John Brownlee - page 210

Steve Jobs on the $100 Bill? Why not, shrugs Raffael Hannemann, a German college student contributing to the Dollar ReDe$ign Project.

My intention? There has to be a full-colored US flag on every bank note, and there have to be faces of some of the latest idols on them. Let’s stop looking backwards and focus on the future. This is the time where we live. I’ve chosen Steve Jobs, but why not Zuckerberg, Larry Page or Michael Jackson?

Unfortunately, I doubt that Hannemann’s new design would pass Jobs’ own rigid sense of aesthetics. And really? Steve Jobs on the hundred dollar bill? That’s not even walking around money for the billionaire CEO. Put His Steveness on a benjamin and he’s going to be blowing his nose all over his likeness five times a day.

If the main reason you’re hoping for Apple to announce the new, iOS-driven iTV is for the promise of some app gaming on your 50-inch plasma, you don’t have to bank on Cupertino. Accessory maker Griffin has a new dock in the works that allows you to hook your iPhone or iPod Touch up to your television and then use it to play multiplayer games with up to four players at once.

Don’t expect it to work with just any game: the Griffin PartyDock will only work with select Griffin games, which have yet to be announced and are of unknown quality, with no word yet if Griffin will open the PartyDock up to third-parties.

Download a supported game, though, and you can play an iOS game multiplayer without having to awkwardly hot seat it by passing your iPhone around. Instead, four included remotes allow you to control the action from across the room.

Obviously, a lot of this device’s niche could be filled by a $99 iTV, but if that doesn’t materialize next month — or doesn’t support apps — the Griffin PartyDock might be the only solution in town to treat your iOS device like a game console.

On the wild, anonymous Internet, you just can’t always trust a glowing review… but at least the iTunes App Store has gotten a little more trustworthy, after the Federal Trade Commission slapped down a California marketing company that was employing people to write positive App Store reviews without full disclosure.

In a statement on Thursday, the FTC said that they had reached an agreement with Reverb to remove the offending reviews from iTunes, as well as barring them from doing any more fraudulent reviews in the future and forcing them to to fully disclose their relationship with their clients, which includes Digital Leisure, Harmonix and MTV Games. A monetary fine was not disclosed.

On Reverb’s part, they seem pretty petulant and unrepentant about the whole thing, casting themselves as the victims.

“It became apparent that we would never agree on the facts of the situation,” she said. “Rather than continuing to spend time and money arguing, and laying off employees to fight what we believed was a frivolous matter, we settled this case and ended the discussion.”

A FaceTime-capable iPod Touch with a Retina Display is pretty much a lock in at this point, but what about the Touches distinctive case design: will it be going the way of the iPhone 4, or will it continue to have the smooth, curved metal back that we love (and hate to scratch) so well?

According to a source speaking to iLounge, expect a new back, but not the iPhone 4’s. Instead…

Familiar. Think of the top of a MacBook Pro, only smaller, which is to say flat rather than curved at the center—closer to the look of the first-generation iPod touch’s back, only with modifications. The rear camera is there, but there is still some question as to whether what’s next to it will be a LED flash like the one in the iPhone 4, or a microphone like the one next to the video camera of the iPod nano. We’ve been told to expect a microphone rather than a flash, with a continuation of the bottom-mounted headphone port and Dock Connector port.

In other words, it sounds like brushed aluminum, similar to the iPad’s back. The advantages here are something that isn’t quite as unsightly when scratched, and while the level of excitement this rumor garners has a lot to do with whether you plan on going bareback with your fourth-generation Touch, the picture I have in my mind certainly seems like a move in the right aesthetic direction.

Come September 1st, everyone expects Apple to announce at least some sort of streaming iTunes functionality… but what if that’s all a red herring? According to All Things D, that might just be the case: they are saying that the next version of iTunes won’t stream media from the cloud, but will instead by heavily integrated with social networking features.

The idea is this: future versions of iTunes would basically be little social networks, in which you’d be able to share recommendations of apps, movies or songs with other people. There’d be no actual media sharing ability at first, but this is clearly an evolutionary move, laying the groundwork for a more feature rich streaming iTunes to come.

It’s a very interesting rumor. Apple executives have said that the streaming iTunes capability we should expect in the near future is more modest than the pie-in-the-sky dreams of internet opiners. Combined with the rumored streaming television ability of the new iTV, this would seem to be a more realistic rollout of a future cloud-based iTunes for Apple to take.

Got a current gen MacBook Pro that just won’t play nice with your external display, or has a tendency to freeze at starting line at the sound of the OS X boot chime? Apple has just updated the MacBook Pro EFI firmware to version 1.9.

