If you’ve held off so far, this week’s new iPhone announcements may sway you to re-consider moving your phone service to iPhone. So what will this decision cost you? The phone cost is the least significant factor. Whether the 8GB iPhone sells for $200 or $400 subsidized or $400 or $800 unsubsidized only minimally affects your other out of pocket costs over two years.

Read on for the facts and figures that will help you make a decision. (more…)

We have received word that Apple retail stores have received unidentified shipments, as well as new signage, slated to go up on Monday. The London Regent Street Apple Store has received a single box that is padlocked, and under orders to be put in a safe until Monday. “Just one box?” I asked. Yep, just one… at this particular store, anyway. This news coincides with an AppleInsider report from yesterday that Australian Apple resellers received boxes marked “DO NOT OPEN.” The stores have also received new signs (also under lock and key, of course), that is slated to go up over existing iPhone signage on Monday.

You may have also heard some buzz this weekend over yet even more allegedly leaked photos of the next-gen iPhone (pictured in this post), with a bonus red option. Personally, I don’t buy it for a minute. Engadget also has some deets from a “reliable source” about the 3G iPhone’s firmware, revealing that it has GPS and tri-band UMTS/HSDPA.

As you may recall, Apple added some strings of code into the iPhone SDK beta 6 firmware earlier this month that enabled the ability to turn 3G on and off. Now it appears that they have begun adding the finishing touches to the 3G experience on the iPhone. Apple updated the SDK beta to build number 9M2192 earlier today, adding two new prompts that warn you about the effects of turning 3G on and off during a call:

• “Disabling 3G will end your phone call. Are you sure you want to disable 3G?”
• “Enabling 3G will end your phone call. Are you sure you want to enable 3G?”

[via MacRumors]

Did last night’s news of 10.5.3 boasting Google contact syncing with iPhone and iPod touch owners get you down? Well, LifeHacker hopes to lift your spirits as they tell you how to enable Google syncing in Address Book.app without ever syncing an iPhone or iPod touch.

The process requires you to edit some .plist files within Address Book.app. LifeHacker notes that the .plist entry only occurs when you sync some type of iPod first. So, you will need to do at least one sync for the entry to show up. Some of the comments seem to suggest that the .plist entry will change back to the original value once you sync an iPod a couple times. Even still, this is a cool hack.

Slinkee Gadgets is run by a group of talented website designers who are collectively known as Durgle. If you read this blog and are interested in attaining web design then please show your support and give the guys over at Durgle a shout. The design produced by their team of web-architects is top notch as you can see from the quality of the website work they have on their portfolio site. Their team has just recently done a lot of work in the area of eCommerce design and their skills in the area are by far the best there is. I know this has nothing to do with gadgets but we just thought it would be nice to educate our readers who may be in search of professional website design & development that Durgle would definitely be our top reference to you.

Thanks,
The Slinkee Team

A reader of the popular apple blog TUAW, sent in this link to a Forbes story about a possible solar-powered iPhone. We recently posted about Apple’s new Solar Energy patent so it’s not a big jump to start seeing articles speculating on how that new technology will be used and expressed in Apple’s product line.

I have nothing against solar power–the Sun is the source of most of the Earth’s human-usable energy but I’m not sure that the iPhone is a particularly good match to solar refueling.

As the Forbes article points out, the iPhone is small and is built to radiate light from a large part of its surface, not collect it. Unlike low-powered calculators, the iPhone is a pretty power-hungry device and is going to get hungrier if the (likely) move to 3G occurs. And what the Forbes article does not point out and should be highlighted is that for the most part, iPhones live in our pants, which isn’t a very sunny place (for most people).

So do the math. Small surface + pants-based existence means a Solar-powered iPhone is not very likely to debut.

Rumors are flying about major changes coming to Apple’s .Mac online service. Perhaps most interesting is this post from Dmitry Chestnykh, the CEO at Coding Robots. He went through the iCal Localizable.strings file in the recently released 10.5.3 update and found a number of changes. In particular, he found a lot of evidence that the .Mac brand name is going to be replaced. Apple is apparently using a placeholder %@ which will be dynamically replaced by the new name, whatever that is, when it’s released.

A while back we posted on another rumor that .Mac syncing was coming with iPhone 2.0 to bring the enterprise features to those of us without Outlook server access. My guess now is that Apple is going to announce a radical overhaul of the service (including iPhone syncing), together with a new name at WWDC. As far as I’m concerned it can’t happen soon enough.

-TUAW

We know as well as anyone what an insane mess it is shopping for tech gifts for your friends and family this time of year, so we’re going to do our best to simplify the process. We’ve hand-selected a slew of gadgets and written a number of reviews to help you make it through alive.

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After meeting with key component suppliers and manufacturers in Asia, researchers for investment bank Goldman Sachs said this week they believe Apple will introduce two revisions to the iPhone in 2008 — one minor, one major — in addition to an Apple TV overhaul during the second half of the year.

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The Nikon D300 is the LONG awaited successor to the D200, which was introduced way back in 2005. This upgrade isn’t evolutionary by any stretch of the imagination — it’s a totally new camera. Read the full review after the jump (more…)