Monthly Archives: April 2009

[Windows] Office 2010 to be Available as 32bit and 64bit versions

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It seems like Microsoft Office is the main topic during the last few days. Office 2008 for Mac is available for trial download, while Office 2007 Ultimate for Windows is available at a special discount to german students and now ArsTechnica.com even got information about the upcoming Office 2010 (Office 14).

According to them Office 2010 will be available as 32bit and as 64bit versions. The beta testing program is rumored to begin in May 2009. Some screenshots have been leaked already.

Screenshots are courtesy of ArsTechnica.com, find more at their place…

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[MacOS] Microsoft Office 2008 Available for Trial Download

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Microsoft Office 2008 has been made available for trial download. The trial will cease to run after 30 days. The trial download seems to be a part of Microsoft’s strategy to address the competition with the open source freeware OpenOffice.org. Microsoft also offers Office 2007 Ultimate at a special discount offer for students in Germany as of today.

» Download Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac…

[Windows] Vista and Office 2007 Special Offer for Students in Germany

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As of today Microsoft allows to purchase Windows Vista Ultimate and Office 2007 Ultimate at a special discount price. The offer is restricted to students from german universities. Prices vary between 52€ (Office 2007) and 56€ (Vista Ultimate). Both products are available for immediate download only. A backup DVD is available for additional surcharge of 13€ per disk.

When registering with a valid eMail address of a german university (i.e. john.doe@fu-berlin.de) it seems it is not necessary to provide a certificate of enrollment.

» http://www.daswahreoffice.de …

[Pre] Palm Pre’s Release Date

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According to phonenews.com the US american carrier Sprint will be the official distributor of Palm’s new flagship “Pre”. phonenews.com is referring to internal Sprint memos that there are two possible launch dates.

If Palm can deliver enough units the launch might be on May 17th, 2009 or if not the release will be delayed until June 29th, 2009. The end of june has also been mentioned by Palm when referring to the iPhone. At the end of June, the first iPhone subscribtions will be finished and people might want to search for an alternative.

In our opinion the Pre is a very strong contender to the iPhone. Its Linux based WebOS looks also very interesting to developers and hackers. Moreover the Pre supports multi-tasking. Let’s see what the new iPhone models will feature.

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[iPhone] iPhone 3G Bootloader 5.8 Compromised

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George Hotz – well known to the iPhone scene as GeoHot – has put some efforts into analyzing the  behaviour of the bootloader 5.8 that is running in many iPhone 3G’s. He found the signature checking of the bootloader is buggy. By exploiting this bug we are now able to up- and downgrade the bootloader. Sadly many of nowadays iPhone 3G’s contain bootloader 5.91. which added an RSA check that GeoHot could not circumvent yet. Read his whole article here.

By the way: this seems to be the same exploit the iPhone Dev Team used and released to be able to be used for manipulating (read our news here). Anyway GeoHot did standing work again. Kudos to you, dude.

[iPhone] Rumors about 3rd Gen iPhone Features

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Apple’s policy to upgrade devices once a year seems also to apply to the iPhone. A new iPhone – 3rd generation – is expected to be released at the end of june/beginning of july.

Rumors are circulating about the following features:

  • Developers who are already working with the latest beta version of iPhone OS 3.0 now report new drivers for WLAN chipsets allowing 802.11n connections to access points (according to MacRumors.com)
  • Also the camera could get an upgrade to 3.2megapixels as those CMOS image sensors have been ordered in large quantity (according to the asian Digitimes.com)
  • A video capture function seems to become integrated (according to EngadgetMobile.com)
  • A video editing function might become available (according to austrian Benm.at)
  • USB tethering might become available (also according to EngadgetMobile.com)

Will the 3rd gen iPhone be the same success story like the 1st and the 2nd generation? Let’s see.

We are very curious on the battle against the Palm Pre, that has been designed by the former Apple Manager and iPod architect Jon Rubinstein.

By the way: iPhoneBuzz.com has already released a comprehensive comparison between iPhone OS 3.0 beta and the Palm Pre. And StuffTV.com yet allows themselves to summarize the Linux based Palm Pre will be superiour to the iPhone. See here:

[iPhone] Quickoffice To Edit Microsoft Office Documents

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TheRegister.co.uk reports Quickoffice will be released within the next week on the iPhone’s AppStore. The Quickoffice suite will integrate Quickword and Quicksheet. It will allow

  • to create and view Microsoft Excel sheets on the iPhone (via Quicksheet, that is already available via AppStore)
  • to create and view Microsoft Word .doc (Office 97-2003) documents on the iPhone (via forthcoming Quickword)
  • to transfer files via WiFi
  • to access files on MobilMe’s iDisk
  • to email files
  • to view jpg, png, tiff, gif and svg pictures
  • to view (or play)
    • Office 97-2003 files (DOC, XLS, PPT)
    • Office 2007 files (DOCX, XLSX, PPTX)
    • Adobe PDF
    • Webpages (HTML, HTM, MHT)
    • Audio files (MP3)

The introduction price for Quickoffice will be about 20US$. By the way: Microsoft themselves seem to work on a native Microsoft Office version for the iPhone. But there are no further information available currently.

This picture is courtesy of Quickoffice, Inc.

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[iPhone] Microsoft To Mimic iPhone User Experience

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According to DetNews.com Microsoft plans to mimic the iPhone user experience on less costly Windows Mobile phones, said Andy Lees, chief of mobile-phone division at Microsoft.  Especially the graphics acceleration makes the software design and thus the user experience more fluid and movie-like. Currently Microsoft is working with hardware manufacturers to make user experiences like the iPhone’s GUI available to the masses.

[iPhone] Jailbreak for iPhone OS 3 beta (Update)

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We’ve been informed that a jailbreak for iPhone OS 3 beta is on doubtful trade for about 10$ (and on doubtful websites full of ads). We strongly recommend

  • to wait with updating to 3.0 until the iPhone Dev Team has released a working solution, that also helps people maintaining the unlock possibility for the iPhone 3G (means to not update the baseband!) and
  • to  not use jailbreaks for 3.0. As there are no technical information available, how it works and thus what might be screwed up by applying it.

Be patient.

Update April 2, 2009: Now the iPhone Dev Team also comments on those non Dev Team jailbreaks. Obviously some people use a self modified version of QuickPwn. The iPhone Dev Team will of course give no support to people using modified QuickPwn versions.The Dev Team explicitly warns from updating to a iPhone OS beta version floating on peer2peer networks and from applying non Dev Team jailbreaks to it.The problem is the iPhone OS 3.0 is beta and thus contains lots of bugs. That is why Apple releases these betas in such a short period.

iPhone 3G users will also lose the possibility to unlock, since baseband 02.30 cannot be unlocked at this moment. Yellowsn0w is compatible to baseband 02.28 only. Last but not least: all iPhone OS 3 betas will cease to work at a certain point of time.

Just be patient.