iOS

Major changes coming to MacOS, iOS, watchOS and tvOS during WWDC 2016

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Right from the mouth of Mark Gurman (during the Jay and Fared Show Podcast), first reported by O’Grady’s Powerpage;

  1. No hardware announcements (that we already know)

  2. Siri in MacOS, to be featured in top right corner alongside Spotlight

  3. iOS Design Refresh with more colors – this is big. There are still many who insists that iOS 7 to 9 have been pretty bland and boring design-wise, coming from design powerhouse Apple, and refreshing the UI will definitely help in the looks department.

  4. Notifications will change (among other iOS system tweaks). Probably for the sake of watchOS 3, since the current less-than-perfect notification system is weighing watchOS 2 down.

  5. Big enhancement to Photos both on iOS and MacOS (to fend off Google Photos, as well as address the demise of Aperture somewhat. After all, Google Photo’s editing features are worked on by the former team at Nik.

  6. Redesigned Apple Music. (Whatever, just bring back the old Music app please)

  7. New encryption abilities (Wow).

  8. Send money to others through iMessage

Introducing MacNet (SgMac.Net). Get all your iOS 7 questions answered!

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Introducing MacNet – for devoted Mac Users.

MacNet is the closest thing you will find to an Apple Cult these days.

Based in Singapore, but we welcome every single Mac user.

We hope to create a community where the purest and most devoted Mac users can be active in, as we recognise with the rise of Apple, many devoted Mac users feel left out.

No longer can a Mac user just start a chat with someone else he/she spotted using a Mac in a public area. No longer is there any tight-knitted group where devoted Mac users can share information and tips about Macs and related stuff.

We hope to bring all that back.

We are not some crummy user group which was left to die when its core members lost interest and its founder went missing, neither are we some off-shoot group of a rowdy PC-hardware forum.

We are here to stay.

We sincerely invite both long-time and novice Mac users to join this group, so long you believe yourself to be genuinely interested in Macs and most things Apple.

Hit us with all your iOS 7 questions

With the introduction of iOS 7 today, we recognise that many will be shocked at all the changes in iOS 7 and might not be able to cope. A bunch of us with prior access to iOS 7 (dev access!) for the past two months will be around the group and helping to answer any iOS 7 or Mac related queries you might have, so join us today!

MacNet is located at http://sgmac.net.

The Mystery of the iPhone 5C placement in Apple’s lineup

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Apple Event 10th September 2013

As recent rumors have pegged, tonight’s Apple event will introduce two new iPhones – the iPhone 5S and the iPhone 5C.

We have seen enough leaks to know everything there is to know about the iPhone 5C’s five colors and construction, and how they are really just iPhone 5 innards in a new plastic housing.

That said, the exact placement of the iPhone 5C in Apple’s iPhone lineup remains a mystery up till now.

In a previous post, I had revealed that the iPhone 5C had a 4-inch screen and a Lightning port (thanks to my friends) and speculated that the iPhone 5C will replace the iPhone 4S at the lowest end of the iPhone lineup and complete the transition of the iPhone line to Lightning ports and 4-inch screens this year, leaving the iPhone 5S at the top and the current iPhone 5 in the middle of the lineup.

I still think that this will be the arrangement, but rumors (from idiotic analysts nonetheless) suggest that the iPhone 5C will replace the iPhone 5 completely, leaving only the two new iPhones (and the old iPhone 4S) in the iPhone lineup.

This is weird for various reasons.

Firstly, it will leave a big gap between the pricing of the iPhone 5S and the iPhone 5C, assuming that the iPhone 5C will be quite a bit cheaper than the iPhone 5S. Previous years, the mid-range iPhones have always been about 100USD cheaper than the top-of-the-line models, and people who are intending to buy mid-range this year will not be happy that they are paying for something that are not last year’s models, at the same top-range-minus-hundred price point.

Secondly, it will not be feasible to have the iPhone 4S remain on the lineup, for the extra effort Apple needs to maintain the dock connector accessories and the assumed extra cost of making the iPhone 4S’ metal and glass housing will outweigh the benefits of just letting the same production lines making the now lesser in demand iPhone 4S continue running.

The only reason/way I can see it (iPhone 5C replacing the iPhone 5) is if the supply yield of the delicate aluminum and glass housing of the iPhone 5 still remains small today even after one year of production, due to the care needed to prevent scratches on the soft aluminum on the assembly lines.

