AnandTech did a battery life benchmark for Apple’s new 15-inch MacBook Pro, and call it “Battery Life To Die For” and “The Best Battery Life I’ve Ever Seen”.

Eight, freakin, hours. I couldn’t believe it. In my lightest test, the new 15-inch MacBook Pro lasted eight hours and eight minutes. That’s with the screen at half brightness (completely usable) and no funny optimizations. The notebook is just playing music and surfing through a lot of my old reviews. There’s no way this could be right. Maybe my test was too light?

The 15-inch MacBook Pro lasted a full 8 hours running Anandtech’s wireless web browsing test before it died. Apple claimed a battery life of 7 hour. Even with a web browsing test running a higher CPU utilization load, the new MacBook Pro lasted 6.48 hours, which is twice as long compared with last model.

Looks like no one will complain about battery being non-removable with such impressive performance.

Photo geotagging is the process of adding latitude and longitude location data to the EXIF header of JPG photo file. Site such as Flickr is able to extract this info and display a map of the location alongside the photo. iPhoto ’09 is able to make use of the location info for its Places feature, allowing you to categorize photos by location, search photos using readable location names such as “Paris” or even add travel maps to your photos book.

Starting with firmware 2.0, the camera in iPhone is able to geotag the photo’s location with iPhone’s build-in GPS. iPhone requires the following in order to geotag your photo:

• Ensure location service on your iPhone is turned on. Under Settings->General, check that “Location Services” is switched on.

• The first time you use iPhone’s camera, a message appear with the prompt “Camera would like to use your current location”. Tap “OK” to enable geotagging.

• iPhone’s GPS is able to identify your location before it can tag the location. iPhone might not be able to get your location if you’re indoors for example.

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Not sure if this is a fake demo or is running some sort of screen emulation, but it appears to be iPhone OS running on a Mac Pro with a 24 inch multi-touch monitor.

Amazon released its 9.7inch display Kindle DX on June 10, at $489 it is not inexpensive and deserves more careful evaluation before your purchase.

One of the new feature of Kindle DX is its build-in PDF support. The older Kindle and Kindle 2 requires conversion before reading a PDF document. We found the post by Matthew Williams useful to see how Kindle DX fare in terms of reading technical document PDFs. Matthew included a number of large resolution screenshots of Kindle DX in action with PDF technical documents.

WolframAlpha, the online ‘answer’ engine that answers your factual queries by computing answer from structure data, announced the release of an iPhone/iPod touch optimized website.

To view the mobile site, visit www.wolframalpha.com/iphone with Safari on your iPhone.

WolframAlpha is soliciting comments and ideas for a possible native iPhone app, you can join in the discussion here.

New to WolframAlpha? Here’s the links for you:

• WolframAlpha Overview.

• WolframAlpha Gallery of Query Examples

Routine maintenance helps to keep your Mac running smoothly, maintain optimal performance and reduce risk of computer problems. The following are our five recommendations:

1. Empty the Trash folder

When you delete a file, Mac moves it to the Trash folder. You can free up disk space on your Mac by periodically emptying the Trash folder. We recommend emptying the Trash folder at least once per month.

To empty Trash folder:

• Ctrl click the Trash icon on the dock. Select “Empty Trash” from the menu.

• Alternatively using Finder, either enter Shift-Command-Delete or select from menu Finder>Empty Trash…

2. Uninstall unused applications

You can free up hard disk space by uninstalling applications that you no longer use.

From Finder’s Application folder, drag the app icon to the Trash icon on the dock. Or you can select the app icon and then enter Command-Delete.

Alternatively, make use of an application such as AppDelete to do the task. There is no system wide uninstaller on Mac.

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When you visit Oprah Winfrey’s Twitter page, there is a “Verified Account” badge appear at top-right portion of the profile page. Twitter just launched this “Verified Account” feature to tell us that the Oprah Twitter account is the real thing.

• Twitter’s Verified Account main aim is to deal with account impersonation.
• Twitter displays the badge only after it has contacted the account holder and verified its identity.
• The “Verified Account” badge appears at top-right portion of profile page and not anywhere else.
• The badge will also appear next to usernames in the Find People section.
• For now, Twitter will check only a handful accounts, mainly well-known accounts of celebrities.
• Twitter might verify more accounts in the future.
• It does not mean accounts without the “Verified Account” badge are fake.
• You can contact Twitter via feedback form if you have account impersonation issue.
• Twitter is not verifying businesses now. Contact Twitter via feedback form if your business is interested.

WordPress version 2.8 is released for immediate download. WordPress is one of the most popular blogging software for running self hosted blogs. Watch the video below for WordPress 2.8 new features demo.

• WordPress 2.8 release is code named “Baker” in honor of noted trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker.

• Visually feels a lot like version 2.7.

• Improved speed with over 790 bugs fixes.

• Browse WordPress themes from the entire theme directory and install theme all within WordPress dashboard.

• A complete redesigned widgets interface.

• A cleaner and more robust API for developers to create widgets

• New screen options to change the number of items displayed on dashboard, great for wide monitor.

• Read the full list of over 180 new features, changes, upgrades, and improvements here

Source: WordPress Blog

Google has released Google Quick Search Box for the Mac.

Google Quick Search Box is similar to Spotlight and QuickSilver, allows you to search for information locally on your computer or the net, and perform actions on the item such as launching applications, opening files or email documents.

To use Google Quick Search Box:

• Download the app from www.google.com/quicksearchbox/.
• Drag the app from the mounted dmg folder to the Application folder.
• After the app is launched, press Ctrl+Space to activate the search box.
• Enter your search text on the search box. Search results will appear as drop down list below the search box.
• Select the item from the search result, press Enter to launch the default action. For example if the item is an application, pressing Enter will launch the application.
• Press the Tab key instead if you want to choose other possible actions for the item.

Google Quick Search Box has an extensible architecture, developers can create plug-in to enhance its functionalities. For example, the Twitter plug-in allows you to tweet directly from Google Quick Search Box. But too bad you can not search Twitter stream from Google Quick Search Box.

Facebook announced in a blog post that Facebook Usernames will be opened for your choosing starting at 12:01am EDT on Saturday June 13.

Facebook Usernames provides vanity URLs to make it easy for people to visit your profile or Pages on Facebook. Instead of numeric number, your chosen username will form your new Facebook URL.

The username is on a first-come, first-serve basis. Expect a landrush when the service goes live this Friday midnight. Choose your Facebook username at www.facebook.com/username/.

Think carefully about the username you want as you won’t be able to change or transfer it once selected. To prevent abuse and name squatting, Facebook prevents you from choosing a username if you signed up for a Facebook Page after May 31 or a user profile after June 9 at 3pm EDT.

Facebook usernames will be available in basic text forms, and you can only choose a single username for your profile and for each of the Pages that you administer. Your username must be at least five characters in length and only include alphanumeric characters (A-Z, 0-9), or a period or full stop (“.”). While usernames are currently available only for Romanized text, we’re looking at how we might support non-Romanized characters in the future.

Check out the Facebook Usernames FAQ.

Get details here if you are managing Facebook Pages.