John Brownlee - page 243

A few short months ago, the Kindle seemed completely unassailable. While Amazon’s e-reader was hardly a tech revelation, before the iPad, it didn’t need to be: Amazon’s gigantic e-book store engorged with millions of $9.99 titles and free online connectivity through Whispernet was a huge wager that other companies struggled to meet.

In the wake of the iPad, though, the Kindle’s prospects look bleak. Before they’ve even released it, the iPad has managed to slaughter the Kindle in the eyes of the gadget-buying product. Case in point: ChangeWave Research has surveyed 3,171 consumers about their e-readers, and 27% say they’d rather have picked up an iPad… if it had been available at the time they picked up their original e-reader.

It’s a hypothetical exercise, of course: — despite the headlines on some blogs, those surveyed aren’t saying they would have waited for the iPad — but it’s still impressive that Apple has managed to impress so many existing Kindle owners with a device that costs more in both initial expenditure and e-reading upkeep in every way. But it’s also unsurprising: just like the iPod made all other MP3 players on the market look like antediluvian crapgets, the iPad’s done the same to e-readers.

In his emails to Apple customers who take the time to write him and ask him questions, Steve Jobs usually comes across as a really busy guy who, despite his workload, is really trying his best to maintain a human, one-on-one connection to his customers.

On some other occasions, though, Jobs will occasionally comes across as a devastating master of pith, capable of infusing a few matter-of-fact words with a palpably scornful undercurrent, as if — if he wasn’t just so darn busy all the time — he might instead muse for a few hundred words on just what it must be like to be as stupid as the quivering, moronic biomass to which he must deign to pander… and of which his correspondent is just one molecularly small part.

Whether the specific email from Jobs that is the subject of this post comes across as the former type of Jobsian communiqué or the latter is up to you. Either way, it contains at least one new bit of information about the iPad: you won’t be able to tether it to your iPhone.

Although I generally find a reason to pick them up anyway, I was particularly enamored with MacHeist’s last nanoBundle, which offered some really fantastic Mac apps (including my all-time favorite, distraction-free text editor, WriteRoom) for, well, nothing.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to beat free, which makes MacHeist’s sequel to the nanoBundle a little harder to recommend: it costs $20. Still, complaining about a few fins is just greedy when you’re looking at this amount of cheap quality software, including MacJournal, RipIt, Clips, CoverScout and Flow.

As usual, there’s further incentive to buy: once 50,000 people purchase the bundle, Tales of Monkey Island will be unlocked, with Rapidweaver to be unlocked at an unspecified point thereafter. I don’t believe MacHeist has ever failed to unlock every title in their bundles, regardless of sales, so you can probably consider it a sure-thing that you’ll get these two titles as well.

These are some great apps, each one of which normally costs more than the $20 asking price of the bundle. Even if you’re only interested in one or two of these titles, this is an impulse buy you can feel good about.

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It was perhaps inevitable that Old Spice’s surrealist Manmercial campaign would eventually yield an Apple-specific parody. It’s a simple formula: just take the shirtless, dripping beefcake of the Old Spice ad, replace it with a doughy nerd in a turtleneck and change the can of Old Spice into an Apple product.

Predictable or not, though, neo-fight.tv‘s adaptation is worth an early Friday morning chuckle, especially on a day when we’re all celebrating the iPad’s officially announced release date.

Rest assured: it all ends on a horse. Natch.

The original Old Spice Manmercial after the jump.

It’s official! After a month and a half of eager anticipation, Apple has announced the U.S. launch date of the iPad.

You’ll be able to pick up the iPad WiFi on April 3rd, with the iPad 3G coming later in the month.

Pre-orders start next Friday on March 12th through Apple’s online store.

International roll-out in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK of both the iPad WiFi and iPad 3G will happen in late April.

Hurrah! The end is in sight! So much for those rumored delays: this puts the iPad launch exactly within the 60-90 day launch window Steve Jobs promised on January 27th.

Who else will be compulsively refreshing Apple.com on March 12th along with me?

Press release after the fold.

