No-money-down mortgage financing is back. Doesn’t that ring a bell? Isn’t it one of the things that got us into our ongoing real estate quagmire causing thousands of foreclosures, sending home values crashing and crippling the finances of many homeowners with upside-down mortgages? Call it déjà vu or old wine in a new bottle, but you heard it right. Zero-down mortgages are back in fashion, but with a twist.

These mortgages are being offered to wealthy home buyers that have substantial assets. In order to qualify for these loans, prospective homeowners are required to pledge two forms of collateral, including a house and a percentage of the individual’s investment portfolio.

While many of these clients have various investments from which they could make money available for down payments, they may not be interested in liquidating them according to Market Watch. So by using these available assets as collateral in addition to the house, the potential home buyer can obtain 100% financing while continuing to let their investments grow and earn interest. In essence they can have the cake and eat it too.

There are a few reasons why this type of financing is making a comeback. One is the continued availability of historically low borrowing rates. Another factor is the strong stock market which continues to rise despite poor economic indicators such as a weak dollar, unabated federal deficits, high unemployment and the $16+ trillion national debt. Borrowers of these loans are hedging their bets on a higher return on their investments against the low mortgage rates. They can also get additional benefits such as no tax on capital gains and in some cases, qualify for mortgage-interest deductions as well.

Banks that offer these loans claim that they are a lot safer than similar loans of the past. History however has a way of repeating itself. All good intentions can go terribly wrong over time if minor compromises are made along the way by any stakeholder. We have still not recovered from the robo-signing indiscretions and the negligence of lending procedures that landed us in the prevailing mess. Let’s just hope that banks have gotten their acts together this time around instead of learning it the hard way all over again. Only time will tell if this new flavor of 100% mortgage financing will help or hurt the housing market.

Tumblr is a microblogging platform and a social media network. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog. Tumblr has over 91 million blogs and 41 billion posts to date. It is very popular with young adults.

Tumblr lets you effortlessly share anything including text, photos, quotes, links, music, and videos from your browser, phone, desktop, email or wherever you happen to be. Much of the website’s features are accessed from the “dashboard” interface, where the option to post content and posts of followed blogs appear.

Young renters and potential home buyers are more likely to use Tumblr than any other social media for locating an apartment or home. Here’s why real estate professionals cannot afford to ignore this platform. Tumblr has an 85% user retention rate, compared to 40% for Twitter.

If you are a property manager and if you are new to blogging, your first choice for starting a blog ought to be Tumblr rather than WordPress. While WordPress is a robust and excellent platform, it can be a bit frustrating for people that are new to blogging or are not very tech savvy because it offers a plethora of widgets and great features, some of which require a lot of time and patience to figure out.

If you use mac computers or any Apple products you will love the user experience of Tumblr. Its design is instinctive and elegant. It offers myriads of free and paid themes that are professional and highly customizable. It also allows you to design and upload your own theme and use a custom domain.

You can easily showcase your listings and rental properties, thanks to Tumblr’s user-friendly dashboard. Since Tumblr is a picture-centric platform, you have a much higher probability of reaching your target audience and getting their attention. You can add large-sized pictures of high quality and offer key details in short paragraphs. The younger generation likes to get their information in bite-sized text that’s peppered with a lot of audio-visual content.

Posting your text and uploading pictures and videos is extremely easy. You can do this via your desktop PC or any web-enabled gadget like a tablet or smartphone. Just like Twitter’s re-tweeting feature, Tumblr users can reblog content from other posts.

Why wait? Create your Tumblr account today and start blogging in style like a pro.

Happy New Year ya’ll! 2012 is history and it’s time to look forward to 2013 in terms of the housing market outlook and predictions. Many experts are predicting a real estate recovery in 2013, but they are also quick to caution that the recovery would be moderate at best. But there is general consensus that 2012 was perhaps the rock bottom for most markets throughout the country, and the glimmering signs of light at the end of the tunnel are real.

