John Brownlee - page 249

A documentarian shooting a film about the impact of Haitian poverty filmed more than he was expecting when a calamitous earthquake hit Port-au-Prince nine days ago, crushing him under rubble. His life was ultimately saved not just by rescue workers or foreign aid… but by his iPhone.

The filmmaker, Dan Wooley, first used his DSLR camera to illuminate the wreckage of the building he was in. Finding a relatively safe elevator shaft, Woolley then used the Pocket First Aid and CPR app to make a bandage for his leg and to staunch the bleeding from a head wound, which proved so serious he even used the iPhone’s built-in alarm clock to prevent himself from going to sleep.

An amazing story, but perhaps everything’s best summarized by Wooley’s own five star review of Pocket First Aid and CPR, posted on its iTunes App Store page: “Consulted this app, while trapped under Hotel Montana in Haiti earthquake, to treat excessive bleeding and shock. Helped me stay alive till I was rescued 64 hours later.” Now that’s the kind of review that sells an app.

The techno-sweatshops of Beijing have never seen an Apple design they weren’t willing to ineptly rip off, but these MacBook Air knock-offs spotted by M.I.C. Gadget are the first I’ve actually liked.

Basically, what we have here is a white plastic simulacrum of the MacBook Air’s aluminum unibody chassis, crammed with the innards of your stock, last generation netbook: an Intel Atom N280 processor with up to 2GB of RAM and a 320GB hard drive.

I love it, right down to the lid’s pulsing, multichromatic logo! If Apple ever introduces a plastic unibody Air, this is exactly what I would imagine it looking like. It’s unfortunately a Windows machine, but at around $249 I’m tempted to pick one up anyway, just to see if it’s as easily Hackintoshable as my Asus Eee PC 1000HE. What a coup one of these MacBook Air netbooks with Snow Leopard installed would be for my gadget cred next time I showed up at the blogger’s hall at CES.

Apple’s troubles with their 27-inch iMacs just never seem to come to an end.

In December, Apple notified its authorized resellers that new volume orders would be pushed out about two weeks, following numerous complaints about screen flickering and yellowing issues with the showcase Mac, as well as numerous complaints from customers who received broken iMacs in shipping.

Just last week, Apple finally started shipping replacement 27-inch iMacs back to their authorized resellers… but today, Apple Insider is reporting that those same machines now have an estimated three-week ship time when ordered through Apple.com.

In truth, it seems like there’s a load of issues here: while the 27-inch iMac indisputably has some screen issues that need to be further investigated, mostly, it’s just a victim of its own success: it was the best-selling desktop system in America last quarter.

Still, it’s got to be frustrating both for prospective customers and Apple themselves that they just can’t quite seem to squelch the last of their 27-inch iMac issues. Let’s hope this is the last one.

With the recent release of Song Summoner for the iPhone and iPod Touch, Square Enix basically cemented their commitment to the App Store as a gaming distribution platform, so it’s no surprise that a mere few weeks later, the JRPG makers have announced through their Facebook page that they will be bringing Final Fantasy I and II to Apple handhelds sometime soon.

There’s no official word on pricing or release, but the first two Final Fantasy games have been endlessly re-mastered over the last twenty years (despite — or perhaps even because of — the fact that they are remarkably simple, plotless yet addicting games). The iPhone version seems to take the graphical remastering of the games to a new level: although I’ve played the remastered Final Fantasy I and II package on Sony’s PSP console recently, the crisp, colorful, super-deformed sprites on display in the iPhone version are an improvement of several orders of magnitudes. Final Fantasy I and II on the iPhone looks like it’ll quickly become the new standard for retro-gaming fans of the series.

At this point, conventional wisdom firmly places the stateside release of the forthcoming Apple Tablet in March, with the possibility of a delay to June. That’s a long enough wait for Yanks, but what about the rest of the world? According to The Guardian, Britons can expect a delay of at least a few months.

