John Brownlee - page 251

Although it’s been promised for awhile, a new update to Facebook’s popular iPhone app has hit the iTunes App Store, finally bringing push Facebook notifications to your iPhone.

As soon as you update the Facebook app to version 3.1, you’ll be given the option of turning on push notifications, which will pop up on your phone anytime someone send you a new message, writes on your wall, requests to be your friend, lurid new sexts, tags you in a photo or… jeez, whatever Facebook kiddies are doing these days… throwing vampiric llamas at each other, I guess. However, if you don’t want your iPhone chirping in your pocket every time your mother buys a new sheep in Farmville, the selective push notification options seem robust.

The 3.1 update also adds contact syncing to the mix, which adds Facebook profile pictures and links to your contacts automatically, although it seems buggy and prone to duplication right now. I’d personally recommend holding off on enabling this little feature, although it would be nice to see this functionality continue to improve, given the growing role of Facebook as a subscribable, automatically updated address book for smartphones.

There’s little reason not to grab this one, so hit the update button in the App Store now.

A few months after the gorgeous — albeit issue prone — 27-inch iMac exploded everyone’s socks, Dell has just unveiled their own 27-incher, the UltraSharp U2711, which matches the iMac’s resolution of 2,560 x 1,440 and throws in HDMI 1.3, DisplayPort, two DVI-D ports, VGA, composite video, component video, four USB ports and an 8-in-1 multicard reader

None too shabby, and Engadget loves it. But man, what is up with the price? Dell says that their new display will go on sale next month for $1049. Granted, the 27-inch iMac is $650 more… but you get a frickin’ top-of-the-line Mac along with it.

On the other hand, Dell does tend to discount heavily through coupon codes and the like, so I imagine we’ll see the price fall over time. In a few months, then, this might be worth considering, if you want to give your laptop another 2500 odd pixels of horizontal real estate.

Dell actually makes quality displays, and I doubt the UltraSharp U2711 is any exception, although it’ll be interesting to see if the display, once shipped, is prone to the same yellowing problems as the 27-inch iMac.

It seems pretty clear that Apple and Google are planning for a ruckus in the mobile app space. Google picked up mobile ad company AdMob in November, right under Apple’s noses; Apple responded by acquiring one of AdMob’s biggest competitors, Quattro Wireless.

Google, on their part, seems pretty blase about the upcoming battle, though. Over on the Google Public Policy Blog, group product manager Paul Feng wrote:

When we announced our planned acquisition of AdMob in November, we noted that the mobile advertising space is highly competitive — with more than a dozen mobile ad networks.  In fact, the experts at MobiThinking recently called mobile advertising a “very fragmented” space, in which “no ad network is dominant” and “no one really knows what ad network is biggest.”

Today’s news that Apple is acquiring one of AdMob’s competitors, Quattro Wireless, is further proof that the mobile advertising space continues to be competitive.  And with more investments and acquisitions in the space, including from established players like Apple and Google, that’s a sign that vigorous growth and competition will continue. That’s ultimately great for users, advertisers and publishers alike.

In truth, there’s room for both Google and Apple in the mobile ad space: Apple will be happy if they can establish control the in-app advertising on their mobile touchscreen devices, while Google will be happy to control the rest of the market. Business isn’t a kilted sword fight amongst Queen-backed space vampires, after all. There can be more than one.

PocketHeat is an app that has recently been pushed to the iTunes App Store designed to keep your hands warm in the winter. For $0.99, the app will push your iPhone or iPod Touch to its maximum CPU capacity.

It’s rather mystifying that this app got through the App Store approval process, since pushing your iPhone or iPod Touch CPU to the point of meltdown seems risky, to say the least.

Still, it has given me my own killer idea: an exfoliating iPhone app that works by making a user’s handset physically explode. Any developers out there want to help me make it happen?

Intel’s decision to marry their new mobile Core i5 and i7 CPUs with integrated graphics has reportedly not gone over well with Apple, who are rumored to be demanding custom-designed chips from Intel for an update to their MacBook and MacBook Pro line of notebooks.

