John Brownlee - page 214

Look, we’ve all been burned by the Verizon iPhone rumor before, but we’re really starting to think that a CDMA iPhone 4 is coming sooner rather than later. Consider these three separate stories surfacing this morning.

First, we have this story from Techcrunch, claiming that a CDMA iPhone is due in January:

Sources with knowledge of this entire situation have assured me that Apple has submitted orders for millions of units of Qualcomm CDMA chipsets for a Verizon iPhone run due in December.

Next up is this AT&T SEC filing which hints very strongly that their iPhone exclusive is nearing an end. The filing contains an entire section dedicated to the risks involved when “exclusivity agreements end,” as well as assurances to shareholders that the loss of the iPhone isn’t a “material negative impact.” This all reads like a company that sees the writing on the wall.

Finally, consider this Digitimes story, claiming that a CDMA iPhone will go into mass production in December by Pegatron, who will supply the resulting handsets to both Verizon Wireless and China Telecom.

Like I said, we’ve all been burned on the Verizon iPhone rumor before… but there’s a lot more scuttlebutt swirling around this time than usual. More importantly, even though all these intel reports have different sources, the details are lining up: AT&T’s exclusive is ending by the end of the year, and a CDMA iPhone will be available in January.

If you are unhappy with AT&T’s service and your contract is coming up, it might behoove you to hold off on renewing it for the time being.

From Steve Jobs’ promise to ship millions of FaceTime capable “iOS devices” this year to a leaked iPod Touch front plate with a front-facing camera hole, the imminent release of a FaceTime-capable iPod Touch is looking more likely by the moment.

The latest evidence? Confirming earlier rumors about how FaceTime would be handled on the next gen iPod Touch, MacRumors has discovered that the latest beta of iOS 4.1 supports email-based FaceTime initiation.

I’ve been banking on an iPod Touch capable of FaceTime ever since the iPhone 4’s release, but now I’m really beginning to wonder if we won’t see that device in the next couple of weeks. Take the existence of email-based FaceTime in iOS 4.1 beta 3 and combine it with Apple’s seeming slowness in releasing a fix for iOS 4.0.1’s PDF security vulnerability and today’s rumor that the next iPod event will happen next week, and I think what we’re looking at here is an update to iOS 4.1 timed around the imminent release of a new iPod Touch. What do you think?

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYVG-cKHPIE&feature=player_embedded

Comex has done it again. The man behind the popular Spirit and JailbreakMe jailbreaks has successfully ported Flash to the iPhone 4.

The Android-to-iOS flash port, called Frash, was first unveiled last month, but this is the first time it’s been available for the iPhone 4. The instructions for installing it aren’t exactly noob-friendly, but either way, this is Steve Jobs’ worst nightmare come true: Flash running on any modern iOS device capable of being jailbroken.

Of course, the man never said that it couldn’t be done, just that it shouldn’t be done… and watching the video above, we have to agree. While Frash seems to work well enough, it’s noticeably slow, especially in loading new Flash videos. That kind of stuttery performance is simply anathema to Apple’s principles… well, unless you’re running iOS 4 on an iPhone 3G, that is.

Apple’s annual iPod media event is traditionally held in September, but according to Brazilian Mac site Mac Magazine, they might hold it a bit early this year.

According to MacMagazine’s “reliable source within Apple,” Cupertino plans to refresh their iPod line and unveil the next-generation iPod Touch as soon as mid-August, with a date of August 16th or August 17th being cited as the most likely dates.

Mac Rumors points out that if these rumors are true, this iPod event date also aligns with a claimed August 17th release date for iLife ’11, although it’s not entirely clear how that product’s release would fit in with a strongly-focused iPod announcement.

Given that Apple has yet to send out invites for their iPod event, that date might seem suspiciously near, but it’s plausible: Apple has traditionally given only a week’s lead time to the press when throwing their iPod events. Last year, the invite for their “It’s Only Rock and Roll” iPod Event came with just nine days worth of lead time, and in 2008, Apple sent out the invites just seven days before the event. If this rumor is true, then, expect official press invites to start landing in the next day or two.

>Back in 2008, Apple wanted chip design guru Mark Papermaster so much that they actually got into a lawsuit with IBM over him. A mere fifteen months later, though, Papermaster has left his position of Senior VP of Devices Hardware Engineering at Apple… and all signs point to Papermaster having been canned.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Papermaster had a a “falling out” with Steve Jobs over Apple’s corporate culture, and has lost Jobs’ confidence months ago.