The Guardian’s sources claim that Apple has only just started looking for a carrier partner in the UK who will be willing to bundle a 3G contract along with the subsidized Apple Tablet. It’s the absence of a British partner that will ultimately delay the Tablet’s release.

Of course, this presumes that the Tablet is only going to be solely available in the UK with a carrier contract… but I highly doubt that Apple is going to make that a consumer requirement for a non-phone device. In that case, I would assume that this delay only faces customers who want to pick up subsidized devices, while people willing to pay full price and supply their own 3G SIM will be able to buy the Tablet will be able to pick it up sooner. Or at least I hope.

Although Bluetooth headsets are a regrettable fashion choice for everyone short of the cyberpunk-enthused Secret Service agent, the Jawbone line has always been one of the more interesting brands out there. They were the first guys to use bone conducting technology to minimize background noise, and they are still one of the few Bluetooth headset manufacturers out there that don’t make their customers look like The Last Starfighter extras when chatting hands-free.

Jawbone’s latest headset, the ICON, continues the company’s trend of attractive, full-featured, understated designs, but also adds some really impressive iPhone compatibility into the mix. The main addition is that when the ICON is paired with an iPhone, its battery meter will display in the status bar, just like Apple’s Blueooth headset did.

Additionally, the ICON allows users to set custom tones and change the voices of incoming call alerts, as well as featuring software called MyTALK that allows you to voice-control mini-apps and assign button.

The ICON is available now in colors including black, gold, pearl and red, but weirdly, you’ll have to pick it up from Verizon for now, although AT&T is supposed to follow shortly.

Okay, Apple’s a couple of weeks in making its self-imposed deadline, but no matter: Apple has just released update 3.1 to their Boot Camp software, enabling official support for Windows 7.

The update comes in two separate flavors — one for 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and one for 32-bit versions — and require official DVD copies of Windows 7 or Windows 7 upgrade to function.

Curiously, not all Intel-based Macs support the update, but only Intel-based Macs released after 2007. That means that my own 2006 MacBook Pro won’t run Windows 7 through Boot Camp. I have a netbook that runs Windows 7 happily, so I assume this is a driver issue, and not because of 2006 models’ paucity of horsepower.

You can grab the Boot Camp updates now over at Apple’s official Boot Camp support page.

My inamorata likes, on occasion, to wistfully pine for an alternate reality in which her grade school predictions of Apple’s future success had been funded by a benign patriarch and made her a plutocrat. Instead, she got a cynical ‘C’ from her teacher for her “implausible” stock pick, and now blames this woman every day for her daily diet of bread crusts and dry Ramen.

The point is, it’s foolish to bet against Apple’s stock rising, but could analyst Gene Munster be taking it to far? He told Henry Blodget at The Business Insider that Apple stock could someday be worth $1,000 per share.

Munster’s reasoning is that Apple is well underway towards being the global smartphone leader and that Cupertino will be able to maintain its incredible growth rate. As the iPhone gets cheaper over time, there’s room for explosive growth. In the meantime, Apple seems ready to revisit its iPhone success with the forthcoming Tablet, which will expand Apple’s media profits in bold new directions.

Understandably, it seems like people took Munster’s comments as a reason to pick up Apple stock, as it closed at an all-time high yesterday of $215.04 per share. If you’ve got a few bucks rubbing together, you may as well get in: it’s just only going to go higher.

Skype for the iPhone is a pretty nifty port of the venerable VoIP software, but it has two big gaps in its feature set that have had users clamoring for months now: namely, push notification of incoming calls and messages, and voice over 3G.

It’s completely shocking, then, that the latest Skype for iPhone version 1.3 patch didn’t add support for either. Instead, all the software gains is a call quality monitor, a landscape mode for instant messaging and hint functionality to gently lead new users along.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIf_09tVX5s&feature=player_embedded

In nine days, Steve Jobs will walk on stage, shout “Bam!” and unveil the Apple Tablet. That much we pretty much know. But with rumors that the Tablet will require a steep learning curve, evidence is mounting that the Tablet won’t interface with us like a mere tablet PC or an iPhone, but instead set an entirely new paradigm.

