The first thing you’ll want to do on your brand new iPad 3G is sign up for a data plan. It’s pretty easy, and you can do it right on the iPad. It’s basically half-a-dozen finger taps (except for typing in your credit card number of course).
Here are step-by-step by instructions, courtesy of this knowledge base article from Apple.
Cupertino’s already got a history of stepping down on app developers who use Apple’s own app icons in their software, so clearly they are protective of their assets, but now words comes that Apple has filed trademark motions on a number of its official app icons.
None of them are new, so there’s no forthcoming features of future devices to spy here. Each icon is marked by a description as well as a list of colors, and an image of each app icon has been submitted in the huge size of 1000×1000 pixels, which means that Apple shouldn’t have to re-render any of them for the next decade to come.
When Apple acquired music streaming service Lala year, almost everyone assumed that iTunes’ tenth iteration would find Apple’s music syncing software re-envisioned as a service which allowed users to stream their tunes from anywhere without actually having their musics locally stored.
That’s still a safe bet , especially as Apple phases out their older iPod models and shrinks down the footprint of 3G SIM cards to be installable in even the smallest chassis. But it did raise a question: would existing Lala customers be left high and dry by the Apple buyout?
No, as it turns out. While Lala has just announced that their service will be shutting down on May 31st for good, with no new users accepted. Lala’s going the extra mile by converting any money spent on streaming music into iTunes credit. That counts even if you have unused Lala credit. How generous.
It was a Brian J. Hogan, a 21-year-old resident of Redwood City, California, who found Apple’s iPhone in a bar, according to Wired.com.
He now regrets not trying harder to contact Apple, and sold the phone to Gizmodo because they told him “there was nothing wrong in sharing the phone with the tech press,” according to a statetment provided by his attorney to Wired.com.
Hogan has been interviewed by law enforcement investigators but has not been charged with a crime. His attorney says he is willing to cooperate with authorities…
… The person who found the phone “is very definitely one of the people who is being looked at as a suspect in theft,” San Mateo County Chief Deputy District Attorney Stephen Wagstaffe told Wired.com Wednesday. “Assuming there’s ultimately a crime here. That’s what we’re still gauging, is this a crime, is it a theft?”
… A friend of Hogan’s then offered to call Apple Care on Hogan’s behalf, according to Hogan’s lawyer. That apparently was the extent of Hogan’s efforts to return the phone.
Today, Patently Apple revealed a whole slew of new multi-touch gestures that Apple might introduce in new products and software updates, most of which are detailed in the image above… which, incidentally, looks like the pictogram instruction set for the secret high five that was in vogue my senior year in high school, and which I could never pull off without the tendons in my wrist rolling up like a window shade.
Patently Apple’s post also indicates a neat new iPod technology which is unrelated, but plenty cool: automatic adjustment of music tempo based on your performance. For example, if you’re flagging on the hill, the tempo increases, while if your heart is about to explode, it slows on down. Looks like a smart evolution of Apple’s current Nike partnership to me.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
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John Stewart on The Daily Show rips Apple a new one for going Big Brother on Gizmodo:
“Apple – you guys were the rebels, man, the underdogs. People believed in you. But now, are you becoming the man? Remember back in 1984, you had those awesome ads about overthrowing Big Brother? Look in the mirror, man! …It wasn’t supposed to be this way – Microsoft was supposed to be the evil one! But you guys are busting down doors in Palo Alto while Commandant Gates is ridding the world of mosquitoes! What the fuck is going on?!
…I know that it is slightly agitating that a blog dedicated to technology published all that stuff about your new phone. And you didn’t order the police to bust down the doors, right? I’d be pissed too, but you didn’t have to go all Minority Report on his ass! I mean, if you wanna break down someone’s door, why don’t you start with AT&T, for God sakes? They make your amazing phone unusable as a phone! I mean, seriously! How do you drop four calls in a one-mile stretch of the West Side Highway! There’re no buildings around! What, does the open space confuse AT&T’s signal?!
…Come on, Steve. Chill out with the paranoid corporate genius stuff. Don’t go all Howard Hughes on us.”
Fast Company has written up the iPhonegate saga as a funny Choose Your Own Adventure. The flowchart is spot on and made me laugh out loud.
