So my daughter dropped her month old iPhone in the toilet the other night.  I'm not sure of the particulars of how this event took place, nor do I really want to know.  What I was glad to find out was that it was at the very least, a clean bowl.  Naturally I find this out after she's dropped in my hands and I ask why the $600 phone she bought is water logged.

So without even taking an extra breath, she finished the explination and follows it with a "can you fix it?  Because it's not turning back on."

Can I fix it?  That is one hell of a loaded question.  Read on for the details and the conclusion.

As much as everyone either loves or hates Apple's iPhone, I'm in the middle.  I think it's a neat gadget, but it's not something I need.  However, my daughter just had to have it and thus she bought one.  I however, have not had the oppertunity to play with it for more then 5min so I haven't been able to do an actual review.  Thank God for Ars, as they have done a fantasic, in-depth review.

So, love it or hate it, go check out their many page long review and be better armed to get one or to talk smack about it.  If you are going to talk smack at least be well educated when you do it.

In the mean time, I'm going to try and swipe my daughters from her long enough to form my own opinion.  Maybe take a few pics if I have enough time.

I've been waiting for this to come about.  Basicly, the only downside to owning the larger capacity iPods is that they have actual hard drives in them and that they are seceptable to vibrations, g-force and other HD killing forces.  Hence why the iPods nano's are so popular.  They work on Flash memory that has no moving parts and therefore isn't easily damaged by jogging, drops, sudden fast movements.

So it would only seem logical that someone would get off their butts and drop some flash memory in a HD equiped iPod and tell the world how to do it.  Well, it's finally happened over at Geek Technique. Their article shows you how to hack your iPod and add flash memory, right where the HD used to be.  I will warn that at the time of this posting, the site was rather slow and sluggish.  Turns out that Slashdot found out about this before I did and already has the Slashdot Effect is alreday in full swing.  So you might want to wait a bit before checking it out.

Ars snagged a copy of the long awaited Google Desktop Beta and did a nice little write-up.

Now I'm not a Mac guy by any means so I can't test this thing out myself.  For now it's still a Beta, but hop on over to Ars and see what they have to say about it.

If so there are a few things you can try to unfreeze it.

1. Switch the hold button at the top of the iPod on, wait a few seconds, and then turn it off.

This generally doesn't work, but it has been known to every blue moon or so.

2. Press and hold both the Menu button as well as the center select button for about 5-10 seconds.  For most Ipods, this i the reset button combo and will restart your iPod.  Some older iPods use the Menu and Play button's rather then Menu + Select.

3. Let the damn thing run out of battery life.  While not the prefered method, it is known to work, but depending on the battery charge, well, you could be waiting a while.

4. Using iTunes, there is  restore option for your iPod.  It's a pretty simple step by step process, however, it can take up to 30min in some cases.  The main draw back to this is that you will loose all the music on the iPod and will have to reload it.  If you have purchased music that you haven't backed up yet, well, it will be gone as well.

So thats it for now.  Main reason this came up is that my wifes iPod freezes every once in a great while and I just got a "Please Help" call from someone else.  Being that mine nor my wifes had frozen in quite some time, I had to look up the options again.  Once I had rendered the help, I figured it couldn't hurt to post what I had found here.  Hope this help some of you folks.

Yesterday Steve Jobs did as everyone expected and announced the iPhone at the Mac World conference. If you arn't up on all of the iStuff comeing from Mac, the iPhone is the latest thing released from Apple's iToy bin sure to the attention of the iPeoples wallets everywhere.

The iPhone (which can be seen here) is a fairly versital toy. Backed in it's sleek black shell is a phone, iPod, PDA, camera, e-mail client, full web browser and I'm sure there is a kitchen sink as well knowing how Apples goes about things. Once you get over the very appealing look of this toy, the next logical questions are 1.) How much? and then 2.) Where?

The answer to those is:

1.)$499 for the 4gb version and $599 for the 8gb version                                                                                                                                                                                                                          2.)Cingular will have an exclusive rights for 6 months starting in June, but you will have to sign up for 2 years.

You know, like just stopped working and when you power it up, it just asks you to select a language like the day you bought it?  Has it just lost all of the music files you had one it and doesn't show up in iTunes when you connect it to the computer?  Well, if so, all is not lost.  well, patially, but it is fixable in most cases.

Seems most people forget that the Ipod is very much like a computer in that it's software does get updated.  Now many of the times, iTunes does this for you.  However, if you Ipod is hosed up, here is something you can try.  Download the iPod Updater which can wipe your iPod clean and set everything back to factory defualts wile making sure it has the current firmware version as well.  Warning - If you choose the restore option, it will wipe any and all files from the iPod, nothing you had on the device will remain.

Read more for a better idea of how to use the updater under the worst case senario.

It seems there might be.  Ars is running a story that was originaly broken on another site about the condition of the Chineese factories where the world famed Ipods are built.

It seems that these factory conditions and employee treatment were likened to sweatshops and mill-villages.  Workers are mostly femal and work 12+ hours a day for around $50 a month of which half goes back to the employer (foxconn) because they all live in the on-site dormatories.  Conditions in the dorms didn't sound all that favorable either.  However, read for yourself and be sure to come back here and speak your mind.