One interesting bit of speculation on what kind of new interface we might expect comes way of Roger Åberg, who points out an interesting new interface technology Apple has been pursuing over the last couple of years, eye control, which could allow Tablet users to do everything from scroll, navigate, launch apps and even type through blinks, motion and long dwelling gazes.

The venerable Grand Theft Auto series has been ported to almost every device in gadetry’s zoological garden, but few of the efforts were as superlative as Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars for the Nintendo DS. Realizing that the first-person style of the likes of Grand Theft Auto III and IV would be ill-suited for the DS’ control scheme and modest hardware, they instead came up with an amalgam of the frenetic, top-down 2D action of Grand Theft Auto and Grand Theft Auto 2 combined with the story and strong characters of the latter games in the series.

The result is a masterpiece: not just one of the best games in the handheld line Grand Theft Auto games, but the series as a whole. And now it’s available over at the App Store for $9.99.

I haven’t tried the iPhone version yet, but the screenshots look remarkably more crisp and detailed than the Nintendo DS version, although it retains the latter’s attractive cel-shaded top-down perspective. A failing of the DS version was afterthought touch gimmicks, and I imagine those have been ported wholesale to the iPhone version, but overall, if Chinatown Wars for the iPhone is as good as game as its DS counterpart, this is a must buy for Apple gamers.

The slavering, cannibalistic undead have shambled onto the App Store in the new Dawn of the Dead game, available now for iPhones and iPod Touches.

As a fan of Romero’s spaghetti zombies, I’m slightly disappointed to learn that Dawn of the Dead is based not on the original 1978 classic, but Zack Snyder’s execrable 2004 remake. That means fast zombies and Ving Rhames. Ugh.

Still, it’s hard to go wrong with a zombie game, and Dawn of the Dead seems like a perfectly serviceable zombie masher. Its gameplay model seems plucked from the likes of games like Dracula X, Crimsonland and SmashTV: it’s a top-down shoot-em-up, with a number of weapons and power ups.

At $1.99, you might as well pick it up: with the forthcoming zombie apocalypse as certain as the release of the Apple Tablet, you’ll need all the zombie-beheading practice you can get.

The Apple Tablet is coming, and if our own tipsters are anything to go by, the UI will require a “steep learning curve” and a complex vocabulary of new gestures. We won’t know for sure what to expect until Steve Jobs sends his fingers dancing across the tablet’s slate-like surface on January 27th, but until then, Patently Apple has hit the US Patent Office archives, prophesying what we can expect.

Kotaku, of all places, is reporting that they have received their invitation for Apple’s January 27th event. The Loop has also received an identical invitation. Leander presumably has one rattling around in his mailbox as well.

“Come see our latest creation,” the invite reads, superimposed over a multi-chromatic palette paintgun-like spatterings.

No surprises here. From the colorful splotches of e-ink to the mention of a “latest creation,” that invite all but confirms the January 27th unveiling of the Apple Tablet. All we need to do now is wait for Steve Jobs to pull it out on stage, give it a name and spell out the details.

Over 2,000 workers in the Chinese city of Suzhou went on strike last week after persistent rumors circled that their employers, Taiwan-based Wintek Corp, would not pay a promised productivity bonus for 2009. They certainly seem to have earned that bonus: the workers build the touchscreens used in Apple’s iPhone, only the most popular and bestselling smartphone on Earth.

According to reports, the workers are outraged, flipping vehicles and damaging facilities in protest. Needless to say, production has halted in the meantime.

