It’s common knowledge that plugging a regular SIM into the iPad is as simple as cleaving it down to microSIM dimensions… but what if you want to use the unlimited AT&T iPad data plan on your iPhone? Over at HiJinks Inc, they’ve posted a great guide to doing just that.
Put this firmly in the rumor file for right now, but Macsimum News is reporting that a live streaming version of iTunes will debut at this year’s WWDC, building upon Apple’s December purchase of online streaming service Lala.
At first blush, I absolutely loved this iPhone speaker dock, crafted in the GlaDOS style aesthetic of an old iMac arm. And, undeniably, it looks great.
The problem is, it’s not a speaker, per se. Instead, it uses resonance to transmit the sound from your iPod, iPhone or other MP3 player into the hard surface of the table underneath it. The audio output is rated at 12W, with a built-in amp for a bit of a boost, but the inevitable result here is still going to be terrible sound.
What a pity. I always loved the lamp-style iMac. At $42, though, this is a waste of money as anything besides a conversation piece.
The same hackers who got the Android operating system running in a dual-boot configuration on the first and second generation iPhones are now working on porting the hack to the iPod Touch.
In a new blog post, Linux on the iPhone is reporting that the binaries of the iPod Touch port are coming soon for jailbreakers to play with.
With the hatchet between Apple Computers and Apple Records long buried and the digitally restored catalogue sounding better than ever, the continued absence of The Beatles from iTunes is a bigger mystery than ever. Don’t blame Apple, though… either Apple. According to former Beatle Paul McCartney, it’s EMI gumming up the works.
“To tell you the truth I don’t actually understand how it’s got so crazy,” Sir Paul told Newsbeat. “I know iTunes would like to do it, so one day it’s going to happen.”
“It’s been business hassles”, he said. “Not with us, or iTunes. It’s the people in the middle, the record label [EMI]. There have been all sorts of reasons why they don’t want to do it.”
On their part, EMI say that discussions are ongoing, and claim that they would love to see The Beatles’ music available on iTunes. Translation: they want a much bigger cut of the iTunes pie, and you’ll have to rip your Beatles’ tracks yourself until Apple caves… which I seriously doubt Cupertino has any intention of doing.
The impasse continues.
All hail Vietnam, new Xanadu of surprising Apple leaks! Vietnamese site Tinthe — the very same site that leaked video of the fourth generation iPhone last week — somehow managed to get their hands on pictures and specs of the next MacBook.
Don’t expect anything too boldly different from the case: the new MacBook appears to be identical to the old unibody plastic. This is mostly just a hardware refresh to make the MacBook more competitive with the baseline 13-inch MacBook Pro, and like the latter laptop, the new MacBook gets a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU and an NVIDIA GeForce 320M GPU.
Steve Jobs and Gawker haven’t seen eye-to-eye lately, so it’s somewhat surprising to see the Apple CEO engage in a lengthy email exchange with Gawker’s Ryan Tate over the App Store’s walled garden ecosystem and Apple’s ongoing feud with Adobe and other intermediary APIs.
Less surprising is the fact that Gawker’s Tate, in response to Jobs’ polite, reasonable and clear-headed replies, quickly resorted to disrespectful dickhead mode (partly fueled, it seems, by one too many cocktails.
The exchange begins with a simple question by Tate: how does Jobs think Bob Dylan would feel about Apple if he were still 20 today? “Would he think the iPad had the faintest thing to do with revolution? Revolutions are about feedom.”
Jobs’ response is to say that the iPad is about freedom: freedom from spyware, freedom from poor performance and (lamely) “freedom from porn.”
“Some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away. It is,” Jobs wrote.
To celebrate their 10th anniversary, Tivoli Audio has introduced an attractive new iPod Dock, the Connector, which allows you to hook your iPhone up to any radio… although the wood panel design of the Connector indicates that it is specifically meant to be paired with Tivoli’s own $199 Model 10 table radio.
A bit rich for our blood at $129, especially when you can hook an iPod fairly easily to any speaker system that accepts audio-in, but technology enthusiasts who have absorbed their sense of design from the aesthetics of Mike Brady’s living room might give the Connector a go.
Foxconn Technology, the world’s largest electronics contractor and main supplier of most of Apple’s componentys, is once again in the news over the welfare of its employees in China after it racked up its sixth employee suicide this year.
The most recent suicide occurred in Foxconn’s factory city in Shenzen, where one of their 300,000 workers leaped to her death from her rented apartment. This follows a suicide last week by a 24-year old male factory worker, who also jumped to his death from the top of a dormitory building.
“We regret to see the recurrence of such incidents,” Foxconn said in a statement.
Apple has had bad publicity due to the way Foxconn treats its workers before.
In 2006, Apple launched an internal investigation over the matter of Foxconn “iPod Cities in which hundreds of thousands of employees worked in extreme squalor for pennies a day, and ultimately rejected the claims of abuse, noting that most workers’ biggest complaint was that they couldn’t work more overtime.
