Tomorrow’s the official international launch day of the iPad in nine select countries, so why not celebrate with a slice of delicious iPad cake, complete with edible candy App Icons. I call dibs on the Plants Vs. Zombies, Twitterific and Kindle for iPad app slices.
Photo via Flickr user Extra Ketchup.
Apple didn’t even need to release the iPad overseas in order for it to become an international hit, according to analytics released by AdMob on the day before the iPad’s official international launch.
According to AdMob’s data, international usage of the iPad hovered at around 25% of total traffic in April.
That’s an amazing number, but it groks with my own experience living in Germany: iPads are fairly easy to find here on eBay and Craigslist, at entirely reasonable premiums. The iPad may be big in the States, but it’s going to be huge in the rest of the world.
Logic3’s latest accessory, the LCD ProDock, is a compact dock for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPod Classic that isn’t particularly remarkable in any way, except for one: it comes with a neat, Nano-like LCD remote that allows you to browse your docked iDevice’s media content through an iPod-style interface.
Otherwise, it’s a pretty standard cheapie dock, featuring component and composite video outputs for hooking up to a television or stereo, but we do like that remote. We’d like it even better if it had a clickwheel instead of buttons.
You can pick the LCD ProDock up now for just £79.99
The sometimes accurate, oft wishful thinking Digitimes has a doozy of a story this morning, claiming that the fourth-generation iPhone we’ve seen time and time again in countless leaks might not be the one Jobs hoists onstage at WWDC in June.
According to their interview with senior analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple has two iPhones its currently working on, internally called the N90 and the N91. The N90 is the iPhone Gizmo got their hands on, while the N91 is a less impressive handset more similar to the iPhone 3GS.
The N90 is the iPhone Apple wants to release, providing they don’t have any unexpected setbacks (such as component shortages). The N91 is the iPhone they’ll release if they can’t get their ducks in a row.
Speaking Tuesday at Amazon’s annual shareholder meeting, CEO Jeff Bezos said that a color version of the Kindle e-reader is “still a long way out.”
According to Bezos, adding color to the Kindle’s e-ink display, while possible in the lab, is simply “not ready for prime-time production.”
Don’t think for a second, though, that Amazon intends to let the iPad run away with the e-book market without a fight.
Bezos appears to have been very specifically saying that a color e-ink Kindle wouldn’t be out soon, but his wording leaves the possibility of an iPad-like Amazon tablet wide open. Trying to beat Apple at the tablet hardware game is probably folly, but there’s got to be a lot of temptation in the Amazon offices to give it a try.
There’s a growing number of analysts and pundits who believe that netbooks will increasingly become irrelevant to most customers as tablets This latest Retrevo poll seems to support that opinion.
The Retrevo poll’s sample size was over 1,000 individuals of different genders, ages, incomes and location who considered buying a netbook last year. The question asked was: “Did you hold off on buyinga netbook after the iPad was announced in January?”
The results are quite good for iPad. 40% waited to buy a netbook until after Apple announced the iPad, while 30% didn’t wait at all. The remaining 30%? They all abandoned their netbook plans and went with iPad instead.
Apple’s been under the scrutiny of the U.S. Department of Justice in two anti-trust investigations over the last couple of months: the first in response to complaints by Adobe that Apple wouldn’t allow Flash on iPhone OS, the second in relation to the forthcoming iAd network.
Steve Jobs can’t be happy about either of these investigations, so the prospect of a third must have him massaging his temple as if someone just fired an invisible BB into it: the New York Times claims that the DoJ is launching yet another anti-trust investigation against Apple, focusing on the iTunes hegemony over the digital music market.
Apple’s slice of the web browsing pie sits restlessly at around ten percent, in the States when you take all of its platforms into account and is growing every day. It doesn’t quite have the same breadth of pie wedge in Europe, but as this chart from AT Internet auditing the visitors of their monitored websites makes clear, Apple’s operating systems are gobbling up more and more pageviews every day.
According to AT Internet, Apple’s marketshare is now sitting at around 6.8% in Europe, having grown 2.3 points since last November. iPhone OS is consuming about 1% of all European website views. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s own marketshare has gone down over the same period… with websites visited by Windows Mobile and Android devices are so insignificant that they can be comfortably lumped into “Other OS” category.