As Daring Fireball’s John Gruber points out, that seems to be consistent with external evidence: namely, despite the fact that Papermaster was in charge of the iPhone 4’s hardware, he is nowhere to be seen in Apple’s iPhone 4 promotional videos. Nor was he on stage during Apple’s “Antennagate” press conference.

Rather, in both instances, Papermaster’s ostensible subordinate, Bob Mansfield, took his place to talk in detail about the iPhone 4’s hardware. No surprise, then, that Mansfield has now been promoted into Papermaster’s now vacant position.

Ultimately, this seems to be a case of a square peg not being able to fit into an Apple-shaped hole.

The most interesting detail of this story is the fact that Papermaster was not fired by Jobs over the iPhone 4’s antenna issues. In fact, according to Gruber, the iPhone 4’s antenna issues were ticked as a bug over two years ago, and Steve Jobs himself gave the okay on releasing the handset as designed, believing the “death grip” issue to be comparable to antenna-issues on other smartphones.

Steam for Mac is great and all, but after an impressive launch of Mac titles, the stream of new OS X games has slacked to a mere trickle.

Don’t expect that to change anytime soon. In a new interview with Gamesindustry.biz, Valve says that we probably can’t expect developers to make a concerted effort to bringing their in-progress titles to the Mac until 2011.

“People are looking at their titles for this holiday and saying ‘a Mac version would screw with my schedule, or I’d have to ship it late. Neither of those is super-desirable. But the titles that I have in Spring of 2011 or in Holiday of 2011, let’s have a discussion and let’s see those numbers and start to figure it out,” said Valve’s Doug Lombardi.

The good news is that it seems game developers do want to support the Mac. The bad news is that Steam for Mac took them a bit by surprise, and so we’re probably looking at slim pickings in native Mac ports until sometime next year.

A few times a year, some dusty old Beatle pops up out of his crypt, coughs out a centipede and tells us that they really want to bring their catalogue to iTunes and it’s coming soon, honest.

It can be confusing: three years ago, Paul McCartney said that an iTunes deal was “virtually settled”, but just three months ago, he said a deal was just a far away as ever, claiming those boneheads at EMI were the ones gumming up the works.

Now John Lennon’s infamous wife has emerged from her Black Pyramid and recited the incantation that transforms her into Yoko-Ono The Ever-Living. She doesn’t blame EMI: she basically just says Steve Jobs is messing things up by not paying them enough money.

“Steve Jobs has his own idea and he’s a brilliant guy. There’s just an element that we’re not very happy about, as people. We are holding out,” Yoko said.

“Don’t hold your breath… for anything,” she then ominously added, punctuating the implied threat with a maniacal cackle before returning to her mausoleum to plot the attainment of the fabled Sword of Omens.

Sure, everyone’s grateful that Apple got around to divorcing their gorgeous 2560×1440 display panel from the 27-inch iMac and selling it on its own, but it came at a cost: they discontinued their 30-inch Cinema Display in the same stroke.

It’s a bummer, and we know this will be small comfort, but if you miss the 30-inch Cinema Display, Dell will soon be shipping a monster of a 30-inch display of their own christened the U3011, containing a 10-bit IPS panel boasting the old Cinema Display’s 2560 x 1600 resolution and mustering a 10,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio and a 270cd/m2 brightness rating, with ports including VGA, two DVI ins, one component, two HDMIs and DisplayPort.

Dell’s actually responsible for some of the better monitor buys out there, and the U3011 looks like it might be a good successor to the classic 30-inch Cinema Display… if you can stomach the usual gross Dell design aesthetic on your desktop. It should be out in October for an unknown price.

At first, I didn’t quite understand WaterField’s press release, announcing a new line of attractive cases specifically designed to ensconce your new Magic Trackpad.

Hey, there’s no denying it: these cases are nice. The $12 Socket is a simple padded pouch that will protect your Magic Trackpad’s glass surface from key scratches and the like, while the $25 Slip is a ballistic nylon case with a lightly padded liner and multiple trim options. Like I said, nice…. but who is taking their Magic Trackpad on the road with them? It’s a desktop device: your MacBook already has a Magic Trackpad built into it.

