Leander Kahney - page 64

AT&T is promising more and faster bars. CC-licensed photo by daBinsi (Vegas).

Hot on the heels of the faster iPhone expected this summer, AT&T is promising to double the speed of up its 3G network.

AT&T on Wednesday said it is bumping its 3G network to support HSPA 7.2, which offers download speeds up to a peak of 7.2 Mbps, which is double its current capacity.

The rollout will begin later this year, AT&T says. The company also promises it will “introduce multiple HSPA 7.2-compatible laptop cards and smartphones beginning later this year.”

One of the smartphones is likely Apple’s next-generation iPhone. Apple is expected to introduce a faster iPhone that will support HSPA 7.2. The new iPhone will also likely have a faster processor, which will be better able to handle the faster data stream, quickly updating content like web pages and maps.

Apple’s entry-level white MacBook received a hardware update on Wednesday, possibly foreshadowing revisions to the aluminum unibody MacBooks.

For the same $999 base price, the WhiteBook now gets:

* CPU bump from 2.0 GHz to 2.13 GHz.
* Hard drive from 120 GB to 160 GB.
* RAM boost from 667 MHz to 800 MHz.
*Battery life upped from 4.5 hours of “wireless productivity” to 5 hours. And now rated Energy Star EPEAT Gold, up from EPEAT Silver.

Thanks to the updates, the WhiteBook now has a faster processor than the entry-level aluminum MacBook, and a bigger build-to-order hard drive (500GB). And it still has a FireWire port. Updates to the unibody soon?

Apple is rumored to be offering similar upgrades to the aluminum MacBooks at WWDC, and rebranding the machines as MacBook Pros to further distinguish them from the white plastic MacBook.

White MacBook tech specs.

White MacBook at Apple’s online store.

Microsoft will release a Web-surfing, HD-video-playing, multitouch Zune in the fall to compete with the iPod touch — and the hardware actually looks pretty cool. But as Apple well knows, the gadget is one thing, the software and services are another.

Sporting a sexy metal case, the Zune HD will have a 3.3-inch, 480 x 272 OLED capacitive touchscreen display (16:9 widescreen); a built-in HD Radio receiver, and WiFi. The “HD” refers not to the touchscreen, but the HD radio and HD out (720p), though that’s only available with an optional cradle. Pricing was not released, and release is “early fall.”

“There’s a lot here that MSFT is doing well, especially when it comes to the hardware,” said Interpret analyst Michael Gartenberg on his blog.

San Francisco’s No Starch Press has posted a big chunk of it’s popular My New iPhone book on Scribd for free, plus is selling it cheap as a PDF.

No Starch has a new version of Wang’s iPhone book coming out with the release of iPhone OS 3.0 this summer. In the meantime, the publisher is making about 50% of the current version of the book available for free.

“We have this content ready to go, but with the OS 3.0 release looming, it didn’t make sense to print and ship a book just to have it go out of date in a month,” said Leigh Poehler, No Starch’s sales manager. “It also didn’t make sense to hoard this information. So we’re making the content available to people via Scribd.”

No Starch is no stranger to experimenting with digital formats. In 2008, the publisher made available copies of my Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod books on the Bittorrent file-sharing network (which saw tens of thousands of downloads).

More recently, No Starch has posted several samples of its books on Scribd, including an excerpt from its “Manga Guide to Databases,” which has been read over 9,600 times). But this is the first time it has given away such a large chunk of a book and let Scribd sell the full PDF (for $9.95).

Hit the jump to read a chunk of the book.

Our friend Roger, the t-shirt designer from Brighton, U.K., has another Mac-related shirt for us to check out.

It’s a classic skull design, made with the keys from a pair of Apple keyboards. The white keys come from an extended white Mac keyboard; the black keys were taken from the original iMac (the one with the half sized F keys). Says Roger:

“I could say it depicts the obsolescence that all computer equipment faces, but really it’s just skulls make great tees! What Mac geek wouldn’t like to see a design featuring Mac keys, and only only closer inspection can you find the classic Apple command key.”

Hit the jump for a bigger picture of the skull — and the elusive command key.

You can find Roger’s skull tee here, available in a range of colors.

Apple’s Safari 4 browser is a pig. It’s a resource hog that doesn’t clean up after itself — and it remembers every site you visit, even in “porn mode.”

Safari records every site you visit, even if you turn on the “Private Browsing” feature or clear the browser history. And the files it generates can consume gigabytes of disk space.

“This is a huge privacy concern,” writes designer and musician C. Harwick, from Chapel Hill, NC, who did some snooping in Safari’s hidden system folders. “With no good way of getting rid of them except manually (clearing the history doesn’t do it, and I don’t think resetting Safari does either), these hidden files are strewn all over the user’s hard drive unbeknownst to him waiting for snooping relatives (or more pertinently, law enforcement) to dig them up. I really like Safari, but I’m going to have to seriously consider using Firefox now (ack).”

