At the IFA in Berlin this morning – a big ol’ electronics and gadgets fair that showcases new products – Samsung officially launched the Galaxy Tab, their high profile tablet PC.

Actually, it’s difficult to say whether it’s a tablet or an oversized phone. It has a 7 inch screen, runs on Android 2.2 and is 3G capable, so it’s creating a curious sub-market inbetween large screen smartphones and iPad-sized tablets.

It’s available in two flavours – 16GB or 32GB, which is expandable by 32GB more. Connectivity allows for 3G, WiFi and Bluetooth, and the device also supports Adobe Flash Player 10.1. It also serves up front and rear-facing cameras – functionality that Apple should have included in the iPad from day one.

Vodafone (shudder) have already confirmed they will be European distributors for the Galaxy Tab from October – the only question now is price.

A 9.7 inch 3G iPad weights in at £529, a 5 inch Dell Streak is £449, but if Samsung attempts a price point between the two, it’s unlikely to establish the company as the market leader it clearly wants to be. Without Apple’s dominence in the market, the Dell Streak hasn’t managed any traction; if Samsung want to be first choice for tablets – and they’ve plans for plenty more products in the coming months – they probably need to be aiming for below £400, otherwise mainstream consumers are unlikely to look beyond their shiny iPads.

Exciting times from California this evening. Well, maybe. Well, probably. Sort of. Here’s the rundown of what Lord Jobs decreed moments ago:

iOS 4.1 will be released next week for iPhone and iPod Touch, to include:

• fixes to previous bugs, including a promised solution for long-suffering iPhone 3G users. Thank. Christ.

• the ability to take HDR photos – it automatically creates mosaics of photos taken at different exposures to produce images with more detail

• new Games Center functionality that’ll allow gamers to connect through apps, including shared gameplay and scoreboards

iOS4.2 will be released later in November for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch including iOS 4 improvements like multitasking, as well as wireless printing

The iPod range has been overhauled, from Shuffle to the iPod Touch:

• the new iPod Shuffle is based on the squarer second generation, but dinkier, and includes playlists and 15 hours battery time, and will be $49 for 2 GB.

• the iPod Nano loses the circular track-wheel, to be replaced with a multi-touch screen; it’s something of a comedy device – it’s almost too small to hold. The iPod Nano is $99 for 8 GB.

•the new iPod Touch will include Retina Display, both a front and rear camera, including FaceTime and HD video capability, and costs from $229 for the 8GB version

And then we were onto iTunes. Yes, it kept on coming and the audience took any excuse to holler like a pack of sycophantic banshees. iTunes 10 will include Ping, a new social network for iTunes users, allowing users to connect to friends and generate newsfeeds of music and events. “It’s not Facebook, it’s not Twitter.” Actually, yes it is, Steve. It’s Facebook.

Finally, onto Apple TV – a new teeny tiny box for rented tv shows and movies, costing just 99¢ per show to rent for 48 hours. No word yet on what shows will be available in the UK, except to say that there will be content available in this country. It’ll cost $99.

Knobhead alert!

(@ereuben)

Stand aside Sir Clive Sinclair, there’s a new idiot car in town. Taking what the Sinclair C5 did, more or less ignoring it and doing something else instead is the Human Car.

The brainchild of scientist/inventor Charles Greenwood, the Human Car is an idea that he first had in 1968, and has seemingly only just realised. It runs on human power, duck eggs and dreams or something and if this isn’t the future then we’re a bunch of misguided idiots.

Amazingly, the contraption will set you back just $15,500 (that’s only £10k in the UK money) and you can put your flag in one with a deposit of only $50. That seems almost too good to be true – we’ve ordered ten and if they arrive, there’s every chance that we’ll give them away as competition prizes (there’s no chance – we’ll be keeping them).

On his website Charles Greenwood says that the Human Car is “…beautiful and it handles like a dream. It’s fast, sexy, makes you ultra healthy and oh yeah, saves the planet. Welcome to the future.”

Thanks Charles!

[Presurfer]

It’s what the world has been waiting for. Not only did you not realise you needed a toothbrush sanitiser, but there’s a gap in the market for a device that can be plugged into a PC or laptop. Because that’s where you brush your teeth, isn’t it? Buy it today. Or don’t. Thanks to avid Bitterwallet reader Crosby

It can’t be denied that Bill Gates has forever changed the world in which we live, you know, with all that computer stuff and that. But the big guy has hinted that his greatest challenge may still lie ahead – to revolutionise the humble toilet.

