John Brownlee - page 161

In our last post announcing the availability of the white iPhone 4 on Apple’s web site, we asked who would buy a new iPhone on a two year contract ten months into the lifecycle of the current model.

Hey, why not ask the people in this huge line for the iPhone 4 outside of the Beijing Apple Store?

“New things are always fashionable.” said 19-year old high school student Chen Zhi. “I think girls always like products that are white in color.”

Berry Li, a 22-year old of indeterminate profession, agrees: ““White is brighter. The color makes you feel young.”

In other words: to pick up girls and to fight off the hideous ravages of time. Why will you be buying a white iPhone 4? Give us your examples of magical thinking in the comments!

After a ten month delay officially blamed on needing to put “more UV protection” into the mix (and unofficially blamed on light leaking onto the camera sensor), the mythical white iPhone 4 is here.

It’s available now on Apple’s official site in both AT&T and Verizon flavors, but be warned: there’s a 3-5 business day ship time, and that number’s probably only going to go up. If you want one today, go to a store.

The best comment on the white iPhone 4 I’ve seen today comes courtesy of Twitter’s AmyJane, who writes: “Got white iPhone email from Apple. Thought, “What kind of ass buys a new iPhone now?” Exactly 10s later I dropped and shattered my iPhone.”

AT&T’s issued its second warning to jailbreak tetherers: either sign up for their official Personal Hotspot tethering plan, which costs $45 for 4GB, or AT&T will upgrade your mobile data plan for you.

Between last year’s arterial spray of unreleased Apple products leaking in Vietnam and the surplus of presciently iPad 2 cases popping up in Asia months before Apple unveiled the second-gen tablet, it’s been pretty clear for awhile that Foxconn needed to get its house in order. They had some pretty bad leaks, and given Apple’s notorious secrecy concerning future products, heads were bound to roll.

Now they have. Digitimes is reporting that three Foxconn employees have been arrested for leaking the iPad 2 design weeks (editor’s not: weeks? Try months) before apple’s official announcement.

In a recent study by National Geographic co-sponsored by Nintendo Power magazine, it was found that the only people on Earth who have never heard of that strange, mushroom-gobbling, Koopa-smashing plumber, Mario, are the natives of certain Papua New Guinea aboriginal tribes. So I guess we know where Apple is outsourcing the App Store review process: a shameless rip-off of Super Mario Bros, using Nintendo’s trademarked assets, has hit the hit the iOS App Store.

Those maverick statisticians over at Retrevo have put together one of their smartphone landscape studies, finding that most consumers feel that their smartphones are either obsolete or will soon be obsolete.

That’s sort of a no-duh claim at first, but when you actually look at the numbers, smartphone makers are actually making new and better smartphones faster than consumers can possibly buy them.

Look at that chart above: during the last year alone, Samsung released over 30 new smartphones, while HTC released over 20 new smartphones. If you purchased a Samsung or HTC phone even as recently as a few months ago, there’s a good chance it’s already behind the tech curve.

The notable exception here? Apple. Ignoring the slight hardware changes of the Verizon iPhone 4 and white iPhone 4, Apple’s only released two smartphones over the course of the last two years: the iPhone 3GS and the iPhone 4.

Better yet, Apple historically has only radically redesigned the iPhone every two years. That means if you buy an iPhone shortly after it comes out, you can be reasonably sure it won’t be totally obsolete before your contract is up. What are the argument for buying an Android smartphone again?

If you like to manage your photos on your iPad but prefer Lightroom’s rich feature set to iPhoto or Aperture, meet Photosmith, an app for the iPad that allows you to do all of your Lightroom organizing, rotating, sorting, metadata editing, labeling and keywording.

All you do is import your photos into Photosmith using your method of choice — Camera Connection Kit, EyeFi card, email, etc — then do all of the light editing and organizing on your iPad. When you get back to your main computer, a Photosmith plugin for Lightroom slurps the images into your library, ready for editing.

Don’t want to wait to get home to share? No problem. You can export your photos using Facebook, Flickr, Dropbox or e-mail.

This is a pretty cool program for the die-hard photographer working within Lightroom. On your next vacation, you can leave the laptop at home and just bring along your iPad for most of your on-the-go needs. $18. [via Gadget Lab]

The white iPhone 4 will be here shortly, and given Apple’s difficulty getting it to market, you could be forgiven for thinking that it is in some way unique compared to the regular iPhone 4 besides chromatically. But nope, it’s basically just an albino iPhone 4, albeit with a different proximity sensor design… and it’s just as prone (or not prone, depending on your personal feelings on the extent of the problem) to the fabled iPhone 4 “death grip” as its predecessor, as this video from Italian Apple blog iSpazio makes clear.

