John Brownlee - page 228

At this week’s Computex expo in Taipei, Hitachi-LG unveiled their new HyDrive: an amalgamation of a Blu-Ray DVD drive and solid state drive that could afford us a look at the direction future MacBook hardware will take to slim down chassis design.

The HyDrive is interesting: the current models offers 64GB of NAND flash memory with a read/write speed of 175MB/60MB per second, although capacities should increase. The SSD and Blu-Ray drive are then connected through SATA II. The end result is two drives — one optical, one solid state — that take up half the room as their separate counterparts in a laptop.

We all know how much Cupertino likes efficiency. If Apple chose to use a combined solution like this in their next MacBooks, they’d significantly cut down on the size of their internal components, leading to slimmer, lighter notebooks that have Blu-Ray functionality to boot.

The HyDrive will launch in August 2010, and while there’s no official price yet, they’re still definitely priced for luxury laptops: it’s been hinted that a HyDrive could add $200 to the price of a standard notebook.

For scuba-diving iMovie users looking to edit together some gorgeously lurid undersea footage, Sanyo’s gorgeous new Xacti DMX-CA100 promises to be the world’s first completely waterproof camcorder capable of shooting 1080p video at up to 60 frames per second nat up to 10 subaqueous feet. Even better: the resulting footage is captured in iPhone-friendly H.264 format, although a word of caution: your iPad isn’t nearly this submersible.

Additionally, the Xacti DMX-CA100 can capture still shots at up to 14 megapixels, and supports 6X optical zoom and high-speed sequential zooming that allows you to capture up to 22 photos per second at a 2MP resolution.

Sanyo’s latest Xacti will be released this June in colors of black, yellow or pink for a still unrevealed price.

Even if the iPad did have weight sensors, this would still be a self-evidently bad app idea…. and grow exponentially worse in direct correlation to user weight density.

[via Slashgear]

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATpSPNIuj3M&feature=player_embedded#!

Steve Jobs himself said the iPad is “magical” but this may be the first we’ve seen it used as a prop in a magic trick, thanks to Japanese YouTube illusionist “Salary Magician.”

His tricks are all standard sleight-of-hand affairs that take advantage of the iPad as a prop behind which birds, books and envelopes can be hidden “in plain sight” but the real beauty of this act is the way Salary Magician has conjured himself up a home-made app to give his tricks that extra bit of shazam.

End note: is “Salary Magician” the best name for a Japanese magician ever, or what?

[via Gizmodo]

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qw5jH8GN12U&feature=player_embedded#!

Created by Stanford alums Ashkay Kothari and Ankit Gupta as part of the Launch Pad class at the Stanford Institute of Design, Pulse is an absolutely gorgeous iPad newsreader that makes RSS and Atom feeds as easy as Google search, and even more gorgeous than Google Reader Play.

Whether in line with the national average or not, the recent slate of suicides at Foxconn has been a public relations nightmare not just for the Chinese electronics manufacturer, but for their partners as well.

Now, a report from Chinese site Zol.com.cn suggests that Cupertino might be taking the well-being of their subcontracted workers into their own hands: they claim that Apple will subsidize the wages of Foxconn employees working on their products with a profit-sharing scheme.

According to the article, Apple believes the main reason for the suicide jumps is low wages, and so they are prepared to offer roughly 1 to 2% of the profits of Foxconn-produced Apple products to the employees who have worked on them.

According to a report in the Financial Times, Google is so fed up with Windows 7’s woeful security issues that they are now taking Redmond’s operating system by the pants seat and unceremoniously hurtling it from the building.

What machines are employees getting instead? Linux rigs… and Macs.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJeGt5fe7e8&feature=player_embedded

It was a rude dose of unexpected knowledge in the intricacies of USB when starry-eyed iPad owners first came home with their new devices, plugged it into their computer’s port and instead of juicing saw… nothing.