But perhaps there’s another solution. Gizmodo noticed that NVIDIA, maker of the MacBook line’s ubiquitous GeForce 9400M GPU, is now teasing a new notebook technology called Optimus that is supposedly capable of achieving the performance of discrete graphics in a notebook while still delivering great battery life.

It’s probably just scalable performance, but if the Optimus tech is as good as NVIDIA is bragging, it would allow Apple to ditch the substandard switchable GPU configuration of current unibody MacBook Pros, which requires a reboot, to a discrete-only solution, like the earliest MacBook Pros and PowerBooks.

While it probably won’t encompass a 3D interface, there’s been enough background murmurings about the method users will employ to interact with Apple’s forthcoming tablet to expect something new. What that “new” is? Only Apple knows… but if our tipster is right, whatever the Tablet’s UI is, it’s going to be different enough from OS X or the iPhone OS to require a significant learning curve.

According to reader Tom: “I just heard [to] be ready for a steep learning curve regarding the “new” Apple product about to be released [and its] interface. This person is an employee of Apple and had just had a meeting regarding some of the new things coming. He/She would not go into details, but did say that he/she hoped we liked learning.”

Its publication conveniently timed to coincide with insistent talk about the forthcoming Apple Tablet’s unexpected new interface, Gus Santementes of the Baltimore Sun has spotted a new Apple interface patent that describes a touch-screen device with a graphical user interface for “manipulating three-dimensional virtual objects.”

In essence, the patent — filed by three Apple software engineers — describe a way for users to manipulate 3D virtual objects like an icon, a shape or a character. The patent states that “there is a need for electronic devices with touch screen displays [to] provide more transparent and intuitive user interfaces for navigating in three dimensional virtual spaces and manipulating three dimensional objects in these virtual spaces.”

It’s possible this is the patent office skeleton of the new Tablet UI we’ve been hearing about, but I doubt it. This doesn’t describe much more than a method of interacting with 3D objects on a touchscreen, which isn’t particularly revolutionary.

My guess is that if the new Tablet UI has the dye of the weird to it, it’s going to be a lot less pedestrian than a 3D shell plopped atop the iPhone OS. More interesting is the patent’s description of an internal camera that can be shifted by the user to either back or front mounted positions: that’s something I could easily see coming to the Tablet and future iPhones, if it works up to Apple’s standards.

[via Patently Apple]

If you read this site every day, it’s hard to imagine that you could have suffered the sort of massive cranial trauma that would prompt you — swollen tongued, googly eyed and phonemically fixated on an open-ended “Duhhhh…” — to waltz into a Best Buy and buy your next Mac. The online Apple store is only a click away, with free shipping even!

But yeah, yeah. I know. Snap decisions and all. Just promise me one thing: if you do, for some reason, make the decision to pick up your next Mac from your local Best Buy, don’t let their Geek Squad sell you a $40 optimization. According to Slate.com’s The Big Money, that optimization is just as much a waste of money as you’d expect.

I’m a bit mystified by the Airstash, the latest iPhone accessory to come out of CES.

It looks good on the tin: the AirStash is a dongle that allows you to greatly expand the internal storage of your iPhone or iPod Touch. You just plug an SD card into it, slap it into your computer, transfer files on over, then put it in your pocket. Now, as long as your iPod Touch or iPhone is in WiFi distance of your AirStash, you can access its contents. But those are all the details we have.

At first blush, those details are enough: who wouldn’t want more space on their iPhone or iPod Touch? But, really, what do we use our internal storage for? Movies, videos and apps. There’s the rub: the AirStash might expand storage, but it won’t allow you to launch apps that are stored on the dongle, and my guess is that it won’t integrate with iTunes for music and movies. That makes this peripheral fairly useless for a large number of people.

My guess is that the AirStash is mostly just a dongle for people who might need to email files that they can’t natively store on their iPhone or iPod Touch. Not bad functionality, certainly, but limited in scope.

Still, this is all speculation: we should know more about the AirStash, including availability and price, later on this week.

[via Engadget]

Current internet scuttlebutt has the next iPhone pegged for upgrading its current 3.2-megapixel camera to a 5-megapixel camera, courtesy of Omnivision. That will make the iPhone competitive with other camera phones, at least on the vastly overblown quality criterion of the megapixel scale.

