John Brownlee - page 234

Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg isn’t the only politician to use an iPad. Russian President (and Putin-wielded political hand puppet) Dimitry Medvedev was spotted using an iPad during a recent meeting of the State Council, the Council of the Arts and the Council for Science and Technology. Unlike Stoltenberg, though, Medvedev was quick to reveal his own Ludditical tendencies, claiming that he initially found the iPad “impossible to read” (perhaps he prefers e-paper) and only warmed up to it when he downloaded the beautiful Russian novel A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov… which, incidentally, you should definitely read in the Nabokov translation if you can find it.

[via TUAW]

Borrowing design motifs from Blade Runner’s Tyrell Corporation, this hideous, glowing pyramid is the kind of coffee table cum iPhone dock that only a degrading Replicant could love. It’s called the Horus, and if owning a glass topped coffee table is the sort of thing that made you paranoid before, we’re sure you’ll love the addition of a razor sharp, impaling spike on the surface top. You can contact the designer for pricing information, but furniture this garishly tacky doesn’t come cheap when you’re not buying it bulk in a storage auction.

[via Born Rich

Eye-Fi, pretty much the only company in town doing interesting things with SD cards, have just announced their newest card: the Apple-exclusive Eye-Fi GeoX2.

Like other Eye-Fi cards, the Geo X2 allows you to upload photos directly from your camera’s SD card to your computer over 802.11n WiFi. The Geo X2 will directly interface with iPhoto and MobileMe, as well as Picasa, Facebook and a slew of other online services.

The Geo X2 also boasts previous Eye-Fi cards’ cool Endless Mode, which allows the Eye-Fi to automatically clear space on the card after photos have been uploaded. It will also automatically geotag your photos to make it easier to use with iPhoto’s Places feature.

The Geo X2 will be exclusively available starting in May and cost $69.99 for a 4GB card.

Well, would-be iPad 3G owners. Your long, long wait is finally coming to an end. According to 9to5Mac, pre-orders of the iPad 3G are finally starting to ship, and should be in your hands by Friday. If you didn’t pre-order one, you may be able to snag an iPad 3G at an Apple Store if you swing by after 5PM.

Got your shipping confirmation? Brag about it to us poor suckers in the comments.

Update: Reader Chris Wanja says, “I see you pulled it from the 9to5Mac article. In the mass of the 130+ comments, I added to a lot of them. We… have come to the conclusion that the image is Photoshopped due to NO one else having a shipping confirmation via email or order status. Several people confirm with other blogs and forums that they have not yet shipped, but are “prepared for shipment”.

Seems like a rather pedestrian use of Photoshop, personally. Have any of our readers received shipping confirmation yet?

Accept no imitations! Reader Rob Kearney wrote us to claim ownership of the genius that came up with the original “i Went Drinking With Gray Powell And All I Got Was A Lousy iPhone Prototype” t-shirt. And he can prove it!

With Gizmodo’s leaked fourth-generation prototype confirming both front and back-facing video cameras in the next iPhone, we can now take it as read that video conferencing is coming to iPhone OS, as the 3.2 and Beta 4 SDKs have long hinted.

So what kind of software video features can we expect in the next iPhone? MacRumors has taken a close look at the latest build.

The popular European music streaming service Spotify has gotten a substantial new desktop update in new version 0.43, which brings social networking integration, the ability to import your own MP3 into your Spotify library, an offline storage locker, and a new user inboxes for the sharing of tracks.

Transmit, the popular OS X FTP client by Panic Support, has finally broken its half decade run of version 3.x executables and finally released version 4.0, a significant and shiny upgrade that boasts faster performance, a new user interface and several fantastic new features.

Confirming earlier rumors, the New York Times is reporting that Apple has purchased ARM design firm Intrinsity for an estimated $121 million.

HTC just got a powerful new ally in its patent fight against Apple.

Following Google’s announcement that they would support their frequent manufacturing partner in its defense against complaints made by Apple that HTC handsets infringe upon a number of key iPhone-related patents, Microsoft has issued a press release saying that they have signed a broad patent-sharing agreement with HTC.

According to the agreement, Microsoft will license its patents to HTC across all of their phones. If the phone is a Google Android handset, HTC will pay them a couple bucks in royalties on every handset sold.