The culprit, they soon found out, was the iPad’s USB requirements: it simply hates the low-powered USB ports so ubiquitous in most PCs, and will accept nothing less than a full 10 watts of energy output if you want it to charge. This forced some users to divorce syncing from charging, plugging their iPads into their computers only when they wanted to slurp up some content from iTunes, and charging it via the wall plug.

Not exactly ideal. Luckily, in the months since the iPad’s debut, some of the biggest names in motherboards (namely Gigabyte, MSI and Asus) have all come out with software that juices up their motherboards to be able to power the iPad.

Better yet, Asus’ software seems to work on pretty much any computer, as illustrated by the above YouTube video. If you’re still grinding your teeth about USB charging issues with your iPad, you might give it a shot.

[via Engadget]

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbHF63b7g50&feature=player_embedded

Although the joke in this Star Wars iPad Briefing video —in which footage from A New Hope is overlaid with Steve Jobs’ iPad presentation — is fairly straightforward, it’s really the skeptical coughs and embarrassed shuffling of the Rebel Pilots that really makes it work…. not to mention Han Solo’s exasperated eye-roll.

If you’re dreaming of Netflix for your iPhone, good news: you’re just a jailbreak away. Hacker Knisitruck says that the existing Netflix iPad app is secretly a universal binary and can be easily ported to the iPhone with a few simple steps.

Steve Jobs’ “hobby” device might not be a hobby for long: Engadget reports that sources close to Apple claim that the Apple TV is currently getting a massive overhaul as an iPhone OS, streaming video device.

The old Apple TV was like a big iPod that connected to your set, so it’s not really a surprise that Apple’s re-imagining of Apple TV is essentially as a big iPhone connected to an HDTV. According to Engadget, the new Apple TV will have an A4 CPU, run iPhone OS and only ship with 16GB of flash storage.

Why so little room? Because Apple’s trying to do away with local storage in favor of their cloud iTunes service. The new Apple TV will be capable of streaming your media at 1080p through a web connection (or a Time Capsule, if you still want to store your media locally, but it’s all still streaming).

The biggest reveal? The price. Engadget says the new Apple TV will costs only $99. Wow.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yO2KQHkt4A&feature=player_embedded

If you’re looking for a little project to pursue this Memorial Day, word comes down the pipeline that installing Android on your iPhone 2G or 3G is now easier than ever, thanks to the automated iPhodroid application.

Earlier methods of installing Android on the iPhone were rather complicated, but this new method only requires a jailbroken iPhone running firmware 3.1.2 (in other words, jailbroken using PwnageTool, RedSn0W or Blackra1n and not Spirit), OpenSSH installed with the “alpine” password, MacFuse and the iPhodroid software. Connect your iPhone, run iPhodroid and five minutes later, you’ll have a dual-boot iPhone running the two best mobile operating systems on the market. Shiny.\

[via 9to5Mac]

When Gizmodo got their hands on the first leaked fourth-generation iPhone prototype, they weren’t able to give a resolution for the display. It was a frustrating omission which caused many of us to wish they’d taken a microscope to the display and confirmed resolution through the tedious process of pixel counting.

Someone else has now done just that and seems to have confirmed what we all suspected: the next-gen iPhone display is a 960×640 IPS, quadruple the resolution of the current iPhone.

That’s really impressive: imagine how fantastic games are going to look on the iPhone, or video for that matter… the new iPhone is going to be just shy of native 720p HD. This is turning out to be an iPhone well worth having waited for. WWDC just can’t come soon enough.

Uh oh. The Department of Justice just keeps on moving their anti-trust magnifying glass farther and farther away from Apple’s competition with Amazon, blowing up the pores on the whole iTunes apple skin. The DoJ is now reaching out to Hollywood as they investigate their anti-trust case against Cupertino.

According to the New York Post:

“The [Justice Dept.] is doing outreach,” said one Hollywood industry source. “You can’t dictate terms to the industry. The Adobe thing is just inviting the wrath of everybody.”

Added a senior source at a media company: “If Apple thinks it’s going to increase its monopoly with the iPad, it should look at the history of other walled gardens.”

