No Line on The Horizon

The good: "Most impressive of all is the seven-minute-plus ‘Moment Of Surrender’, a gorgeously sparse prayer built around Adam Clayton’s heartbeat bassline and Bono’s rough growl. It crawls and creeps and seeps into being, with each separate part knowing exactly when to melt away – a sweetly melodic Edge solo, a sudden choir of backing vocals for the climactic chorus, a lick of organ behind the verse – and doesn’t feel overlong."
The bad: "And a close-to-50-year-old using his Apple Mac as inspiration for parts of ‘Unknown Caller’ (“Force quit and move to trash… Restart and reboot yourself”) and slithering “sexy boots” on single ‘Get On Your Boots’? Too far, dad."
The awkwardly worded: "There’s a song on the new U2 album that has quite possibly the worst title since Neanderthal man first bashed one rock with another rock and said, “This one’s called ‘Same Jeans’.”

Kindle 2 released by Amazon

The Kindle 2.0 has been compared to a trophy wife, “sleek, Botox-tight and a lot less comfortable than its predecessor”.

The Guardian has had a hands-on testing of the device but says that there a number of niggly functions. Its reporter, Staci D Kramer, describes the text to speech function as “very cool”, adding: “Unfortunately, the first article I picked was from the New York Times Latest News blog about the president's speech to Congress—and the nice man's voice is trained to say O-Bama as in Alabama—not Oh-Bah-Ma as in Bahama. The sound is pretty decent.”

She said that migrating titles onto the device is “as easy as possible”. She said: “Books can be set for download through an owner's Amazon.com archive even before the unit arrives—or they can be managed directly through the device. They can be moved back and forth and so far, multiple copies are working just fine on my multiple Kindles registered to the same account.”

iphone Gamer!

Rumour in today from Apple Insider suggests that a new model of the iPhone could be unveiled in June, the next device set to include more powerful graphics capabilities, designed to further bolster gaming on the phone.

Although only a rumour at present, June would be one year after the iPhone 3G was revealed, various references to the next gadget having already been spied.

Speculation has it that this new iPhone will see Apple completely rebuild the phone's architecture, offering far greater advancements than the previous upgrade.

It seems as if Apple has forged new partnerships with a number of manufacturers, and that this will see the iPhone using 'System on a Chip' components, presumably of the non-edible kind.

ARM processor cores are mooted, while PowerVR/Imagination Technologies hardware looks set to deliver vastly improved graphical capabilities, which should give game designers much more to play with, as well as potentially paving the way for older releases on the iPhone.

Rise Of tweet

Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams and launched in July 2006, is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post their latest updates. An update is limited by 140 characters and can be posted through three methods: web form, text message, or instant message. The company has been busy adding features to the product like Gmail import and search. They recently launched a new site section called “Explore” for external and third party tools that interact with Twitter and a new visualization tool called Twitter Blocks.

The service was started by Obvious Corp, who also started Odeo.

In April 2008 Twitter launched Twitter Japan in partnership with Digital Garage.

Lost season 5 begins......

The season 5 premier of Lost brilliantly introduced time travel as a major component of the storytelling. The people left behind on the Island are randomly jumping through time. There’s a mystery about whether the points in time they jump to is random or pre-ordained, but other rules have been established.

Dr. Marvin Candle and Daniel Faraday both explained that people can’t change the past, and that any attempts to do so will fail. However, Faraday also revealed that, for unknown reasons, Desmond is special and immune from this rule.

Franz Ferdinand sounding pretty much like Franz Ferdinand

We’ve been here before. A big band begins work on a new album and there are months of rumours about what they’re up to in the studio: they’ve gone all “world music”; Timbaland’s producing; every song features monks chanting; there are no samples/it’s all samples (delete as appropriate). Finally, the album comes out and they sound just like they always have done. So, here are Franz Ferdinand sounding pretty much like Franz Ferdinand (except on the opening track, Ulysses, which sounds exactly like Take Me Out); but the songs aren’t as good as they used to be, and the formula is beginning to sound a little tired. It’s not until track 10, Lucid Dreams, that we hear some genuine reinvention.A few more tracks with that sense of abandon and Tonight could have been so much better.

IPhone Nano?

Coming in June, apparently Steve Jobs may be temporarily stepping down from Apple to recuperate from his health issues, but his return in June could be accompanied by a new iPhone nano.

Chip off the old block

Chip makers in the Far East are apparently preparing to ramp up production, ready for a new smaller iPhone that could start being manufactured in March all set for introduction in June.

This fits with Apple's current iPhone schedule, which has seen the previous two models introduced, in the US at least, in the middle of the year.

The good news, for the chip makers that is, is that the new smaller iPhone is expected to require a similar number of chips as the original and cost around the same to manufacturer.

Less good, if you're in the semiconductor trade, however is the anticipation that Apple will use the introduction of the new model to reduce the price of the original, giving it an additional way to fight off Google's Android OS.

Availability

There's nothing official yet, and it's unlikely anything will happen until Steve Jobs returns to his day-to-day duties, but Apple has consistently stuck to its product schedules in the past. If all goes to plan, though, this should hopefully mean in six months time Apple will be back with a bang.