Qantas announced yesterday it's plans to go "Apple-only" on it's frequent flyer lounges around Australia - giving travellers access to the "latest generation Mac's" in a national roll out.

Alan Joyce, chief executive of Qantas said that the Apple desktops would be available immediately in the Qantas club facilities and that it would be rolled out in other cities by the end of 2010. He said, "We are launching Sydney Qantas Lounges with the new technology from today; Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne and Perth from November; and Alice Springs Cairns, Darwin, Hobart and Townsville from December."

Yesterday Qantas also launched a Frequent Flyer iPhone app - which helps members explore different ways they can use their points, the app allows tehm to track their balance, see where they have been earning points and work out the best way to use them. The free app also uses the iPhone's built in GPS features to to locate Frequent Flyer partners.

Last night at the Astral Bar in Sydney's Star City Casino - VHA general manager of Devices and Pricing, Ross Parker confirmed that Vodafone Hutchinson Australia would have exclusivity rights to the HTC Desire HD forever - this, he confirmed.

The Desire HD is the big brother to the popular HTC Desire handset - which when launched earlier this year was an exclusive to Telstra's Next G network - it ended up being very popular. With the launch of the Desire HD, it will hopefully continue the success and popularity that sometimes can rival the iPhone and now VHA will have that exclusivity.

Additionally, Parker confirmed that there will be no immediate pricing plan where customers can buy the handset outright - this leaves customers having to sign up for a monthly contract with VHA if they want the Desire HD.

iOS fans had the brief opportunity to score a sweet app this morning before Apple quickly pulled it away. iDOS, a DOS based emulator, was briefly released and then yanked from the Apple Store, but not before quite a few people got their hands on it and were using it do run things like Windows 3.0 and some old school Space Quest.

While I'm sure many of you are pretty gleeful at the thought of Steve Jobs tripping out about Windows running on an iPhone, there is precedent for the app being pulled due to it being able to interpret and run executable code. If you weren't one of the lucky few to get your hands on the app, you'll have to turn to either a jailbreak or a developer account to get it going via the sourcecode here.

Google's Android is slowly getting popular, with the help of multiple handsets it is gaining traction throughout the world as competition for the once lone soldier of the battlefield, Apple's iPhone.

Google has announced it has hit the 100, 000 apps milestone - surpassing the number of apps on competing stores from BlackBerry, Nokia or Palm. Even with 100k apps, they're still number 2 in the market, to the iPhone with over 300k.

It has taken Google 20 months to get to the 100k milestone, where it took Apple 16 months to get to the same 100k mark. The more popular the Market gets, the more work Google will have to do to it's Market to keep everything in good order. Consider that it takes a developer and average of 6 minutes to get an App into the Market, compared to *four days* on Apple's App Store - how is it that Google are falling behind in the number of Apps they host?

Nintendo has been busy the last few months with the celebration surrounding the 25th birthday for Mario and for the original Nintendo game system. Nintendo is offering up some sales details on the Wii and its accessories to show off how many units it has moved even if the popularity of the Wii is waning today. The number of controllers sold by Nintendo is impressive.

According to the gaming company, it has sold 46,000 Wii Remotes daily in the US. It has moved a total of 65.3 million Wii Remotes so far in the US alone. That number would be much higher if sales globally were figured into the numbers. Nintendo trys to give an idea of how many controllers 65.3 million actually is with some illustrations. The most interesting is that 65.3 million is enough to give one to every person living in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Detroit and San Francisco, and enough still remains for every resident of Florida, Ohio, Virginia and North Dakota.

That is huge amount of controllers. Nintendo breaks the numbers down a bit to tell how they were purchased. People that bought the Wii console purchased 30.41 million of the Remotes. 12.92 million remotes came with Wii Play and 18.56 million white remotes were purchased alone. So far, 2.44 million black remotes have been purchased and 467,500 pink remotes have been purchased along with 645,200 blue remotes. The number of Nunchuk controllers sold comes to 52.9 million.

