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BMW, one of the leaders in technological car gadgetory are bringing aboard select production vehicles another advancement to help distract drivers some more from the critical responsibilities of road awareness down under.

BMW will be the first car maker to bring vehicles to Australian roads with an in-car web surfing option. BMW simply refer to it as BMW Internet; it's designed to work via the iDrive interface and utilizes a 3G network equipped smart phone for its connection point. So it's not quite as advanced as you may have first thought with self-linked internet, but I'm sure in the not too distant future they will tick that box.

The system is also designed not to be operational when the car is in motion, but we all know how quickly someone will find a way around that.

Apple's huge press event on Friday did more than announce free cases for all iPhone 4 users; it also lit a fire under several companies as Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that many modern phones suffer from "death grip" signal loss. He used examples such as the

BlackBerry Bold 9700, HTC Droid Eris, and a Samsung Omnia II during the conference and the top brass at several of the companies aren't taking Jobs' words lightly.

July 30 is the big day many are holding out for in the land of Oz with Apple launching its iPhone 4 then. But perhaps the sales numbers won't be quite as big as they would have been if the whirlwind of reports about signal issues (dubbed antennagate) weren't floating around.

However, Jobs had this to say upon opening a press conference on Friday morning. "We're not perfect. We know that, you know that and phones aren't perfect either, but we want to make all of our users happy. If you don't know that about Apple, you don't know Apple.

When we fall short, we try harder ... if a user is having a problem, it's our problem."

In defence of the signal woes, Jobs demonstrated that when holding other types of phones such as RIM's Blackberry Bold 9700, HTC's Droid Eris and Samsung's Omnia 2 in the same way as the iPhone 4, each phone lost signal in a comparative way.

He also went on to say that the issue was amplified materialistically due to an incorrect algorithm that was used to calculate the number of bars indicating signal strength, showing a larger drop in strength than was actually the case.

It's not hard to understand in today's world of technology why many services of yesteryear have become redundant and forced people and corporations to go the way of the internet highway. In many ways this is for the better for all parties involved, but there are a lot of cases where the ease of accessibility and usefulness of internet based services is a big black cloud hanging over many business owners heads.

One such example applies to owners of video rental stores. With such advents as Foxtel IQ, fetchTV, Telstra's T-Box etc. giving a vastly growing number of movies on demand, this is one of the main reasons why you see Blockbuster and Video Ezy stores shutting down that were once upon a time booming with activity. It's all too easy to jump on the net and pay for a movie download or stream these days, too. The convenience of such means less people taking trips to their local video rental store.

Yesterday it was reported by many outlets, including yours truly, that the eFuse technology will brick your Droid X if the phone finds anything modded or hacked in the software. The guys at Engadget decided to do a little more digging and got a response from Motorola. Motorola states that eFuse will not kill your phone; it will simply go into recovery mode until approved software is reinstalled. It seems the modders out there will still have a rough time tinkering with the Droid X, but the results don't seem to be as bad as initially reported.

Motorola has caught some flack before from the modding community for locking down their mobile devices, and it looks like some more backlash is on the way. It seems Motorola has included a technology called eFuse to secure the Droid X against unauthorized modification attempts, firmware changes, or rooting.

eFuse runs when the phone boots; checking firmware, kernel information, and the bootloader and making sure they have not been tampered with. If eFuse finds something it doesn't like, it "trips a fuse" and the phone is rendered inoperable until it is returned to Motorola. Sorry modders, looks like you'll have to go somewhere else to have your fun. Or you could accept the challenge..

Well, the cries over the iPhone 4 have been heard all the way to the top of the mountain. While Apple gears us for the press conference tomorrow, even a U.S. senator has gotten involved in trying to get Apple to fix things with their newest device. Charles E. Sumner, a senator from New York, has posted an open letter to Steve Jobs criticizing the iPhone 4 and its problems and strongly encouraging Jobs to make things right with customers.

If you are the user of any Android smartphone, you now have a new choice for your web browser that can be downloaded right now. The latest version of Opera Mini for Android is available on the Android Market.

The new version is 5.1 and it adds some new features for Opera fans optimized for Android. The browser is much faster than previous versions according to Opera. Version 5.1 compresses data by 90% before sending it to the phone.

With the release by Consumer Reports stating that the iPhone 4 antenna issues are hardware related as well as the other problems plaguing the iPhone 4, many are wondering when Apple is going to take a hard look at what to do about the situation. Public relations experts spoken to by CultofMac.com seem to have a similar take: a hardware recall may be in order.

People trying to browse the NZXT site last night as well as those subscribed to the NZXT newsletter got an awful surprise when a letter was released stating that NZXT was going out of business. This was an attack on their site in which hackers infiltrated the site and changed product warranties, deleted products and banners, and even sent out a newsletter stating that NZXT was going out of business.

The folks at NZXT have since booted the hackers, cleaned up the site and have assured us that NZXT is still going strong and plan to continue business as usual.