Apple's Netbook rumblings heat up

[ Music ] ^M00:00:07 [ Background music ] >> What's up? I'm Brian Tong. Welcome to the Applebyte. It's all the good and bad inside the world of Apple so let's jump into the stories. There's more run leads on Apple's latest tablet Media Pad or whatever you guys like to call it at the Applebyte here we like to call it the maxi pad. Now the China Times is reporting that Apple will release their Net book with a 9.7 inch touch screen and it will be priced at $800. These are still rumors but it's significant when it's one of China's big 4 newspapers reporting it. Plus it falls in line with what my sources told me back in June who said the maxi pad would be here by the end of the year. Now I through in my 2 cents on CNETs Buzz Out loud podcast earlier this week. Yeah every time I see these potential mockups I'm just worried about if this just a big large iPod touch, it's gonna be a stinker. >>Why? Why do you say that? >> Because the reason being is like you can do almost everything you can with a laptop honestly on an iPhone. Like there's times now where I don't even take my laptop with me cause I can do my email, I can surf the web in a form factor that's the size that fits in my pocket. You're telling me I want to take another device that no longer fits in my pocket >> Right. >> Might do the same things as my iPhone and just has a bigger screen. [ Background music ] >> So that's where I stand. I'm stickin to it and I definitely like to hear what you guys think as well. Now let's stay in China with news from Comtext that Foxconn, the contracted iPhone maker is manufacturing iPhone 3Gs custom tailored for China without Wi-Fi [buzz]. Now it will still be a GSM phone but it looks like the big A has conceded to the Chinese governments demands to get their phone approved in the middle kingdom. Now Apple is still in talks with the world's third largest mobile provider, China Unicom, but no deal has been made yet. So for all my people in China watching this I know who you guys are just get an unlocked US phone like they're already doing and you'll get your Wi-FI. Alright let's shift gears for a moment with a how to in moving your iTunes collection to an external hard drive. ^M00:02:00 [ Music ] ^M00:02:06 >> If you have a massive iTunes library filled with gigs and gigs of music, movies and podcasts it's not a bad idea to off load that content to a separate external or internal hard drive. But transferring your library isn't as obvious as dragging, dropping your music folder onto an external drive. It's not hard, but to do it right you've to let iTunes do the work for you. To get started, open iTunes and make sure the drive you want to move your library to is connected to your computer and ready to go. Next, go into your iTunes preferences. On a PC you'll find this under the edit menu for Mac it's under the iTunes menu. Click under the advance tab and where it says iTunes music folder location. Change the location to the desired folder on your external drive. Next make sure the copy files to iTunes music folder option is checked off, this ensures that any new content you download or rip into iTunes gets transferred to the new location. After that, hit the OK button. Now, there's one more step to take before iTunes really starts moving your library to new location but before we commit your computer to what could be a few hours of transfer time why not take a moment to do some general iTunes housekeeping. Delete any old podcasts you're not listening to, maybe some movies or TV shows you never plan on watching again. The point is there's probably a lot of junk in your iTunes library that you don't need to waste time copying. You'll thank me later. Now when you're ready to make the transfer, click on the File menu in iTunes, then select Library and select consolidate library. This is going to take all the files referenced by iTunes on your computer, your movies, music, audio books, podcasts, TV shows and copy it to the new location. It will take some time and remember it's not deleting the old files it's just copying them to the new location. If you're feeling confident you can delete the files living in your old iTunes music folder after the transfer is complete but be cautious. If you don't feel sure about what you're doing it can't hurt to use the back up to disk feature in iTunes so that you can restore your library in case something goes wrong. Once the dust is settled and all your precious iTunes content has made the journey over to the new hard drive you can finally pat yourself on the back. Unless the hard drive is powered off or disconnected, iTunes will remember to load your library from the external drive every time it launches. Without the drive connected iTunes will still function for things like streaming podcasts and internet radio or downloading stuff from the iTunes store but you won't be able to play your library content without connecting it back up to the drive. [ Background music ] >> For CNET.com I'm Donald Bell helping give your iTunes library a little extra breathing room. >> Thank you Donald. You know you are my Yoda and [inaudible] learner. Now we congratulated the App store last week for its 1 year anniversary and Apple recently announced there have been 1.5 billion apps downloaded, 65,000 apps available, and over 100,000 developers. Every other cell phone manufacturer has followed its lead but Verizon the mobile carrier is rolling out its own cross platform app store. Computer World says Verizon plans to launch it before the start of next year. Well what makes this unique is that Verizon will be shipping all their phones with just Verizon's own app store. They won't block the user's ability to install on device stores like the Blackberry App world or the Android Market Place but they won't come preloaded on the phone so if you guys read between the lines this roll out has larger effects. For all of you who are hoping and waiting for the iPhone to come to Verizon, that light at the end of the tunnel is getting really small for the time being because do you really see a Verizon App Store preloaded on an iPhone because that is not gonna happen. Now let's get to some quick bites. Apple released its latest iTunes update. It's 8.2.1 and guess what the ability for the Palm Pre to synch to iTunes is gone and we could see that coming from a mile away. The latest iPhone 3.1 Beta 2 has been released and unfortunately its disabled all tethering hacks. So if you have 3.0 stick with it if you want to keep tethering your phone. And Apple you just had to put down the hammer and crack down on all of this this week. Alright guys there was a ton of good news, it'll keep on coming. So send me your emails to the applebyte@cnet.com. We're working on another e-mail show and as usual I am down for any questions. I'm Brian Tong. Thanks for watching and come back next time for another bite of the apple. ^M00:06:30 [ Music ]