Many of us recall the shock when Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the iPod nano and its video camera - months of rumour and speculation had suggested a similar feature would appear within the iPod touch - it didn’t - but now it seems set to ship this Spring.

This seems somewhat strange to us: Apple is allegedly refusing to honour warranties on Macs belonging to smokers, voiding warranties while arguing that smoking near a Mac exposes the tech support worker to secondhand smoke. 

Sure, chain smoking can make everything around disgusting and we feel for those technicians who have to deal with those machines that probably stink and have some tar residue in the fans.  But does smoking actually cause damage to the computer?

As the Consumerist reports: “Two readers in different parts of the country claim that their Applecare warranties were voided due to secondhand smoke. Both readers appealed their cases up to the office of God Steve Jobs himself. Both lost.”

Apple has at last managed to approve Touch DJ, a serious-seeming application for digital DJs.

Macs are pretty robust, but sometimes they fail...indeed a recent study claimed Apple’s machines see around a 17.4 percent malfunction rate (at three years) - still putting the platform in among the four most reliable PC makers.

What to do? Well, assuming you’re not a smoker then there’s the AppleCare Protection Plan. When you buy a new Mac Apple always tries to sell you this insurance, which extends warranty on your Mac up to a maximum three years.

Remember we told you how Condé Nast was building its Wired publication into tablet form in anticipation of Apple's upcoming tablet/slate?  Well here's a video of what they've been up to from this year's Wired Store.  Note the interactive graphics at the 30 second mark. 

Again, this is built with Adobe's Air platfrom which might not get a shot at being on Apple's product.  Otherwise, we have to say we like it.

Very good post at Computerworld from Mike Elgan about Apple, though I'd venture that a lot of you already know this:

Tech watchers love the horse race aspect of technology industry competition. Apple competes with Microsoft. Apple competes with Google. Apple competes with companies like HP. But Apple doesn't see it that way.

Industry titans like Microsoft, Google and HP instinctively "fill out" their product lines to dominate huge areas of technology. Microsoft, for example, wants Microsoft software running on wristwatches, supercomputers and everything in between. Google wants to offer every conceivable service that can be squeezed through an internet connection. HP's massive product line runs the gamut from consumer digital cameras sold at Best Buy to entire data centers filled with enterprise systems.

Apple doesn't want to dominate like this. It has no interest in this kind of imperialist expansion. Apple is interested only in surgical strikes into this business or that product category, where they can solve design problems others have failed to solve.

From the Toys section:

This one looks like a mistake so you might want to jump on it.  Tiger Direct has the Wireless Internet Camera Server TV-IP100W-N, for $39.99.    Features include 15 fps at 640x480 (30 fps at 320x240), 802.11g wireless streaming, 4x digital zoom, and more.  No one else has it for under $110.

It is also the lowest price camera server we've ever seen.

Woops.  It looks like Apple might have made those new iMacs a little too fast! 

According to Macworld's tests, the Core i7 iMac beat the Octo-core Mac Pro 2.2GHz in a number of Speedmark 6 tests and overall it was 1.5% faster than the fastest base model computer Apple sells.  Sure, you can update that Mac Pro Beast to 2.93GHz Octo, but that is $2600 more, $500 more than the entire Core i7 iMac!  Even the Core i5 iMac did pretty well. Oh, and that iMac has the best display Apple has ever produced.

Computerworld has the story.  A lawsuit that has been dragging on since the iPhone 1.1.1 update that bricked a lot of jailbroken iPhones got an interesting twist this week.  The plaintiffs in the case are requesting that Apple reveal the source code of the iPhone 1.1.1 software so they can ascertain whether or not Apple maliciously bricked jailbroken iPhones or whether is was just a by-product of the new software code.

Good luck with that. 

I can't think of anything that Apple would want to give up less than that source code, even if it is two years and iterations old.

Bad news for those Android users who were hoping to get the same level of game access as exists on the iPhone.  It doesn't look like it is happening.  Gameloft and companies like them have started to scale back their Android investments, according to someone who should know, Gameloft finance director Alexandre de Rochefor (Bolds are ours):

"We have significantly cut our investment in Android platform, just like ... many others," Gameloft finance director Alexandre de Rochefort said at an investor conference. Rochefort said the company has cut back on investment mostly due to weaknesses of Android's application store. "It is not as neatly done as on the iPhone. Google has not been very good to entice customers to actually buy products. On Android nobody is making significant revenue," Rochefort said. Games for iPhone generated 13 percent of Gameloft's revenue in the last quarter. "We are selling 400 times more games on iPhone than on Android," Rochefort said.

400 to one isn't a good ratio for Android no matter how big a lead the iPhone has had. via MR