I was ready to delegate this conundrum to the Department of Redundancy Department, but then I actually opened my MacBook for the first time in a couple of weeks and realized how luxurious that 80% larger Magic Trackpad really is. It’s pretty hard to go back…and don’t even get me started about the postage stamp sized trackpad of my Hackintosh netbook. So maybe I do want to take my Magic Trackpad out on the road. I guess that means I need a case.

Canny, WaterField! Canny!

Wish Jonny Ive’s aesthetic sense was more like an old flea-market VCR? A mere $25 will get you one of Karvt’s wood-panel iPhone 4 skins, coming in flavors of dead tree flesh ranging from bamboo to cherry and from walnut to pine.

Now if only someone would just come up with a musty orange shag bumper and my iPhone 4 would be the spitting image of my creepier grandma’s basement.

Remember this case from China that allows you to use a regular SIM to make phone calls and SMS messages from your jailbroken iPod Touch? It’s been reviewed.

Not so surprisingly, it works, but it’s buggy. You can’t adjust the call volume, the SMS delivery shorts out occasionally, etc. The Peel 520 was a neat idea, but if you want to use your iPod Touch as a smartphone, Sprint’s forthcoming 3G hotspot case combined with a good set of headphones and a SkypeOut account seems like your best bet… no jailbreak required.

Digicams, like Darwinism, tend to exhibit certain mutations that define their species from the rest of the genus. In other words, it’s common for digicams to have a gimmick.

The Samsung PL90 point-and-shoot’s gimmick is pretty neat, though: a built-in USB connector eliminating the need for an external cable to sync and charge. That makes this an excellent choice for an entry-level camera for laptop users.

Quality-wise, the Samsung PL90 packs 12 megapixels onto its tiny sensor, which means you can expect a good deal of noise in your snaps. On the positive side, though, the lens here is great for an entry-level, with a 29-116mm equivalent zoom and a ƒ2.8-6.5 aperture range, which is surprisingly bright.

At $150, this actually looks like a really good camera to give an amateur in need of a new casual snapper. It even has some pretty great self-organizational software features, including the ability to sort pictures according to criteria ranging from their date, time and even dominant color. Pretty neat.

Inundated with a deluge of iPhone 4 jailbreaks at their retail locations, Apple has finally locked down access to JailbreakMe from inside the Apple Store. If you try to go to jailbreakme.com from within an Apple Store now, a DNS forward will just route you back to Apple.com.

Good move, Apple… but what’s taken so long? JailbreakMe.com has been around since 2007, and even back then offered an instant jailbreak to anyone visiting the site in Mobile Safari running iOS 1.1.1. You’d think they would have shut jailbreakme.com access off at their retail stores three years ago.

An uncanny resemblance, don’t you think?

On the left, an in-app screenshot of Where To?, an iOS app nudging travelers along a GPS trail to local points of interest. “Where To? makes it incredibly easy to locate the closest steakhouse, bank branch, billiard club or anything else you may be looking for, at the drop of a hat!” That in-app homescreen has not changed since version 1.0, which was a Day 1 download on the App Store.

On the right, Where To’s eerie doppelnganger, plucked from the Aha-like inner mindscape of an Apple patent attorney. The patent is dated December 18, 2009 and describes “systems and methods for integrating travel services in a single application available to a portable electronic device,” allowing users to easily be directed to local restaurants, banks or nightspots. Sound familiar?

In other words, Apple seems to have patented the functionality of another company’s app, right on down to that app’s physical design and title.

Serious>PC heavy, but if you game under Boot Camp, that shouldn’t be a problem, and there are numerous Mac titles like World of Warcraft, Civilization IV and Unreal Tournament 2004.

Other features of the G510 include custom-color backlighting, allowing you to truly tart up your keyboard according to your own chromatic specification, integrated USB audio for headset support, 18 programmable keys and simultaneous key input for up to five keys at once, allowing you to deploy some truly polydactyl shortcuts.

The G510 costs $119.99, and although it’s temporarily sold out, you can sign up to be notified when the keyboard’s next available over on the official Logitech website.

You’d be hard pressed to identify a peripheral maker whose sense of design is more anathema to Apple’s than Logitech. Where one is symbolized by the plinth of aluminum, the slate of glass, the opalescent bar of plastic, the other is a PC-centric slab of black plastic and glowing LEDs. That said, Logitech makes some of the best gaming mice in the business, and their new G-Series Wireless Gaming Mouse G700 is no exception.

