John Brownlee - page 212

Once the most profitable cell phone company in the world, and still the largest, Finnish telecommunications giant Nokia has seemed so utterly unprepared for combating the game-changing iPhone that their corporate confusion could only be matched by someone flipping the gravity switch to the off position in the middle of a basketball game.

It’s no wonder that Nokia is trying to copy Apple’s success, but as these recently leaked shots of their upcoming N9 prestige phone is anything to go by, their strategy seems to be to petulantly ignore Apple’s revolutionary advances in the smartphone arena while rather lamely aping the brushed aluminum and black chiclet aesthetic of the MacBook line.

The result is a confused mishmash: a smartphone that wants to be a MacBook when what Nokia needs is a handset that makes the iPhone want to be more of a Nokia. Come on, Nokia: once upon a time, you made the best phones on Earth. You can do better than this.

Figuring out which Mac you want to drop your moist wad of bills upon just became a little easier thanks to a new addition to the online Apple store called Compare Macs.

The feature offers a tri-paned juxtaposition of the hardware, software, storage, environmental impact, communications and display of any OS X machine sold by Apple online. The option becomes available in the top menu bar once you select a Mac.

Although there’s nothing particularly revolutionary about the feature, as usual, Apple has managed to execute the new option with such perfection that the HTML5 seems to shiver. Each genre of juxtaposition — Hardware, Software, Technical Specifications, And Configuration Summary — is delineated into specific sections that collapse as you scroll down the page, with each point of comparison flushly horizontal with its comparable brethren. The pie charts under the Environmental Status Report section are particularly well rendered, using different patinas of oak and walnut to attractively convey the green-friendliness of each model.

In truth, Apple’s computer line-up is so well branded that it’s usually pretty clear what performance you’ll get from each computer simply according to where the line model falls within Apple’s spectrum of products. But that’s besides the point: ultimately, “Compare Macs” is just another example of the exemplary interface polish that Apple is known for whether in software, hardware or HTML.

Like prison cakes, iOS updates tend to have secret files baked into the firmware, each capable of sawing through the bars of Apple’s own internal clampdown to free details on upcoming products. The latest beta of iOS 4.1 is no exception, offering a tantalizing first glimpse of three upcoming iOS devices.

The first two tipped products aren’t particularly surprising: a reference to an iPod 4,1 is clearly pointing towards next month’s updated iPod Touch, which is likely to boast an A4 CPU, FaceTime support and a Retina Display.

Similarly, once you know that iProd 1,1 was the internal Apple coding reference to the first-gen iPad, iProd 2,1 is easy to peg as a second-gen iPad. What’s curious here, though, is the fact that Apple’s officially programming support for a second generation iPad at all into iOS 4.1. If Apple sticks to a yearly product update for the iPad, we’re eight months away from an update to the tablet; does the reference to iProd 2,1 in an iOS update scheduled for next month indicate a surprising hardware refresh for the iPad line later this year, possibly fixing the begrudged lack of FaceTime support?

The final reference, though, is the most intriguing: an unknown device described as “unknownHardware” tagged with a unique Apple product ID of 20547. Smart money is this being an iOS-driven update to the AppleTV, although we’ve all been surprised by Apple before. Only September’s annual iPod event will give us partial answers.

Facebook just dropped version 3.2 of their iOS app onto iTunes, bringing an interesting new feature to the mix that seems like a direct challenge to the likes of foursquare’s location-based dominance: Places, a feature which lets you “check-in” to your current location and share it with friends.

Other new features in the update include the ability to set privacy of individual status updates, see all the recipients on any inbox messages, and even upload photos and videos in the background taking advantage of iOS4’s nifty multitasking abilities.

Facebook for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad is available free for download, and the 3.2 update should have rolled out to App Store users internationally. Just hit refresh.

If you’re a true Star Wars fan interested in supporting the franchise, on one hand, you could get yourself a Motorola Droid 2, which passes on a small sliver of a royalty to LucasFilm with every handset sold thanks to George Lucas’ trademark on “droid.”

