With mixed emotions Ben Kelly, Simon Dingle and Samantha Beckbessinger discuss memories of Steve Jobs who passed away this week, the iPhone 4S breaking pre-order records, Windows 8 and the future of Nokia, the BlackBerry and Seacom outages, India’s $35 Aakash tablet, debunking the BBM rumour, and much more – including our picks of the week.

Is there still hope for BlackBerry? Can Lenovo make a dent in the tablet market? We don’t know the answers to these questions, but are willing to speculate wildly. This week Andy Hadfield, Simon Dingle and Steven Ambrose discuss the Lenovo K1 tablet, Samsung pulling the Tab 7.7 from its stand at IFA, the Amazon tablet, app stores and operators, iOS 5, the launch of Telkom Business Mobile, Evernote acquiring Skitch, Google shutting down old projects, and more…

On the eve of the World Cup 2010 kickoff in South Africa Leo Laporte and I discussed technology at the tournament and how South Africa has been upgraded for the biggest event in human history. We talked about 3D television, stadium bandwidth, Google StreetView, social media and gigapixel image technology, amongst other things. Check out the video above for our full discussion.

Sitting back and reflecting over the past two years makes me realise how lucky we are to have enjoyed the support that we have from our families, friends and fans. The show owes its survival to the support of a group of the most awesome people I’ve met – but more about them later.

Since we intend to broadcast every one of our shows live from now on we are committed to starting on time at our usual 4pm (UTC+2) slot every Friday. This is not an ideal time, but is the only point at which we can get most of our regular panel together. We are looking at other potential broadcast slots and might announce a scheduling change soon.

On the technical side we had to work on a shoestring budget as the podcast is yet to make any profit. We’re planning to change that soon, and the intention was always to grow this slowly and make it scalable for when the economies of the local market align with our vision for broadcasting online in it.

That in mind, we chose to broadcast the audio-only version of the show using an Icecast server that runs out of the data centre of our bandwidth sponsors, Internet Solutions.

Icecast is an awesome piece of software and ideal for our needs, providing a standardised stream that is widely supported and enables us to cater for thousands of concurrent listeners while providing the audio on local (South African) bandwidth.

To get the audio from our “studio” to the Icecast server we use an excellent piece of software from Rogue Amoeba called Nicecast. I’m a big fan of Rogue Amoeba’s software in general, and we use Audio Hijack Pro to do complex recordings of the show that require Skype calls to be supported.

Using Nicecast in conjunction with Audio Hijack Pro also has the advantage of us being able to stream and record audio on the same computer. And by now you would probably have realised that we run Macs end-to-end in our makeshift studio, although we will likely use a PC to drive our video setup in the future and we are experimenting with software solutions for live video mixing since we can’t afford to get something like a Tricaster just yet.

The rest of our setup is standard stuff. We use Shure microphones and a simple 8-channel Behringer mixer. Our live video is streamed using Ustream and the built-in webcam on a Mabook Pro. This suffices given the limit on bandwidth that we face, both for our upstream and the average downstream of our viewers. The audio for the video stream is provided from our main mixer, allowing us to bring in Skype callers.

So video is on international bandwidth and audio on local, which we feel is a good enough solution for now.

The first broadcast went relatively well and raised some good ideas for how we could make it better in the future.

We also have some new office and studio space, thanks to the awesomeness of Don Packett and Richard Mulholland at Thunk! Perspective Lab, and we will be kitting this out over the next few weeks using clever tech to get around our tiny budget.

We made fun of that fact that we don’t have a studio at the moment by packing heaps of boxes around an old coffee table that we broadcast from last Friday, pretending that we were at Brett’s mom’s house, in her storeroom. Apparently some of live viewers took us seriously on that.

The ZA Tech Show started as a group of technology journalists drinking beer and talking about technology on a Friday afternoon and we plan to keep it that way, preserving the camaraderie and raw, honest discussion that has made the show as popular as it is.

We believe that the future holds big things for the show and we look forward to sharing that with our listeners, and now viewers, live =)

Brett Haggard, Ben Kelly, Duncan McLeod and Jon Tullett are the crazy f*#kers that started this thing with me and it was great to have them all back on the show for episode 100. Since then Toby Shapshak has become a regular on the show and deserves a special mention.

Since starting the show we’ve also added Candice Jones, Samantha Perry and Aki Anastasiou to our list of occasional guests, along with Will Hahn who dials in from the USA every now and then and who has offered us amazing support.

Mark Shuttleworth, Stafford Masie, Mike Stopforth, Dwayne Bailey, Saul Kropman and other guests have appeared on the show over the last two years and added massive value for our listeners. And, away from the mic, we’ve been blown away by the awesomeness of the guys at Thunk! (mentioned above), Emerging Media Communications, Lenovo, Tribeca, Puruma, Text 100, Microsoft, Nokia and other companies that have come out in support of the podcast in various ways.