It’s hard to imagine this is going to go well for the workers. If conditions at Wintek’s factories are anything like those at Foxxconn’s iPod facilities, most of Wintek’s employees earn less than fifty dollars a month, and work 15 hours a day. They’ve doubtlessly earned whatever meager bonus is being held back. It’s easy to understand their frustration. Too bad the Chinese government isn’t the sort to look favorably upon worker rebellion.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BP5ax1qs5o

Digg founder Kevin Rose has become an investor of the Square iPhone payment system (which was in turn created by another social networking visionary, Twitter co-creator Jack Dorsey), and so he’s posted an informative video tour of the technology on YouTube.

Next week, Apple will either officially unveil their much-rumored tablet device, or the lot of us are going to look like complete idiots. Either way, it should be a fun week, but as anticipation boils to a pitch, we might as well keep ourselves entertained with a look back at the prehistory of Apple’s last tablet launch: three Newton prototypes evocatively codenamed the Bic, the Cadillac and the Batmobile.

A year ago, I took a month’s vacation and enjoyed the coral, sugar cane and sunshine of the small island nation of Mauritius. My days were spent drinking rum cocktails out of a dodo’s skull, my serendipity only occasionally interrupted by a small, translucent lizard darting across my ankle. On the other hand, the evenings were more dire, and largely spent waking fearfully every fifteen minutes only to discover several dozen small centipedes slowly skittering towards my bed, thirsty for eye jelly. No matter what time it was, the Internet sucked: although 3G was ubiquitous, the island’s internet was supplied by a single, badly oversaturated cable strung from Madagascar.

In other words, even in tropical paradise, there’s some horrors lurking unseen beneath the surface. The Mauritian iPhone sit rep is more proof for that supposition: while telecom Orange is indeed selling the iPhone in Mauritius, there’s no Mauritian App Store, leaving all local iPhone customers in the lurch.

Sometimes, you can just punch and punch and punch a guy until he’s squirting gray matter out of his tear ducts and he just won’t stay down. Psystar’s that guy. Though meatily pounded into a puddle of pulsating goo by Apple’s lawyers, the Florida-based Hackintosh makers have officially filed a notice of appeal in order to revoke the injunction made against them, prohibiting them from selling hardware with Apple’s operating system pre-installed.

Lower the pitchforks, everyone. A mere day after everyone’s favorite hirsute, technosexual bear became widely vilified on Mac blogs for claiming that the HTC Nexus One was his new favorite gadget, the Woz has clarified matters to Gizmodo:

Actually, everyone got it wrong. My favorite phones are my iPhones. When asked what my favorite gadgets were I took it to mean new gadgets I was playing with (that I considered good). I am not a switcher but I’m not going to tell people that the Nexus One is not a good gadget. Same for the Droid. I continually buy and play with new hot gadgets because I gets asked about them all the time. I have had prior Android phones that I didn’t consider good. I usually have between 2 and 6 different cell phones on me, more when there are interesting product introductions.

I try mainly to make good comments but I’m honest about flaws too. I don’t get into arguments trying to claim that there are objective reasons that make one person’s phone better than another’s. It’s subjective. You can’t win such arguments, only have a stressful life doing so. I have no problem praising and learning from non-Apple products as well as Apple products, when they are good.

Okay, Woz, we’re placated for now. Just don’t let it happen again.

Makers of quirky, charming and Mac game makers nonpareil Popcap Games are having a fantastic deal: buy a game (or, for that matter, twelve) from them and all the money will go to Haitian earthquake relief.

The deal’s good for today only, but there’s no shortage of great Popcap games to choose from, including Bejeweled 2, Bookworm, Peggle, Plants vs. Zombies and Zuma’s Revenge.

What a wonderful gesture on behalf of Popcap. Let’s hope they can translate the money from my purchase of Plants vs. Zombies into enough medical supplies to prevent some poor Haitian for becoming the latter.

