Those two updates were coded in response to user requests for actually using RunPee's break moments during, you know, the actual movie. Pick a movie, set an alert and time buffer (1-5 minutes before the break), and RunPee will buzz you with a notification that, say, the scientist is explaining, so now's your chance for relief. With the offline storage, RunPee also becomes a much more useful iPod touch app. Of course, there's a joke in there somewhere about an app that vibrates when you really need a bathroom break, but we're far too mature to make it.

The RunPee.com web site has also added support for more languages, and a non-Flash mobile site for scoping out key non-action points right before a flick. Finally, there's a $1 Android app in the market, and other mobile apps are expected to come along soon. RunPee's iPhone app costs 99 cents, requires an iPhone or iPod touch.

Update now, says Apple. [TUAW]

Unfortunately, extender support and HD streaming are still not part of the Netflix package—a major disappointment. Engadget also claims that Internet TV picture quality is lacking. Still, all things considered, it should be a welcome update for fans of online TV. For most Windows 7 users, the updates should show up automatically—otherwise they can be downloaded via Tasks. Hit the link for a full gallery. [Engadget]

Update 1.1 offers new audio notifications that have a richer tone, though users still cannot change sounds themselves. Animated drop down and context menus have also been added to WebOS and result in a more fluid user interface. In addition to aesthetic changes, Palm has improved the functionality of several applications—the photo app is noticeably faster with photo rendering. Javascript Interpreter performance upgrades were included with the update and seem to make everything on the phone a bit speedier. Palm also addressed owner complaints by improving auto-complete functionality and adding a more comprehensive dictionary. The update isn't without its drawbacks though; some users have been lamenting the loss of the key combination that quickly opens a new card. Overall, the update was well thought out and dramatically improves usability overall—hit the link to check out all the changes. [Pre Central]

There are a ton of minor fixes to the Pre, which you can read about in the changelog below. The big standout is re-enabled iTunes compatibility. As Palm says in their blog, "That's right — you once again can have seamless access to your music, photos and videos from the current version of iTunes (8.2.1)." How they managed to hold back from adding in "...Bitches!" at the end of that, we'll never know. But there are a bunch of other sweet new features, especially "person reminders," which let you set individual reminders for each person in your contact list (imagine a buddy calls, and a message pops up, reminding you to, say, congratulate him—or, if you're like me, to ask him to pay you back the money he owes you). So cool! [Palm]

Update: Confirmed.

Version information

* Version: webOS 1.1.0
* Release date: 23 July 2009
* Configuration: Sprint 1.7

New applications
NFL Mobile Live from Sprint

* Watch or listen to live NFL games right on your phone.

Feature changes to existing applications
Calendar

* For Calendar accounts you create on your phone, the default reminder intervals are 15 minutes for timed events and one day for all-day events. A few notes:
o This change applies only if software version 1.1 was on your phone when you bought it, or if you did a partial or full erase on your phone and signed in to your Palm profile again after updating to version 1.1. If you simply update your phone to software version 1.1, the default reminder intervals in Calendar do not change.
o This change applies only to Calendar events you create on your phone, not to events that are synchronized to your phone from an online account.

Camera

* The Photos application opens more quickly when launched from the camera.

Clock

* Enhanced support for time zones in Clock.
* When you set an alarm in Clock, an alarm icon appears in the notification area at the bottom of the screen. Tap the icon to display alarm details. Alarm details include the following:
o If the alarm is set for the current day, the alarm time appears.
o If the alarm is set for tomorrow, the alarm time and "Tomorrow" appear.
o If the alarm is set for any day other than today or tomorrow, the day of the alarm appears.

Contacts

* Friends added and deleted in Facebook on the web are now correctly added and deleted in the Facebook account in Contacts on the phone.
* As soon as you create or makes changes to a Google contact on the phone, the phone begins a sync to reflect those changes in Google on the web.

Email

* When you set up an Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) email account, you can enter the mail server name as an IP address.
* Support for self-signed certificates with multiple common names has been added.
* When you reply to an email in HTML format using an EAS account, the formatting of the sender's original message is now retained in the reply.
* Palm's EAS implementation now supports several Exchange ActiveSync Policies, including the following:
o PIN/Password Required. IT administrators can ensure a password is assigned to the phone. Administrators can also specify the minimum length of the password.
o Inactivity timeout. IT administrators can ensure that an inactive phone goes into a locked state after a certain time period. You cannot set a higher timeout interval for your phone, but you can set a shorter interval.
o Remote Wipe. IT Administrators can remotely erase all data on a phone from their Exchange console. IT administrators can also have the device wipe itself if an incorrect password is entered more than a specified number of times.

Messaging

* You can enter emoticons in new text, multimedia, and instant messages. Emoticons also display in incoming messages.
* If you set the phone to use a 24-hour time format, the message times shown in a conversation appear in 24-hour time.
* If you go into an IM account's preferences, all the options are available even if you are signed in to the account. You can tap Remove Account to delete the account, enter a new password to update the password, or tap Sign In to sign in with your updated password. Previously, you needed to sign out of the account before you could use these preferences.
* When you delete an IM account, a message now appears asking you to confirm that you want to delete the account.