On the other hand, that would stick you with using Android, and luminous beings are we. So fly your geeky colors proud and true by instead purchasing this official $30 R2-D2 iPhone case. It won’t snuggle your iPhone 4, but it’ll shell your iPhone 3G or 3GS like an astromech, making it very much the droid you’ve been looking for.

If you’ve ever hit Craigslist or eBay looking for an iPhone, you’re probably used to seeing ads for new, unlocked iPhones from mystery dealers. You might see less of them for the time being, though: London detectives have arrested nine members of an international iPhone resale ring.

The suspects in question are alleged to have taken advantage of the UK’s extremely subsidized iPhone rates to purchase thousands of new handsets through a middleman boasting a fraudulent credit card or identity. They would then sell those iPhones internationally for a healthy profit, sticking local British iPhone carriers with the tab.

That’s not all: the same criminals stole over £1.2 million in July from wireless carrier O2 by hooking up SIM cards to automated dialers to call premium phone lines in their control which charged ten pounds a minute. They then simply abandoned the contracts by disappearing without a trace.

It was that latter crime that actually prompted the City of London detectives’ month-long investigation, which ultimately netted them nine collars. At one home, they also confiscated over £15,000-worth of iPhones still in their boxes.

[via Apple Insider]

It just farts. According to Wired, Phillip Shoemaker — the director of applications technology at Apple, and the honcho responsible for maintaining a puritanical standard of quality in the App Store library — has a side job: selling a series of flatulence, evacuation and micturating simulators on the App Store through his company, Gray Noodle.

One such app is called iWiz. “Simulate the experience of urinating for a long time,” the app description reads. “Convince your friends that you’ll never stop.”

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bulLBD18uI8&feature=player_embedded

Recently vacated Mac avatar and sloe-eyed hipster hunk Justin Long popped up on Jimmy Kimmel Live the other night, and let’s just say he’s probably glad his “Get A Mac” gig has ended, because otherwise he might have gotten into some serious trouble pulling out that jailbroken iPhone.

But that’s not really the most interesting thing about his appearance. I got to tell you, I love this clip: I’ve always despised Justin Long, but this anecdote is funny enough that I’m seriously starting to think I just hated him because he was beautiful. And a lackluster thespianr, but whatever. Who knew he was so funny?

[via 9to5Mac]

Not only does the iPhone Spy Stick seem to serve a particularly shady raison d’etre, but it seems ready to kick you squarely between your wallet’s thighs while it does so.

Basically, the iPhone Spy Stick is a dongle that can be plugged into the bottom of any iPhone running iOS 3.x. Once connected, it will begin slurping up all of the private data you not only thought was secure, but might have even deleted, including internet history, contacts, text messages, photos and more.

That functionality isn’t necessarily evil, of course: data recovery can be totally benign. The name of the product, though, hints at more insidious motives, and the price is certainly extortionate: $199. As a commenter over at Gizmodo notes, that’s a lot of money for a “SQLite front-end and a fake iTunes data layer server.” You’ve got to be really suspicious of your spouse’s infidelities to drop bank on this.

Read more at Brickhouse Security

Valve’s Source engine games run fantastically on the Mac already, but the performance hasn’t quite been up to the level of what they’ve come to expect under Windows, mostly due to issues inherent to Snow Leopard’s graphic drivers. We posted last month that Valve was working closely with Apple to remedy that issue, and now the fruits of their labors have been released, courtesy of a new Snow Leopard Graphics Update.

Here’s what the 69MB update fixes:

Addresses frame rate issues occurring in Portal and Team Fortress 2 by Valve, on iMac (Late 2009 and Mid 2010), Mac mini (Early 2009 and Mid 2010), Mac Pro (Early 2009), MacBook (Early 2009 and Mid 2010) and MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2010) or MacBook Pro (17-inch, Mid 2010) models.

Resolves an issue that could cause Aperture 3, or StarCraft II by Blizzard, to unexpectedly quit or become unresponsive.

Resolves an image corruption issue that may occur when disconnecting and reconnecting external displays while the system is running.

