If you go to Verizon Wireless‘s front page right now, they are hyping the imminent launch of something, which we can only assume is iPad 3 related.
But what is it? An iPad 3 with LTE is obviously a big contender, but I wonder if it could be something less splashy but just as important overall, like shared data plans.
What’s your guess? Let us know in the comments!
Running Cult of Mac, one of the most addictive aspects of managing the site on a daily basis is watching our real-time analysis metrics spit out numbers at us. It’s a fun, gamey way to measure how we’re doing over the course of the day — the site owner’s equivalent of watching XP bubble out of his level 13 warrior’s head as he wades into a crowd of orcs in World of Warcraft.
If I were an app developer, it seems like it would be pretty great to have the equivalent of real-time analytics for my app: a way to see at any given moment how many people were playing with my app, and what they were doing with it. And now TestFlibght, the popular beta distro service for iPhone and iPad apps, is here with a new service that does just that.
Could iPad 3 cases already be shipping to Best Buy? Sure, and probably are. Does that mean third-party case manufacturers know what to expect? Don’t count on it, but if so, the iPad 3 case above — a variation on the existing Targus Versavu 360 case for iPad 2 — is the first one you’ll be able to buy.
The iPad 3 will be officially unveiled just days from now, but the rumor mill is always forward-looking, which means it’s already on its way to being yesterday’s news. What can we expect after the iPad 3? That’s what everyone wants to know now.
If a report from Apple’s best frenemy Samsung is anything to go by, it’ll be the long-rumored iPad mini.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — During his keynote speech on Tuesday, Google’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said, seemingly with all seriousness, that someday, “there will be Android in every pocket.”
For someone who has been prowling around Mobile World Congress for the past four days, it’s a statement that’s hard to react to without spraying crumbs. Schmidt couldn’t sound any more delusional if he were sealed up in a hermetic chamber with a scale-model of the Spruce Goose. The iPhone dominates Mobile World Congress. Google can’t even get an Android in every pocket at its own tradeshow.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — If you’re looking for cans on the high-end, you can always count on Sennheiser. Their latest headphones, though, are particular nice. Don’t expect just warmed over tech: their new MM 450-X and 55-X Bluetooth headphones can pipe in some of the clearest tunes you’ll hear without a wire.
According to this official White House picture, “President Barack Obama receives the Presidential Daily Briefing from Robert Cardillo, Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Intelligence Integration, in the Oval Office, Jan. 31, 2012. Part of the briefing was done using a tablet computer.”
Oh really? I assert that President Obama isn’t using a “tablet computer” in this picture at all. A tablet computer is a vague term for some crummy, half-baked Android thingie like the Motorola Xoom or Transformer Prime. No, what President Obama is using quite openly and proudly here is an iPad 2.
Hey, Android fans! Does your president use an Android device? Ha, just kidding, obviously the answer is no.
[Thanks, Tim!]
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — Prowling the showfloor for scoops on the second day of Mobile World Congress, we happened to stop by the Windows Phone 7 booth, where we discovered that just hours before, an original first-generation iPhone beat a top-of-the-line Windows Phone in one of Microsoft’s very own challenges. Oh, delicious hubris!
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — Although Cupertino currently uses their own custom-baked ARM chips inside the iPhone and iPad, Intel’s gunning for their business. Caught with their pants down in the mobile market, Intel thinks they have finally gotten their silicon caught up to ARM when it comes to power management.
Their new mobile platform is called Medfield, and while it’s only for Android now, you should take Intel’s entry into the mobile market seriously: this could very well be the first-generation of the chip that won’t just power future iPhones and iPads, but run OS X on them as well. We got a hands-on.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — As a company, Nokia has embraced Windows Phone as their long-term smartphone strategy, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some Symbian execs rattling around inside the company, and today, they’ve given us the PureView 808, a Symbian-driven smartphone with a laugh-out-loud claim: a 41 megapixel camera.
