John Brownlee - page 182

Samsung’s latest SH100 digicam is a new point-and-shoot with some well thought out WiFi functionality that not only makes it easy to offload fresh shots and videos to your computer, but also to wirelessly pipe content up to your HDTV.

Spec-wise, the SH100 is fairly typical, boasting a 14.2 megapixel CCD sensor, an f4.7 lens capable of 5x optical zoom, 720p HD video support and the usual gaggle of easy-to-use photo filters.

It’s probably the built in 802.11 b/g/n WiFi that helps distinguish the SH100 from the competition the most. Leveraging the WiFi connection with DLNA, you should not only be able to wirelessly slurp down your videos and stills, but even directly connect your camera to your HDTV or even your smartphone (although Samsung, backing Android heavily right now, only calls out the Galaxy S by name).

The SH100 should be available in March for the price of a song: it’ll cost just $199.

In a move that might well have Fake Steve quaking in his boots, Apple has just struck down the Twitter account of one of the growing number of tech parodists poking fun at Cupertino and its products.

A few hours before popular rumor indicated it would launch, Apple pumped Mac OS X 10.6.6 down through Software Update … most notably including support for the new Mac App Store, which is launching with more than a thousand apps, including a very sexy new Twitter for Mac client.

iWork ’11 is, surprisingly, not debuting on the Mac App Store, but you can find Aperture, at least, as well as iLife ’11. Check out the press release after the jump, and check in later for more of our impressions.

Short of an official announcement from Apple, it’s anyone’s guess whether or not Apple’s next-generation desktops and notebooks will use Intel’s recently unveiled Sandy Bridge architecture… but even if Cupertino defies expectations and sits this CPU gen out, don’t sweat it: you’ll at least be able to put yourself together a Sandy Bridge Hackintosh.

With remarkable alacrity, hackers with early access to Sandy Bridge wasted little time upon the lapse of Intel’s non-disclosure agreement to install Mac OS X on a Sandy Bridge processor, pushing Snow Leopard onto a machine running the new Intel Core i5-2500K CPU running at 3.30GHz.

How’d it run? Not as well as it will once OS X officially supports Sandy Bridge: a Geekbench score of 8874 and an Xbench score of 282.40. As it is, the hackers needed to patch the kernel to even get Snow Leopard to boot. Still, if there was any doubt, the benchmark scores do make it pretty clear that when Snow Leopard starts supporting Sandy Bridge, we’ll all be looking at the fastest Macs yet.

In their 2011 lineup of HDTVs, Samsung is throwing a new universal remote into every box with a design you might just have seen somewhere before, since it looks almost exactly like the iPhone 4.

Amazon has announced that they will be throwing their hat into the App Marketplace ring by opening up the Amazon Appstore Developer Portal, which will allow developers of Android apps to submit apps for their upcoming Amazon Appstore for Android. It’s an interesting move, and one that might end up kicking Google’s own Android Marketplace right in the teeth.

Yesterday, a firm named GlobalDirectParts put together an extensive five minute video showcasing what they say are the components of Apple’s next-generation iPhone.

While the video could have been an elaborate fake, GlobalDirectParts’ video gave a clear look at the charging port flex cable and a new design for the external antenna design. Unfortunately, the video was quickly pulled by YouTube because of a copyright claim by Apple, gifting the video with at least some tint of posthumous veracity.

A site called Smartphone Medic is now confirming the GlobalDirectParts video with several images of a new iPhone antenna, which has four black bands separating the antennas, compared to the current iPhone 4’s three. Since antenna attenuation (aka “death grip”) happens when you bridge these antennas with your hand, four separations would presumably mitigate the issue compared to three.

What were the nigh-implausible terms that Apple agreed to in order to finally compel the Beatles to bring their catalog to iTunes? Did Steve Jobs personally agree to perform on “butt bongos” for Ringo Star’s & His All Star Band? Did Apple’s elite team of corporate espionagers steal back the sentimental leg Sir Paul once gave Heather Mills and return it to his bosom? Did they just liquor Yoko up with a cocktail comprised of a plum floating in perfume served in a man’s hat?

None of the above, sayeth Reuters. Instead, they say — surprise! — it all came down to just paying the Beatles gobs of money directly, instead of paying Sony, who controls most of the song catalog.

About a week after the first successful modification to the new iPod Nano’s .plist file was made — whisking away one of the pre-installed icons from the home screen — dev Steven Troughton-Smith has brought the nano one step closer to jailbreaking: he’s figured out how to put his iPod nano into the equivalent of the iPhone or iPod Touch’s DFU recovery mode.

The feat is accomplished by holding down the restart buttons across two separate reboots, at which point iTunes will see the device and alert the user. Once accomplished, Troughton-Smith is apparently able to push firmware files to the device and execute them.

Pretty exciting stuff. For more information on what this means for the possibility of iPod Nano hacking, check out Erica Sadun’s informative post over at TUAW.

Google’s new Cr-48 laptop is supposed to usher in the future of cloud-based operating systems thanks to the search giant’s own Chrome OS, but surprise surprise: a computer made for early developers to hack to their hearts content ends up being Hackintoshable. It’s apparently a lot of work, but honestly, it seems appropriate in a way: the Cr-48 always channeled a lot of the elegance of the old black plastic MacBook, and it’s nice to see a doppelganger of the old girl live again.

According to popular theory, we should either have the Verizon iPhone confirmed at CES later this week, or not hear anything and keep on scuttlebutting about it amongst ourselves until it eventually does come out.

