Fellow readers, probably just like us you are waiting for the updated iMac lineup to come out. If so – good news. The same destiny is spelled for Mac Pros as well, or at least so we have it and so shows the fact that, as with iMacs, Mac Pro is skipping on a number of important new features so far. Again, features are the same that average iMac lacks: next-gen graphics, Intel Core i-series processors, SSDs, etc. Oh, and there will be a new Cinema Display and a pure novelty – the Magic Trackpad. If we are lucky we are having these babies out tomorrow, if not – they will dawn on us sooner or later anyway, hopefully with an upgraded to A4 chip and Retina Display iPod touch alongside them.

You may have heard, readers, that Microsoft after successfully releasing Windows 7 Client and Windows Server 2008 R2 was seriously thinking about skipping its traditional Professional Developers Conference this year. But they decided to hold it anyway after all on October 28 and 29 in Redmond. There will be changes to the conference format developers all over the world got used to which include roughly only a thousand of visiting developers compared to at least a couple of thousands and, to balance it out, Microsoft will provide live streaming of the PDC10. Still, contents of the PDC10 is what we are more interested in.

Has your iPhone 4 ever let you down because of the “antennagate” problem? Have you though of any ways to fix it? Well now you don’t have to anyway because there are three totally free solutions outlined for you. The first one is to get a free bumper or a refund for yours if you have already bought one. Second is to get a refund for the iPhone 4 itself or to get free Samsung Galaxy S by tweeting about how your signal went out of the door. That’s right, Samsung UK are giving out free Galaxy S smartphones to those who tweeted their “antennagate” problem. How this will work in practice is a question, but Samsung UK twitter account statement is quite block-bald about giving away a Galaxy S if you have experienced the “antennagate” problem and tweeted about it.

It has been a long while since iMac got its update last time. In fact, if you want a decent iMac now you are limited to a legacy graphics card and with a 21-inch display you get Intel Core 2 Duo only. So naturally, an update has to be coming soon. Very soon as rumor mill has it. In fact Apple is rushing its retailers to get ready for a new shipment of iMacs. There is not much information about iMac update, but there sure is a thing or two that latest iMacs must have such as ATI Radeon HD 5000 series graphics cards for example. I find it a cause for an interesting debate as whether Apple will install ATI or NVIDIA solution. My word is ATI because from the iMac’s user experience point of view GeForce GTX 400 series units won’t pay off for a higher price as we are not talking about its gaming-worthy features here. Apart from new graphics updated iMac should be Core i-powered only. Anyway, this is a rear update that we really are waiting for with a bated breath.

Having Windows Phone 7 coming out soon and having great profit and mobile market share expectations on this basis, Microsoft continues to expand the number of potentially compatible devices as to offer WP7 for them. The news is that Microsoft has recently signed a license agreement with ARM architecture owners to secure and enhance their cooperation. Some say this is to make next iteration of Windows operating system run on ARM-based processors. I think it’s unlikely. Well, if Windows edition in mind is not the Embedded but a full desktop one.

Microsoft still has a couple of months to put on last touches onto Windows Phone 7 operating software platform. The development has been going strong for the last dozens of months heating up our interest which sincerely wasn’t a hard job to do because Apple and Google were so much better most of time than Microsoft with their smartphone OSs. Everyone knew they will fight back sooner or later and Widows Phone 7 does have a lot of promise. This and quickly spreading impressions on early Windows Phone 7 demos ported to existing devices have interested AT&T as well. So much in fact that they have written themselves out eight million Windows Phone 7 devices to make sure they have enough when the platform is released.

Your eyes are not deceiving you – this is EVO 4G pictured on the left. This is what we think HTC Desire HD will be – a European version of the famous EVO. We also think it will come sans 4G network support but this doesn’t bother us too much somehow. What does though is pricing and data plan offerings and, of course, whether or not HTC Desire HD aka Ace does actually turn out to be EVO’s European cousin when it comes out in October because this is what it looks like spec-wise. Take a look by yourself and say your word.