Who says Apple doesn’t listen to customers? Thanks to a public outcry, Apple has reversed course and accepted the Eucalyptus eBook reader into the iPhone App Store.

The web erupted in outrage last week when developer Jamie Montgomerie’s eBook reader was rejected by Apple because it allowed readers to download the Kama Sutra from Project Gutenberg — which Apple deemed “inappropriate sexual content.”

But on Sunday Montgomerie received a call from Apple. The Apple representative chatted with the developer about his app and invited him to resubmit it.

“We talked about the confusion surrounding its App Store rejections, which I am happy to say is now fully resolved,” Montgomerie wrote on his blog.

The application is now available for purchase from the App Store for $10. A small victory for common sense.

Via Macworld.

David Leibowitz is a veteran fine art photographer who’s lately been making some pretty amazing art using his iPhone.

Based in NYC, Leibowitz’s pictures of the city look like a French Impressionist painted the scenes (hit the jump for more pictures). There’s nothing to indicate they were made using his iPhone and about $40 worth of apps from the App Store.

Leibowitz has a long history of using digital tools to make art. He started in the ’80s with a Polaroid camera. He’d hand manipulate the emulsion to create photographs that look also look like Imrpessionist paintings. But now he’s discovered the iPhone, and the results are not your typical iPhone art.

Hit the jump for some of Leibowitz’s latest pictures and an interview explaining how he makes iPhone art.

Picture by Nikolai Thelitz.

A big crowd turned out for the opening of Apple’s latest flagship store in Zurich on Friday.

There’s no official numbers, but pictures at MacPrime, a Swiss Mac magazine, suggest the line snaked several blocks.

Opened at noon, the new Bahnhofstrasse store was mobbed. Several fans camped out overnight, waiting 16 hours to be the first inside.

The Bahnhofstrasse store is the second in Zurich.

It has an unusual design, accoring to Gary Allen of IFOApplestore. It’s only the second Apple store (after 5th Ave.) to have an underground space. A glass staircase leads down to a large Genius Bar for service and training at the “Pro Labs.” More details about the Bahnhofstrasse store at Allen’s site.

Via TUAW.

Swiss insurance company Mobiliar gave knockoff iPods to guests at the Swiss Economic Forum. Pic: Berner Zeitung.

The head of Apple Switzerland has threatened legal action after a Swiss Insurance company gave 1,200 iPods to bigwigs at the tony Swiss Economic Forum. Trouble is, the iPods were cheap Chinese knockoffs.

At the Swiss Economic Forum last week, the insurance company Mobiliar surprised guests with an MP3 player that looked very much like a second-generation iPod shuffle.

But when Adrian Schmucki, the head of Apple Switzerland, received his, he threatened legal action against Mobiliar.

Add insult to injury, several of the guests asked Schmucki if the knockoffs would work with iTunes.

The Swiss Economic Forum is a two-day gathering of Switzerland’s leading companies, politicians and academics.

Berner Zeitung (Google German-to-English translation).

Many thanks to Renato Mitra of ApfelBlog. Link to Renato’s post.

My friend Jeffy picked up this pack of stickers at a Macworld past. Do Mac users have a sense of humor ? Should they be printed up as stickers for MacBooks?

What it is: An iTunes add-on for cleaning mislabeled tracks, downloading art and finding music videos, concert info and artist bios.

Why it’s good: After years of downloading weird crap off the internet, my iTunes library is a swamp of mislabeled and unidentified tracks, and I’m sick of it. So I downloaded TuneUp — and I’m in love. TuneUp handily cleaned up a bunch of mislabeled tracks using the Gracenote database (which uses the track’s “audio fingerprint” to identify it). Cleaning takes a few seconds per track and was about 70-80 percent effective on my odd library (British punk, post-punk and lots of electronica). Previous track cleaners I’ve tried have been useless. But it’s the extra artist info via the Net that I’m really digging. TuneUp sits to the side of the iTunes window and displays all kinds of artist info: Wikipedia bios, Google News stories, music recommendations, upcoming concerts and YouTube videos, which I’ve wasted hours watching. The information is truly useful, fascinating, appropriate and timely. Apple thinks so too. TuneUp was added to the shelves of Apple’s retail stores this week — a rare honor granted only to tip top software.

Where to get it: TuneUp is available as a free download with 100 cleans and 50 album covers. Full version costs $29.95 (or $19.95 for an annual subscription),

NOTE: Use CULTOFMAC activation code to get a 15% discount.

