Pete Mortensen - page 3

The wait is finally over. Apple has conspicuously ignored consumer demands for third-party application multitasking over the last three years, but now anyone with an iPhone 3GS or 3G iPod touch can now freely switch between apps without missing a beat. In many ways, today’s launch of iOS 4 is Apple’s most anticipated software release in almost two years. Not since the opening of the App Store via iPhone OS 2.0 has the company made such drastic changes to its flagship product line.

Having installed and played with iOS 4 on my 3GS a bit more than two weeks ago, I can say with confidence that it doesn’t disappoint — but it does take some getting used to.

Image via Mactropolis

In certain corners of the Internet, it has become received wisdom that the iPhone will appear on Verizon any time now. Timelines are speculated upon. AT&T’s rampant incompetence is cited. And then Apple announces another must-have product that only works on AT&T’s network in the U.S.

So, in case you’re wondering, the iPhone 4 isn’t coming to Verizon in September. It’s not going to T-Mobile (in spite of what some misinformed analysts think, it’s still not 3G-compatible) or Sprint, either.

This is understandably frustrating, as every U.S. iPhone user has, at one time or another, experienced complete AT&T meltdown — full bars but no connectivity, battery life dropping at more than a percentage per minute, and dropped calls every few steps. But the sad fact is, AT&T was and is the only credible partner for Apple to work with on the iPhone and the iPad. And the reason for that has very little to do with the United States and everything to do with the rest of the world. They’re stuck together until everyone goes 4G.

The iOS device-controlled AR.Drone quadricopter from Parrot, last seen terrorizing my co-workers, will finally reach the consumer market in September for $299. The crazy vehicle, which can do things that no flying thing should be able to, for lack of better words, uses cameras, WiFi, and the iPod touch, iPhone, or iPad to look through a live video feed, steer around blind corners, hover, bank, and generally act amazing.

Oh, yeah, and you can hold augmented reality dogfights with your friends. An Android client will ship eventually, but for now, this thing is for Apple users only. Check it out!

In the last three months, the hippest flight accessory has become the iPad, as legions of travelers have brought the magical future of computing on board to the envy and occasional derision of those less fortunate. Well now, soon you won’t need to own an iPad to feel superior to those suckers lugging around “books.” At least if you live in Australia.

Jetstar, the low-cost subsidiary of Qantas, has announced that it will make iPads available to its passengers for $8.40 per flight, allowing them to watch a small selection of movies, play games and read some pre-loaded e-books. No Internet access, sadly.

Still, it’s a lot more appealing than paying extra to rent headphones, no?

TNooz via NYTimes.com

With the announcement of the leaked next-generation iPhone coming tomorrow morning at WWDC, the rumor mill is in even higher overdrive than usual. The photo above, from Pursuitist, is an alleged photo taken “inside” the Moscone West center in San Francisco that purports to reveal the all-new iPhone HD. It’s also a transparent fake, as the colored iPhones are an amateur mock-up that 9to5mac posted almost a month ago. I find it hard to believe that Apple would conclude that a fan’s creative would be the ideal way to launch their latest and greatest phone.

Also notable: The word “iPhone” and the 64GB capacity aren’t well-centered on the back of the device, another dead giveaway. You can head over to Pursuitist to see more fake photos if you wish, or wait until about 11 a.m. Pacific tomorrow to see the real thing.

via TUAW

Never one to let an opportunity to explain a technology with a metaphor pass him by, Steve Jobs compared the transition from PCs to tablets as similar to when people stopped buying trucks and started buying cars (which is a dubious view of history, but let him run with it). From Engadget:

When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks. But as people moved more towards urban centers, people started to get into cars. I think PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them. And this is going to make some people uneasy.

I actually think Steve is both right and wrong about this. What’s more likely is that a lot more households will again become one-PC homes as the need to do intense writing, coding or other keyboard horsepower activities gets more evenly distributed as other kinds of applications migrate to tablets. Only time will tell, of course.

The subject of Google and Android’s major in-roads in the mobile space inevitably came up during Steve Jobs’s interview during the Wall Street Journal’s D8 conference this evening. Steve’s take? Google went after Apple, not vice versa. Per Engadget:

Walt: But how about Google? Something has changed. What happened?
Steve: They decided to compete with us… so they are.

