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Here’s a demo-video of the newest functions and features of iPhone 3.0:

Rumors are spreading that a new version of the Conficker worm will be causing widespread havoc again on April 1, its anniversary date. Media reports have related that Conficker could be activated on that day giving a hacker access to millions of computers affected by the worm. Others reported that the French military has grounded a few of its fighter planes due to the threat.

While the media are concocting doomsday scenarios, worm and virus experts are shrugging off the threats. Anti-virus company F-secure has already said that there is no likelihood of a widespread, global attack. Only those that are still infected by the Conficker worm will be affected, if such an event should happen.

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Mozilla recently launched the first release of its mobile browser, Fennec. Touted to be the mobile Firefox, Fennec is currently in rough beta and understandably, it has a lot of bugs and things that need to be worked out.

At first look, however, Fennec is quite impressive, very easy to use even with the smaller screen space of a Smartphone. I particularly liked the integration of touch screen features. It allows you to zoom, scroll and pan using your fingers or stylus. You can also “flick” the page you are on to transfer to another tab.

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I’ve heard about claims that the video game industry, along with healthcare, is recession-proof. Well, these claims might be proven to be true, especially when you take into consideration the gaming industry’s February 2009 sales in the United States, which involved a double-digit growth year-on-year at a time when overall retail sales growth was sluggish. That is made even more special when you take note of the industry’s consistently growing sales for the past few months, while the rest of the world was experiencing recession blues.

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Most ordinary Internet users have encountered a link. That blue thing that they see on blogs, Web sites, Facebook accounts, even on YouTube. Just about every page of the Web has it. And when these links point to your Web site, they are called your site’s backlinks.

Backlinks, or inbound links, are incoming links to a certain Web site or page that does not originate on that particular site. Put simply, it is a link from another site that points back to your own site. If you have a Web site, pray hard that you get a lot of backlinks, as they are the only way people will get to visit your site without you telling them personally that your site exists.

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Backlinks quite simply are inbound links from other sites that point directly to your Web site or page. And while backlinks are that simple to define, they carry an important role to improving your Web site’s or page’s PageRank.

The page rank is a numerical indicator or gauge of the importance or popularity of a particular Web page or Web site on the Internet. This means that the more popular the page or the site is, the higher the PageRank is.

Although the algorithms used by search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN are top secret, it is generally accepted that PageRank is one of the more important considerations in these engines’ ranking schemes. Conversely, the more popular your page gets and the higher PageRank you have, the higher you rank on search results.

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Search engines do not publish the algorithms they use, so there is no sure way of determining how exactly they rank pages. It is, however, common knowledge that backlinks play a vital role in ranking high in your targeted search results.

Backlinks or inbound links are incoming links from other Web sites that point to your Web site. More than telling other people that your site exists, backlinks have been proven valuable in the area of search engine optimization as they are known indicators of your site’s popularity, which is a determining factor of your site’s PageRank. The PageRank, in turn, is one of the more important considerations that search engine algorithms take into consideration when ranking your site.

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iPhone has touted it as the next generation of the world’s most advanced operating system. On March 17, Apple gave the world a preview of the iPhone 3.0 OS.

The new OS promises to bring 100 new features to iPhones worldwide, including the following:

- the ability to search or “spotlight” the whole phone
- cut, copy and paste functions, even between apps
-you can also send photos, contacts, audio files and location via multimedia messaging
- read and compose SMS and e-mail in landscape orientation

All these are just the official ones. Unsurprisingly, various blogs and tech journals have come out with their own versions of what features would be included in the new 100 list. Some are unimaginative, while others say that the new iPhone 3.0 would enable you to use your iPhone to predict when the Second Coming would take place.

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Apple has done it again. This time it produced the world’s most powerful desktop computer. The new 8-core and 4-core Mac Pro has been describe by Apple as “perfect for power users”. Its most appealing spec is its innovative Nehalem microprocessor with a clock speed of approximately 2.26GHz. This processor utilizes one of Intel’s most potent lines of processors – the Xeon 3500 / 5500.