[via Hard Mac]
Valve Software has just announced that their revolutionary shooter Half-Life 2 will be coming to Steam for Mac later today… and to promote it, they’ve released this incredible Half-Life 2 themed riff on Apple’s own seminal “1984” advertisement, with City 17 resistant fighter Alyx flinging the series’ iconic crowbar through the televised face of the Big-Brother-like Walter Breen.
Absolutely brilliant. As for Half-Life 2, the Steam release marks the first time that the game has been playable under OS X for the last six years. At this point, the game is a little long-in-the-tooth, and Valve has released much better games like Portal and Left 4 Dead II since then, this is a great opportunity to play a classic.
Price is still unknown, although the PC version costs $20 on Steam, so unless Valve offers Half-Life 2 at a discount, that’s probably what you can expect to pay.
Yesterday’s release of Google’s Chrome 5 internet browser made it even more viable a Safari replacement than ever (if you can get over the design niggles, that is), but if a rather sly hint from Daring Fireball’s John Gruber is anything to go by, Apple may attempt to match Chrome and Firefox’s most interesting feature — extensions support — with Safari 5.
Quoth Gruber:
The other big thing that’s missing [in Safari] (compared to both Chrome and Firefox) is a proper extension API. If only Apple had an imminent developer conference where they could unveil such a thing.
This is a big weakness of Safari compared to many other modern browsers , and the ability to easily tweak the Safari experience according to user preference would certainly win Apple’s browser some converts.
The question is: are browser extensions anathema to Apple’s own design ethos, which tries to perfect the user experience through tight-fisted control? As great as Firefox and Chrome extensions are — I simply can’t work with a browser that doesn’t support them anymore — things can get quite ugly and confusing, design-wise, with a lot of extensions installed. Apple can’t be too happy about that prospect.
Still, at the end of the day, the option of extensions coming to Safari is a win for everyone. My only hope is that Apple will crib some other ideas from Chrome while they are at it: Chrome’s effortless merging of the search field and address field is so brilliant that it makes any other interpretation seem amateurish in comparison.
For years, I’ve been resiting the urge to upgrade my deck and instead pumping my iPod or iPhone audios to my antediluvian car stereo with a cheap $2 cassette deck adapter. For guys like me, then — individuals who own cars worth less than their phones, and are proud of the fact — the iDeck iPod Car Cassette Adapter seems ideal: it turns your existing cassette deck into a permanent in-auto iPod dock.
I’d be typing “SOLD” here except for that last remaining sticking point, the price: the iDeck costs $39.99 through Amazon. Heck, for that price, a cheapskate like me might as well buy a new car. One with floorboards!
It’s hard to describe Onkyo’s latest PC as anything besides a little bit daft. The E713 is an all-in-one Windows 7 PC (with all the hideous matte gray plastics aesthetics of such) which prominently boasts a slide-out, built-in iPod dock that has been sillily mis-designed so it’s mouth just isn’t quite wide enough to slide an iPhone in. What?
Otherwise, it’s not a bad looking machine, featuring a Core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM, a digital TV tuner, Blu-Ray drive, 1TB hard drive and a 23-inch 1920 x 1080 LCD for just $1100… but the obvious bone-headedness of designing a computer with a built-in iPod dock that can’t dock with Apple’s most popular product is just the sort of casual ineptitude that keeps us all on Macs to begin with.
Capcom’s fantastic series of lawyerly anime adventure titles, the Ace Attorney series, have been delighting gamers on Nintendo’s handhelds since 2001… and now the first game, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney is available to download through iTunes.
The iPhone version of Phoenix Wright is basically a direct port of the Nintendo DS version, with the lower half of the iPhone screen standing in for the DS’ lower display. Otherwise, though, the two games are identical, and as a long-time fan of the series, this is an easy game to recommend if you like quirk, tongue-in-cheek gravitas and cheeky mysteries to solve.
You can buy Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney on the App Store now for just $4.99.
It’s that time of year again! Apple’s throwing a bone (or, alternatively, trying to lock-in) green undergrads heading to college for the first time with their annual “Back to School” program, which nets eligible students a free 8GB iPod Touch (or $199 off any other iPod).
If you want to qualify, you have to buy a new Mac and iPod simultaneously at the Apple Education Store, an Apple retail store or authorized campus store. The discount is in the form of a rebate, so you’ll need to wait ninety days to get your $199 back.