The new firmware resolves issues where a mid 2010 15- or 17-inch MacBook Pro might freeze during startup or sometimes stall during day-to-day use. In addition, the update clears up some issues hooking your MBP up to certain external displays.

Anyone out there have one of the afflicted models who can give us a first-hand report on whether or not the latest update solves the problem? Hit us up in the comments.

[via 9to5Mac]

Back in June, SurfaceInk made a splash for themselves by demonstrating a 12.1-inch Ubuntu-powered tablet, clearly positioned as a possible competitor against the iPad. Seems like that might have been a mistake: as it turns out, Apple was a SurfaceInk client, and let’s just say Cupertino wasn’t too peachy on the idea of doing business with a company in bed with the enemy.

According to SurfaceInk CEO Eric Bauswell, the two companies decided to part waysbecause of “Apple’s growing awareness of our turnkey capabilities.” SurfaceInk won’t say just what they did for Apple, but given the company’s engineering work for companies like Palm and HP, it’s easy to guess that they had some sort of hand in the iPad.

What really irked Apple, though, was SurfaceInk’s 12.1-inch prototype that used a Freescale i.MX51 800MHz Cortex A8 chipset, ready to sell the reference design to any company that wanted their own would-be iPad killer and claiming they could ship such a device out by Q1 2011.

Of course, what might seem like a mistake on SurfaceInk’s part in alienating a lucrative client may very well end up proving extraordinarily lucrative: there are a lot of electronics makers out there who are scrambling to get their pants back up after the iPad proverbially dropped them, unawares. There’s a lot of lucre to be made selling as many of those guys tablets to rebrand as possible.

I-O Data’s new portable hard drive has the standard specs for its class, maxing out at USB 2.0 and 500GB of storage, but it’s the HDPN-U500/V’s video functionality that intrigues: just plug it into a Sanyo Xacti, JVC Everio or Sony Handcam camcorder and it’ll suck in all the video with no bridge computer required.

The big advantage here is to video bugs who find themselves filling up their camcorder’s storage out in the field. If they buy I-O Data’s drive, they can leave the MacBook at home and if they fill up their camera, easily slurp out the footage and keep shooting within seconds.

It’s hard to say, but since it hooks up to your camera via USB, it could theoretically be used with an iPhone too. I’d be interested to know if the drive can offload iPhone 4 videos if you connect it with an Apple Connector Cable.

The seems to be Japan only right now, so if you want one, you’ll need to find an import shop and lay down ¥14,600 (or about $170) for the drive. That’s actually very expensive for a 500GB drive, but if you’re constantly running out of drive space on your camcorder, it may very well be worth it.

[via Gadget Lab]

For those of us poor souls still feeling for the ghost of Google-gobbled SimplifyMedia and looking for a way to easily share our media across our computers and social networks, Libox has stepped in to fit the bill.

Think of Libox as a personal P2P streaming application for your media. You simply download the software for the PC or Mac and let it scan your computer for media like movies, music and images. Once it’s done, any medial then be available for streaming on any computer you own, or even on your iPhone or iPad through a free (and attractive) universal app.

Want to share your media with friends? That’s easy enough too: just add them as contacts and they’ll be able to play any media you select to share. You can even selectively share media: Leander can take a look at my movie collection, sure, but he’s not getting access to the porn directory.

The iPhone 4’s new 720p video recording capabilities and the fantastic iMovie for iPhone app make shooting beautiful movies on the run an absolute snap, but sharing them is another story. The second you try to upload your gorgeous, high-def movie to YouTube, the iPhone 4 crunches your video down to a low-quality 360p clip.

What the heck, Apple? Don’t you want us to show off your phone’s video capabilities? That forced compression is plenty irritating, but an enterprising App Store developer has now remedied the problem in the form a free application called 720Tube, which does exactly what it says: makes sure your videos are shared in the same quality they were shot.

[via GigaOM]

There’s something heartwarming about a Mac software developer so dedicated to maintaining the quality of his product that, discovering a pirated version of his software on the Pirate Bay that had been shoddily cracked at the expense of the user experience, he actually told the cracker how to do it more elegantly.

That’s just what Coding Robots dev Dmitry Chestnykh did when he found a version of his journal-taking application, Mémoires, up on the popular Bittorrent search site.

Incensed at the crumminess of the crack, Chestnykh wrote the following to the Pirate Bay.

The iControlPad has been teased for so many years that the case — which promised to allow you to add physical gaming controls to your iPhone or iPod Touch — was the front contender in our own internal Vaporware awards. Heck, just a month ago, I wrote: “The sad fact of the matter is we’re never going to see the release of the long fabled iControlPad.”

