I guess that everybody would like to get the best price when they buy an iPod touch; often you don’t find any special offers as Apple controls the prices. Sure we had a case recently with a newly opened store here in Switzerland where they were offering a 10% discount on all items in their shops, including iPod. I was very close to ordering one but decided to wait a bit. The discount of 10% is not something to laugh at, but something else a friend of mine just had to laugh about yesterday was Amazon.com and their VERY special price for Apple 16 GB iPod touch

Let the picture tell the story:

A total saving of $0.01; made me feel like buying one extra iPod just to take advantage of the discount… NOT :-)

Almost sounds as if he is in love with it; just hope his girlfriend understands :-) It might also just be the touching he likes:

Das Feeling, besonders das des Displays wenn man darüber streicht, ist einfach sensationell.

Interesting what he writes about the ‘unlimited’ deal with T-Mobile and the free hotspots from T-Mobile. Hope that we will have such options when it one day arrives here in Switzerland; I could easy imagine myself going more to Starbucks if I had free iPhone wifi access from there.

He is so far the only one I know who have an iPhone but some of my other friends got the iPod touch and they all are very happy about them. So here I am all alone without iPod and iPhone. Sure I could buy an unlocked iPhone in Germany for the insane price of €999 but that is beyond my budget.

So this leaves me with either waiting for years for the iPhone to arrive here in Switzerland or settle with an iPod touch. I was SO close last weekend to get the iPod touch as a local store had 10% discount. In last second I decided to wait a bit longer, need the money for Christmas. So I will be without iPod/iPhone for at least the rest of this year.

So until the time comes for me to get one I will just have to listen to Daniel talk about how great the iPhone is. I’m sure he will be blogging more about it in the future, so keep an eye on his blog. (I will try to convince him to write the next one in English).

Since I had an old unused 15″ TFT I decided to ask directly at the Apple Boot Camp forums about support for ATI X 1900 XT and a NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT. I didn’t get a 100% confirmation that it would work but I went ahead and bought the graphics card. In case it would not work then the graphics card would go on sale on eBay.

NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT

The card arrived in a box without any fancy pictures on. I’m used to seeing boxes with fancy NVIDIA or ATI/AMD logos and images but then again, this is another market and the card can not be bought in a store so not a real surprise. But I was a bit surprised to see that it came with out CD or any instructions. All I found was some papers about world wide 1 year guarantee and then a sheet: For installation see the documentation that came with the computer. It also came without any bundled games but again, that was not expected.

So I went to Apple’s support site and found some documentation, all very simple.

Installing

Open Mac Pro (No screws), lay it down and remove the holder for the PCI express cards (No screws). Plug the card it. Connect it and turn the Mac on. This is how hardware installation should be.

Screen setup

I’m now using a setup with 3 TFT screens. From left to right: 17″ Sony SDM-S71 (1280×1024), 24″ Dell 2407WFP (Rotated 90 degrees, 1200×1920) and the old 15″ Philips 151AX (1024×768). The plan was to have the 17″ as primary screen.

OS X 10.4 (Tiger)

The new graphics card was detected right away and when I booted I got a window with the settings for the PCI Express lanes, I had just added it to slot 3 but with this I was not able to get more than 1-wide lane. So I moved it to slot 4 and was able to get 8 lanes. The main ATI card is using the 16 lane PCI slot.

I was able to setup the 3 screens as I planned, took 15 minutes to align them in the system preferences so that the mouse moves correct from screen to screen.

Windows XP

I was worried about getting the graphics cards working with Windows XP but this turned out to be without reason. Windows detected the graphics card right away but found no drivers for it. These are on the Windows driver CD that Boot Camp creates, so I was able to install these.

The primary screen was set to the 15″ to start with, but I just disabled the 15″ and the task bar moved over to the 17″ and all worked fine.

Rotating the 24″ monitor went without problems with the NVIDIA control panel. Alignment was as easy as under OS X.

UltraMon

Just wanted to mention this great little tool, a must have if you use multiple monitors. It allows you to move windows between monitors with a single click, resize to cover all monitors (taking into account that monitors does not have same height). It also allows for the task bar to be shown on all monitors. I have it setup so the task bar pr monitor only shows the applications that is running on that monitor.

There is also support for wall paper and screen savers, which can be defined pr monitor. Having 3 different screen savers did fail for me and only one was shown; not a problem for me as I never have screen savers enabled anyway.

Verdict

I had no problems with adding the extra graphics and also no problems with setting the screens up as I wanted. So now I got a rather nice setup, especially for when I’m programming. Having the source code on the 24″ rotated screen is amazing. Really wonder why I never tried that.

Having the 17″ screen as primary is perfect, as it allows games to be played on that. Also great for when working, as the game we are working on will show up on this screen and not cover the editor.

Just wondering what I should use the last output for… One more 24″ or is that over doing it…

I’m using Boot Camp for this of course, which allows OS X users to install various versions of Windows, such as XP and Vista. It includes all the drivers needed for the hardware. When all is installed it is possible to dual boot, meaning, upon boot you can select what operation system you want to boot. It is of course also possible just to let it boot into a selected OS each time.

