The wistful tone and open-ended time frame of Steve Jobs’ email announcing another medical leave of absence from Apple has led many to fear the worst when it comes to the charismatic CEO’s health, but a new report suggests that Jobs’ health might actually be better than expected.
In fact, not only is Jobs still making appearances at Apple’s Cupertino campus, but he seemed upbeat, described as wearing a big smile and with a spring in his step.
Readability is an excellent bit of Javascript that strips online content down to its barest and most readable elements, and was borrowed wholesale last year by Apple for the new Safari Reader option in Safari 5.
Late last month, it became even more excellent by relaunching itself as a reading platform in its own right. Launching aside a native iOS app powered by Marco Arment’s excellent Instapaper, Readability is now more than a snip of Javascript code but instead a monthly subscription service that pays 70% of its collected fees directly to the writers and publishers being read.
We reached out to Arc90’s Richard Ziade for a quick chat about what Readability’s new change in scope would mean not just for existing users, but for publishers of web content looking to get paid.
Rounding out a triumvirate of new webOS devices, HP just took the wraps off of the third-generation Pre, or Pre3, their new flagship webOS smartphone. Unfortunately, while the HP Veer was a cute pebble of a phone filling a unique niche, and the HP TouchPad is an able iPad competitor that might even hold its own against the iPad 2, the Pre3 just seems generic.
Forget the likes of the Samsung Galaxy Tab. At their webOS event today, HP just unveiled the HP TouchPad, and judging by first initial blush, it might be the first tablet that can really challenge the iPad in its own game.
Boasting a dual-core 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and a 9.7-inch 2024 x 768 display (just like the iPad), the HP TouchPad comes with either 16GB or 32GB of onboard storage, as well as Flash Player 10.1 support and the newest iteration of HP’s webOS operating system.
Thanks to a front-facing camera, the TouchPad supports FaceTime-style video calling, and to improve sound quality, HP has carried their Beats Audio technology over from their line of notebooks to the TouchPad. And because of the new functionality found in webOS 3.0 as well as HP’s revised Touchstone technology, the TouchPad has its own versions of AirPrint and AirPlay. Like with the Veer and Pre 3, this TouchStone technology will allow you to share information between webOS devices by tapping them together, as well as allow you to charge your TouchPad wirelessly.
To be honest, this looks like a heck of a response to the iPad, and maybe the first tablet that tries to compete with Apple on its own terms. The only problem is that when it’s released this summer for an unreleased price, the TouchPad won’t be taking on the iPad… it’ll be taking on the iPad 2. That puts HP at a huge disadvantage, because not only will the iPad 2 obviate most of the TouchPad’s strengths (video chat and a dual-core processor, most of all) but will also give users access to a much more robust app ecosystem than that afforded by webOS.
When HP purchased Palm last year, it made no secret of the fact that it was doing so to get a hold of Palm’s webOS operating system in order to better compete with Apple in the tablet and smartphone space.
Now, at an official event today, HP is starting to finally reveal what they’ve accomplished with webOS in the last year. First up? The HP Veer, a tiny pebble of a phone meant to bridge the gap between feature phones and smartphones.
Thanks to the massive headache of Antennagate, Consumer Reports famously felt that it could not recommend the iPhone 4 to its readers… an approbation that, as we all know, tanked Apple stock, prompted Cupertino to dump unsold iPhones by the millions into an Arizona landfill and ultimately led to Apple’s enthusiastic embrace of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 operating system.
I kid. As you know, none of that happened, and the iPhone 4 is the best selling iPhone yet. But I’m sure you’re wondering what Consumer Reports thinks of the Verizon iPhone 4, right?
Well, as it turns out, they like it, with Consumer Reports’ Mike Gikas claiming that “key technical differences” separates the Verizon iPhone from the AT&T iPhone.
Color me pretty shocked with this pronouncement, considering the fact that the Verizon iPhone suffers from many of the same attenuation issues as the AT&T iPhone. Charitably, the issue may simply be that Consumer Reports is willing to recommend the Verizon iPhone despite much of the same hardware design thanks to the strength of the Verizon network… but could it also be that, despite their principled stand on the matter earlier, after eight months Consumer Reports has decided that the so-called “death grip” isn’t really a big deal after all the page views have stopped flowing in?
TUAW has just posted a rather interesting theory about what will happen to the original iPad once the iPad 2 is released in the next few months: they suggest that the iPad will be handled more like the iPhone than the Mac, and the previous generation iPad will still be sold for another year as the “budget” model, similar to the way the iPhone 3GS is still sold by AT&T as the sub-$100 iPhone.
Under this theory, the iPad range might start at a $399 price point for the original iPad with WiFi. It’s an intriguing thought, but I tend to doubt it, for one reason: Apple selling the previous gen iPhone as a budget model has more to do with the carriers than Apple itself.
What better way to bide your time waiting for that institutionally late Amtrak than loitering in an Apple Store? Such seems to be the thinking in Cupertino, as sources now indicate that Apple wants to open a brand new Apple Store right in the heard of New York City’s Grand Cental Terminal.
