John Brownlee - page 164

Gamers, quantify your frugality! It’s that time of year again: the Humble Indie Bundle has again launched, this time offering Mac gamers the choice of paying whatever they want for the Humble Frozenbyte Bundle, a four-pack of game from dev Frozenbyte that includes the gorgeous fantasy action game Trine, the two Shadowgrounds games, and a new platformer called Splot as a pre-order bonus.

As usual, you can pay what you want for the bundle, and the games will all not only work on the Mac, but also be cross-compatible with Linux and Windows. In addition, you can even divvy up your donation between developer Frozenbyte, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Child’s Play and the Humble guys themselves.

All told, the latest Humble Indie Bundle is $50 worth of gaming excellence for whatever you want to pay… which, for Mac users as of writing, is hovering on average at around $6.19. I expect you to do better.

In November of last year, Brazilian billionaire Elke Batista declared that he wanted Apple to abandon Foxconn and China and come build iPads in Brazil.

Well, looks like he got half his wish: while Foxconn remains involved, future iPads may soon be built in Brazil thanks to a $12 billion investment by that company in the South American nation.

Apple’s resisted consumers’ calls to equip future iPhones and iPads with build in SD and microSD card slots thus far, making getting your photos to your iDevice a matter of either picking up a Camera Connection Kit (which only works on iPad) or accomplishing the same feat more indirectly through iTunes.

At CES, much beloved memory card makers Eye-Fi unveiled a cure all for these woes: a new feature coming soon to their line of WiFi-equipped SD cards called “Direct Mode” which allows the card to broadcast itself as its own WiFi network, made accessible to any iOS mobile device just by loading up an official app.

It’s taken a few months, but Direct Mode is now here. If the prospect of slurping your SLR’s photos or videos onto your iPhone or iPad wirelessly appeals, you’ve got two options. If you’ve got an existing Eye-Fi X2 card, you should be able to invoke the new mode just by installing a firmware update, due out next week along with the appropriate iOS app. Otherwise, the new Eye-Fi Mobile X2 card with 8GB of storage and Direct Mode bake in will go on sale on April 17th for the price of $79.99

Best Buy hasn’t exactly been playing fair cricket when it comes to distributing iPad 2s to customers. First, Best Buy admitted they were holding back iPad 2s, supposedly for an “upcoming promotion” but rumored to actually be to manipulate their sales quota numbers. Strike one.

Now we’ve got strike two. A reader writing to Crunchgear says a Best Buy manager effectively blackmailed him into buying a $109 rip-off Best Buy protection plan before he would sell him an iPad 2.

Jailbreaking your iPhone is easy enough to do as long as you don’t mind staying parked at an earlier firmware until the Dev Team gets a new hack out, but unlocking your iPhone to work with any carrier is a lot more complicated. What if you want to just unlock your iPhone once and be done with it forever? A new company called CutYourSim claims that they can just do that, offering permanent unlocking of any GSM iPhone for a one-time fee of $169.99.

How are they offering this service? As near as anyone can tell, it looks like CutYourSim has someone on the inside of AT&T who is unlocking iPhones for them on the sly.

Thanks largely in party to the debut of Epic Games’ cross-platform Unreal Engine on iOS through titles like Unreal Citadel and Infinity Blade, games on the iPhone and iPad have finally reached a level of graphical excellence indistinguishable to the untrained eye from many of the last’s year’s console games.

Dream:scape is a new iOS title currently pending approval with Apple that aims to add to that rich pedigree, not with another action game, but with what appears to be an adventure game. Not much is known about Dream:scape, short of the impressive trailer above, and this blurb of a description:

The player takes on the persona of a coma patient unlocking his past by exploring the dreamscape of his memories. As the player explores the huge open world, memories are unlocked. These are represented by cut-scenes, featuring audible dialog, and diary entries, which the player reads in-game via a 3-D representation of a leather-bound book. The player must determine which areas to explore so as to find and unlock the story.

It certainly looks gorgeous, and the plot seems suitably Silent Hill style for my liking, but I’m a bit worried about the voice acting, which seems just a spot too amateurish for a game that is largely supposed to be about exploring relationships and memories of loved ones in the past. Then again, the developer seems to be a small one, so I’m more than willing to give him a break.