Apple’s always struggled to keep its laptops both cool and quiet. Steve Jobs is notoriously perturbable in regards to fan noise, which means the fans on Macs, when present, kick in a lot less often than on their PC counterparts. A lot of the true engineering genius of the unibody aluminum MacBooks are in the way they effectively dissipate heat while keeping the fans turned low.

It’s a great solution for now, but laptops are just going to burn hotter in the coming years, not cooler. Forward thinking Apple isn’t going to sit on its haunches when it comes to notebook heat dissipation. They’ve filed for four separate patents related to cooling efficiency in future Macs: one for venting heat through open USB and FireWire ports, two addressing a notebook’s ability to adjust its performance dynamically based upon airflow measurements, and one that outlines a plan to use heat conductive hinge assemblies.

As usual, there’s no telling just when, or even if, we’ll see these patents rolled out into actual Apple products, but it’s good to know Apple’s staying on top of the problem as computers continue to burn hotter. After upgrading to a unibody MacBook, I couldn’t go back to my first-gen’s proclivity for scrotum searing if I tried.

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We’ve already got a good handle on how periodical publishers intend on using the iPad to revitalize their businesses, but what about book publishers? Outside of just having another e-book platform to publish for, how can the iPad’s incredible multimedia and interactive capabilities be leveraged to transform the way we experience literature?

On Tuesday, Penguin Books’ CEO John Makinson tried to answer just those questions, demonstrating some upcoming books that will be coming to the iPad. Perhaps the most impressive demo was for the iPad version of the beloved children’s book, Where’s Spot? which has been transformed into an adorable interactive learning app. Penguin’s not stopping there: their Vampire Academy e-book is “an online community for vampire lovers” that features live chat between readers (a nice touch, but parents might get their heckles up at the idea of a real-life Edward Cullen prowling for pre-teens in the pages of their cildren’s book) , while a Paris travel guide switches to street map view when it’s put on a table.

To Be Or Not To Be… Steve Jobs. That is the question.

Well, actually, that’s not the question at all: the real question is whether you will pay good money to see “one of the elite performers in American theater,” Mike Daisey, be or not be the reclusive Apple CEO in a one-man show titled The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre.

Don’t expect a flattering portrayal of Jobs. The official description of the monologue declares that Daisey will follow the “epic story of a real-life Willy Wonka” along his “trail to China where millions toil in factories to create iPhones and iPods.” Did you get that? Forget Oompah-Loompahs, Jobs apparently has millions of his own diminutive ethnic slaves to work at his Wonka factories.

We’re guessing that Dickey isn’t going to be afraid to play fast and loose with the facts in order to embellish the internal struggle of a charismatic tech leader and grand poombah of the Cult of Mac… but it’s not like he doesn’t have the credentials. Daisey’s first big theater break came from a show focusing on his employment at Amazon.com, and he’s also done a one-man show in which he portrayed another enigmatic cult leader: the one great nemesis of Lord Xenu himself, “Commodore” L. Ron Hubbard.

If a questionably sourced monologue about Jobs piques your interest, you’ve got plenty of time to pick up tickets: The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs won’t hit the stage until January 14, 2011.

[via Valleywag]

We reported two weeks ago that Capcom was planning on bringing Street Fighter 4, to the App Store despite the iPhone and iPod Touch’s lack of waggling physical controls… but now we can see exactly how the iconic fighting game will play on Apple’s line-up of touchscreen handsets thanks to a recently released trailer.

We already knew Valve was bringing its popular Steam games delivery service to OS X thanks to some Mac-specific files floating around the latest PC beta, but you can now pretty much take it as read: the Half-Life 2 developer has been releasing a slew of images slathering the Apple coating across their most popular gaming franchise.

So far, Valve has released images of Half-Life 2‘s Gordon Freeman wearing an iMacified HEV suit, replete with Apple logo instead of the Black Mesa Lambda symbol; the Team Fortress 2 Heavy eating a sandwich in the style of the dancing silhouette iPod ads; turrets from both Team Fortress 2 and Portal (a game which boasts a very Mac-inspired visual design scheme) doing the “I’m a Mac / I’m a PC” dance; Left 4 Dead’s Francis mocking the iconic “Think Different” series of ads; a Steam-specific take-off of the first “Introducing Macintosh” advertisement (courtesy of RPS); and Half-Life 2’s Alyx transported into the famous “1984” commercial (via Macworld).

