mail application also detects addresses for mapping via Google, as well as contacts for a quick save. Natural language capabilities, similar to those within Gmail, recognize phrases such as "next Saturday" for scheduling. Changes are synchronized between Mail and iCal. Setting up Mail is less complicated than Outlook, and it works with accounts from 27 services, including Yahoo, AOL, and Gmail.

However, we wish we could access RSS feeds from Mail without signing into our e-mail account. We encountered delays with several different Gmail accounts. In one case, the most current Gmail message that loaded in Mail--15 minutes after we had logged in--was from December 2006. We kept leaning on the Get Mail button for an unsatisfactory, slow and incomplete refresh.

Finally, the Safari browser default is tabbed without making you turn on the feature. Safari's cool new Web Clips tool lets you turn any snippet from a Web page into a widget for your Dashboard. Potential plug-ins from third parties that would be nice to have already include the Web Clips feature for the popular Mozilla Firefox browser.

Leopard offers many tie-ins to Web-based content (see the Webware video). Among them is Wikipedia as a new companion to the Dictionary. Although you can access the open-source encyclopedia from the Desktop, no entries are saved locally.

Geotagging is a cool addition to Leopard, enabling you to tie photos to latitude and longitude through built-in GPS on digital cameras so you can put picture galleries on a map.

Leopard offers 17 new features. There's support for Braille output devices as well as contracted and non-contracted Braille. It's the first operating system that can use a Braille display during installation.

VoiceOver makes it easier to jump to sections on a Web page, and its preferences can be transported to other Macs. However, for people with repetitive stress injuries, Leopard supports voice-activated commands only--not dictation.

There are updates to less glamorous elements such as Automator and Dashcode, and Network Preferences has been streamlined. Developers can enjoy full 64-bit support, and get to tinker with fun extras, which we wish were integrated already within iChat Theater.

ColorSync reads EXIF sRGB data from cameras, and there's support for connecting more cameras via cable or Wi-Fi, and for other gadgets via Bluetooth.

Security More firewall controls are among several security enhancements to Leopard. Yet the firewall isn't turned on by default, and we consider it vulnerable to outside threats. To fend off Trojans and spoofing attempts, you'll be grilled more when downloading materials.

A mechanism called Sandboxing is supposed to prevent potential external threats from hijacking your applications. Parental controls are now featured more prominently in the System and offer content filters, time limits, and Internet activity loggers to keep tabs on young Web surfers.

We saw only a 1 percent to 3 percent improvement with Leopard over Tiger on our performance tests. As this falls within our typical margin of error (5 percent), we saw no significant difference with application performance when moving from Tiger to Leopard.

We were unable to complete our Photoshop CS3 test because our automation routine tests, which typically run fine under Tiger, had problems with Leopard.

Adobe's Web site indicates that Photoshop CS3 should be compatible with Leopard--other than the automation snafu, Photoshop CS3 appears to operate normally.

This underlies the point that some applications might not be 100 percent compatible yet with Leopard. For instance, Adobe is rolling out updates to various CS3 image, video and audio editing applications within the next four months.

FileMaker is warning users of FileMaker Pro 9 that there are some compatibility problems with Leopard. However, FileMaker expects to have an update available by November 19.

Service and support Support options remain the same as in the Tiger version. You get 90 days of help free by telephone, as with other products from Apple.

Phone support thereafter costs $49 per incident. AppleCare support lasts a year after you buy Leopard. For extra peace of mind, you should consider extended warranties.

Apple also tweaked the Help menus within OS X 10.5. These are arranged well, although they didn't always provide an instant answer. Many items are better explained on Apple's Web site via message boards, user forums, and a well-organized knowledge base.

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)