While the speaker can connect to any computer— or any other audio source — it is particularly well-suited for using the otherwise unoccupied space under your Apple monitor, and has been designed to match its aluminium body.  The speaker fits neatly just underneath your iMac screen or Cinema Display so your desk stays neat and tidy.

The Tango Bar has a six speaker configuration: dual dome tweeters, midrange/bass drivers, and passive radiators for bass and carries audio from your computer via USB. There’s also a line-in jack if you want to hook up a device without USB and a back-lit volume control in case you need to adjust the volume levels in the dark. The device also has a headphone output and a sub-out port on-board.

The stylish speaker, which promises to deliver twice the sound power of other USB speakers, would make for a great Christmas gift for an Apple fanatic.

The XtremeMac Tango Bar retails for R999.95.

The iLuv is compatible with most major smartphones handsets, digital cameras, and MP3 players. Use the iLuv on your iPhone, Blackberry, HTC, or Samsung when you need just a little more juice to send that all-important sms or make that deal-making phone call. But that’s not all you can charge using the device – iLuv works with pretty much any device that charges with a USB connector. However, if you want to charge an Apple product you will have to buy the Apple connector and cord separately.

The portable USB charger is super easy to use – just charge it up, by plugging it in your PC or laptop’s USB port, and once it’s all juiced up pop it into you bag or briefcase for easy charging on the go. The iLuv promises to give you an extra few hours of juice on your device – iLuv claims that the battery kit’s 1250mA capacity can charge your iPhone 3GS for 4.5 hours talk time, 21 hours music playback and 6 hours of video. The LED indicator on the device lets you know how much battery life is left on the iLuv so you know when you’re about to run out.

The iLuv iBA200 is also incredibly portable – it’s lightweight, fits perfectly in to your pocket and comes with an easily foldable USB charging cable.

The device is the only USB flash drive that works with Apples suit of products – iPhone, iPad, and iPod. The flash drive supports two-way data transfer between computers and different iDevices. A free downloadable companion app is also available from the Apple App Store to allow iDevices to perform file management with the iFlashDrive. With the app, users will be able to transfer files between the iFlashDrive and iDevice and as well as enjoy a built-in music player, voice recorder and text editor. Users will also be able to access and import photos/videos from the iDevice library, backup and restore iDevice contact list, and send out files as email attachments.

The iFlashDrive, available in three different capacities of 8GB, 16GB and 32GB, has a USB connector to connect to computers and functions like any USB flash drive in the market. This allows users to transfer data between their computer and the iFlashDrive – just like a regular flash drive. But, what makes the iFlashDrive so different from other USB flash drives is that on the other end of the device, opposite to the USB connector, is an Apple-approved 30-pin dock connector.

HyperDrive iFlashDrive is the easiest solution to transfer and share files between different iDevices and computers. You won’t need iTunes, internet access or a wireless networks to transfer data – which makes it perfect for quick instant transfers between different iDevices, when computers or networks are not an option.

Weighing in at 20 grams and measuring 67.5 x 35.4 x 10.4 mm the device is easy to carry with you. With a transfer Speed of 10MB/s for USB, 100KB/s at iDevice side you’ll be able to copy across music, photos and documents as needed.

We were unable to locate local prices at this stage but the device retails from $95 for the 8GB and up to $180 for the 32GB.

Here is just a few of the features you’ll find in the new iOS5:

iMessage

• Configure to use SMS when not connected to Internet
• Group messaging
• Ability to send photos and videos
• Blue message bubble indicates it’s an iMessage
• See if other person is typing a message

Reminders

• Location-based reminders

Newsstand

• Dedicated area for news publications
• Download more via the App Store
• Background downloading

Calendar

• Add, rename or delete calendars
• View attachments from within the app
• Landscape mode gives weekly view
• Default alert times
• Year view (iPad only)
• Switch days by swiping

Notification System

• Notification Center
• Displays missed notifications
• Touching a notification takes you to the app
• View in lock screen
• Banner style notification
• Choose which notification for specific apps
• Custom vibrations
• LED flash alerts
•  Slide specific notifications to go directly to its respective app
• Displays Calendar tasks

Keyboard

• Split keyboard
•  Twitter keyboard, with @ and # buttons
• Keyboard shortcuts

iCloud

• Create a free @me email account
• Everything in-sync
• Photo Stream
• Find My iPhone
• Online backup
• iTunes in the cloud
• iTunes Match
• iCloud section of the Settings app
• Purchase History
• Buy more storage
• Documents/Data Sync