With 16 million plus foreclosures in the past five years since the crash of 2008, any prediction of a recovery, no matter how anemic, was a good enough reason to pop the champagne on New Year’s Day. But it is still a long way from what’s considered as healthy growth.

Thousands of homeowners are still under water, with the loan amounts they owe being greater than the value of their homes. In many markets however, homeowners with upside-down loans have recovered from that position due to rising home values.

Since adversity and opportunity go hand-in-hand, investors have been having a gala time gobbling up properties on the cheap and the numbers do all the talking. According to RealtyTrac, 1.2 million properties were acquired by investors in 2011, as compared to 749,000 in 2010. These numbers are expected to be higher this year.

According to a recent survey by Trulia, consumer optimism for 2013 is high. 61 percent of the 2,000 respondents predicted that home prices in their local market would rise next year, 58 percent believe that it would take 10 years or less to return to the pre-crash values, and about 80 percent of renters said they will buy a home in the future.

There are many signs and statistics that confirm a real recovery. Home inventories continue to fall. San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, Denver, Phoenix, San Diego, Los Angeles and the D.C. area, have all seen inventories fall below a 3-month supply.

The nation’s largest homebuilder D.R. Horton reported 2 consecutive quarters of profits that beat estimates by analysts, with the recent one being as much as 225 percent higher. Their total sales were increased by 28 percent, new orders by 19 percent and backlog by 17 percent. Similarly, the second-largest home builder in the country Lennar Corp exceeded analyst earning expectations by 100 percent. Their total sales rose 30 percent; new orders grew by 33 percent and backlog by 39 percent.

According to Clear Capital, a company that provides real estate data and analysis, home prices increased by 4.9 percent nationwide, and the median price of existing homes jumped by a whopping $14,000, to $185,000, at the end of September.

As often stated, all real estate is local. While many major cities have shown a definite improvement in their housing markets, some like Atlanta have declined further. Median home prices have gone below $100,000 in metro Atlanta and are expected to decline further this year.

There are positive signs all over, but only time will tell if the real estate recovery we are currently seeing in many parts of the county is sustainable.

Till the mid-2000’s, Black Friday – the Friday after Thanksgiving Day, kicked off the shopping season for the holidays. Brick and mortar retailers were the only choice and storekeepers opened their doors at 5am, and herds of voracious shoppers would almost beat Olympic running speed records to dash to the aisles and score some (or all) of the unbelievable early bird steals.

Black Friday’s monopoly was shattered in 2005 when online merchants got into the action because broadband Internet speeds increased substantially to foster rapid ecommerce transactions in large volumes. Consumers that disliked freezing themselves by standing in long lines overnight, and the subsequent stampede to grab door-busters which would be gone by the time they managed to get into the stores, loved the idea of shopping on the Internet in their PJs from their warm and cozy homes.

The term Cyber Black Friday was coined for the online version of Black Friday. Online sales have been seeing double digit growths since 2006. But online merchants wanted a bigger share of the pie and they didn’t like the idea of competing with their brick and mortar brethren. They created their own version of Black Friday on the Monday immediately following Thanksgiving Day and called it Cyber Monday. This gave online merchants exclusive attention of consumers and enticed them with sweeter deals which in some cases were better than the ones on Black Friday. In 2010, consumers spent over a $1 Billion on Cyber Monday and the sales figures continue to head up.

Traditional retailers fought back by matching online prices and also advanced their opening hours to as early as 3am. Over the past two years, they have taken the game to a new level by opening their doors at midnight. They went one step further and started the trend of Black Thursday in 2011 by keeping their stores open on Thanksgiving Day, and their online counterparts followed suite by offering, you guessed it…Cyber Black Thursday. But wait there’s more. This year, Wal-Mart, Sears and Kmart will begin their Black Friday sales at 8pm on Thanksgiving Day, while Target and Toys “R” Us will be opening at 9pm.

Will anyone be surprised if they come up with Black Wednesday next year? Heck, why not go all the way and have Black Thanksgiving Week? The U.S. economy would definitely appreciate the favor.

If reading this whetted your shopping appetite, here are a few websites that provide details of deals on Black and Cyber Thursday/Friday and Cyber Monday.

http://www.theblackfriday.com/
http://blackfriday.com/
http://bfads.net/
http://blackfriday.gottadeal.com/
http://www.cybermonday2012.com/

One final thought. Let’s not forget the main thing – Have a Happy Thanksgiving!

Regardless of whether the Republican challenger Mitt Romney or the Democratic incumbent Barack Obama becomes the next President, the fact of the matter is, the American public will expect a strong leadership role from the next White House occupant about many financial issues facing the nation.

Although there are signs that the real estate is making a slow but sure come back, the country needs a tremendous boost in terms of reducing unemployment and putting the economy on a track to grow at a higher rate than the past several years. We are just 5 days away from the upcoming presidential election and the next president would have to take some drastic measures to improve the economy and give a burst of energy to the housing market.

Real estate had typically led the country out of most of the previous recessions, but during the current so-called jobless recovery, real estate has taken a back seat and continues to stay there, despite the historically low mortgage interest rates. The President-elect would have to pull out some innovative tricks to make the real estate market healthy again.

As the year comes to a close, many investors are taking a wait-and-see approach and have therefore parked their money in mortgage-backed securities and Treasury Bonds. Although the presidential debates are behind us, the “real debate” on housing deductions, according to Jamie Gregory, the deputy chief lobbyist of Realtors will be on Capitol Hill next year regarding mortgage interest deductions.

During campaign stumps, both Romney and Obama have made promises to help the housing market. In his newly released plan for the next 4 years, Obama has stated that he would continue to go along federal programs that are already in place such as loan modifications, foreclosure relief, and easier refinancing.

Romney plans to make it easier for small financial institutions in the private sector to competitively enter the mortgage market again. He said ”we have to have regulation, but we need it modern and up-to-date because when you have massive regulations, it makes it harder for smaller and regional banks to be able to make the loan modifications they need to make and to also get credit to people.”

One of the biggest challenges the next President will face is regarding the structure and means by which the Federal government will continue to subsidize the housing market. The eye of the storm is the controversial “Quantitative Easing” or QE3 that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke initiated in mid-September, according to which the Feds will pump $40 billion per month into mortgage-backed-securities as a way to stimulate the economy through a housing market recovery.

Many economists argue that unless the employment situation improves and home values start to rise, the QE3 initiative will not do much to increase home sales enough to make a positive dent in the economy. The rental market is expected to grow and property managers are looking forward to it.

The impending fiscal cliff, the financial crisis in Europe, the impact of hurricane Sandy, the domestic economy, stimulating job growth, the fight over taxation, an anemic housing market…we will find out next Tuesday as to which of these two men will be crowned the winner to tackle these herculean challenges in 2013 and beyond.

Pinterest, the popular photo sharing website is now considered to be a part of the elite list of top ten social networks. It made history in January of this year by becoming the fastest website in history to break through the 10 million unique visitor mark. Property managers are beginning to include this social media tool in their online marketing initiatives.

Key Facts

• It’s an online pin board-style social photo sharing platform
• It’s mission is to “connect everyone in the world through the ‘things’ they find interesting”
• It’s not just for pictures. You can pin videos too
• It’s like an online scrapbook to organize and share pictures of your projects or things you like
• You can create and manage theme-based image collections such as events, interests and hobbies
• Users can browse other pin boards for inspiration, re-pin images to their own collections or ‘like’ photos
• With over 10 million active users and growing, it is imperative that property managers include Pinterest as part of their social media marketing ecosystem
• You no longer need invites. You can join immediately on their website

How can property managers take advantage of this rapidly growing social media?

• You can create multiple pin boards for marketing (example: one for each subdivision that you manage properties in, before/after pictures, etc.)
• Upload images of the pool, club house, and other differentiating amenities.
• If you manage apartments you could have a separate pin board for each floor plan to show images of various rooms in each plan
• You can have pin boards for model apartments and condos, and show detailed pictures of decorated rooms, cabinets, closets, bedrooms, bathrooms, living rooms, etc.
• Embed your YouTube videos of home walkthroughs, before and after inspections on your Pinterest account
• Re-pin (just like Retweeting) images and videos of DIY tasks such as fixing a leaky faucet, pressure washing and painting from other users
• It’s a fast way to propagate images and videos of your rentals to many people on the web with just one click. Many viewers could be potential tenants or investors from all over the world
• It’s a great search engine optimization tool for boosting the organic ranking of your website because images and videos on Pinterest are linked back to the original location

Important Tips

• Use good quality pictures and videos that can be appealing to your target audience. Nothing fancy, just professional
• Link your Pinterest account with your Facebook and Twitter accounts to maximize visibility of your pins
• Name and describe your pins appropriately. Use keywords that are relevant to your business, region or area of expertise and be sure to include a link back to your website or blog to attract more traffic
• Make sure your pictures and videos are well…Pinteresting.

Many new smartphones have been announced or released in the past few weeks. While each claims to have the fastest processor, greatest battery life, newest OS and so on, there is one common theme – screen sizes are becoming larger.

So this begs the question what’s the ideal screen size of a smartphone? Several surveys and studies claim that it’s in the 4 – 4.5 inches range. Many people, especially the diehard iPhone fans cringe at the thought of anything larger than the size of the current iPhone. Not surprisingly, many are hoping that Apple retains the 3.5-inch size in their soon to be unveiled iPhone 5 (or is it “The new iPhone?”). A small but growing number of iPhone fans however are hoping that it would grow to or beyond the 4+ inch mark.

There are a couple of facts that debunk these studies. Over 20 million Samsung Galaxy S III smartphones – with a screen size of 4.8 inches, have been sold globally in the past 3 months and the combined sales of previous versions, the S and the S2 have topped 50 million. Wait there’s more. Industry analysts and pundits had pretty much written off the success chances of the Samsung Galaxy Note Phablet (phone + tablet). With a screen size of 5.3 inches, this was clearly a behemoth when compared to the petite iPhone 4S. But contrary to all expectations (including perhaps Samsung’s), over 10 million units were sold worldwide in under 10 months and many people are eagerly anticipating the arrival of its sequel – the Samsung Galaxy Note II, and pleading their carriers to offer it. As if 5.3 inches were not enough, the screen size of Note II has been supersized to 5.5 inches. At this rate will Note III grow to 7 inches?

The sales figures of these large screen phones make the myriads of “ideal screen size” surveys meaningless. So why did these 50+ million people opt for phones that were bigger than the perceived ideal size? Clearly it was not for their features or bells and whistles. There were other choices that were better and faster. In fact there were some initial complaints about the Note being somewhat slow to respond and its integrated S Pen sluggish at times. But that didn’t stop 10 million people from buying it.

There are many reasons why bigger smartphones are gaining fans. People have been using their phones less for talking and more for texting, browsing, editing spread sheets and documents, and using apps. A larger screen also makes it easier to use the phone’s virtual keyboard and with 4G LTE becoming a staple, it makes the experience of watching videos more pleasurable. Also, more people are becoming comfortable with using both hands for operating these units because they don’t consider them as just a phone; it’s their single dream gadget for all their voice, video and data consumption needs.

Like many things in life, one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to smartphones. A day may soon come when manufacturers would offer multiple sizes of each model, and may be in the not too distant future we would all be able to order phones that are tailored to the size of our palms and fingers. May be lefthanders prefer to have their volume up/down or camera buttons on the opposite side, who knows? Lefties have had such options even during the era of the almost extinct 35mm film cameras, and since smartphones are on their way to becoming the only device one would carry at all times, the option to order a personalized smartphone may perhaps become a reality over the next few years. There will indeed be a plethora of apps for that.