Here’s the whole thing: Choose Your Own Adventure: The Gizmodo iPhone Saga
Since contacting Steve has gotten so popular lately, The Joy of Tech has created this handy web based Steve Jobs Email Reply Generator for simplifying the process…
HTC just got a powerful new ally in its patent fight against Apple.
Following Google’s announcement that they would support their frequent manufacturing partner in its defense against complaints made by Apple that HTC handsets infringe upon a number of key iPhone-related patents, Microsoft has issued a press release saying that they have signed a broad patent-sharing agreement with HTC.
According to the agreement, Microsoft will license its patents to HTC across all of their phones. If the phone is a Google Android handset, HTC will pay them a couple bucks in royalties on every handset sold.
Police have identified and interviewed the person who found Apple’s iPhone 4G at a bar, the San Jose Business Journal reports.
Also, it looks like Gray Powell, the engineer who lost the iPhone at the bar, and an Apple lawyer reported it as a theft. However, the District Attorney still hasn’t determined whether the case is a crime.
Investigators said they have identified and interviewed the person who took the phone from the Gourmet Haus Staudt on March 18 after it was left there by Apple engineer Gray Powell following a birthday celebration. Officials were unable to tell the Business Journal whether that person, whose name has not been released, was the same person who eventually sold the phone to tech Web site Gizmodo.com. […]
Wagstaffe said that an outside counsel for Apple, along with Apple engineer Powell, called the District Attorney’s office on Wednesday or Thursday of last week to report a theft had occurred and they wanted it investigated.
San Jose Business Journal: Apple asked for ‘lost’ iPhone criminal probe
Another piece of the iPhonegate puzzle has fallen into place. It’s been officially revealed for the first time that Apple reported it’s iPhone 4G protoype as “stolen,” not lost, according to the Wall Street Journal:
Stephen Wagstaffe, the chief deputy district attorney for San Mateo County, said Apple contacted authorities and “advised us there had been a theft,” which led to the search warrant and an investigation.
Until now, it’s been rumored that Apple considered the iPhone stolen — but hasn’t been officially confirmed. The distinction, of course, is crucial. If authorities conclude the iPhone was stolen, Gizmodo may be on the hook for buying stolen property. If the iPhone was lost, Gizmodo may be in the clear. However, under California law, a lost item that isn’t properly returned to its owner may also sometimes be considered stolen.
The authorities themselves don’t seem to have reached a conclusion yet. It is still unclear if they are investigating Gizmodo or the person who sold Gizmodo the phone. CNet spoke to the San Mateo District Attorney , reporting that it “has not been able to confirm whether the felony investigation is targeting Gizmodo staff, the iPhone seller, or someone else.”
If the authorities conclude that Gizmodo bought stolen property, staff may face up to a year in prison. But if police and the District Attorney are pursuing the seller, the raid on Gizmodo editor Jason Chen’s home may not have been warranted. Gizmodo may be protected under California shield laws, which prohibit judges from issuing search warrants against editorial publications, including online news sites. Techcrunch reports that the investigation has been “paused” while authorities decide whether Gizmodo is shielded or not.
Artists make use of the tools around them. The iPhone is one of the newer ones in the toolkit, and it’s unique capabilities and limitations make for some interesting results.
Norm Zarr says about the Art of iPhone Photography:
“It’s a challenge to take great photos with an iPhone. Compared to most any digital camera, it doesn’t stand up as a camera. But the integration of the iPhone camera, the internet, and the hundreds of camera App’s has made it truly a mobile photographic workstation. This brilliant connection of technologies makes the power of iPhone far beyond the camera itself.”
Some of Norm’s work is shown on his website, Norm Zarr iPhone Photography Galleries; all photos are taken and edited on an iPhone. A very nice mobile version for Safari on the iPhone is also available.
Apple sits on the steering committee of the special police task force investigating iPhonegate, Yahoo News reports, raising the possibility that the company may have had a hand in the raid of Gizmodo editor Jason Chen’s house.
Friday’s police raid on Chen’s apartment was ordered by Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team (REACT) task force, which is commissioned to investigate high-tech crimes. Apple is a member of the task force’s steering committee.
