Apple boss Steve Jobs has said that outside developers will now be allowed to make add-on software for the iPhone.

The move follows criticism that Apple was previously not allowing outsiders to make programs that would run easily on the popular mobile phone.

Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers' hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users. With our revolutionary multi-touch interface, powerful hardware and advanced software architecture, we believe we have created the best mobile platform ever for developers.

It will take until February to release an SDK because we're trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once—provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc. This is no easy task. Some claim that viruses and malware are not a problem on mobile phones—this is simply not true. There have been serious viruses on other mobile phones already, including some that silently spread from phone to phone over the cell network. As our phones become more powerful, these malicious programs will become more dangerous. And since the iPhone is the most advanced phone ever, it will be a highly visible target.

Some companies are already taking action. Nokia, for example, is not allowing any applications to be loaded onto some of their newest phones unless they have a digital signature that can be traced back to a known developer. While this makes such a phone less than "totally open," we believe it is a step in the right direction. We are working on an advanced system which will offer developers broad access to natively program the iPhone’s amazing software platform while at the same time protecting users from malicious programs.

First, I am sure that we are making the correct decision to lower the price of the 8GB iPhone from $599 to $399, and that now is the right time to do it. iPhone is a breakthrough product, and we have the chance to 'go for it' this holiday season. iPhone is so far ahead of the competition, and now it will be affordable by even more customers. It benefits both Apple and every iPhone user to get as many new customers as possible in the iPhone 'tent'. We strongly believe the $399 price will help us do just that this holiday season.

Second, being in technology for 30+ years I can attest to the fact that the technology road is bumpy. There is always change and improvement, and there is always someone who bought a product before a particular cutoff date and misses the new price or the new operating system or the new whatever. This is life in the technology lane. If you always wait for the next price cut or to buy the new improved model, you'll never buy any technology product because there is always something better and less expensive on the horizon. The good news is that if you buy products from companies that support them well, like Apple tries to do, you will receive years of useful and satisfying service from them even as newer models are introduced.

Third, even though we are making the right decision to lower the price of iPhone, and even though the technology road is bumpy, we need to do a better job taking care of our early iPhone customers as we aggressively go after new ones with a lower price. Our early customers trusted us, and we must live up to that trust with our actions in moments like these.

Therefore, we have decided to offer every iPhone customer who purchased an iPhone from either Apple or AT&T, and who is not receiving a rebate or any other consideration, a $100 store credit towards the purchase of any product at an Apple Retail Store or the Apple Online Store. Details are still being worked out and will be posted on Apple's website next week. Stay tuned.

Since the details are public, it seems likely that a small industry may spring up to buy U.S. iPhones, unlock them and send them overseas.

"That's exactly, like, what I don't want," Hotz said. "I don't want people making money off this."

He said he wished he could make the instructions simpler, so users could modify the phones themselves.

"But that's the simplest I could make them," Hotz said.

The modification leaves the iPhone's many functions, including a built-in camera and the ability to access Wi-Fi networks, intact.

Google Video went through many revisions before taking the state it has today - a video search engine - at one point offering TV screen caps, at another trying to match YouTube feature for feature, and now fading away as a destination now that YouTube is owned by Google. Interestingly, the ability to make purchases through Google Video actually preceded the company's launch of its payment service, Google Checkout.

I've been tracking the Google Video RSS feed of items for sale since about the time we started NewTeeVee, and literally the only thing that comes across is episodes of the Charlie Rose Show. I don't think the payment option was a very heavily used (or promoted) service.

On the other hand, it's not like iTunes is stepping up to help independent video producers sell their wares, so it's somewhat disappointing to see this go away.

Opening weekend sales of iPhones may have reached 500,000, according to an analyst's estimate, as Apple's much anticipated product saw sales that lived up to and even exceeded its hype.

Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster released a report Sunday night estimating that the iPhone sales would reach that mark through the close of business Sunday. He had previously forecast first weekend sales of 200,000 of the device, which sells for either $499 or $599.

"Overall, Apple met strong demand over the weekend with adequate supply," he wrote in the report. "We were surprised by the rate at which Apple was able to sell the handsets, with 50 cashiers processing up to 1,000 iPhones an hour in some stores."

Apple was not immediately available to comment on that estimate early Monday. It has set a goal of selling 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008, and analysts are generally looking for it to sell about 3 million units this year. The phones went on sale at 6 p.m. Friday, with long lines outside many Apple Stores.

