There aren’t many iPhones left, as many note, but if you do find one and you want to purchase it, you’re going to need a credit card.

It’s not for the activation or anything of that sort, but Apple requires you to use a marked form of payment for the transaction to help eliminate scalpers, a problem it’s had between itself and AT&T.

According to Apple it does this to make sure that whoever is purchasing the iPhone is the person who’s activating it, so that they can be informed of the policies, notably that not signing up for an AT&T iPhone plan voids the warranty.

A guy in upstate New York found this out the hard way when he went to buy an iPhone with cash and was told that’s not how it works. He was embarrassed, as he doesn’t have a credit card. Sure it’s odd, but many people don’t have a credit card for fear of identity theft and other privacy issues.

Guys: this TOTALLY means there’s going to be a new iPhone next week. I don’t care what you say: they wouldn’t pull the hottest device since the ventricle stent and not have something lined up for release… unless Apple is going out of business, Crazy Eddie style. What think ye?

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This smartpen lets you take notes and record those notes for later perusal. You tap the ink and it plays back the audio recorded at that moment.
David Pogue shows this quite handily and even harshes on the bugs he found in the pen. Good stuff and a great way to spend Mother’s Day weekend avoiding the phone.

A Brooklyn, NY startup named miShare, has created a product, which could bring back the mating ritual of mixtape-swapping (but a modern version of it). The gadget allows you to swap music, photos, and anything else you can fit on your iPod.

Instead wasting a CD on a paternal love interest, you simply attach your iPods to the miShare to transfer your mix. Depending on their iPod and setup, they may or may not be able to listen or view the files right away. They may have to wait until they get home, since it swaps the files to the disk area of the iPod. The miShare works with all Mini, Nano, 3G, 4G, Video 5th Generation, and Classic 6th Generation iPod models.

The device retails for $99 and is available now.

Following the lead of Nissan and NEC, which both recently have started down this track, the German carmaker is looking into lithium-ion batteries to improve its hybrids and electrics. It sounds like the Nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) batteries in their cars are both heavier and more toxic than the alternative.

The Li-ion batteries would lower the weight of the car by hundreds of pounds, improving handling and mileage. You’ve already got them in your phones, media players, and so on, but adapting them for the high-capacity, high-throughput application of powering a car is a serious endeavor — which must be why Sanyo is pledging nearly a billion dollars over the next couple years to developing the technology.

So an OpenBSD developer got an email the other day saying SAMBA was having trouble talking to a DOS file system. The developer thought it was a problem with SAMBA until he found that there was a workaround in place to fix issues with some BSD code. He did a little digging and found that the code had been in place since 1983 — meaning that pretty much every BSD system out there, including OSX probably, has had this Rip van Winkle of a bug sitting in it this whole time.

The fix was straightforward and you can find it here. I doubt Apple will be releasing an updates because of this, but it goes to show that it’s still a jungle out there sometimes. Here’s to another 25 years of squashing bugs.

With just around a month to go before the iPhone 2.0 software hits, does RIM have reason to sweat? Apple pundit extraordinaire and co-creator of the Markdown syntax, John Gruber, thinks they might.

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PHOTO CREDIT: presta

Simply amazing.

Solid state drives have always excelled in power economy and heat levels, but have faltered in the price-to-performance ratio, and even lagged behind in sheer performance by some measures. That last complaint is valid no longer. Memoright’s high-speed drives operate at far higher speeds than other SSDs on the market, and show nearly double the performance of the closest competitors in the spinning disk category where it counts — or more. With four 32GB modules in RAID 0 configuration, the Memorights showed read and write speeds of 450MB/S and 323MB/s, respectively. That’s madness, friend. Their I/O counts are off the charts as well, I’m talking like 20 times HDD performance.

It’s not a total shutout, of course; the WD VelociRaptor is comparable on several measures but gets its ass handed to it on just as many. And it’s worth noting that the Memoright modules cost fully ten times as much ($1000 per 32GB). But when Tom’s Hardware goes this gaga over something, you know it’s worth the cash if you’ve got it.

The take-away message here is that the performance gap between SSD and HDD has been decisively closed; it’s now just a matter of getting that price down. Man, I can’t stop thinking about that 0.45GB/s read speed. I’m freaking out here.

Hey CrunchGear readers! Let’s give a shout out to our Fearless Leader, who’s celebrating his 33rd birthday today.

John is the rubber cement that keeps CrunchGear going. He’s the cheese to our macaroni. He’s the glowstick to our sweaty, high-on-ecstasy raver. He’s the Dre to our Snoop. He’s the Hawaiian Punch in our lunchboxes. The Wayne to our Garth. The fire to our caveman — we think he’s magic.

Happy birthday, big guy. Let us know when you’re sober.