John Brownlee - page 111

Back in 2004, I couldn’t afford $499 for an iPod, so instead I got a 20GB Dell DJ for $299. Honestly, it wasn’t a bad little MP3 player, but it looked like it had been designed by some sort of extraordinary, irradiated orangutan toiling away in the bowels of the Kremlin during the Soviet electronics revolution of the late 1980s. I realize that analogy doesn’t make any sense, but just look at the design and button placement on this thing, and all will become clear.

My DJ lasted me quite a few years, but when I finally upgraded to an 80GB iPod Classic in 2006, I breathed a sigh of relief. The lesson? Accept no substitutes.

On that note, here’s the latest bizarre Communist clone of a popular Apple gadget: the Red Pad, named after the only book a loyal Maoist ever needed in the 1960s-era Chinese Communist Party, his Little Red Book. It looks just like an iPad, but it’s tailored specifically to run apps compatible with China’s massive state propaganda machine. Oh, and it costs twice as much as an iPad 2!

The only problem? After poor reviews, the Chinese government has wiped out all mention of its existence.

Eager to try the new iBooks Author tools? Better have an iPad. In fact, even if you do have one, you can’t even preview what your e-book will look like on an iPad itself without connecting the device to your computer.

What a bummer. That’s convoluted, and cuts right out authors who want to publish their e-books through the iBookstore without necessarily spending $499 on a device first. Considering there’s already an iOS simulator as part of Apple’s development tools package, why didn’t they just hook iBooks Author’s preview functionality up to that?

[Thanks for the tip, Roger!]

If you missed this morning’s Education Event at the Guggenheim in New York City and our live blog coverage wasn’t good enough for you, Apple has posted up the full footage of the event over on their site. You can stream it here or download through iTunes here.

It was a fantastic event, but man, do I wish Steve could have been there.

Today’s Education Event at the Guggenheim in New York City was by all reports supposed to be “demure,” but that didn’t stop Apple from making a big splash. In fact, today’s event may have marked the most concerted attempt by Apple to revolutionize the classroom since the original Apple IIe.

Among today’s announcements? A new version of iBooks that makes textbooks on an iPad fully interactive, along with free authoring tools so easy-to-use and revolutionary that literally any author can create a beautifully formatted interactive e-book. Coupled with iTunes U — perhaps the most comprehensive classroom learning software ever — and a pledge to keep the price of all textbooks at $14.99, Apple’s goals are clear: they want to get an iPad in the hands of every student in the country.

There’s only one problem, right now: the lack of a budget iPad. It’s a problem Apple can (and should) fix.

For a “small, demure event,” Apple announced a shocking amount of new stuff at today’s Education Event: a new version of iBooks with e-textbook support, iTunes U’s new virtual classroom app, iBook Author (which should revolutionize home publishing) and even several incredible, interactive textbooks. We’re wondering, though, of all this stuff, which of today’s announcements do you find most revolutionary, most exciting?

Tick off your answer in the poll above, then join us in the comments, where we’ll be discussing what Apple’s announcements mean for the future of iOS and the e-book industry.

With today’s announcement of iBooks Author and iBooks 2, Apple intends on making expensive, bulky textbooks and exploding book bags a thing of the past. But one thing they didn’t mention is that while an iPad 2 may be thinner than a traditional textbook, iBook textbooks gain bulk in a different way: the files are absolutely huge.

This is a surprise: iTunes U has just moved on to its own app, and it’s a whole virtual classroom in app form. Why even go to class?

Now Phil Schiller is back on stage, and he’s here to tell us all how these amazing iBooks 2 e-textbooks have been created: a new app called iBooks Author, exclusively for the Mac.

Roger Rosner, VP for Productivity Software, has just come up on stage to show off some textbooks using iBooks 2. And it looks pretty amazing.

Apple’s Phil Schiller has just taken the stage at the Guggenheim in New York City, and he’s here to reiterate what many of us have never forgotten from our days on old Apple IIe’s in the classroom: education is important to Apple. “Today’s event is about education,” says Schiller. “And education is deep in Apple’s DNA.” “Apple’s entire education business is based on teaching, learning, and student achievement. Try to bring the same passion they bring to every product into education business, too.” Schiller’s here to bring the iPad more forcefully to the classroom, to use the iPad as a tool to get American kids back to the forefront of reading, math and science. Could today’s event launch the second iPad revolution: the education revolution? [image via Macworld]

See that adapter in the picture above? It’s an Apple 30 Pin Micro USB Adapter. And it might just prove that China is more important to Apple than Europe.

AT&T has been forcing the same crappy $25 for 2GB plan down everyone’s throat since June 2010, but now they’re upgrading it for the first time. Starting Sunday, AT&T will be upgrading all their new smartphone data plans with larger data allocations… and larger prices. Yes, pay-by-the-month iPad users, that means you too.

Some bits and bobs of tech just never seem to go away entirely no matter how much tech you own, and just as you always need to have a printer around for that rare printout, there’s always a need to have access to a scanner to digitize the stray scrap of paper or mottled receipt.

