We eagerly waited for Mojang to release the much anticipated port of Minecraft for almost a year, and while we ended up loving Minecraft: Pocket Edition on its own merits, it was missing a lot of stuff from the desktop game, including crafting, monsters and more.
If you were disappointed by Minecraft: Pocket Edition, though, turn that frown upside down. A post on the official Mojang blog says that their future plans include bringing many of the desktop’s best features to the mobile edition.
On Friday, Google opened a new Android store with Androidland in Melbourne, a place to hawk Android tablets and phones made by various manufacturers. So how’s it stand up against the Apple Store? Let’s see! (click to enlarge)
Apple Store (left) — Brightly lit, thronged with customers, tastefully designed with the finest materials and well-staffed with bright, enthusiastic employees at the top of their field who are constantly moving to help people with questions.
Androidland (right) — Dark and dimly lit, with a design more evocative of an early 90s Chuck E. Cheese arcade pit than a high-end retail store. Staffed by two disengaged lunkheads, who expertly manage not only to ignore the only customer on the floor, but to be at least fifty feet away from him.
Amazing.
Don’t miss Apple Store vs. Microsoft Store. It’s just as funny.
In late 2010, Steve Jobs commented on the sudden influx of 7-inch tablets by calling them ‘tweeners. He said that Apple had considered 7-inch displays for the iPad, but after extensive testing, a 7-inch screen was too small to really be useable.
Android tablet makers, of course, scoffed… then rushed to market with their own 10-inch tablets once they discovered that Steve Jobs was telling the truth. So how long until Amazon updates the Kindle Fire to 10-inches? The results of Kindle Fire usability studies are in, and the 7-inch Kindle Fire is an ugly, hideous mess of missed taps and users screaming out of frustration.
With every new iPhone, we know to expect a faster processor and faster GPU. However, a weird report coming out of Germany says that Apple isn’t just testing new CPUs and GPUs for the next generation of iPhone… they are also testing some truly bizarro resolutions that could indicate that Apple will radically redesign the iPhone in 2012 to be even higher resolution and with an entirely new aspect ratio.
MacUpdate always knows how to throw a good bundle, and their Yuletime offering is no exception, offering 11 incredible apps for just $49.99, shaving nearly $700 off of their full retail value.
Ever since Jobs enigmatically said in his bio that he had “cracked” the television problem, people have been going nuts speculating… and Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster has gone so far as to say that the iTV will cost twice as much as a regular television set, and come in three different sizes.
Well, looks like Munster’s forecast has some corroborating evidence. A new report not only says that Apple’s iTV will come in three different sizes, but that it will also pack Apple’s next-gen A6 CPU.
Despite the fact that Apple allows users an easy way to opt out of the service, have removed it entirely from most of their phones and that Apple’s implementation of Carrier IQ tracks no personal information whatsoever, guess what? Cupertino’s been named in a class action lawsuit over the notorious keylogging software, along with a host of other hardware makers, all of whom are way more guilty.
A few months ago, Facebook announced a partnership with Microsoft and Skype that brought Skype video calling to their desktop website, and now it’s coming to the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, according to a new report.
Apple co-founder and burly all-around cuddle bear Steve Wozniak was in India last week to talk to up-and-coming entrepreneurs a thing or two about becoming a technology legend, and while he was there, he gave a great interview in which he said that competing smartphones were “failures,” just like the Apple III and the Lisa.
It’s Monday morning, and oh gawd, I need this: a faucet of espresso I can just pour into a cup by pulling my iPhone out and launching an app.
Everyone knows that OS X has code names, and how they work: each version of OS X comes branded as a carnivorous big cat, ranked from smallest to largest. Likewise, Android’s got code names up their wazoo, twee little monikers taken from the realm of desserts like Gingerbread, Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich.
But did you know that iOS has code names too? They aren’t publicized, but internally, Apple refers to the latest version of iOS by a number of cool monikers.
This week, a lot was made in the news about Siri’s supposed pro-life leanings. Essentially, a bunch of people got upset because Siri couldn’t find a local abortion clinic, even though abortion clinics don’t actually call themselves that. Apple denied that Siri had any pro-life leanings whatsoever, saying instead the service was in “beta.”
So what really happened? Well, Apple just learned its first lesson about search: you’re held responsible when the information people are expecting to see doesn’t show up in a search query, even if that information is only tangentially related to the actual words in the query. It’s a headache Google’s been dealing with for almost a decade.
It’s a slow Friday afternoon, and in browsing through our emails for tips, we stumbled across this incredibly detailed tattoo of Steve Jobs designed by Jaime De Leon Tud of Wildside Tattoo in the Phillippines.
It got us thinking: why not blow off work early and get some Apple-inspired ink? We hit the internet looking for inspiration, and after seeing dozens of images (oftentimes of tattoos still in the process of oozily healing), we remembered that getting ink involves needles and blood, and wimped out.
The whole exercise wasn’t fruitless, though, because in our travels, we came across a number of totally cool, or weird, or sexy, or bizarre, or clever, or just plain hardcore Apple tattoos from members of the Cult of Mac spread around the world. Here’s some of the best of the bunch.
Apple’s a master of the supply chain, keeping just a couple days’ worth of inventory at stock any time under the mantra that any product in a warehouse is just costing the company money. The benefit of all of this is Apple is able to manage its supply chain with laser precision, deliver new products quickly and on-time without worrying about selling out existing inventory and save millions while doing so. But when something unexpected happens, Apple can find it doesn’t have enough inventory in stock to fulfill demand.