Phone

* When multiple missed call notifications are displayed on the dashboard, the time of the most recent missed call is shown.
* When you slide the ringer switch off, a bell icon with a slash is displayed. Previously, the icon was a speaker with a slash.
* In Phone Preferences, the Show Contact Matches preference is now turned on by default. When typing on the keyboard in the phone app, the phone automatically displays both the numbers being entered and any contact matches for the characters entered.

System

* Improved functionality of person reminders. A person reminder is a notification that you create in a contact entry. The notification appears when you have a call or exchange an email, text, multimedia, or IM message with a contact.
* Resolves an issue preventing media sync from working with latest version of iTunes (8.2.1).
* When you enter a search term in Card view or the Launcher to perform a universal search, if you select the Wikipedia web search option, results are shown in the Wikipedia Mobile site instead of the Desktop site.

Web

* You can now use symbols from the symbols table (Sym Sym key icon + key) when you enter text into a web page dialog box.
* If you have a page open at a certain zoom level, leave the page, and use the onscreen Back Web Back button button or the back gesture to return to the page, the zoom level is restored right away.
* A new gesture is now available that works the same as the onscreen Forward Web Forward button button. To move forward through open web pages, make a short swipe left to right in the gesture area.
* When using the Wikipedia drop-down search feature in the address bar, results are shown in the Wikipedia Mobile site instead of the Desktop site.
* When you tap a link, the link appears highlighted to indicate it has been activated, even if it takes a moment for the linked page to open.

YouTube

* After you enter search text, you can tap the Search Search icon icon to perform a search. You still have the option of pressing Enter Enter key to perform the search.

However, that said there is as of yet no nanotechnology update process available to us that will physically fix that keyboard. You know, the one with the space bar placed precariously toward the far right extreme of the typing area?

Seriously, if this were in my hands and I was firing off a text in the heat of the moment after six pints or so at the local Irish pub I frequent, my message on the other side would probably look like a viral marketing campaign for that cheesy V remake coming to TV this fall. [Nokia via BGR]

It's hard to go through all of the new features of course (especially since MMS, tethering and turn-by-turn directions are not quite there yet), but what do you think about the update overall?

It's for unspecified 15 and 17-inch models, but our unibody 15-incher said it didn't need the update, so it's probably for previous-gen models confirmed to have bad graphics cards. [Apple via ars]

Just spoke to AppleCare UK and they also confirm "Apple are aware of the issue and are investigating. At present we do not know if this is a hardware or software issue and have been advised not to offer customers exchanges until the issue is better understood."

I've also read the posts suggesting this is a thermal issue but I got screen noise/distortion when just waking the machine from sleep and also monitored the fans while playing WoW and they were running at 6000+ rpm consistently.

Ultimately Apple have access to more testing resources and should come up with a fix fairly soon but if my replacement exhibits the same issues when it arrives in two weeks time, I doubt I'll keep waiting: I'll have it shipped back and ask for a re-fund until Apple sort this out and I can purchase a working computer.

The catch here is that it may be hardware-based and not software, because the problem happens under both Windows and Mac OS X.

Another problem seems less important, but users claim that it can be even seen in most systems at display in Apple retail stores: If you scroll a web page with HD video on it, there's a wave-like distortion affecting it. Apple says they are aware of the problem and they are working in a software patch that will solve the issue.

While the last one is rather exotic and minor, I just can't understand how they let the first one slip. A problem that manifest itself while playing popular games like Call of Duty 4, World of Warcraft, or Ages of Empire III can't go unnoticed. Or can it? [Apple Forums and Apple Forums via AppleInsider]

1. get this file via ssh: /System/Library/CoreServices/SpringBoard.app/N45AP.plist
2. convert to xml at http://iappcat.com/plist/bin2xml
3. add

< key >telephony< /key >
< dict >
< key >maximumGeneration< /key >
< real >2.5< /real >
< /dict >

underneath

< key >standAloneContacts< /key >
< true/ >

Editor's Note: Be sure to take the spaces out of the commands above. Had to include them here for formatting purposes.

4. save then using that website again reconvert to binary
5. rename original file N45AP.old
6. copy new N45AP.plist in (make sure permissions are 644)
7. reboot ipod
all new Maps features work however you get a searching for service (replaces the word ipod in the top left) and waiting for activation message that pops up occassionally, music settings disappear also music slot in prefs disappears (hjrry)

Hopefully someone can patch the frameworks or springboard which wouldnt require this to be done! Anyway if you're desperate to try it out, thats all that needs to be done theres nothing wrong with stability or anything so you're not going break anything permanately trying this out.

Now, go forth and peep away at your neighbors. [iPod touch fans, thanks Bobby!]

I'm tired of this. This sense of permanent discomfort with the technology around me. The bugs. The compromises. The firmware upgrades. The "This will work in the next version." The "It's in our roadmap." The "Buy now and upgrade later." The patches. The new low development standards that make technology fail because it wasn't tested enough before reaching our hands. The feeling now extends to hardware: Everything is built to end up in the trash a year later, still half-baked, to make room for the next hardware revision. I'm tired of this beta culture that has spread like metastatic cancer in the last few years, starting with software from Google and others and ending up in almost every gadget and computer system around. We need a change.