End result? White iPhone 4 drops a bar, but signal isn’t otherwise compromised. Someone alert Consumer Reports: they haven’t had a tizzy about the iPhone 4 lately.

Stuck on an ancient PPC Mac? That’s cool: they’re still great machines, and I have an old Powerbook I keep around as a guest laptop myself. The problem, unfortunately, is that while these machines are still quite excellent at lighter computing tasks, the thing they have primarily been good for — doing some light browsing and emailing — has become more and more difficult, thanks to the heady advances of HTML5 and CSS3, and the decision of browser makers to leave the PPC architecture behind.

Mozilla’s excellent Firefox browser decided with version 4 to drop support for the PPC architecture, but thankfully, there’s TenFourFox, which takes Firefox 4 and gets it up and running under OS X 10.4 and 10.5, with precisely tuned builds for each PPC processor.

What does this mean? Firefox 4’s advanced Javascript engine, WebM video support, HTML5 and CSS3 on your old Mac. That old Mac just might have some Facebooking in it left yet.

[via TUAW]

Trying to answer the perilous question why they were storing cell phone tower data to begin with in their response to the iPhone tracking furor earlier today, Apple has disclosed a future product: a crowd-sourced database, using iPhone users as a way to determine arterial congestion… of the traffic variety, not circulatory.

Apple’s reportedly on the cusp of getting all the major music labels signed for their upcoming cloud-based music locker service… but don’t expect it to be free. According to rumblings from industry sources, Apple is planning on charging for their cloud-streaming service.

Apple’s not happy with Amazon for calling their new app store for Android… well… “Amazon Appstore for Android.” In fact, they’re suing over it, claiming ownership over the term Android.

Amazon’s trying to get the suit tossed out, of course. First witness for the defense? It’ll be Apple CEO Steve Jobs himself.

What does Apple’s excess of $65.8 billion in cash reserves mean in real world terms? Well, for one thing, Steve Jobs could walk into any home in the United States, peel off a few bills from his fold of walking-around money and then, merely by fluttering those bills rhythmically and speaking in a soothing tone of voice, convince even the sternest ethicist, most rigidly defined vegan or opulently well-to-do moneybags to eat his wife and children.

Or, put a less prosaic way? Apple’s stock reserves are so great that if something happened and Apple stopped selling anything at all, the company could keep going until 2018 on its savings alone.

Put even less prosaically — we swear this time — Apple’s cash is worth half of Google’s entire enterprise value. Wow. [via GigaOM]

You’d think this is something Apple would already have locked down already, but the guy who just mindlessly rubber stamps all patent applications at the USPTO apparently lost this one behind some filing cabinets for a few years. No bother, because he found it, and now Cupertino owns a patent for the veritable iPod click wheel… just in time for Apple to eliminate it entirely with the next generation of all touchscreen iPods! Great timing!

It looks like tomorrow will be the day the white iPhone will go on sale, and to prove it, you can already buy one in either 16GB or 32GB varieties… as long as your are one of les Belgiques, that is.

Yup, you can buy a white iPhone 4 now from at least one retailer, but only if you’re in the Benelux region. All of us without a genetic predilection towards marzipan, the collected works of Hergé and finishing off a day with a flagon of Geuze will just have to wait another twenty-four hours. Which is no big deal, considering we’ve already been waiting for an incredible ten months.

As a final, off-hand comment: anyone else the white iPhone 4 looks kind of fat in this pic?

Apple’s got an obsession with thinness perhaps best described as techno-anorexic. They’ll shave millimeters off a device until it seems ready to melt upon the tongue, a communion wafer of a gadget.

I wouldn’t be surprised, then, if the following rumor pans out: Apple is reportedly working with Sharp to create new poly=silicon LCD displays that will allow the sixth-generation iPhone to get even thinner.

Boom. According to MIC Gadget, who aren’t about to start cutting off pinky fingers to testify the image’s veracity, the front panel on the right is for the next iPhone, featuring most notably a significantly (but not miraculously) thinner bezel.

It certainly looks legit enough. Rumors have had it that the next iPhone will largely be identical in hardware to the iPhone 4, but boast the new A5 chip, a larger screen real estate in the same form factor accomplished by narrowing the bezel, a modified antenna design and possibly a capacitive home button.

What do you think? Real or fake? Let us know in the comments.

