Yes yes we know this is a Mac site but we couldn’t resist the temptation.  Here is some unboxing photos of the new Nexus One phone from Google.

As you can see the phone comes in a box that is packed similarly to the iphone’s box with the exception of a case with the android logo on it.

The screen is highly reflective in this photo but it is of a good size.

Here you see three phones of the same size.  The Nokia E72, the Nexus One, and the HTC Hero also running android.  The iPhone 3Gs is the one taking the photos

The back side of the Nexus one without the battery and showing where the sim card slot is and the 4gb Micro SD card slot it.

Finally we take a look at whats in the box.  As you can see the charger, the battery, USB cable and the Headset.

Performance:

This thing is fast.  It took a while to start up but the it was very snappy after that.  Switching between application is also fast.  Setup was very easy.  After configuring Zain internet settings, we supplied a gmail account.  Our contacts from Google contacts were downloaded, as well as the emails, calendars, and even Google talk was setup and ready.  The touch screen is responsive which is the on par with iphone’s touch screen.  The voice controls are very good and the wealth of applications is excellent.  We were even able to configure Google Voice and receive SMS and calls on that number.  Overall we like this phone.

Got our hands on Apple’s latest “Magic Mouse” , The touch sensitive mouse that does almost everything simply by stroking it “literally”,after having it for a little over a week, lets see if it performs and does what apple says it would.

When I first took it out of its glass shell, it feels like something from outer-space , elegantly designed and feels smooth to the touch with some of that apple heft, this mouse is the best mouse I’ve ever held in my hands ever since I started using computers ages ago, but I was wondering if it would perform as good as it looks and feels.

After you pair the mouse with your computer (using “Set up bluetooth device”) , unless you don’t have snow leopard installed on your computer, it would require you to download and install an update (For leopard or Snow Leopard) or from “Software Update”, which will enable all of the Magic mouse touch features, and lets you scroll up, down, right & left click, moving forward and back on webpages, click and rotate photos and more…, the whole shell clicks which is apples way of clicking on a mouse, no other buttons on the mouse except the power ON/OFF  switch that lies on the bottom surface of the mouse.

Pros:

- Gorgeously looking and great design.

– Feels great in the hand (though it might feel strange at first).

– Makes navigating web pages easier and faster.

– doesn’t consume alot of battery power.

Cons:

- Takes time to get used to.

– Not for the average user (Some “None Mac” users might find it useless (since they got used to having buttons and scroll wheels) )

– Small size “not comfortable for larger hands”

Overall:

I find the “Magic Mouse” to be very useful, it really made my navigation faster and easier , though I miss having the “Squeeze ” feature of the old “Mighty mouse” that enables expose and dashboard , but if you are willing to compromise that for having a sleek looking touch mouse you can live with using keyboard short cuts instead, all in all the Magic Mouse is a great effort from apple, though I thing that apple can bring more potential out of it with future firmware upgrades.

Our forum member aljawad has given us an exclusive look inside the largest Apple store in north america ( Boylston St. store in Boston) , check out his full review of the store in our forum section Here.

( Photo courtesy of our forum member “aljawad” )

We left off part 1 with a running system. Complete parts were assembled and a guest OS, either Windows or Linux, was installed to test the system components and make sure everything was running. Now on to OS X.

The ex58 chip set is not supported under Leopard 10.5.0 and our installation DVD is 10.5.0 so we can not just install leopard as we did previously with our EP45 build. Here we need a different route. First let us gather our parts.

Steps:

First we connect the hard drive we want to install leopard on to our working Mac system. You can accomplish this by directly connect to any available SATA port or to the USB to eSATA dongle to your laptop. Open up disk utility from Applications/Utilities and select the disk you have connected. Then Click on the Partition tap and select your desired partition scheme. For our drive we selected 1 Partition.

Put a name for it and make sure it says Mac OS Extended (Journaled) in the format drop down menu.
Now click on options and button and make sure that the GUID partition option is selected and then click OK. Click Apply and Disk Utility will start format the drive according to our selections.

Now we need to install Leopard on our fresh new drive. We start by inserting our Leopard DVD into our working Mac laptop or desktop and it should pop up a windows with an icon that says Install OS X. Fire up terminal from Applications/Utilities and type the following: Note that each line is separate.

cd /Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ Install\ DVD/
cd System/Installation/Packages/
open .


