Apple doesn't give iPods for free, but a lot of other organizations/companies do, as we were able to see happening at the Oklahoma Christian University, where iPods and iPhones come together with MacBooks, but I won't get back to that - you have the link, read it, if you think it may be interesting for you or your kids. Today, I found a very interesting occasion to get a free iPod, but it's not simply a "go and ask" job. Let's see...


Just as a side note, Apple's shares rose by 11 percent in the last 4 days, and while the US economy is slowing down, planned Macs purchases remain strong, but let's get to our free iPods now, shall we?

If you're going to fly with Eos Airlines between until the 11th of April, you may become one of the happy users of a brand new iPod, but it's not that simple as it looks. First, you have to book a flight between New York and London, and the iPod you will get will depend on your ticket's price, as it follows - $4,000 or less on a round trip will bring you an iPod nano or 15k Eos services points, while those spending more than $4,000 on their tickets will get an iPod classic, or 30k points.

Well, Eos Airlines may not be for everyone, but if you are one of those enjoying their luxury flights with the 48-suites Boeing 757 jets, I think you should spare a few minutes to check this page for more details on the free iPods or Eos services.

I was just about to forget this, but it should also be mentioned, without any special link with the free iPods, that according to Morgan Stanley, 40% of college student are planning to buy Macs. Not bad at all, don't you think?

Unfortunately, theft is nothing out of ordinary on this planet, and not even stealing an iPhone isn't a deed "one of its kind" - it happened before, and it's going to happen again. The interesting part is that, usually, thieves are breaking a door or some windows, get into the store, grab as much as they can, and disappear quickly. I said "usually," because this time happened something that I wasn't really expecting to see anytime soon ...


...because two Apple employees decided to have their own iPhone business, but since the Cupertino-based company doesn't work with individuals and small companies when it comes to selling their wonder-phone, these guys decided to grab some from the store they worked in. Pretty original, considering the iPhone thefts so far, don't you think?

Joshua Garrand, 28, and Christopher Nashed, 22, were both already arrested by the police, and charged of stealing 332 iPhones, valued at no less than $132,468. These two "bad apples" were employeed at the Apple Computer Store in the Mall at Rockingham Park [Salem, New Hampshire], and their boss noticed something is fishy and allerted the police since January, so it took them a while to dig through store records and grab Joshua and Christopher (you weren't thinking they stole all those iPhones at once, weren't you?).

Today it seems to be a day with a lot of interesting news and rumors about the iPhone, and I am sure you'll be happy to find them all in one place, especially since there's not much to say about them, but they are all good hints for the future of this notorious phone, portable media player...and a little more. Basically, it's about the iPhone disappearing from US stores, some rumors about the upcoming 3G iPhone, as well as the amazing fact that Microsoft may release software for the iPhone!


First, if you're in New York and you need an iPhone, don't bother to look for one in Apple's stores. Why? Well, in a report published in The Huffington Post, Danny Shea wrote that not a single iPhone can be found in any of the 3 Apple stores located in the city! To make things even a bit worse, none of those stores seems to have a clue about when they will get new iPhones, but the good part - for Apple, of course - is that the iPhone seems to sell like crazy, if they ended up in this situation...

Second, we have a report from Gartner's Ken Dulaney, who claims to have gotten some hints from his Asian sources that Apple placed a huge order for 3G iPhones. We're not talking about 1 million, 2 or 5 million iPhones, but no less than 10 million units! Apart from this impressive order, it seems that the 3G version my incorporate an OLED display, but none of these two facts have been confirmed or negated by official sources yet.

At last, it seems that a team based in Silicon Valley played with the beta iPhone SDK for over a week, while Microsoft executives consider the iPhone an interesting platform to move on. In the end, if they play their cards right, it is possible to see the iPhone software revenue exceeding the revenue Microsoft gets from its Mac software in a couple of years, but we're still far from that moment. Anyway, this is another interesting issue worth keeping an eye on, so this is it - 3 iPhone facts for today!

On Macs, Yahoo! Messenger doesn't have some of features that made it so popular on Windows, but things are changing with each new release, no matter if we're talking about final ones, or Betas. For now, the current non beta for Mac is 2.5.3, and is dated back in 2003, missing a lot of features and being quite buggy, as users reported. In June 2006, the first Beta for Mac OS X arrived, and remained in a perpetual Beta stage since then, despite all new builds that were made public. Now, the latest Beta has finally managed to add a feature everyone was expecting on the Mac version of Yahoo's instant messaging software...


Ready to be downloaded for free from the official page, the new Yahoo! Messenger 3 Beta 3 for Mac is now a Universal Binary, so it's going to work natively on both Mactels and Power PC-based Macs, and comes with tabbed chats and voice calling.

Being given the above, most things that can be done with the Windows version are now also possible on Mac, including free computer to computer calls, the ability to use a Phone Out account to call regular phones from your computer via Yahoo! Messenger, SMS messaging, as well as the chance to receive calls from phones on your Mac, but that is only possible if you have a paid Phone In account.

These being said, I only hope they will release a stable version once and for all, because I know a lot of people that usually don't even try Betas, and Mac users could also add a little crowd to the mass of Yahoo users, but they could also simply go away, if things are not right. After all, there are plenty of choices when it comes to instant messaging, don't you think?

Sometimes, Apple comes up with a bunch of patents, and despite the "closed doors policy" of the Cupertino-based company, we could figure out what to expect next, but until then, we'll talk a little about the new content available on iTunes. Why? Well, due to various reasons, Apple failed to deliver the content they promised to arrive on iTunes by the end of February, and now they have to catch up...


To make a long story short, here you have it - currently, the US iTunes store features no less than 600 TV shows, all coming from 64 different networks. The last ones to join were the premium network Starz, its Manga Entertainment subsidiary(Tokko, Noein, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, and Tactics), as well as the Independent Film Channel(The Whitest Kids U'Know, The Henry Rollins Show, and The Minor Accomplishments of Jackie Woodman), all announced earlier this week.

At last, it should be noted that Apple won a patent for touch pad for handheld devices, more specifically for a media player having a touch pad. Are they going to get back to the basics? Well, that's what remains to be seen, as usual.

Oh! I was just about to forget about the microphone elements spacing patent! What about it? It seems it's all about speech processing for computer systems, but taking things one step further, I would really like to see a speech-controlled iPod, as well as, maybe, in the years to come, a Mac with voice-input only...