We’ve got all the images after the jump, At the barest minimum, though, OS X is about to get a proper digital delivery platform for games, and native ports of Valve’s greatest games. Rare good news indeed for the dedicated Mac gamer.

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It was bound to happen: every new Apple product announcement inevitably becomes the lure for some unscrupulous scumbucket’s latest scam, and the iPad certainly wasn’t going to be any different. But the latest online scam to prominently feature an Apple product seems a bit more dastardly than most. According to security firm Sophos, a new iPad scam has hit Facebook, and far from giving you a free iPad, it could cost you a pretty penny.

The scam starts innocently enough: you are directed to a Facebook page which reads “iPad Researchers Wanted — Want to beta test Apple’s latest product?” The page then goes on to encourage you to become a fan and to recruit your friends, claiming propagation of the scam will increase your chances of being accepted into the beta.

But here’s the insidious part: go to the page brings up a pop-up window, claiming to be a quiz that you need to fill out to be eligible for the beta… and the quiz asks for your permission to get your date of birth and cellphone number from Facebook.

“That’s where the scam happens,” says Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos. The hackers who created this page are trying to sign you up for a premium rate cellphone service, that will charge you something like $10 a week until you unsubscribe.”

The good news here is Sophos alerted Facebook, who quickly pulled the scam… but the bad news is, it’s doubtlessly going to pop right back up again.

The lesson here, of course, is if it’s too good to be true, it always is… and Apple’s never going to let a schmuck like you or me beta test its new products.

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According to Doctor Who lore, inside the dimpled chassis of the genocidal Dalek is a cycloptic squidling, but Steve over at BotBuilder knows the real truth: in actuality, the warbling, murderous cyborgs are remote controlled via iPhone using the accelerometer.

According to Steve, “The iPhone sends out OSC signals over WiFI to processing which then talks over serial to my Servo Board. The Dalek moves around when you tilt the ipod/iphone. I am getting the accelerometer data out for this. I also have a turret that can be rotated and some leds that are switch-able.”

All very well and good, Steve, but you just haven’t taken this project far enough until I can pick up my iPhone, shriek “Exterminate!” into the mic and have it automatically converted into an oscillating, high-pitched electronic shriek emanating from the remote-controlled Dalek’s head plunger.

Yesterday, Cupertino surprised everyone by throwing a bonafide legal temper tantrum about rival handset maker HTC’s alleged infringement on up to 20 Apple patents.

Although Apple is targeting HTC, the takeaway here is clear: Apple’s going after Android, HTC’s bread-and-butter. Google recognizes this, and is standing in solidarity with HTC.

As Apple fans, it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture here. Competition is good for the consumer, and Android becoming a credible threat to the iPhone’s dominance will only make the iPhone cheaper and better for consumers in the long run.

There’s other aspects that make this sort of patent battle bad news for consumers though. The New York Times Bits blog asked some IP experts on the possible ramifications of the Apple-HTC patent dispute, and according to Harvard Law School professor Jonathan Zittrain, if Apple wins, we could see the courts order HTC to hit the kill switch on their Android phones, just like what happened in the TiVo/EchoStar lawsuit of 2004.

Apple’s line of notebooks are great computers, no doubt, but you’ve got to admit: they’re slick, streamlined designs come at the price of a paucity of ports. The MacBook and MacBook Pro only have two USB 2.0 ports, where as the MacBook Air only has one. Given how many gadgets charge and sync through USB, that makes USB hubs a way of life for those lugging an Apple laptop around.

CableJive’s duaLink Sync Splitter Cable is a great little accessory to maximize the usefulness of your rare open USB port. Essentially, it’s a standard iPod syncing cable, bifurcating polycephalically to allow you to dock, charge and sync two devices at the same time.

It’s not a big innovation, of course, but it’s a nice little accessory if, like me, you have an iPod Touch, Classic, Nano and iPhone to sync (with an iPad soon to be thrown into the mix), and only one free USB port to do it with. You can pick it up at CableJive’s online store for $26.

[via Technabob]

For hardcore users, the iPad’s WiFi-only SKUs may seem like “why bother” affairs… especially given the $30 month-by-month data plan AT&T is offering to customers who pick up the marginally more expensive 3G version.

