Continuing on with our talk of digital downloads, George Ou over at his ZDNet Blog is on a bit of a mission to educate the consumer about all this HD talk on digital downloads. The problem is that 720P is getting thrown around a bit too loosely with digital downloads, and high compression brings the quality way down to sometimes that of standard definition content.

He has followed it up with another piece labeled Here's what fake HD video looks like. Both are a great read if you're interested in the HD war or just generally interested in learning more about what exactly having the ability to play back HD content is.

Full HD! We're hearing it everywhere these days; walk into your local store to buy a TV and the sales staff are pushing 720P and 1080P onto you. Ultimately what it means for us is a better image quality which should in turn help further immerse you into the movies and enjoy it even more.

It seems though that not everyone is so happy about High Definition, with Hollywood actor's flaws coming up clearer than ever there are more and more techniques coming out to hide those bags under your eyes.

With all the talk of digital downloads becoming the next big thing it wasn't going to take long for someone to put up a poll and see exactly where the newly announced Apple TV HD downloads sit.

The boys over at engadgetHD have done exactly that.

With almost 4,500 votes at the time of writing, over 50% of people say they're sticking with HD discs while only 20% of people say "Consider me sold".

4 million iPhones have been sold to date according to Steve Jobs at the recent MacWorld conference in San Francisco. When considering the market was exclusively limited to the USA up until the third quarter in 2007, then this has to be considered quite a feat.

In addition, Apple has promised that towards the end of February they will release the Software Developers Kit (SDK) to allow developers to create iPhone applications on their own steam. This is definitely a good move to generate more support and enthusiasm from iPhone end-users (As if Apple really needs more buzz).

That's not all and according to Jobs, any iPhone or iPhone Touch user can upgrade their product by downloading the latest patch to tap into the following awesome features:

Apple's latest gizmo; the Macbook Air is said to be the "the world's thinnest notebook", 0.16" at its thinnest and 0.76" at its thickest.

Steve Jobs managed to impress everyone by introducing the notebook at the MacWorld Show held earlier this week, sliding the ultrathin notebook out of a regular office envelope. Jobs focused on the new and innovative technology incorporated into the notebook, saying many times that Apple has heard the end-user and he feels that Apple has delivered something that the customer will love.

With CES now wrapped up and the announcement that Warner have decided to go Blu-ray exclusive, all eyes were on sales figures for the coming week. Well, the numbers are in over at High Def Digest and it looks good for supporters of the Blu side.

While the Blu team has not only been able to achieve 85% of HD sales last week, they also managed to keep the competition HD-DVD out of the top 10. The top title last week came in the form of the newly released "3:10 to Yuma", a Blu-ray exclusive while "The Kingdom" was the number one selling HD-DVD managing only 10% of what Blu-ray's number one title achieved.

Over the last week we've covered just about every angle of GIGABYTE's new DES technology, so we thought we'd give you one last DES related story; a quick report from the press conference. Although it was all in Chinese, we acquired an English version of the presentation that we'll do a brief summary of for you.

It all started with a quick speech and presentation by GIGABYTE's Senior VP, Richard Ma. He was talking a little bit about what GIGABYTE is trying to do to help the environment and DES is one step towards that, as the company is expecting to ship no less than one million DES enabled motherboards this year alone. That could result in a rather large overall power saving if all those users take advantage of DES, although the current range of boards is somewhat limited but expect to see DES on just about every single motherboard from GIGABYTE by the end of the year.

A quick heads up for users of the popular FPS counter software Fraps; a program used for benchmarking, capturing screens and recording gameplay video in real-time. There is a new version out this week which includes the following fixes and enhancements :-

* Added 64-bit Fraps FPS1 codec

* Added support for resolutions up to 2560x1600 on single core CPUs

Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Inc, in his keynotes speech at Macworld 2008 said that Leopard, the proprietary Mac OS X has sold 5 million copies in the last three months.

Leopard is definitely on target to be the most successful Mac OS X Operating system software ever. Already 20% of all Mac owners have taken the step to upgrade to Leopard and this statistic is seen as a milestone whereby others can only dream of. Microsoft could take a few pages out of Apples book and firstly show in a detailed way how Vista improves one's life over XP, and secondly they could show how it speeds things up (Not bloody likely).

The spies have been hard at work this morning. Word has it that the dual-GPU ATI 3870 X2 based graphics card is now on order from overseas manufacturers. We've been able to get an idea of what the pricing should be in the land down under and probably a fair idea of what it should show up as in the states too.

We should see the card pop up for around $500 USD. This translates with today's current exchange rate to around $568 AUD before GST. With 10% GST wacked on top of that we really should see the 3870 X2 show up for around the low $600 mark.

The only reason we should see the price go up a lot more than that is due to price gouging a new product. Word is that limited stock will be available but there's no denying that video card sales aren't like they used to be in Australia, so if most manufacturers have stock then getting one come launch day shouldn't be too much of an issue.