Featuring over 13 programmable buttons easily identified by their individual sculpting, smooth gliding polytetraflyoroethylene feet and a comfortable ergonomic design, the G700 is specifically designed for MMORPGs like World of Warcraft. Onboard memory profiles guarantee that it’ll always remember your settings even across Macs, while the 5,700 dpi laser promises to track your slightest twitch and jactitation accurately.

The G700 is even rechargeable: simply plug in a micro-USB cable to switch it into corded mode and give the internal battery a juicing good for over two weeks.

If you’re interested, the Logitech Wireless Gaming Mouse G700 is available for pre-order now for just $99.99. Sure, it doesn’t exactly match Jonny Ive’s vision for your desktop… but Ive’s clearly not a gamer, is he?

Ever since Dev Team member Comex unleashed his latest jailbreak on iOS 4 users through the website JailbreakMe, an extremely dangerous exploit in the way Mobile Safari opens PDF files has effectively been in the wild.

Surprisingly, once the exploit used to effect the jailbreak was known, jailbroken iPhones were counter-intuitively more secure than their locked-down cousins, thanks to a Cydia-only software hack that plugs up the PDF vulnerability.

Needless to say, Apple wasn’t about to let that stand, and after marking the bug as “critical,” Cupertino has now released a statement on the matter.

“We’re aware of this reported issue, we have already developed a fix and it will be available to customers in an upcoming software update,” Apple has said.

This is a huge vulnerability, and to me, that sounds like Apple intends to have the hole plugged within the week. If you plan on jailbreaking, better do it now… just remember that if you decide to stick with iOS 4.0.1, you’re going to need to watch out for malicious PDF files.

HardMac thinks they’ve got quite a scoop on their hands with this leaked illustration of what they say is a next-generation iPod Touch in a clear case. They claim their source is “very reliable.” I’m not sure I buy it.

Look, it’s all hearsay until Apple actually unveils something, but this “next-gen” iPod Touch doesn’t have a front-facing camera… and we’ve got very strong reasons to believe the next iPod Touch will have exactly that. We saw an LCD assembly unit for the next iPod Touch as recently as last month that had a FaceTime camera oculus, and Steve Jobs himself has said we can expect “millions of FaceTime devices” to ship this year. Since the iPod Touch is the only other iOS device we can reasonably expect this calendar year, a FaceTime iPod Touch seems like a lock.

Another point: it would be easier to put a forward facing FaceTime camera into the iPod Touch’s existing footprint than it would be to put the iPhone 4’s 5MP camera into that same footprint. In fact, the latter might be downright impossible… yet that’s exactly what this image seems to suggest.

Finally, if this is a current mockup according to Apple’s own next-gen iPod Touch specifications, then why didn’t they bother showing the iPod Touch running iOS 4?

It doesn’t quite grok for me. What do you guys think? Sound off in the comments.

3G? Pfft. What are you, some kind of stone-humping caveman? WiMax is the new hotness, and your pitiful iPhone 4 can’t even do it… or can it?

Thanks to Clear’s iSpot WiMax hotspot, it certainly can: in fact, the iSpot can serve up to 40 Mbit per second of mobile broadband throughput collectively to up to eight connected iOS devices… but only iOS devices.

That’s right: Clear’s iSpot has a special software feature that detects the operating system installed on the devices connecting to it and shuts out anything not running iOS.

On the plus side, that means that the iSpot is pretty cheap when it debuts on August 10th: that soap-like bar of WiMax goodness will cost just $99 with a $25 month-by-month unlimited data plan.

On the other hand, if you want to connect your Mac, expect to lay out another $15 per month: Clear won’t brook no moochers.

Apple’s>”>suing a number of unlicensed third-party accessory makers for products of inferior quality that reflected poorly on Apple’s brands.

Of course, part of the reason why third-party accessories work so poorly is because Apple is sneaky and employ various hardware tricks to make sure that only “Made for iPod” accessories work perfectly.

The hackers over at Minty Boost have gotten to the bottom of one such trick Apple deploys to make sure that unauthorized accessories have a hard time charging your iPod or iPhone.

In essence, Apple uses secret resistors that are placed in the connectors for Apple devices: if these resistors aren’t there, your iPhone or iPod Touch won’t deted the 2.8V and 2V signals, and hence won’t charge, coughing up a “Charging is not supported with this accessory” message instead.

The good news for unauthorized accessory makers (and makers) is that once you know the trick Apple employs to stop iPod charging on non-“Made for iPod” devices, it’s pretty easy to work around. Now that the secret of how Apple gimps unauthorized accessories is out in the wild, though, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Apple come up with a new way to stick it to those unwilling or unable to pay their “Made for iPod” licensing fees.