Among its latest and refurbished parts include:
- a new video system
- a new hardware look
- 4-core processors on 1 die
- On-chip memory controller
- Turbo Boost
- A whooping 4 Tera-byte of hard drive storage (maximum capacity)
- Up to 6GB of memory
- Enhanced Data Rate wireless
- NVIDIA GeForce GT 120

All these specs make the new Mac Pro 1.7 times faster than the 2008-released Mac Pro model.

But all beautiful and powerful things come with a price. For a Quad-Core Mac Pro (with a clock-speed of 2.66GHz), its price ranges from $2,300 to $2,500. On the other hand, the Eight-Core Mac Pro (with a clock-speed of 2.26GHz) can go up to $3,400.

At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) last January, Dell unveiled this sleek, sexy, ultrathin notebook called Adamo which had techies speculating furiously. Is this going to be a Macbook Air nemesis? Will this be the notebook that will give Apple a run for its money?

Sadly, answers could not immediately be found, because Dell revealed no specs nor internal features (booting wasn’t even allowed, reportedly). The sleek, black Adamo was literally just displayed for all to see and nothing else. On the outside, the machine sports a 13″ display covered edge-to-edge in glass, three USB ports, an eSATA jack, a backlit keyboard. It also is 0.65″ thick.

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Ready for IE8?

Microsoft’s latest browser upgrade, Internet Explorer 8, is here. The official market release schedule is 4PM GMT on Thursday, 19th March. However, a release candidate has already been made available to the public since January, allowing people to download, install, and play around with the new browser.
I myself have not tried it, as I have been a long-time Firefox user (with occasional forages into Google Chrome). I had abandoned Internet Explorer since IE6. I have IE7 installed but have never felt like actually using it. But this newest offering from Microsoft has me curious, especially with the promise of a faster, safer, and more enhanced browsing experience.

On that note, here are 5 features of IE8 that have caught my interest.

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So goes the e-mail I got from the good guys at Yahoo. I have a little less than two weeks to log on and retrieve my files. After the closing day on March 30, 2009, I will no longer be able to get the files I have there.

Yahoo did not say why it was closing the file storage service in its e-mail, but with all the problems that Yahoo has been experiencing in the past few months, I have to say it is because they are losing money and would rather concentrate on their core business. Which is, which is… hmmmn… what IS Yahoo’s core business, anyway? Officially, however, Yahoo maintains that “users have outgrown the service” especially when you got unlimited e-mail storage via Yahoo Mail as well as media sharing sites like Flickr.

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As a writer, I found that not many of my fellows actually know about this amazing little tool. I myself only discovered it last year, during the frenzy of NaNoWriMo. And I tell you, it helped a whole lot. If you haven’t stumbled across it yet, I highly suggest you go check it out.

Q10 is a word-processing software for Windows, sort of like Notepad but packed with just the right features that every writer needs. Q10 blacks out your entire screen, getting rid of distractions and letting you concentrate on the writing task at hand. It even hides your task bar. Instead, you get a useful little info bar that displays your running word count, page count, character count, and the current time — details that matter to a writer. Additionally, you have the option to toggle this info bar on and off, and you can set which particular counts you want to display. You can choose to show only the details that are important to you. Nifty, eh?

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When news first came out about a new version of the Nintendo DS, gamers were abuzz with curiosity. With the original DS, Nintendo revolutionized the handheld gaming industry and paved the way for stylus-based gameplay. The second installment, the Nintendo DS Lite, was a simple redesign and didn’t really offer anything unique.

After its release in Japan last November, the DSi already boasts of more than one million units sold. It is scheduled for release in the US, Europe, and Australia this April. Now, gamers all over the world are asking themselves whether it’s worth their money to upgrade to Nintendo’s latest handheld.

If you’re one of them, here’s some info on the new DSi features that, hopefully, may help you to decide.

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During the last quarter of 2008, Google horned its way into the already crowded mobile Smartphone market when T-mobile launched the G1. The G1 is the world’s first (and so far, the only) Smartphone that is powered by Google’s mobile operating system, Android.

Although still dominating that segment of the market, Apple found a worthy competitor to its beloved iPhone, with some Apple iPhone users defecting to the newer Android based G1. More than just bankrolling the platform, Google is also banking on the open source movement to provide more innovations for the Android, which it hopes to translate into more applications, software and overall improvements to the operating system itself.

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