Short of sexting and posting Facebook status updates illiterately quoting homonymously mangled Lady Gaga lyrics, few teen activities seem as ubiquitous as descending upon the local Apple store in one lolzoring, bubble-gum-smacking biomass and stupiding it up for everyone. Usually that stupid is pretty much confined to Photo Booth, but one New York teenager set a new record in Apple Store idiocy when he walked into the Apple Store at the Staten Island mall and typed up a terrorist threat.

According to 1010Wins, 17-year old Jason Barry walked into the store and wrote this note on one of the display Macs, signing it as a friend’s father.

I have threatened your store and all its employees with a bloody death … whoever the crew maybe working, or the innocent citizens that walk in … will be eliminated with the force of a… bomb loaded with C4, strapped to my chest.

Outside of the sheer moronism of gangly pubescent youth, Barry doesn’t seem to have had a reason for the threat. His typical toe-shuffling excuse of “thinking it was funny” is pretty weak, but as a stupid teenager up until the age of 29, I at least understand: imbecilically doing something “for laughs” and having it blow up to involve the police is practically a rite of passage for teenage males.

It’s sad in a way. I have no doubt Barry was kidding around, but he’s looking at a seven-year conviction and being on watch lists for the rest of his life. Not a great pay-off for such a lame joke: he’d have gotten a better pay-off with a simple pantsing.

[via Macworld]

At 4:53pm on Tuesday, Haiti’s capital of Port-au-Prince was struck by a catastrophic magnitude 7.0 M_w earthquake that essentially vaporized the entire city. Casualty estimates are still unknown, but with the earliest guesses ranging anywhere from 30,000 to 100,000 dead, it is clear that only international effort is going to be able to cope with the aftermath’s sheer scope of human suffering.

To that end, Apple has figured out a smart way to leverage their existing iTunes infrastructure to easily allow users to donate money to the American Red Cross for Haitian Earthquake Relief. Just decide how much you can afford to give — denominations of $5, $10, $25, $50, $100, and $200 are supported — and click the donate button. The money will automatically be deducted from your credit card and sent on to the Red Cross, with no margin to Apple.

It’s a nice gesture on Apple’s part, but you may want to donate directly to the Red Cross, since Apple warns that since iTunes does not share personal information with external companies. From a purely practical perspective, that means the Red Cross can’t acknowledge the donation… and you can’t deduct it.

However you decided to donate, give what you can. Haiti’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

For all of its problem, $60 for a MobileMe account is still a great deal if you need to store a lot of photos or movies online… the only problem is there hasn’t yet really been a good way to take your photos or movies with you on the road.

Apple’s latest MobileMe app, MobileMe Gallery, plugs that hole. It’s a companion to the other recently released MobileMe, app, iDisk, allowing you to browse and share the photos store on MobileMe from your iPhone and iPod Touch.

It works great, with snappy performance and local cashing which allows users to view photos even when offline. All of the usual multitouch functions are supported, including pinch zooming and landscape orientation.

If you have a MobileMe account, there’s no reason not to pick MobileMe Gallery up: it’s a free download on the iTunes App Store.

If the forthcoming Apple Tablet does indeed run on the iPhone operating system, which seems likely, it stands to reason that it’ll be a major evolution of the OS, with new multitouch gestures and features that will selectively trickle down to the smaller handsets, even as the app format is expanded to a sort-of “universal binary” system to allow one executable to run on two significantly different hardware conditions.

If that’s all true, then it’s no wonder that Apple is sitting on the release of the next update to the iPhone OS until after the Tablet is officially announced. A source speaking to iPodNN has now confirmed that that is indeed the case: while the iPhone 4.0 firmware is in deep internal testing, it hasn’t been released to developers because there are too many references in current builds to functionality of Apple’s upcoming tablet.

Other than that, iPodNN’s source is tight lipped, but goes on to describe the tablet as an “iPhone on steroids” with multi-touch gestures that are “out of control.” He also claims the internal model number of the Apple tablet is K48AP, running an extremely fast ARM CPU, designed by PA Semi.