System

• Rounded toggle buttons
• Game Center improvements
• New color for SMS bubbles
• Access applications from the Lock screen
• Make FaceTime calls without a SIM card
• Define your own words in the built-in dictionary
• Updated Lock screen
• Create and delete photo albums
• Access camera from lock screen
• Crop, rotate, enhance, and remove red-eye in Photos app
• Camera Grid
• Lock Auto Exposure & Auto Focus
• Cards app: Compose, Send, Print cards
• Find Friends & Family app
• Profile pictures for Game Center
• Friend recommendations for Game Center
• FaceTime over 3G
• Application Updates in background

Mail

• Rich text formatting
• Search through entire mail messages
•  Flag emails
• Mark multiple emails as read
• Swipe left or right from your mailboxes folder list to navigate to other mail accounts

Safari

• Private Browsing
• Read Later
• Reader View
• Open link in background
• Tabbed browsing (iPad only)

Twitter Integration

• Tweet from Safari
• Tweet from Photos
• Tweet picture from the camera roll

The download is around 700MB so might take a couple of hours to complete as everyone is currently rushing to update their iDevices. So hang tight, let it do its thing and get ready for all these new features and upgrades!

A quick recap of all things Apple

• 45 million iPods sold last year
• 300 million iPods sold world wide
• iTunes has 20 million songs in its library and is the #1 music store in the world
• iPhone 4 sales make up 50% of all iPhones sold ever
• 250 million iPad’s sold
• 18 billion apps downloaded
• iPod touch is the most popular music player AND portable gaming device in the world

Some pretty impressive numbers! No wonder they have around $75 billion in cash reserves!
 

iOS 5 and the 2 new apps

The big new regarding iOS 5 is that it’s set for launch on 12 October – that’s next week! We have seen tons of news and “top 10 feature” posts about the new iOS, so to finally have a launch date is great.

Apple also launched 2 new apps, Cards and Family and Friends.

Cards allows you to create and send physical cards to your friends and loved ones directly from your iPhone or iPad. Printed on 100% cotton paper and shipped worldwide, this app is definitely going to be a hit with some of the older generation. I’m actually looking forward to creating a card and shipping it to my parents at random times during the year. They will love it! The cards are shipped using USPS which will send you push notifications of delivery. It will cost $4.99 a card to ship it anywhere in the world, $2.99 if delivery is in the US.

Find My Friends is an interesting one. It’s similiar to the Find Your Phone app, however this time it lets you locate your family and friends. There are simple sharing options and privacy controls included too. Will we use it? Time will only tell.

iPod updates

Two minor updates to the range of iPods were announced. The iPod nano is getting a UI update with bigger icons, easier navigation, multi-touch gestures and 16 more clock faces. Great to see Apple recognising people are using the iPod nano as a watch and have given them more clock face options! The big change for me is the improved fitness section. So the nano hooks up with Nike+ and will track your runs without the need for any additional equipment or sensors.

The iPod touch has a new white version coming out with iOS 5 also available for the device. Other than that, not much else has changed with the most popular portable gaming device in the world.

The big one – the iPhone 4S

Disappointed fans hoping for a brand new iPhone 5, saw Apple launch what can only be called an upgrade to the iPhone 4. In the same way Apple went from the 3G to the 3GS, this update to the 4S sees the internals of the phone updated. So what’s been updated?

• A5 chip – 7x faster than the current iPhone 4
• Battery life increased to 8 hours talktime
• New antenna system allows for 4G data speeds – 14.4Mbps download speed possible
• 8MP camera
• Full HD video – 1080p
• Real time video image stabilisation and noise reduction
• Siri – the humble personal assistant
• 64GB model introduced

Apple have included their A5 chip that they introduced into the iPad 2. They claim the iPhone 4S is now 7x faster in doing CPU related activities, which will definitely impact the gaming side. Not only is it faster, but with the new chip, they have managed to save battery usage, so talk time on the phone has increased to 8 hours! The current battery life of the iPhone 4 is pretty decent compared to other smartphones, so this is even greater news!

The iPhone 4S now is technically a 4G phone allowing for download speeds of up to 14.4Mbps. Vodacom and MTN do offer HSPDA speeds, so we should be able to feel those data speed increases with the new phone.

I’m most excited about the updated camera. Not only is the camera 8MP, they have greatly improved the lens system. For anyone that knows about cameras, the body of a camera can only do so much. After that its all up to the lenses. The new lens system is a f2.4, really wide lens which is a 1/3rd faster and allows 73% more light into the sensor. They also added an IR filter to improve the camera even more.

The new camera also take video in full 1080p HD. It has included real time video stabilization and noise reduction, so your home videos are going to come out even better!