Like many of JBL’s speaker docks, the On Air Speaker Dock looks less like a piece of stereo equipment than a Sharper Image Anti-Ionization Purifier repurposed by the BBC into the helmet for one of Doctor Who’s more disposable villains, but look beyond the strange styling and you’ll see JBL’s first AirPlay-capable dock.

Now shipping to BestBuys and Apple Stores around the country, JBL’s willingness to write a check for AirPlay’s licensing fees mean you should be able to stream your iTunes library directly to the dock no matter where you are. The unorthodox design is meant to fill the room with 360-degree sound; otherwise, you’ll find a color LCD, digital FM radio, inbuilt alarm clock and more.

$349.99, though. AirPlay or not, that’s way more than any Doctor Who helmet should ever cost.

There’s few things in life less annoying than having to charge your Apple Wireless Keyboard or Magic Trackbad once or twice a year. In fact, on the annoyance scale, it’s well below other marginal annoyances like having to sharpen your pencil when it gets dull, or floss out a popcorn kernel after a night at the movies.

Still, if you’re willing to spend $60 on a gadget just to avoid life’s smallest and most inconsequential inconveniences, there’s the Mobee Magic Bar… an aluminum sleeve that plugs into your local USB slot and which will charge your Magic Trackpad or Wireless Keyboard’s battery through induction.

A pretty slick solution to a pretty mundane problem, no? Sadly, these won’t start shipping until the end of June, so you’ll have to wait… but then again, the chances of your keyboard batteries running down before then are pretty small anyway.

[via HardMac and Gizmodo]

Amazon’s goal is to have a Kindle in every pair of hands in America. That’s Apple’s goal with the iPad too, but the difference is, Apple wants to do it while remaining profitable on the hardware. Amazon’s willing to give that up if it means they can make boatloads of cash on the ebooks.

That’s why Amazon releases free Kindle software for every platform capable of running text on a screen, and that’s why — if you plot the Kindle’s price decline over the past couple of years — you can see that it is on track to eventually be free in November of this year, at least to Amazon Prime customers.

For the rest of the consumers out there, though? Amazon’s now working on a new plan: ad-supported Kindles. And while users don’t get much of a discount off of the regular Kindle now (just $25 off the $139 entry-level Kindle price to have your e-reader “sponsored” with advertisements on the homescreen and in the screensavers), I expect that the savings will drop to free soon enough.

Amazon’s plan has never really been to build the best e-reader, although the Kindle’s an excellent device. Their plan has been to make a good enough e-reader cheaply enough that they can just give one away to anyone who wants one.

Let’s face facts: worrying about someone dropping a twelve pound bowling ball on your new iPad 2 is probably as paranoid as, say, worrying about it being trampled by an elephant driven insane by the winter’s musth.

Still, if you must worry about such things, or other high impact calamities that could happen to your iPad — like a 747 smashing into it as it plummets out of the sky, or a narcoleptic parachuter face planting upon your tablet after sleeping through his ripcord count — it looks like you might want the G-Form Extreme Sleeve.

Made of something called “PORON® XRD™,” the G-Form works by turning rigid upon impact, protecting the iPad from being smashed into smithereens. As you can see, it works quite well, and it’s not even that expensive at $59.95.

Blowing into them isn’t going to do a lick of good, but if you’re a fan of retro gaming, these gorgeous iPhone 4 cases have been designed to look exactly like the backsides of retro Famicom and NES cartridges, replete with emphatic warnings about taking your copy of Zelda into the bathtub with you, or trying to clean the contacts by licking them out. These beauties aren’t cheap, though: each one will cost you nearly $57.

Apple’s AirPlay system is an exclusive club. If you want to be part of it, you pay Apple a licensing fee to get “Made for AirPlay” certification, at which point Apple sends you a private key that allows your hardware to broadcast itself as ready for streaming. Technically, there’s no whiz-bang hardware at play here: just a private key that Apple keeps close.

Developer James Laird just ripped that key from Apple’s clutch. Frustrated by the lack of open-source Airport Express and/or AirPlay emulators out there, Laird has just released his own home-baked emulator, called SharePort.

SharePort allows you to stream music from iTunes to third-party software or AirPlay certified hardware. Previously, you could stream iTunes to an Airport Express, or use third party software to stream to an Airport Express, but now you can use iTunes to stream directly to 3rd party software or hardware.

