John Brownlee - page 155

Never one to shy away for “Me-Too”-isms, Amazon has just launched their own analogue to the popular Mac App Store.

As rumored, Google just announced their new service, Google Wallet… and unless Apple has some surprises up its sleeves when it comes to NFC, it looks likely that the search giant will have a year’s head start on Cupertino when it comes to the lucrative and burgeoning market of mobile payments.

If you’ve ever tried to use your iPad while wearing a pair of Ray Bans, you know the drill: you can barely see the display. Counter-intutively, it’s not an issue of brightness: rather, polarized sun-glasses work by only letting in light that vibrates vertically, and the light coming from LCDs vibrates the wrong way.

Your next iPhone or iPad, though? It might change all that.

Foxconn’s public relations issues have just collided. A week after an explosion rocked Foxconn’s iPad 2 production facility in Chengdu, China, an employee of that facility has committed suicide.

Here, have a barf. Watch this guy assemble a random assemblage of PC parts, cram them into a tablet chassis, install Windows XP on the resulting mess and then have the sheer audacity to emblazon it with an Apple logo and call it the iPad 3… all to a soundtrack of nu-metal-for-fratties band Linkin Park, as apparently broadcast by AM radio to a receiver made out of a tin can.

When it came time to test the CDMA iPhone 4 on Verizon’s networks, Apple had learned a few things about security from the infamous Gizmodo early iPhone 4 leak. They weren’t about to make the same mistakes twice.

As both a bibliophile and an 11-inch MacBook Air owner, there’s only one word to describe the new BookBook case by TwelveSouth: utterly gorgeous:

Apple may be preparing to nuke Mac Defender from orbit in the next Snow Leopard update, but not only is the malware still a very real threat… Mac Defender now mutated into an even bigger danger than it was before.

When OS X 10.7 ships later this summer, one of its least used yet most beloved system applications will be getting a gorgeous new facelift.

Indie sensation Minecraft is coming to smartphones this year… but it won’t be coming to iOS first. Instead, it’ll debut on Android as an exclusive to the so-called PlayStation Phone, the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play. It’s a betrayal that especially hurts given the fact that Minecraft was briefly available on the App Store last year.

The placement of the cellular and WiFi antennas between the iPhone 4 and iPad 2 couldn’t be more different, but that’s not stopping a small but vocal minority of iPad 2 owners to cry about an Antennagate of their own.

In most of the world, when you buy an iPhone, you pay a small initial fee upfront, but the rest of the handset’s price is baked into your two year contract, which you pay off in monthly installments. In India, though? It’s totally backwards… and totally bizarre.

Apple has built the majority of its modern day fortunes upon the back of the low-voltage ARM chipset. Ever since the first iPhone, ARM chips have driven Apple’s biggest and best-selling products. Thanks to the success of iOS, which only runs on ARM, the futures of Apple and ARM are so intertwined that Cupertino now designs its own custom specced ARM chips.

Given how forward thinking Apple is, it probably wouldn’t surprise you to hear that the Mac maker once bought a 43% stake in ARM back in the early 1990s. What probably would surprise, you, though, is that Apple sold that stake at a loss… and that sale saved the company from total bankruptcy.

In a contentious move, Apple has been telling its official support reps not to remove the Mac Defender malware from users’ machines. Now that policy is starting to make more sense: Apple doesn’t want support reps removing the malware from Macs because they’re releasing a software update that kills Mac Defender automatically.

If anyone was going to ascend naked directly into heaven as beings made entirely out of light, it’s the guys who work for Apple, and while it may not have happened on May 21st as it was supposed to, at least one Apple Store prepared for the Rapture.

Apple’s Smart Cover for iPad 2 is great for protecting your iPad’s display from nicks and scrapes while in your gadget bag, but how good is it actually protecting your iPad 2 when it goes flying from your butterfingers to skitter across the concrete pavement?

The iPhone isn’t likely to get NFC-capabilities allowing it to function as a credit card until 2012, according to most reports, but Apple’s biggest competitor in the smartphone arena has no intention of waiting so long: Google is preparing to unveil their own mobile payment system on May 26th.

Apple’s first CEO wasn’t Steve Jobs, but rather Michael Scott, who ran the company from February in 1977 to March 1981. Installed by Apple’s first backer Mike Markkula because Jobs and Steve Wozniak couldn’t be trusted to run the company, Scott has a unique view of Jobs in his youth: a hot head who ignored people and talent in favor of an anal-retentive attention to aesthetic detail.

We’ve seen and loved Jan-Michael Cart’s incredible iOS 5 concept videos before, but his latest might be our favorite yet: it shows how Apple could bring OS X’s Dashboard feature to iOS 5.

The guys over at MacHeist are much revered among Mac users for their wonderful series of discounted app bundles. Now they’ve turned iPhone developers with their new game, The Heist… and if you beat the game, you’ll get a free game through Steam for Mac for your trouble.

It’s no iPad, that’s for sure, but Barnes & Noble has just taken a big new step towards making e-readers even more accessible to the populace at large: they’ve added a touchscreen to their latest Nook,

(Update: Looks like we were right to be skeptical. GigaOm has since corrected their post to say they mistakenly published an old press release.)

In what we hope is a return from his medical leave of absence, Apple has apparently just confirmed that Steve Jobs will be the official keynote speaker at this year’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference.

Apple’s suing Samsung for copying the intellectual property of their iPhone, iPad and iOS designs. In return, Samsung’s suing Apple for patent infringement.

In the Apple vs. Samsung case, though, Apple has just won a weird little concession from the judge: they get to see five of Samsung’s unreleased tablets and smartphones. Can you imagine what would happen if Samsung got the same concession in their suit against Apple?

With iOS 4, Apple left the original iPhone and iPod Touch behind in the dust of iOS 3.1.3, and even the iPhone 3G could not avail itself of some of iOS 4’s most notable features, like multitasking. As long as you at least had an iPhone 3GS, though, you’d be fine.

Given how many problems the iPhone 3G hardware had running iOS 4.0, it should come as no surprise that Apple is hoping to consign that hardware to the dustbin when they debut iOS 5 at WWDC next month. What may be more surprising is that the iPhone 3GS will go into the dustbin too.

Since iOS 4, Apple has been securing your iPhone’s data with 256-bit encryption. That encryption has just been cracked, and just by running a simple program, anyone with access to your handset can access the full data stored even in encrypted iPhone backups.