So much for my soothsaying and shows what I know. After two and a half years of development, the very first iControlPad has finally popped off the production line as the sexy unit you see above. The first run of the device will be limited to 3,000 units, and orders should start being taken “soon.”

That’s great news for iPhone gamers, particularly emulation enthusiasts, but what impresses me most about the new design is its modularity: the bumpers actually pop off and can be changed to theoretically support another smartphone, or even an updated iPhone design.

Really neat. We’re glad to see the iControlPad’s long transition from dream to product finally nearing the end its final days.

Apple’s iOS devices clearly aren’t built with styluses in mind, and Apple institutionally loathes them but some of us feel a more nuanced and precise control when using styluses, particularly when it comes to digital drawing.

There’s a lot of companies who are willing to sell you a little plastic pointing stick for your iPad, if you don’t just go the cheap route and use a SlimJim instead, but one problem with these styluses is that they obscure what’s underneath the stylus, making it hard to see what letter you’re tapping on the onscreen keyboard or even if you’ve completed that circle.

We’d prefer someone figure out how to make a fine-tipped stylus work with an iPad, but until then, the DAGi Pen is a neat solution: it makes the tip of the stylus transparent and suspends a red dot in the middle so you always know where the stylus contact area is in relation to your iPhone’s display.

Pretty clever, and cheap to boot: each DAGi Pen costs just $20.

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The first of the would-be, Android-toting iPad killers is about to arrive in the Samsung Galaxy Tab. It’s set to debut at next week’s IFA conference in Berlin, but as you can see, Samsung’s already teasing the device.

We’ve got to admit: the rapid fire staccato of intercut images in the promotional video actually does get our pulse pounding a bit… well, as much as our pulse ever pounds for an Apple knock-off product, that is.

As far as specs, nothing’s official except it’s 7-inch form factor yet, but the Galaxy Tab is tagged to feature an AMOLED display (distressingly rumored to run at a resolution of only 800 x 480, the same resolution as the four-inch Galaxy S smartphone) and run Android 2.2. As you can see, the Tab’s shape is different than the iPad too, allowing for one-handed holding.

The one obvious advantage the Tab has over the iPad is video-calling support, thanks to a forward facing camera… but that camera’s also rumored to be pretty chintzy, only supporting a 320×240 resolution. There’s also a rear mounted 3.1MP camera, according to scuttlebutt.

Can the Galaxy Tab trump the iPad? We doubt it: spec-wise, the Tab is looking underwhelming, even in the areas where it bests the iPad. Still, can’t fault an electronics manufacturer for trying.

Pioneer’s latest iPod speaker dock is the KODO XW-NAW1, which sounds more like a jive-speaking droid’s designation than a product to be interested in, but look beyond the engineer branding and what you will find is a gorgeously svelte wafer of a dock that doesn’t sacrifice big sound for footprint.

Perhaps designed to be wall mounted, the KODO XW-NAW1 is only 83mm thick, but still contains a couple of thirty watt speakers. The buttons are as touch-sensitive as your iPhone, and while the ports on the KODO are few, there is a component video output for hooking up to a TV.

It’s a gorgeous dock that would elegantly fit any entertainment center decor, but one big problem is the small width of the docking bay, meaning iPad owners can’t avail themselves of the KODO’s docking abilities without snapping their tablet in half and cramming it in a crunch of aluminum and glass into the bay.

It’ll also be pretty expensive when it drops in September, costing around $300.

Read more at Pioneer

If your Time Capsule or Airport just won’t blanket your entire house with sweet, invisible WiFi, Western Digital has a new, easy to use solution to extend your network to the basement, the attic or the back yard: the Livewire Powerline AV Network Kit.

The kit includes two Livewire network adapter boxes, each with four ethernet ports. All you do is plug one Livewire adapter into your router or Time Capsule as well as a wall socket. Then plug the other adapter into a wall socket in any room in your house where you don’t have networking. As long as those two outlets are on the same power grid, which most newer homes are, your internet connection will be shot through your electrical socket to the Livewire in the other room.

A practical use for this would be to extend your network to a room that is too far away to get WiFi. For example, if you wanted to set your basement up as an office, you could just set the Livewire adapters up and plug your iMac into the second one. Easy networking, without extending your WiFi network with repeaters or wiring up the room for Ethernet.

According to Western Digital, the Livewire Powerline AV Network Kit can provide data transfer speeds of up to 200 megabits per second, which should, theoretically, be enough to stream even 1080p video. At $140 for a pair of adapters, this is a solution to consider if you’ve got any dead spots in your home network you’re feeling an itch to fill.