Siri, which most people have no idea about, is Apple’s voice activated system. Everyone probably is screaming, “but voice activation isn’t new.”

However Siri has one of the smartest AI I have seen. It uses natural language and is conversational. So ask Siri, “Hows the weather today” or “Find me a sushi restaurant in Cape Town” and it will show you the weather forecast for the day or list sushi restaurants sorted by reviews. Not only that, it can read your messages to you as well as compose and dictate emails and notes. I’m very excited to see how developers will use Siri to enhance their apps!

Lastly, a 64GB iPhone 4S version is now available.

So that’s it from Apple, Tim Cook and his team. The new iPhone 4S goes on sale in the United States, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the UK on the 14th of October, with 22 European countries next up on the 28th of October. The rest of the world, which includes South Africa, should see the phone in December. There is no official launch date as of yet for South Africa. Vodacom have announced the launch of the iPhone 4S for the 16 December 2011.

What are your thoughts on the new iPhone 4S? Let us know in the comments!

Then I upgraded to OS X Lion.

I found myself at the office with my old Mighty Mouse and frustration quickly set in. Natural scrolling and all the new gestures I had learned and started to love the night before on my Magic Mouse were lost to me. In a huff I fired off a sarcastic tweet about how Apple had clearly released Lion to improve sales of Magic Mice.

About 5 minutes later someone from the office was at my desk with his Magic Trackpad and insisted that I give it a try.

I gave in, paired the trackpad with my laptop and turned off my Mighty Mouse. It took all of about 3 minutes and I was in love. From fine finger movements to get the cursor to glide over the screen to the 3 and 4 finger swipes to change between full screen applications and Mission Control it all just worked and worked well. Just like getting used to natural scrolling, there is a period of a few minutes where your brain still tells you that you need to move your arm and your wrist around to get the mouse to move, but you very quickly become comfortable with just having to swipe a single finger over the smooth silver surface to achieve the same result.

Do yourself a favour, if you are in the process of deciding on which new mouse to get for your Mac running OS X Lion, get into an Incredible Connection store and try out the Magic Trackpad first – it will change how you interact with your computer.

The latest Macbook Air is said to be at least twice as fast as the previous version. How did they manage this? Well they stuck in second generation Intel i5 and i7 processors, Intel HD graphics through these new processors, the brand spanking new Lion OS X coupled with new Thunderbolt port technology. Along with that, Apple has made some aesthetic changes; most notably the addition of backlit keyboards which was a problem for those attempting to travel with the previous generation of Air’s. The new Macbook will come in two versions: an 11 inch as well as a 13 inch version which carry around 5 and 7 hours of battery life respectively.

The 11 inch Air weights in at just 2.38 pounds which is just over 1kg, with the 13 inch version coming in at around 1.3kg, both incredibly light, yet also very durable. With the Air being so light, ultraportable and fairly powerful, many students and travelers will see this as the ideal laptop to provide them with performance and portability all in one.

The 11 inch Air comes with a 64gb SSD drive which will be incredibly quick while also not draining to much battery life, and comes with 2GB RAM. The real steal is the Thunderbolt Technology, which seems to be faster than USB 3.0.

The 11 inch Air comes packed with quite a decent resolution, and with the Intel HD graphics on board, a 1,366×768 resolution screen can handle newer games like Starcraft 2 on lower to medium settings.

With these machines weighing less than a netbook, but having a bigger screen and being far more powerful, it seems that the new range of Macbook Air’s will be quite tempting to the student or traveler looking for an ultraportable but powerful machine, and the price point makes it fairly attractive to those looking to enter into the world of Apple.

After the rather quite launch of the last version of Apples operating system, Snow Leopard, Apples saw the need to raise their game with their latest version, namely OS X Lion. They have continued with the big cat naming structure and finally gone with the King of the Jungle to symbolize their signal of intent with a wide range of new features.

The latest version of OS X is touted as being the most secure yet with state-of-the-art security features that will blow away other competing operating systems. It is said that unlike Snow Leopard which simply offered incremental updates to security, Lion offers a complete overhaul of the way Apple does security.

The most important addition is full “ASLR”. Short for Address Space Layout Randomization, which makes it much harder for attackers to exploit bugs by regularly changing the memory location where shell code and other system components are loaded. Other improvements include security sandboxes that tightly restrict the way applications can interact with other parts of the operating system as well as full disk encryption that doesn’t interfere with other OS features.