Microsoft’s long belated response to the iPhone finally arrived in October with the launch of Windows Phone 7, but despite being an admittedly great modern day mobile operating system, it’s not doing so great in retail, so far only selling two million licenses to OEMs, with even less actual phones getting into end user’s hands.
Microsoft thinks it needs to do better to retake the smartphone market from the likes of Google and Apple, and now they’re shuffling around the upper management in the hopes that an internal restructuring will help them take Cupertino on.
See this iPad? It’s a hit-and-park casualty, gunned down in its prime by the treaded wheels (both front and back) of a Chrysler PT Cruiser, a car so heavy that even the standard Apple case was not enough to prevent it from being smashed nearly to smithereens.
But god bless Gorilla Glass and Apple’s fine craftsmanship, because unbelievably, this iPad still works, from multitouch down right to the marrow of its accelerometers. What a champ.
Of course, how “functional” this is depends a lot on how you feel about dragging your finger across a planar surface comprised of thousands of tightly packed, razor sharp glass shards. Does multitouch still work when you’ve scraped your pointing digit down to just a protruding bit of skeleton?
Back in December, Adobe pushed out the first beta of version 10.2 of their notorious Flash Player for Mac… a plugin that is so notoriously demanding on battery life that merely installing it can drain the maximum capacity of a laptop battery by over an hour. now it’s available in a final version.
The big advance in Flash Player 10.2 is functionality called Stage Video that offloads almost all of the rendering of high-performance videos to the GPU, using “just over 0 percent CPU usage.” Stage Video should have a noticeable effect on battery life and snappiness, and if you can’t get along with Flash on your Mac notebook, Stage Video support alone makes this an easy upgrade to recommend.
Well, it will make it one, eventually. Right now, not all content providers have enabled Stage Video APIs in their system, and until they do, Flash Player needs to rely on the CPU to process their video. Also, considering that most of the battery drain attributed to Flash on the likes of a MacBook Air come from advertising and site elements as opposed to a playing YouTube video, it’s unlikely that Stage Video will really make a difference in the short term for many users.
Either way, though, Flash Player 10.2 should bring a significant performance increase to the machines of many users, with Adobe citing their two-year old test Mac Mini being able to run full 1080p content with a CPU load of under 8 percent. That’s pretty good performance for one of software’s most notoriously resource hogs.
Apple just delivered a small but welcome tweak to the Mac App Store: a window that pops up when you click “Purchase” next to an app, asking you to confirm your decision.
Depending on whether or not, like me, you’ve accidentally bought a $50 piece of software on the Mac App Store through the errant click, you’ll find this either a welcome prophylactic against your own casual stupidity, or an irritant that doubles the clicking required to actually get the app you want.
Unfortunately, if it’s the latter for you, the Mac App Store doesn’t allow you to toggle the purchase confirmation off, as in the iOS App Store, so you’ll just have to live with the redundancy for now.
If you’re on an iOS device, today’s Google logo is pretty neat. Simulating the brass-plated portcullises of Captain Nemo’s Nautilus in order to celebrate Jules Verne’s birthday, the logo will read your iPhone or iPad’s accelerometer and slosh around the subaquatic view accordingly.
If you’re on a laptop or a device without an accelerometer, no problem: a handy joystick next to the logo will simulate the effect.
Evidence continues to mount that Apple will release the next refresh of the MacBook Pro line soon, with Best Buy’s internal inventory system already showing a new 13-inch MacBook Pro for $1199 that will be in stock come March 11th.
If Best Buy’s inventory is accurate, it further stresses the likelihood that the new MacBook Pros will use Intel’s dual-core Sandy Bridge chips, which are due to start shipping on February 20th.
Intel’s Sandy Bridge architecture promises faster performance in both computing and integrated graphics power, all the while maximizing power efficiency. It is the successor to Intel’s Arrandale mobile processor line, which Apple failed to adopt for the last MacBook refresh, instead depending upon the aging Core 2 Duo processor.
It is unknown what other changes the new MacBook Pros will integrate, but given Tim Cook’s comments that the MacBook Air is the future of the MacBook line, a slimmer footprint, SSD options and instant-on ability seem like the most reasonable guesses. What are your predictions?
In just four months, Instagram has already pooled together a user base of over two million daguerro-hipsters, who are now responsible for uploading up to 300,000 photos a day. That’s a success by anyone’s measure, so it’s no surprise that Instagram is looking to keep their momentum going by expanding in interesting ways.
In a blog post, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom explains how the company intends to grow: by opening up the site to other developers and let them hook into the Instagram ecosystem thanks to a new API.
Reading between the lines of Reggie Fils-Aime’s most recent criticism of the App Store, Nintendo is deeply afraid of Apple’s influence on the video games industry: the president of Nintendo of America says that the price levels of the App Store have created a consumer “mentality” that portable games should only cost a few dollars.
Fils-Aime’s comments come even as Nintendo prepares to launch its new handheld console, the Nintendo 3DS, in March.