If that is truly the case, it will make sense for Apple to divert all current iPhone 5 housing production lines to the production of the iPhone 5S, to ensure maximum supply of the iPhone 5S on launch day (20th September) and in the months after that, especially with the rumored increase in color choice.

Plastic housings are extremely cheap and easy to produce (ask Samsung), and will be produced fast enough to meet iPhone 5C launch demand, and a big supply of iPhone 5Cs is need if China is going to be part of the first launch countries this year.

Apple will still have to adjust their prices accordingly, and there will still be a gap, unless of course they just went ahead with the old top-range-minus-hundred pricing assuming that people will pay for the "newness" of the multi colored iPhone 5C lineup.

Can’t wait for tonight! Will love a blue 5C.

Visit Sgmac.net, the new fb group (still in tweaking mode until mid-Sep, but open for joining) for devoted Mac users today!

WWDC 2013 predictions?

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Sometimes I wonder why people even crave for such posts when everything is out there in the open, but I guess there are some who would not bother with the research.

I am just going to rehash everything that is already all over the web, adding some of my opinions if necessary.

1. Completely new UI (User Interface) for iOS 7

Honestly, I do not know what to expect. Jony Ive has designed the majority of the Apple hardware we know and love today, but his take on UI is still uncharted territory. As far as we know, he was, to quite an extent, involved in the original iPhone’s UI design back in 2006/2007 but everything after that was under Forstall. The whole “flat look” rumour thing that has been reported widely sends chills down my spine – I absolutely will hate iOS losing most of the fun elements it is known for.

However, if looking the gradients and gloss means a much slicker and professional looking UI (think Tweetbot, think Reeder), I am all for it. It is highly unlikely the hordes of software engineers will let Jony Ive change iOS into something as tasteless as Windows Phone 8, after all. Besides, the Brit has impeccable taste. A clean look, less gloss, less gradient, but with lots of colours and fun elements will be the hallmark of a modern iOS. Besides, change just for change’s sake, for once, is something that iOS needs to keep a majority of their bored customer base from “looking for a change”.

2. Mac OS X 10.9

As with iOS 7, OS X 10.9 must be the most well kept secrets in Cupertino right now. Rarely in the past two years has information about the two new operating systems been so tight-lipped that even now, less than a week from WWDC 2013, there has been no leaks, no screenshots of new features or the new UI (in the case of iOS 7). Rumour-mill has it that engineers have been taken from 10.9 development to help speed up iOS 7’s development pace, and that has resulted lesser changes to 10.9.

Like many of the traditionalists I am more interested in OS X than iOS, and a much improved OS X will perk me up way more than a completely revamped iOS. That said, though, OS X is extremely mature and with much of the underlying changes needed for a modern desktop OS already done in Snow Leopard and Lion, all that is left to do for the next few years is tweaking OS X to perform better, and address the outstanding issues still present today.

An improved Finder (as rumoured) will be welcomed, and hopefully the UI for Calendar and Contacts will be changed to something slicker. Mail.app is in crazy need of a refresh after many years of bloat, though most peeps these days run Sparrow, or more recently, Airmail, as a replacement for Mail.app. I really doubt a new file system will debut anytime soon to replace HFS+, definitely not in 10.9. There is also some speculation that widgets and Dashboard might be discontinued, but I hope that they do keep Dashboard as I still use it everyday for currency conversion.

What other changes do OS X need? You tell me. I am really happy with how everything works so far.

3. New iPhones and iPads?

NO. NO NEW IPHONES AND IPADS. PLEASE. THESE ARE COMING IN SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER.

I am going to slap anyone who tells me that he or she is disappointed because there is no new iPhone/iPad at WWDC.

4. New Macs?

Haswell is just released. So new Retina MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs are definitely coming. There are rumours that the 13″ Retina MacBook Pro will go on a diet and get slimmer (thanks to crazy power efficiency in the new Haswell platform), and that will be definitely welcomed. The current rMBP 13″ is not that much lighter from the old 13″ MBP (non-retina) right now, and is not tempting enough for anyone to switch.

Oh ah, and a price drop across the whole line of Retina MacBook Pros is much needed (will and probably come).

You can follow MacRyu at @ryuworks on Twitter and @ryu on App.net.

The iMessage Flaw (aka the iMessage Bug) Detailed and Explained (mostly)

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Man, this is going to be really long. How should I start?