Does it really have that many megapixels? It seems so. Does it take nice pictures? Absolutely. But there’s a lot more going on here than just megapixels, and it’s doubtful anyone with an iPhone 4S will be clamoring for one.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — One of the things that first inspired me to be a professional writer was sharing my early fiction experiments as a 10 year old on the discussion boards of the old dial-up service, Prodigy. The instantaneous feedback, the helpful advice, the suggestions from other people about what should happen next to my character (a monster-killing, Nazi-loathing private dick named Dr. Crypt, a name which I still use as my Twitter handle): all of this was a formative experience for me, and without it, I never would have dared to dream that someday, I would make my living putting words down on paper.
Prodigy’s bulletin boards aren’t around anymore, but a new start up is trying to encourage kids and teenagers to write the same way. The company’s called Movellas, and it’s taking the concepts of Twitter, LiveJournal, Kickstarter and the Kindle self-publishing platform to help identify and nurture the next Stephanie Mayer or Stephen King when he or she is still a kid. And, of course, they have an app for that.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — Forget a bigger screen or LTE. Ask anybody who has ever dropped their iPhone in a sink, puddle or toilet what they want from the iPhone 5 and waterproofing is number one on the list.
The good news is that there are now a number of companies who are bringing to market superhydrophobic technologies that will help make the soggy iPhone or iPad a thing of the past. Don’t expect a waterproof iPad 3, but an iPhone 5 by the end of the year isn’t just possible, it’s probable.
There’s a certain kind of computing nostalgia that holds that the art of typing has been steadily wussified since the late 1980s, when the venerable IBM Model M and Apple Extended Keyboard went out of favor.
These keyboards, it is held, were the last of a breed of keyboards for men. Like a vintage Underwood typewriter, these mechanical marvels were made for those who meant for their words not just to be heard, but to be felt: the hefty chunk of each key smashing into the mechanical switch underneath shouldn’t just make a letter light up on a screen; it should land with such authority it shakes your teeth loose.
For the last month, I’ve been trying to become one of these burly typist he-men. I put my Apple Wireless Keyboard — as pale, thin and pretty as the world’s most anemic twink — and have instead replaced it with the Das Keyboard Model S Professional for Mac. Now when I type, it sounds like ten tiny John Henrys working away under my fingers, pounding spikes through the invisible gold-plated key switches beneath each key.
It’s not really for me. Not most of the time.
The fantastic Letters of Note blog has posted an amazing letter that a 30-year old Bill Gates sent to John Sculley and Jean Louis Gassée back in June of 1985.
In the letter, Gates argues that Apple should license their hardware and operating system out to other companies, making Macintosh a “standard.” If that pitch sounds familiar, it should: after being ignored by Apple for six months, Microsoft took the idea and ran with it, bringing Windows to the world.
Fifty-seven years ago today, Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco, California.
If he hadn’t been, none of us would be here. There’d be no Cult of Mac. It wasn’t just Steve Jobs who was born that day, but the iPod. The iPhone. The iPad. The Mac. Apple itself.
Apple wears its love for microblogging social network Twitter on its sleeves. With iOS 5, Twitter became deeply integrated into every iPhone and iPad; with Mountain Lion, Twitter will be a native feature of every Mac.
Given the above, it would be easy to conclude that Apple doesn’t think much of Facebook. However, as Tim Cook made clear to investors at the annual Apple Shareholder’s Meeting today, the truth is more complicated.
A potentially major coup has happened at today’s Apple Annual Shareholder Meeting: ignoring the request of Cupertino itself, Apple’s shareholders have approved a measure that now requires a majority vote for the approval of new Board Directors.
That’s big. For the first time, any new appointment to Apple’s Board of Directors will require that the shareholders approve in majority any new appointee. That gives the shareholders a lot more power over the company’s future… and could potentially lead to some interesting power struggles down the road.
Steve Jobs called then tweeners: too big to be a phone, too small to be a tablet. Others have coined a better portmanteau to describe them: “phablets.” It’s a wonderful word, isn’t it, somehow evoking both expectoration and flabbiness?
