The 3,1 phone was spotted in an analytics report from November for the iPhone app iBART.

This isn't the first time something with that ID popped up on the rumor radar. In August, 3,1 was discovered hiding in iPhone firmware files. However, as MacRumors notes, this is the first time the marker's been "seen" gallivanting out in public.

Also noteworthy is the timing of the discovery: In October 2008, Apple starting testing the 3GS in and around the San Francisco area. [MacRumors]

It only works on movie posters for right now (and probably just recent ones too). When you capture an image, it'll pull up any information that might be associated with it such as showtimes and merchandise. The service should roll out to other regions soon. [Crunchgear]

Early on, we showed you completely non-scientific evidence of Win 7's pleasingly fast boot time. (Shutting down is another matter—my build (6801) sometimes takes forever.) I was glad that Kingsley-Hughes—using a Phenom 9700 quad-core system with ATI Radeon 3850, 2GB of Corsair Dominator RAM and WD's 10K RPM Raptor as primary drive—managed to demonstrate that the fast boot isn't a fluke. By the way, Vista SP1 had the slowest boot.

In two other tests, PassMark Performance and PCMark Vantage, Win 7 pre-beta beat the Vista builds, though it failed to trounce them in the CineBench R10 test.

Remember, this is a pre-beta, so nothing is guaranteed, but what makes this newsworthy is that Kingsley-Hughes—who incidentally is in no way a Bond villain—ran similar tests with Vista a few years back, and early Win 7 makes a mockery of that noise. Check the ZDNet article for the full system specs and benchmark scores—I'm sure at least some of you will want the nitty gritty. [ZDnet via Lifehacker]

Multi-Touch Trackpad
After a month of getting used to the Multi-Touch touchpad on the MacBook Air, I have to say that the Pro's touchpad is not quite as good in comparison. Comparatively, the Pro's touchpad is slightly narrower in width and a whole half of an inch shorter in height. (It's identical to the touchpad on the last Gen MBP's pad.) My initial thoughts were that the smaller touchpad would make using Multi-Touch more difficult, but that wasn't exactly the case.

Initially, in iPhoto, Multi-Touch on the smaller pad was more difficult, but after a few minutes we realized we were trying to use fingers in the same fashion as we did on the Air, where we had more room to gesture. For example, on the Air we skipped through photos with our fingers vertically but because of the Pro's size it's not comfortable to do this. So we placed our three fingers horizontally and it worked perfectly.

We came to the same conclusion with the rotate function. Instead of trying to move our rotate finger from the top of the touchpad to the bottom, we realized that by simply doing the rotate movement with more of a flick, iPhoto and Preview correctly rotated our photo to the next layout.

For testing zoom, we did a side-by-side comparison with the Air and found that the Pro's smaller touchpad actually zoomed into the same position as it did using the Air.

Screen
One thing to note though is that the LED matte screen on the version we got was less bright than the glossy screen on the MacBook Air. This might be the matte vs. glossy difference, or it might be that the MacBook Air's screen is just brighter.

Keyboard
The updated keyboard now has the F-key functions, same as the MacBook Air, and we think the additional Dashboard and Expose buttons use the F-keys nicely. We might not actually use buttons for these features but we think it's cool that the buttons are now clearly labeled.

Benchmark
The Penryn MacBook Pro has already been benched and compared to the previous generation MBP, and its clear it's about the same performance, per GHz. With that in mind we tested the new Penryn MBP agaisnt a year old Merom MBP and found a slight increase in speed. Also not surprising.

In a video encoding test, the Penryn MBP exported a 2.5min HD trailer in 11 minutes, where as the older Merom MBP took 13 min. (The basic config on the older machine included a 2.33GHz processor and 2GB of RAM; the Penryn had a 2.6GHz processor and 4GB of RAM, so this test is just a rough guide.) As noted in the temperature section, the Penryn did use much more of its power to accomplish the encoding which produced more heat. If you would like to see the Xbench results and compare it to your own machine you can check them out here.

Temperature
While idling, the Penryn MBP's CPU was running at 127 F—slightly cooler than the Merom MBP which had 133 F. But as for the actual experience, the new Penryn MBP felt much cooler on your lap than the older Merom.

While performing a video encode in iMovie with the new Penryn MBP CPU was operating at a temperature of 170 F; actually warmer than the older Merom MBP at 165 F. The increase in operating temperature during a video encode is likely because the more efficient machine is still doing more work every second at its higher clock rate.

Battery
So why do Apple's battery ratings look the same or lower in comparison to the last generation's Macbook Pro ratings? Simple: They made the tests harder. Again, according to numbers provided by Apple, for this and the last generation's MacBook Pro's battery life, you get about half an hour more due to the Penryn redesign, and half an hour more from the LED backlights. As with the AirBook ratings, your mileage will definitely vary. Downwards. But relative to the older books, these are more miserly.

Conclusion
Overall this MacBook Pro update is nothing amazing. The Multi-Touch touchpad and the Penryn processor are nice upgrades, but not necessarily something that a previous generation MacBook Pro user would feel an urgency to upgrade to. This update is more about efficiency than power gains.

Then it'll feed just about every test pattern you can imagine into projectors, televisions, CRT displays, LCD and plasma. We're taking this little sucker to CES, and we'll be able to run displays through the DisplayMate obstacle course, as long they're hooked up to a PC. It's excellent, and well worth the $79 for the DisplayMate for Windows on USB. DisplayMate for Windows Video Edition on USB is $99, and DisplayMate Multimedia Edition on USB is $495. [DisplayMate]

When you search for the same keywords again, you'll continue to see those changes. If you later want to revert your changes, you can undo any modifications you've made.

The system only works within browser...for now...meaning that your opinions will not affect other users. Of course, if such a system were deployed in a widespread fashion, we're guessing Google would aggregate data trends to alter search results over time for better relevance.

And would such a system be better? What do we trust more, man or machine? Or sweatshops full of children adding "Nike.com" to every query result? [google via theregister]

It's been built by Nascar team owner, Gene Haas, in conjunction with Jacobs Engineering, and will be rented out to other teams to cover what I'm sure is the huge price tag. [Jalopnik]

In addition, they went and dropped the phone on carpet, tile and the concrete. The iPhone pulled through with barely any scratches thanks to the keys and just a little bit of scuffing on metal edges thanks to the concrete.

We cringed at all the tests, but this should give you a semi-accurate view of how the iPhone does after a couple months abuse.

iPhone Stress Tests [PCWorld via PCWorld]

"Sources at equipment makers stated that KYEC has already started testing engineering chipset samples for PS3," writes Digitimes, and this essentially means that they're ramping up for full production.

KYEC said to benefit from ramping PS3 chip testing orders from 2Q06 [DigiTimes via TheInquirer]