By 7:30 p.m., dozens iPhones were listed for resale in the Washington area on Craigslist.org, listed at about $900 to about $1,200.

Analysts and skeptics warned of the new phone's potential downsides. AT&T's network, the sole carrier for the iPhone, operates at a slower speed than some of its rivals, prompting some criticism. And industry analysts said even the hallowed iPhone may need some time to work out the kinks.

"No one waited in line to get an iPod, and it got mediocre reviews," said Chris Null, a consumer advisor for Yahoo! Tech. "It didn't consume the market until the second or third version, once the issues had been worked out."

But Apple's carefully orchestrated marketing and its tightly controlled media strategy helped heap fuel on consumer and media fascination.

When Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the first iPod on Oct. 23, 2001, he said: "With iPod, listening to music will never be the same again."

Indeed, the iPod and Apple's iTunes music store have transformed the music business, sparking a new way for users to legally download music - and spurring a stunning rise in Apple stock.

Apple (up $0.43 to $79.42, Charts) shares, which traded around $9 five years ago, have risen nearly nine-fold since then.

iPod sales are still growing - shipments rose to 8.73 million in the latest quarter, up 35 percent from a year earlier- even though there's some serious competition out there now for the world's most popular digital music player.

Jobs described the forthcoming $299 set-top box as "completing the package" of Apple's multimedia offerings. Users can download music, TV programs, and now movies from the iTunes Store. They can watch those multimedia files on both their Macs and iPods. However, there's no easy way of watching such programming on their television sets-Jobs sees iTV as the key piece of that puzzle.

Resembling a squat Mac Mini, the iTV will use wireless networking to stream movies and TV shows from iTunes to a television. The power supply is built right in to the unit; it also features USB 2.0, Ethernet, High Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) plug, component video, analog audio and optical audio interfaces.

In demonstrating iTV to the press at a Tuesday event in San Francisco, Jobs scrolled through menus for movies, TV shows, photos, and podcasts using an Apple remote. Floating artwork—movie posters for the Movie menu or album art for Music, for example—appears on the left-hand side of the screen while a list of titles appears on the right.

Because iTV connects wireless to the Internet, it can also show movie trailers from Apple's Web site.

The 8-bit system came with 4KB of memory, expandable to 48KB. It used a cassette rather than a disk for storage. It cost $1200, about twice the base price of its two biggest competitors, the Tandy TRS-80 Model I and the Commodore PET 2001. It couldn't even display lowercase letters (in the first several years of its existence, anyway). Yet it packed more pure innovation than any other early computer, and was the first PC that deserved to be called a consumer electronics device.

Born out of the Home Brew Computer Club by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs's tiny Apple Computer in 1977, the Apple II was the company's second PC, but it boasted more than its share of firsts: It was the first color PC (you could even use it with a television), the first to be easily expandable by users, and the first to run the VisiCalc spreadsheet--proving that these new boxes had a place in business.

Perhaps its greatest innovation was its design. Jobs wanted the machine to look at home on people's desktops, so he insisted that the Apple II have a sleek look, as opposed to the sheet-metal-and-exposed-wire appearance of most other early PCs. The machine's coolness factor--an Apple trademark to this day--was as important to its long-term success as Wozniak's inventive engineering was.

Apple is said to have wanted to develop its cell phone from the ground up and not merely redesign or re-brand an existing phone with a different interface. In the process of doing so, however, sources say the company has run into problems making the various cell phone components work together. Issues also have cropped up with the chip Apple was using that receives the cellular signal.

Timelines had originally called for a possible third-quarter release of an Apple cell phone, but these issues have delayed any roll-out indefinitely. Those waiting for an Apple phone, rumored for a number of years, may find themselves waiting into at least 2007.

QUESTION: Is Microsoft going to develop a handheld like MP3 player to combat iPod, Apple's dominance of the last year?

BILL GATES: Yeah, Apple has done a fantastic job with the iPod. How many of you have iPods? OK, some.

Well, we are talking with partners about how we working with those partners can make even better music players. We've got some in the market today. I'd say in total they may have about 20 percent market share, which is lower than we like and so we're seeing where we could come together to make a device that's less expensive and connects in better ways, does photos and videos in better ways.