Foxconn’s latest slate of worker suicides calls into question the veracity of that report, as does a strike of 2000 workers earlier this month at fellow Apple contractor Wintek over 47 cases of hexane poisonings at the company’s Suzhou factories.
Not only did a survey by a local agency in the case of the Wintek poisonings find that managers at Wintek repeatedly deceived investigators trying to figure out the cause of the poisonings, but that none of their interviewees had ever even heard of Apple’s contractor code of conduct, which is meant to be enforced at the factories of all of manufacturing partners to guarantee the well-being of employees.
In America, Apple is one of the best and most employee-conscious companies in tech, but consistent reports of worker abuse and unhappiness in China really does raise the question: is Apple having the wool pulled over its eyes by companies like Foxconn and Wintek over the well-being of the workers who make our MacBooks and iPads?
Possibly not, but at the very least, it seems like its time for another internal Apple investigation… and a statement reaffirming Apple’s interest in the emotional and physical wellness of their contracted workers overseas.
The iPhone and iPod Touch have the industry’s best touchscreens, but some people still find the lack of true tactile feedback a barrier to adoption. Various companies have been working for a solution to that problem, but Toshiba’s new Senseg E-Sense technology seems ready for prime time now: slapped as a film on top of the display of an iPod Touch radically amplifies the tactility of objects on screen.
The film works by producing weak field changes in the area of the touchscreen touched by a user. This allows, for example, a swipe of the screen to offer the slight feel of resistance, or for an on-screen button to feel like it is actually protruding.
That’s genuinely exciting, and better yet, it’s cheap: Toshiba says that the Senseg E-Sense film, available now, costs as little as $0.11 per unit. Would you be interested in this sort of technology on your iDevice?
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_09mqhMa-g&feature=player_embedded
When Greg Hughes’ first revealed his amazing Wi-Fi Sync app a couple weeks ago, it didn’t take a genius to realize Apple was never going to let it on the App Store. Sure, there was no actual rule preventing it, but Apple has shown time and time again that they don’t want anyone messing around with iTunes sync. Plus, the very existence of the app makes Apple look bad: why the heck don’t we already have this functionality in iTunes? Apple was bound to kill it.
And so they have. Curious about Apple’s reasoning, Hughes’ even called them up, and was told that while the rep he spoke to agreed the app didn’t technically break any rule, it ” encroached upon the boundaries of what they can and cannot allow on their store.” Plus, you know, unnamed security concerns.
Still, not to fret if you’re a jailbreaker. Wi-Fi Sync was also bound to hit Cydia in case of an App Store rejection. And so it has, for a steep $9.99.
Gradaddy’s song “Jed’s Other Poem” off of their album The Sopftware Slump has to be one of the most sweet and lonely ballads ever ostensibly written by a sentient robot, but Stewart Smith’s retroactively official “music” video for it — which prominently features an Apple IIe running a hand coded AppleSoft II program illustrating the lyrics — is probably what has made the song so famous.
Now, that music video has come, in a round about way, to the iPad. Smith, the original video’s programmer, happened to notice that the guys from Panic Software had an old Apple IIe sitting around, so he asked if they could run his animation on it. They didn’t have the old cassette drive to help Smith out, but they did have an iPad… and that worked just fine.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLz72XErN8U&feature=player_embedded
The iPad is a perfect accessory for the living room table, and Comcast’s forthcoming remote control app, the Xfinity Remote, capitalizes on that by pairing your iPad to your cable box through Bluetooth, allowing you to easily search listings and access movies on demand through an extremely attractive interface.
Additionally, Xfinity comes with some powerful social and sharing features, which allows you to share television or movies that you’re watching with other friends, even if they’re not in front of the same television.
You can find more information about Xfinity Remote here. It looks great, but at the end of the day, perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the app is that it’s for Comcast instead of a better cable provider.
That Verizon iPhone we mentioned the other day? According to Digitimes, it’s already in production, with Taiwanese manufacturer Pegatron having been contracted to produce up to 10 million CDMA iPhone units a year.
The Digitimes report seems to confirm the September Verizon launch that we’d previously heard rumor about, as the new CDMA iPhone isn’t expected to contribute to Pegatron’s revenues until August or September, according to sources.
That will likely give AT&T a three month exclusive on the next iPhone. No wonder, then, that they’re pushing up their upgrade eligibility dates to late June to entice existing subscribers to sign a new contract.
Exciting stuff: if the rumors of a CDMA iPhone pan out, American iPhone owners are finally going to be able to choose their network with the same freedom that they chose their smartphone, while Apple’s iPhone profits are going to go through the roof.
[Image via BeGeek.fr]
iPads don’t charge through USB ports that aren’t 10 watts, which is a bummer, especially if you’ve got a laptop that won’t juice your tablet. Enter Quickertek’s iPad Charge Monitor, perhaps the most useless accessory of all time. It’s a $29.95 dongle that tells you if your iPad isn’t getting enough juice to charge… a function already provided by your non-charging iPad. Who can put a price on confirmation of the obvious, though?