It’s really good to see Apple taking Mac gaming seriously enough to specifically call out new games in their patch notes. Cupertino’s long sent the message that it doesn’t really care about gaming under OS X, but perhaps all that was missing was a passionate advocate like Valve.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nupVEJCC97k&feature=player_embedded

As an Apple blogger, I should be utterly aghast at this advertisement from Free Tax USA of an iPad meeting the pointy end of a sniper bullet, but my real gut reaction is just how viscerally satisfying it looks to shoot an iPad in the face. Someone should make a first person shooter of this for the App Store.

[via Crunchgear]

Apple’s sprucing up their online Support Discussions boards to incorporate more social networking features like user profiles, biographies, user avatars and even the ability to have personalized home pages, complete with widgets.

Apple’s announcement about the new Apple Support Communities is terse: “Very soon a major change will be taking place here at Apple Discussions. To help you prepare we have created some documents to give some insight and instructions on this major upgrade.”

Until the rollouts occur, it’s hard to say just how extreme a revision the new Support Communities will be, but somehow I doubt we’re about to experience the 4chanificiation of Apple’s official forums.

[via 9to5Mac]

Overheating iPods have been consistently making the news in Japan over the last week. First, Apple admitted that their first-generation iPod Nanos can suffer meltdowns, and offered free replacements to any Japanese iPod owners who’ve experienced the problem. On the heels of that comes this story from Reuters, in which an iPod going nuclear knocked a Tokyo rush hour subway train out of commission.

If not for the bad timing, the story’s pretty funny. Around 8:20am, a train in Tokyo’s Setagaya Ward was stopped by officials who noticed a strange, burning smell in the train. Staff members quickly investigated, only to be approached by a sheepish and embarrassed commuter with a smoldering, burst-apart iPod in her hands.

It’s not clear at this point what model iPod burst apart yesterday morning, and it’s almost definitely just a fluke, but one thing’s for sure: Apple Japan is going to have a public relations debacle on their hands if iPods don’t stop melting down.

Paul Devine — the Apple global supply manager who was arrested over the weekend for allegedly accepting over $1 million in kickbacks from Asian iPod and iPhone accessory manufacturers for privileged insider information — has pleaded not guilty to the charges in Federal Court.

The plea comes even as Pegatron (a division of Asustek) has suspended the head of one of their units for doing business with Devine.

Pegatron says they thought the money was a brokerage commission, and paid it to an intermediate trading company between 2005 and 2008, but occurred before Pegatron bought up Kaedar, a company which has supplied iPod boxes to Apple for years.

According to Pegatron, the executive responsible for paying Devine the kickback thought she was paying money for a legitimate commercial purpose and not as a kickback.

Pegatron isn’t the only company to have either conspired or been burned by Devine’s scheme. South Korea’s Cresyn andJin Li Mould Manufacturing have also been named in Apple’s civil lawsuit against Devine. It’s not clear at this point if these companies were actually conspiring with Devine, or if they’ve just been burned by one rogue, criminal mid-level manager.

As we all know, the iPad has problems charging through some USB ports… specifically if your USB port doesn’t support 10 watts of output. According to XMultiple Technologies, a solution to those beleaguered by iPad charging problems are just a $5 dongle away from serendipitous juicing forever.

Basically, it’s a sort of power-serving bridge device that you slide prophylactically over your existing Apple Dock Connector cable and which will magically allow USB ports that don’t serve 10 watts to juice up an iPad, thanks to some integrated electronics. Hmmm.

XMultiple Technologies says the iXP1-500 is “100% guaranteed to work.” I’m not quite sure how it could work, though. A dongle that isn’t externally powered isn’t going to magically serve up more electricity to an underpowered USB port. I’m guessing that the integrated electronics send a faked message to the iPad that it’s drawing enough power to charge, even when it isn’t.

More to the point, even an iPad that gives a “not charging” message is usually charging, albeit extremely slowly. So what we most likely have here is a placebo: a dongle that probably does nothing but trick the iPad into not serving up the “Not Charging” message. In other words, while the iXP1-500 is “100% guaranteed to work,” it’s still probably something of a scam. For $5, though, you don’t really have a lot to lose to give it a try for yourself.

