John Brownlee - page 186

Chair and Epic Games’ Infinity Blade ($5.99) may disappoint those who looked for a direct iOS analogue to the Unreal 3 Engine’s console offerings (where first-person combat by beefcakey “Tom of Finland” style space marines often spills over into rocket-turret-mounted monster truck driving sequences) but gamers who would so miss the point are a rare breed easily descried by the government-mandated “DERP” tattoos branded into their foreheads. For the rest of us, Infinity Blade is a perfect crystallization of the iPhone’s capabilities as a cutting-edge gaming device, a paradigm shift in the way AAA developers approach multitouch interfaces, and… lest we forget… the most visually impressive and polished game on the App Store.

We report with reservations, because this rumor — while titillating — is clearly absurd. That said, if you don’t hear it from us, you’ll hear it from someone more breathless: Mac Daily News is claiming that the Verizon iPhone is coming to a Verizon outlet near you as soon as December 26th.

Having sold millions of copies of their fowls vs. sows catapult game, Angry Birds, developer Rovio is experiencing such success that they’re even starting to begrudge Apple their thirty percent cut off the top of in-app purchases.

Rovio has just announced that they intend on launching Bad Piggy Bank, a new in-game payment system which will allow Angry Birds customers to make in-app purchases without going through Apple.

Ping just got a micron less useless on Friday with the addition of new functionality: the ability to make social playlists and share them with friends.

Boy, Delta’s getting everything right with Apple owners this year. Hot on the heels of their announcement that they would be installing 135 free-to-use iPads at their gates at JFK comes word that they’re now in the process of installing gadget charging stations in their gate areas at 19 United States airports.

Just as Cydia is the dark mirror to the iOS App Store, Cydia will also be available on the Mac, according to Cydia developer Jay “Saurik” Freeman.

The new MacBook Air is a remarkably solid wafer of hardware, especially after the recent EFI Firmware Update that solved the occasional issue of graphics corruption when the Air wakes up from sleep.

It looks, though, like there may be a new crisis brewing and a new glitch to address, this time with the Air’s ability to play nice with he official USB Ethernet Adapter.

Steve Jobs’ disdain for the 7-inch tablet form factor embraced by the likes of would-be iPad killers like the Samsung Galaxy Tab couldn’t be any more dripping even if it poured in bilious rivulets out of his open mouth. At the last earnings call, he flat out dismissed them as “DOA – Dead On Arrival.” He even fantasized about customers sanding the meat off of their fingers until only the skeletal bone was left, since “sand[ing] down their fingers to around one-quarter of their present size” is the only way to type comfortably on one.

This contempt seems pretty unequivocal to me, but someone apparently wasn’t paying attention: according to Reuters, Asian manufacturing sources are telling them that Apple is putting together a 7-inch “iPad Mini” for shipment in early 2011.

We’ve been remiss in officially marking the event, but make no mistake, it’s only because we’ve turned into gem-matching zombies. Let us remedy that now: Popcap’s Bejewled 3 is now available for download on the Mac. And it’s awesome.

Last month, Damon Alban of Gorillaz announced that he was in the midst of recording the band’s first album to be recorded entirely on the iPad… and now they say that they’ll be giving that album away for free as a Christmas gift to all their fans.

Everyone can agree that there’s simply no chance that when the iPad 2 ships next year that it won’t support FaceTime: the iPad’s the only current-gen iOS device that doesn’t support Apple’s video chat standard now, after all.

So sure, it can be taken for granted that the iPad 2 will handle FaceTime, but will it also allow for rear-facing photography? How else will it improve upon its predecessor?

Whenever the Mac App Store launches, it’s not going to be as full-featured as the iOS equivalent. We already knew that the Mac App Store would launch without promo code support, but according to new information Apple has just sent to developers, it also won’t support Game Center or in-app payments at launch.

The storied Verizon iPhone remains as questionably and rumorous as a cryptozoological specimen: no matter how many times it is reported as a soon-to-be-imminent reality, it never quite seems to come about, no matter how assertive the Wall Street Journal or New York Times seem to be about the matter.

Still, even if it hasn’t come about yet, Apple’s clearly interested in the possibility of bringing the iPhone to Verizon when their exclusivity deal with AT&T ends, as evidenced by this most recent job posting looking to hire a new staff member who is experienced with Verizon’s CDMA network.

Although the service has already made a fairly impressive debut on the Mac, we’ve been waiting to see what gaming thin client OnLive had in store for iOS.

The potential for gamers is pretty great: imagine a graphically intensive PC game running at maximum graphical settings on your iPad or iPhone, thanks to Onlive’s fantastic streaming technology.

The only problem: how do you translate a PC or console game’s controls to a touchscreen without porting it over? Earlier in the year, Onlive demonstrated one solution and showed Gearbox’s fantastic shooter Borderlands being played on an iPad, but the controls looked pretty cumbersome.

