BindApple

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it's true - South Korea won!!! No, it wasn't a two-hours war with some (northern and communist) neighbor, and they didn't use government's resources to win the lottery, either. Since we're here, it should be obvious - South Korea won the right to be on the "iPhone list." If you're wondering about this list, the answer is very easy to find, but let me help you - I am talking about the (long) list containing all the countries where Apple's iPhone is officially available.

After over a year spent on the US market, the iPhone is finally reaching some "dark corners" of the world, but I think South Korea is far from being such a place. So... why did it take so long for the iPhone to reach it?

The answer is that, unfortunately for those who had to wait so long to have the iPhone available, South Korea requires a specific mobile platform, called WIPI, of which most is based on Java. Apple got lucky, because this policy was changed early this week by the Korea Communications Commission (KCC), so carriers are now finally able to decide whether they want to use WIPI or not.

This restriction will become ineffective starting April, so South Korea won the iPhone, but will have to wait for its prize until 2009's spring...

One last thing that is known for now, since pricing and subscription plans are still secrets, is that SK Telecom and KTF are the companies chosen by Apple to be iPhone's official carriers in South Korea. Other than that, we should wait for the winter to end, and then we'll find out more about the South Korean iPhone.

I don't know about you, but I am not crazy at all about pink stuff. Not even a pin iPod dock shouldn't be able to change my mind about this color, but - fortunately - there's much more to it than the color, as we're going to see right away...

Today's pink iPod dock comes from Scandyna Speakers, and it's called iPod Dock Pack. Sorry for that - not just "iPod dock pack," but "Micropod Dock Pack." Basically, we're talking about two 100W Micropod SE Speakers and one 15W stereo dock, all in black, white, or pink.

Only available in the US and England, this nice iPod dock package includes the following:

- 1 x Dock(inc. Amp 15watt stereo, 2 channel)
- 2 x Micropod SE Speakers (100watt Kevlar bass/midrange driver + softdome tweeter)
- 1 x Infrared Remote Control (Copatible with all ipods (excluding shuffle))
- 2 x Speaker cables
- 6 x Aluminium spike feet

While a black iPod dock from Scandyna would be a great addition to my iPod, I think $300 is a bit too much, but if you really want a pink iPod dock, then this may be one of the best choices available, unless you want to grab some cheaper model usually available in black/white/silver and paint it pink! ;)

As far as I know, while there are plenty of iPhone 3G problems to talk about, only a few of them are related to the GPS features of Apple's device. Even more - I happen to have a few friends in the military, and I know one thing for sure - they don't need Google Maps or the GPS feature of some smartphone to find their way around, and that's why it seems really strange to find out that the Egyptian government is afraid of the iPhone GPS...

...because I can't see any other reason for Apple to disable the GPS functionality of the iPhone 3G in Egypt, as a recent report published in New York Times says.

While no details on how they managed to disable the GPS feature of the iPhone 3G emerged, but inside sources claim that all started because of the government's fear of anti-military/anti-Egyptian applications using the iPhone. Now, what could they do with the iPhone 3G against the military? Throw it at a tank, maybe? Damn, where is this whole terrorism paranoia leading to!

If you ask me, I find it normal to sell old iPhones without GPS features on the Egyptian market, but hearing that normal iPhones are being crippled because some strange fear of a certain government makes me shiver, and remember those days when 80486 CPUs weren't allowed to get out of the US without knowing exactly where were they sold and for what purpose...

I don't know why, but it seems cloning Macs starts to become a widespread business. Oh, wait - I DO know why is this happening, and - first of all - it was Apple's fault to switch from the PowerPC processors to Intel ones. Obviously, now anyone can build a "Mac OS X-compatible," although this is not something Apple's lawyers leave unpunished, especially when you start selling such clones around and advertise for them on a website...

First, we had some lone eBay seller, then the OpenTech Mac clones, and then we heard about Psystar, over and over again. Now, the time has come for those cloning Macs outside the US to show up in the spotlight, since today's "Mac maker" comes straight from Argentina!

OpeniMac, the first company who's into cloning Macs in South America, has two computers on sale - the OpeniMac, featuring a 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of RAM, a 320GB SATA drive, SuperDrive and an ATI Radeon HD PRO video card, and selling for for $990($1,330 with monitor), and the OpeniMac PRO, with a 3.0GHz Core 2 Duo processor, support for 4GB of memory, a 500GB SATAII drive, a SuperDrive, and a Nvidia GeForce GS video card for $1,710US. Even more, both of them come with a 6-in-1 memory card reader built-in and a 20" LCD!

What else can I say but "LOL?!?" I knew this is going to happen the minute I found out about Apple planning to use Intel processors, and now I think the best solution for them would be to allow Mac OS X to run on any computer, and turn into a second Microsoft...but leaving most of the bad parts aside!

"An App Store download a day keeps Microsoft Windows away," don't you think? I am sure that over 2 million apples are being eaten every day(poor fruits...), but if we look at the App Store download rate, two million seems much bigger than in the previous case. After all, Macintosh apps don't grow on trees...

...but seem to become more and more popular, since statistics are looking just great! In a new print ad from Apple, it is said that the Cupertino-based company delivered no less than 300 million downloads through the iTunes App Store, also pointing out that over 10,000 different apps are currently available, 20 times more than the 500 that were ready to be downloaded at the App Store's debut.

When looking at the numbers above, it's also worth considering that, back in October, Apple announced that the App Store was nearing the 200 million downloads mark, so over 100 million downloads were made since then, accounting for about 2.2 million apps downloaded daily!

At last, you should also know that - according to comScore, Apple.com ranked 5th amongst the most visited retail sites on Cyber Monday(the Monday immediately following Black Friday), with 3.68 million hits, after eBay (12.9 million), followed by big-box retailers Amazon.com (9.2 million), Wal-Mart (6.76 million), and Target (4.8 million).