Is iPod Touch 4 An iPhone 4 Without A Phone?

The newly unveiled iPod Touch 4 brings a lot of new features that Apple has borrowed from the iPhone 4 that was launched earlier this year. Most notably, the device is equipped with the same retina display, an Apple A4 chip and two cameras – one on the front and one on the rear.

Does it make the new iPod Touch an iPhone without a voice plan? As GigaOm points out, there are some pretty important functionalities that the upcoming version of iPod Touch will be missing that is hard to call the features on this device close to the iPhone 4.

Firstly, iPod Touch 4 will not carry a GPS chip. What that means is that users will not be able to use the hugely popular location based services when they are outside Wi-Fi coverage areas. Presently, iPod Touch users can only use LBS applications using the location data pulled from the Wi-Fi networks. Of course, even with a GPS chip on, this device cannot do much outside a Wi-Fi network primarily because the iPod Touch also misses 3G connectivity.

Following the successful launch of the iPad 3G model, it was widely speculated that the iPod Touch model too could come with a 3G data plan. But that was not to be.

Lastly, the rear-facing camera on the iPod Touch does not compare to the specs of even the older iPhone models. This is because the camera renders images at 960 x 720 pixel resolution which is approximately 0.7-Megapixels. That is completely unusable for capturing any picture worth, well, capturing.

What are your thoughts? Are you buying a new iPod Touch?

Google Wave In A Box To Let Developers Run Local Wave Servers

Google Wave truly promised a lot when it first came about. A year of beta servicing later, Google Wave launched only to find that nobody noticed. Google’s experiment to reinvent email apparently failed. However while Google has conceded defeat and have noted that Wave would cease to exist a few months down the line, there is good news for developers who have aspirations to build similar services.

Google has announced that their next step would involve expanding their open source project to create a complete application called “Wave in a Box” that will let developers build local Wave servers and even build upon the functionalities to suit their custom business needs.

Google’s new project will involve

• an application bundle including a server and web client supporting real-time collaboration using the same structured conversations as the Google Wave system
• a fast and fully-featured wave panel in the web client with complete support for threaded conversations
• a persistent wave store and search implementation for the server (building on contributed patches to implement a MongoDB store)
• refinements to the client-server protocols
• gadget, robot and data API support
• support for importing wave data from wave.google.com
• the ability to federate across other Wave in a Box instances, with some additional configuration

As is evident, these functionalities will not be able to bring the full functionality that exists in Google Wave. But this will without doubt help build bigger and better applications moving forward.

No timeline of the release was given.

Gmail Call Phone Users Seeing “Cannot Complete Your Call” Error

Google introduced a nice little feature late last month. The new ‘Call Phone‘ service was integrated with the chat widget on Gmail and allowed users to directly place a call to family and friends over the browser. What is interesting is that the service offers free voice calls inside USA and Canada with pretty cheap call rates to users elsewhere. The service is still being rolled out in a phased manner to users inside USA.

However, many users have been complaining that they are frequently noticing an error that reads “Cannot Complete Call” that stalls the phone calling process. According to Google, this is a known bug that the company is working on.

There is a workaround if you are eager to get started in the meanwhile – by upgrading your Google Voice account to a full account. Doing so will help you circumvent the prevalent bug until that is resolved. To upgrade your Google Voice account,

• Click the ‘Call Phone‘ button from the Gmail chat list

• The Call Phone window will display your current balance. Clicking on this link and further select ‘History‘ or ‘Add Credit‘

• You will be taken to your Google Voice account. Here, click on ‘Upgrade your account‘ button

• Complete the steps required to upgrade.

You are done. You will no longer see the ‘Cannot complete call‘ bug.

Disabling Priority Inbox In Gmail

Google recently introduced a new feature on Gmail – Priority Inbox. The feature is pretty useful for those of you who have several hundreds of unread email and always find it difficult to sort through the list to check out the important messages. Google started rolling out the feature earlier this week and the Priority Inbox is now available on all the Gmail accounts.

However, for those users who do not get too many emails or who check unread mails fairly frequently, the new feature does not bring too much value. In fact, I found the service quite distracting. If you too find it the same way and are looking to disable the functionality, follow these simple straight-forward steps to disable Priority inbox in your Gmail account.

1. Click Settings on the top right hand side on your Gmail account

2. Click Priority Inbox

3. Select ‘Do not show Priority Inbox‘ and save the changes