Today, Apple announced the release of their new browser; Safari 3.1. The new Mac and Windows browser can be downloaded from http://www.apple.com/safari or via your standard software upgrade if you are running Mac OS X.

According to Apple, Safari 3.1 run 1.9 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and 1.7 times faster than Firefox 2.

Philip Schiller, senior vice president of product marketing at Apple said:

“Safari 3.1 for Mac and Windows is blazingly fast, easy to use and features an elegant user interface. And best of all, Safari supports the latest audio, video and animation standards for an industry-leading Web 2.0 experience.”

Since the release of Mac OS X Leopard, I love the new Safari. They got the tabs just right and I have much less crashes (I can alsmost say it never crashes now) than with OS X Tiger and older versions of Safari.

After being released for only 4 days, the iPhone SDK, a set of tools for developers of iPhone applications has been downloaded over 100 000 times.

This toolset will let developers created and legally sell their mobile applications created for the iPhone. In june, we should start seeing iphone applications and games with the release of the iTunes app store. The developers will choose a price and split profits 70/30 with apple.

Apple’s senior vice presedent of product marketing Philip Schiller stated:

“Developer reaction to the iPhone SDK has been incredible with more than 100,000 downloads in the first four days. Also, over one million people have watched the launch video on Apple.com, further demonstrating the incredible interest developers have in creating applications for the iPhone.”

Let’s hope big corporations will see this as a profitable source or revenue and start creating games for the iPhone. EA is already at it so others will probably follow sooner or later.

John Markoff from the New York Times published that the iPhone started out as a project for a handheld safari browser. Here’s what he said:

Apple’s multitouch technology began life not as a cellphone, but as a notepad-sized skunkworks project internally dubbed Safari Pad, run by Tim Bucher, then Apple’s head of Macintosh hardware. To his credit, Mr. Jobs seized on the technology and morphed it into the iPhone.

Knowing that the iPhone would be too expensive or too big of a phone for a large part of the apple community, Apple released the iPod Touch. It does everything the iPhone does except obviously having a phone.

The Apple Time Capsule is a wireless backup solution for Macs. It automatically backs up your computer’s hard-drive wirelessly with airport. There are 2 models available at launch:

• 500GB ($299)
• 1TB ($499)

Here are the first impressions from reviewers around the web:

• You can’t transfer an existing Time Machine backup to the Time Capsule. You must start over and redo the initial backup process.
• Initial backup is very long but you can make it faster using an ethernet cord instead of doing it wirelessly with airport.
• You cannot pause the initial backup. Even if it’s long, you must keep your computer on the whole time.
• Easy setup and it works as good as it says it does.

The Time Capsule is the perfect backup solution for laptops. While you’re on your couch browsing on safari, your computer automatically backs itself up wirelessly without you doing anything.

On february 19th, Apple dropped the price of the 1GB iPod Shuffle to 49$. This is a surprising 30$ price drop.

On the same day, Apple introduced the 2GB iPod Shuffle the 69$ This is 10$ lower than the price of the 1GB iPod Shuffle before the price drop.

At this price, Apple will be much more competitive with the low-end MP3 market.

Yesterday, when Apple released the new Macbooks and Macbook Pros, they also announced that they became the 2nd biggest music retailer in the United States. The only one in front on them is the all mighty Walmart.

Here’s a message from Apple’s vice president of iTunes, Eddy Cue:

“We’d like to thank the over 50 million music lovers who have helped the iTunes Store reach this incredible milestone. We continue to add great new features like iTunes Movie Rentals to give our customers even more reason to love iTunes.”

Let’s hope this can help Apple attract new people to Macs by selling more iPods and interesting people with the Apple way of things.

Today, Apple released the new and improved Macbooks and Macbook Pros. The new Apple laptops now have Intel Penryn processors, marketed as Intel Core 2 Duo.

Here are the key improvements:

• Faster Penryn Processors
• Bigger storage
• Double VRAM (Video RAM) (Macbook Pro only)
• New multitouch trackpad (Like Macbook Air got at its launch)

Here are the specs of the new Apple Macbook:

Here are the specs of the new Apple Macbook Pro: