Apple (AAPL) today confirmed what the analysts and rumor sites had already divined: OS X Leopard, the sixth major release of the company’s flagship operating system, will go on sale Oct. 26. Apple’s retail stores will start selling it at 6 p.m., local time. Its online store is already accepting pre-orders at $129 apiece.

Much of what the new OS does is already known, thanks to the lengthy previews Steve Jobs has given over the past year and a half and to leaks from developers working with pre-release builds. (See, for example, Prince McLean’s Road to Leopard series at AppleInsider.) But the order in which the company’s press release ticks off the new features telegraphs which features it thinks will be Leopard’s key sellings points:

• Redesigned 3D Dock with Stacks, a new way to organize files with one-click access
• Updated Finder with CoverFlow, so you can flip through files as you do album covers in iTunes
• Spotlight search of content from any computer on a local network
• Back to My Mac, which lets you grab files from remote Macs over the Internet
• QuickLook, which displays the contents of files without having to open the app that created them
• Spaces, a new way to organize files by project and to flip from one project to another
• Time Machine, the much-touted back-up system*
• A new version of Mail wih 3-D stationary designs
• Notes and To Dos that can be synced across multiple Macs and stored in Smart Mailboxes
• Data detectors that recognize e-mail addresses and RSS feeds
• iChat Theater, which adds slides and movies and Photo Booth effects to iChat video
• Improved parental controls
• The complete Boot Camp release (it’s not disappearing as some had feared)
• Web Clip for bringing widgets to the Dashboard
• New PhotoBooth features, such as adding backdrops
• An enhanced Dictionary with Wikipedia built in
• A new iCal that supports the CalDAV standard
• An updated Frontrow for watching movies and TV shows at a distance with Apple Remote

The biggest surprise in this list may be the relatively short shrift Apple gave Time Machine, the feature that generated the most buzz at Macworld. The reason for this may be hidden in the footnote at the bottom of the press release:

*Requires an additional hard drive sold separately.

Backups are the bane of every power user’s existence. Time Machine is a worthy attempt to solve this perennial problem, but because it requires advance planning and a big exernal hard drive, most users probably still won’t bother.

Steve Jobs must have known this was in the works.

Asked again last month why he hadn’t built a 3G iPhone, Apple’s (AAPL) CEO replied that he was waiting for a chipset that would allow him to deliver 3G speeds with something close to the eight hour talk time the slower EDGE-based iPhone gets now. “Hopefully we’ll see that late next year,” he said.

He may not have to wait that long. In what could be a preview of the next-generation iPhone, chipmaker Broadcom (BRCM) announced yesterday that it had begun sending manufacturers samples of an integrated device it’s calling a “3G Phone On a Chip.” The chipset’s features read like an iPhone hold-out’s wishlist. They include:

• a 3G baseband transceiver supporting download speeds of up to 7.2 megabits per second
• Bluetooth 2.1
• an FM radio receiver
• an FM radio transmitter (for car stereo playback)
• multimedia support for a 5 megapixal camera
• 30 frames per second video with “TV out”
• support for EDGE, HSUPA, HSDPA, and WCDMA

It doesn’t do GPS, Wi-Fi or windows.

While Broadcom did not offer battery life estimates, it does describe the chip as “extremely low power.”

The BCM21551 was delivered to manufacturers in small quantities yesterday will be available in bulk for $23 apiece. This is one chip Jobs may be tempted to hoard, because if Apple doesn’t buy it, its competitors surely will.

Or not. In an oddly time piece, Blackfriar’s Carl Howe, who is usually pretty well plugged in to Apple, today published his five reasons why Apple’s iPhone Doesn’t Need 3G. Latency, he says, is more important than bandwidth. Besides, he adds, high bandwidth radio networks are more error prone. Hmmm.

For more on the Broadcom chipset, see Eric Bangeman’s piece in Ars Technica.

That green glow around Apple (AAPL) didn’t last long. Only three days after the company gave over the front page of its website to proclaim itself “bursting with pride” over boardmember Al Gore’s Nobel, the environmental activists at Greenpeace have attacked Steve Jobs for failing to make his cellphone as green as his competitors’.

In a slick video posted on YouTube (and pasted below the fold), the organization paints Jobs as a hypocrite for promising a “greener Apple” but failing to take the minimal steps that Nokia and Sony Erikson took to earn a higher rating in Greenpeace’s Guide to Greener Electronics. After earning cheers from Greenpeace last May, the company has actually slipped a few notches on the organization’s green meter.