Now that the Verizon iPad is here, the once mythical device has turned out to be just as much of a slab of aluminum and glass as every other iPad out there… and just as prone to its own small but annoying problems.

The latest? A growing nunber of Verizon iPad 2 owners are reporting issues with the CDMA 3G modem… namely, that after turning 3G off, Verizon iPad owners need to reboot their tablets to get a connection again.

This overarticulated mech claw? It’s an iPhone stand, meant to grip your fragile handset with T-800-style menace. And it costs only slightly less than the original T-800 hand, locked somewhere in a vault deep within the belly of Cyberdyne Systems.

Called the Rokform Rokstand, the stand is machined from aluminum with an anodized finish and features six angles of adjustment boasting “precision high speed bearing and cam adjustment.”

Of course, a 50 cent business card holder will prop up your iPhone equally well, so these are just marketing phrases to distract you from the price of $169. Of course, now that you’ve heard that price, with your eyes just dangling from your sockets like that and the taste of vomit in your mouth… how much more distracted could you be?

The Rokstand comes in pink and chocolate brown too, if that makes things better.

Alternate Reality Games, or ARGs, tend to be deviously complex, and Valve Software‘s latest is now exception: they are sending out a series of elaborate glyphs embedded in images to multiple gaming sites.

The point of ARGs is to crowdsource their solving, joining in with a bunch of other fanatics to make a story out of the cryptic, and Valve is a master at this, so if you have any taste for these events, you may want to head over to the Wiki and get cracking on the clues.

The most likely explanation so far is that this ARG is to promote Valve’s much-anticipated physics and teleportation-based FPS, Portal 2, which is due out on Tuesday, April 19th and is the first Valve game to launch simultaneously on the PC and Mac.

The image above is about 8/9ths of the image puzzle that has been solved so far, and looks much like one of GlaDOS’s personality cores rom the original Portal.

Apple has a vested interested in getting as many iPad 2s into customer hands as possible, as quickly as possible. It’s not only about mere volume of unit sales. It’s also about trying to slacken the crazy demand that the iPad 2 has generated before customers actively start resenting Apple for it and, in their impatience, are literally driven out of their minds (a state diagnosable by purchasing a Xoom).

So imagine how absolutely ticked off Apple must have been when they heard that Best Buy has been refusing to sell all of its stock of iPad 2s to customers, because they’ve already reached their sales quotas for that day. Actually, no need to imagine, because according to a Best Buy employee speaking to Crunchgear, the answer is “very.”

Bing has just been released for the iPad. It sure as heck looks gorgeous. Loading it up, you don’t just get Bing search or their usual flourish of a gorgeous wallpaper, but Bing’s app will also give you a quick look at the local weather, news, movies, trends, finances and more.

Bing’s done a pretty good job differentiating itself for the better from Google in the last year, and we’ve even heard the occasional rumble that Apple would choose to get into bed with Microsoft and make Bing the default search engine instead of Google. That’s unlikely for a number of reasons, especially since Apple doesn’t view Google as much of a threat as Amazon right now, but it does mean that Bing’s worthy of your attention, at the very least.

When we talk about 3D when it comes to displays, the third dimension we’re talking about is a z-axis popping out at you, a la the Nintendo 3DS. But when we talk about the possibility of a 3D iPad, or a 3D iPhone, or any other 3D touchscreen device, why are we talking about Apple adding a superfluous visual dimension when we can be talking about adding a very real tactile dimension to the same device?

In other words, when you poke an icon on iOS, what’s more important: for it to float off the screen, or for it to feel like you pressed something physical, and not ephemeral. That’s just the problem that Peratech is working on, and with its QTC (Quantum Tunneling Composite) Clear, it’s come up with an invention that any Apple fan can excited about: a force-sensitive touchscreen that allows users to apply the third-dimension of pressure.

What does that mean? Think of painters being able to apply pressure to the strokes of their virtual brushes, or on-screen game controls that were truly analogue.

Best of all, Peratech’s tech can be used not only to replace resistive touchscreens (think: stylys-based) but also to supplement capacitive ones, like the iPad’s. And since the touchscreen is only between 6-8 microns thick and the panels draws almost no current, it ‘s a good fit for iOS’s line-up.