A finder windows will pop up with lots of packages to choose from.
We need only one, the OSInstall.mpkg. Double click on that file and it will start the Mac OS X Installer. We go through the option we want and when you get to the destination part we simply select the hard drive we prepared earlier. About 20 minutes later we have Leopard 10.5.0 installed on our fresh drive. Now we find the Combo updater we downloaded and double click on the dmg file, and run the installer but also making sure to select our fresh drive as our destination.

Final steps:
After the OSX installer and the combo updater we now have 10.5.7 or 10.5.8 depending on your selection installed and ready to boot. If you remember correctly, our build used eVGA Nvidia GeForce GTX275 and so we need to install the correct drivers for it. Navigate you browser to the Nvidia’s site to download these drivers or to eVGA’s site. We used these ones here from eVGA. Double click to mount the dmg and install the drivers.

Now we shutdown the mac and remove the hard drive and install it in our build machine. We also plug the EFIX(tm) Module in the first USB header. Booted up the machine and went into bios to set the EFIX(tm) to boot first and we have a working Mac.

Problems:
The X58 chipset and the core i7 for some reason run the clock fast when booting with EFIX(tm) version 1 but not with version 1.1. So if it is 9:00 pm in about 2 minutes real time it would be 9:04 and not 9:02 so time is twice as fast. This messes up a lot of programs like Growl and QuickTime.

In Part 3 we get rid of EFIX(tm).

I promised you guys a writeup on an EFI-X(tm) chip build sometime ago and here it is. If you don’t know what EFI-X(tm) you need to check their site out and read up. Basically it is a chip that enables PCs, yes, PCs to boot our favorite OS. What this chip does is act as a layer between the computer and the OS to allow the OS to communicate with the computer. If you remember sometime ago we did a similar build in which we followed the recommended hardware list and it worked out of the box. What makes this new build special is that we are using hardware that is not yet approved and a new processor, the core i7 from intel.

Here are the specs:

We first assembled the Gigabyte Motherboard into the case. Some careful consideration should be taken with the Extreme board from Gigabyte because they come with Huge Heat Sink that fits into a slot of its own and cools the chipset of the motherboard. Make sure you dummy fit all the cards you want as to see how or in what order you might need to install these. After securing the CPU bracket for the Zalman Cooler from under the motherboard, we proceeded to installing the motherboard into the case. We then screwed everything in, and fitted the OCZ Ram modules before installing the CPU. We then installed the CPU and applied a bit of thermal grease that came with the Zalman Cooler, Arctic Silver, just enough to cover the CPU and create a really thin layer on top of it. We did the same thing for the heat spreader of the motherboard chipset. Installed the Zalman Cooler and then the heat spreader onto the motherboard and making sure everything is fastened snugly. We then installed the Graphics card. Here you can see how huge the card is. The 200 series from nvidia are pretty wild in size. After we fitted everything in and make sure all your wires are connected correctly, we fired up the computer and made sure BIOS and other setting are all correct and working. To make sure that the components for our build are in good working order, we installed windows and loaded all the drivers. Below you will find a gallery of all the images we took. In Part 2 we will look at how to install OS X on this beast!

Hello everyone. Lets get started.
First off I went and scorched Hawalli for the parts that we needed to get this baby running. The list of compatible hardware on the EFIX website is pretty limited when it comes to motherboards. For the sake of easiness and to avoid problems we went ahead and purchased items that were on the list. The motherboard is a Gigabyte EP-45-EXTREME. Although this is an excellent motherboard it is also very expensive. We also purchased a Core 2 Quad CPU from intel. SATA hard drive and DVD drive, 4 GB of DDR2 800 Kingston memory, GeForce 7600GT Video card and a case.

Motherboard: 130KD
Memory: 11KD per 2GB = 22KD
Processor: 99KD
Graphics Card: 30KD
Hard Drive 500GB: 20KD
DVD: 10KD
Case: 15KD
Power Supply: 35KD

We went a head an put everything together at about 2:00 AM when all of a sudden the motherboard refused to boot. Naturally, being Mac people, we thought that we did something wrong.


Scorching the motherboard’s manual we noticed that we needed a bigger power supply and hence the added power supply cost. Next day, everything booted find. We started the machine up. Made sure all the setting are correct and rebooted with the EFIX USB module attached. Low and behold here it was showing one hard drive with Caution sign on it and DVD icon. We loaded an Original Copy of leopard and pressed enter. 5 seconds later we were greeted with Leopard installation screen. Click on disk utility from the menu bar, partitioned the drive, and clicked installed. 20 minutes later, it rebooted and went right into Leopard with the Welcome Screen.

