Non-Filipino readers might find this post’s title odd, but it’s just Taglish for “I’m mobile”, which for this blogger is a clumsy play on the rumored new name for Apple’s .Mac service (and for the purposes of this blog will be referred to as DotMac, to retain the sanity of my word processor’s autocorrect feature.) It’s also a play on the current and more-than-annoying marketing campaign of local telecom provider Smart Communications called “Me na Me” presently irritating us silly here in Manila for their Smart Buddy service.

Ok. So there I go ruining the whole structure of the post just so I could have my silly title. Let’s just have it out then: According to rumors, Apple seems to be set on renaming their DotMac service, that US$99 one-year thing where you get a paltry amount of online storage and a snotty email address that ends in “mac.com” (and some other stuff), to Mobile Me. Ugh.

Dunno about you, but the fact that you can get everything DotMac is offering for free elsewhere online seems to me a testament to the lengths fanboys will go to for their mothership. (Full disclosure: I used to be suckered into this thing too, and had a DotMac account for three years or so until I wised up and saved my money instead to buy more useful things like food. And beer.) But apparently it may be time to come back to the fold.

According to many archived reports, Apple trademarked the name Mobile Mac on Jan. 5, 2006, and while much was made of it at the time as Apple folk are wont to do, nothing happened and people forgot about it. Now though, people poking through the code of the recently released 10.5.3 update of Leopard have come across considerable evidence that Apple is finally going to use the two-year-old name, presumably after the relaunching announcement to be made at Steve Jobs’ WWDC keynote on June 9.

A rose by any other name, blah blah. What’s more important is what new stuff it will offer for the hundred bucks (or however much they’ll be charging for it), and right now all we can do is make educated guesses. Obviously it will tie in with the new 3G iPhone and include stuff like push email, wireless syncing and things Blackberry fans have been enjoying for years. We’ll just have to add Mobile Me to our list of things to wait for during the keynote. If it had really useful features, I wouldn’t be averse to signing back up again and resurrecting my old DotMac address.

Which also means most of us renegade iPhone users will have to formally sign up with Globe Telecom when it finally releases the phone for my country (sometime in September, if rumors are to be believed). Obviously my non-3G first-gen kracked-and-jailbroken iPhone won’t do, so I’ll have to pony up for the new one. Life is hard. Ah, well.

(By the way, is it just me, or does Mobile Me really sound like an embarrasingly jejune name for an Apple service? It even sounds …Microsoftian, like something Gates and Ballmer might’ve thought up. Sheesh.)

[Box art mock-up via TUAW]

Many Mac users have been hoping for safer, faster Solid State Drives in their lappies ever since the Air was launched with the option. In fact, many secretly pray that SSDs become (cheaply) available with all new Macbooks, hopefully to be announced at the WWDC Jobs keynote in a few days, cost, capacity and availability notwithstanding.

But what about us with existing clunky and primitive old Macbooks and Macbook Pros? Will we be doomed to be forever looking from the sidelines, laboring under the slower, power-hungry and easily damaged old-fashioned harddrive?

Never fear, ExperCom is here!

ExperCom is offering a service that does SSD upgrades for both new and old Macbooks or Macbook Pros, at prices ranging from US$550 to US$899. Or you can buy preconfigured units directly from them at US$1649 for a white Macbook with a 60gb SSD or a Macbook Pro with a 120gb SSD at US$2649. No word if they’d do it for your tangerine toilet seat iBook G3, though.

Check out the site here. It even includes charts and explanations why SSDs will cure cancer and bring about world peace. That is, if you’re one of the few still sitting on the fence, mind-fogged by the black propropaganda being spread around by traditional harddrive manufactures that SSDs are fragile, low-capacity, expensive cr@p.

The temptation is great, but think I’ll hold off until they offer higher-capacity and cheaper SSDs - or upgrade to some future Mac altogether.

But it is something to think about, isn’t it?

FYI: folk travelling by air to or within the United States will not be allowed to carry lithium batteries, whether loose or in battery packs for equipment like laptops or cameras, in their checked-in luggage for safety reasons beginning January 1, 2008, by order of the US Department of Transportation.

Lithium batteries will have to be inserted into the hardware they’re meant for and be handcarried to pass. If loose they’ll have to be enclosed in a ziplock plastic bag or remain sealed in their original packaging, and stowed in your carry-on luggage, with a limit of two lithium batteries to a passenger.  (Do they differentiate between single batteries and battery packs? Do coin-shaped lithium batteries count? Are computer batteries and camera batteries counted together or separately? Hmmm.)

According to the Federal Aviation Administration, if lithium batteries catch fire in the cargo hold, current built-in extinguishing and safety measures won’t be able to deal with it. This sort of situation is widely speculated as the cause of a fire at an airport in Philadelphia in 2006.

Bummer for us road warriors who like to carry extras.

(Via The New York Times)

It should be a no-brainer prediction that one of the high-capacity optical formats will be included in an impending iteration of iMac (nice alliteration, huh?) or other new Mac, but its still anyone’s guess which of the two warring standards Steve-O will side with, and we won’t likely know until the next Macworld Keynote. (Blu-Ray is emerging as the dominant format, but you never really know with notorious contrarian Jobs.) But for those portable Mac users with ginormous storage needs, you don’t have to wait (well, maybe a month): Fastmac’s got a solution.

Fastmac announced yesterday their new slim, low-profile, slot-loading 2x Blu-Ray burner upgrade for Mac laptops. Now Mac users can enjoy burning 50GB worth of files at twice the speed, or watch a growing number commercially available BD movies like PS3 owners can.

The new burner is also Adobe certified, and supports Blu-Ray video disk authoring on Mac OS X. It works with the following models:

iBook G4
iMac G5
iMac Intel
MacBook Pro (17-inch)
Mac mini
PowerBook G3 Pismo
PowerBook G4 Titanium (667 Mhz or higher)
PowerBook G4 Aluminum

The burner works with Roxio Toast 8 Titanium or Adobe Premiere CS3 for Macs. It’ll be shipping within the month but is already available for pre-order on the FastMac site for a cool US$1K special introductory offer.

(Crossposted on Mobile Philippines)