So the answer to the often asked question “what’s the ideal smartphone size” is…it depends. It depends on the individual. Each of us has our own ideal screen size. In fact, Apple should grab the opportunity of becoming the pioneer of customized smartphones. They certainly have the marketing pitch. iPhone = individualized phone!

Desktop virtualization, which is also called client virtualization, enables the use of virtual machines to let multiple network users maintain individualized desktops on a single, centrally located computer or server. The central machine may operate at a residence, business, or data center. Users may be geographically scattered, but all must be connected to the central machine by a local area network, a wide area network, or the public Internet. The central machine acts like a server to the virtual machines that are connected to it.

Desktop virtualization requires a computing model known as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). VDI includes the hardware and software systems that are needed to support the virtualized environment. Desktop virtualization separates a personal computer desktop environment from a physical machine using the client-server model of computing.

The network environment has gone through several transformations over the years. The good old mainframes became dinosaurs with the proliferation of PCs, which ushered in the client-server model. The Internet led us to the web-based applications model which has since transitioned into cloud-based computing, thanks to the availability of reliable bandwidth, increased processing power and cheap storage.

Here are some advantages of desktop virtualization:

• Businesses can reduce the number of servers they need which translates to cost savings
• IT staff can reduce planned outages and greatly minimize unplanned downtime
• Maintenance, upgrades, updates and patches can be done efficiently by moving applications from impacted areas to other locations and restoring them back when maintenance activities are completed
• Users get to run multiple operating systems on their computers and access hosted desktops from any location and any device.

For people that worked with the dumb terminals of mainframes where they could get any colored font as long as it was green (akin to Henry Ford’s black Model Ts) desktop virtualization may seem like Déjà vu, but in reality, it combines the best of both the mainframe and the distributed computing models by enabling applications and user settings to be stored on a central server and accessed via any device that can support the virtual desktop application.

Desktop virtualization is not just for large enterprises. One-person firms and small businesses also have the option to take advantage of this technology.

2011 will soon be history. Just like any year, this one also had its share of good, bad and ugly events. Without ranking them in any particular order we’ve come up with our own list of events that left their mark on 2011.

Jan 8: Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot at a supermarket in Tucson, AZ while she was having a public meeting with her constituents. Six people died in the shooting. After going through several surgeries and months of rehab, Ms. Giffords has recovered some of her ability to walk, speak and write.

Jan 14: Using the popular uprising in the Middle East called Arab Spring, the people of Tunisia ousted President Zine El Abdine Ben Ali’s after 23 years of autocratic rule.

Feb 6: The Green Bay Packers won the Super Bowl by defeating the Pittsburgh Steelers 31-25.

Feb 11: Pro-democracy protestors overthrew Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak after capturing his palaces.

Feb 20: Civil war breaks out in Libya after the military shoots and kills over 200 protesters in Benghazi

March 9: NASA’s space shuttle Discovery, the most flown spaceship, was retired after making its final touchdown at the Kenney Space Center. In its 27 years of service, it had completed 39 successful missions.

March 11: Japan’s Pacific coast of Tohoku was hit by a triple disaster. A massive 9.0 magnitude earthquake at an underwater depth of 20 miles triggered powerful tsunami waves that reached heights of up to 133 feet and traveled 6 miles inland. It wiped out entire towns and claimed the lives of 20,000 people in its path. The powerful quake which reportedly shifted the Earth on its axis by an estimated 4-10 inches caused a number of nuclear accidents in the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant complex. At an economic impact of$235 billion, the World Bank reports it as the most expensive natural disaster in world history.

April 6: Following Ireland and Greece, Portugal became the third debt-ridden European country to seek a bailout.

