Think you can do a better job running a 3G network than AT&T. Here’s your chance to prove it: Telecom Tycoon HD is a mobile broadband network sim for the iPad that allows you to roll-out a 2G, 3G and LTE network across a virtual city.
The latest MacBook Pro refresh finally brought Intel Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs to Apple’s line-up of laptops… but only the 15 and 17 inch models. If you want a 13-inch MacBook, you need to satisfy yourself with the Intel Core 2 Duo chipset.
Steve Jobs claims that the reason Apple went with the Intel Core 2 Duo chips for the 13-inch MacBook Pros because a 20% CPU increase was outweighed by giving the 13-inchers a much better CPU and 10 hour battery life.
But Ars Technica has a more in-depth explanation: price, graphics performance, battery life and the laws of physics.
It’s been a content rich morning from the Chinese gadget sweatshops, but this latest handset will undoubtedly give the true Mac faithful the vapors: the TEG W3000 is the spitting image of the unholy, cross-species union of an iPhone and a Nexus One.
Despite common consensus and Apple’s own “Get a Mac” ad campaign propaganda,, Macs certainly aren’t immune to the threats of viruses and malware: they’re just less likely to be infected by them, thanks to OS X’s excellent security measures and the operating system’s relative low market share compared to Windows.
As OS X rapidly gains in market share, though, Apple computers will continue to plumpen in the eyes of malware programmers as a juicy, ever more low-hanging plum. Now comes word from computer anti-malware firm Integro that a new variant of malware, dubbed HellRTS.D, could soon hit the wild.
We were pretty confident that the iPad-like, unibody-looking iPhone 4G leaked in grainy pictures last week was utterly bogus. Heck, we still think it was probably bogus, but bogus or not… maybe the renderer of those images was on the right track.
You probably remember the picture above. It was leaked to Engadget a day before Steve Jobs announced the iPad, and it was our first look at Apple’s much-rumored tablet. At the time, no one really paid much attention to the iPhone-like devices to the right of the iPad and captured in the iPad’s reflection: what people really cared about was the tablet itself.
Now, though? Those two pointing arrows seem to provide strong indication that Apple will extend the iPad’s design to the iPad 4G, with further confirmation provided by these MacRumor shots of alleged iPhone 4G components.
At this point, we seem to know what the iPhone 4G will look like and what it’s specs will be. What will Apple surprise us with when it’s officially unveiled in June?
The latest in a long and veritable line of Chinese iPhone knock-offs is this button cute Leady Apple… although we think they probably meant “Lady Apple.”
As the name implies, it’s like the iPhone 4G redesigned by the Powerpuff Girls.
Congratulations, yankees! Apple has just updated its online store, listing the shipping date for the iPad 3G.
When will you be able to hold one in your greedy little hands? If you ordered an iPad 3G, prepare for it to be delivered on May 7th… hopefully hand-delivered by UPS as opposed to being smashed through your mail slot.
For Europeans like me, this is something of a bitter pill: it means you damn cowboys will be browsing the mobile web on the iPad a full three days before Apple even announces the European pricing and release dates. The only solace? This hopefully indicates that the WiFi and 3G models will be available simultaneously in Europe.
Update: Apple is assuring existing pre-order customers that their existing iPad 3G orders are still coming in late April. The May 7th date only applies to new orders.
Thank you for your recent order of the magical and revolutionary iPad 3G.
We would like to confirm that your order will be shipped in late April as communicated at the time you placed your order. You will receive a confirmation notice when your order has shipped.
[via Engadget]
Looking for something to play this weekend? The amazing rogue-like RPG, Sword of Fargoal for the iPhone and iPod Touch is free to download for today only. I bought it for $4.99 a month ago, and it was worth every penny.
Fargoal going free is serendipitous, since this is an especially good time to grab the game: a new patch adding a chunk of new content is imminent, and the developers have been firmly committed to not just expanding the existing game, but evolving it in fresh new ways as well.
If you want to watch movies on your iPhone outside, you’ve got a couple of options. You can hold it in your hand like a sucker, or you can lay out $30 for this TV Hat, an absurdly long billed baseball cap with a built-in hood like an even bigger sucker. Just harness your iPhone at the end of the darkened viewing chamber and you’re good for hands and glare free viewing. Alternatively, duct tape your iPhone to your face. Whatever!
Poor Verizon. They’ve got the nation’s best 3G coverage, but there’s no concrete plans for them to get an iPhone in sight. They don’t even have the so-called Googlephone, the HTC Nexus One, probably the second best smartphone on the market after the iPhone.