Problems:
With the installation going without a hitch, we proceeded to upgrade Leopard to the latest version. Naturally we used Software Update and let the system do its thing. After 3 hours of downloading, the system asked to be shut down to start the installation of the updates. Suddenly it got stuck at configuring installation forever. This happened to all the updates downloaded using software update. So we decided to download the old fashion say with a download manager. All the updates installed fine when downloaded using a download manager. The system also refused to shutdown or restart cleanly. It would get stuck with a spinning dial and you have to press the reset or power button manually. The solution to this was simple. We turned off the put the hard drive to sleep option in the System Preferences Energy settings.

Overall Feel:
The computer is fast running Leopard. Programs are snappy to start and manipulating images is a breeze. Writing a 500MB mp3 CD to the DVD-CD drive took only 2 minutes. The screen sleeps and wakes up normally as well as the computer. As you can see from the previous post, EFIX doesn’t detect the Quad Core CPU string but it does do so with dual core CPUs. Writing and reading to the USB drives is not as fast as the Macbook Pro but it works fine. Even writing to the hard drive sometimes feels a bit sluggish. Booting the system from pressing the power button on to Leopard being ready to use take about 30 seconds or less. Overall the computer is perfect and EFIX delivers on its promise.

More to come: Benchmarking!

Watch Unboxing videos of the MacBook Air on YouTube now by following the Link

Source : YouTube

I know its a bit too late but I wanted to share with you some pictures. Here are a set of pictures of Leopard installation screen!

Here are also pictures of the unboxing of Leopard.

And finally, here are pictures of my Macbook Pro undergoing a Hard Drive transplant.

Enjoy and as always, comments and suggestions are always welcome!

Power Boz: Well Well well, so far, Leopard fairs well.  I did have issues with installation but I got over it with a quick hard drive swap.  First the installation was hell.  Halfway through the installation and the system stops.  Restart and redo the installation and the same thing happens again, crash.  So I figured let me delete the resident bootcamp partition and use the whole hard drive space.  Finally the installation went without the a hitch.  I got Leopard up and running in about and hour.  Everything was flawless until I got the black screen of death.  The dreaded kernel panic.  Restart again and the computer went to hell.  It was slow and very weird.  Mail crashes constantly but that is another story.   So I went to Hawalli and after about an of searching I found the hard drive I was looking for.  Went back home and popped open my Macbook Pro and swapped the drive out.  Reinstalled everything and it went smoothly from there on.  Networking is simply amazing.  It finds all the computers on the network and was able to see and receive and send files.  I didn’t try printers yet but that is next on the list.  The networking preference panel has changed dramatically.  It takes a bit of getting used to but is a lot more informative and more powerful then before.  Wireless networking is bad on a Macbook Pro because of the Aluminum casing.  Spaces is perfect.  The transition from one space to another is fast and smooth.  The application assignment works perfectly so even if you start an application in space one that is designated to run in space two, it automatically goes to that space.  Everything is snappier and faster.  Stacks is good but a bit over rated.  Finder is faster and more productive with cover view. Preview, iCal and other iApps are just better and faster.  So far Leopard is perfect.  It has a lot of features that are under the hood but nothing really significant on top.  As we said before, Leopard is an evolutionary release and not a revolutionary one.  It is feature filled and geared for developers with lots of development only features.  So far it is solid.

G-Funk : I’ve had no issues during installation. the process went smooth with no issues what so ever. Installed it on 3 macs that I own in my household (Family Pac) and they are running fine. The only problems I’ve faced are bugs with the initial version of leopard (10.5) like wireless access points not responding . screen share. back to my mac.. time machine etc… After the upgrade to 10.5.1 most of those issue disappeared and all is fine and swell . No problems to mention to date except for some enhancements I’d like to enable for better performance and stability.

Finally my iPod touch is free! Yes, I hacked it, and I made do many things. A while back I reviewed the iPod touch and I said that it is an excellent device but is way too limited and needs to be hack in order for people to use it effectively. About a month later, hackers realized and utilized a flaw in Safari, the TIFF exploit, which allows a person to insert code in from the buffer. A couple of days after that hackers where all up inside the iPod touch and soon after, yesterday, we got a hack guide. I used the guide to hack my iPod touch and what can I say, it works!!! I can go on and on but I’ll let the images do the talking. I will also give it a week and see what happens with it and report back.

Guide to Hacking you iPod Touch

http://www.touchdev.net/wiki/Jailbreak_Guide