John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
Got a Time Capsule that’s giving you problems? According to a new Apple Knowledge Base article, Time Capsules with a serial number conforming to XX807XXXXXX – XX814XXXXXX are now eligible for a trade-in.
According to the article, “Some Time Capsules sold between approximately February 2008 and June 2008 may not power on or may shut down unexpectedly after starting up.”
I actually have a 500GB Time Capsule with that serial number, but it’s still working like a champ for me… despite the fact that the average Time Capsule sold during that time apparently dies every 19 months and 20 days. Anyone with an ailing Time Capsule going to take Apple up on their exchange offer here?
Last we heard, it seemed likely that the next iPod Touch would be camera-equipped with, at the bare minimum, a forward facing, video-only FaceTime camera… but due to space constraints, it didn’t look like the Touch would also gain the iPhone 4’s 5MP camera.
Today, MacRumors is following up last week’s speculation with the idea that while the 5MP camera won’t fit into the iPod Touch’s chassis, 3.2MP camera could conceivably fit… if Apple made the iPod Touch’s thickness uniform across all capacities.
Keep it secret! Keep it safe. Given Apple’s once impeccable track record of keeping their future products under wraps up until the very moment that Steve Jobs held them aloft on stage, the product-leaking Smeagol lurking around the underdark of their supply chain is really doing Cupertino a bad turn.
The latest supply-chain leak, spotted by Apple.pro, shows a tiny 1.18″ square, 3cm x 3cm touchscreen, complete with an Apple copyright branded upon the connector cable. The obvious assumption? A touchscreen iPod Shuffle, possibly as early as September.
Developer Keven Smith (neither doppelganger nor relation to Silent Bob) has just released a fantastic new text editor for Dropbox users on iOS.
Called Droptext, the app allows users to open, edit and save text files directly within their Dropbox account. It supports standard text files, naturally, but also any file with a text-based mime type, such as HTML, PHP or even C programming code.
If you’re a big Dropbox user like I am, it looks like a great app. It’s available now on the App Store for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch and costs a mere $0.99.
Trade company Alibaba claims to have a lead on the next-generation iPod Touch that strongly suggests it’ll come with a front-facing camera.
Their lead comes from an LCD assembly unit with digitizer and a stand-alone digitizer, both of which include a hole in the top center which they speculate will form the occulus of a FaceTime-capable iPod Touch.
The only problem with the theory? Sure, Apple probably wants FaceTime on the iPod Touch, but because of the way the iPod Touch is built, putting two back-to-back camera (one forward-facing, the other back-facing) is impossible.
Me, I’m not sure the iPod Touch is going to get a back-facing camera: I think Apple wants FaceTime to gain more ground more than they want the iPod Touch to be able to take snaps. Only the September iPod event will tell, though.
File firmly in the rumor folder, but NewTeeVee is resurrecting the old iOS-driven AppleTV rumor, but with a twist: this time, they say a future $99 AppleTV will feature the ability to stream television shows for just $0.99.
On one hand, such a move would make iTunes television offerings a lot more competitively priced, especially compared to services like Netflix and Hulu Plus… but on the other hand, it seems that this would replace (on the AppleTV, at least) the current purchase scheme of $1.99 – $2.99 per episode, depending on definition.
At the end of the day, though, it all seems a bit expensive to me: $20 bucks to rent a television season is a hard sell when that’s what the DVD will cost. There’s no doubt, though, that a change in the way iTunes currently prices television shows will go a long way to making the AppleTV a lot more popular, though.
Concept designs in general tend to be wishful-thinking affairs, but we can’t help but wish that this smart packaging design by Sverre Wiik Øberg uses the iPod’s own packaging as a charger. The box protects the iPod during shipping, then out pop the prongs to juice your iPod in any wall socket once it arrives.
What a snazzy design. Apple’s been increasingly moving towards minimizing its packaging in the interests of green friendliness over the past fe years. The next obvious step seems to be something just like this: discourage customers from throwing away their packaging to begin with by making it legitimately useful.
