Apple has released their MobileMe Gallery application to the App Store. The app allows you to view MobileMe gallery photos and videos on your iPhone or iPod touch.

From the application description:

• View your entire gallery including password protected and hidden albums
• Flick through photos and pinch to zoom in for more detail
• Rotate iPhone to see photos in landscape
• View your friends’ gallery photos and movies
• Access previously viewed photos when offline
• Easily share a link to an album from iPhone

I haven’t tried the application, as I don’t actually use MobileMe galleries. But, the application looks beautifully designed and, from what I’ve read online, it works really well.

MobileMe Gallery – Free

Donald Bell reporting for CNET:

Come Spring, the Zune HD should receive a firmware update providing support for MPEG-4 part 2 Advanced Simple Profile videos, including the torrent junkie’s format of choice, XviD. When pressed on whether DivX support would also be added, our contact explained it was unlikely, because of proprietary restrictions. Also unclear is what range of resolutions will be supported, although we did confirm that the new format support will maintain compatibility with the HD AV dock accessory.

The Loop reports that Apple has sent out invites to the media for an event to be held at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco on January 27.

There have been several rumors that have cropped up since the last time I wrote about the tablet. Jeffrey Trachtenberg has heard that HarperCollins Publishers has been negotiating with Apple, TG Daily has heard that Apple has bought up all available supply of 10.1-inch multi-touch LCD and OLED displays, and John Gruber has heard that the tablet won’t have a webcam.

All the rumors are interesting but I’m more interested in the number of writers speculating about what the tablet will and won’t do (Tim Van Damme did some speculating and also linked to many of the more interesting tablet speculators). Just like with the build up to the iPhone, we all just assume that this thing exists. I’m not doubting it’s existence, I just find it fascinating that almost no one is questioning it anymore.

Clayton Morris writing for FOXNews.com has went to the trouble of “confirming” that the tablet will be announced at the January 27 event.

Apple just announced an event on January 27th that will no doubt dazzle us with what the company is calling its “latest creation.” At the event, Apple will unveil the company’s long-rumored tablet device.

Honestly, does anybody really care about this confirmation? Like I said, everybody has just assumed for months that it was coming sometime in the first quarter of this year.

All of this build up has made me wonder why we’re so interested in the tablet at all. Whenever I ask anyone why they want a tablet, they don’t really have a good answer for me. Apple wouldn’t release a product without finding an answer to that question. But, John Gruber said it best:

“I’d use it on the couch and lying in bed” is not a good answer. You can already use your iPhone or MacBook on the couch and in bed.

If no one has a good reason for why they’d buy a tablet then why are we so intrigued by the idea of Apple building one?

I don’t think that anyone wants a tablet just because Apple wouldn’t release it without having a reason to include it in their product line. I think the real answer is more about our hope for a new way of interacting with our computers. I believe we’ve all grown tired of the same old user interfaces. No one wants to deal with files and folders anymore.

Put more simply, people are interested in the tablet because it is literally a clean slate (pardon the pun). The tablet isn’t about the hardware, it’s about the software — a new way of computing — done right this time (not like Microsoft’s tablet initiatives).

After countless rumors about the display, the technical specs, whether or not it will have a webcam, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is the software — how we will interact with the device in new ways. The only absolutes with the tablet is that it will have Safari and a video player, beyond that it’s just pure speculation. It’s almost as if we’re all trying to come up with brilliant ideas before Apple manages to ship the product.

I’m not going to say that the tablet undoubtedly be announced on January 27, specifically (because who knows, maybe it’ll be like the iPod touch’s camera) and I’m not going to write several hundred words about what I think the tablet will be, others have done that.

I just want to remind you that the tablet will ship at some point, and when it does we’ll all be thinking the same thing: “I can’t imagine it working any other way.”

Image credit to Andy Ihnatko.

Om Malik:

What Motorola needs to do is take a page from the Apple/RIM playbook and get vertically integrated.

And in order to do that, the company should buy Palm. As I’ve already noted, Palm has a great OS. It actually has a couple of other things going for it as well, including Jon Rubenstein and the team he’s assembled, many of whom are former Apple folks. The Palm team should do the software and Motorola’s engineers, the hardware. And when it comes to the hardware, again, it should be adopting Apple’s design and development principles, which Rubenstein must know pretty well.

I agree with Om. Handset manufacturers need to realize that they can’t just be another company building another Windows Mobile or Android device. HTC can do that only because they have clearly become both Google and Microsoft’s favorite hardware partner. But Motorola, with their flagship handset launching just 2 months before Google and HTC announce the Nexus One, needs to take a different approach.

Motorola should buy Palm because Motorola needs something that will help them stand out in the crowd, webOS would do just that.

