The iPhone, specifically the team behind iPhone (hello Steve Jobs), has given us many reasons to ditch this mobile phone slash multimedia tool slash somewhat pocket PC platform. It’s finicky like a high maintenance girl friend and at the same time it has the temper of a boorish boy friend.

At the top of the reasons list is the fact that it is a very restrictive phone and unless you lock it, you remain with AT&T. What if you are a Sprint or a Verizon user? No sir, you have to switch to Cingular turned AT&T or else you can not use the iPhone. Second, it has a number of bugs you have to deal with that you get tied up with the customer service line for an hour or two just trying to get the darned thing fixed.

That is why the Apple iPhone team keeps on releasing latest iPhone updates to keep us consumers hold on to the phone after our initial attraction to this one of a kind mobile sweet body has faded. As they say, beauty fades but hardware and software capacity is endless. So what are the latest iPhone updates nowadays?

Aside from the fact that the Apple iTunes store has released more third party applications that we can definitely use, some of the latest iPhone updates are as follows.

One, the team has finally fixed the call dropping and the phone crashing problem that seem to keep on happening to a handset that has a lot of third party applications installed. It was beginning to get annoying but thank goodness that has been fixed.

Two, the issue of the scary “Blue Screen” appearing when the iPhone (or iPod or iTouch) is plugged to a PC that has a Windows Vista operating system was also remedied. No longer will your heart thump for a couple of nerve wracking seconds when the “Blue Screen” pops up.

Three, iPhone’s text messaging speed and contacts list loading speed has also improved. No more waiting time for you while you message your husband to pick up the dry cleaning and you will no longer wait feverishly while you search for that hot chick’s number hoping that you were not too drunk to forget to ask her digits.

Four, we all know how whacked the accuracy of the 3G signal of this mobile phone. Bar code says that the signal is at the maximum level but you still are having a hard time with the 3G. Well worry no more as the display is now more accurate. It would have been better if the Apple people would address the strength of the signal for us to have a better 3G reception but let them work on that for their next update.

Five, like Motorola’s mobile phones, the Apple iPhone will now also have repeat alerts for messages received.

All these latest iPhone updates plus a whole lot more on security patches and mobile phone security are all available on the iPhone 2.1 updated software.

Popularity: 3% [?]

There currently is a new transcription software out there called Dragon Naturally Speaking. What can Dragon Naturally Speaking do? It has the potential to be able to use your computer verbally, rather than using keystrokes or the mouse. All you do is open the text program, dictate your words entry, copy and paste and voila! It even open’s your web browser or open your other computer programs. And it is Mac compatible. If you need a little more convincing, kindly watch:

and

There are times when I need to get my thoughts in writing but sitting down and typing what my thoughts are impossible. If you need someone to type the way you talk, you can truly rely on Dragon’s typing speed test! In fact, it’s like hiring a personal typist to do the typing job for you. You can create documents, reports and emails faster than most people type — with up to 99% accuracy. I have not tried out the software but the company claims this program can capture and transcribe a voice at 150 words per minute. Check out the video demos embedded above for your reference.

Macintosh users they also have a version called MacSpeech Dictate.

So, if you are a Mac user, they also powers Mac Speech Dictate so kindly check out Dragon Naturally Speaking at their website called Nuance.com. Visit their website right now!

Popularity: 2% [?]

The Similarity-Enhanced Transfer was developed to help speed up the transfer process between nodes in the file sharing network. The way it works, is it looks for chunks of data that are exact or an almost exact copy of what the client application is looking for. This technique is known as hand printing and it is basically looking for the data the file needs to be completed. By looking for and downloading similar chunks, you can actually improve the download time by 71%. The lower the SET filter is set, the more similar pieces it can find and therefore the number of connections that can be made. This is important as while you are downloading a file, you can suffer lags in between connection while the client application is looking for exact matches. By lowering the SET limit, you can then close these soft spots or lagging download points drastically which if figure out over the length of the entire download, you can increase the download time by up to 71%.

However, on popular data, the SET will most likely not help your download capabilities as these are limited by your ISP. However, when it comes to less popular files that have little seeds available, you can then increase this download time drastically whi will make it worth the effort.