But what if Apple one-upped everyone and slapped a 14.6-megapixel image sensor capable of shooting 1080p video at 60 frames per second into the next iPhone? That’s certainly an option: iPhone camera sensor suppliers Omnivision have just announced the OV14825, which is slated to go into mass production in the second quarter of 2010… just in time for a new iPhone.

Apple might go that route, sure, but let’s all slaughter some pigs on our aluminum unibody altars and pray that they don’t. There isn’t a smartphone on the market with a lens capable of taking advantage of even a 2-megapixel sensor, and there’s no advances to cell phone lenses on the horizon. 14.6 megapixels is sheer lunacy: sure, there’ll be 14.6 million dots, but 12.6 will be random noise.

[via Gizmodo]

According to Kara Swisher of All Things D, Apple is on the cusp of buying mobile ad company Quattro for $275 million.

No surprise here: Apple was just outbid on mobile ad company Admob by Google for $750 million. Apple is obviously interested in entering the mobile advertising space.

Optimistically, that’s because they recognize that owning the ad network that power all of their App Store apps would make them a killing… although given how poorly the App Store is maintained, one wonders if Apple has the customer service chops to run their own advertising network.

Pessimistically? Apple’s been flirting with some alarming patents for mandatory advertising within OS X. It’s hard to believe they’d go that route, but just the existence of such patents is enough to cause you to arch your eyebrow when Cupertino drops $300 million for an advertising company.

A laughably fake “iSlate development document” has been “leaked” to PhoneArena, possibly through a drainage shunt trephined through the cranium of some wishful thinking prankster.

The first clue that the document is phony is the fact that, two days later, Apple’s lawyers aren’t Q-tipping the gelatinous remains of PhoneArena’s site owners out from between their toes. But there’s other reasons to be skeptical.

First of all, the document claims that the Tablet will run OS X 10.7, codenamed “Clouded Leopard.” Ha, whatever. Not only is that name ridiculous, but we know that if the Apple Tablet is announced at the end of January that we can expect a launch by no later than June: Apple needs to give App Store developers time to tablet-ready their apps, but they can’t wait so long that the competition has time to catch up. More over, Snow Leopard was just released in August 2009, and the first developer build of its successor is rumored to be released at WWDC in June.

The bottom line: the tablet is going to come out well before the release of the next version of OS X. And it’s probably going to run something closer to the iPhone OS anyway, although I personally expect to see those operating systems as distinct entities begin to converge more drastically with the release of the Tablet.

Take the dusty and venerable name of the Wall Street Journal out of this otherwise pedestrian piece, and what you’re left with is a stock purple-print-and-pulp regurgitation of all of the current Internet rumors about the forthcoming Apple tablets, along with a few speculations and just a dash of WTF.

According to a lone anonymous tipster writing into to Silicon Alley Insider, Apple COO Tim Cook is executive search firm Specer Stuart’s first choice for CEO of General Motors.

According to their tipster:

[Interim GM CEO Edward E. Whitacre] wants the candidate to come from a company known for operational excellence, innovation and customer satisfaction and in addition he is looking for someone that has turnaround experience. It also doesn’t hurt that [Tim] has been able to work with Jobs. Whitacre does want to stay on as Chairman.  Also, Cook has been the key link to AT&T and should understand the culture that Whitacre,  [a former AT&T CEO] built.

Responding to an inquiry made by the FCC to explore the transition to an IP-based communications network, AT&T has asked that a firm date be set for the total extinction of landlines.

“With each passing day, more and more communications services migrate to broadband and IP-based services, leaving the public switched telephone network (‘PSTN’) and plain-old telephone service (‘POTS’) as relics of a by-gone era,” AT&T wrote.

They continued: “It makes no sense to require service providers to operate and maintain two distinct networks when technology and consumer preferences have made one of them increasingly obsolete.”

Given AT&T’s fundamental inability to address the substandard service and network congestion caused by their iPhone exclusivity deal with Apple, it seems blushingly laughable that the telecom would now be asking for the death of landlines, which can only increase network congestion.

But AT&T has a point: for everything but businesses and emergency services, landlines are already a technology of the dodo. AT&T must spend considerable money every year maintaining an increasingly obsolete network, which means funneling away from the development of the clear and rapidly evolving future of telephone communication.

