There has been mixed reaction to Apple's announcement of a speedier new iPhone and moves to cut the price of the year old 3G model in the US.

News of the updated iPhone 3GS handset was made at the company's annual developers conference in San Francisco.

Apple said improvements in the iPhone 3GS made common tasks, such as launching applications, much faster.

But veteran tech journalist Steven Levy of Wired Magazine said: "It's not a game changer."

Rumours of an update to the iPhone have been circulating prior to the start of Apple's World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC).

When it was finally unveiled more than an hour and a half into the keynote speech, few were surprised.

"We have been trained to think that when one more thing comes out it is going to rock our world and that didn't happen," said Mr Levy.

Ernest Doku of comparison site Omio was more effusive.

Is it earth shattering compared to what was there before? No. Van Baker, Gartner analyst

"Majorly cool has just become mass market," he said "Essentially the 3GS is a refinement of the existing device so not all worlds will be rocked but as usual with Apple there are some big reasons to be excited.

"Features like data encryption, improved data speeds and increased battery life will attract users. With faster web browsing and the ability to record and upload video to YouTube, the 3GS will get more people using their mobiles to go online than ever before.

"It's the must have multi-media device," said Mr Doku.

The .htaccess files (Hypertext Access file) is a very powerful configuration tool on Apache web server. The Apache web server has a number of configuration options that are available to the server administrator. The .htaccess is a simple ASCII text file placed in your website root directory. You can create and edit an .htaccess file using a text editor like notepad.

The C901 Green Heart model features an electronic in-phone manual to replace the standard paper version, saving more than 90 per cent in paper, while the phone casing is made from a minimum of 50 per cent recycled plastics.

It also has an optimised display light sensor that uses less energy, and is covered with a waterborne paint that lowers exposure to volatile organic compounds.

The phone will also include the Walk Mate application, which will let users compare the steps they take to the equivalent journey by car.

The Naite model will feature many of the same innovations as the Green Heart, and will also come to market with the EP300 Green Heart low-power charger.

It will feature a carbon footprint calculator to show how much CO2 a user is saving by walking instead of travelling by car.

Here are some tips for using a MacBook or MacBook Pro with an external monitor. They range from the painfully obvious (for brand new Mac users) to one I actually just learned yesterday.

1. When you connect an external monitor to your MacBook (or PowerBook, for that matter), you can combine your MacBook's LCD and your external monitor to create one big monitor. That means when your mouse pointer goes off the edge of one, it will appear on the other. Open the Displays Preference Pane to configure the resolution and orientation of the two monitors. This type of configuration works well when you want to keep your main work on your larger external display, but still keep things like IM, iTunes, and email constantly visible on the smaller laptop LCD.
2. Some windows act like they don't want to be dragged on to your external monitor. If a windows is being stubborn, try dragging it up to the menu bar, and keep dragging, even if stays stuck below the menu bar. Sometimes once you have dragged it far enough that it has room to render the entire window, it will jump to the other monitor (Terminal used to have this problem, but Apple fixed it some time ago). If that doesn't work, try dragging it from a corner of your monitor. My Adium contact list doesn't seem to want to live on my external monitor, but I can coerce it up there by dragging up from either corner.
3. When your laptop is open, you can't switch to using the full resolution of an external monitor. I have no idea why, but it's a fact of life for MacBook users. You can use both displays in "extended" mode, or you can mirror your MacBook's display (which most likely doesn't use the full resolution of your external monitor), but you can't switch to using only the external monitor. Very strange.
4. If you close your laptop, you can actually get the full resolution of your external display. Put your MacBook to sleep, connect your external display and an external monitor, and wake the computer up by pressing any key. You will have full use of your external display while your laptop is closed.
5. If you really want to have your MacBook open while only using an external display, after following the procedure above, you can open your MacBook, and it's screen will remain off, which means you can still use the MacBook's keyboard and trackpad. Why you can't get into this mode using F7, I have no idea. This is a good technique for allowing some heat to dissipate while still using an external display so the lid of your MacBook doesn't melt or warp.
6. You can boot your computer using just an external display. Just connect your external display, open the lid, hit the power button, and close the lid again immediately.
7. In order to output only to an external monitor, you have to have the power cable connected. I tried for several minutes yesterday to get my MacBook to wake up with an external keyboard and monitor before unpacking my AC adapter from my backpack, and it wouldn't work. It took me a while to make the connection (no pun intended), but I eventually discovered that with the power cable attached, everything works as expected.
   