So Apple introduced iMessage with iOS 5. Just like iOS 5 itself, there are, rather than calling them bugs, what I will term inconsistencies or ideas that aren’t very well thought-out before execution all over the OS, and iMessage’s authentication process is one of those.

iMessage itself is a wonderful idea, it relies on data only, is completely integrated in the what most think of as the SMS app, and most of all, is completely transparent to the clueless user.

You get your iPhone 4S (or any other iPhones capable of running iOS 5), pop in your sim card, your sim card then discreetly sends an SMS to Apple to register your phone number on iMessage’s servers, and from then on every time you try to SMS another iOS 5 user you wonder why the text bubble turned from green to blue. “Ah, maybe this iPhone is smart enough to detect which of my friends are cool as blue and which are green and boring”, you may think. And then you wonder why you are billed for 20 SMSes instead of the usual 5000 SMSes at the end of the month.

iMessage, therefore, really works, in typical Apple fashion, seamlessly.

Or does it?

For those in the know, iMessage works not just with your phone number, but with any email address-based Apple ID as well. If you set the iMessage Caller ID on your iPhone as your Apple ID instead of your phone number (non-iPhones can only use Apple IDs as Caller IDs), your iMessage conversations will magically duplicate themselves across all your iDevices (with the same Caller ID), including all your spare iPhones, iPod Touches and iPads (and your Macs too, with the new Messages.app beta). This is wonderful, for you can start a conversation on your iPhone and continue on your iPad. The confusion sets in when you, like others, by default, set your iPhone’s iMessage Caller ID to your phone number and start wondering if Apple’s advertising if iMessage as being able to sync across devices is bullshit. But then, this is a topic for another day.

In recent months there’s been reports about iMessage “malfunctioning” by sending messages to wrong parties or going missing, but most of those reports only painted a picture of the “symptoms” without going anywhere near addressing the real cause of these “symptoms”. Others, like theives-blog Gizmodo, only used the chance to throw shit on Apple. Too bad they don’t have any credibility left for anyone to believe their bullshit.

iMessage, however, does have a few problems stemming from their authentication and “pushing” process, and I will attempt, from the very limited knowledge I have, to detail what is happening and explain why.

I have personally tested iMessage extensively using a combination of phones and sim cards and below are the three scenarios I have encountered often. The phones I am using are the iPhone 4S which is my main phone, the Galaxy Nexus my spare phone, and another iPhone 3GS. I am using 3 sim cards, let’s call them Singtel, Starhub and M1 (which really are Singtel, Starhub and M1 sim cards). The Singtel is my main sim card with a 9-number, and the M1 is a prepaid sim card with a 8-number. The Starhub is a DATA-only sim card with a 8-number.

What are the possible problems?

Situation 1

I have been using the Singtel sim card in my iPhone 4S since the day I bought the phone, and iMessage is obviously activated with the Singtel 9-number. Recently I decided to test out ICS and switched out the Singtel sim card and started using it with the Galaxy Nexus. However, there is absolutely no way I can get any work done on Android with its crappy third party apps so I needed my 4S as well. To ensure it works properly I inserted the DATA only Starhub sim card into the 4S, without rebooting the phone even once. This causes a strange situation. Under Settings>Messages>Receive At, listed at the top is “Verifying 9-number(my Singtel sim)” and at nowhere is the Starhub 8-number listed there despite the Starhub sim card being inside the 4S at that very point of time. “Maybe iMessages sent to my Singtel 9-number will just fail and default to SMS then, since the 9-number isn’t verified”, or so I thought. Over the next few days, many have came up to me and asked why I didn’t reply their messages. I simply didn’t receive them on the Galaxy Nexus, which at that point of time was holding the Singtel 9-number sim card. I didn’t even receive them on the iPhone. I then reinserted the Singtel sim card into the iPhone, reactivated iMessage under the 9-number, but the messages never came through. They were all blackhole’d, sent to a dimension where humans don’t exist.

Situation 2

I was setting up my old iPhone 4 for my mum one day by restoring it through iTunes. When the activation screens came up, I just inserted my Singtel sim card to get through the activation screens as per pervious iOSes. Next thing I know, for the next few days, because my mum haven’t got around to getting her sim card transferred from her old phone to the iPhone 4, she was receiving every single one of my iMessages. And that’s like 20 threads per day, a few hundred messages every 24 hours.