For the last few days, numerous iPhone users in major AT&T network hubs have noticed apparent 3G upload throttling. AT&T has just released a statement concerning the problem: its a bug with the Alcatel-Lucent HSUPA hardware, and they are working on it.
“AT&T and Alcatel-Lucent jointly identified a software defect — triggered under certain conditions – that impacted uplink performance for Laptop Connect and smartphone customers using 3G HSUPA-capable wireless devices in markets with Alcatel-Lucent equipment. This impacts less than two percent of our wireless customer base. While Alcatel-Lucent develops the appropriate software fix, we are providing normal 3G uplink speeds and consistent performance for affected customers with HSUPA-capable devices.
In other words, something went kablooey, and until Alcatel-Lucent gets around to fixing the problem, users with HSUPA-capable devices like the iPhone 4 will be limited to regular 3G UMTS upload speeds.
Wonder if you’re affected? If you’re in NYC, Central Jersey, Boston, Orlando, Seattle, South Jersey/Philly, Columbus, Cleveland, West Houston, Phoenix, Northern Colorado, St. Paul/Minnesota, Suffolk County/Long Island, Quad Cities, South Jersey, Denver, Detroit Metro, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, Kansas City, Fairfax and Minneapolis… well, could be.
By many people’s estimations, the iPad is missing anywhere from between one and two cameras, and Apple’s curious choice to eschew adding at least one web cam to their tablet when they already had their video-conferencing standard FaceTime in the wings is often cynically described as a move to encourage customers to quickly upgrade to the second-gen unit once it pops out of Cupertino’s manufacturing shops.
Why wait until then, though? This iPad Cam-Case design by Chet Rosales adds a swiveling camera to the enclosure. Of course, without proper support from Apple (and a port of FaceTime to iPad), a case like this would be pretty useless… but we’re hopeful, if not optimistic, that Apple might choose to sell something like this themselves when the camera-equipped, second-gen iPad comes out sometime in the next year. Let’s not leave the early adopters behind.
This gorgeous pinhole camera on Etsy isn’t just elegantly simple in its design, but its made out of an old iPhone box. Load a standard 35mm film reel into its spool and you’ll be able to take simple pinhole snaps with the best of shoebox toting grade schoolers. It even has a built-in advance and rewind reel, enabling you to “shoot a picture, advance to the next frame, use the entire roll of film, rewind it back into the canister and take it to the drug store for processing!” Who needs iPhoto?
When some intrepid young capitalist coats a new gadget in superglue and then rolls it in Swarovski-brand crushed glass then reprices it for a few thousand dollars more , we usually decry the resulting product as a tacky, shameless money grab aimed at Cristal-swilling rappers, bling-encrusted divas, porn star kingpins and the like.
This $299 iPhone 4 case, on the other hand? What can we say? Has Steve ever looked so bedazzlingly fabulous?
Earlier today, Apple made a new job posting on their official site, calling for an iTunes Fraud Prevention Specialist to work in Austin “canceling fraudulent orders” and “researching and resolving fraud escalations from various sources.”
It was a well-timed posting. A couple of days earlier, developer Thuat Nguyen and his dev company “mycompany” was caught hacking into the accounts of 400 iTunes users and funneling money from their accounts into a number of cheesy, crappy, Dragonball-themed e-book apps… a transparent money-funneling move that got Nguyen banned from the Apple dev program.
Since the job posting appeared, though, it seems that Apple has rethought lending any publicity to the fact that they think, internally, they need to do more about iTunes fraud: the job posting has since been pulled. No need to be cagy about this, Apple: credit card fraud happens, it’s not really your fault, and it’s good that you’re hiring more guys to protect us. Don’t worry about it!
After the fashion of their many other great infographics, GigaOm has continued their series of informative high-res JPEGs with iPhone: The Art of the Launch, which puts into perspective just how huge the iPhone has become… and some of the problems that have faced previous launches.
The most interesting part of the infographic to me? The citation of Gizmodo’s Brian Lam back in 2006, ahead of the iPhone launch: “The iPhone Will Be Announced On Monday. I Guarantee it. It isn’t what I expected at all. And I’ve already said too much.” Considering that four years later, the same site would strip a stolen and still unannounced iPhone 4 down to its bolts for its readership, that seems like an awfully coy admission of insider knowledge for Gizmodo to make, in retrospect.