Apple has completely rebuilt its disk encryption software, FileVault, to make it operate at the block level, well below the file level, as was the case with previous operating systems. As a result, users may now encrypt an entire hard drive rather than just a single folder or user directory. It also eliminates a major frustration for many users, because for the first time it works seamlessly with the Mac’s Time Machine feature for automatically backing up files and folders, and now eliminates the need to boot from a CD. FileVault now also includes other improvements, such as the ability to encrypt disk contents when a Mac is put to sleep, meaning you can leave your Mac running, but without having to worry about any form of security issues while you step away from your machine.

Although security and minor improvements seems to be the main issues with Lion OS X, Apple have also listed the 250+ changes it made to the operating system and separated them into neat categories.

The new launchpad in OSX Lion. Borrowed from iOS

Although many claim this is the most secure operating system to date, it is clear with the ease that some are hacking into many iDevices that the computer operating system could very well be able to be exposed. However, Apple has seriously raised the bar in an effort to set the standard for operating system security, and Lion shows just how serious that intent is.

For a full in-depth review, click here.

At end of 2010 Apple proved once again that they are still king of the ultra-portable laptop by releasing an upgraded 13″ model with new features across the board and a new 11″ model. I was lucky enough to get my hands on the 13″ model and have absolutely loved using it for the past 3 months.

For the first time ever on the Macbook Air range Apple has used its amazing uni-body construction method of casting the entire laptop base out of a single piece of aluminium. For non-geeks this means these are the lightest, strongest, Macbook Airs ever!

On the visual side you get a LED backlit screen with an increased resolution that now matches that of a typical 15″ laptop and the baby Macbook Air matches that of a typical 13″ laptop. Both Airs have a Nvidia graphics processor that allow it to easily handle HD video and some light to medium gaming.

One of my favourite improvements is the solid state hard drive which allows the Macbook Air to instantly come out of sleep when you open the lid. With the increased battery capacity and the amazing standby time I hardly ever turned it off, just close the lid and pop it in a bag and you are ready to go.

I only found a few issues with the Macbook Air. There is no backlit keyboard present, this shouldn’t be an issue if you use it during the day or in a well lit area though. A problem that is likely to affect more people is the presence of only 2 USB ports that have been placed right next to each other. If you have dozens of peripherals or even one USB hungry portable hard drive you are going to have to grab a USB hub to add some more ports. Lastly this is a premium device with premium features and with that comes a premium price.

I truely love the Macbook Air 13″ and would recommend it to others who are looking for a stylish well-built ultra-portable. Yes it is a little bit pricier than the Windows ultra-portables but they dont come close in terms of features.

iOS 5 is the next mobile operating system for iPod touch, iPhone and iPad. “With iOS 5, we’ve added over 200 new features — taking a mobile operating system that was already years ahead of anything else and moving it even further ahead” is what the guys from Apple are saying, here are a few reasons why:

With Notification Center, all you will need to do is one swipe downwards on you device and instantly you will have every notification from new mail to reminders, calendar appointments to new texts, friend requests to tweet mentions and more. Most importantly you get to choose what you want to see all in one convenient place. New notifications appear briefly at the top of your screen, without interrupting what you’re doing. And the Lock screen displays notifications so you can act on them with just a swipe.

The new Camera features will have you using your camera a lot more than you used to, there will be no more fumbling around to find the camera icon as straight from the lock screen you will be able to hit the camera button and you are there. Added features include the use of grid lines, pinch-to-zoom gestures and what I have been waiting for, hit the volume-up button and the picture is yours. With Photo Stream enabled in iCloud (see related blog shortly), your photo will be readily available on all your devices within minutes.

Safari has had a make-over too. On the iPad you will find tabbed browsing, and the new Reading List lets you save interesting articles and again with the use of iCloud, they will be readily available for you to read on any of your devices.

iMessage has been dubbed the BBM killer, it is easy to see why. Any iOS 5 device connected via Wi-Fi or 3G will have this fantastic facility built in to the Messages App so you can send text, photos, videos, locations and contacts to any iOS 5 user. You will be able to track your messages with delivery receipts and the optional read receipts and see when someone it typing in return. With full synchronization across all your iOS 5 devices you will be able to start a conversation on one and seamlessly continue on another.

Twitter will have full integration in that you will be able to sign in once in settings and you can tweet directly out of Safari, Photos, Camera, YouTube or Maps and tweet from any capable app as Twitter is integrated system wide. Your contacts will have a field for a twitter username and profile picture.

As Apple have said, over 200 new features, so there are plenty other improvements from photo editing to mail and calendar tweaks, PC-Free which means out of the box activation without having to plug in to your PC first, Wi-Fi sync with iTunes on demand or whenever you plug in to power, Multitasking gestures on iPad and much much more, so I will definitely be the first to upgrade come the expected upgrade this Spring.