Welcome back everyone, to another edition of “The Roundup”! And Happy 3^rd Birthday to The iLife!

This week I’m talking about Sidekick users having no data, Finland requiring internet, and Amazon giving you your products even faster.

This week I have three stories for you. Let’s get started.

1: From : Technologizer
Microsoft to Sidekick Users: We Seem to Have Lost Your Data
Sunday, October 11, 2009

If your one of the few people who still uses a Sidekick then, as you probably know, you’re having some issues. See, the Sidekick doesn’t actually save its data to the phone, it is stored in volatile (meaning if you turn the power off, it’s gone) flash memory and it’s synced it to a Danger (the company the makes the sidekick, now owned by Microsoft) server. This may sound cool, since theoretically if you ever lose your phone, you still have your data and you can access it via the internet. But that means you’re dependent on some server, somewhere. And this week, that server failed. Danger/Microsoft managed to lose all of their customers’ data. To make matters worse, there only advice was to “not turn your sidekick off” and that your data was almost certainly lost. Luckily, they were lying and managed to recover most of it. However, do you really trust them to keep your data safe? Plus, it’s time to move on from the side kick, I mean wouldn’t you want to switch to the much more open and interesting T-Mobile G1 or MyTouch?

Take a look at the rest, after the jump.

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Welcome back everyone, to another edition of “The Roundup”!

This week I’m talking about Windows 7 being cheap (for students), Facebook adding features, and 802.11 N Wi-Fi is now real! Take a look, after the jump.

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Welcome back everyone; it’s the end of July, and time for another edition of “The Roundup”!

This week I’m talking about the all new “Micro-Hoo”, and a Google Voice app store rejection. Take a look, after the jump.

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Welcome back everyone, to another edition of “The Roundup”!

This week I’m talking about the Palm Pre being almost out, Windows 7’s launch date, and Google Squared has gone public. Take a look, after the jump.

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Welcome back everyone, to another edition of “The Roundup”!

This week I’m talking about Google’s latest product release, The new Microsoft Zune, a Hackintosh maker going bankrupt, and a reminder about Windows Vista SP2. Take a look, after the jump.

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The future of FireWire is terminally unknown. IEEE 1394 has always been strong, however in today’s market it may not survive.

FireWire was developed by Apple in the 80’s, with contributions from Texas Instruments, IBM, Sony and a few other companies. FireWire’s first release was in 1995, and its major contender is Universal Serial Bus (USB), which was released in 1996. USB was a collaboration between Microsoft, IBM, Intel, and several other companies.

As shown, FireWire came out earlier (albeit by a year) and was vastly superior to USB. Not only that, but it took USB until 2000 to beat FireWire’s theoretical max. However, what is rarely stated is that even though USB’s theoretical max is higher, this is the THEORETICAL speed, meaning the actually speed is typically slower. In the case of USB 2.0, normal sustained transfer speeds max out around 240 Mb/s, half of its advertised 480 MB/s. Typically speeds are even slower than that, sub 200 (my external hard drives running USB 2.0 usually sit around 200 Mb/s). Of course the same applies to FireWire, however sustain speeds for FireWire are much closer to their theoretical, with their read speeds being 70% faster read and 50% faster write speeds over USB (for Firewire, we see ours sit around 325 Mb/s). Even though USB is slower, USB is on every computer you can buy on the market. FireWire on the other hand has been dwindling.

But USB isn’t Firewire’s only competitor. External SATA has been becoming increasingly more common with external hard drives, boasting speeds of nearly 1 Gigabit/s. And eSATA has plans to start marketing to film cameras soon, which is one of the few markets FireWire has a good hold on.

HDMI is another competitor after FireWire territory. FireWire can be used for TV, but HDMI is gaining a larger market penetration than FireWire has.

FireWire’s major holds in industry are film, automobiles, and military aircraft. These are industries that use FireWire as a standard. But with new standards rising, FireWire may lose its hold. Faster components are coming around every day. FireWire is starting to show its age, and support seems to be dwindling every day.

I wouldn’t say FireWire is going to die anytime soon. FireWire has shown itself to be versatile and fast. It does has a certain niche of the market. However, it seems to be lacking support, especially in the consumer market. USB already has 100% market penetration, and is held as a standard by the entire industry. eSATA is displacing FireWire for transfers to and from external drives, due to its higher transfer speeds. Soon, unless FireWire makes a big jump quickly, FireWire may be lost as a IEEE standard.

It’s a major topic PC users use to bash Macs, and comparing Macs to PCs it seems to be true.

Now that Apple has started to make more headway into the Microsoft dominated market, the flamewars have become more intense. As we know Apple has already made several distasteful commercials attacking Microsoft and Vista, now Microsoft is stepping up to the plate, and hitting where it hurts: the Price.

Microsoft was quite respectable for not degrading themselves to mudslinging until this point, but they undeniably know that attacking the price of Mac products is the most effective way to boost sales. The Apple Tax has become notorious, especially for PC users who try to stop others from switching to Mac. In almost any situation, if you compare Mac and PC hardware, there always seems to be a gap in pricing even when they are almost identical computers.

Continued after the break…
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Hello Again, Let’s get started with rounding up this weeks big tech stories.

Take a look, after the jump.

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Happy 2009 everyone! Here’s your first (official) Roundup!

This has been a rather slow news week (being in between the holidays), but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t find anything to roundup!
Take a look after the jump this week’s top tech stories! (in no particular order) Read more…

My name is Keith Hobin, and I’m the managing editor here at theiLife. I originally joined theiLife back in June, but now I’m making my first post. I grew up in Montclair, NJ with Matt, Sidney, and a few of the other iLife writers. I graduated from Montclair High School this year and will be attending Drexel University as an Information Systems major. I prefer the Microsoft side of computers and plan on adding a little diversification into this blog. You will be hearing from me from time to time with new stories and information about the goings on of the blog. If you want to contact me, you can email me at keith@theilife.com . For my full biography, check out the about page section.

In getting ready for my attendance of Drexel, I have recently purchased one of Dell newest Laptop, the Studio 15. The Studio line is intended to have a mix of features from the XPS and Inspiron line at prices starting around $650 and around $750 for a decent configuration. For my Studio 15, I paid $ 1,839.94 with a 4 year warranty, accidental damage protection, and lojack, before tax and shipping. A PDF of the invoice / configuration will be posted along with this (Here). Just the price difference of $460 alone, a MacBook Pro being $2,300, is a good reason to consider another brand. But let’s delve into the features of each computer.

NOTE: All Comparisons made will be between MY Dell Studio 15 and the 15″ 2.5GHz MacBook Pro. However, I will note the optional features I selected for my dell and will note higher features that I opted not to get. When I discuss option prices, the price increase will be from the cheapest configuration available to the general public at the time of writing. To be fair, both of the base prices of the computers are with educational discounts and I received an extra discount for taking the 4 year warranty.

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