The guys over at repair shop TechRestore have put together this goofily sinuous and retro-styled stop-motion video of an iPhone 4, doing a strip tease down to its very frame. Consider this the technological equivalent of a burlesque dancer slowly undressing herself down to her skeleton in a dust-free clean room. Or don’t, because that’s just plain creepy.
Elusive as some albino cryptozoological flora, the white iPhone 4 has been snapped in all its glory by Japanese blog Impress Watch. It looks exactly how you’d expect it to look, but since this is the iPhone 4 many of us wanted to be holding in our hands a couple of weeks ago, Impress Watch’s catalog of unboxing shots can be classified as a bit of late night gadget pornography starring that elfin, ivory love who somehow got away.
YouTube’s mobile website has just gotten a lot more iPhone-friendly, thanks to some hefty HTML5 optimization.
A new spartan, icon-driven dashboard now greets the YouTube visitor coming in through Mobile Safari, offering quick and easy access to subscriptions, playlists, favorites, your videos, search and settings. It’s all a lot more finger friendly.
When it comes to video viewing, you also now have a lot more options, including the ability to play a video in a higher-quality format, vote it up or down, write comments or view related videos.
The biggest change, though, is speed: videos load much quicker than the native YouTube player, as well as gaining higher-definition options for watching on the likes of the iPhone 4’s Retina Display.
If you want to check it out, just point Mobile Safari to youtube.com and check it out.
As far as compulsive time wasters on the App Store are concerned, Doodle God is a new favorite.
The game is a silly puzzler, in which various elements are combined to create new elements. Some of the puzzle logic is hysterically (and frustratingly) wonky: the combination of “Life” and “Rock” results in “Egg,” for example. Successfully bond two elements together and you’re given a new building block to play with, as well as a pithy, oft-times humorous philosophical quote.
I’ve really been enjoying the game, inscrutable though it sometimes may be. If you’re interested in trying it before you buy, there’s a great Flash version, or you can pick it up on the App Store for just $0.99.
If you’re looking for an unconventional portable hard drive with the aesthetic of a West Coast Chopper, Iomega’s new Skin drives might fit your requirements: each 500GB drive comes with a unique design that, according to the Press Release, screams “Who says portable storage has to be boring?”
Or, depending on your tastes, even palatable. Looking beyond the skins, though, you can expect fast 2.5″ drives and Iomega’s Mac-friendly Protection Suite, including a 12 month subscription to Trend Micro Smart Surfing for the Mac, Iomega QuikProtext and Retrospect Express backup software, and MozyHome cloud storage.
You can buy a cheap dashboard mount for your iPhone for as little as $10 bucks, but if you take your phone seriously as a replacement for your GPS unit, you might want to consider Magellan’s new iPhone car kit.
Compatible with all iPhone and iPod Touch models, the Magellan Premium Car Kit features an adjustable dash mount, a built-in speaker and noise-canceling microphone and even a GPS receiver to boost your iPhone’s signal. It’s compatible with all iOS GPS navigation applications, and it’ll even accommodate most cases without fretting.
It costs $130, which is certainly pricier than most, but then again, most dash mounts don’t have this volume of functionality. If you’re serious about GPS, the Magellan Premium Car Kit looks like money well spent.
The iPhone 4 already takes some of the best smartphone snapshots around, but it’s no match for a DSLR. No worry, though: the guys over at Hypebeast just paired the iPhone 4 with a DSLR lens through a Manfrotto pocket tripod mount.
The end result? Probably worse photos than the iPhone 4 took before. But until smartphones get DSLR-style CMOSes (improbable until someone figures out how to shrink a CMOS without making the pixels less sensitive to light) and lenses (pfft), this kind of Frankenstein rig is probably the most that serious iPhone 4 shutterbugs can hope for.
Want to know what it’s like to work at Apple? A post over at Quora has some illuminating answers, but according to ex-employee Chad Little, it all boils down to “a divided mix of typical corporate red tape and politics… mixed with a start-up level [of] urgency when the direction comes from Steve.”