And so I don't think what's out in the market today is the final answer, but again it just shows the magic of software; Apple did a very good job on iTunes, did the user interface design right, and so that means we'll have to match all that good work and do something even better.

So between us and our partners, you can expect to see some pretty hot products coming out over the next couple of years.

Bear Stearns maintained an "outperform" rating on Google and said the Internet search giant may be looking to expand into the MP3 downloading business.

"We believe that Google is in the midst of creating its own iTunes competitor, which we've dubbed 'Google Tunes'," the analyst wrote in a client note issued today. "We think this is a logical step, now that the nascent Google Video product has been introduced."

Analyst Robert Peck speculated that it makes sense for Google to create a rival for the popular iTunes service by Apple Computer, given the explosive growth of unique visitors to the iTunes' Web site.

More than 300 episodes from about a dozen prime time, cable, late-night and classic TV shows are now available for $1.99 apiece, viewable on computers or downloadable on the latest, video-capable iPod.

The programming spans from the 1950s to the present, including shows from "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," "Dragnet," USA Network's "Monk," the Sci-Fi Channel's "Battlestar Galactica," and NBC's hit series "Law & Order." Sketches from "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" and "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" are also for sale.

Apple unleashed a dramatically different way of distributing television programs when it debuted videos for sale on its iTunes Music Store on Oct. 20 with Walt Disney Co.'s ABC as its first network partner. Customers have since downloaded more than three million videos.

I think this is by far the most exciting announcement since I started! Today, we announced that TiVo intends to support iPod and Sony PSP as new portables in our service update first quarter of next year. This means that you will be able to use the TiVoToGo feature to transfer shows from your TiVo box to a PC connected to your home network. Then you can choose to have the transferred shows prepared for synch to your iPod automatically once the transfer is complete.

I don't currently have the new video iPod—they came out with it one week after I bought my first iPod—the Nano. Which. I. Love. But I might just have to run out and buy the new one so it can cross-pollinate with my TiVo box!

And actually, I think podcasting or whatever it morphs into over the next two or three years is here to stay and will remain popular. What was interesting about podcasting was that, while everyone was waiting for digital video for so many years, kind of like waiting for Godot, podcasting arrived. And it tapped this latent demand for being able to hear what you wanted when you wanted it. It unleased all these indie voices and encouraged the traditional media companies to let their content go mobile.

Like the record labels, television stations are now lamenting the iPod, and are worried about lost revenues, reports the Wall Street Journal. Shouldn't they be worrying about lost audiences, thanks to bad programing, instead of blaming the technology. I agree with Mark Cuban when he says, "Bob Iger has saved Network TV ... By completely changing the economic model." This is the new economic model that takes into account that most consumption patterns are changing, and media like everything has to fit our supremely busy lives.

Hi-tech, trendy colours, rock music, punchy slogans... remind anyone of anything? When technology watcher John Ousby realised the modern day parallels, he knew he had to do something. Ousby told the BBC that thousands of people looked at his Flickr post.

"I did a bit of digging around," he says, "and found a good website on vintage electronics. I then matched photos of the transistor with photos of the iPod Mini."

He then posted the above picture on the photo-sharing website Flickr. "Normally my photos there are viewed less than 100 times. But I was away for couple of days and came back to see there had been more than 15,000," he says.

The similarity between the two has "created quite a stir", he says, particularly in the Mac community. He is, however, at pains to point out that he believes the similarity between the 50s radio and the iPod mini is purely coincidental.

Using a voice recorder attachment, you can record your thoughts on your iPod, dump it to your computer, publish it to your web site in such a way that people can download your musings to their iTunes Library, sync that with their iPod, and listen to you babble about something on their way to work. It's called podcasting and hopefully it'll get much easier than that.

a new "show video full screen" button that lets you easily watch full-screen movies that have been organized in your iTunes Library, as well as options to view movies in a separate smaller window, or within the main iTunes pane.

They were totally hush hush about this update, so it's got to mean all the pieces of the puzzle aren't quite together yet. Apple quietly rolled out iTunes version 4.8, which includes playback support for QuickTime video content. So what does it all mean? Video iPod? iTunes Movie Store? Just plain tease? What do you think?

Overall, Tiger is the best and most advanced personal computer operating system on the market, despite a few drawbacks. It leaves Windows XP in the dust. It also adds to the Mac's general superiority over typical Windows computers as the best choice for average consumers doing the most common computing tasks.