[via Gadget Lab]

Apple has been rumored to be working on smart bezels for its iOS device series for a long time. The idea is to make all of that empty black space actually do something by imbuing the bezel with all of the touch sensitivity of the display itself. The problem, of course, is how to convey to a user that they’ve just interacted with something in the bezel, as well as avoid accidental triggers.

An exciting new patent shows us exactly what Apple has in mind: bezel’s imbued not just with touch functionality but with an underlying electroluminescent display that would allow the bezel itself to light up with words and icons when needed.

According to Digitimes, iPad 2 supply might not be constrained by touch panels, but rather by the cover lenses needed for the touch panel modules.

Although Apple has reportedly sold between 2.4 to 2.5 million iPad 2s in March alone, and it’s thought that once supply ramps up, Apple may be able to ship over four million units per month through the coming financial quarter.

However, all of these plans could be stymied unless manufacturers ramp up their production of the necessary lens component. Right now, TPK Touch Solutions and G-Tech Optoelectronics are trying to produce more cover lenses for the iPad 2, along with competing devices… and many sales will be determined by their ability to cope with surprise demand.

At their EOY financial call, Apple COO Tim Cook made it clear that he thought Apple could have sold more iPads if they could have made enough of them to satisfy demand. He may very well be saying something similar at EOY 2011.

Who’d a thunk? Consumer Reports says that the iPad 2 is the best tablet out there right now, compared to models from Archos, Dell, Motorola, Samsung, and ViewSonic.

Of course, since Consumer Reports still stupidly clings to its insistence that they can’t recommend the iPhone 4, which is still the best and most in-demand smartphone on the market, you know their recommendation of the iPad 2 is going to come with some backhanded compliments.

“So far, Apple is leading the tablet market in both quality and price, which is unusual for a company whose products are usually premium priced,” said Paul Reynolds, Electronics Editor at Consumer Reports. “However, it’s likely we’ll see more competitive pricing in tablets as other models begin to hit the market.”

If CR is implying that other companies are going to undercut iPad on price, that’s not necessarily likely at all, at least soon. Apple controls a huge chunk of the tablet supply chain right now, and while that hold will loosen with time, right now it seems like Apple’s the only company out there who can really make a $500 tablet without selling it at a loss.

Either way, though, the iPad 2 did well in Consumer Reports’ estimation, and at the end of the day, they recommended the 32GB iPad 2 with 3G as the best value for the price. Hey, that’s the one I have!

For most intents and purposes, I’m really content with my Smart Cover (although I’d advise anyone not to get one of the more expensive leather ones, since the leather is cheap and they seem to scuff easily) but there’s always going to be people who want to stand out from the crowd and own an iPad cover just as eccentric as they are.

For those bright young things, perhaps this DIY 1945 iPad Case, made from the refuse of a basement: a few pieces of old wood, some old shorts for padding, a few screws, a luggage tag, a couple old kitchen magnets, some wood glue and wood stain. Pretty gorgeous, methinks.

Right now, the 2010 MacBook Airs are the only Macs that still boast the stinky Core 2 Duo CPU, compared to the much faster processors Intel has released since. Even though the Air is a speed demon thanks to its ubiquitous SSDs, Apple will have to update it at some point… and Intel may have just announced the Sandy Bridge processors that will probably go into the MacBook Air starting later this year.

According to a source speaking to 9to5Mac, when the Apple Store went down this morning, there was only one major change in the database when it came back online… the total elimination of the white iPhone 4 from Apple’s database.

Not only is the SKU gone from Apple’s system, but images that were once for the white iPhone 4 have now been tweaked to feature the black iPhone 4 instead.

iPhone customers who jumped AT&T’s ship for Verizon upon the unveiling of the CDMA iPhone did so for mostly one reason: better call quality. But does the data back up the hope?

According to Changewave’s February data, it sure does. Their survey found that new Verizon iPhone users are experiencing fewer dropped calls than their friends over at AT&T, with only 1.8% of all Verizon customers experiencing dropped calls compared to almost 5% at AT&T.

Those numbers are really good for Verizon. Even better, 46% of future iPhone 4 buyers say they’ll get a Verizon iPhone, compared to only 27% for AT&T.