“If you have a project that Steve is not involved in, it will take months of meetings to move things forward,” says Little. “If Steve wants it done, it’s done faster than anyone thinks is humanly possible.
Verizon understandably relishes the opportunity to kick AT&T and the iPhone whenever they possibly can, so it’s no surprise that their latest full-page ad in The New York Times this week for their upcoming flagship Android device, the Droid X, openly mocks the iPhone 4’s death grip issue with one choice line: “And most importantly, [The Droid X] comes with a double antenna design. The kind that allows you to hold the phone any way you like and use it just about anywhere to make calls.”
One of the more frustrating aspects of Apple’s official response to the iPhone 4 reception issue is that the solution they are adopting isn’t just a non-fix, but it’s transparently just an optical illusion.
The iPhone 4 death grip is very real, but it only exhibits itself in middling reception areas. Why? Because Apple symbolizes 40% of the signal in the fifth bar of reception. If you have five bars of reception, you won’t notice a Death Grip drop, but if you have four bars or less, you’ll see numerous bars instantly drop off your iPhone if you touch it wrong.
Apple chose to capture 40% of the iPhone’s signal in the fifth bar to give the superficial appearance of excellent reception even when the cellular signal was as low as 60%. Their fix to the iPhone 4 death grip, then, is to more accurately correspond the actual cellular signal to signal bars, so the reception drop doesn’t appear to be so profound. This will make the “Death Grip” drop in reception look less serious, but on the other hand, it’ll make iPhone reception look worse across all devices. If you were used to getting a stead five bars of reception on your iPhones in the past, the update might drop it down to four or even three bars.
To pre-emptively counter complaints of signal degradation from customers, Apple’s slyly decided to make the first three bars of signal look bigger. That’s the optical illusion: they are hoping that by making the first three signal bars look larger and more tangible will stop people from complaining (or, worse, filing class-action lawsuits) about the just-as-imaginary reception degradation.
The bottom line: the forthcoming software update for the iPhone 4’s Antenna Problems will not fix anything, it’ll just make it less superficially noticeable. And now, even Apple is admitting it, specifically telling customers that the software update won’t fix the “Death Grip,” and the only solution is to either hold the phone differently or buy a case.
Come on, Apple. This is nuts. If you’re going to rely on a software update stage trick to fool customers into thinking everything’s okay, you can’t also cop to it all being an illusion through your official Customer Support organ. It’s time to just start bundling bumpers with the iPhone 4 and be done with it.
Although the iPhone 4’s reception issues get all the press attention, the iPhone 4 has another pressing issue: the tendency of the proximity sensor to misread how close your face is to the handset, which can in turn cause the touchscreen to turn on when it’s close to your face, allowing your chin or cheek the unfortunate liberty of blindly dialing or even hanging up during a call.
The proximity sensor issues are commonly theorized to be a software issue, but according to an Apple Store Genius spoken to by TUAW’s Aron Trimble, we may be looking at another design flaw.
Why? According to the Genius, Apple had to move the proximity sensor location in the iPhone 4 so that it actually points into the ear canal during a call. That means that if you have particularly glistening ear canals, light bouncing around the ear canal can mistakenly tell the proximity sensor that you’re no longer on a call.
The Genius’ recommendation on how to fix the issue? He said that you should make your calls from somewhere darker.
During the WWDC keynote, Steve Jobs’ efforts to show off the improved speed of Mobile Safari on the iPhone 4 were thwarted by a catastrophic WiFi meltdown, but a month later, our good buddy Obama Pac-Man is here to prove what Steve could not: Mobile Safari on the iPhone 4 is wicked fast.
In a showdown against the iPhone 3GS on 3G with WiFi turned off, Mobile Safari rendered all the tested sites significantly faster on the iPhone 4. It’s all a matter of a few milliseconds here, a half a second or so there, but that time adds up in an app as integral to the iOS experience as Mobile Safari.
Extra points go to Obama Pac-Man for his stylistic choice of silence for the video: anyone else would have supplemented it with a loud soundtrack of moist mouth-breathing or, failing that, phlegmatic nu-metal. Bravo.