If you try to work from an iPad exclusively, it can be done but you will not want to do that with the onscreen keyboard for an extended period. Thankfully, the iPad supports Bluetooth keyboards and you can connect an external keyboard to the iPad and work all you want in comfort. The iPhone and iPod touch also support a BT keyboard in later models.

Photography shop Adorama has been rolling out all sorts of new products into its catalog for a long time and it has a wide range of gear that has nothing to go with cameras today. The latest new item from the company is a BT keyboard called the iBoard Bluetooth Wireless Keyboard. The iBoard supports the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch and has some dedicated keys to access sites with one button press.

The keyboard is controlled by an app that gives shortcuts to the favorite apps on the device and the favorite websites of the user. The Flashpoint iBoard kit sells for $69.99 and has the same specs as the original Apple wireless Bluetooth Keyboard with the addition of the single key shortcuts. The app is on the App Store right now at no charge. The kit also includes a free iBoard waterproof skin to protect the keyboard from spills.

Western Digital is a big player in the storage market with a huge range of traditional storage drives for notebooks, desktops, enterprise, and media center needs. The company has announced that it has added a new streaming media player to its WD TV media player line. The new player is called the WD TV Live Hub and it has some very nice specifications.

The machine has support for full HD 1080p resolution and has 1TB HDD integrated that can store content from computers on the same network. The device will be offered exclusively at Best Buy online and will be inside all Best Buy locations around the country as well. The WD TV Live Hub supports streaming of flicks through Blockbuster on Demand the same day that the titles are released on disc. The device also supports YouTube, Netflix, Pandora, and a lot more.

It supports multiple video formats including .mkv, .mp4, and .mov. The HDD is small and quiet with the performance needed to stream video without any playback issues. Data can be transferred to the internal HDD from Mac and PC systems or from external HDDs, cameras, and devices directly attached to the dual USB ports of the player. Users can also stream the video from the device directly to an iPhone, iPad, or Android smartphone with third party applications installed. The streaming media player sells for $199.99.

We just got back from the Taipei launch event of the ViewSonic ViewPad7 at the second largest building in the world, 101.

There ViewSonic took the chance to officially announce its new 7-inch tablet computer appropriately called the ViewPad7. It comes installed with Google Android 2.2 and initially from our first look today it seems to be a capable little device.

It is powered by a 600MHz Qualcomm MSM 7227 processor and comes with 512MB of RAM. Sadly there is only 512MB of onboard NAND flash for your storage needs, but the device does support a single Micro SD slot for additional capacity up to 32GB - at an additional cost, of course. Moving on the 7-inch display is based on TFT WVGA technology and supports a capable resolution of 800 x 480. The screen has nothing on the iPhone 4, but it still works pretty well. It also comes with 802.11 b/g wireless as well as 3.5G (quad band). You can make calls from this thing, but you'd probably look a little silly holding it up to your ear. Rounding things out the device also comes with Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, front and back camera, GPS (and AGPS) support and it seems to work rather well using Google Maps.

Firesheep is something that has been popping up around the place for a few days - I thought I'd share it here for the uninformed, or at least, if you didn't know - pass the news on to someone you know who uses unsecure Wi-Fi.

The above picture shows what it would look like - allowing you to login as another person on the open wifi network.

A Seattle based programmer, Eric Butler has released an extension for Firefox which shows you a graphical list of the online accounts of everyone sharing an open wifi network with you - with a simple single click, you're instantly logged in as them.

As with other Apple devices of late, the new MacBook Air has been taken down a dark alley, bashed across the head and taken advantage of - but, in a good way.

We knew this before, but with it being opened it's now confirmed - the new MacBook Air is next to impossible to do self-service on, as it uses mostly propriety components. The interior is secured using five-sided Torx T5 screws - where as the rest of the components are so customised that it would be near impossible to find them in a parts store.

Interestingly, the SSD is what most people (as well as myself) want to see, instead of the standard 2.5" SATA SSD drive - they use a unique Toshiba SSD, looks purdy!