Apple’s just been hit by the rare downside to the way it handles its supply chain. The hard drive shortages caused by massive flooding in Thailand over the past few months have finally caught up with Apple, delaying built-to-order iMacs with two terabyte hard drives.
It’s not just Robin Williams making fun of Siri on national TV these days. Wry faux-conservative Stephen Colbert picked up his iPhone 4S the other day to address the recent controversy over Siri’s inability to find a single abortion clinic in New York, which Colbert describes as such an impossibility (“There’s one at the top of the Empire State Building”) that he summarily declares Siri to be a pro-life, racist arch-conservative, “like Laura Ingraham, except less robotic.” But who can blame her? As Colbert points out, it’s “only a matter of time before she loses her job to the Mexican yoPhoñe.”
Very funny. If you like Colbert, check it out.
Ray Bradbury is a living legend of futurism, and short of Tolkein and Asimov, probably the most important writer of fantasy and science-fiction in the 20th Century. He’s also a feisty old technophobic grampaw who would rather smash an iPad into pieces with his walking stick than read a book on one. That’s just one reason why Bradbury’s most famous book, Fahrenheit 451, has never been available in e-book form up until now.
The other reason? The novel famously describes a future dystopia in which books are burned on sight by a totalitarian government, and Bradbury has long contented that the power of the premise goes away when you’re reading it on a medium besides paper.
Bradbury’s had to suck up his objections to iPhones and iPads, though. The 91-year-old author has finally lived to see Fahrenheit 451 comes to iBooks and Kindles.
This video shot with an iPhone 4S has a couple of great “We’re going to need a bigger boat” moments in it. Shot about 25 miles southeasy of Wrighstville Beach, the 18 foot Great White shark circled this 21 foot ship for a good half hour, occasionally slapping the side of the boat with its tail, probably to test how easily the boat of meat would capsize. Incredible.
[via Daring Fireball]
Apple comments on the presence of Carrier IQ on some iPhones:
We stopped supporting CarrierIQ with iOS 5 in most of our products and will remove it completely in a future software update. With any diagnostic data sent to Apple, customers must actively opt-in to share this information, and if they do, the data is sent in an anonymous and encrypted form and does not include any personal information. We never recorded keystrokes, messages or any other personal information for diagnostic data and have no plans to ever do so.
Seems like that says it all. Carrier IQ’s not seeing a lot of support from the big boys here, is it?
[via All Things D]
If you have a Mophie Juice Pack, you might want to back up a bit: Mophie’s Juice Pack Air for the fourth generation iPod touch is being recalled for burning so hot it can potentially damage the device. If you’ve got one of them, check to see if it has a serial number starting with between TR113 and TR120, then head on over to Mophie’s web site to get it replaced.
Mophie’s not the only company with some battery problems today, though. Best Buy’s in-house Rocketfish brand battery case for the iPhone 3G and 3GS are also being recalled after 14 iPhones caught on fire while charging. You can check your eligibility here, with affected owners getting a gift card for $70 USD or $105 CDN.
Carrier IQ’s not having a good day. The invasive keylogging software which comes installed on over 140 million Android, Nokia and Blackberry smartphones is embroiled in controversy, and it’s not just creepy… it’s probably illegal, and Senator Al Franken — who once grilled Apple over the so-called LocationGate — is now demanding answers.
Robin Williams popped up on the Ellen DeGeneres show the other day to talk about “the new future” that Siri offers, and as he is wont to do, he used it as an opportunity to break out an outrageous impression of Siri as a stereotypical, cheese-sniffing Frenchman, dripping with contempt for the American bourgeoise.
[via Techcrunch]
We think it’s adorable that this fat, fuzzy cat sleeps in an empty eMac fitted out with warm lights and cozy blankets, but it’s not particularly unique by itself: those old vintage all-in-one Macs have been turned into pet carriers and aquariums since time immemorial.
What sets the so-called eSleeper apart is that every time puss pushes his way in for a nap, it sends out a random tweet thanks to a controlled Arduino. And the tweets aren’t bad, although that cat certainly sleeps a lot. Less a Nyan Cat than a Nyarcoleptic one.
[via TUAW]
The Carrier IQ scandal has broken everywhere since we first reported it yesterday morning. The invasive rootkit is installed on over 140 million phones the world over, and logs everything you do with your device, from the numbers you dial to the smutty pictures you send to your girlfriend.
Yesterday, we reported the story as one proving Steve Jobs right about how Android tracks everything you do, but a day later, things seem a lot less black and white. Carrier IQ’s software comes pre-installed on other devices besides Android, like BlackBerrys and Nokias, and as even the name of the software suggests, seems to be something installed by carriers. And, as it turns out, some iPhones. Luckily, disabling it is the easiest thing in the world, and it logs none of your personal information, unlike the software’s more nefarious Android counterpart.
Because hanging a fragile slate of glass and aluminum from a thin twig of Christmas fir is a road to ruin: these iPad 2 and iPhone 4 Christmas Tree ornaments.
Don’t expect anything fancy — they are strictly two-dimensional, printed from photo-quality paper and backed by high-quality cardboard. Heck, you could probably save $11.00 and make them yourself from paper lying around your office. Still, ’tis the season to spend lots of cash on silly ornaments…
Click the image above to embiggen.See that notebook to the left (his right) of a casually-dressed President Obama? That’s not a notebook, it’s the iPad 2 3G Obama got “a little bit early” from Steve Jobs, wrapped in a Moleskine-like DODOcase.
DODOcase must be beside themselves. They’ve got a good claim to being the only iPad case manufacturer personally endorsed by the President of the United States himself.
[via TNW]