Jobs noted that Apple hasn’t gone into the search business and has no plans to. He claimed that he kind of woke up one morning and heard about Android. Given his feelings about loyalty (and the fact that the iPhone was well-underway and had Google working on apps for it), it’s no real surprise that Steve is showing some signs of feeling hurt about the situation. I think he genuinely believed Google wouldn’t try to eat his lunch, even if he’s as ruthless as they come himself.

He ultimately got tired of the line of questioning and tried to end the conversation with a non sequitur: “My sex life is great!”

For the very first time, Steve Jobs spoke publicly at the Wall Street Journal’s D8 conference about the much-discussed prototype iPhone that found its way into the hands of Jason Chen at Gizmodo last month. Without going into much detail (and certainly not acknowledging that the model that was being tested had final industrial design, Steve shared more than anyone else from Apple has to date about the incident. As reported on Engadget’s live-blog:

There’s an ongoing investigation. I can tell you what I do know, though. To make a product you need to test it. You have to carry them outside. One of our employees was carrying one. There’s a debate about whether he left it in a bar, or it was stolen out of his bag. The person who found it tried to sell it, they called Engadget, they called Gizmodo.

The person who took the phone plugged it into his roommates computer. And this guy was trying to destroy evidence… and his roommate called the police. So this is a story that’s amazing — it’s got theft, it’s got buying stolen property, it’s got extortion, I’m sure there’s some sex in there (huge laughs)… the whole thing is very colorful. The DA is looking into it, and to my knowledge they have someone making sure they only see stuff that relates to this case. I don’t know how it will end up.

If I recall correctly, the details about trying to destroy evidence and the roommate calling police is news. It’ll still be awhile before we know the whole truth of the situation, but it’s certainly been fun keeping an eye on the brouhaha…

Much has been made over the last 24 hours about the fact that Apple has managed to sell two million iPads in just 60 days — a pace dramatically ahead of the original iPhone, which took 74 days just to get a million units into the hands of the public. Much less-debated, but potentially more interesting for Apple’s long-term future, is that the iPad has grossed more than $1 billion in revenue by hitting the 2 million mark. At $499 a pop and units as pricey as $829, they’ve cleared that barrier by a flying leap in record time. For context about just what a monumental achievement this is, consider the fact that when FedEx reached $1 billion in gross sales in its tenth year of operation, that was the quickest rise to a billion dollars in revenue without acquisitions in the history of American business.

Apple’s growth machine has hit a new gear with iPad, and I’d like to take this post to due some geeky quick and dirty analysis in the manner used at my day job to get a sense of Apple’s expectations for the platform and to guess as to whether its rapid take-off is a good sign or a sign of danger.

I’m fairly well-known for being a detractor of the convoluted mess that iTunes has become in the video and apps iPhone era. I might have even labeled it Apple’s own IE 6 at some point. That’s actually not true — it’s more Lotus Notes, trying to fit every possible feature into a single application rather than writing a bunch of specialized programs that excel at their task. From a desktop experience perspective, at least, I know I would be way happier with discrete applications for a slimmed-down music player, video player, and store/file manager.

Well, I might have found the first of that set. It’s called Instinctiv, and it’s a gorgeous, free, Mac OS X exclusive music player that actually makes listening to music on a computer intuitive again. It has some shortcomings, which I’ll address, but on most levels, it’s a superior music solution to iTunes.

As you might recall, I reviewed Cadence for iPhone several months ago. I found it a useful app and a fun way to browse your music collection by tempo, not title. It did, however, have a near-killer flaw: a setup process that consumed hours as it added (with lots of errors) tempo data to the entire iTunes library.

The creators of Cadence have released a new version that resolves these problems by connecting the app to EchoNest to just grab tempo information over the air. You simply go into the settings on iPhone, ask it to grab info, and after a few minutes, you’re good to go. Having used Cadence for more than six months, I can say with some confidence that it’s most useful in a party setting, when you’re not sure what you want to hear, but you know the mood you want to bring about. Bear that scenario in mind when contemplating the new, elevated $4.99 price tag.

It’s available now in the App Store.