But AT&T doesn’t see it that way at all: in fact, speaking in a financial conference call this week, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson has flat-out warned Ma Bell investors that they shouldn’t expect a huge upswing in new subscribers when the iPad launches.

ThinkFlood’s latest product, the RedEye Mini, is another universal remote dongle for the iPhone and iPod Touch, but it’s interesting in that it is both more and less gainly than the iPhone Universal Remote Case we wrote about last week.

Unlike the iPhone Universal Remote Case, the RedEye Mini is a small dongle that plugs into your iPhone or iPod Touch’s 3.5mm headphone jack. In other words, it keeps your Dock Connector open where the iPhone Universal Remote Case hijacks it, requiring you to pull your iPhone out of the Remote Case every time you want to sync it. The RedEye Mini solution is better in this regard, although now you have an easy-to-lose dongle to worry about.

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There’s enough left over bits of iPhone-specific functions diffused through the iPad SDK to be skeptical of any claims of unannounced telephony “features” in Apple’s forthcoming tablet, but this one’s getting a bit of bit of press: enable passcode lock on your iPad, enter your code wrong five times in a row, and you suddenly have the functionality to slide for an emergency call, just like on the iPhone.

It seems just like residual iPhone functionality crawling around the iPad SDK, but 9to5Mac thinks it could be something more: they point out that FCC regulations mandate that all cellphones must be able to place emergency calls even without a contract.

I seriously doubt that’s what is going on here. 3G is not the same as voice, and the FCC doesn’t enforce the “emergency call” functionality on 3G-only devices. If they did, your 3G netbook or Kindle would have to be able to make emergency 911 calls. This is just residual code… but hey, it makes for a good headline.

Apple’s App Store Approval Process is often too arbitrary or subjective by half, but no matter how you feel about the latest app rejection to storm the newsfeeds, at least their rationale makes sense: QuackPhone, an app developed by Nick Bonatsakis of Atlantia Software, was rejected for “containing minimal user functionality.” In other words, the app — which made your iPhone quack like a duck — just didn’t do enough for Apple’s tastes.

From a critical perspective, it’s hard to argue with that logic: the App Store is already distressingly filled with lazily programmed and tasteless sound board apps that will allow your iPhone to simulate everything from the sound of a braying jackass to the flatulation of a loose rectum. A higher signal to noise ratio on the App Store is in everyone’s best interests.

But while most people can probably do without these kind of apps, the real issue with Apple rejecting them outright is the old slippery slope argument: exactly how much “functionality” does an app need to have to be approved on the App Store, and isn’t this sort of rejection just really a veiled editorial move on Apple’s part? If an app is open and honest about what it does, who is Apple to say that its users aren’t allowed to use it? If iPhone owners want their handsets to quack like a duck, just what’s the big deal, outside of Apple’s own arbitrary distaste at the concept?

It’s Tuesday morning, and we’re all a little tired. Regrettably, this smooth trance infused tribute to Apple product design isn’t exactly likely to wake anyone up: as an experience, it all feels a little bit like dreaming of electric sheep in an android sherpa’s belly.

Soporific or not, though, this is an impressive little video. Animated by US design company Transparent House, the animation was rendered in just ten days by using various 3D visualization tools. Overall, it’s an attractive little love letter to Apple’s three decade history of excellent product design.

There’s reason enough to arch a wry eyebrow at yet another classic platformer with a virtual control overlay ported to the App Store, and Gameloft’s newest iPhone gaming release, Rayman 2: The Great Escape is no exception, even at $6.99.

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Apple’s latest iPhone ad “Family Travel” follows the app-heavy formula of the most recent iteration of the campaign but adds a Mom’s gushing narration mix to make its point: the App Store is pretty neat.

The premise of the app is that the iPhone works as a veritable Swiss Army Knife for traveling Moms. “It’s unbelievable how much better family trips have gotten!” Narrator Mom enthuses, as she demonstrates using the SouthWest Airlines app to check on her reservations, find a place to eat at the airport with Gate Guru, checks if she turned the lights off with the Schlage Link app and then finally hands her iPhone off to the kids so they can watch Pixar’s FInding Nemo to the flight.