Looks like Verizon just caught a break, though. They’ve just announced that they’ll be getting HTC’s latest, the Droid Incredible on April 29th, which is equal to the Nexus One in almost every way, including a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, a 3.7-inch 800 x 480 AMOLED touchscreen display, an 8MP camera with dual LED flash, integrated 3G, GPS and wireless. It’ll be available for $200 with a two-year contract.
Not a bad little coup for Verizon, but with the next generation iPhone just around the bend and likely boasting a 1GHz A4 CPU, a 960×640 display and dual-cameras, the Incredible’s not going to look so very much so for long.
Political caricaturist Mark Fiore was awarded the first Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning to ever be awarded to a web-only cartoonist, so obviously he’s got some artistic and editorial merit… but not in Apple’s eyes.
Word from the Nieman Journalism Lab reports that Fiore submitted his iPhone app, NewsToons, back in December, but was rejected for “ridiculing public figures.”
It’s Friday and we’re all a little tired. Luckily, a surprisingly vociferous Steve Jobs has been taking to his iPad email client a lot lately to entertain us.
His latest missive? Explaining the rationale behind leaving the 13-inch MacBook Pros behind the Core i3i5 15 and 17-inchers with comparatively wimpy Core 2 Duo processors.
If you’re one of the 1+ million inhabitants of Canada’s Texas-sized prairie province, Saskatchewan, it looks like you’ll have some options on which wireless carrier to pick when Apple announced the next iPhone in June.
SaskTel has just announced that they are building out their new HSDPA network in the province, and they’ll be offering Apple’s handset to all of their customers.
According to President and CEO Robert Watson, “We’re building the 3G network right now. It will be up and running for July 1st (with) completion by the end of this year. The good news is that (Apple) is coming out with a new version of the iPhone in the June time-frame and they’re going to put us on that.”
That’s good news for Saskatchewanians: Rogers’ existing HSDPA coverage of the province is pretty woeful. Being totally dedicated to the region, hopefully SaskTel will do better with their network of 3G coverage, especially if they get the iPhone.
[via 9 to 5 Mac]
We like our Steve Jobs slightly grumpy, so after his humorous prosaic experiment with Californian surfer lingo yesterday, it’s nice to see him get back to keeping it real: namely, by calling a potential customers nuts.
The iPad in Germany will have data plans from at least three carriers on launch, Cult of Mac has learned.
In a surprise move, Apple isn’t partnering with T-Mobile, the official iPhone carrier, but E-Plus, the country’s third largest mobile operator.
However, not to be left out, T-Mobile is also preparing to offer a low-cost data plan for the iPad.
T-Mobile’s move as well as recent announcements by other European providers illustrates the likelihood that multiple carriers in several countries around the world will offer competing data plans for the iPad, which should drive down monthly data costs and also result in heavily subsidized iPads offered by multiple networks to anyone who is willing to sign a traditional contract.
It may also indicate that month-by-month 3G off-contract will widely be available both in Europe and abroad through Apple’s exclusive iPad 3G partners.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bvdYhlbjRc
Utterly fantastic. Joypad is an iPhone app that operates as a virtual, touch-controlled gaming pad for emulators on your Mac. All you do is run a free helper program under OS X, launch the iPhone app and you’re ready to crush some Koopas. It seems to work pretty well, and at $2, is cheaper than even the most remedial USB pad you can find. You may not be able to play emulated games on your iPhone, but that’s not to say you can’t control them.
[via Gadget Lab]
This week’s MacBook Pros were pretty much cutting-edge all over, but they were missing one major upgrade: USB 3.0 ports. After all, the transition is already under way, and the newest version of USB can move over 5GBps, over ten times faster than USB 2.0 and about six and a half times faster than Firewire 800.
Still, maybe Cupertino’s waiting to see how USB 3.0 now that Intel’s Light Peak standard (which is rumored to be Apple-inspired) is making its way to market. Intel Light Peak pundit Kevin Kahn has gone on record saying that he believes that the standard will be available in computers and laptops by 2011, and totally replace USB 3.0 over the course of the next few years.
“We view this as a logical future successor to USB 3.0,” Kahn said. “In some sense[s] we’d… like to build the last cable you’ll ever need.”
