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>> Brian Tong: What's up? I'm Brian Tong and welcome to The Apple Byte. It's all the goodies and baddies inside the world of Apple. So let's get to the stories. Do you guys want free stuff? Well, of course you do. But I'm not giving anything to you. Instead, Apple's on the verge of selling one billion applications, and to celebrate, it's giving away toys like a MacBook Pro, if you download the one-billionth Ap. Now when the iPhone debuted, Steve Jobs said it would be a revolutionary product that changes the industry.
>> Software that's at least five years ahead of any other phone.
>> Brian Tong: Well, it's pretty safe to say that he was right. Now if you look at the top 20 Aps purchased, iBeer's at number five and iFartz at number 16. These are Aps that people pay for. Like who actually even uses these things?
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>> Brian Tong: The Wall Street Journal is reporting that AT&T's exclusive deal to carry the iPhone will be up next year and AT&T's CEO is in discussions to extend it to 2011. Now it's never been publicly stated how long the exclusive deal will last, but it's pretty obvious that keeping the iPhone away from its rival carriers is key. Now the main complaint or weakness of the iPhone is its service and reception through AT&T, and I know all you guys know about those dropped calls. So seeing the iPhone on another carrier like Verizon would be intriguing, but that requires specific hardware to talk to their CDMA network, and it's not as common as GSM networks worldwide. We'll keep tabs on what happens here. Now we talked about digital music stores increasing prices to as high as $1.29 a song. Well, here's a utility for all you iTunes users on a Mac to potentially help you find cheaper using.
>> Tome Merritt: I saw this site on Boing Boing called Advantageous. They offer a script that combines the Amazon music store with iTunes. Here's a quick tip on how it works. Go to AdvantageousMP3.com and download and install the script. Then go into iTunes, shop the music stores you usually would, and when you find a song you'd like to buy, go to the script icon, up there in the menu, and select Get MP3 from Amazon. Your default browser will open with the Amazon Music Store, where you can purchase the track you were looking at. Advantageous notes they can't guarantee that every song in the iTunes library is going to link directly to one in the Amazon store, so make sure you've got the right MP3 before you click to buy it. That's it for this quick tip. I'm Tom Merritt, CNET.com.
>> All right, thanks Tom. Now I showed you the iPiggy last week so, basketball fans, lets check out this guy, it's the iHoop. Now this is an iPod compatible hoop from Spaulding so you can listen to your jams while you throw it down like LeBron. You'll have to plug it in to listen to your music, and that's pretty much a bust for me, because how many people have an outlet where they put a basketball hoop? There's no pricing on the iHoop yet. Now I said I'd take a few emails, so let's get to them. Luke Anderson writes, "Hey Brian, I'm a big fan of The Apple Byte and was wondering if you knew any other wireless backup solutions other than Time Capsule?" Hey Luke, there are other options that you can try. Now if you have a hard drive connected to and Airport Extreme bay station, and you can see it on your network, you can use an application like Carbon Copy Cloner, or Retrospect to back up to that disk wirelessly over your local network. There's also some other services online that allow you to backup your hard disk, for a fee though. So you can check out either Motzy.com or Backblaze, which recently launched officially for Mac users. So check those guys out, all right? Now [inaudible] Mann asks, "How many megapixels will be in the new iPhone 3G?" I guess I'm not the only one that wants to know these things. Nothing has been confirmed for sure yet, but the rumblings are that it will be a 3.2 megapixel camera for the new hardware. And everyone who has an iPhone knows that the camera is one of its weakest points right now. So you guys, thanks for those emails and remember to write us at The Apple Byte at CNET.com. I'm Brian Tong. Thanks for watching and come back next time for another bite of the Apple.
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