The Mounties in British Columbia just busted their biggest counterfeiting operation ever — and the brains of the operation were a very sinister and criminal-looking iMac and MacBook.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police in British Columbia raided a counterfeit “currency lab” in Surrey, B.C. last week, seizing more than $220,000 in American and Canadian notes and arresting four people.

They also seized a new iMac, a MacBook, and what look like a pair of inket printers and a laser printer. HP is the ink of choice for funny money, looks like.

(I’ve always suspect Macs were the machine of choice for counterfeiters, given their graphics history. I’ll look into it).

RCMP news release.

Vancouver Sun story.

Via TUAW.

Labor protestors outside Apple’s Taiwan Office on Thursday. The Apple laptop says “Responsibility.” Images: Global Post.

Apple’s office in Taiwan drew protesters on Thursday complaining about layoffs and unfair working conditions at one of Apple’s main contractors.

A group of 30 to 45 workers complained of exploitation at Wintek, one of Apple’s major suppliers of LCD panels. The company is rumored to be supplying screens for the long-awaited Apple tablet. The workers chanted slogans and held signs saying “black-heart business” and “responsibility” outside Apple’s office in Taipei.

“We want to go through Apple to put pressure on Wintek,” one of the protestors told the Global Post.

The workers hope the action will force Apple to enforce it’s Code of Supplier Responsibility, instituted after 2006 allegations of exploitation at an iPod factory run by Foxconn, another Apple supplier factories in mainland China.

UpNext 3D NYC iPhone App from Danny Moon on Vimeo.

The 3D NYC iPhone App from UpNext is unbelievably cool. It renders Manhattan in 3D, allowing you to zoom up and down the city streets, in-between buildings, finding places to eat and things to do. The rendering is amazing — see the video above.

It overlays the subway map and crowdsources popular destinations. All this for only $2.99 from the iTunes App Store. Worth buying even if you don’t live in NYC.

Apple will launch a $700 touchscreen tablet with a new operating system and optimized apps in 2010, new research claims.

Apple’s response to the fast-growing netbook market will a touchscreen tablet like an outsized iPod touch. It will have a touchscreen measuring 7- and 10-inches; will cost between $500 to $700; and may have built-in 3G wireless, claims Wall Street analyst Gene Munster of investment bank Piper Jaffrey.

But thanks to the complexity of the tablet’s hardware and, more importantly, the new version of OS X and the apps it will run — it will not be ready until early 2010, Munster said i.

In a long and detailed research note to clients, Munster cited “mounting evidence” for his claims:

Source: DisplaySearch 2009 Touch Panel Market Analysis

Thanks to the success of the iPhone, touchscreen technology will see explosive growth in the next few years.

The touchsreen market will nearly triple in the next few years, growing from $3.6 billion now to $9 billion in 2015, predicts a new report by market research firm DisplaySearch.

“With the success of the iPhone, the touch panel market has entered a dramatic new growth phase.,” the DisplaySearch report said.

The report predicted big growth in projected capacitive touchscreens — the technology used in the iPhone and iPod touch.

“Projected capacitive touch screens have increased substantially and become the second biggest touch technology following closely behind resistive touch,” the report said. “About 27 touch screen suppliers manufacture it. Not only have more resistive touch screen manufacturers moved to produce projected capacitive, but projected capacitive technology has evolved to single layer or film type, and can serve sizes larger than 100-inches.”

Whoa  — a 100-inch iPhone in 2015.

Mobile phones and smartphones will be the most popular application of touchscreens, but they will also be the primary interface for media players, navigation devices, and games. More than 40 percent of mobile phones will have touchscreen interfaces by 2015, the report predicts, up from 16 percent now.

Touchscreens will also become popular in applications like retail, ticketing, information kiosks, and education and training terminals, the report said.

Rumors that the new iPhone will feature a glowing Apple logo on the back of the handset have generally been met with derision. The idea that Apple’s designer’s would waste precious battery life with a glowing logo is so abhorrent, many have used it to dismiss the rumors altogether.

But a group of Russian hackers in August last year hacked an iPhone to make the logo glow. The hack — as seen in the video below — involved a Dremel tool and about $300 in parts, according to reports.

And it had no effect on the battery life whatsoever, the Ruskies said.

But why would Apple add a frivolous glowing logo?

To make the Apple logo more visible, of course. Just like glowing lighthouse on the lid of a MacBook, or the iPod’s white headphones, Apple is not shy of using us to advertise its wares.

Photo: Alf Ove Hansen/Dagbladet.no

Nerdy Norwegian Petter Roisland helped police find a fugitive drug dealer, thanks to his stolen MacBook.

Roisland, a 23-year-old who lives near the southern Norwegian town of Stavanger, lost a computer in a burglary last year.