Take the iPhone, for example, one of the most successful products in the history of consumer electronics. We like it, I love mine, but the fact is that the first generation was rushed out, lacking basic features that were added in later releases or are not here yet. Worse: The iPhone 3G was really broken. For real. Bad signal, dropped calls, frozen apps. This would have been unthinkable in cellphones just five years ago. They were simpler, for sure, but they were failure proof. Today's engineering and testing is a lot more sophisticated. In theory, products can't go out into distribution with such glaring problems undetected.

Another recent example is my iMac 24, which had the infamous video card problem out of the box. How can a machine with such an obvious problem—instantly detected by the user base—be sold like that? The same happened recently with Nvidia video boards. In fact, graphic cards—being always in the cutting edge of technology—are perfect examples of beta hardware being sold as final hardware, with many released with beta-quality drivers and requiring firmware patches.

From that to the now-universally-accepted Blue Screen of Death, from buggy Blu-ray players to the Xbox 360's red ring of death and PS3's bugs, even from kitchen ovens to faulty DSLR cameras, the list of troubled products is endless. Just this week, the eagerly anticipated BlackBerry Storm launched to mixed reviews, in part because of its crashy, apparently unfinished software.

On the other side, my parents have a Telefunken CRT TV and a Braun radio from the '70s which are still in working condition. They were first generation. They never failed. Compare that to my first plasma TV from Philips, which broke after less than a year of use. Mine wasn't the only one. The technology was too young to be released; it was still in beta state. Philips wanted to be the first in the world with a flat TV and beat the competition, so they released it. This probably wasn't a good move: Today, Philips' TV business is struggling, and is nonexistent in the US. Meanwhile, my Sinclair ZX Spectrum and Apple IIe from the 1980s still work like they did from day one, perfectly.

For sure, today's products are far more complex than those of 20 or 30 years ago. But back then, the manufacturing was also a lot worse. It was less automated, often purely manual, and imperfect. Today, in a world where automated factories run 24/7, there's less chance of error. Yet still, there are countless problems in the final products, and those problems affect every unit in an entire model line. In the age of manufacturing perfection, there are still major recalls concerning products that burn or break.

Clearly, the problem is the development process and the time to market, with product cycles shortened and corners cut to keep a continuous stream of cash flowing in. The rush to feed these cycles with increasingly more complex engineering seems to be at odds with shortened development and quality assurance processes, resulting in beta-state first-generation products. This beta culture, the same one that already plagues the web, breeds people who are willing to accept bugs in the name of cutting-edge gear.

Who's to blame? Google and their web apps? Apple and their iPhone 3G problems? Microsoft and their countless buggy versions of operating systems and the Xbox 360's RROD? Philips? Sony? Samsung? LG? We all are. The manufacturers, who are driven by a thirst to expand and satisfy their shareholders at all costs. The consumers, who are so thirsty to drink in the shiniest, newest technology that they are willing to sacrifice stability. And the press too, who pours more gasoline onto the consumerism bonfire by writing glowing reviews and often minimizing things that are simply not acceptable.

Personally, I'm tired of all this. But I'm mostly tired about the fact that it seems that we all have given up. Tired because now we see "upgrades" as an opportunity to protect our investment, but in reality, it's laziness and a poor job on the manufacturer part that we have accepted without questioning. Instead of calling foul play and refusing to participate, we keep buying.

That's the key: We have surrendered in the name of progress and marketing and product cycles and consumerism. Maybe those are good reasons, I don't know, but looking at the past, it feels like we are being conned. Deceived because the manufacturers of electronic products have taken our desire to progress faster and even embrace the web beta culture as an excuse to rush things to market, to blatantly admit bugs and the rushed features sets and sell the patches as upgrades.

Maybe the recession will put some order in this thirst of new stuff and change the product cycles. As the economy slows down, people will think twice before buying the latest and greatest; they'll keep older hardware for longer. Then, manufacturers will have to rethink their product lines, and lift their feet from the accelerator, which will result on slower cycles and better products. Maybe that's our ticket for better electronics that actually make sense.

Or maybe... maybe that will be another excuse for the manufacturer to cut even more corners and keep lowering prices so that consumers keep spending and ending up with worse products than we have now.

Improved Gmail IMAP compatibility and an updated setup wizard with the new Gmail settings

Updated compatibility for Google Mobile Maps My Location feature to approximate your current location – great for directions, finding nearby restaurants or business, or checking local traffic.1

Improved ongoing delivery of email sent to VersaMail accounts using Microsoft's Direct Push Technology via Exchange ActiveSync

Bluetooth usability enhancements and updates

Sprint TV performance enhancements2

Enhanced AOL Instant Messenger performance

Improved performance when adding a contact using Mobile Voice Control

Improved email attachment handling

Changed default camera shutter sound to “ON.” Audible shutter “click” will be heard when taking photos

Allows Preferred Roaming List updates over the air

[Kotaku and Playstation Blog—Thanks Eric]