Snow Leopard Shipping (or Not Shipping) August 28th...Nokia 5800 Navigation (aka Free Maps and Car Kit) Edition...Will Southwest Airlines Wi-Fi Be Cheap Like Its Tickets?...Blu-ray Quality 1080p on an iPhone 3GS...
We've seen Snow Leopard making random appearances on Apple retail pages for days now, but this one was special: A UK retail page identified Snow Leopard's ship date as August 28th. I use the past tense because when I checked it, the ship date had been revised to a more vague, and more disappointing, "September." What's to glean from all of this? That within five weeks, your Snow Leopard will be purring. But it might not be within one week. [Engadget]
Nokia just re-released its 5800 in a "Navigation Edition," and though it's Europe only, and I don't really give a fig about the 5800, I hope this idea catches on. For a modest increase in price (in this case, around $40), buyers get a car charger, dashboard mount and a lifetime of updated roadmaps, lifetime for the phone that is, so that you can hop in the car and really get somewhere. Compared to the $100 it costs now just to get software for, say, an iPhone—charger and mount sold separately—this is a pretty good deal. [Nokia via Symbian Guru]
Southwest Airlines is home of the cheapest plane tickets I ever bought, so it's exciting to see them getting Wi-Fi on board. The free beta testing appears to have ended, and now Southwest promises to roll out the service to its fleet starting early next year. What's still up in the air (whoops!) is price: Says Forbes, Southwest will "continue testing prices for the service through the end of the year." So if someone comes up to you on a SW flight and asks what you'd pay for in-flight Wi-Fi, be sure to low-ball 'em. I'm thinking like $2/hr. [Forbes]
It's times like this I wish I knew Chinese (and make a note to force my kid to learn it): A guy claims to have tested some sick HD video on the 3GS, by tricking it to accept the files. Like the original 3G, the 3GS is capable of decoding 1080p video. But this fella says he loaded some video on the order of 35Mbps 1080p—pretty much Blu-ray quality—and that it played fine, only encountering issues when he hit 40Mbps. Again, that's via Google Translation (and via MobileCrunch to boot), so it's not terribly actionable info. Still, it's worth looking into, and maybe duplicating this guy's hack if you can. I hope Apple really does lift the resolution caps, though, because I am tired of iTunes telling me what I can't load, even after I go through all the trouble to encode in their fancy H.264. [WeiPhone via MobileCrunch]