While the DoJ is just “investigating” right now, an anti-trust case — scurrilous or not — is pretty much inevitable at this point: Apple is now the biggest tech company in the world, and since so many big, powerful companies are now smaller than them, they’re going to lobby to knock Apple down a few notches in whatever way they can.

The t’Light sounds more like a rejected noun from the Middle Earth dictionary than a product you’d actually buy, but it’s a fantastic idea: an attractive, minimalist 3 watt LED desk lamp containing a USB port, an iPhone dock and a jack which emits enough power to juice your laptop… although there’s regrettably no adapter available for a MacBook, since Apple frowns on anyone else making them. That’s hardly the t’Light’s fault, though, and the price isn’t wholly unreasonable: it costs only $90.

First released in 1989, Jordan Mechner’s swashbuckling classic The Prince of Persia is now available on the App Store.

Called Prince of Persia Retro, the game puts you in the roll of the eponymous hero, who only has one hour to defeat the villainous vizier Jaffar and rescue the imprisoned princess to save the day.

The iPhone version costs $0.99, and if you’re the type who likes spamming your Facebook friends with pointless updates… it’ll do that for you too. Go grab it if you’ve got any love of the original: this is a great port, and it’s nice to see one of the best games for the Apple II restored for the iPhone.

If you’re a hopeful author sitting on what you hope to be the next great literary classic — or, failing that, the next mopey emo vampire series that you think will sell like gangbusters amongst the indiscriminate Hot Topic tween market — great news: Apple’s just released information on self-publishing on the iBookstore.

It’s a bit more complicated than just uploading your fan fiction, of course. Basically, you need to have a manuscript in ePub format, a 13-digit ISBN, validate against epubcheck 1.0.5 and contain no unmanifested files, as well as a US Tax ID, a valid iTunes Store account, and an Intel-based Mac running Leopard or higher. But once you’re established, you can start selling your books online, even internationally.

I’ve been really waiting for this: I can’t wait to read the first self-published iBooks blockbuster. Hell, time to head back to Scrivener and try to write one myself.

In the first year of Windows Phone 7’s launch, Microsoft wants to sell 30 million licenses by the end of 2011… three times the amount of iPhones sold in its first year.

What a joke. There’s simply no way Microsoft can manage that. They aren’t even in the game at this point, and Windows Phone 7 is, at best, playing a game of catch-up with iPhone OS 3.0. Meanwhile, iPhone OS 4.0 — an operating system attached to the world’s best selling smartphone — is right around the corner. And that’s not even mentioning Android, a far superior and more fully featured mobile operating system that is available to every handset manufacturer for free.

Let’s run the math. In the first quarter of the year, Apple sold 8.8 million iPhones compared to Microsoft’s 3.7 million licenses for Windows 7. So for Microsoft to sell 30 million licenses by the end of 2011, they essentially need to keep pace with the most popular smartphone in the world’s sales, without any app library or existing users, while competing with not one, but two superior operating systems with thriving user and app ecosystems, one of which is free.

Perhaps I should just end this post here with one final word: lolwhut?

[via Apple Insider]

This seems like an absolute no-brainer to me, but over on their official blog, Adobe is asking whether iPad owners want the company to make it possible to view native PhotoShop PSD files on their tablets.

Muses former Photoshop Product Manager, John Nack:

I periodically hear requests for the ability to view Photoshop PSD files on devices like the iPad (for example, browsing files that one has synced via Dropbox).

This is obviously a capability that Adobe could build. The question of course is whether we should build it (as opposed, say, to building something else).

I’m not sure if Adobe’s really this obtuse or what, but of course the iPad is the perfect device for an artist or graphic designer to use to show prospective clients his portfolio at a meeting, peeling back layers and perhaps making light modifications on the go. Heck, I’m not either an artist or a graphic designer, and I want that functionality.

Although still lower than the national average, Apple’s manufacturing partner Foxconn’s worker suicide problem is becoming such a public relations nightmare, so it’s understandable that their announced plan to raise wages for about 420,000 factory workers is being seen by many as a way to mitigate worker deaths.