Palm needs the Pre to be a success

Palm's make or break new smartphone, called the Pre, has had good reviews ahead of its US launch on 6 June.

The company, which hired many ex-Apple employees to build the device, needs the Pre to be a success in order to turn its fortunes around.

Once a giant of the smartphone sector, Palm has struggled in recent years to match Apple, Nokia and Blackberry.

Many reviews have said the phone is the first serious challenger to the iPhone in terms of design and usability.

We haven't seen so much buzz over a phone since the iPhone, but for the past six months, all eyes have been on the Palm Pre.

Despite some missing features and performance issues that make it less than ideal for on-the-go professionals, the Palm Pre offers gadget lovers and consumers well-integrated features and unparalleled multitasking capabilities.

The phone has been designed to make organising your life simpler

If the Palm Pre had appeared a year ago, it might have turned the smartphone market upside down. It would have beaten out Apple's iPhone 3G and the iTunes App Store, Google's Android, the BlackBerry Bold and Storm as well as BlackBerry App World, and possibly taken the spoils.

It is easy to forget that when the iPhone launched, it also had software and hardware issues. The difference is that Apple was effectively pioneering a new market, so it had plenty of time to get the formula right. Palm, a struggling company going up against surprisingly strong competition, faces a vastly more difficult challenge.

I am pulling for the Pre, but I wouldn't want to bet my iPhone on its success.

I've been testing the Pre for a couple of weeks, and I like it a lot, despite some important drawbacks that will have to be remedied.

I consider the Pre to be potentially the strongest rival to the iPhone to date, provided it attracts lots of third-party apps, which it sorely lacks at launch.

Whether the Pre is better than the iPhone depends on your personal preferences, though I'd note that the new iPhone to be unveiled next week will have lots of added features that could alter those calculations.

The Pre, which goes on sale Saturday, is an elegant, joyous, multitouch smartphone; it's the iPhone remixed.

The Pre's all-new operating system, called Web OS, is attractive, fluid and exciting. It borrows plenty from the iPhone — pinch or spread two fingers on the screen to zoom in or out, for example, or flick a list item sideways to delete it — but has its own personality.

The Pre will be a hit, but the iPhone isn't going away. First of all, Apple's lead of 20 million phones will only grow when the new iPhone 3.0 software (and, presumably, a third iPhone model) come out shortly.

Windows 7, the next major release of the world's most popular operating system, will be officially available to the public on 22 October.

Microsoft is hoping it can avoid the negative press that surrounded the launch of Vista, the last major Windows release, almost three years ago.

Windows 7 has been designed to be compatible with Vista so users do not have to invest in new hardware.

Customers who buy a new PC with Vista will be offered upgrades to Windows 7.

Microsoft's new Bing search (or rather, decision) engine is still in beta, but that doesn't mean that the Redmond company can't begin to advertise it. To show that they mean business, they have already released the first ever commercial for the new service, in the form of a video, as one would expect.

Bing is Microsoft's overhauled Live Search, now with a range of new features that warrants it the description 'decision engine', as opposed to the regular 'search engine'. You can easily search videos, websites and filter them to show reviews or other links. You can also use it to compare things such as flight information, maps or different shopping websites.

The ad is a collection of different clips, with a voice-over narrating it, and with flashing text to help display the message, concluding by telling the watcher to Bing and decide. Bing was initially officially unveiled on May 28, and it aimed at helping consumers make better decisions. It is currently being rolled out internationally, and will be fully available on June 3.

Japanese business daily The Nikkei is reporting that platform holder Nintendo will reveal a new version of its world-conquering Wii Fit game at its E3 press conference tomorrow.

Reuters says that it will be entitled Wii Fit Plus, and that its leading USP will be the ability to share game information with friends and family over the internet using Nintendo’s Wi-fi Connect 24 network.

MCV would also suggest that the name could well mean that Wii Fit Plus will make use of Nintendo’s soon to be released Wii Motion plus controller add-on, that drastically improves the sensitivity of the WiiMote.

In addition, Nikkei also claims that a brand new Mario title will see the light of day, too. Fans will be hoping for something along the lines of Super Mario World 3 or Super Mario Galaxy 2 – though perhaps it’s more realistic to expect some sort of racing or sports affair, instead.