It’s difficult for nonscientists to judge how benign or dangerous the traces of brominated fire retardants in the iPhone’s antenna or the phthalate plasticisers in the white headset really are. But by failing to perform the due diligence that would have told the company what its competitors were doing about those components — or to match the “take back” recycling programs that have earned Nokia and Sony Erikson high marks with European greens — Apple has left itself open for another round of negative environmental agitprop.

With only two weeks to go before the release of OS X Leopard, the fifth major revision of Apple’s (AAPL) flagship Macintosh operating system, AppleInsider today published the sixth entry in its comprehensive Road to Leopard series — and at Apple’s insistence pulled two earlier posts offline.

Written by Prince McLean, the nom de plume of a systems programmer who clearly knows his stuff, the series not only describes with text and screen shots the key innovations coming in Leopard, but it takes pains to place them in the history of graphical user interfaces as they evolved from Xerox Parc, through Lisa and the first Macs, Systems 8 and 9, Next and the previous versions of OS X. The Commodore Amiga even makes a cameo appearance.

The series is so good that Apple’s legal staff has stepped in, demanding through cease-and-desist orders that parts of the first two entries be removed. AppleInsider has taken them temporarily offline while they are being redacted.

[UPDATE: The first two posts are back up in heavily redacted form.]

If you’re interested in what’s in store for you when Leopard finally arrives, you might want to archive the other posts before key sections disappear. Here are the links:

• Road to Mac OS X Leopard: Preview 4.0 [redacted version]
• Road to Mac OS X Leopard: Dictionary 2.0 [redacted]
• Road to Mac OS X Leopard: Dock 1.6
• Road to Mac OS X Leopard: Finder 10.5
• Road to Mac OS X Leopard: Spaces
• Road to Mac OS X Leopard: Time Machine

Next week, Daniel Lyons, a.k.a. the Fake Steve Jobs, steps out of character to start a three-city book tour to promote Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs (A Parody) [Da Capo Press; $22.95]. That means hard-copy versions of the book — galleys of which have been floating around reviewers’ offices for more than a month — will start to arrive in bookstores, where loyal readers of FSJ’s website can see for themselves how the fake Apple (AAPL) CEO’s online persona translates into print.

The good news is that this is not just a compilation of FSJ’s online posts, although some of his best set pieces — including Hillary Clinton shaking down the Silicon Valley VCs for campaign cash and Yoko Ono insisting that iTunes list the band as “John Lennon and the Beatles” — appear in the book more or less intact. This is, by and large, an original work of fiction, with lots of new material and something resembling a plot — with a beginning, middle and end.

The bad news — which struck this reader at about page 31 — is that this is not really a novel either, with three-dimensional characters who live in a fully-realized fictional world. It was on page 31 — when Jobs, devastated by the possibility that the options backdating scandal might cost him control of his company, goes home, smokes some pot, and calls his house manager at her boyfriend’s house to come over and make him a mango smoothie — that it occurred to me that the real Steve Jobs doesn’t live alone. He lives in a real house with a real wife and real children. And he probably doesn’t have the luxury of getting stoned, dropping acid, running off to San Francisco with his friend Larry Ellison to shoot paintball guns at the homeless, or any of the other reckless things FSJ does on a whim in this book.

For whatever reason — perhaps the pressure of writing a novel on deadline on top of his regular online posts and his day job as an editor at Forbes — the challenge of bringing Fake Steve Jobs convincingly to life was too much for Lyons. Instead we get what is in effect a 248-page blog entry populated by paper-thin characters who just aren’t that funny. It’s a lesson in how literary tricks that made for truly brilliant short-form writing can grow lame when played again and again at book length

The novel also suffers from the timidness of Da Capo Press and its libel lawyers, who have shorn Lyons of one of the features that made his blog must-reading among Silicon Valley insiders: his willingness to skewer real computer industry executives, from Microsoft’s Bill (”the Beastmaster”) Gates to Sun’s Jonathan (”My Little Pony”) Schwartz, without pulling any punches. With the exception of Ellison, almost all the identities in Options have been fudged, turning what might have been a razor sharp parody into a coy roman a clef.

It’s been a tough few months for Danny Lyons, between his outing by the New York Times and the rush to get this book out on schedule. The best part is that none of it seems to have slowed his online output — or his willingness to call ‘em like he sees ‘em. His Sept. 3 rant against the TV Networks is as good as anything he’s written to date — and as smart a critique of the broadcast industry as you’re likely to read anywhere.