We also owe a serious debt of gratitude to the guys at Internet Solutions who have offered amazing support and who sponsor our local bandwidth. Jason Bronkhorst and Charl Malherbe at Infiltrate Media have also been legendary and designed both the ZA Tech Show and ZA Car Show logos.

I’d also like to thank our friends at the TWiT Network in Petaluma CA, especially Dane Golden and Leo Laporte who I consider mentors in the game of online broadcasting. Without knowing it they’ve provided inspiration and know-how for our show via their online knowledge-base and, more recently, they allowed us to broadcast over their wildly popular channel from the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Finally, I must thank my business partner and friend Craig Rodney who glues this whole thing together from a business perspective.

It’s been a wild ride and it ain’t over yet. Here’s to the next 100!

• Gartner Symposium.
• Microsoft TechEd – Windows 7, Live Mesh and all things MS.
• Screens and the rumoured Apple tablet.
• The Nikon S1000pj camera with built-in projector.
• The evolution of interfaces.
• Mobile broadband.
• Eric Schmid leaving the Apple board.

And more…

Grab the episode from the ZA Tech Show website, or subscribe to the podcast in iTunes.

In this episode we look at:

• Telecommunications in South Africa post Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri.
• Will South Africa’s electric car, the Joule, ever hit the road?
• The digital music price war.
• DRM, piracy and bandwidth dynamics.
• Telkom’s mobile offering and restructuring.
• 97% of all email is spam, according to Microsoft.
• The ups and downs of BlackBerry.
• ARM-based netbooks.
• The netbook conundrum.
• Wii production costs go down, but prices hold fast.

And more… get it now.

Topics discuss include:

• Netbook price discrepancies. Jon bought an Aspire One in the UK for next to nothing. Why are we paying through our teeth in SA?
• Tweaks and hacks for netbooks.
• Neotel’s NeoFlex Data offering being launched last week. We talk caps, prices and practical use.
• Informal collusion in South African tech pricing.
• We dive into Windows 7 Beta and Internet Explorer 8.
• Vista Service Pack 2 delayed.
• A new Worm threatens the world’s computers. Apparently.
• The Macintosh platform finally has a real virus doing the round. Again – apparently.
• MacOS X developer group CocoaHeads now has a South African chapter.
• Application roll-out on smartphones and the BlackBerry app store.
• Canonical is reaching its goal of becoming self-sustaining.
• Some of the Tech in the Obama inauguration, courtesy of CNN.

And much more… grab it over here.

• Why Google didn’t do a doodle for Madiba’s birthday.
• The HP 2133 sub-notebook. Or ‘netbook’, if you will. Brett has one to play with.
• Nokia’s Music store launching in South Africa.
• The Apple versus Psystar court case.
• The WOW Glider court case.
• Nintendo’s Wii taking the lead in US console sales.
• Neotel launching its enterprise services.
• Apple blocking VoIP on the new 3G iPhone.
• Updates on the Viacom vs. Youtube case.
• BT rolling out fibre in the UK.

And more…
Get it over here.

• The 3G iPhone along with educated guesses as to when we will see it in SA, and at what price.
• The launch of Apple’s MobileMe service.
• The Ace Aspire One sub-notebook and Eee PC killer.
• Acer’s other market movements, including its launch of a gaming division.
• Desktop Linux.
• Red Hat’s patent achievements.
• Impi Linux, enterprise Linux and competition in the open source space.
• The launch of Firefox 3.
• Plurk.
• Adium X – now with Facebook Chat support.
• Updates on the Apple IMC grey-import saga and Apple’s seeming disregard for developing markets.
• The poo-flinging between Altech and IS.

Get it by clicking here.

Vodacom has confirmed that the iPhone will arrive in South Africa on July 20 2008 as part of the ten-country deal that Vodafone has signed with Apple to bring the Jesus phone (so titled as a result of its committed following) to South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, India and other territories.

Australia will be first to benefit from the Vodafone deal, receiving the iPhone on June 29. Vodafone is a majority shareholder in South Africa’s Vodacom.

Today also marks a much anticipated announcement by Apple CEO Steve Jobs of the next-generation iPhone which he is set to unveil at the annual Apple Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC). It is expected that the new iPhone will come in a variety of colours and with 3G connectivity, integrated GPS and other new features. South Africa will undoubtedly receive this version of the device.

We discussed the arrival of the iPhone in South Africa as well as other expected announcements from WWDC in episode 15 of ZA Tech Show, a podcast I host.