Determined not to get ripped off twice, Roisland installed Orbicle’s Undercover recovery software on two MacBooks he bought as replacement machines. And then in February, they too were stolen.

The designer of the brilliant “PhotoShoplifter” t-shirt (see the pic after the jump) is back with a new design honoring old Macs.

Roger of RubyRed T-shirt Designs has created the “Sad Chimes Rest Home” shirt featuring three vintage machines that are loved but no longer used.

“Old Macs deserve more than ending up on the scrapheap after a life of creation and innovation,” Roger says. “Be sympathetic to your old Apple in its time of need, send it to the Sad Chimes Rest Home for retired and redundant Macs. A place where the Mac Classic and the G3 iMac can reminisce about operating system developments.”

More of Roger’s work after the jump.

Chart: Silicon Alley Insider.

UPDATED: YouGov sent a little more info about the survey’s other metrics — posted after the jump. Basically, Apple still leads on quality and reputation, but MS has caught on value, satisfaction and willingness to recommend.

Microsoft’s “Laptop Hunters” ad campaign is hurting Apple, according to a new consmer survey by YouGov BrandIndex.

Redmond’s new ads portray consumers rejecting Apple’s laptops as too expensive. Though clearly a defensive reaction to Apple’s successful “Get a Mac” ads, they are nonetheless reinforcing the stereotype of the “Apple tax,” says YouGov.

“With the Laptop Hunters campaign, Microsoft is making an impact on the perceived value score in the mind of consumers, particularly young consumers,”  Ted Marzilli, global managing director of BrandIndex, said on Tuesday afternoon when I phoned him up.

YouGov is an international market research firm based out of London. Its BrandIndex survey queried about 5,000 people online from a pool of about 1.5 million, Marzilli said. It claims to be representative of the U.S. adult population.

Its latest survey shows a clear uptick in Microsoft’s “value,” and a clear downtick in Apple’s. The change coincides with Microsoft’s high-profile campaign.

The new iPhone will be available July 17 and will have a bunch of new features, including video recording and editing, a digital compass, turn-by-turn directions, and a better battery, according to an obscure blog called iPhone Apps.

The blog, who no one has ever heard of before, claims to have been contacted by a “reputable source,” who is “closely connected to Apple’s hardware development team.”

Whatever. I’m dubious, but the rumor somewhat gels with previous rumors and the site’s detail and specificity lend the claims are certain credence. Kinda.

Full specs after the jump.

CC-licensed iPhone homescreen screenshot by Blake Patterson.

Developers are sneaking Easter Eggs into their iPhone apps to get around onerous App Store restrictions, Brian Chen at Wired.com reports.

Programmer Jelle Prins’ song lyrics app Lyrics, for example, was initially rejected by the App store because it included songs with naughty words. Apple bans profanity, pornography and basically anything adult and fun.

But the Lyrics app will include swear words if you go to the About page and swipe downward three times. Up pops an option to turn off a swear word filter.

“Lyrics has slipped in a quiet ‘Screw you’ to Apple’s App Store gatekeepers albeit one mumbled behind their backs,” Chen writes.

Has anyone else discovered undocumented features in iPhone apps? If so, leave them in the comments. A prize for the best one.

Palm’s long-awaited rival to the iPhone, the Pre, will go on sale on June 6, Palm said on Tuesday, and will cost $200 and up with a two-year contract, depending on the plan.

The Pre goes just two days before Apple’s WWDC keynote, where he company is expected to announce the third-generation iPhone.

The Pre looks like a genuine rival to the iPhone. The software looks very slick, powerful and easy to use, and the hardware includes a built-in keyboard, an important distinguishing feature.

But Palm already seems to be pulling consumer-unfriendly stunts with pricing. The $200 price tag is dependent on a $100 mail-in rebate, which is never popular. And the data plans appear to cost between $70 and $90 a month (it’s not clear on Sprint’s page which plan the Pre needs). Plus, Palm is charging an extra $70 for the innovative Touchstone charger, and $30 for a car charger.

Apple of course charges extra for an iPhone docking cradle, but Palm seems to be nickle-and-diming consumers already.

CC-licensed photo by Joohyun Jeon

Apple appears to be building a large, distributed helpdesk operation, either in anticipation of a major new product, or simply to sustain the company’s growing popularity.

Apple this summer is recruiting about 450 “At Home” technical support staff in at least six cities across the U.S., according to a document seen by Cultofmac.com.

Instead of locating these workers in a centralized call center, they will work out of their own homes.

“As a company who’s motto is ‘think different,’ our ‘work different’ philosophy offers you the opportunity to work independently in your home office,” the job ads said. “You will receive all the wonderful benefits of working for an amazing company without ever leaving your home.”