Weekly high-tech hot topics in the blogs: iPhone 4 pre-order problems, Microsoft Kinect, Office 2010

(2010 Apple Inc.)

Hot topics in the tech blogs for the week ending June 18 include problematic iPhone 4 pre-ordering and one-day sales records, Microsoft Kinect, Office 2010 becomes available, and YouTube takes video editing into the cloud.

iPhone 4 pre-order problems, security breaches

In the USA, Apple and network provider AT&T opened up pre-orders for the iPhone 4 on June 15. Tech fans rushed to get their orders in and both Apple and AT&T experienced major problems with the online pre-ordering process. Blogs reported that customers quickly became frustrated by having to attempt the ordering processes multiple times before successfully placing an order. Many consumers abandoned the process after hours in front of their computer resulted in no success. Tech sites also started reporting that some AT&T customers' orders "were charged and sent to the wrong people" and others received emails saying their completed order had been canceled due to lack of stock.

Pre-sales of 600,000 iPhone 4's on first day
"Even With Pre-Order Failures, iPhone 4 Sells Out In Under A Day" read a headline from tech blog TechCrunch. Apple was keen to explain the chaos around the pre-order "disaster" too, and provided bloggers with an official statement that said, "Yesterday Apple and its carrier partners took pre-orders for more than 600,000 of Apple's new iPhone 4. It was the largest number of pre-orders Apple has ever taken in a single day and was far higher than we anticipated, resulting in many order and approval system malfunctions."

Microsoft Kinect
Microsoft's project Natal was officially re-branded as "Kinect" for Xbox 360 when the company provided further details about the controller-free gaming device at the E3 gaming expo in Los Angeles this week. Bloggers were hungry to hear about the price of the console add-on which converts people's movements into on-screen actions, but were told they would have to wait until August.

Microsoft Office 2010 released internationally
The latest version of Microsoft's productivity suite, Office 2010 went on sale in retail stores around the world this week. Microsoft played down the significance of the new Office cloud-based features, but bloggers made a point to focus on them (and the company's decision to scrap upgrade pricing options for existing users), saying that Microsoft would have to quickly learn how to compete on the web if it didn't want to lose additional market share to Google's online productivity suite.

YouTube video editor
YouTube went live with a cloud-based video editing application that let consumers quickly and easily edit their videos on the web without having to download and install video-editing software on their PC. Ars Technica called it the video editor "your grandma could use" while 9to5mac called Google's "answer to iMovie," Apple's proprietary video-editing software.