Until the iPad has wide availability outside the U.S., Apple’s taking even more paranoid precautions than typical. Notably, everyone is still limited to buying no more than two of the devices, and, until today, no one was allowed to buy an iPad with cash. That policy was allegedly in place to prevent exporting by creating a credit card trail for each device.

But the policy’s silliness was revealed rather dramatically when Diane Campbell, a disabled woman living in Silicon Valley on a fixed income, attempted to use $600 cash to buy herself an iPad. She was turned down at the Palo Alto Apple Store, and went home, dejected, ultimately writing Steve Jobs a rather delightfully pointed e-mail.

“Come on Mr. Jobs, give a sister a break, okay. I’m not going to go sell my iPad.”

That message quickly hit, and earlier this evening, Apple reversed the policy, and Diane went home as a proud iPad owner. She intends to fill it with guitar song instructions. One thing that’s unclear is if the policy reversal also applies to iPhones, which similarly require a credit or debit card to purchase. I would assume not, as they require two-year service contracts, and a line of credit is usually required to secure that.

Nice to see Apple step up on what’s just a ridiculously common sense decision. And this makes me want to roll up to the Apple Store in the middle of next week with a big bag of penny rolls. Who’s with me?

Via ABC 7 On Your Side

Picture copyright CNN

This weekend market the White House Correspondents Association, an annual black tie dinner when a large number of political insiders gather to smile politely while a washed-up comic offers up lame impressions of Jimmy Carter. (With the lone exception being that time that Stephen Colbert shot everybody in the face)

During the dreaded run-up to Jay Leno’s observations about the foibles of modern life, CNN’s Ed Henry convinced First Lady Michelle Obama to send her first-ever Tweet from his iPhone. Except she couldn’t — because she had no idea how to type on it.

“How do you type on this?” she asked, before handing the phone back to Henry and dictating the highly inoffensive “from flotus: ‘here at dinner this is officially my first Tweet. i am looking forward to some good laughs from the potus and jay'”.

There you have it. No word on whether Steve Jobs is sending the White House the entire collection of “This is how you…” ads from when the iPhone was first introduced.

CNN via The Awl

Jean-Louis Gasseé, gather of the Macintosh II and the BeOS, is a canny thinker and doer in tech. Even though he doesn’t quite have the track record of, say, Steve Jobs (by inches), he does know what he’s talking about, he guided not one but two great PC platforms, and he’s worth listening to when he has something to say about the rising trends.

On his blog today, he writes about “Very Personal Computing,” the arrival of the smartphone as the most profitable sector of the tech industry. As he notes, the PC is finally moving toward a state of less relevance, at least from a business perspective. Despite being No. 1 in PCs, HP realizes around 1/6th of the profit from that business that Apple does from the iPhone. That, as should be noted, is despite the fact that Apple isn’t even one of the top 5 manufacturers of phones on the planet.

This is absolutely essential reading, especially in thinking about the next big wave of mobile innovation. HP’s acquisition of Palm is really one to watch…

Via Daring Fireball

Yes, we have an official replacement for the MacQuarium as the best use for a 25-year-old Mac: Cut a slot into it so it can serve as the ultimate past-meets-future iPad stand. Great work from Flickr user Mapgoblin, though you might want to consider washing the front of your old Mac if you decide to emulate him.

(And yes, I know the photographer thought it was a Mac Plus — I’m pretty sure it’s actually a 512k Fat Mac)

Flickr via Unpluggd and TUAW

The Blagoblogs are a-buzz with a report that shows Android has overtaken the iPhone in mobile web traffic. This would be concerning were it not for two things:

1. The report only shows Android overtaking iPhone in the U.S. (it’s still dominating globally)
2. The report is created by AdMod, the mobile advertising company owned by Google, and is based on mobile traffic through its network. In other words, it doesn’t count any traffic directed through areas it doesn’t serve, including any by Apple-owned Quattro and many iPhone apps built on other platforms.

Since AdMob is a key part of Google’s mobile strategy at this point and is a key component to any ad-supported Android applications, this is almost exactly the trend we should expect to see. And this trend will only become more dramatic as Apple rolls out iAds in iPhone OS 4.0, which won’t wipe out third-party ad providers in iPhone apps but will likely come to dominate. Don’t be surprised to see a report six months from now showing Apple’s mobile web traffic dropping by half or more.

