John Brownlee - page 159

Illustration student Rachel Walsh was assigned a seemingly impossible design task by her professor: explain the concept of the Amazon Kindle to Charles Dickens. Her solution is ingenious, and applies just as well to iBooks, but just imagine if she’d been asked to explain the iPad to Dickens instead.

With the 2011 iMacs, it’s become even harder for users to upgrade their machines without paying Apple their pound of flesh.

Just a couple of days ago, we saw a leaked case for the iPod nano that seemed to confirm that Apple intends on ditching the sports clip and integrating a 1.3 megapixel camera instead. At the time, we wondered just why Apple would do such a thing.

Now it looks like we know: it’s so the Nano can look out into the world and see just where it’s being used, then adapt itself like a chamelon accordingly.

If you’re so inclined and mad enough to try it, you can install Google’s Android operating system on your original iPhone, iPod Touch or iPhone 3Gwith a minimum of fuss, but later iPhones like the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4, as well as the iPad? A much stickier wicket.

A handful of components said to come from the guts of the next iPhone have hit the web. Or they might just be a piece of junk taken from some tinker’s pockets. If they’re for real, though, consider at least a couple of the juicier rumors about the hardware of the iPhone 5 debunked.

False alarm, guys. Despite fears, the latest 4.2.2 firmware for the second-gen Apple TV is still just as jailbreakable as it ever was, despite an update to iOS 4.3.

If you want to find an available hooker nearby, there will soon be an app for that on the iOS App Store.

Sick of iPhoto ’11 splitting all your events into fragments when you import your iPhone photos? Version 9.1.3 is here, and should set you right.

Expect as much as twice as much storage to be stuffed into 2012’s MacBook Airs. Industry market research firm Gartner says that the price of solid state drives will drop below a buck per gigabyte by the second half of 2012.

Got a second-generation Apple TV? Get it while it’s hot: a new update has just hit Apple’s update servers.

When Google and Amazon launched their cloud music services, they did so without signing deals with the four major music labels. Apple will not be following suit, and according to music industry insiders, having all the contracts signed is what’s going to let Cupertino kick the competition’s teeth in.

Will Apple, as rumored, shift the MacBook line over to an ARM processor this year, starting with the MacBook Air? If you answered yes to that question, one analyst has some compelling reasons why you might just be huffing fumes.

Would it surprise you to know that the iPad 2 suffers from a bug that causes universal color gamma issues during video playback, resulting in low contrast and washed out blacks?

A Chinese gadget maker of dubious distinction, vowing to directly clone a popular, in-demand Apple product? Is this even real life????

The one-two punch of the iPad and the new 11.6-inch MacBook Air have basically killed netbooks off, but Google doesn’t seem to be paying attention: they’ve just announced the first two commercial netbooks running the new Chrome OS. Christened ‘Chromebooks,’ they’re like little MacBook Welfares.

I just don’t get this Kickstarter project. Called the iKeyboard, the idea is to make the iPad easier to touch type on without adding bulk to either your iPad or your gadget bag.

But as a guy who does a lot of touch typing throughout the day, I’ve got to say, I’m a bit mystified by how exactly trying to type through a bunch of rectangular holes is going to make iPad writing easier for me.

Google Music Beta launched yesterday, beating iTunes into the cloud by at least a couple months, but with one big drawback: it wasn’t supposed to work on iOS devices, but just one day later and Google Music is already up and running on iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.

Here’s how to use Google Music on your iDevice.

If you’re read this expecting to see Linus Torvalds and Steve Jobs exchange body blows in court, read the headline again: that homophone can be confusing, the ‘e’ matters and the company we’re talking about here is Linex, a Florida company that licenses wireless technology.

Even so, Linex and Apple are revving up to go to court, and if Linex has its way, the import of all MacBooks will be banned, along with Apple’s Airport Extreme and Time Capsule products.

When it comes to the iPad, you’re either a cheapskate or a sheik. That’s the message coming out of new data published by Context, which says that most people either buy the cheapest iPad or the most expensive one.

Those who are familiar with my long smoldering side-joint, Ectomo, know I might have a little bit of thing for the Eldritch, the R’lyehian, the Nyarlathotepesque. Cthulhu, in other words.

So I’m sure you’ll excuse the steaming pool of ejaculated central nervous system at my feet as I write this, because I got a little bit excited when I heard tell that indie dev Red Wasp Design is bringing Call of Cuthulhu: The Wasted Land to the iPhone and iPod Touch.

See that? It’s a just-awarded patent for an iPad boasting a landscape-oriented dock connector port in addition to the regular port-oriented one.

I’m sure there’s at least a few of you guys out there who are looking at that line-drawing and clawing strips of flesh out of your face in frustration: “ARGH… WHY DIDN’T APPLE RELEASE THAT?” Sorry, guys. The Department of Redundancy Department called, and they wanted their port back.

As promised, Apple sent V.P. Guy Tribble to Washington to address Senator Al Franken and other stuffy politicians about the so-called LocationGate scandal.

Cupertino’s message? Same as it ever was: we don’t track user locations. Period.

“We do not share customer information with third parties without our customers’ explicit consent. Apple does not track users’ locations. Apple has never done so and has no plans to do so,” said Tribble.

Curiously, while Apple may not track users’ locations, the United States Department of Justice would like mobile providers to start, allowing the Department of Justice to attain records that would “enable law enforcement to identify a suspect’s smartphone based on the IP addresses collected by Web sites that the suspect visited.”

What’s good for the goose isn’t necessarily what’s good for the gander. Apparently, it’s only okay for the government to keep track of what you do with your smartphone, not Apple.

Supposedly, what you see on the left here is the new iPod Nano, complete with 1.3 megapixel camera and with the clip removed. Consider us skeptical that Apple would ditch the Nano’s sports cred for anything as utterly superfluous as camming yet another camera into people’s pockets.

Apple has infamously railed on Google for being fragmented on multiple occasions, lambasting the Android-maker for allowing carriers and handset manufacturers to dictate the terms of updating the Android software.

Cupertino was right to criticize: the vast majority of Android smartphone users couldn’t even be reasonably sure before now that they’d even be able to update their operating system in the future. But Google’s made a big step today towards addressing Android fragmentation: they’ve announced a partnership with carriers and handset manufacturers that guarantees that new smartphones will receive Android platform updates for a minimum of eighteen months.

Following the announcement of their new cloud-based music service, Google today unveiled the latest version of their Android mobile operating system.

Code-named Ice Cream Sandwich, the next update is mostly dedicated to converging Android’s diverging smartphone and tablet code branches into a single united trunk.

If that sounds familiar, it should: it’s exactly what Apple had to do when it forked the iOS code for the original iPad’s release. At the time, the iPhone and iPod Touch were on version 3.1.3, while the iPad shipped with version 3.2.