Two pieces of great news for my country, the Philippines! One is, I’m back, and the other more important one is that Engadget reports that Globe Telecom is releasing the iPhone in the Philippines!

Well, apparently not all credit goes to Globe. According to Engadget’s EIC Ryan Block, it’s actually Singapore Telecommunications which secured the rights, and is releasing it through it’s partly-owned subsidiary Globe.

According to Engadget:

Singapore Telecommunications (aka SingTel) announced that it’s secured agreements to distribute the iPhone in Singapore (on SingTel Mobile) and its partly-owned subsidiaries in Australia (on Optus), India (on Bharti Group), and the Philippines (on Globe Telecom). Vodafone’s also distributing the iPhone in India and Australia though, so we’ll have to wait until later this year to find out who gets to shoot first.”

No news as to when though, nor any other details yet, but knowing it’ll actually happen is the important thing. I’m hoping it’ll be announced at the WWDC next month.

(Thanks to Jason for the heads-up!)

UPDATE: Globe Telecom has made the announcement (tersely though; Engadget had more to say) on its website. Question now is, what’s longtime rival Smart going to do? I don’t think they’ll take this sitting down.

The rumors were true - updated iMacs, hot off the griddle! It seems the only thing they didn’t get was that it was happening a day earlier than the customary Tuesday announcement.

So what’s up? Same price, better specs! Core2Duo Penryns, faster speeds, more goodies:

• Bluetooth 2.1+EDR
• 802.11n WiFi
• Gigabit Ethernet
• built-in iSight
• 5x USB2
• Firewire 400
• Firewire 800
• 8x double-layer SuperDrive

Here’s the breakdown:

• 20-inch iMac: 2.4GHz proc, 128MB ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT (1680 x 1050), 1GB RAM, 250GB 7200RPM disk, $1,199.
• 20-inch iMac: 2.66GHz proc, 256MB ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro (1680 x 1050), 2GB RAM, 320GB 7200RPM disk, $1,499.
• 24-inch iMac: 2.8GHz proc, 256MB ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro (1920 x 1200), 2GB RAM, 320GB 7200rpm disk, $1,799.
• 24-inch iMac: 3.06GHz proc, 512MB NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS (1920 x 1200), 2GB RAM, 500GB 7200rpm disk, $2,199.

Available now. Here. Cool.

Gizmodo’s got proof!

Someone actually got an actual living, breathing Psystar Open Computing unit, that third-party hardware pseudo-Macintosh desktop and made a video of it booting up. Software Update can’t seem to figure out what it is, but it thinks it’s a Macbook Pro. Whatever it is, it’s damned fast!

See the exclusive video!

UPDATE: Psystar itself seems to want to validate itself. It just put up a video of its own on their site, although they can’t seem to shake off that cloud of seediness and smarm that’s been clinging to it from Day One, up to now. Especially now. Watch it here.

Macbook Air.

The folk from ModMyiPhone are alerting iPhone users about a malicious install that might mess up your units.

Apparently if you have jmwiki.com in your list of sources in Installer, an app called “113 prep” that purports to be an update of Erica Sadun’s utilities and implies that it prepares your unit for the 1.1.3 firmware is actually malware. When installed, the app will just say “shoes”, and when you uninstall it it takes with it important files from the /bin directory, and breaks other working apps like utilities from Ms. Sadun, and apps like sendfile.

Please do not install 113 prep and remove the JMCO source jmwiki.com from Installer.

(Via MMi)