All of which suggests that a mobile ad network isn’t the best source for reporting the totality of mobile web traffic. Wouldn’t it be nice if all the mobile carriers got together and shared what they knew?

Via Fast Company

Kyle Conroy, a computer science student at UC Berkeley has just released a project that asks a provocative question: Should you buy Apple’s products or Apple’s stock. Using a large data set combining Apple’s stock price over time and the prices of nearly every Apple product introduced since 1997, he calculates how much your AAPL holdings would be worth if you had spent the price of a contemporary Apple product on investing instead.

For Mac lovers, it isn’t a pretty picture. In some cases, stock valuation has increased as much as 5800 percent. So, for example, a top-of-the-line Powerbook G3 from 1997 cost $5,700 at introduction. If you spent that on stock, you would have $330,563 bucks today. If you bought the laptop instead, it’s currently available for $10 on Ebay.

As a very small holder of AAPL, this makes me cry. Though I have invested a bit more than a 13″ MacBook Pro in stock over the past few years, I also bought that same computer, an iPhone, an iPod nano, a shuffle, and an iPod in the same period. I love them all, but it’s pretty eye-opening to see what might have been. How about you? Any products you wish you’d spent on stock?

A variety of circumstances, all of them terribly uninteresting, have prevented me from commenting on the recent introduction of iPhone OS 4 hot on the heels of the iPad launch. Since I’ve missed the window, I’ll keep the big picture thinking short: I think Apple has done exactly what it needs to maintain its lead in mobile operating systems. I wish I had it now. I will be annoyed if paid apps get over-run with iAds, but I don’t think such paid apps will sell well enough to survive.

But there’s a lot more to discuss in the details, and here, I have one big quibble with iPhone OS 4 – and it’s also a strength of WebOS and Android. Why haven’t notifications been fixed yet? If you own an iPhone, you know exactly what I mean. As you browse the web, or play a game, or even compose an e-mail, a blue box with white text pops up in the middle of the screen, letting you know about an imminent appointment, an incoming text message, a bill due through Mint.com, or even a Facebook friend request from your high school nemesis.

Last week’s release of iTunes 9.1 was largely noted for enabling the use of the iPad, no small feat. Of potentially far more use for those of us who haven’t yet managed to scrape together the pennies to buy an iPad is the ability to downsample all music for devices, whether iPad, -Pod, or -Phone, to 128kbps AAC. What this means is that you can keep high-quality (even lossless) audio files on your computer, and still carry a ton of songs without investing in a 160 GB iPod classic.

This is incredibly welcome news for me. I have a 28.07 gigabyte iTunes library, more than enough to take up nearly all the room on the highest-capacity iPhone 3GS. And lately, it had gotten to the point that I couldn’t even update my larger apps unless I deleted some music. So I synced my iPhone, clicked on its icon in iTunes, and then checked the box under Options reading “Convert higher bit rate songs to 128kbps AAC”. And voila — my phone was out of commission for eight hours! Seriously, don’t stop this process if you start it — there are grave consequences for interruption.

But when I woke up, the magic had been done. I went from eight spare megabytes (really) to 8.5 spare gigabytes — a thousandfold improvement. It’s like Apple upgraded me to a 40 GB iPhone while I slept. The music isn’t noticeably worse (to my ears, anyway), and it means I can carry a lot more of it. Brilliant. Thanks, Apple.

One of the most exciting things about Apple’s overall shift to touchscreen technology in the last few years is that it allows the iPhone and the iPad to replace much more expensive custom solutions for niche markets. Contrary to what you might have heard, these are actually democratizing forces.

Robert Rummel-Hudson is semi-famous on the Internet as the father of Schuyler, a girl born with BPP, a rare brain malformity that can cause all kinds of developmental problems. For Schuyler, most of the impact has been on her speech — she really  can’t. She can, however, use a touchscreen device to select from lists of words to talk for her, what’s known as augmentive/alternative communication.

