The iPad arrives
 
Apple’s iPad was finally unleashed on the world last Saturday with its launch in the US. Cupertino managed to sell over 300 000 iPads on the first day of its availability, and by the fifth that figure reportedly rose to over 450 000. Most of the feedback from was good, apart from some issues with the Wi-Fi. Apple acknowledged and addressed these issues quickly, with a posting on 3 April on its user support forum, providing some solutions for the issues, with another on 5 April.  
 
iPhone OS 4 will bring multi-tasking to the iPhone, iPod Touch & iPad
 
Yesterday Apple showcased iPhone OS 4, which will be available to consumers during summer (around Q3) for the iPhone as well as iPod Touch, while making an appearance on the iPad later this year. The latest iPhone OS update will bring 100 new features to these devices, with the most important one being multi-tasking. According to Apple developers will have access to seven multi-tasking services, making it possible for more tasks to be performed in the background, with battery life and the devices’ performance not being affected too adversely. Other notable features include the ability to organise your apps by using a drag-and-drop function to move them into folders, viewing your e-mail from all your different accounts in one unified inbox and the addition of iBooks (which is already on the iPad).
 
Roomier blu-ray disks on the way
 
The Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) announced two new ‘media specialisations’ utilising Blu-ray Disk technology. The BDA said that BDXL (high capacity recordable and rewritable discs) and IH-BD (Intra-Hybrid discs) “are expected in the next few months”. The new BDXL specification will offer a write-once disk capacity of up to 128 GB and rewritable disk capacity of 100 GB. Current Blu-ray disk hold 25 GB (single layer) and 50 GB (dual layer) of data. An IH-BD disk integrates a 25 GB read-only layer and a 25 GB rewritable layer on the same disk. New hardware will be required to use BDXL or IH-BD media. 

It's all about location, location, location

In the latest Twitter newsletter from the social networking site's co-founder, Biz Stone, comes the announcement of a new location based service for Twitter. To be able to use this service to add your location info to your tweets, you must first activate it within your account settings. You'll be able to add your exact location or a general one, for example the neighbourhood or town that you're currently tweeting from. Facebook also announced a location-based feature that is said to be launching during their f8 conference that will be held on 21 April. 

New hominid fossils discovered
 
Scientist yesterday announced the discovery of two new hominid fossils in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site in South Africa, that was found with the assistance of the navigation facility and high-resolution satellite imagery in Google Earth. The two partial fossils of a young male and an adult female are between 1.78 and 1.95 million years old. A team headed by Prof. Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand have described and named the new species of hominid, Australopithecus sediba. “Sediba, which means natural spring, fountain or wellspring in Sotho, one of the 11 official languages of South Africa, was deemed an appropriate name for a species that might be the point from which the genus Homo arises,” comments Berger.