It doesn’t look like Onlive’s come up with any better solution in the six months since that demo, though, because they still haven’t delivered a way to play their library of streamed games on iOS devices. Still, it looks like they are at least trying to raise awareness of their company on the App Store, because they’ve just announced that they have enabled game spectating on the iPad.

Sure, it’s better than nothing, but I really want to see a more aggressive move towards iOS on Onlive’s part at this point.

The iPhone 4 is already one of the most luxurious phones you can own, but since everyone already has one, how can you, millionaire Joe Paleontologist, separate yourself from the rest of the hoi polloi?

How about an iPhone 4 forged of meteoric stone and a bloody, flesh-tearing cuspid ripped from the jaw bone of pre-history’s most fearsome thunderlizard?

Intel’s integrated graphic solutions are pretty lame even on Windows machines, but that makes them doubly so when running an operating system as GPU-intensive as Snow Leopard, which is exactly why Apple has embraced NVIDIA’s superior mobile chipsets.

Unfortunately, a lawsuit between Intel and NVIDIA complicated matters from Apple, and ultimately ended up resigning Apple’s current-gen laptops CPU obsolescence, but it was recently suggested that Intel and NVIDIA were soon to settle their differences, allowing Apple to update their MacBook line to more advanced Intel CPUs without having to sacrifice the integrated NVIDIA graphics architecture that helps keep even entry-level Macs running speedily along.

A new rumor, however, suggests the smaller MacBook line (13-inches) might be advanced through a different method: by ditching NVIDIA entirely.

A Danish tabloid is threatening to take Apple to court, and over what? The exposed breasts of the nubile and flax pin-up girls who have graced Ekstra Bladet‘s ninth page for the last thirty five years.

If you are one of the many Apple rumor mongers who expects the Mac App Store to flutter cherubically out of the fertile womb of Software Update later this week, The Loop’s Jim Dalrymple suggests you put your celebratory cigars back in the humidor: it ain’t coming this week, or even this month. Dang.

Are you proud to call yourself a skinflint throwback to the antiquated ideals of Neo-Chaucerian 2009? Best Buy’s got a deal for you: a totally free iPhone 3GS.

A mere half a minute just not enough time to figure out if you actually want to pluck down that hard earned buck on The Pipkins’ classic sonnet, “Gimme Dat Ding”? You now have thrice the time to sample, courtesy of iTunes.

Even though the introduction of the iPad-only publicationThe Daily is slated to also herald the coming of iTunes app subscriptions early next year, don’t necessarily expect that move to suddenly make your iPad a digital stand-in for the local newsstand: traditional magazine publishers remain skeptical of Cupertino’s app subscription plan because of the company’s refusal to share credit and billing information.

Just like the Visible Man, Apple used to make transparent Macs with the viscera tightly packed and clearly exposed inside. The idea was to allow Apple’s designers to see and understand how components actually sat inside a Mac before the case was attached and the beige slapped on.

These transparent Macs were super rare: only ten are known to exist. One such transparent Mac SE was recently put up on eBay with a rather aggressive reserve price of $25,000.00.

I have a bet for my pinky finger with a certain man from the south that Apple will never release the white iPhone 4.

What’s the point? After long delays caused by light leaking onto the camera sensor, the white iPhone 4 has been delayed nearly nine months… and the next-gen iPhone is, at best, due out a mere three months after the white iPhone 4 is set to debut. At that point, anyone who wants one is going to just wait for a white iPhone 5.

I’d always assumed Apple was just hoping that delaying it until spring of 2011 would just get everyone to forget about the white iPhone 4, but their latest official signage at Apple Stores around the country reminds people that the albino iPhone 4 is still coming.

Crap. Maybe I’m about to lose that pinky bet after all.

Sales deals on Apple products are precious occurrences, as spontaneous and rare as the collision of matter and antimatter localized entirely on the Grand Concourse Parkway in the Bronx. Sure, you can get a buck or two off at some of the big boxes; you may be able to weasel a fin out of Amazon, but ultimately, Apple’s MSRP is an immutable law.

So this is exciting: the iPhone 4’s first honest-to-goodness sale at a physical and reputable retailer. Effective as of Friday, if you sign up for an AT&T contract at one of Radio Shack’s stores (new or upgrade), you can get an iPhone for $50 off the retail price. That’s $249 for the 32GB iPhone 4 (usually $299), $149 for the 16GB iPhone 4 (usually $199) and $49 for the 8GB iPhone 3GS (usually $99).

The latest MacBooks (including the Pro and the new Airs) have been understandably criticized for their anachronistic adherence to Intel’s last-gen Core 2 Duo CPU when competing notebooks have all moved on to the superior Arrandale architecture.

There’s a good reason for that, though: a lawsuit between Intel and GPU maker NVIDIA that prevents the latter company from making chipsets for current-gen Intel CPUs that include an NVIDIA memory controller. That lawsuit may be on the cusp of being resolved.