These devices are amazing — and very expensive. Under the hood, they’re basically like an iPad but with a lot less horsepower. And, crucially, only children with disabilities carry them. Imagine replacing a medical or therapeutic device with the coolest gadget on the planet — at a lower price. If these many custom hardware solutions are replaced by apps, children like Schuyler won’t be regarded as weird, they’ll be regarded as cool. Rob is calling on PRC, the developer of Unity, the program she uses to communicate, to make a high-priced but life-changing app for iPad. We second that request.

The hottest debate going at the moment is whether or not the iPad is a laptop or netbook replacement. The conversation has focused on the quality of the virtual keyboard, the power of the processor, the storage capacity, and the simplified UI. But we now have a definitive opinion on the topic — Apple’s. Hinted at in the technical specifications now confirmed in Leander’s unboxing, the iPad won’t even turn on unless it has been synced through iTunes.

I sincerely hope this changes. You’re not going to attract an army of non-computer savvy users to a revolutionarily simplified platform if they have to own a regular computer, too. It’s time to cut the umbilical cord, Apple. Let the iPad exist unto itself. If you never connect it to a computer, it should still work brilliantly. If you want to connect it to a computer to transfer files, so be it. But the Mac didn’t need to sync to an Apple II. The first PowerBook didn’t have to dock into a Quadra to turn on. You’ve made a serious new computing platform for the rest of us. Don’t treat it like it’s just an iPhone, dependent on a big brother computer to be truly useful.

“Next week! That’s like the worst thing you could say to an early adopter!”

Thanks, Hulu. Of course, the only people who won’t be able to watch are those lucky bastards who already have an iPad…

When the iPad was first unveiled, the single thing use for it that excited me most was reading — but comics, not books. Though various publishers have tried to make digital comics a going concern over the years, it’s never worked out. The problem was simple — no appropriate hardware. Doing a great digital comic just requires a large, portrait-oriented screen nearly the size of a comics page.

Fortunately, Apple’s on this wavelength. And both Xeni Jardin from Boing Boing and Andy Ihnatko from the Chicago Sun-Times report that review iPad units shipped with a brilliant comic book store and reading app from powerhouse publisher Marvel. You can see just a few seconds of the Marvel app in the PC Mag video (hat tip: Dante) we linked previously, but I like Ihnatko’s description, as well:

If you’re a purist who needs to see the whole page at once, you can hold the iPad in portrait mode and flip through the story as you would with a paper comic. You can zoom in and out as you wish, but though the iPad screen is smaller than a standard comic page (I measure it as 7.5”, compared to a comic’s 10”) it’s still crisp and readable when scaled down. Turn the iPad on its side, and a new viewing mode becomes available. In iBooks, tapping the left and right sides of the screen turns pages. In the Marvel app, it “moves the camera position” forward and backwards through the story, snappily zooming in and out through the “units” of the page, highlighting moments of dialogue or action.

Can’t wait. And with iVerse pulling in a bunch of the indie publishers, it can only be a matter of time before DC gets on board, too.

The best new comedy of the year, Modern Family, has further cemented itself in my heart with tonight’s episode, which is basically a start-to-finish tribute to the powerful hold that new Apple products have over early adopters. Only watch the above YouTube clip if you’re comfortable with spoilers.

Otherwise, the full episode will appear here at 5 a.m. Eastern.

Let’s face it: if there’s one thing Apple is really not known for, it’s making great headphones. The white buds that ship with every iPod and iPhone deliver mediocre-at-best sound (while constantly falling out of your ears), and the microphones built into the phone models tend to pick up nothing but wind.

I was converted a few years ago to Shure headphones, beginning with an old pair of Shure EC2’s. At the time, they were the undisputed champs of portable audio. With the right fit, they could literally block out all external sound, deliver clear bass, mid and treble, and all without breaking the bank.

Since my initial Ec2’s met an untimely demise (Severed Cord. Slamming Car Door.), I’ve used successive models of their replacement, the SE110 and SE115. And I’ve been singularly unimpressed. The sound isn’t as good, the fit isn’t as as good, and, if you can believe it, the build quality is less. Every pair I’ve had has shorted out in one ear or the other, at first temporarily before going away permanently. Though it was my first love, Shure has let me down.

Reluctantly, I’ve left behind Shure. And thank goodness. Because Ultimate Ears has delivered in the SuperFi 5vi a headset near-perfectly matched to the iPhone. I don’t know how I got along for so long without them.