The SET was developed by a joint effort between Professor David Andersen, Himabindu Pucha and Dr. Michael Kaminsky. After the development of this file sharing protocol, it would later be integrated into the bit torrent protocol. It is for this reason, that the bit torrent client applications are very expedient when it comes to downloading files. This also plays an important role in the development if the bit torrent protocol’s rarest first paradigm. In the rarest first technique, the client application will hunt down the rarest portions of the requested file first using the SET concept, therefore making the rarest portion, the least rarest and this will continue indefinitely until a medium is found in which all the pieces of data have the same availability. Or until you finish downloading the file!

There are many other concepts that have been envisioned into the development of the bit torrent protocol to help with its popularity and speed. Regardless of the underlying technology involved, the bit torrent protocol is now considered to be the most popular file sharing protocol in the world. Users can be found in any country that has a public internet access. Yes, there are still some in which the citizens do not have sufficient, or any internet access at all. Some of these reasons for the lacking can be as simple as cost, while others may be due to government constraints and control on its people. None the less, the bit torrent network is still considered to be the largest community on the web and in the world to date.

Popularity: 23% [?]

Some of you might also be looking for it but I been searching for a powerful all in one media converter. I found Blaze Media Pro Multimedia Software, the Blaze comes from the incredibly fast speed that the software rips, converts, records and burns files. Blaze Media Pro definitely packs in a lot of features which make this software a definite must have if you work with media files extensively or are looking to start out with complex media tasks like recording, editing and converting one format to another. Using this application is easy and it has some really cool advance features This such as video capture, video creation, combining, and extraction, video editing. You can even do conversion for your audio files like converting from MP3 to WAV. I like having to only use one piece of software to do just about everything, including light video editing with a great Sound Recorder. And they have online help and tutorials if you need them. Their products are easy to use and affordable. The multimedia application software from Blaze Media Pro is powerful that allows you to do a lot of things [convert, edit, record, burn, etc] to your audio or video files. They offer a FREE DOWLOAD 15 Day Trial of the software!

This post is sponsored by BlazeMP.com

Popularity: 56% [?]

Although in general, the concept of web based file sharing can be directed towards the use of 1 click FTP or HTTP file downloading, however, only the FTP allows uploading since the HTTP version is strictly downloading.

Along came the P2P and bit torrent file sharing protocols. The P2P network was the first to arrive on the scene, but unfortunately it was still a centralized file sharing network. Napster was one of these networks in which a server handles the storing of a file for others to download.

Following the P2P’s centralized network was the decentralization by the bit torrent protocol. But this was not enough for many people as their internet connection may not be fast enough for the download of a file. In response, a PHP based web server application was developed to allow someone to turn a high bandwidth server into their bit torrent client and once the file was downloaded, they could simply access it via FTP.

When this web based bit torrent client application was released, it did not have a sufficient amount of extras, so many people would make their own hacks. These hacks included the changing of lines of code as well as adding lines of code to the base PHP script. Although this issue would become overwhelming as people would add more hacks, they would also have to maintain logs of changes so they could do future hacks as well.

In response to all these issues involved with literally hacking the lines of PHP code, another person sat down and rewrote the entire install program to utilize all off the more popular hacks to this web based bit torrent client application.

This does not mean in any way shape or form that the web based bit torrent client is an attempt to recentralize the file sharing networks, but rather aide in the faster transfer of files amongst its peers. A user who has a dial-up connection, can install this bit torrent client application on a free hosted web server that offers PHP and databases, and once the download is complete, they can access it via FTP, which on some connections may be a sufficient amount faster that their standard dial-up access.

One of the major downfalls though, is the fact that using a server to download torrents of a dubious nature can make you more visible. Of course the number one reason some may opt for this selection though is not for their personal speed capabilities, but for the throttling that their ISP may do to their bit torrent connections. However you decide to access the bit torrent network, just remember that some files may be under copyright and therefore one must take into account the possibility of getting caught with pirated intellectual data.

Popularity: 100% [?]