Nostalgia: Steve Jobs tours the first Apple Store at Macworld 2001 (video)

Since we'd rather not attempt to pick out a birthday present for the retail store that has everything, we're breaking out the home movies to see just how far it's come in the past decade. Here's some footage from Macworld 2001, in which a chipper Jobs takes us behind the wood barricade for a "little private tour" of the first ever Apple Store in Tysons Corner, VA, showing off a rear-projection screen for playing commercials and debuting the hyperbolically-named Genius Bar. All said, not that much seems to have changed with the stores in the past ten years, save, of course, for the inventory -- of particular note are the MP3 player and PDA sections, both populated with third-party hardware. Apple would scorch the earth of the music player market later that year with introduction of the iPod. The personal organizer still had a little time left, but surely even back then the iPhone was a twinkle in old Steve's eye.

Tawkon: The Radiation Detector

A new app for smartphones allows you to detect radiations around you. This app, called Tawkon, has been rejected by Steve Jobs, but is anyway available for jailbroken smartphones on Cydia.

This app detects non-ionizing radiation emitted by mobile phones (not the ionizing radiation that is causing problems in Japan), and answer to questions such as what’s the real cancer risk if you stay too much time near your mobile phone and so on.

It works this way: once installed, the app works background and measures the radiation level around you. If the radiations reach the red level (the highest) your smartphone will sound an alarm. This could be used to chose where to make calls and where not.

Probably Jobs has rejected this idea because it would generate panic. The official excuse has been that “Apple looks for apps that are useful, unique, fun and positive, such as Angry Birds, iHandy Flashlight and UrbanSpoon,”.

I think, anyway, that this app could be useful since it helps us understand how much’s the risk of using a mobile phone in certain places. Since the cancer percentage is increasing, I suppose it’s better to get some even small precaution.

Apple's Big Surprise

USA, 3 March : Steve Jobs the CEO of Apple just came back from his medical leave to disclose the iPad 2. This version of iPad sports two cameras for Apple’s FaceTime feature, has faster processing speeds and is also thinner than the iPhone 4.

On the launching event on Wednesday jobs said “While others have been scrambling to copy the first generation iPad, we’re launching iPad 2, which moves the bar far ahead of the competition and will likely cause them to go back to the drawing boards yet again”.The audience was greatly surprised and gave Steve jobs a standing ovation.

The tech fans rapidly tweeted and blogged out this news over the internet. The iPad 2 comes in both black and white version in the US market on March 11 and the Price range starts from $499 of WiFi only model. There are nine different versions of iPad 2, with AT&T and Verizon having their own different 3G versions.