Not that we ever expect elegant, fully-realized products from China’s plucky constabulary of Apple knock-off shops, but apparently, it takes a lot more to make an iPad killer than just aping the design and slapping Android on it.

Reviewed by Giz-China, the ePad seems to be an excellent example of what you get if you try to save yourself a couple of hundred bucks when you buy yourself a tablet.

It looks like an iPad superficially, but where the iPad has an aluminum unibody casing, the ePad has a cheap plastic back that’s easy to break. Unlike the iPad, though, at least the ePad has you covered with all your missing features, including a USB port, HDMI port, a microSD card reader and even a front-facing camera.

The display is where things really start falling apart, though. According to Giz-China, the ePad’s display looks “dull and washed out” and is “terrible” compared to the iPad.

As for performance, sure, the ePad boasts a 1GHz ARM A8 CPU… but apparently, even that isn’t enough to get this baby running right. The ePad is apparently plagued by choppy video and app launching so slow, the reviewer compares it to Commodore 64.

Bizarrely, after that litany of complaints, Giz-China ultimately declared the ePad a better device than the iPad in their head-to-head faceoff… only to contradict themselves a sentence later. I’ll have a snootful of whatever you guys are having, it seems like a real loosener.

[via Gadget Lab]

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eUyNh4g0qc&feature=player_embedded

I’m certainly no expert, but I’ve often felt that a lot of what is behind Japan’s seeming eccentricities — the fascination with robots and automation, as well as the strict adherence to a social protocol that can seem , to Westerners, distant and stand-offish — to the crushing biomass of their overcrowded cities. In a country of shoebox sized apartments and packed trains, the only personal space you can get isn’t physical, but psychological.

One of the examples I like to point to is just the experience of walking into a diner. In America, you’d go in, sit at the counter, order your food from a waitress and get it delivered to you a few minutes later. In Japan, though, it is handled with what can seem to be an absurd level of detachment from your server: orders are placed through a touchscreen or ticket machine, where you pay for your food. That ticket is placed, without a word, upon the tray of someone working behind the counter, who later — and just as silently — brings you your food.

I was really interested, then, to see this iPad self-ordering system pop up on Japan Probe. Designed by Sharp Systems Products, it allows Japanese diners to order from a menu on their iPad, completely obviating the need for the aforementioned touchscreen ordering systems or ticketing machines. It’s a more feature rich implementation too: for example, you can pinch to make a picture of your food bigger, or drill down for ingredients.

Interesting stuff. It’s an obvious fit for a country like Japan, but I wonder if this isn’t the inevitable path that American dining will take as well: the tablet as a dynamic, self-updating menu.

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Fantastic. This LED-embedded jacket might just be the glue gun and rhinestone vest of the iPhone generation.

Created by Art and Program after collaboration between Yutaka Takahashi and Junpei Wada, the Vanilla Jacket is simple to use. Just shrug it on on and plug your iPhone or iPod Touch into it. Not only will the Vanilla display a graphic visualizer of the beats you are jamming to on the 8 x 8 LED matrix embedded into the back of the jacket, but you can even use the coat as a turn signal: just flick your wrist to let people behind you know if you’re turning left or right. You can even use the jacket to pump out a Twitter message.

The Vanilla jacket series will supposedly be available for purchase later this year at an undisclosed price, but what I love most about this video is how it seems to be a callback to Apple’s own “dancing silhouettes” iPod ads. I could easily see Apple outfitting a bunch of dancers in Vanilla jackets and starting out the September iPod event with a choreographed, LED equalized dance.

[via Gizmodo]

The former global supply chain manager accused by Feds and Apple of accepting over $1MM in kickbacks for insider information might have even more money out there that the authorities have yet to discover.

Paul Devine — whose offshore assets and bank accounts have already been frozen, and who was recently discovered to have $150,000 squirreled away in shoeboxes as fast “escape” money — is now said to have two safety deposit boxes, which might contain even more money and perhaps a spare passport or two.

Authorities are now demanding access to those safety deposit boxes, saying that they won’t allow him out on bail until they know the contents of those boxes since Devine is a serious flight risk. Man, this was a guy with a plan.

There’s not a gadget under the sun that the chroma-crazy lads over at ColorWare won’t slather in Pantone hues if you pay them enough money, alleviating the necessity of the Mac-loving hockey fan from trying to turn his iMac into as gaudy a display of team pride as his torso and face with the help of spray paint alone.

Needless to say, with the advent of the Magic Trackpad, Colorware has now updated their services to allow you to custom-color your new input device. So if you’ve been despairing that your Magic Trackpad doesn’t match your desktop’s Pan-African chromatic aesthetic, head on over and plunk down your change. Who says every Mac has to be so gray, anyway?