As usual, it’s a pretty sweet deal that is available to any educator, students of higher-education or parents shopping for their college-bound sproglings. If you think you’re eligible and are looking to buy a new Mac, this is a great time to pick it up and get yourself a free iPod in the process.
With every new Apple product comes a new advertising campaign, so it’s no surprise that Cupertino’s already casting for a new campaign centered on the next iPhone. Now Engadget has confirmed it with their sources.
According to Engadget, the next iPhone commercial will be directed by American Beauty director (and mawkish paper bag enthusiast) Sam Mendes will be helming the commercials for the next iPhone, which is being referred to as Mammoth / N90 internally… presumably to keep the actual name of the next iPhone (the only aspect of the device not yet revealed by leaks) underwraps until WWDC.
The spots will apparently heavily promote the next iPhone’s videoconferencing abilities, and one will featureg a mother and daughter having a video iChat call with one another.
Engadget also spotted some Twitter status updates from young actors bragging about their forthcoming auditions…. although I’m guessing after their indiscretion has been picked up by the newsfeeds, their chances of actually landing the roles are pretty slim.
In the ramp up to the official unveiling of the next-generation iPhone next month, megalithic big box retailer Wal-Mart is planning on slashing the price of Apple’s 16GB iPhone 3Gs to just $97.
That’s a $102 savings over the current price, and strongly implies that, next month, the 16GB iPhone 3GS will be AT&T’s new entry-level iPhone and cost $99 in locations across the country (Wal-Mart tends to undercut AT&T’s own prices by a couple of bucks).
To get the deal, customers will need to sign up for a two-year contract from AT&T. However, with talks of a Verizon iPhone hitting at the end of the summer gaining traction, it seems like a short-sighted move to sign up with AT&T before seeing what deals might result from an iPhone price war between two competing national carriers.
This is unlikely to gobsmack anyone, but with a new iPhone right around the corner, the days of the $99 iPhone 3G are likely numbered.
According to Boy Genius Report: ” We’ve heard that Apple has stopped shipping iPhone 3G 8GB units to AT&T stores and orders are not being placed for the device.”
The most obvious interpretation of this is that the iPhone 3GS will plug the place previously filled by the 3G as the entry-level AT&T iPhone… a guess that seems to be strongly evidenced by Wal-Mart’s recent decision to slash the price of the 16GB 3GS to a mere $97.
The Elgato EyeTV HD DVR is easy to recommend to Apple fans who are serious about video: it’s whole raison d’etre is to make it as easy as possible to transcode your high-defenition television content to watch on your MacBook, iPhone or iPad.
As a DVR, the EyeTV allows you to plug it into your satellite or cable box and record shows in high-definition H.264 video, which can easily be converted to iPad or iPhone optimized files when you plug it into your Mac’s USB port. If that’s too much work for you and you expect to watch a show on your iPad over your HDTV, you can opt to record in iPad or iPhone mode.
Even better? If you don’t want to physically sync your EyeTV media to your iPhone or iPad, you can just stream it over 3G or WiFi with the EyeTV app.
The Elgato EyeTV HD is available now at your local Apple Store for just $199.
The MacBook Air is likely to get a speed boost soon, thanks to freshly shrinked versions of Intel’s Core processors.
Today, Intel announced the expansion of their processor family with six new chips designed for ultraportable notebooks, promising to make MacBook Air sized notebooks thinner and lighter while yielding a 32% performance bump over the last generation of ultrathin Intel chips.
These new mobile Core processors are based on the same 32nm chip design as the standard Core i5 and Core i7, but offer 15% power efficiency and the ability to be packed into machines with a 30% thinner form factor, without giving up features like Hyper Threading or Turbo Boost.
Right now, over 40 OEMs are promising to release new ultrathins using Intel’s mobile Core CPUs. Apple’s not listed among them, but Cupertino’s not going to let Intel spill details of a new MacBook Air for them. Expect a hardware refresh sometime in the coming months.
When people first started playing with the iPad, a common comparison was to the interactive, tablet-like book (, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer: a Propædeutic Enchiridion) featured in best-selling author Neal Stephenson’s steampunk sci-fi novel A Diamond Age, so it seems like a natural fit that Stephenson will soon be coming to iPad with an app of his own.