The pay raise is substantial: each worker will currenly earning $131 a month will get a 20% pay hike. On Foxconn’s part, they claim the pay hike has been planned for some time… but it’s hard to believe the recent publicity about worker conditions hasn’t, at the very least, pushed this plan onto the fast track.

Employees seem hopeful. “[The pay hike] may help the suicide situation, because we workers just need money and the financial pressure on us is great,” one worker said.

It’s been a long 57 days, but if you’re in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland or the UK, and you jumped to pre-order an iPad when it was first announced, you’ve probably already gotten one in my hands.

On the other hand, poor suckers like me who missed the initial pre-order date due to their own idiocy have another couple of weeks to wait. And if you aren’t from one of the international countries blessed by the hand of Jobs for the first round of international iPad launches, but instead live in some more exotic and fragrant clime, you’ll have to wait until some time in July before you get an iPad at best.

So, which of our own chattering non-Yankee natives are now holding an iPad in their hands? What do you think? Is it everything you hoped it would be? Sound off in the comments!

Pop quiz. You’re at your local AT&T store when two unarmed men rush in and steal multiple iPhones without harming anyone. What do you do?

a) Calmly wait for the police to arrive and take your report.

b) Rush out of the store on foot, pull out your hand cannon, brace your legs and fire round after round at the fleeing get-away vehicle as onlookers and passers-by scream in terror and dive for cover, all the while laughing maniacally after every squeezed off shot.

Most of us would pick the former, but Roger Witter of Gresham, Oregon chose the latter and ended up in jail for it, prompting the local police to issue this statement in the understatement of the year:

“It is important to remember that no matter how frustrated one may be with crime and the criminal justice system, it is not permissible to use deadly force in this type of situation.”

The two iPhone thieves remain at large… probably because Witter’s Dirty Harry jackassery distracted police long enough for them to make their clean escape. What a doofus.

Here’s a device filling a mystery niche if I’ve ever seen one: the iP49 is a bulky, fold down clamshell travel alarm clock which includes a dock for an iPhone or iPod… itself a travel alarm clock. Double indemnity of redundancy. ho!

Personally, I’m not sure I get it, but in case you do, the iP49 features separate weekday/weekend alarms, customizable snooze times, gradual wake and sleep volume controls so you don’t start off the morning swallowing your tongue.

It also boasts “Bongiovi Acoustics’ patyented Digital Power station technology and four neodymium compression drivers,” which sounds impressive and promises to provide “studio quality” sound wherever you are. It also boasts both an AC adapter and a built-in, rechargeable lithium-ion battery.

The iP49 is available from iHome now for $159.99.

If you pre-ordered an iPad and you live in the land of Marmite and Pickle, keep an eye out for a member of your local postal constabulary this morning: according to reports, numerous Brits are claiming that their iPads are already en route or already delivered, a day before Apple’s May 28th U.K. launch.

It seems like Apple might have been prepared for this: according to reader Paul B., they’ve pushed Pages, Numbers and Keynote to the UK App Store, which weren’t available until now.

Any of our readers hailing from Albion holding an iPad in their hands yet? Brag to us poor sucker continentals in the comments.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQRYNWbd5rI&feature=player_embedded

Firefox isn’t likely to come to the iPhone anytime soon, but a new application being developed by Mozilla called Firefox Home will at least allow you to take your Firefox data on the run with you.

Based upon Firefox Sync technology, Firefox Home allows iPhone users to always have access to their Firefox browsing history, bookmarks and open tabs, as well as access to their “Awesome Bar,” which allows them to browse to a site with the minimum of typing fuss. Find what you want, and Firefox Home passes on any opened pages to Mobile Safari.

The demo app is a bit rough graphically, which Mozilla acknowledges, saying it’s as yet unbranded. But the functionality looks fluid, and while the websites I visit on my desktop differ greatly from those I visit on my iPhone, the option to have my desktop browsing data up-to-date in my pocket at all times is certainly nothing I’d pass over.