From the video description on Uncrate:

Just when you thought you were all ready to plunk down your holiday gift cards toward a new iPhone, Google comes out of a left field with a scrappy alternative.

This is the best hands-on video I’ve ever seen.

Kasper Jade writing for AppleInsider:

People familiar with Apple’s initiative claim the electronics maker is seeking allotments of LED camera flash components in the tens of millions for delivery during the 2010 calendar year, meaning future iPhones — and possibly the iPod touch — are the most likely recipients of those parts, due to their sales volume.

Poor camera quality is something that the iPhone has been criticized for in the past. The 3.2MP camera with auto-focus in the current iPhone 3GS was a huge leap in the right direction. But, anyone who has tried to take a picture with their iPhone in low light knows an LED flash would be a big deal.

AppleInsider isn’t the only one talking about the next iPhone. Bloomberg reports Goldman Sachs analyst Robert Chen who said the following in an interview:

Apple’s going to put a lot of innovation, not just on the hardware, but also on the software of the new iPhone.

Chen mentions an improved camera and a touch-sensitive casing as some of the new features. He compared the touch-sensitive casing to that of the Magic Mouse’s.

I can’t really imagine what the new case would be used for and it seems a little too far fetched to me. But then again, if you told me two years ago that Apple was going to release a one-button mouse without a scroll ball, I would have thought you were crazy.

These entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours.

Google Nexus One, originally published Jan 6, 2010
Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus Coming to Verizon, originally published Jan 13, 2010

I regularly update previously published entries. This entry is a way of letting RSS feed and homepage readers know about the new information. You can find past updates here.

Spring Design has partnered with Borders to sell their Alex e-book reader. Borders will be selling the device in their retail stores  and will create a digital book store and some “mobile eBook applications.” Spring Design has also announced that the device will cost $359 when it is released on February 22, 2010.

So, Spring Design sues Barnes & and Noble for stealing their design and then partners with their biggest competitor for the Alex. Wise decision.

I couldn’t find the press release on Spring Design’s website but Engadget is hosting it on theirs.

Previously:
10/23/09: Spring Design Announces ‘Alex’

At CES Palm announced the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus, both of which will be coming exclusively to Verizon on January 25.

The Pre Plus has twice the internal RAM and storage and comes with the inductive charging back cover by default. The Pixi Plus now has Wi-Fi and has more colors for the back covers, which are all capable of inductive charging. Both devices have lost their navigation buttons on the front.

Both the Pixi Plus and the Pre Plus will come with a mobile hotspot app that lets users turn their device into a Wi-Fi hotspot that uses Verizon’s 3G network.

Ars Technica has a great rundown of Palm’s other announcements at CES, including their native plug-in development kit and that they are opening up their developer program to everyone.

As a side note: AT&T announced that they will be launching two webOS based devices this year. They haven’t announced what devices they’ll be getting but it will certainly be some variant of the Pre and Pixi.

Previously:
12/20/09: Palm’s CES Announcement
10/18/09: Verizon to Get Palm Pre ‘Early Next Year’
5/27/09: AT&T to get WebOS and Android Based Devices This Year

Update 1/15/10: A Phone Arena “tipster” has told them that the Pre Plus will cost $149.99 after a $100 mail-in rebate and the Pixi Plus will cost $99.99 after mail in rebate. This is clearly a rumor — this tipster could have pulled that number out of thin air – but it isn’t too far off from what one would expect a device like this to cost.

Alex Brooks wrote a fantastic piece on World of Apple entitled “You’ve All Gone Lala.” The piece was about the shoddy reporting by various online publications who connected the appearance of 30-second song previews in Apple’s web based iTunes.

the apparent appearance of song previews in iTunes Preview and the existence of Lala in Apple’s back pocket means that apparently the two are related.

Here’s why that is complete misinformation:

• Apple has had 30-second previews in the iTunes Store since its inception. As of iTunes 9 the iTunes Store has been built in HTML and rendered using Webkit, the same rendering engine which Safari uses. Surely wouldn’t be difficult to use the same technology for previews on both platforms.
• Lala’s streaming license has been said in the past to be non-transferrable, not a clear cut reason I’ll admit.
• Apple has been making song previews available via iTunes Store RSS feeds for years.

Alex goes on to  list many of those who falsely connected Lala with the 30-second previews.

I let this story pass by because I didn’t believe Apple needed to own Lala in order to add 30-second previews to their web based iTunes preview pages. But, I basically didn’t report on it because I didn’t think it was significant, whether Apple owned Lala or not, this was a logical step forward and therefore would have happened.

I guess I’m just amazed that nearly all of the big technology news sites reported on it, and did a poor job at that.