As you may have noticed, Apple unveiled some new goodies yesterday. As you may not have noticed, I’ve written about two of them.

First up, FaceTime video calling in the iPod touch:

The big question is whether people want to see one another on the phone. I think the older generation hate the idea. I certainly do, but that’s because I have what’s best described as a face for radio and some really ugly friends.

And then, the sad tale of the UK Apple TV.

Badly dubbed adverts really annoy me. Faintly sinister firms make an advert for shoes or yoghurts or incomprehensible children’s toys in Germany, and instead of filming a new version for the UK they just do a half-arsed bit of dubbing that doesn’t even attempt to match the mouths to the sounds they’re supposed to be making. “Oh, who cares,” the advertisers think. “It’s only the UK.”

The Apple TV is a bit like that.

Doesn’t time fly? As you may recall, Windows 95 was a good operating system surrounded by some bad behaviour.

In 1998 consumer advocate Ralph Nader wrote a devastating critique that accused Microsoft of “suffocating” the PC industry and argued that “the victims of Microsoft’s monopolistic activities aren’t just the companies that go belly-up; they are the consumers who pay high prices to use mediocre and unreliable products.”

It’s bleakly amusing to note that when the (then) Microsoft-owned Slate magazine responded to Nader, it argued that “in the browser wars, Microsoft faces a formidable array of opponents–Sun and Oracle, to name just two–and, after two years, it still lags behind Netscape even though IE generally gets better reviews than Navigator.”

Back in January, I wrote this:

I also have a £702/year newspaper habit. Imagine if I could come downstairs in the morning, grab the iPad, and use it as a newspaper. It’s big enough so there’s still the serendipity of seeing articles you might otherwise miss, and it’s digital enough that I can get my news for free (or nearly free, depending on what the Guardian, Sunday Times etc do about online content).

Now that I’ve spent several weeks sitting on a sofa with only an iPad for company, is it a worthy replacement for print?

Not yet.

NYT Editors’ Choice: Nifty but short

I’ve found newspapers on the iPad a curiously annoying affair. They’re nice enough in the browser but irritating to use – endlessly having to return to the back button is, literally, a pain – and I’m spending much more time in Instapaper than I am on the websites on which the articles are actually published.

RSS isn’t working for me so far either. While apps such as the sublime RSS reader Reeder are good at what they do, the feeds themselves can be irritating as the same story follows you across multiple sections. The Guardian is particularly bad for this, with stories appearing in, say, the Media, G2 and Main News feeds over the course of the day.

Other newspapers don’t even try with RSS: they have headline-only feeds that are pretty much pointless. Such feeds are slower and more annoying than just visiting the website in the first place.

Mind you, they’re not as bad as the tech sites that publish a headline in their feed which takes you to… the headline! Click here to read more! Here’s the headline again, with a link to the actual site it came from this time! Sites that do this, or publications such as Wired whose iPad apps don’t render text – text! – legibly hate you. It’s that simple.

But I digress.

Flipboard: Meh. Maybe I follow the wrong people

There are a few interesting apps out there, but there are a few disappointing ones too. Flipboard is ok if you like the idea of a paper made only from the links your acquaintances are posting on Facebook and Twitter (I don’t). The much hyped Pulse newsreader excelled at showing the stories I didn’t want to read and hiding the ones I did. The (London) Times app is ten quid a month for a paper I don’t particularly like in its daily incarnation. And The Guardian iPhone app hasn’t made its way across to the iPad yet. Reuters News Pro is quite nice, if a bit newswire-y, BBC News is a bit TV-y and the Huffington Post is too Huffington Post-y.

So far my favourite is the New York Times Editors Choice app. It’s very short (it’s free) but it delivers a lovely reading experience and the serendipity of a good old fashioned bit of newsprint. I could do without the interrupting ads, mind you.

Times for iPad: lots of potential. It isn’t the Times newspaper.

The one app I’m crossing my fingers about isn’t any of the ones I’ve already mentioned, though. It’s Times, the iPad version of a popular OS X RSS reader. The iPad version has a lovely interface, but unfortunately a wee bug affecting many of the feeds I want to use means I haven’t been able to use it for protracted periods yet. I’ll get back to you on that one.

Anyone else exploring print alternatives on the iPad? I’d love to know what you’ve found.

Are you getting the impression that I’m not entirely keen on Facebook? Facebook Questions is its latest attempt to be like the AOL of the 90s, but more annoying and evil.

It’s a simple enough plan: make every single link on Google point to a Facebook page. Where’s the best place to buy a T-31 Modulator? Ask Facebook. What’s the best time of year to go turtle punching? Ask Facebook. How can I tell if I have a horrible bum disease? Ask Facebook. Have we always been at war with Eurasia? Ask Facebook.

Never mind inventing a slightly shinier battery charger: Apple’s got big plans. I think they include giving Macs the iOS operating system, or something awfully like it.

It’s not just the Mac, either. I’m willing to bet that it’s coming to the Apple TV, too.

Apps would make Steve Jobs’ hobby much more appealing, and it would mean that all of Apple’s consumer products – iPod, iPhone, iMac, iPad and Apple TV – would share the same interface, the same apps and the same data.

After all my whingeing about the catastrophic effect iOS 4 has on the iPhone 3G’s performance, I’ve become quite adept at downgrading it: I tried 4.0 and downgraded, then 4.0.1, and had to downgrade that. There are a few how-tos out there but I felt that some were too complex and that there were a few issues that weren’t being raised. So here’s my take on it: how to downgrade your 3G from iOS 4.0 or 4.0.1 to OS 3.1.3.

We can’t stress this enough: the downgrade will wipe your iPhone, and once you’re back on OS 3.1.3 you can’t restore data from backups made in iOS 4.0 or 4.0.1. That means if something hasn’t been copied from your iPhone to your computer and you’ve added it since upgrading to 4.0 or 4.0.1, you’ll lose it permanently.

Everybody loves the Old Spice viral campaign. It’s fresh, it’s funny, and it isn’t selling any more Old Spice. In fact, sales have fallen. Oops.

While there is little doubt about the viral hit’s  popularity – the official version has racked up 12.2 million impressions on YouTube - sales of Red Zone After Hours Body Wash have fallen by 7%.

Maybe the problem is, as Jezebel suggests, that it takes more than a funny viral campaign to shift many years of negative connotations, or that the target audience of young women simply don’t buy shower gel for their boyfriends.

The YouTube response vids were still inspired, though.

Update, 25 July: PR Week reports an overall 107% increase in Old Spice body wash sales, based on figures from Procter & Gamble.

Me, on the iPhone 4 Antennagate:

Apple has arguably the most loyal fans of any firm, and if it had addressed their concerns earlier and got them on its side, this supposed scandal would have remained a minor kerfuffle. Look how quickly and how widely fake Jobs emails – “it’s just a phone” – spread. A real one sent to every Apple ID could have stopped the whole thing before it started.