The Horizontal 51 sound board from Finite Elemente isn’t just a shelf, it’s an iPod docking solution with integrated Surround Sound speakers with a 25WPC amplifier and a frequency range of 50 to 25,000Hz, as well as other available connections for TV, PCs and MP3 players. The shelf itself can support up to 25KG of weight, so if you don’t want to put plants or books on it, it can probably support the weight of a light HDTV. It’s an attractive solution, but $664 is a lot of money to spend on a shelf, no matter how many devices it can integrate with.

Unless you have a Mac Mini or Mac Pro, there’s not a lot of reason to buy a third-party webcam if you’re on a modern Apple machine, but Telcast’s latest webcam, the W900, does one thing your built-in iSight won’t: it’s a wireless web cam that can transmit 5 megapixel video and images at distances up to 200 meters.

A welcome advance in webcam technology that should prevent at least a few MacBooks from vibrating off the lubricated bedside table top on anniversary night. The Telcast W900 costs $117.

I’ve been eagerly anticipating the release of Steam for Mac since it was first announced back in early March, but Valve has continued to be mum about their games delivery platform’s Mac-specific details. An informative thread on the official Steam forums, though, has a lot of information about what Mac gamers can expect when Steam for Mac lands in May.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs isn’t exactly known to mince words with his customers or employees, and his characteristic bluntness even extends as far as his conversations with other CEOs.

Take this conversation he had with eerie William Macy lookalike and Nike CEO Mark Parker upon the introduction of the Nike+ product line. Asking Parker for advice on how to run his company, Jobs bluntly replied: “Get rid of the crappy stuff.”

“I expected a little laugh,” Parker said. “But there was a pause and no laugh at the end.”

No, Mark, Jobs is dead serious about excising the crap. Well, except for the Apple TV.

Apple’s own iPad dock gives an easy and handy way to use a physical keyboard with your tablet, but one annoyance is the official dock’s inability to allow you to type when the device is in a landscape position.

It’s slightly irritating, but the Book of Joe has an easy-to-follow instruction manual on how to dock your iPad in a landscape position.

Essentially, you prop up your iPad (in Joe’s case, with the official iPad case) and use an iPod cable extender to connect the iPad to the dock connector. It’s a lot more of a kludge than it has to be, and I imagine a bluetooth keyboard and a sixty-nine cent business card holder would be a better solution for the price. Still, if you’ve got this stuff lying around already, it’s not a bad hack… at least until a third-party accessory maker comes out with a dock that allows typing in both landscape and vertical orientations.

Surprise surprise. There’s a new morsel of PC malware out there plaguing Windows machines. Nothing to write about there: it’s non-news, the equivalent of Paris Hilton getting a polite note from the Center of Disease Control.

What makes this bit of malware interesting to Apple heads, though, is the way it’s propagated: through an e-mail urging victims to download a new version of iTunes that has been upgraded for “best iPad performance, newer features and security.” Download the infected executable and the code, called Backdoor.Bifrose.AADY, then tries to slurps up the victim’s software serial numbers, IM, e-mail and protect storage login details.

Needless to say, even if you’re on a PC, you’re better off going directly to Apple.com or allowing iTunes to alert you to a new update than downloading a strange executable from even the most earnest of Russian malware mafioso.

Tumblr’s Topher Chris uses the possibly illegal seizure of editor Jason Chen’s computers on Friday night to effortlessly skewer Gizmodo’s own next generation iPhone teardown.

“You are looking at Jason Chen’s computers. They were found lost at the San Mateo Country Police Headqaurters. We got them. We disassembled them. They’re the real thing, and here are all the details.”

A Dell XPS!? An Acer tower?!? Oh, Jason… a gadget blogger should know better.

We’ve shown you a first generation iPhone dual-booting into Android OS, but want to do it yourself? You’re in luck! Here’s an easy to follow seventy step guide, simple enough for that even a drunk, googly-eyed neonate could figure it out.

We’re slightly kidding: a lot of this instruction list is devoted to things like setting up virtualized Ubuntu installs, so it’s really only fifty steps. Still, that’s an order of magnitude too many steps for a guy whose technical sophistication tops out at dragging the install icon to his Applications folder.

Are you Cylon enough to attempt it though? God speed, and let us know how you get along in the comments.

Nokia’s forthcoming N8 smartphone has been touted as the beleagured Finnish handset maker’s long-coming answer to the iPhone… but judging from Mobile Review’s preview of a leaked N8 handset, Nokia’s dropped the ball yet again.