Genius. In the style of Atom-embedded computer-in-a-keyboard solutions like the Asus EEE Keyboard, a plucky modder gutted a partially dead MacBook Air and crammed its workings into an old, heavily modified Apple Keyboard casing, precisely topped by an Apple Wireless keyboard and Magic Trackpad snuggled together.

The result? The MacBook Air Project, an all-in-one Mac-in-a-keyboard: just plug in a monitor to the MacBook Air keyboard’s DVI port and you’re ready to rip. Hey Apple: this is what the next Mac mini should look like!

Remember the Apple Peel 520, a case that allows you to take a jailbroken iPod Touch and turn it into a bonafide phone capable of texting and messaging?

It’s got some competition: the tPhone does basically the same thing, allowing you to slot any SIM into the case to enable calling and texting on your iPod Touch.

The main advantage here, though, is in the enclosed battery, which bests the Peel 520 with the inclusion of a 1200mAh pack, offering 50% more juice than the Peel, as well as a built-in mini USB port for charging.

The only drawbacks? Like the Peel 520, you need a jailbroken iPod Touch to enable calling, and unfortunately, the tPhone case is significantly more expensive than the Peel, costing almost $100.

Tech blogger Keith of Bit-101 just picked himself up a fancy new USB microscope, and as was his geeky wont, he immediately started aiming it at two gadgets just lying around on his desk.

On the left? The Kindle’s e-paper display, magnified 26x and 400x, respectively. On the right? The iPad’s. Thanks to the nature of e-ink, the Kindle display resolves amazingly well even blown up twenty six times, while the iPad must resort to software anti-aliasing to keep things smooth. Imagine how well that would look with a Retina Display, though.

It’s when you get to four hundred levels of magnification that things get really interesting, though, with the Kindle display breaking down into several strata of monochrome granularity, while the iPad ‘s pixels become a series of colorful bumpers of primary RGB dots. Neat!

[via Gadget Lav]

Can’t bear to part with your mouse, but in love with the slim slate of touch-capable glass and aluminum, the Magic Trackpad? 9to5Mac calls our attention to this gorgeous mousepad by Just Mobile, the Alupad.

Gorgeously carved from a slap of anodized aluminum, then infused with a coating of iPod ivory plastic, the Alupad looks like the mousepad Apple would create if they bothered themselves with such things… and makes me even sadder that the Magic Trackpad itself isn’t large or flush enough to double as a mousepad when it’s not in use.

The price is right, too: $35 is a lot to spend for a mousepad, but most mousepads just wouldn’t go with our iMacs nearly as well.

[via 9to5Mac]

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r71t-FSoFAI&feature=player_embedded

With Apple’s recent acquisition of LiquidMetal, a lot of people have been wondering just what they’ll use their new and incredibly T-1000-like metal alloy for.

Meanwhile, we’ve been running a contest asking readers to guess what hardware element Apple is already making out of LiquidMetal. The prize? A new Magic Trackpad, which — protip — doesn’t have any LiquidMetal in it at all.

For answers, perhaps we should look at what other highly design focused companies are doing with the alloy. The interesting video from watchmaker Omega embedded above shows one possible use for the Liquid Technologies supermaterial: super durable and gorgeously aesthetic bezels.

Would Apple drop serious bank on an exclusive license to Liquidmetal just to make nicer bezels? Or are they already doing so? Your guess is as good as mine, but Leander will set us all straight later today when he announces the winner of our contest. You may want to get your last minute guesses in now

Apple keeps plugging away at getting their iOS-oriented social gaming network, Game Center, and the latest version in developer builds of iOS 4.1 include new parental features to the mix.

Joining other parental features like turning off access to Safari, YouTube, in-app purchases or location services, the new option will allow users to restrict multiplayer game settings per device. Given the amount of homophobia, racism and downright vile smacktalk that takes place in multiplayer games on other services like Xbox Live, it’s probably a wise addition.