With so many people now ditching their laptops for iPads, the iConvert aims to fill a niche. Featyring a front feeder adjustable from between 2- and 8.5-inches wide, the iConvert can scan almost anything normal sized you throw at it, and digitize them directly to your iPad’s picture folder as 300 DPIs.

Pretty swank for the mobile road warrior looking to keep his portfolio of documents as svelte as his iPad 2. Couple this with an OCR app, you’re all set. $150 when it goes on sale in February, courtesy of Brookstone.

In last week’s Friday Night Fights, Cult of Android’s Vincent Messina and I argued about what was superior: the iPhone’s 3.5-inch display versus Android’s 4+ inch superphones. In my argument, I posited that one reason Android phones had such huge displays was because it allowed them to cram more battery into the device, but as it turns out, there’s a better reason: Android sucks at scaling UI elements.

Yesterday, we told everyone who was still rocking a jailbreak under iOS 4.3.3 (mainly iPad 2 users) to upgrade to the soon-to-be-jailbroken-for-A5-devices iOS 5.0.1 now, before Apple releases iOS 5.1, which closes the vulnerability. If you don’t, you might lose your chance for a jailbreak for good.

Here’s the caveat though. If you’re on an iPhone 4S and if you want to carrier unlock it down the line, don’t upgrade. iOS 5.0.1 has a different baseband than iOS 5, and while the Dev Team has an exploit for iOS 5 that they hope will lead to an unlock, they don’t know when or even if they’ll be able to crack open the later update.

Do you have an old first or second gen iPod touch or iPhone? If so, you’re probably pretty red-faced with jealousy about all of those cool new iOS 5 features you’re missing out on: multi-tasking, reminders, iCloud, homescreen folders and so on.

There’s no reason your face has to be so flushed, though. Thanks to Whited00r, you can get iOS 5’s best features on your old iPod touch or iPhone 3G, no jailbreak required.

Are you still rocking iOS 4.3.3 on your jailbroken iPad 2? Time to bite the bullet and upgrade to iOS 5.0.1. If you don’t, you might lose your window to jailbreak iOS 5.

For a pretty big chunk of users, the iPod nano isn’t just an MP3 player; it’s also their watch. But what if you want something a little less watch-like from your nano? Maybe it’s time for a Nanolet — an iPod nano watchband that looks and acts a bit more like a bracelet, letting a tiny sliver of your wrist peek through.

You can grab one right now from Curecreative in a variety of colors including black, white, red, indigo and grey for just $21.52.

Well, it’s been about three months, but Apple’s finally managing to get iPhone 4S online order ship dates down to a reasonable amount of time: just 3-5 business days. Nice one, especially considering just a couple weeks ago, shipping times were between one and three weeks at all times. No matter how much iPhone building capacity Apple seems to make, though, they can’t ever seem to make them fast enough. Bet that’s a problem the competition would like to have.

Although I’ve always been delighted with my Apple USB Keyboard, but some people live and die by the clickety-clack. For some QWERTY warriors, in fact, things never got better than the vintage old IBM Model M, a platonic ideal of a mechanical keyboard.

DAS has been trying to appeal to the vintage old IBM Model M crowd for a couple years now with their fantastic series of DAS Keyboards, but those beautiful accessories — while admittedly both beautiful and satisfying to type on — weren’t strictly Mac compatible.

Now that’s all changed. Meet the DAS Keyboard Model S Professional for Mac, and it not only will help old Model M-ers make the switch… it should even please vintage Mac users who have been missing their old Apple Extended Keyboard II.

When you suck up too much data on your iPhone on AT&T, they will eventually throttle you, especially if you’re on a legacy unlimited data plan (and especially especially if they think you’re tethering through a jailbreak).

Want to know what it’s like to be throttled, though? As this video walkthrough by AppAdvice makes clear, it’s hell, a total nightmare.

The iPad 3 is widely anticipated to hit store shelves in March, about a year from the date that the iPad 2 first debuted. Apple’s next-gen tabled it expected to pack a 2048 x 1536 Retina Display, an A6 SoC and (possibly) 4G LTE support. Now a new report suggests that we’re just a few short weeks away from getting our first look at the iPad 3.

Remember those riots at the iPhone 4S launch in Shanghai and Beijing last week? Meet the group responsible for them: this orange-capped crowd of scalpers, an army of 500 strong so organized and massive that it took eleven busses to bring them to the event.

We’re only about two or three months away from the iPad 3 dropping and blowing our socks off. Right now, we can tell you a lot about what the iPad 3 will probably be like. It’ll feature Apple’s new, quad-core A6 CPU. It’ll feature a 2048 x 1536 resolution Retina Display. It may — but probably won’t — be the first iOS device to ship with LTE support.

But what about Siri, Apple’s amazing new voice control technology prominently featured in the iPhone 4S? Surely, that’s a lock for all future Apple devices starting with the iPad 3, right?

Well, hold on. Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.

There’s no shortage of waterproof coating coming to market that Apple could potentially slather future iPhones in, making water damage all but a thing of the past.

After CES, though, if you wanted to take bets about which company would end up landing the deal, money would rest on HzO, who not only claim that their WaterBlock superhydrophobic coating is better than the competition’s… but Apple’s interested.