While the long-awaited delivery of the Verizon iPhone has been the big story of the week, evidence continues to mount that another semi-mythical model of the iPhone 4 might be dropping at almost the same time, at least if this Best Buy shelf sticker for the 16GB iPhone 4 is anything to go by.
Other than this shot and the fact that Canada’s The Source chain of retail outlets are also gearing up to sell the white iPhone 4, about the only concrete knowledge to be gleaned here is that the white iPhone 4 will be selling for $599, which is the same off-contract price as the black iPhone 4.
Keep calm, everyone: you only have a few more weeks to wait until the white iPhone 4 is yours… just a few months before the white iPhone 5 makes you wish you’d never bought a new phone more than halfway through the lifecycle of the previous gen!
Worried that your Verizon iPhone might not be as jailbreakable as the AT&T version? Don’t sweat it: as it turns out, the Verizon iPhone shipping to customers this week with iOS 4.2.6 works with the same GreenpoisOn utility that Chronic released over the weekend for untethered jailbreaks under iOS 4.2.1.
Of course, once iOS 4.3 comes out, everything’s likely to change again, so if you’re going to jailbreak your new Verizon iPhone… better get it in under the wire while you still can.
If you prefer to use Twitter as a source of interesting news stories throughout the day, you should try Smartr, a free app by Factyle that filters all of the cat updates and #cairo hashtags from your Twitter stream and instead serves up an attractive and uncluttered collection of the articles your friends and followers are linking, complete with page preview and summary. You can then easily read those articles, retweet them, or even push them to Instapaper to read later.
Smartr’s a fantastic looking app, and best of all, it’s free. Give it a try.
As predicted, Apple’s Mac App Store is already a huge success, driving sales through the roof for the small Mac developers who have already taken part even as Cupertino rakes in thirty percent off the top. Needless to say, the Mac App Store’s success indicates that Apple would eventually like to use it to drive most if not all of Mac software sales… and part of making that happen is to start downplaying the role of boxed software in the Mac ecosystem while emphasizing the Mac App Store as a central hub for OS X digital distribution.
No surprise, then, that Apple is already planning on getting rid of boxed software at their retail locations and directing customers to the Mac App Store instead, where Apple makes better margins on software sold.
Despite the fact that the iPad is seemingly the perfect medium for their frenetic space warfare RTS, Blizzard has so far resisted all calls to release an iOS specific game or port of their famous Starcraft series of games… but hey, why bother when those franchise rip-off artists extraordinaire over at Gameloft will do it for you?
Check out this new trailer for GameLoft’s upcoming iOS RTS, Starfront: Collision, and marvel at the admittedly well-realized shamelessness. It’s pretty much identical to Starcraft II right down to the choice of races, the UI, the graphics, the units… even the font!
When he first showed off OS X Lion last year, Steve Jobs explained Apple’s reluctance to add multitouch displays to their line of iMacs by saying that multitouch needed to be horizontal to be pleasant to use. Use it in a vertical position and you’re always leaning forward to poke and prod the screen, leading to what Steve Jobs calls “gorilla arm.” That’s why Apple has only brought multitouch to the Mac through peripherals like the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad. Even so, some patents have shown up over the past year that suggest that Apple’s been experimenting with multitouch-capable iMacs with pivoting displays that pull down to a more appropriate horizontal orientation when a user wants to interact with on-screen elements directly.
If you want to see what such an iMac might look like in the flesh, though, check out HO’s latest TouchSmart PC. Look familiar? Yup, that’s right: it features a pull-down design that drops the multitouch display into a horizontal position to reduce arm fatigue… just like in Apple’s patent!
Mark your calendars: the next iPhone will be revealed sometime between June 5th and June 9th, 2011, as Apple has already booked those dates at the Moscone Center in San Francisco for this year’s WWDC.
Although the Moscone Center’s website officially lists the early June event name as a “Corporate Meeting,” this anonymous description is usually deployed by Moscone Center management to refer to Apple events.
Apple’s next iPhone is traditionally announced at each year’s WWDC event held at the Moscone Center sometime in June.
Apple events tend to be grand affairs, but as the presumed launch of the iPad 2 approaches, it’s unclear exactly how Cupertino will choose to herald in their second-gen tablet with the company’s charismatic CEO on an indefinite medical leave of absence.
An Apple product launch just isn’t the same without Steve, and it appears that Apple knows it: according to a brief new report, the launch of the iPad 2 will be a smaller affair than customary.
The report comes by way of macotakara.jp, a blog with a decent record when it comes to accurate predictions. They say that the event that Apple will host a “small event to introduce [the] next generation of iPad.”
When the iPad was first unveiled, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson explained his company’s decision to offer a month-by-month, committment-free data plan for the tablet by saying that he saw the iPad as a “Wi-Fi driven product.” That prediction seems to be accurate: while Apple sold seven million iPads last quarter, AT&T only activated 442,000 3G accounts for it.
Never the less, the latest rumor suggests that Apple is planning on making a big push for 3G in the iPad 2, with a good sixty percent of the first production run devoted to manufacturing 3G models.