No! It's a magical leopluradon, Charlie!

If this doesn’t mean anything to you, you may want to check out the Charlie The Unicorn YouTube video.

The delay arose after Cupertino, California-based Apple made design changes before the Lunar New Year, according to a report by Vincent Chen and Alison Chen, analysts at Yuanta. Jill Tan, an Apple spokeswoman in Hong Kong, declined to comment on the report. Edmund Ding, a spokesman for Hon Hai, didn’t answer calls to his Taiwan and China mobile phones.

“Our checks suggest new issues are being encountered with the new production and it is taking time to resolve them,” said Chen in the report. “As a number of Android 3.0 tablets are being launched in April and May, the delay in iPad 2 shipments may give the Android camp a brief window of opportunity.’’

Hon Hai, the Taipei-based contract manufacturer for Apple, dropped 3.1 percent to NT$110.50 in Taipei trading as of 12:36 p.m. local time, set for the lowest since Dec. 2.

A two-month delay in introducing the iPad could lower the tablet computer’s shipments to 23 million units this year, as compared with the brokerage’s current forecast of 30.6 million, according to the report.

The iPad, introduced in April, accounted for 17 percent of sales last quarter. The company has sold more than 15 million iPads so far, Vice President Eddy Cue said on Feb 2. The iPhone is Apple’s top-selling product, accounting for 39 percent of revenue last fiscal year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Faster Chips

Apple started producing an updated version of the iPad, the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month citing unidentified people familiar with the matter. The new version is thinner, lighter, has more memory and uses faster chips than its predecessor, the newspaper said. It also has a front-facing camera that would enable videoconferencing, the Journal said.

Samsung Electronics Co., HTC Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. are also offering tablets to compete with Apple. Global shipments of tablet devices will more than double this year, led by Apple and Google Inc.’s Android-based models, according to researcher IDC Corp.

The iPad faces intensifying competition from Android tablets made by Samsung, Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. and Acer Inc. The Apple product accounted for 75 percent of global tablet shipments last quarter, according to research firm Strategy Analytics. Android tablets captured 22 percent of the market.

To contact the reporter on this story: Weiyi Lim in Singapore at wlim26@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Young-Sam Cho at ycho2@bloomberg.net Darren Boey at dboey@bloomberg.net .

Find out more about Bloomberg for iPhone: http://m.bloomberg.com/iphone/

I bought mine 4 years ago. it’s a Macbook Pro Core Duo 2.16, 2gb and I upgraded the HDD from 120gb to 500gb about a year ago…. So when one appeared on Ebay at a reasonable price, it looked like exactly the same spec and I bought it.

Anyway – I did a clean installation of Snow Leopard and connected to my Belkin N1 Vision wireless router which is an absolutely awesome router if you have 50mb Virgin Broadband. Whereas my old Macbook was blisteringly fast…. this new Ebay one seemed to perform like a dead dog savaging a sheep. The connection speed went up and down erratically and at times it wouldn’t connect at all just giving me a ‘Connection Timeout Message’

Belkin N Vision Rocks!!!

I tried a number of Internet speed tests and finally settled on the Giganews one because it was quick and easy to do – and I could run the test several times a second without answering lots of stupid questions.

Whereas my connection gave a healthy average speed of around 34000. Hers kept bouncing between zero and 10000Kbps and frequently freezing up altogether. In short it wasn’t a fun way to surf the Internet.

Anyway – to avoid further digression, I eventually checked the “About This Mac” page and found that her Macbook had a Atheros 5424: 2.1.14.5 whereas mine had an Atheros 5416: 2.1.14.15 – The difference being that hers only supported 802.11 a/b/g whereas the 5416 supported a/b/g/n.

So for a quick solution, I bought a Sumvision SVW322U for the Mac from Amazon and plugged it in….

Whose bright idea was it to use a Mini CD for Mac Drivers?

…And it didn’t work. The CD that came with it was one of those ridiculous mini-CD’s which doesn’t even work in Macbook or an iMac anyway. So I decided to Google for the drivers.. and nothing came up (apart from loads of affiliates trying to flog me one ) – In the end, I gave up and rummaged to find an old Toshiba Portege R700
that would take one a mini CD and copied the drivers to a USB stick.

Anyway – I copied the drivers to the Macbook and it worked, but the drivers were quite old and the method of connection somewhat primitive compared to the slick Aiport Icon at the top. However – I could not identify the driver, and it appears that the Sumvision SVW322U is just a rebranded version of Ralink RT2780 and you can download mac drivers for Sumvision SVW322U here.

The new drivers work a treat and now Magda’s laptop is performing very nicely. In fact, I’m even writing this blog post on her machine. It’s amazing that the only difference between her machine and mine was the WiFi and what a difference that makes.

Broadcom BCM4321

The only downside to using  USB Wireless N Sumvision SVW322U is that it sticks out of the side of the machine. As such, I have taken a gamble and ordered a Broadcom BCM4321 Mini-PCI Express internal card from Taiwan (was around £14 with the delivery charges) – I’m hoping that I can replace the crappy Atheros card with the Broadcom and not have to have a USB thingy sticking out.

It hasn’t arrived yet.

It seems pretty good. It integrates with bit.ly and posts my blog posts to twitter… what more could I ask for.