The project’s called The Mongoliad, a wonderfully stupid title that sounds like a gag from the lost sequel to John Barth’s Sotweed Factor. But the idea is sound: Stephenson and a few fellow authors including Greg Bear and Nicole Galland will be releasing a set of serialized stories to the App Store, presenting “an ongoing stream of nontextual, para-narrative and extra-narrative stuff” that will allow readers to interact and create their own stories in the Mongoliad universe with some “pretty cool tech.”
Though details are scarce and while Stephenson’s product could be nothing more than some fancy e-books, this is worth being excited about. Stephenson’s fiction has long luxuriated in the magical possibilities of technology, and I’m eager to see if what he comes up with in code is just as future-thinking as what he creates in prose.
If rumors of a Verizon iPhone in September (or a Sprint iPhone later this summer) are true, AT&T is going to have a hard-time keeping iPhone customers on their network after their exclusivity is up. One great way of keeping subscribers would, of course, be to offer better rates and improve their service… but since this is Ma Bell we’re talking about, they’ve just decided to try to almost double the price of Early Termination Fees from $175 to $325 to keep their existing customers locked-in.
To be fair, this is already the price of Verizon’s ETF… so AT&T is really just trying to make it equally difficult for subscribers to walk away from a contract as Verizon already is. Short term, however, it makes it a lot more expensive a proposition for customers to abandon ship for their competitors.
On their part, AT&T is saying the timing of the price increase isn’t related to Verizon getting the iPhone. Yeah, yeah. We’ll believe that only if a CDMA iPhone isn’t announced at WWDC.
With Apple’s factory leak in China seemingly spurting iPhones by the palletful into Vietnam and other south-east Asian countries, it’s looking less and less likely that, hardware-wise, Jobs will have anything to surprise us with when he officially unveils the fourth-generation iPhone in four weeks. We know what it looks like, we know its hardware, we know its operating system… heck, we even know what colors it comes in, black and white.
But just in case you weren’t quite convinced by the white faceplate that leaked last week comes these better shots of a fully assembled white iPhone. It could still be fake, of course, but it takes a special kind of incredulity to disbelieve that Apple, after all these leaks, just wouldn’t release the next iPhone in white, of all colors. Either way, guess we’ll know for sure at WWDC.
Dismayed enough by AT&T’s woeful service that you’re considering hiring a shyster? The Worstphoneever website offers up a helpful class-action lawsuit generator against AT&T that uses your actual call drop data to tell just such a shyster just how bad (and actionable) your service actually is, and help him sue Ma Bell on everyone’s behalf.
The site works by searching for baseband crashes as recorded by your iPhone’s log files, automatically uploading them to the service, saves them to a database and tabulates them. Once Worstphonever has enough data, the site makers claim that they will file a class action lawsuit on behalf of their users, “running Apple and AT&T through the ringer” while giving users a “slice of the action.”
Not that we’d recommend this. There’s obvious privacy concerns associated with uploading your iPhone logs to a third-party, and while AT&T’s service can be atrocious, suing Apple over it just seems sleazy.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8OKFle2gGk&feature=player_embedded
Having long hated Apple’s Get a Mac campaign, I was surprised to find myself getting sentimental as I watched this three-minute tribute to the whole Mac vs. PC saga, as put together by OneMoreThing. Minimize Justin Long’s lugubrious smarm and what you’re left with is the core strength of the campaign anyway: John Hodgman’s consistently winsome and hysterical performance as the PC. That core strength, though, always seemed directly opposed to the message: PCs suck. It’s just so hard to hate PCs when their avatar is this awesome. Either way, it’s nice to see Hodgman get one last hurrah: this is a man who earned his paycheck for the last five years. Hurrah!
Got an iPhone 3G and looking for a project to occupy yourself this weekend? The binaries of hacker David Wang’s Android port for the iPhone 3G has now been released.
Android on the iPhone is still more of a “because you can” proposition than recommended for day-to-day use, but follow Wang’s somewhat complicated guide and you’ll soon have an iPhone that dual-boots into Android.
There’s some drawbacks, of course: Wang has yet to implement any sort of power management into Android for iPhone, so your fully-charged handset will only last about an hour before it shuts off. Also, if you want to switch back to the iPhone OS, you need to do a reboot.
Still, if you’re interested in what the mobile space looks like from the other side, Android for iPhone looks like a worthwhile little hack.