When the new MacBook Airs shipped with Snow Leopard on USB disk drives, many of us hoped that the days of DVD-based operating system installs were behind us. Optical media is pretty much dead, after all, largely thanks to Apple’s successful push into digital delivery with their iTunes service. Sure, you need to ship operating systems physically somehow… but as more and more of us jettison our DVD drives, USB is just a heck of a lot more ubiquitous.

It doesn’t look like OS X 10.7 Lion will be the first Apple operating system to ship exclusively on USB drive, though. A listing for Lion has just popped up on German’s Amazon website, and it’s for a DVD, not a thumb drive. My guess is that users will have a choice at retail — how else to satisfy the need to upgrade of MacBook Air users like me? — but still, it’s a tad disappointing. Maybe Apple’s waiting to go all-in on flash media OS installs until it can be done through Thunderbolt?

[via AppleBitch]

If you’re on iOS 4.3.2 and fancy taking a joyride on another company’s network besides the one you are indentured to, good news: the iPhone Dev Team has released Ultrasnow 1.2.2, which will allow you to unlock iOS 4.3.2 on both the iPhone 4 and on the iPhone 3GS.

If you’re on the 3GS, you’ll need to be both jailbroken and on the 06.15.00 baseband, which is easy enough to do… *cough*.

Once accomplished and rocking either an iPhone 4 or an iPhone 3GS with baseband 06.15.00 restored, you’ll need to preserve the old baseband and grab Ultrasnow through Cydia. The process is a bit complicated, and sometimes results in test participant implosion, so follow this tutorial for a walkthrough on getting through the carrier unlock process safely.

In a typically terse email to a concerned iPhone customer, Apple CEO Steve Jobs thundered down some authoritative wisdom about the so-called iPhone LocationGate scandal: Apple isn’t tracking anyone, and if you think that Android isn’t tracking you, think again.

Last month, President Obama almost smacked some goofus upside the head for insinuating he couldn’t get an iPad. “I’m the President of the United States. You think I’ve got a – you think I’ve got to go borrow somebody’s computer?” he said.

It was a perfect little moment of presidential sass, and the only way it could have been more perfect is if Obama had called his interlocutor a jive turkey before actually smashing him over the head with his iPad. However, questions abounded, including what flavor of iPad Obama favored: a first-gen model or the iPad 2?

Well, here’s your answer, courtesy of the White House’s Flickr account. The president owns an iPad 2 and what appears to be an unassuming gray polyurethane smart cover… a wise choice on the President’s part, given how prone to picking up Marmite and beer stains the leather covers are.

But one great, eternal question remains: does the president use the iPad 2 WiFi-only model, or the iPad 2 3G? Update: As a reader points out, it’s an iPad 2 3G!

[via TUAW]

Well, crud. I knew the day was coming when my beloved 11-inch MacBook Air would become obsolete, but I hoped it wouldn’t be so soon. It appears those hopes are dashed: Apple will reportedly refresh the MacBook Air line in June, replacing the current Mini DisplayPort with their new 10Gbps bi-directional Thunderbolt I/O port.

I like to imagine that Bulletproof started out as a pitch by Mobigame to develop an official, first-person game based upon the Matrix trilogy.

“Okay, dudes, get this: here you are, and you’re Neo, and there’s like five agents in front of you, shooting at point blank range, and then you stop time, and then you start punching the bullets right out of the air, and OH MY GOD IT’LL BE AWESOME.”

“Pass,” says Warner Bros. But no problem: you just change the background, slap some vaguely Soviet guard hats on the agents, and sell the whole game to Amnesty International, pitching it as a way to raise awareness of human rights violations around the world.

Now that’s business savvy.

When Valve Software released their much anticipated physics-based shooter Portal 2 earlier this week, they did so on pretty much every platform that could handle it, including the Mac, PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Unfortunately, despite its beefy A5 processor, the iPad 2 wasn’t on that list… but if you just can’t get enough Portal 2, you can at least download a new app for an exclusive, multimedia behind-the-scenes look at the creation of Valve’s new classic.

Called The Final Hours of Portal 2, the app is primairly a 15,000 word essay on the making of Valve’s much anticipated new game, documented with videos, lots of behind-the-scene pictures and interviews. It’s written by Geoff Keighley, an excellent video game journalist who wrote “The Final Hours of Half-Life,” “The Final Hours of Half-Life 2” and “Knee Deep In A Dream: The Story of Daikatana”. Collectively, these are some of the best example of long-form video games journalism ever, and I anticipate “The Final Hours of Portal 2” will be good company for them.

[via MacStories]

Why does AT&T need to gobble up T-Mobile? It’s all about dropped calls on the iPhone and the sick amount of data the iPad is slurping up, AT&T argues in their latest filing with the FCC.