Game Center’s probably nearing launch: Apple has tended to heavily tout the iPod Touch as a gaming device over the past year, and with a hardware refresh of that device likely to happen in September or October, we can probably expect Game Center to drop simultaneously, bundled in iOS 4.1.

[via Apple Insider]

There’s a lot of money in iPhone accessories, but one midlevel Apple manager may have taken things too far after he managed to make over $1 million in kickbacks for supplying Asian suppliers and manufacturers insider information about new products and other internal decisions.

According to the San Jose Mercury News, Paul Shin Devine — a global supply chain manager within Apple — used an elaborate network of national and foreign bank accounts as well as a front company to receive payments for his information. He has since been arrested and named in a 23-count federal grand jury indictment for wire fraud and money laundering. The Asian accessory manufacturers with whom Devine did business have not been named.

Needless to say, Apple’s none too happy about this:

“Apple is committed to the highest ethical standards in the way we do business,” Apple spokesman Steve Dowling said in a statement. “We have zero tolerance for dishonest behavior inside or outside the company.”

In fact, Apple has so little tolerance for these sorts of shady ethics that they have filed a separate civil lawsuit against Devine. Even if he escapes prison, Devine is going to be sued into a gelatin slurry by his former employers.

Somehow, I’m guessing Devine didn’t quite think this through all the way.

Near Field Communication, or NFC, is a short range wireless technology that allows you to use your mobile phone for mobile payments. In other words, walk into a cafe, wave your phone over a NFC-sensitive plate and you could automatically buy yourself a cup of coffee, no cash required. Or wave your handset in front of a parking meter to fill it up with a couple hours without digging through your change purse.

Last month, we reported that AT&T was looking to use NFC to allow their smartphones to work as the equivalent of debit cards, but it looks like Apple’s getting serious about NFC too… they’ve just hired Benjamin Vigier, an expert on NFC technogloy, as its new product manager for mobile commerce.

Just you wait: in a couple years time, you’ll be leaving your credit card at home and doing all of your payments with your iPhone.

[via Mac Rumors]

Stuck using Windows Vista or 7 on your work machine? You poor sucker. Luckily, though, you’ve got a new option: the freeware Snow Transformation Pack will make your Windows install look like OS X.

The pack’s transformative effect is quite remarkable: it will change the appearance of your system from the login screen, wallpapers, sounds, dock and even dialog boxes. You’ll have to turn off UAE to install it, though.

Overall, the Snow Transformation Pack looks pretty good, but let’s call a spade a spade: as decent an operating system as Windows 7 is, this is the equivalent of printing Angelina Jolie’s face on a paper bag and slapping it over the head of a gross street walker. Unless you have no choice, you can do better.

Were you one of the many prospective customers disappointed that the iPad didn’t run OS X? Axon’s got your cover: their forthcoming Haptic tablet is designed from the ground up to run any Darwin-based operating system… which means it can be Hackintoshed to run OS X.

The stats make it clear that the Axon Haptic is strictly a netbook on the inside:

• 1.6GHz Atom N270
• 10″ 1024×600 LED-backlit LCD
• Resistive touchscreen w/ built-in stylus
• 2 200-pin SO-DIMM slots (2GB standard)
• 2.5″ HDD bay (320GB standard)
• 1.3MP webcam
• Wi-Fi (A/B/G/N)
• 3G SIM slot (AT&T or Verizon)
• Built-in speaker
• 3x USB, Headphone, mic, ethernet, VGA ports, card reader
• On-screen keyboard and handwriting recognition
• Removable battery (3000mAh, ~3hrs)
• 0.9kg (just under 2lb)

For $800 bucks, that’s some pretty woeful performance, particularly when it comes to battery life. Worse, if you do decide to break Apple’s EULA and install Snow Leopard on this thing, the operating system isn’t really designed to be useable on a tablet.

The bottom line is that while this tablet’s interesting from a hackability perspective, if you want a Hackintosh, you’re better off with a netbook, and if you want an Apple tablet, the iPad is going to be superior in performance and functionality in almost every way. For collector’s only, we’d say.