Apple is giving out iOS SDK 4.1 beta to developers and only developers. To download it you have to log in with your Apple developer account and to activate your updated device via iTunes you then have to add its UDID to your developer account. All in the name of stopping people selling betas on eBay. Now, the features. There certainly is a couple of new ones, but the early feedback is that they are only minor user interface tweaks. The biggest one is a completely redesigned Game Center. Cold dark color tones and modern glare were inverted to much more lively green broadcloth and wood. The other immediately notable change are slightly touched signal bars. They are now taller and therefore behave differently when the iPhone 4 is loosing signal. You didn’t expect iOS 4.1 beta to eliminate Death Grip, didn’t you? It’s a hardware problem. But it will be addressed this Friday, July 16th at Apple press conference.

This news is not a biggie. Nonetheless, given that Acer has previously announced color and grey-scale e-book readers sized at 7- and 6-inches respectively, these 7- and 10-inch tablets are not the replacements but self-dependant models. It is in question if there will be enough demand for all Acer e-book readers and tablets, but so far all we know is a splash of future Acer tablets’ specs. Both tablets will have ARM-based architecture and will run Android 2.2 aka Froyo. That’s right, that very version that quadruples Flash performance and also the last one before major Android changes happen. At the moment Acer reportedly negotiates with mobile carriers in Taiwan so this is probably where their 3G-equipped tablets might start appearing in Q4.

When we compared iPhone 4 with HTC EVO 4G we have marked for a couple of times that most owners of both smartphones and of the other as well might never get to the bottom of device’s functionality. Come to think of it, there are no more than, say, ten absolutely must-have features on both hardware and software sides and all the rest is never used. However, despite the fact that there aren’t too many commonly popular features, those that are commonly popular do require some serious hardware. I’ll give you an example: a thing as simple as browsing should preferably come with a big touchscreen and a fast processor. So the problem is that buying a cheaper smartphone what you end up is not tangibly limited functionality but poorer overall functionality. The problem that was solved by a young designer Andrew Kim and his HTC 1 concept.

It didn’s take long to unlock FaceTime for 3G after all. The updated version of the Fring app finally allows iPhone 4 users to do video calls on 3G network. No worries – there’s no hidden catch, unlike with the previous version which could only recognize main rear camera on the iPhone 4. The latest iOS 4 Fring version uses front-facing camera too plus you can video chat cross-platform, Social Stream feature brings all your contact’s tweets and Facebook status updates, improves multitasking, etc. It’s a free download as usual but Fring disclaims any possible video calling lags on 3G saying the quality is all down to carrier.

How many people would prefer white iPhone 4 to a black one? This is a genuine gadget geek’s question and we should have probably organized a poll for that matter, but this is not the case. Whatever the answer would have been, at least some of you are actually holding out for a white iPhone to come out. And it is a pity that you have to. But thanks to Stuart Hughes, who decided you should have none of that, you can buy a white unlocked 32GB iPhone 4 today for just $20,000. Has he covered it with diamonds? – You are probably asking. Well guess what, yes he has. Another good question though is if diamonds somehow address reception issues stock iPhones have? I’m not sure if this is relevant, but since we are talking smartphones here it probably is. Unfortunately we are not concerned about diamond edition iPhone 4 users having any complains so far, so if you want to make sure you will have to buy it and find out for yourself.

Multitouch technology always had a lot of promise for gaming. At its best this sort of computer experience has never been coming for cheap, so costs of high resolution multitouch panels were’t and still aren’s their biggest problem. The bottleneck that slows down gamer’s cash to flow in return for touch sensitive displays is compatibility issues. Hardware and software both need to support touch input and most from either parties still don’t. Needles to say about old but popular games. Solution, rather unexpectedly, comes from well-known hardcore gaming hardware company iBuyPower. Free MAGIC application download from their website allows you to play any game out there using multitouch. MAGIC actually stands for “Multi-touch Advanced Gaming Interface and Control”. The app will map touch input onto controls of any game, that simple. The catch is that the app will only work on iBuyPower multitouch-enabled machines, so if you have one go ahead and test it and please come back to write down your feedback.