The latest fodder for Verizon iPhone rumor mongering? Verizon’s Trademark services department has just snatched up iphoneforverizon.com and iphoneonverizon.com… a couple of two year old domains purchased from the previous owner (and alleged link farmer) Jim Benton.

Honestly, this is probably just business as usual, in which a company protects its trademark and brand by snatching up domains. Still, the very fact that this news hit during the week the Verizon iPhone is rumored (almost definitely wrongly) to debut was pretty choice timing.

Thanks to the advent of Steam for Mac, the dedication and ingenuity of indie developers and the App Store’s raising of awareness of Apple and its products, 2010 was the best year for Apple gaming since, well, the Big Bang.

We can’t even pretend to have played all the games that came out this year, or even a tenth of them. There were a lot of great games that escaped our radar, or we just didn’t get the time to play. Heck, we don’t even have editorial consensus amongst ourselves.

After the jump, though, you can find at least my list of 2010’s iOS and Mac games that siphoned away most of my time, causing me to miss deadlines, emotionally neglect my girlfriend, and extend my index fingers by three inches through callus mass alone. What were the games that extended yours? Let us know in the comments

2010 was a huge year for Apple news. As we close out the year, we look back at some of the year’s biggest stories and what they might mean for 2011.

Usually, luxury mobile devices are simply tacky tat accomplished by taking a hot consumer product and rolling it in glue and crushed glass, but Gresso‘s latest product is surprisingly elegant. Called the iPad Gresso, it’s an iPad encased in 200 year old African Blackwood, with a logo crafted from pure 18K gold. No word on pricing, but it will cost you more than your skeleton is worth to buy, that’s for sure.

According to the always reliable Digitimes, Apple is preparing three versions of the iPad 2 for 2011… but if you think they mean 16GB, 32GB and 64GB, think again. Digitimes thinks it means WiFi, 3G.. and a Verizon iPad.

Apple’s deservedly racking up a lot of year-end awards as the New Year fast approaches — from the iPad being named Walt Mossberg’s gadget of the year to Steve Jobs garnering the Financial Times’ Person of the Year award — but you can end this one to the more ignominious trophy pile: CNN has just listed Antennagate as one of their ten biggest tech fails of 2010.

Flying’s a frustrating experience, and I think all of us have been tempted at one point or another to take that frustration out on an obnoxious neighboring child. Perhaps he’s kicking your seat rhythmically and incessantly: not one of us would blame you for turning around, dumping your soda all over his crotch, standing up and then loudly shrieking, “Look! The baby wet himself! Big baby!” over and over again until he burst into tears and the rest of the airplane burst into applause. That’s not vindictiveness… it’s just justice.

We draw the line, however, at actually hitting kids. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what 68-year old Russell Miller did on a recent flight heading to Boise, Idaho, after a neighboring fifteen year old refused to turn off his iPhone (which seems to have been in Airplane mode, and we being used to play games and music, not make calls),

It may not really run iOS, but the latest touchscreen Nano has been hacked… and that hack may very well imply jailbreaks to come.

The hack was achieved by dev James Wheaton, who managed to install an alternate Springboard file that allowed him to remove an app from the device.

This might sound like a simple task, but it’s not: to achive the feat, Wheaton has to figure out how to bypass the Nano’s cache comparison, which scans the Springboard file for changes and reverts the device to factory settings if any mods are discovered.

In other words, it’s not that Wheaton was able to load a modified Springboard plist file deleting an app that is the big deal… it’s the circumvention of the Nano’s own anti-modding tech. That means the next step might be bonafide jailbreaking.

Wheaton’s discoveries don’t end there: he also found hidden support for apps, vCards, calendar events and more lingering in the firmware of the device. Even if the Nano will never run custom apps, some of that functionality may very well be able to be unlocked.

The father of a five year old boy born with a rare genetic disorder that delays the development of speech has designed a new iPad app that aims to help the speechless communicate.

Look, you and I both know that leaked third-party case designs for unannounced, unreleased Apple products mean next to nothing. In fact, we’ve all been burned by drawing conclusions from purely fanciful Asian case designs before. So please take this news with a grain of salt: a new third-party case design for the iPad 2 seems to imply that the second-generation tablet will have an all-together sleeker and more iPod Touch evocative look.

Following through with their Yuletide threat, Gorillaz has released their new album, The Fall, over on their official website… an album notable for being both written and recorded almost entirely on the iPad, using downloaded App Store apps.

A new lawsuit filed Monday against Apple and a number of app developers including Pandora, The Weather Channel, Dictionary.com and — uh — Pimple Popper Lite is alleging collusion to create secret profiles of iPhone users, including location, and pass that data onto advertisers without users’ consent.

Retrospectively casting an eye over an incredible year for both Apple and its customers, one of the most surprising developments of 2010 was the Mac’s long-overdue maturity into a serious gaming platform after years of false hopes and promises.

More surprising than even that, though, is the fact Apple almost had nothing to do with it: even while Cupertino oiled and massaged iOS into a platform capable of rattling the nerves of gaming’s most unassailable colossus, they continued to ignore Mac gamers and its developers.

So who was responsible for the Mac Gaming Renaissance of 2010? There’s no one company in particular, but let’s start with Valve.

Ignoring the Zune HD (as most consumers seemed to have done), the dominance of Apple’s iPod Touch over the touchscreen media player market has gone essentially unchallenged ever since it first debuted in fall of 2007… but Samsung — makers of the popular Galaxy S smartphone and the Galaxy Tab — are looking to change that at this year’s CES, when they unveil the Galaxy Player.

Still got a lump of cash around after Christmas? An eBay seller has just posted a rare prototype of the first portable Macintosh for sale to the highest bidder.