Apple is one of the 25 companies that sit on REACT’s “steering committee.” Which raises the question as to whether Apple, which was outraged enough about Gizmodo’s $5,000 purchase of the lost iPhone for CEO Steve Jobs to reportedly call Gawker Media owner Nick Denton to demand its return, sicked its high-tech cops on Chen.
The San Mateo District Attorney’s office said the task force is investigating a “possible theft,” but wouldn’t say whether the target is Gizmodo or the person who found the iPhone in a bar and sold it to the site.
Yahoo News notes that the task force has investigated other cases in response to requests by committee members, including Symantec, Microsoft and Adobe.
“In either case, it’s hard to imagine — even if you grant that a theft may have occurred under California law, which requires people who come across lost items to make a good-faith effort to return them to their owner — how the loss of a single phone in a bar merits the involvement of an elite task force of local, state, and federal authorities devoted to “reducing the incidence of high technology crime through the apprehension of the professional organizers of large-scale criminal activities,” as the REACT website motto characterizes its mission.
Yahoo News: What is Apple Inc.’s role in task force investigating iPhone case?
Gizmodo’s publisher Nick Denton is not likely to back down to Apple or the police, says a publishing industry executive who has followed Gawker closely for years.
Denton, who owns Gizmodo’s parent company, Gawker Media, relishes a fight in the courts, says the executive, who asked not be named.
The seizure of Gizmodo editor Jason Chen’s computers is illegal, says Gawker Media, the parent company of the blog.
As a journalist, Chen is legally protected from divulging his sources of a story: in this case, details of Apple’s 4G iPhone, which Gizmodo purchased after an Apple engineer left a prototype in a bar. Gawker says the authorities are not allowed to search his computers in pursuit of a suspect, presumably the person who sold Gizmodo the iPhone.
Gawker cites section 1524(g) of the California Penal Code protecting journalists’ sources. It further cites O’Grady v. Superior Court, which extends the protections to online journalists. The O’Grady case is another Apple case, but one that the company lost. Apple tried to force Jason O’Grady to divulge his sources after his PowerPage website published details of another product Apple was working on.
Wow. Silicon Valley police have seized several computers belonging to Jason Chen, the Gizmodo editor who detailed Apple’s iPhone 4G prototype for the site.
California’s Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team entered editor Jason Chen’s home without him present, seizing four computers and two servers. They did so using a warrant by Judge of Superior Court of San Mateo. According to Gaby Darbyshire, COO of Gawker Media LLC, the search warrant to remove these computers was invalid under section 1524(g) of the California Penal Code.
The technology site has just posted some of the details and paperwork, including Gawker Media’s response.
Gawker says the seizure of Chen’s computers is illegal. As a journalist, he is legally protected from divulging his sources, and authorities are not allowed to search his computers in pursuit of a suspect (presumably they’re after the identity of the person who sold Gizmodo the iPhone).
Apple has introduced a new Technical Note for OS X 10.6.3 that allows third-party developers to use hardware acceleration to decode H.264 video.
Adobe’s failure to deliver acceptable performance under OS X has long been blamed by the company on the lack of this functionality. Only Apple computers boasting GPUs supporting the functionality (such as the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M or GeForce GT 330M) will be able to take advantage of it.
“We will be enabling support for hardware accelerated video decoding for Flash Player on Mac,” Adobe spokesperson Matt Rozen told Macworld. “Now that the required APIs are available, we are working on an additional Flash Player release to follow shortly after Flash Player 10.1 to include this functionality for the hardware configurations supported by the new APIs.”
Adobe’s only got themselves to blame here on out. Let’s hope they finally get Flash fixed on OS X.
With the addition of the Xbox-Live-like Game Center to iPhone OS 4.0, Apple has finally made a serious commitment to gamers and game developers after nearly a decade of ignoring them on the OS X platform.
Expect that commitment to continue to deepen: Nintendo games expert and journalist Matt Casmassina of IGN has just been hired by Apple as their new Global Editorial Games Manager.
“Anybody who has read my work through the years will know that I’ve long been a huge Nintendo fan, but if there is one company that could entice me away from covering Mario and Zelda it’s the one owned by Steve Jobs. Beginning early May, I will join Apple as global editorial games manager, App Store,” Casamassina wrote on his blog.
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?