[via Gizmodo]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fihOmQY-JxY&feature=player_embedded
Apple’s latest iPad ad, “What is iPad?” is a cheery nod to Apple’s classic “What is Newton?” ad, although I prefer the latter commercial’s droll, humorous tone. Still, when Apple says, “You already know how to use iPad” and then earnestly claims a new revolution has begun, it’s hard not to get a few chills down your spine.
If you’re on the look out for a high quality and great performing compact digicam that plays nice with iPhoto, Canon’s new IXUS 300HS looks about as good as it gets.
HyperMac already has a great range of MacBook battery juicers which can power your Apple laptop for up to 34 hours through an adapter attached to your default Apple power brick, but now they are getting into the iPad game with a range of batteries featuring 10 Watt USB ports that can power your tablet for more than four days.
Buy the most expensive HyperMac — a four-and-a-half pound, 222 watt hour monster battery costing $500 — and you’ll get up to 99 extra hours of battery life from your iPad. Of course, that battery costs about as much as the iPad itself, but for just $169 $200, you can get a smaller 60 watt hour battery that will still keep you going for another 34 hours.
Hot on the heels of reports that Verizon might very well get a CDMA iPhone by September comes word from Mobilecrunch that AT&T has been tweaking its upgrade eligibility dates for the next iPhone.
Most people who purchased an iPhone 3Gs at launch were due for upgrade eligibility this November 21st, but now AT&T is pushing that date up to June 21st, 2010. Since Jobs is likely to formally announced the new iPhone at WWDC at the beginning of June, AT&T’s revised upgrade eligibility date seems like a pretty good bet for the next-gen iPhone’s official release date.
If Verizon is getting a CDMA iPhone in September, AT&T trying to get as many people to extend their contracts in the three month window after the new iPhone’s June release makes a lot of sense. They want to lock in as many existing customers as possible, before their subscribers actually have a choice. If you’re sick of AT&T’s lackluster service, you might well want to wait on taking them up on their “generous” offer to upgrade you early.
[via TUAW]
Swallow a mouthful of salt before you believe this one, but John Biggs over at Crunchgear is reporting a doozy of a rumor today: Verizon will be getting the fourth generation iPhone at the end of the summer.
According to Crunch’s tipster, advertising firm Landor Associates is working on a branding campaign for Verizon for the launch of the upcoming iPhone. Landor and Verizon have been working together since 2007, and since they primarily work in branding, whatever they’re working on is not another of Verizon’s anti-iPhone ad campaigns.
If true, this is huge news for American iPhone owners, who might finally be able to abandon AT&T for Verizon, a far more reliable (although not quite as fast) provider. Still, let’s not get our hopes up until Steve Jobs hits the stage and holds up a new, CDMA handset. We’ve all been burned too many times on this Verizon rumor before.
Apple just can’t seem to keep its hands on a prototype these days. Less than a month after Gizmodo released the first full teardown of the fourth generation iPhone, new teardown pictures of a different handset have been posted to Vietnamese forum Taoviet (link includes breakdown images, which are also mirrored at MacRumors)
The NPD claims that Android is outselling the iPhone and commands seven percent more of the US smartphone market than Apple, but now Cupertino, in a rare response, is saying “Not so fast.”
You know, even if you’re a naysayer, you have to admit: Apple data makes for some of the most compelling infographics around, and this infographic from Mashable explaining the rise of Apple as the hegemon of the digital music industry is one of the best we’ve ever seen. Well, at least, one of the best we’ve ever seen that doesn’t involve Mega Sharks.
The full infographic, after the jump.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za8V2IiGCfY&feature=player_embedded
The iPad’s amazing display can handle eleven simultaneous touch events, or enough probing digits to comfortably handle all but polydactylic concert pianists. Just to prove it, though, Instinctive Code developer Matt Gemmell wrote an open-source program to test it all out.
Yup. It goes up to 11. Not a bad little program, but personally, I still prefer the Plants vs. Zombies proof:
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP6lIcScVh0&feature=player_embedded
[via 9to5Mac]
MobileMe may be the one Apple product I’ve never been tempted enough to at least consider pulling the trigger on. Although it’s got a number of useful features — cloud storage, email, photo galleries, syncing of contacts across all devices, and the super useful “Find My iPhone” feature — a lot of the functionality is achievable through free, third-party applications. Given that, MobileMe’s $99 annual fee has always seemed a bit steep.
According to a MacDailyNews rumor, though, MobileMe might be posed to become a lot more tempting. According to their source, MobileMe will become free of charge “sooner rather than later” depending on “certain facilities going operational…” a clear reference to Apple’s new North Carolina server farm.
That’s great news if true, although frankly, Apple doesn’t need to entirely drop the fee to get me to finally bite the bullet: even if they only cut it by $50, they’d have my credit card number in a flash.