Boot Camp is a great product for us who likes the quality of the Mac hardware but needs to run Windows XP due to work. But so far Boot Camp has been in beta ever since it was released, latest release was 1.4 beta. I would have liked to link directly to it but the page about it has been taken down after they announced Leopard for the 26th. Some of the pages do direct to the Boot Camp information for Leopard, so have a look at that on

This also means no Boot Camp for people who run OS X 10.4 (Tiger) unless Apple decides to release a standalone version.

So based on this it must mean that Boot Camp is no longer in beta and will see the light as final release together with Leopard, no surprise really.

There are new drivers according to the new feature page. I just hope there will be some serious updates also. I made a small wish list of things I would like to see improved, all related to Mac Pro, as this is what I got.

1. Better support for ATI X1900 XT graphics card.
   This is a known issue on the forums, that some fail to get Windows booting and some have issues with blue screen of death when it is rebooted, or just that display is trashed with random graphics. I have had these issues and still have them from time to time. Not a big deal for me; just requires an extra reboot. But really, this should not be the case.
2. More than 2 GB of memory.
   Windows XP can handle 3 GB normally but when running on a Mac Pro it is limited to 2 GB no matter what configurations are done to Windows. MacBook Pro can handle more than 2GB, so it is related to the firmware of the Mac Pro (I assume).
   Mac Pro itself can support up to 32 GB when using OS X but I doubt that many can afford this.
3. Support for multiple graphics cards.
   I can not confirm this problem but according to the forums there are serious issues (such as it does not work) when using two ATI X1900 XT cards or combinations of ATI and NVIDIA. I have been considering to getting more graphics card as I got an unused monitor here but as long as there are doubts about if it will work I will wait.
4. Sound and sound plugs.
   This might just be an issue for me or maybe I have done something wrong (or is using wrong plugs). I’m not able to use the sound plugs at the back of the Mac, so I have my speakers connected to the headset on the front.

I don’t think that’s a long wish list but let’s wait till after the 26th and see what Apple has improved. I’m pretty sure that I will upgrade but who knows maybe they do release the final OS X 10.5 to developers with paid membership.

Widescreen iPod, internet, OS X and a phone… all in one device. They claim they are reinventing the mobile phone, looking at the Apple site for the iPhone and watching the keynote presentation you can surely get that feeling to. But such new invention comes at a price and I’m here talking $. With a price of $599 for the 8 GB version in connection with a subscription contract of 2 years with Cingular; I don’t even want think about what the price will be here in Europe. I also doubt it will be possible to get an iPhone without a contract with a carrier/operator network. Some of the features that they are introducing will require close work with operators, so maybe there will never be an unlocked version…

Some people have been confused/skeptic about a few things; let me give you my view on a few things:

Not been able to extend the storage: I don’t see this as a problem, it already got 4 GB or 8 GB as default. Of course it would be nice to be able to take the pictures directly from the SD card from the digital camera. But I can surely live without it.

No 3G: This is a bit strange I have to admit, but at the same I got to admit that I don’t know how widespread 3G is in the US. Steve Jobs did mention with a quick remark that 3G as something for the future. This might change when the iPhone gets released in Europe and Asia. We can only hope so. Using GSM/EDGE/GPRS for browsing the internet just removes the fun.

No removable battery: Not something that will worry me, why do I want to swap the battery. Never did that before with the other phones I had. Just hope they don’t want the SIM below the battery as a lot of phones already have.

No sync over OTA or WiFi: Again something I never used but I understand people’s reaction to this. But let’s wait and see things might change; it is after all just software… Oh, and you have to recharge the iPhone anyway, so why not do that while syncing with the PC/Mac.

High price: My first reaction was ‘wow, that’s an expensive phone’ and it is if I compare it with my latest SonyEricsson K800i which cost me around 320 USD (2 year contract). But if I compare to the PocketPC I bought long ago (iPaq) plus the price of a normal phone; then it does not feel that crazy after all.

One thing that I would worry about if I had an iPhone would be dropping it. It does happen from time to time that I drop a phone, such as the other day where my K800i decided to launch itself from my pocket. It just got a small scratch on the corner, nothing I care about… but would an iPhone have survived? Would the screen still be intact?
Another thing, my kids like to borrow the phones to take pictures, was okay with the Nokia 6630 but I’m not that willingly to let them use the K800i and if I had an iPhone… NO WAY. I can imagine ice cream finger prints on the screen… or with a few unlucky presses on the touch screen and they might be calling the US in the background while surfing the net, all costing money. They would probably also end up removing my contacts. Sure Apple build-in some nice error correction for using the touch screen, but I’m sure it lacks “child protection”

Anyway, the final word from me is: I want the iPhone; I know I have to wait until the end of this year… gives me some time to save up for it. I will (as many others also will) be looking forward to the US launch in June, so we can get some reviews of the iPhone.