Situation 3

In order to solve the problem of missing iMessages, I reactivated my iPhone 4S’s iMessage using the M1 sim card (iMessage was working properly when I tried to send messages to the M1’s 8-number). I then put my Singtel sim card in the Galaxy Nexus. So at this point of time my Singtel 9-number shouldn’t be associated with iMessage or any Apple devices. I waited 10 minutes just in case. Then I did the test.

I iMessaged the Singtel 9-number from my Mac using Messages.app with my Apple ID. It failed to send. Great.

I iMessaged the Singtel 9-number from my iPhone 3GS (using the Starhub 8-number). It failed to send. Great.

I iMessaged the Singtel 9-number from my brother’s iPhone 4S. It sent. And shown the message to be “delivered”. Of course the message is nowhere to be found on all my phones. Not good.

I got my friend KPS to iMessage the Singtel 9-number. It sent. And shown the message to be “delivered”. Of course the message is nowhere again. Not good at all.

I then iMessage the Singtel 9-number, again, using my mum’s iPhone 4. It fail to send. Whatever.

These three situations are extremely common in today’s world, and especially for Singaporeans since every 30-40 year old changes his or her phone every 6 months or so, and thus either have a large collection of old phones to switch sim cards on or regularly sell phones away to make room for new ones.

Consider Situation 2. Say you are a girl selling your iPhone 4 to some (creepy) old guy (let’s call him Thomas). You wiped (and by that I meant you restored your phone through iTunes, completely reformatting the phone) your phone and brought it to show Thomas at the nearby McDonalds. Thomas says, “Yeah it looks good, but I don’t know if the phone part of the phone is working. Can you show it to me? I don’t have a sim card with me though.” So you foolishly popped your sim card into the phone, and proceed to show Thomas that the phone actually works. Thomas happily paid you the money and took your phone. Unfortunately for you, Thomas never intended to put his own sim card into the phone. From the very moment you inserted your sim card into the wiped iPhone 4, Thomas has access to every single iMessage you sent, as well as every single iMessage sent to you. He will have a copy of all your sexting conversations with your boyfriend, your secret chats with your girlfriends, and the dirty chats you have with your best friend’s boyfriend with whom you are having an affair with. Thomas pwns you.

This is also a problem when you lose your phone, or if your phone is stolen. Yes you can remote wipe your iPhone by Find My iPhone, but because your sim card is still in the iPhone when the phone is being rebooted after a remote wipe, iMessage on the stolen phone will still be tied to your phone number. I imagine in this case, that one should firstly deactivate the sim card through your telco, before issuing the remote wipe. But all these is way too complicated for someone who just lost his or her precious iPhone.

Consider Situation 1. Say you are overseas, in a place like Hong Kong, where 3G prepaid sim cards are available for cheap. You want mobile internet, so you bought one, took your sim card out of your iPhone 4S and popped in the 3 3G sim card you just bought (3 is a carrier in Hong Kong, UK, and many places where democracy can be found. It’s never coming to Singapore.) without rebooting the phone. The mobile internet works, and you are happy. Are you really? After that one week of vacation, you return back to Singapore where a very angry girlfriend is screaming at you because you ignored all of her iMessages. But when you say you didn’t receive any messages she pulls out her iPhone, shows you the “delivered” status underneath every single text bubble she sent, and proceeds to give you one hell of a tight slap without any advance warning.

Solution for Situation 1

I somehow found out, through trial and error, that the “Verifying whatever number” error can be resolved simply by doing this.

After you inserted the new sim card, turn iMessage OFF. Then shut down your phone. Turn it on again, then turn on your iMessage. If it doesn’t work, turn off and on iMessage a few more times, it should work.

For some reason, unless you reboot the phone, iMessage never forces itself to recheck the phone number of the current sim card, and will instead try to verify if the current sim card has the same phone number of the previous sim card. When the phone’s iMessage is activated with the new number, your previous sim card should now not be associated with iMessage. But as we all know, Situation 3 happened. And cannot be resolved. It seems to be a problem of the iMessage servers holding on to the number-phone association for far longer than it should, despite the same phone now being activated with a new number. So if you are overseas and want to use a prepaid sim card with your iPhone 4S, pop in the new sim, do the above sequence, check that the iPhone 4S’s iMessage is activated with the new prepaid sim card number, then pray that the important messages go through via SMS to your spare phone (you do have a spare phone for overseas travel don’t you?) instead.