The N8 looks great on paper — it has a 12-megapixel camera, HDMI output and a huyge touchscreen with multitouch support, as well as Nokia’s new Symbian³ operating system — but in practice it’s nothing special. The camera takes decent pictures, but the 720p HD video isn’t particularly special compared to other handsets, and the HDMI port uses a non-standard connector, making it unlikely to ever be used.

Worse, the much ballyhooed Symbian³ update is apparently just a cosmetic upgrade that isn’t even fit to lick the shoes of the features that both the iPhone OS and Android OS are boasting.

It’s strange to think that a mere three years ago, Nokia was pretty much the most popular handset maker in the world, but they have failed time and time again to be competitive with the likes of Apple and Google. With the N8’s failure, it may now be too late.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j622EyPX6lM

Yerga Cheffe figured out how to turn his old Apple IIe into a dedicated Twitter machinee, not only displaying tweets in that gloriously pixel blurred Apple II font but blowing up the user’s profile picture into a glorious 8-bit portrait. The venerable IIe is too underpowered to actually run a networking stack or Twitter client, so it’s only the display that is being used, but even so: this is what Twitter would have looked like as an 80s door program.

[via Make

Apple has introduced a new Technical Note for OS X 10.6.3 that allows third-party developers to use hardware acceleration to decode H.264 video.

Adobe’s failure to deliver acceptable performance under OS X has long been blamed by the company on the lack of this functionality. Only Apple computers boasting GPUs supporting the functionality (such as the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M or GeForce GT 330M) will be able to take advantage of it.

“We will be enabling support for hardware accelerated video decoding for Flash Player on Mac,” Adobe spokesperson Matt Rozen told Macworld. “Now that the required APIs are available, we are working on an additional Flash Player release to follow shortly after Flash Player 10.1 to include this functionality for the hardware configurations supported by the new APIs.”

Adobe’s only got themselves to blame here on out. Let’s hope they finally get Flash fixed on OS X.

One of the secret new features of the new MacBook Pros is inertial scrolling, which causes the trackpad to function like the iPhone’s touchscreen when scrolling; in other words, your screen scrolls with momentum informed by how hard and fast you swipe your fingers down or up.

TUAW has a post up about the new feature, positing that it should be possible on “all multitouch Apple trackpads. They’re wrong: the feature should already be possible on every Apple touchpad out there, multitouch or not, as indicated by the SuperScroll software.

The big question is: if all Apple touchpads are capable of inertial scrolling, does the functionality in the new MacBook Pros indicate Apple will roll it out across all Snow Leopard machines in a forthcoming update?

How do you feel about inertial scrolling? Is it something you’d use if it was rolled out to existing Apple laptops? Let us know in the comments.

Burbling up as flotsam in the eBay Apple stream, then yanked beneath the waves just as quickly by the webbed fingers of Cupertino’s eldritch lawyer things: these two iPod Touch prototypes marked DVT-1 and DVT-2, complete with built-in cameras. One of the iPod Touches is non-functioning, while the other runs a provisional “Switchboard” operating system. They look to have been legitimate, but regrettably, they were pulled before Nick Denton could click the “Buy It Now” button.

The question, of course, is where did they come from? Well, we know there’s at least one pissed off ex-Apple engineer with access to prototypes running around as an indignant free agent these days…

When Apple first revealed the $30 iPad Camera Connection Kit, which contains a little dongle that allows you to use a USB 2.0 cable to transfer photos from your camera to your iPad’s iPhoto library, a lot of people wondered if it might be used to connect other USB devices as well.

As it turns out, you can: you can use the Camera Connection Kit to hook up an audio headset and a USB keyboard.

Not terribly exciting, but as the Camera Connection Kits begin to be shipped, it might hint at more exciting USB interoperability to come. A game pad certainly would be nice.

With the addition of the Xbox-Live-like Game Center to iPhone OS 4.0, Apple has finally made a serious commitment to gamers and game developers after nearly a decade of ignoring them on the OS X platform.

Expect that commitment to continue to deepen: Nintendo games expert and journalist Matt Casmassina of IGN has just been hired by Apple as their new Global Editorial Games Manager.

“Anybody who has read my work through the years will know that I’ve long been a huge Nintendo fan, but if there is one company that could entice me away from covering Mario and Zelda it’s the one owned by Steve Jobs. Beginning early May, I will join Apple as global editorial games manager, App Store,” Casamassina wrote on his blog.