Anyway, we’re going to be seeing a lot of phablets next week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona (and make sure to stay tuned for our on-site reporting all next week), and my guess is that with most of them, the rationale that manufacturers have employed in making them will be eerily similar to the thought process described in the latest strip of Dilbert.
[Thanks, Mike!]
Even when they are crazily off base, we’re fans of Italian conceptual studio CiccareseDesign’s work. At the very least, their mockups and renders of imaginary Apple products give some perspective to the whys and hows of the designs Jony Ive does choose.
Their latest mockup is of the forthcoming iPhone 5. What’s most interesting about the design they chose was that it is directly inspired by the Magic Mouse: not actually the worst idea for an iPhone, which like a mouse will sit in people’s hands all day. Here’s a gallery of the renders.
With a plethora of options available for any taste, it’s a better time to be a digital music fan than ever before. iTunes Match. Spotify. Rdio. Soundcloud. Grooveshark. There’s a streaming music service for every taste, a place for every song in the cloud no matter how obscure.
With all of these competing services floating around, though, finding music in your library isn’t as easy as it once was, though… mostly because you probably don’t have a central music library. Some of your favorite albums are on iTunes, while others might only be available on Spotify, or knocking around as demos on Soundcloud.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was an iTunes-like media manager to consolidate all of your music? An app you could use to just find that song on all of your services, no matter where it’s stored: just type it in and hit play?
There is. It’s called Tomahawk. And it’s awesome.
Like many Apple fans, I love the idea of the an iPod nano watch. I adore the fact that an idle comment from Steve Jobs about how the new nano is so small it can be worn as a watch got turned into a cottage industry of Kickstarters fashioning a multitude of hip new watchbands.
The only thing is I don’t want to wear the damn thing. I’m not a wristwatch kind of guy: I’m the sort of person who prefers pulling something out of his pocket, like my iPhone. So I wonder why it took someone so long to think of this incredible idea. Instead of a wristwatch, why not turn the iPod nano into a pocket watch?
Here at Cult of Mac, we’re big fans of Clear, the elegant, zen-minimalist to-do app for the iPhone released by Impending and Realmac Software. That said, for all its attractiveness, it doesn’t actually push the bar very far technically… which, as it turns out, makes it a fairly trivial feat to recreate in HTML5!
A few weekends ago, I had some friends over, and we all got drunk and played Beatles Rock Band for a fun couple of hours. It was great. There really is something for everyone in the Beatles’ music catalogue.
One particularly funny moment came as I was singing “I Am The Walrus.” John Lennon has always claimed that the song is a blistering parody of caterwauling crooner Bob Dylan’s nonsense lyrics, but a friend of mine made an utterly bizarre case that the song is, instead, a subversive anthem in support of polysexual sodomy… an interesting interpretation, to say the least.
The key to the interpretation, he argued, is the chorus line. “Ooompah oompah! Stick it in your jumper. Everyone has one,” my friend quoted, his eyes bulging meaningfully. I found the whole exchange so funny that I immediately made myself an iPhone ringtone of the appropriate section of the song.
On a tangentially related note, The Fab Four has just released their first ever batch of iTunes ringtones. “I Am The Walrus” isn’t there, making my ringtone unique and signaling a conspiracy, but there are a ton of good songs available. Full list below.
One of the most beautiful games on the Mac App Store, Trine, is on sale for a limited time only for just $0.99. You should get it.
As we all well know by now, the smallest decision in an Apple product can be the sort of thing that Cupertino designers can have spent man years deciding upon, experimenting with iteration after iteration until inspiration finally and serendipitously strikes. But this obsession with detail isn’t just visual: it goes right down to the sounds you never think twice about.
Here’s one great example, shared by sound designer Jim McKee on the 99% Invisible Podcast. The sound of your iPhone or iPad unlocking itself? It’s actually the sound a vice grip makes opening itself up.