April 27: Hundreds of powerful tornadoes rocked the South and Midwest, killing over 300 and causing a wide swath of destruction. Tuscaloosa in Alabama was the hardest-hit town.

April 29: Britain’s royal celebrities Prince William and Kate Middleton had a well-attended and widely televised wedding at London’s Westminster Abbey.

May 2: The world’s most wanted terrorist Osama Bin Laden was captured and killed at his hideout in Pakistan by U.S. Special Forces in a well-executed operation and then quickly buried at sea, ending over ten years of search.

May 22: With winds reaching upwards of 250 miles, strong tornadoes ripped through the town of Joplin, MO causes over 160 deaths and destruction of over 8,000 homes and businesses.

May 25: The Oprah Winfrey Show aired its final broadcast after running for 25 years.

June 12: The Dallas Mavericks win their first NBA title by defeating the Miami Heat 105-95.

June 22: Boston’s crime boss James “Whitey” Bulger, one of FBI’s 10 most wanted was arrested in Santa Monica, California.

July 5: A jury in Orlando finds Casey Anthony not guilty of murder, manslaughter and child abuse in the 2008 disappearance and death of her 2-year old daughter, Caylee.

July 21: After its 135^th flight, space shuttle Atlantis landed in Cape Canaveral and brought the 30-year old space shuttle program to a close.

Aug 5: The credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s downgraded the stellar AAA rating of U.S. debt by one notch to AA+ citing the federal government’s ineffective and unstable policymaking to stimulate the prevailing anemic economy.

Aug 6: London and several parts of England were rocked by rioting, arson and looting by violent mobs, causing widespread damage to local businesses. The austerity measures taken by the United Kingdom apparently triggered these ugly riots.

Sept 11: A memorial plaza was inaugurated at ground zero in New York to mark the 10^th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the U.S.

Sept 17: A demonstration named Occupy Wall Street began at Wall Street in New York. Calling themselves the “99 percent,” protestors were voicing their unhappiness over their perceived economic unfairness. Within a few weeks similar protests started springing up around the U.S. and the world.

Oct 5: Apple’s icon and co-founder Steve Jobs succumbed to cancer after leaving his mark forever on the world as an unconventional and highly innovative entrepreneur.

Oct 20: Libya’s dictator Muammar Gaddfi was killed by revolutionary fighters after capturing his hometown Sirte.

Oct 31: The world’s population crossed 7 billion today according to the U.N.

Nov 7: Michael Jackson’s doctor Conrad Murray is convicted of involuntary manslaughter for supplying an anesthetic which allegedly caused the entertainer’s death in 2009.

Nov 9: After a record 409 victories and 46 seasons as the head coach of Penn State’s football program, Joe Paterno was fired over the handling of child sex abuse allegations against former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky.

Dec 13: Scientists claim they are close to a breakthrough in finding the subatomic particle “Higgs boson,” which if found would reveal how the universe’s building blocks work.

Dec 18: North Korea’s ruthless dictator Kim Jong II died after bullying the world with his rhetoric threats and nuclear ambitions for over a decade.

Today we witnessed a classic example of what happens when a company sets a very high standard for itself and comes up short on expectations despite delivering a very good product. Over the past decade Apple has successfully managed to marry technology and design to such an art form that it has left not only its competitors in the dust, but also shifted the paradigm for all types and sizes of business around the world.

While Apple had diehard fans even for its bombed Newton – a tablet like personal digital assistant that was released way back in 1987, the company started getting worldwide visibility in 1998 with the launch of its iMac G3  – a brightly colored all-in-one eye candy personal computer, which forever disrupted the monotonous, beige box PC structure. But this was just the tip of the iceberg.

Apple instantly attained cult status with the release of its digital music player, the venerable iPod in November 2001. The rest as they say is history. Since then, Apple has had a Midas touch like no other enterprise in the world. Every product it has launched in the past decade has sold like hotcakes and become a must-have status symbol for geeks, teenagers, executives, soccer moms and everybody in between.