Solution for Situations 2 and 3

The solution for Situation 2 is simply not to put in your sim card once you restored that phone unless you are planning to use it again. Either that or you secretly want Thomas to read all your messages.

The solution for Situation 3? File a bug report with Apple here. Or go to their forums and scream and shout there.

You could always try to get most of your iPhone owning friends to message you through your Apple ID instead and it will solve most of the “blackhole’d iMessages” problem, but clueless folks aren’t going to “SMS you on an email address”, so you will still get some iMessages sent to your phone number no matter what.

What is really causing all these problems? To answer that we have to first understand iMessage’s phone number registration/authentication process. When you first enter a new sim card, or set up your iPhone, there is a hidden SMS exchange to inform Apple’s iMessage servers that your iOS device is now registered to your phone number. This is probably also why when you enter the number of your friend who has an iOS 5 phone, iMessage’s servers will inform you that your friend is using iMessage by turning the color of your friend’s number from green to blue.

If you ever pop in a new sim card, you will need to toggle and reboot the phone in order to force a new phone number registration process as I have detailed earlier.

The problem with the registration process, however, is that when you removed the sim card, Apple’s servers aren’t notified by the same hidden SMS exchange. Well, there’s really no way to notify (by SMS anyway), since when you removed that sim card the iPhone has no way of sending a SMS.

This is why, should you ever remove the original sim card from your phone, say for example, if I removed the Singtel 9-number sim card from my iPhone 4S, and just leave the iPhone on wifi without inserting a new sim card, my iPhone will still receive iMessages sent to my Singtel 9-number despite the sim card not being in the iPhone.

Thus maybe one solution will be to have the iPhone scan for the presence of a sim card, and if it isn’t in the phone iMessage should then just default to using an Apple ID instead, but maybe that in itself will cause other problems.

The problem identified in Situation 3 could be explained if for some reason, some of Apple’s servers were holding on to a certain number-device association even after that certain device has now been activated with a new number, and maybe deletion of that original number-device association isn’t done cleanly across all of Apple’s servers. And this seems to be something Apple definitely has to fix on their end.(I seriously show my lack of knowledge on this part of the problem, argh)

Despite all these problems/flaws, iMessage certainly is crazily popular among the masses, for in every ten messages I receive, only one is green. Apple will have to improve their iMessage implementation though out iOS 5’s lifetime for sure, and hopefully by iOS 6 it will truly become flawless(okay now you know that’s bullshit right? No software and service is flawless. But whatever.)

You can follow MacRyu at @ryuworks on Twitter and @ryu on App.net.

How to insult your Android-using friends / relatives this Christmas / New Year / Chinese New Year

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So it’s the festive season again. If you are like me, this holiday is the perfect chance to tease, insult, those who have chosen, for whatever reason, to stand on Google’s side and use an Android.

Unlike some lesser countries it’s highly unlikely you will ever find yourself in a situation where the number of iPhone owners present is not at least 3 times the number of Android users present, unless there are only two of you or all your friends (I certainly hope not) are lifeless nerds.

Thus, almost always any public teasing of an Android user in the group will serve to both entertain the crowd, and possibly persuade those on the wrong side to start giving excuses like “Oh my 3GS dropped into the toilet bowl and I had to use this because it’s free”.

This list of fine insults will be constantly updated every time I think of something, but for now they will have to do. Don’t follow exactly, be flexible. Be smart about your insults. It always help to do them with a smile on your face. ^_^

Here goes.

General platform-based attacks, if you want to be lazy

“Wah… Your OS is so ugly. What kind of font is that? So messy…. This back button do what one? (Tap the touchscreen buttons carelessly so you will purposely miss activating the buttons a few times, then look frustrated) Wah….. So hard to use! Why like that one? The apps are so fugly… Even my ugliest iOS twitter app is nicer than all the twitter apps you have.”

Then, check if the Google Marketplace has been updated to the ICS-ish version. If it has, it’s bound to be laggy. Start doing some fast taps and swiping and once it starts lagging turn the phone around and show everyone else.

“Wah… Is this Google’s App Store? So confusing! How to navigate? Where to find my apps that have an update? (If your friend shows you how to access the updatable apps area, then on purpose tap the back button once or twice to get out of the area, then turn around to your friend and say) Eh gone? How to go back ah? Why so hard to go back one? How much did you pay for it again”

If they are using anything other than the Galaxy Nexus (which if you are in Singapore, most likely they won”t) then use the Gingerbread attack

“Wah… your phone’s software is so updated leh. Wasn’t Gingerbread ANNOUNCED in Oct 2010? (If your friend has a phone that’s only a few months old, like the Arc series or the Galaxy S2) My (his/her or anyone who has an old iPhone in the group) 3GS/iPhone 4 has a much newer OS than yours do. What kind of a new phone is that? How much did you pay for it again?”