Steve Jobs certainly wouldn’t agree, but I know a few of you grumps out there were disappointed when the iPad turned out to more of a big iPhone than a convertible tablet with a built-in keyboard. Even if you’re not one of those people, serious typing on the iPad pretty much requires lugging a Bluetooth-pairable physical keyboard around with you.

If you fall into either category, you might be interested in this case that transforms into an iPad stand, complete with integrated Bluetooth keyboard. It’s a great design: the keyboard’s chiclet keys get folded against the display when closed to protect the glass. Sure, it adds a bit more bulk to your iPad, but if you do a lot of typing on the go, this is certainly preferable to lugging a real keyboard around you.

Unfortunately, this convertible iPad dock is a bit expensive, costing just over $90… which seems like a lot of money to spend for what will only prove to be marginally convenient for most. Perhaps when it passes through the FCC and hits these shores, though, they’ll have figured out a way to lower that price. Halve that tag and this would be a no-brainer for me.

All the internet scuttlebutt at this point converges upon one big and tasty rumor: Apple will announce a new, iOS-driven AppleTV called the iTV in September, which will cost $99 and have no local storage, but support streaming media only.

If the rumor is true, it’s a bold plan by Apple to transform their “hobby device” into a veritable cable, satellite, HTPC and Netflix killer… but if content carriers aren’t on board and the price isn’t right, even iOS isn’t going to save the new iTV from the ignominy of its predecessor.

According to Bloomberg, though, Apple’s really close to inking deals with News Corp. and Walt Disney to offer $0.99 show rentals over iTunes.

Currently, renting a show for 48 hours through iTunes costs $1.99, which is just enough to keep iTunes from being a competitive way to watch a show, especially when it’s on both the boob tube and sites like Hulu for free… albeit with ads.

$0.99 is a much easier to swallow price for renting a show. It’s a no-brainer price point that is hard to resent, and easily justifiable for most consumers if they can watch a show at their convenience, legally and without ads. It’s also an imperative price point for a streaming iTV with no local storage to reach in order to succeed.

All the stars seem to be in alignment for the iTV: the price now seems set to be right for the device itself and the content it’ll play. If Apple doesn’t announce the iTV in September, this will end up being the most disappointing rumor of the year.

As Mac fans, we all know that Apple habitually throws an iPod event in September, where the obsolete iPods allowed to grow dusty in our love are whisked off behind the killing sheds, while the shiniest new models are simultaneously heralded. These events usually see an updated iPod Touch and a new version of iTunes, and this year, everyone’s expecting word on the new streaming iTunes features and perhaps a relaunched, iOS-driven AppleTV called the iTV.

Needless to say, excitement is high… but Apple still hasn’t tipped their hat on when we can expect the conference. Well, you might want to pencil September 7th in for following our iPod Event liveblog, because Bloomberg’s sources are now saying that date’s a lock.

Of course, since Apple traditionally doesn’t alert the press to an iPod Event until a week ahead of time, we won’t know if Bloomberg’s sources are right until the end of this month… but Apple certainly can’t put it off much later. If you’re hungry for a new iPod Touch or even an updated AppleTV, earmark some credit for that date.

We know, we know: Macs don’t support USB 3.0 yet, which allows USB to pipe through up to a blistering 3.2 Gbit per second of data throughput. The good news is, we all know it’s coming: we just have to be patient.

But why wait for Apple to catch up when Iomega is now selling USB 3.0 compatible external drives in their eGo range, which are not only backwards compatible with USB 2.0 (and therefore, your Mac) but without any price premium over their USB 2.0 progenitors.

According to Iomega, they will be updating all of their eGo portable drives to support USB 3.0 by the end of October. The 500GB currently costs just $114, and the 1TB model weighing in at $189, although these are MSRPs and are quite often yet.

Iomega’s not stopping at USB 3.0 support: they are also adding in 256-bit AES hardware encryption, and promising the drives will be capable of withstanding seven foot drops without a hitch.

As for when we can expect our Macs to be able to take advantage of USB 3.0, Iomega’s Jonathan Huberman told Slashgear that Cupertino’s delay was “interesting,” but he expected them to move to USb 3.0 by Q1 2011.

The bottom line: if you think that Apple is going to shift to USB 3.0 at any time in the near future — and its hard to imagine they won’t — Iomega’s just given you a very compelling reason to pick up one of their new drives. They cost the same, they’ll work with your current Mac, and when USB 3.0 hits Apple’s line-up next year, you’ll be able to take advantage of your drive’s blistering speed the second you unbox your new Mac.