Ever since the iPad’s debut, it has handily dominated the 10-inch tablet space… but that hasn’t stopped companies like Dell from trying to make a dent in the iPad’s sales with smaller 5- and 7-inch tablets.

According to iLounge, Apple might be looking to compete with the burgeoning 7-inch tablet market with an iPad Mini of their very own.

It’s plausible, I guess: the iPad is pretty big — sometimes it seems a skosh too big to me — and a 7-inch iPad wouldn’t sacrifice much in usability for an easy gain in slingability.

9to5Mac is confirming that they’ve also heard this rumor from their sources, adding that the iPad Mini would likely have a 1500×1920 Retina Display.

What do you think? Is Apple aiming to shrink the iPad? If they did, would you want one? Let us know in the comments.

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

iOS 4’s Folders functionality is incredibly useful for organizing the digital App Store protozoa constantly multiplying in your iPhone’s petri dish, but the limitation of 12 apps per folder can be frustrating for those of us trying to keep our home screen down to a single page.

If you’ve got a jailbroken iOS 4 device, though, there’s now a solution: Infinifolders, which allows you to place as many apps in a folder as you like. Just flick up and down to reveal all of your folder’s contents.

It’s not a free tweak — it costs $1.99 — but if you’ve got a lot of apps to corral, the price may well be worth it to you. It’s available now through Cydia.

[via 9to5Mac]

For the green-conscious looking for big sound on the go, Logitech has just unveiled it S715i Speaker Dock, a custom-tuned portable speaker dock that comes with an eight-hour rechargeable battery to save on your AA cost.

Although it’s larger than some luggable speaker dock solutions, the S715i offers big sound to boot, thanks to eight custom-designed drivers that separate and enrich specific sound frequencies, with each channel getting a half-inch tweeter, a 3-inch midrange driver and dual 2-inch passive radiators.

The S715i also comes with a wireless remote, allowing you to control your music, turn down the volume or put your playlist on shuffle even across the room.

The S715i works with any device supporting Apple’s Universal Dock Connector, short of the iPad, and will both play and charge from the built-in battery. If for some reason you got made the sucker by buying a non-Apple MP3 player, or just have an older iPod or iPad, you can connect them too, thanks to a standard 3.5mm auxiliary input.

The Logitech S715i goes on sale today, and costs €179. It will ship this month.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH0zasBkNX8&feature=player_embedded

Games maker Blizzard has always had sympathy for Mac gamers: not only do native Mac ports exist for most of Blizzard’s titles, but they have exclusively shipped hybrid Mac/PC installation DVDs of their titles since World of Warcraft.

Their latest blockbuster title, Starcraft II, follows suit with the Mac love… but the game’s content also includes another fond pat on the head for fans in this in-game ad for the iPistol, a space marine spoof of Apple’s famous “dancing silhouette” iPod ad campaign.

Not that anyone’s seen those ads in a while, mind, but cut Blizzard some slack: given Starcraft II’s ten year development cycle, we should count our blessings that they aren’t parodying “Think Different.”

While JailbreakMe is one of the simplest jailbreaking solutions yet, it goes about its dirty work by exploiting a dangerous flaw in the way Mobile Safari handles PDFs and embedded fonts. The same exploit that is making it convenient today for thousands of iOS device owners to jailbreak their machines could be used tomorrow to totally compromise them and install malevolent code upon their devices.

Needless to say, Apple’s going to be closing this security hole, stat, and now Reuters is reporting that Apple is “investigating” the issue, although there’s no timetable for a fix yet.

The Dev Team must have been conflicted about this jailbreak. On one hand, they were able to allow any device running iOS 3.2 or higher to jailbreak just by visiting a simple website, but in doing so, they were revealing a very dangerous exploit that is now in the wild, just waiting to be adopted and easily deployed against unsuspecting web users. Furthermore, the nature of this exploit makes a quick response by Apple inevitable: this jailbreak solution may go down as the most quickly neutralized on record.

It’s also got to be a nightmare for Apple. Counterintuitively, the only way right now to “close” the security hole inherent in all iOS devices is to jailbreak your phone, then install the PDF Loading Warner from Cydia. Jailbroken phones might actually be more secure right now than unjailbroken ones. Apple needs to fix that, as quickly as possible.