Anytime they answer “Free”, you say this

“No wonder la. Cheap stuff crappy. Google OS is free so it’s crappy. Lousy stuff. Why you so cheapskate?”

If they answer “400+” or something expensive

“Why did you spend your money on something like this?”

And if it’s a samsung device or something that looks plasticky

“Cheap plastic all around… CMI design… It’s worth 400???”

Anytime you want to challenge camera capabilities, it’s almost obvious that the iPhone 4/4S will win. To make it more obvious, do the challenge at night. Then also try to invert the front and back cameras and then say this.

“Wah how to change to front camera? (After your friend shows you) Why so difficult one? Sad…”

Next, Battery life insults

No wonder what you think of your 4S’ battery life, just insist that the Android phone has pathetic battery life. Because it usually does. If the fellow tries to bullshit you just go with this.

“Eh… You lifeless ah? Might as well just get a dumb Nokia phone la. Why buy a smartphone?”

If they tries to argue that it’s their careful power management techniques that gives them decent battery life.

“Wah… see? You really lifeless. You have so much time to do silly things like turning off switches when you don’t need wifi”

Model specific insults

For large-screen phones (Anything above 4″, such as the Razr, the Galaxy S2, the Xperia Arc and Arc clones, except the Galaxy Nexus):

“Do you have swollen fingers? (smile, and ask like you are really puzzled) Is that why you can’t type properly on an iPhone and need such an oversized keyboard?”

or “Do you have terrible vision? (ask with a really serious face) Why do you need such a LOW res, large screen to see your SMSes on?”

Very obviously, if the phone has smaller than iPhone-size screens then laugh at the pathetic size. Or if it has broken rubber port covers then laugh at those too.

Always follow up on insults by touting some good features of iOS that Android users don’t have. My favorite is iMessage.

“iMessage is really fast and good. It’s like I’m SMSing and MMSing people but I don’t pay anything.”

You have to stop here, and DO NOT MENTION WHATSAPP, because this is a lure to make your Android silly friend mention WHATSAPP. Once he/she does, counterattack.

“Whatsapp? It’s so slow and pathetic! Sometimes always cannot connect one. Got server errors and downtimes. It’s really pathetic. The reason why I keep Whatsapp on my phone is for the benefit of the less fortunate people in society. People without access to iOS 5 are so unfortunate. Sometimes it helps to do some charity for these less fortunate people.”

I seem to remember having at least one more insult to type, but my brain is so dead now I guess all these will have to do for now.

Before I go though, some reminders.

Change to dialect, rephrase the insults, add new ideas. Do whatever you want to make the insult more effective.

Always remember that some people will just be better at insulting people than others. If you aren’t good at it, it’s best not to try. You might become a laughing stock once you failed to carry it through.

Why iOS 4.3 will bring Mobile Hotspot to the majority of iPhone owners before Android does to its minions

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So I posted a tweeted the other day declaring that the majority of current Android phone owners will never see their phones ever getting the Mobile Hotspot feature despite Android announcing the feature first in Froyo, Android 2.2, which was released in May 2010.

Why did I say that?

It’s very simple. The majority of Android handsets simply do not qualify for Froyo updates, usually because the carrier can’t be bothered or they just want to push sales of their newer handsets that come with Froyo installed, like the hundreds of new handsets slated for release in the next six months in a world when Gingerbread already exists.

Some guy replied to my tweet, stating,”I don’t think that applies to SG. I’ve been able to tether internet access from my HTC Desire for months now.”

Right.

And the majority of Android-using Singaporeans are using the presumably fugly HTC desire as their phone.

That is simply not true.

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On the whole iPad and iPhone losing their physical home buttons rumor….

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This whole rumor was probably triggered by the fact that iOS 4.3 beta 1 for iPad comes with multitouch gesture controls for changing applications (by swiping multiple fingers horizontally, like on the Mac for changing pages), returning to home screen (by the 5-finger pinch), etc. These gestures definitely will be familiar to current Mac users who already have similar multitouch gestures, and will no doubt will work on the big and nice 9.7-inch iPad screen.

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