Let’s fast forward to the present, to today actually. The world had been waiting with bated breath for Apple’s long overdue announcement of its next generation iPhone, the iPhone 5. Just like the U.S. auto industry, Apple had been consistently releasing a new or updated iPhone in the second quarter of each year. But this time that was not the case. The third quarter had passed without any sign of a new or updated model.

All this uncertainty created an avalanche of rumor mills. The main stream media and even the likes of the Wall Street Journal were infected by the contagious iPhone 5 fever. The Internet was rife with stealth pictures, exclusive videos and debates about the likely features of the new phone. Some even went as far as touting drool-worthy features like a holographic display and a laser-projection virtual keyboard which would display the image of a keyboard on any surface for full-Qwerty typing experience! Other speculations included a curved glass 4.4 inch display, a teardrop shaped design, near field communication (NFC), 4G LTE and a Starbucks coffee dispenser to boot (never mind…that’s one of the expected features of iPhone 7).

It is no wonder that the euphoria, excitement, and nail-biting anxiety were reaching a crescendo just before Apple’s “Let’s Talk iPhone” event at its Cupertino campus this morning. The Internet was on fire from the numerous live blogs and millions of tweets that were zapping around at breakneck speeds. Many popular websites experienced crashes due to the constant refreshing of browsers by frenzied iPhone crack-heads.

It was not just about the iPhone 5’s expected announcement. It was also Tim Cook’s first event as Apple’s CEO and Apple’s first without their super hero Steve Jobs. After a 60-minute long and sometimes boring speech about the features of the new mobile operating system the iOS 5, Tim Cook finally woke up the crowd with the announcement of the iPhone 4S, an updated version of its current generation phone. As he was going through a long list of features many tweets and bloggers swore the best was yet to come. After all, this is Apple we are talking about. They won’t make us wait for more than 15 months for a measly update, would they? No way, they said. Some even speculated that Steve Jobs himself would magically appear from behind the curtains and say…wait there’s more…and erase the malaise of iPhoneAholics in a jiffy by flashing the latest and greatest iPhone 5.

However, before anybody had a chance to blink their eyes, Tim Cook thanked everyone and concluded the event. What? You can’t be serious. Is this some kind of lame joke? It was as if time had suddenly frozen. After a prolonged couple of minutes, which seemed like eternity, most iAddicts regained their consciousness and returned to reality. There was no iPhone 5 after all. For many people in the Apple universe, today’s announcement was a big letdown.

But was it really a letdown? Perhaps a lit bid for a lot of people who were expecting a bigger screen to fall in line with the latest Android phones and the faster  LTE 4G data speed instead of HSPA+, a speedier version of 3G. It was definitely a big blow for fashion-conscious consumers because there is literally no physical differentiator between the 4S and the previous version. A lot of these folks must be saying would it have killed Apple to change the design a little bit? What’s the point of buying one; let’s just hold off for iPhone 5.

While physical beauty is only skin deep, the real beauty of the iPhone 4S lies under the hood. Let’s take a quick inventory of what’s new. A faster dual-core A5 chip that doubles the CPU speed and increases the graphics speed by up to 7 times. The new iOS 5 and a free cloud service called what else…iCloud of course. A new 8-megapixel camera that’s also capable of recording video in 1080p HD quality. It is also a world-phone because of its combined GSM and CDMA radio. The hallmark of the new phone is a voice-to-text digital assistant called Siri. Because Siri understands context, you can ask questions like “Do I need an umbrella this weekend?” or “What time is it in Paris now?” It makes phone calls, sends messages, schedules meetings, sets reminders and a whole lot more.

It may not be the mythical iPhone 5 that everyone was clamoring for. But I bet it’s a damn good phone and the most advanced iPhone yet. Is it good enough to hold its own against the onslaught of Android phones? Let’s ask Siri, and while we are at it, let’s also ask when’s the iPhone 5 coming? Gee I wonder what the answer might be!