Here’s a interesting story about secrecy and making mistakes at Apple. The story is told by Woz, Apple employee number one (check out his hilarious shirt).
While Woz was waiting in line to buy the iPad last month, an Apple test engineer showed him a prototype iPad. It was just a few hours before the device went on sale. Woz, who is still an Apple employee, fired up the Numbers app. Little did he know, the unit was 3G test prototype, and was not to be shown or used outside of secure areas at the company HQ. Unfortunately, Woz’s playing with it must have somehow sent up a warning flag at Apple.
“… I can tell you that the test engineer who showed me an iPad after midnight, for 2 minutes, during the iPad launch was indeed fired. I opted to spend 2 minutes with Numbers on this iPad, trying some stunts I’d seen on Apple’s website demo video. I was not told that it was a 3G model and I had no way to know that. I was told that this engineer had to wait until midnight to show it outside of Apple’s secure area. And I’m an Apple employee who he was showing it to. My guess is that he was allowed to take the iPad outside of the secure area but still not supposed to show it.”
The test engineer was fired for betraying Apple’s ironclad rules on secrecy. The device was not to be shown to anybody — not even Woz. (And worse, Woz told Steve Jobs about seeing the iPad that night. Jobs himself said it was “no big deal.”)
On the other hand, Gray Powell, the Apple engineer who lost an iPhone 4G prototype at a bar, is still employed at Apple.
“Product secrecy is good for Apple and should be strictly enforced, but maybe 10% of niceness and 90% of strictness is OK too,” writes Woz.
It seems mistakes are forgiven, but betrayals are not.
Gizmodo: Steve Wozniak On Apple Security, Employee Termination, and Gray Powell
There’s another juicy wrinkle in iPhonegate. The Silicon Valley cops are investigating, reports CNet:
Silicon Valley police are investigating what appears to be a lost Apple iPhone prototype purchased by a gadget blog, a transaction that may have violated criminal laws, a law enforcement official told CNET on Friday.
Apple has spoken to local police about the incident and the investigation is believed to be headed by a computer crime task force led by the Santa Clara County district attorney’s office, the source said. Apple’s Cupertino headquarters is in Santa Clara County, about 40 miles south of San Francisco.
How’s this for customer service? Steve Jobs personally intervened to get a dodgy iMac replaced. Author Michael J. Weber bought a new iMac, but his Apple machine was a lemon. Perhaps emboldened by Steve Jobs’ recent email responses to customer emails, Weber didn’t waste any time going straight to the top to complain about it:
Steve,
Received a 27″ i7 iMac today that would only boot in verbose mode. Whatever happened to “It Just Works”? This was a top of the line unit built to order in Elk Grove, CA — not China. And it booted like a Gateway 2000!
The team at Patently Apple mined a patent granted today to find what may be future gold: more evidence that the Cupertino company is toying with the idea of touchscreen iMacs and MacBooks.
After slogging through patent no. 20100100947, titled “Scheme for Authenticating without Password Exchange,” they discovered a flowchart illustrating a touchscreen that could be associated with both a Macbook and a small desktop.
In a patent that even these document hounds defined “obscure,” the flowchart they sniffed out points to a touchscreen component not restricted to the iPhone.
From the “oh that’s awesome” category — which quickly leads to the credit card coming out of the wallet — some of the most unique and whimsical iPhone stands I’ve seen from Forked Up Art.
Stands are $30 each, come in portrait and landscape orientations, and are made of genuine used cutlery. The best form of recycling I’ve seen recently. It’s earned a place in my kitchen!
Thanks to iPhone Savior for the tip.
Apple has filed a very interesting patent for a travel app called iTravel that books flights, hotels and car reservations. But the most interesting part is how it uses a radio chip to check you in at the airport, whisk you through security and allows you to wireless board your flight.
The iTravel app uses Near Field Communications, a short-range wireless technology that is starting to become widely used in cell phones for mobile ticketing, payment and electronic keys, especially in countries like Japan.
Apple is rumored to be adding NFC chipset to the next iPhone. If so, it could turn the iPhone into an electronic wallet, allowing you to for everything, from a cup of coffee to a subway ride. Your iPhone could unlock your car, pick up e-coupons at the local mall, and pay for all your supermarket groceries just by laying it on top of the checkout.