On November 12th, 2009, dozens of Apple.com Discussion Board users began to notice that they were suddenly experiencing the sort of quick battery loss in their Bluetooth keyboards that usually exhibits itself in arcs of purple electrical plasma shooting off a Tesla coil. Keyboards that once lasted for several months without a recharge now required nearly weekly battery swaps, even when using high-capacity batteries or rechargeables.

So far, there’s been no official word from Apple about the cause of the keyboard power drains, but consensus seems to be that Apple’s new Magic Mouse is the culprit, somehow preventing the Bluetooth keyboard from going into sleep mode. According to one user, swapping a Magic Mouse for a Logitech mouse eliminated the problem entirely.

There’s no official word from Apple when this bug will be squashed, although according to one Discussion Board user, an Apple Tech Support worker said that it’s a known Bluetooth driver issue, and a fix is in the works.

Any of our own Magic Mouse aficionados out there capable of confirming this problem as ubiquitous?

[via TUAW]

Every New Year’s Day, Japanese consumers line up to take place in the annual tradition of the fukubukuro, in which merchants sell sealed bags of mystery gifts at huge discounts.

For example, if you go into your local video game store, you might pick up a bag of game discs for $100. Walk into the local butcher’s, and you might take your pick of any number of dripping canvas sacks of mystery meat for a nominal fee.

Apple’s Japan Stores have been taking part in the fukubukuro celebration since 2005, and starting Saturday, customers have been lining up to buy a limited number of Lucky Bags for about $380.

With more and more consumers consumers cleaving themselves from the fetid macro-organism of biomassed holiday shopping flesh and doing all of their Christmas shopping online, online customers satisfaction polls are more important than ever. No surprise, though, at the latest polls, courtesy of ForeSee Results: Apple’s simple, pleasant and spartan store did well in consumer’s lists of the best online shopping experience of 2009.

Surveying more than 10,000 visitors to the top forty retail web sites, Apple ranked 82% in customer satisfaction, which is four percentage points higher than their 2008 ranking. Following in Apple’s wake was Newegg.com (8!5), TigerDirect.com (80%), Dell.com (78%), HP (79%) and Circuit City (73%).

That’s not to say that Apple totally destroyed the competition, though. Amazon.com, which is still about the best online shopping experience around, rubbed Apple’s nose in its mess with an astonishing 87% customer satisfaction rating. The reliably stalwart Netflx also did well at 86%, although not being a home television shopper myself, I’m a bit mystified by QVC.com’s impressive 83% rating.

[via ComputerWorld]

Confirming last week’s Financial Times report that Apple has rented out the Yerba Buene Center for the Arts in San Francisco for a January 26th event, Clayton Morris over at Fox News is now reporting that the January event will be “big” and focus on the “mobility space.”

Quoth Morris:

I’ve spoken to a source inside Apple who confirmed a “big” event for January.

While nothing official has been handed down from the notoriously tight-lipped company, my source took the Financial Times report one step further by saying this event will focus on the mobility space, meaning we’ll see something related to the iPhone/iPod touch product line.

Since iPhone and iPod Touch announcements are usually made in June, that means this event is going to focus on something like the iPhone, but a wholly new product. *cough* Apple Tablet. *cough cough*

[via TUAW]

If recent CNBC listings are anything to go by, someone in their programming department got wind that there is set to be an exciting new Apple product announced next month. Hot on the heels of news about CNBC’s planned airing of the Welcome to Macintosh documentary on January 4th comes word that that the 60 minute documentary MacHEADS will air a day later on January 5th, 2010 at 10PM ET.

Like Welcome to Macintosh, this isn’t a documentary I’ve seen yet, but the official site describes the documentary as an exploration of “the loyalty of Apple fanatics and their obsession with the company and its products. The documentary takes an in-depth examination of just what makes the Mac, the iPhone, and Apple’s other products seem like cultural phenomena rather than just consumer electronics.”

If you don’t have a Tivo or have pressing engagements on January 5th, it will also be airing on January 6th at 1AM ET, January 7th at 9PM ET, January 8th at 12AM ET, January 9th at 7PM ET and January 10th at 10PM ET. CNBC’s getting a lot of mileage out of this one.