Bill appeared at the Techonomy conference in California yesterday with just one thing on his mind – sorting out the bogs.

“Latrines are fascinating” he said, while explaining that he has read scores of books on the subject, adding: “No one wants to read about it — it’s one of the greatest under-investments.”

Among his other pronouncements were…

“We’re gonna have a breakthrough in the latrines” (heh heh)

“It’s a super-important topic… you can visit poor-world latrines and learn from that as well.”

“When it comes to things like investing in new toilets, not much money goes into that… you end up with the low IQ guy on the toilets.” (heh heh again, we think)

The crux of Bill’s point was that although the humble toilet works perfectly well, it isn’t efficient… and someone is going to come along and sort it out. Will it be Bill Gates? We’re dying to find out.

[Tech Crunch]

A book, yesterday

Let the mass burning of books commence! That’s because Amazon have declared their UK Kindle store to be open for business and we now have no use for actual, real books any more.

The store was expected to appear at the end of the month to coincide with the release of two new Kindle readers but it popped up yesterday, and has a smattering of popular titles at low, low prices.

You don’t need to wait for a Kindle device as Amazon have released free Kindle apps for all the top smart phones. Smart!

Pity we couldn’t find the fan-written Scooby Doo bondage novels that we’ve been trying to get our hands on though.

Vodafone have become the first UK mobile network to announce that they’ll be offering the new Torch, BlackBerry’s forthcoming attempt to stop themselves being muscled out of the smartphone market by Android and Apple devices.

The Torch will be hit the shops in the UK “in the coming weeks” according to a BlackBerry spokesdude and the phone will the first to feature BlackBerry 6 OS. More specs include 3.2-inch 480×360 touch-based screen, a slide-out keyboard, feathers in the evening, 512 MB RAM, 4 GB storage and a MicroSD card slot, a sneezing clown ringtone, as well as 802.11 b/g/n wireless networking, Bluetooth, and a 5 megapixel camera with flash. We threw a couple of made-up bits of stuff in there just to see if you were paying attention.

Vodafone announced they’ll be carrying the Torch via a tweet, such is the modern way of things, although pricing is still to be confirmed. Other providers are sure to join the throng sooner rather than later.

This might be one of the six million songs you'll be able to listen to, but we're not completely sure.

Another week brings another modern method of listening to music, and this one comes courtesy of the Carphone Warehouse.

They’re calling it Music Anywhere (part of their ‘My Hub‘ thingy) and it’s a ‘cloud’-type affair, allowing to access your existing music library wherever you are (as long as there’s a decent internet connection) for just £29.99 per year.

How it works is thus: Music Anywhere creates a duplicate of your iTunes or Windows Media Player music library in the ‘cloud’ and when you select any given track (say, Fernando by Abba) it scours its own database of six million tracks and lets you listen to a streamed version of it wherever you might be.

Carphone Warehouse claim that if a song can’t be found in the Music Anywhere archive, a digital copy of the song or recording is made and automatically added to the user’s online account.

A series of Music Anywhere apps have been created for practically the full gamut of iPhones that will store the 500 most-played songs in your account and store them on your phone, so that you can play them anytime you like.

But you could face a slap on the wrist if your music collection is filled with naughty, pirated music. Catch Media, who power the service, have said that: “In extreme cases where it becomes apparent that most of a person’s music collection has in fact been pirated”, their subscription to the Music Anywhere service could be terminated.

With the arrival of the iPad and its book-reading capabilities, you probably thought Amazon would let their Kindle roll over and die a quiet death didn’t you? You did? You idiot!

On the contrary – Amazon have unleashed two updated, lighter Kindles today as they continue to try and get their teeth into the modern e-reading pie. Significantly, for the first time, the contraption will be available to order directly from Amazon’s UK site.

Now the sciency bit. Amazon reckon that the new Kindle has 50% better contrast than previous versions, while being 21% smaller and 15% lighter (now weighing less than 250 grams) It comes with a six-inch screen and now has Wi-Fi connectivity, with the battery lasting for a month on a single charge. It’s got greater storage too, and can hold up to 3,500 books at any one time.

The pricing is competitive, with the Kindle going for £109 for the Wi-Fi model and £149 for the model with Vodafone 3G connectivity. Additionally, the all-new UK Kindle store will stock 400,000 titles, including books about cars, elves, fighting and Romans.

It’s all impressive-sounding stuff, but as Amazon haven’t bothered sending us a new Kindle to review, we’re giving it a MASSIVE BITTERWALLET THUMBS DOWN!