You might remember the Dio-Lase – laser-based soft dental tissue treatment solution from the Germans. At this point it really seems like scientist have gone biased towards stomatology because now we have another amazingly futuristic project we can’t skip over. Developed and tested in France at the Institut National de la Sante et de la Recherche Medicale by a group of scientist the new melanocyte-stimulating hormone (MSH) gel could prevent an already formed cavity from being drilled and filled. Group’s spokesman Nadia Benkirane-Jessel sais that the hormone gel, when placed next to the nasty cavity, stimulates tooth tissues to regenerate and therefore creates new and living dentine and enamel. This will repair early-staged cavities altogether with absolutely no need to drill. Mind you though that if things have gone too far, MSH won’t help at all. However, as first experiments show, when applied in time, hormone gel grows newer and healthier cells than the others in surrounding.

Rumors about Android Gingerbread have staggered everyone with a splash of specification requirements for the compatible smartphones. And they all appear to be true. Because there is still so much to discuss about it, everyone seems to have taken for granted that Gingerbread will evolve into Android 3.0. This, I’m afraid is premature. The man who started the ball rolling - Eldar Murtazin - has never mentioned any version number in his podcast. Recently he has tweeted that Gingerbread will not be the 3.0. So my word is that we are speaking about 2.3 version here. Still, this is not all the news.

Apple iPhone 4 and HTC EVO 4G are by far the two most exciting smartphones that money can buy to date. And in many ways they are very similar: both have big full-phone-size touchscreens, smart operating software, lots of free or cheap applications, high resolution photography and video recording, video call capabilities, etc. I imagine for a consumer who is not technically sophisticated it will be an absolute guess whether iPhone 4 or EVO 4G will work better for him or her. But yet somehow Apple and HTC have managed to design two completely different smartphones despite playing on the same field by the same rules. So I decided to try and look at both of them as if there was no such criteria as price, carrier, data plan, or even quality issues iPhone 4 and EVO 4G users have already experienced

Apple products have always been some of the least customizable in the entire computer market. Some say it is a bad thing, others argue that whatever you buy from Apple is a complete package and doesn’t need customization. Anyway, OWC Data Doubler is a thing that could only work for MacBook and MacBook Pro. OWC Data Doubler is basically an aluminum bracket that goes where optical drive in Apple notebooks is. You do loose your SuperDrive but instead you can plug in any 2.5-inch 9.5mm tall SATA HDD or indeed SSD. Storage drive, of course, is not included into the OWC Data Doubler packadge. It costs $79.99 and they say you can do the installation all by yourself.

Passively cooled video cards have always been somewhere on the limit between usable and unusable. Their all-time distinctive feature was 64bit bus width and therefore low price. Until recent times they also only had DDR2 video memory at best. But things have changed. First, there appeared some DDR3 DirectX 11 models. Then SAPPHIRE HD 5550 came along with its 128bit bus and still no fan. Now though meet the new SAPPHIRE HD 5670 ULTIMATE.

Nokia is one of the few manufacturers that I think could play strong in tablet market. So after all the others have actually started working on their’s applying different operating systems and hardware solutions, Nokia, as we have it, is also building an ARM-based tablet with architecture-certified MeeGo in mind. They already have a hundred or so of working prototypes built by Foxconn for testing purposes and, if everything works out well, Nokia tablet starts shipping in Q4. There is a rumor also that the tablet might run Windows 7 as Booklet 3G does, but I don’t think it is a real possibility.

Toshiba is entering netbook market this August with its new AC100 smartbook. You can think of it as a netbook sans desktop operating system but with a mobile one instead. It all seems very promising to me, especially after I looked at A100’s specifications. It is designed round NVIDIA Tegra 250 SoC, manages with just 512MB RAM but works on an SSD. It is a well known fact that no other feature gives out as much performance as an SSD. At this point I wonder if smartbooks like Toshiba A100 will be more capable than yet to see Chrome OS machines and have better user experience than netbooks with desktop operating systems. Check out Toshiba A100’s specs after the jump.