If you’re interested in checking MacHEADS out, you can see the official trailer here.

The popularity of the iPod doesn’t make it immune to accusations of being the cause of society’s ills, and for the last few years, Apple has faced numerous complaints that the iPod promotes hearing loss. The complaints have been taken seriously enough by some to prompt the European Union to consider introducing legislation that would limit iPods and other portable media players to a maximum output of 85db.

Luckily, common sense seems to be prevailing in the American iPod hearing loss debate. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has just affirmed a 2008 ruling that dismissed a case brought against Apple that claimed the iPod promoted hearing loss.

The original suit was brought against Apple by a Louisiana man, who hoped to escalate it to class action status. The suit claimed that the iPod had the potential to cause irreparable hearing loss, thanks to the lack of external volume meters on the iPod itself and the design of the ear buds encouraging too-deep placement. The suit was dismissed because the judge wryly noted that the lawsuit didn’t actually prove that the iPod was dangerous, but was instead just a long list of how it could possibly be made safer.

It wasn’t a suit with much merit, and it’s good to see it dismissed. Although it’s certainly conscientious to make a device safer, I hope most people realize that keeping your iPod’s volume at an acceptable level and not cramming your ear buds down into your cochleas with your thumbs are the user’s responsibility.

Former Quicktime guru Steve Perlman has been flogging his latest startup, OnLive, for awhile now. He’s hawking a thin client for gaming, which requires a bit of explanation: think of gaming in the cloud. Instead of installing an MMORPG or FPS on your Mac, you instead logon to a central server with beefy hardware, which pumps out the game to you over the Internet.

In very loose theory, that means that you can play the hottest and most technically advanced games on even the lowest-specced computers or handheld devices: the server does all the rendering, and basically streams to the user a live video of the game being played according to his or her button and mouse clicks. In even looser theory, you could play even the most graphically demanding PC games on your iPhone.

Last week, Perlman demonstrated the OnLive technology to his alma mater, Columbia University. It’s an impressive demonstration, but there’s plenty of reason to be skeptical of Perlman’s claims.

It’s less than twenty four hours until 2010, and at a time when most of us will be confronting a numb, vacant hole where our sobriety used to be tomorrow morning, it’ll be easy to overlook another hole in our day-to-day Mac lives: official Boot Camp support for Microsoft’s excellent new update to their Windows operating system, Windows 7.

You might recall that in October, Apple promised in a support document to roll-out Windows 7 support to Boot Camp before the end of 2009.

“Apple will support Microsoft Windows 7 (Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate) with Boot Camp in Mac OS X Snow Leopard before the end of the year,” the support document notes. “This support will require a software update to Boot Camp.”

With the clock ticking, Apple Insider sought out an Apple support representative fielding Boot Camp related questions for a statement. He said that his division had still been given no update on Windows 7 Boot Camp support, and his belief was that the update was still undergoing tests, adding that it was unlikely that the update would surface anytime before the drop of the ball.

Of course, Windows 7 already runs in Boot Camp, with a few driver hiccups, so you don’t really have to wait for Apple if you don’t want to. Still, let’s look forward to completely painless Windows 7 Boot Camp support in 2010, eh? The earlier, the better.

More tantalizing hints on Apple’s forthcoming tablet come their way to us today from China, where former Google China president Ka-ifu Lee has posted alleged hands-on impressions of the device on his sina.com.cn microblog.

It’s nice to see good work pay off. While Steve Jobs walked home with his customary $1 salary and $1 bonus for 2009 Apple COO Tim Cook — who stepped into Jobs’ shoes for five months while Steve Jobs underwent a liver transplant — made out much better: his year end renumeration for 2009 was a cool $14 million.

The vast majority of that money went to Cook in the form of $12.3 million worth of Apple stocks… a significant jump from his 2007 and 2008 stock awards of $7 million and $6 million, respectively. Cook also got a $100,000 salary raise, up to $800,000, and a cash bonus of $800,000 to match.

Don’t feel bad for Jobs, though: although that two bucks he earned in 2009 won’t even pay for a cup of coffee, his 5.5 million shares of Apple stock are currently valued at $1,163,855,000.

[via TUAW]