It’s a pretty standard iPhone ad, interesting mostly because of how synonymous the iPhone is with the App Store at this point. Most of the iPhone “features” that Apple advertises these days are third-party software: the iPhone, as far as its advertising campaign is concerned, is pretty much defined as a product by the App Store. Apple is essentially advertising a platform instead of a product, and it’s simply amazing to me that two years ago that platform just didn’t exist.

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The guys over at Vimov has given Touch Arcade a great first-look at their port of Hexen II a great fantasy-themed FPS built upon the venerable Quake engine in 1997.

It’s an impressive port: it runs fluidly, it has a surprisingly innovative control scheme and only the music is missing. The big problem here, though, is that there’ll just never be any way to play it on a non-jailbroken iPhone unless Vimov can ink a deal with Activision, the owners of the Hexen franchise.

The problem is that while Hexen II’s executable is open source, the game data isn’t. The Hexen II GPL license allows for non-commercial redistribution, so Vimov could potentially knock this port up to the App Store as a free product… but since Apple doesn’t officially support a method for users to transfer their own files (like Hexen II’s game data files) to the iPhone for third-party programs to use as they see fit, the app would never be improved.

Still, it’s impressive work, and there is still some hope that Vimov and Activision can work something out: Hexen II was one of my favorite games back as a LAN-going nineteen year old, and I’d happily drop a fin or two for the pleasure of playing it on my iPhone.

Even before Apple unveiled the iPad, I was curious if their tablet-device would be able to function as a small secondary display to desktop Macs. I’ve long liked the idea Mimo’s miniature displays: a ten-inch secondary display isn’t enough screen real estate to add to productivity, but they are great places to corral widgets, contact lists and the like. I would never buy one specifically for that functionality, though, which is what made the notion of the iPad doubling as one so appealing.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like the iPad will functionally work as a secondary desktop display out of the box, but David Klein over at The Apple Blog still thinks that the iPad could function as a peripheral, widget-based display through App Store offerings.

Over at Ars Technica, Jon Stokes ponders why a company as prone to chest-thumping as Apple has been so curiously mum about the iPad’s A4 processor and ultimately comes to an interesting conclusion: Apple hasn’t talked much about the A4 CPU because it’s not really anything special.

In fact, according to Stokes’ sources, Apple’s A4 appears to be nothing fancier than a single core ARM Cortex A8 CPU clocked at 1GHz coupled with a PowerVR SGX GPU. The iPad gets its performance gains largely from stripping away the I/O hardware from the jack-of-all-trades A8 that it doesn’t need.

The best point of the piece, though, is that Apple’s never really been about the hardware: they’ve been about the total experience. As Stokes points out:

[T]he iPad is actually a lot like the Mac. The Mac combines commodity hardware with great industrial design and a superior user experience. The iPad aims to do the same, but under a new compute paradigm that replaces the venerable keyboard-and-monitor combo with a slate form factor, and the decades-old WIMP-based UI (Windows Icons Menus Pointer) with multitouch.

In other words, the iPad is no different than any other Apple product: a fusion of existing hardware, perfectly realized software and world-class design. Getting hung up on the CPU is beside the point.

According to new data from Gartner, Apple’s iPhone operating system is the third most dominant smartphone platform in the world, with a 14.4% market share.

The iPhone still trails Nokia’s Symbian operating system and RIM’s BlackBerry OS. The discrepancy between RIM and Apple is only by five percent… but RIM has only grown their market share by about 13% in the last year, where as Apple has nearly doubled theirs.

On the other hand, there’s still a wide, wide discrepancy between Symbian and iPhone OS. Nokia’s smartphones account for 46.9% of the global 2009 smartphone market, but that’s down from 54.2% the year before… and more and more users continue to abandon the platform in favor of other OSes, like the iPhone’s.

In fact, looking at Gartner’s numbers, it’s easy to spot a trend: the only smartphone OSes that are growing in market share are the iPhone OS, Android and the BlackBerry OS… and the iPhone is outgrowing all of them.

Give it another couple of years: by 2011, the iPhone OS will be the most widely used smartphone OS in the world.

[via Apple Insider]