It came among us, threatening to forever change the way we looked at, thought about and felt about mobile phones, but now, POOF, it’s more or less dead.

We speak of course of the Nexus One, Google’s attempt to break into the mobile handset market. When they launched the thing over in USAmerica, the big plan was that they would sell the handset directly to customers online, cutting out the middle man altogether.

Sadly, the cunning plan never really took off and by the time the HTC-made Nexus One was launched in the UK, Vodafone stores were flogging the thing. But now Google have pulled the plug on their online phone store and after recently announcing that no more Nexus handsets would be released, that’s pretty much that.

But Nexus One owners shouldn’t panic – it’s a well-regarded chunk of phone and the latest Android upgrade, Froyo is available for it now. It just seems that Google will be  concentrating on the software and are leaving the hardware to others.

Recent media coverage would have you believe that Apple are screwed. The reality is, of course, nothing of the sort. And it won’t stop, either; the iPhone 4 press conference made the front page of The Sun – incontrovertible proof that however piss-poor you care to think Apple’s products are, the mainstream is beginning to lap them up.

So there’s that, and the fact they’ve got a metric fuckton of cash in the bank.

The quarterly earnings call that Apple has with members of the media revealed that everything is selling faster than Apple can pay a Chinese factory worker to make them. Apple posted a revenue of $15.7 billion for the previous quarter with a net quarterly profit of $3.25 billion. Some other specifics from the call include:

• A new all-time record for quarterly Mac sales
• Highest quarterly revenue ever, $15.7 billion, an increase of 61%
• Net income up 78% over a year ago
• 33% year over year growth for Macs
• iPod touch grew 48% year over year
• 1.7 million iPhone 4s sold in the five initial countries
• 3.27 million iPads in 10 countries

During the call, Steve Jobs also mentioned that Apple “have amazing new products still to come this year.” It’s unlikely these will be new product lines, but what most people are expecting to see is the introduction of front and rear cameras and FaceTime to the iPod Touch. Regardless of whether you’re an Apple hater or not, that would make the Touch a very decent piece of kit indeed.

[TechCrunch]

Microsoft have unveiled the price tag for their super-terrific new motion-sensor gaming thingamajig that they’re calling Kinect. The thingamajig, that will allow you to control Xbox games games just by moving your body around as if you’re Bez from the Happy Mondays, should be launched by the end of the year.

If you want one, you should probably start saving up now because (brace yourselves) it’s going to set you back £129.99. Yes, that’s right, more or less what you’ll pay for an entry-level console for the added ability to play some as-yet-unmade games in a different kind of way, probably while making yourself look like a bit of a tit and incurring a hernia into the process.

That okay with you all? Yeah, thought so.

Steve Jobs and some of his mates, yesterday

Who fancies indulging in the latest hip pursuit that is Apple-bashing? You do? Great!

The highly influential US of American organisation Consumer Reports (their version of Which!) has gotten round to reviewing the troubled iPhone 4 – and they’re not happy with it one little bit.

In their tut-tut-laden report they have flown in the face of Apple’s recent claims that the phone’s reception problems are caused by a software fault, and are blaming the phone’s new-style antenna for the widely-reported glitch.

In their review, Consumer Reports say:

“When your finger or hand touches a spot on the phone’s lower left side … the signal can significantly degrade enough to cause you to lose your connection altogether … Due to this problem, we can’t recommend the iPhone 4.

Apple needs to come up with a permanent – and free – fix for the antenna problems before we can recommend the iPhone 4.”

Ooooh! But so what you might think – it’s just another review, albeit a damning one. Maybe, but just like Bitterwallet, Consumer Reports is a VERY influential organisation, and following the withering review, Apple’s share price fell by as much as 4.2 per cent, wiping $9.9bn (£6.5bn) off its market value. Gulp.

It’s a double whammy for Jobsy and the boys as things get murkier still with Apple also being accused of deleting threads that are critical of the iPhone 4 on their official forums.

Blogger TJ Luoma wrote: “This isn’t the first time we’ve heard about Apple deleting discussion board threads on topics which are unflattering to Apple’s products. It’s closer to the fiftieth time. In fact, we’ve heard so many reports about this happening that it seems safe to call this standard operating procedure for Apple’s discussion boards.”

It’s almost as though Apple are some kind of paranoid, controlling gang of thought police. Surely not….

Yet again, Apple are ahead of the curve, giving their loyal customers that little bit extra that makes all the difference. Say hello to the Friend Bar, the variation on the Apple store’s Genius Bar for people who just want to chat with each other.

Full story in this video brought to you by the Onion News Network…