A noble goal. Considering USB 3.0 has barely been adopted yet, and given that Light Peak is twice as fast, it may very well behoove Apple to wait until 2011… then start shipping Light Peak capable machines that sync even the largest iTunes libraries in mere seconds.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7ksSDAc9ns
There’s no shortage of ways to kill zombies on the iPhone. Blast them in the head with a shotgun, gobble them up with a venus flytrap, or hit them with a car. Even so, Meridian Digital Entertainment’s Smash TV like, Alive 4-Ever, was one of the more satisfying ways to blow apart fetid corpse flesh around… and the upcoming sequel, Alive 4-Ever Returns, while out-stupiding the naming paradigm of its predecessor, looks even better with its new graphics engine, zombies, skills, power-ups, weapons and environmental effects. It should be available later this month.
It’s a sure thing that the iPad will get a camera in its second generation. After all, there’s already an empty, iSight-shaped slot in the iPad’s frame, and it’s pretty much a sure thing that both the next iPhone and iPod Touch will have a camera. It would be absurd if the iPad didn’t get one soon as well.
Apple must be thinking the same thing. Over at their official site, Apple has posted an employment opportunity for a performance QA engineer to work on still and video capture in the iPad Media department.
A recently chatty Steve Jobs has once again rattled off a personal email on his iPad, this time to an Apple fan worried that Cupertino was ignoring Final Cut Pro.
Customer Alex J wrote to Jobs:
Getting worried about Apple’s interest in Final Cut. Last updates were not stellar. I heard a bunch of engineers were dropped too – give us a sign you still care about Pro Video, not just the iPad.
Jobs typically terse but surprisingly good-natured response:
We certainly do. Folks who left were in support, not engineering. Next release will be awesome.
“Awesome?” That’s all well and good, Steve. Just assure us that the next Final Cut Pro will be bodacious, tubular and radical as well.
Mobile Safari’s method of handling multiple pages groks well with the iPhone’s small touchscreen, but on the iPad, it seems slow and cumbersome when there’s plenty of real estate for desktop Safari’s standard method of navigating between open websites: tabs.
Atomic Web Browser ($0.99, Free) brings tabs back to the iPhone OS. Better, it does so elegantly even on an iPhone or iPod Touch.
One of the major improvements of the latest MacBook Pros is in battery life: the 13-inch MacBook Pro is now boasting an impressive ten hour battery life, while even the more power hungry 15 and 17 inchers are promising eight to nine hours of mobile performance.
How’s Apple doing it? Dynamic graphics switching between the workhorse NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M and the low-power Intel HD GPUs. MacBook Pros have had the ability to switch between GPUs since last year, but it was a user preference that required a reboot. Now, the MacBook Pro handles the graphics switching automatically, without the user ever having to worry about it.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJ7_MOs9ffw
One of the great things about the App Store is how it’s leveled the game development playing field: for the first time since the late 80s, a single developer coding in his bedroom can be competitive both graphically and presentationally with larger developers.
Case in point: Brainphant’s Vertigo Rogue, an action game that literally came out of nowhere and is to helicopters what Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars was to cars. Not only does it feature intuitive controls, a huge, detailed 3D city and frenetic blow-em-all-up action, but Brainphant even programmed in stereoscopic 3D glasses support. You know, like James Cameron used.
At $4.99, Brainphant’s Vertigo Rogue is looking like a strong contender for my weekend time sink. If you need more convincing, check out Touch Arcade’s spot-on review.
This incredible infographic from Information is Beautiful really puts the iTunes business model in perspective: for the vast majority of artists, iTunes gives them a significantly larger share of the revenue than traditional retail outlets, and orders of magnitude more cash than any other digital music service out there.
Full infographic and breakdown after the jump.
Leander seems to think the iPad Keyboard Dock is a no-duh-brainer for real iPad typing, but at $69.00, it’s a luxury accessory when most of us already have Apple’s own bluetooth aluminum chiclet keyboard on our desks (in my case, collecting tobacco detritus).
After all, if you already have a keyboard that will work with the iPad, the keyboard dock’s really just a stand… and New York Times’ Multimedia Editor Andrew Devigal found out that the cheapest stand solution out there for the iPad isn’t 69 dollars, but 69 cents: namely, a business card holder from Office Depot.
Of course, the dock also charges and syncs your iPad, so if you want to go with this solution you’ll need to resign yourself to losing the ability to type on the iPad when its in a vertical position when the syncing cable is attached. (Edit: No, you won’t! As Bryan points out in the comments, you can just turn your iPad upside down and it’ll automatically re-orient itself. D’oh!) You’ll also sacrifice some of the function keys’. Still, who said frugality never meant some sacrifices?
