Leander Kahney - page 70

Photo from John Griffiths

As expected, Steve Jobs at a press conference in London this morning announced the UK iPhone will launch November 9th, use the O2 network, cost £269 and £35 a month for an unlimited data plan. The phone will be available at the Carphone Warehouse, at about 1,300 outlets.

The iPhone will be more expensive, £269= $537, and there’s no 3G — which is common in Europe. Jobs said it’s to save battery power. 3G chips would reduce battery life to just a couple of hours:

According to the Guardian’s liveblog:

“It’s pretty simple, says Jobs. “The chipsets work well apart from power. They’re real power hogs. Most phones now have battery lives of 2-3 hours and that’s due to these very power-hungry 3G chipsets. Our phone has 8 hours of talktime life. That’s really important when you start to use the internet and want to use the phone to listen to music. We’ve got to see the battery lives for 3G get back up into the 5+ hour range. Hopefully we’ll see that late next year. Rather than cut the battery life, we’ve included Wi-Fi and sandwiched 3G between Edge and a more efficient Wi-Fi.”

No announcement about other European countries, though it’s widely rumored it’ll be Orange in France and T-Mobile in Germany. Said Jobs: “We’ll be in a few countries in Europe in the next quarter.”

The European version of the iPhone looks like it’ll be available only in the UK and Germany at first, leaving iPhonophiles in other EU countries looking at unlocked iPhones as their best bet of getting their hands on a multitouch phone.

My friend Roger Aberg, who runs the MacFeber site, already has an unlocked iPhone he uses in Sweden. He has no problems with the device, he says, but he’s hoping the European iPhone will be upgraded to HSPDA — a super fast 3G standard that’s common in Europe.

Writes Roger in email: “People are a bit skeptic about the non-3G-part. I hope for a HSDPA-version (or turbo 3G) that is plenty faster and is pretty common here. Its 3.6 mbit (regular 3G is 0.3 mbit) and would be sweet on the iPhone! That would make me upgrade.”

However, some analysts don’t expect a 3G version of the iPhone until 2008 at the earliest, when Apple will introduce the iPhone to Asia.

If Apple delays the 3G iPhone, Europeans outside the UK or Germany looking for an unlocked iPhone might be best off shopping for one in the U.S. Thanks to the weakness of the dollar, and local European sales tax (or VAT, which can run to 25 percent in some European countries), Yankee iPhones will likely be cheaper — about $35 according to Roger.

The iPod will get three new features at Steve Jobs’ media extravaganza Sept. 5 according to the rumor mill: a touch-screen, Wi-Fi and digital radio. I think two of three are likely:

1. The touch-screen is a slam dunk. It’s the natural successor to the scroll wheel. Who’d buy a new, high-end iPod without it? Case closed.

2. Wi-Fi is unlikely. What’s it good for? Sharing tunes with other iPod users in public, ala the Zune? Maybe, but I think not. Copy protection and DRM is too problematic. How about using Wi-Fi to sync tunes with your computer? Maybe, but you’ll still need a cable to charge the device, so what’s the point? Maybe Wi-Fi could connect the iPod to a set of speakers via an Airport Express base station and AirTunes? Seems like a lot of trouble for a pretty minor feature. Wi-Fi is good for getting on the internet, so unless the iPod is also getting Safari and e-mail, I don’t see the point of adding it.

3. Digital radio is the real killer. It’s a feature that could spell real trouble for the satellite radio industry. With digital radio, the iPod could be a portable TiVo for music, automatically recording favorite shows, rewinding live broadcasts and purchasing songs over the air. Digital radio is so consumer-friendly, it’s completely transformed the UK radio market in a couple of years, and though U.S. broadcasters seem terrified of it, the success of satellite radio is spurring them into action. As Wired News reported in July:

“In the United Kingdom, more than 4.7 million digital radios have been sold since 1999. Listeners browse station listings in an electronic program guide, pause and rewind content as it’s broadcast, bookmark specific programs or songs, and record them using postage-stamp-size memory cards. And starting in May, they can buy songs as they hear them on the radio, downloading them to computers, digital receivers or cell phones.

… IBiquity says that the HD Digital Radio Alliance, a consortium of U.S. broadcasting chains, will commit nearly $250 million in air time to promote the format in 2007. And UBC Media’s Simon Cole says that satellite’s head start in the United States might actually be good news for HD Radio. “Satellite is softening up the market,” he says. “It’s waking U.S. consumers up to what digital can deliver.”

Unafraid of Apple’s lawyers, Think Secret has a gallery of gorgeous screenshots and icons from the latest build of Leopard (9A527), which was released to software developers last week.

Above is the large version of the new Network Utility icon. According to Think Secret, almost all the icons in Leopard are now bigger, better and brighter.

And just as the icons are getting bigger, so too are the applications. According to Think Secret, Address Book has grown from 25.2MB in Tiger to 47.7MB in Leopard; Safari has grown from 6.5MB to 51.9MB; and Mail has grown from 49MB to 279.7MB.

Hacker genius Erling Ellingsen has made his own $2 multitouch input pad from a plastic bag full of blue dye and an iSight camera. He’s also hacked the iPhone’s accelerometer that allows you to control the phone by tipping, rotating or shaking it.

Ellingson’s jury-rigged multitouch input pad lets him control his computer with his fingers, just like the iPhone or Jeff Han’s futuristic multitouch table. Using a bag of die and an iSight camera beneath it, Ellingson can navigate the Web, move chess pieces and play a virtual keyboard. How it works exactly is not clear, but check out the impressive video:

Ellingsen has also hacked the iPhone’s accelerometer, allowing him to control various homemade iPhone applications by tilting, rotating or shaking the iPhone. Ellingsen has created three demo apps controlled by tipping and shaking: a virtual Steve Jobs bobble-head that bobs its head when the phone is shaken; a maze that is navigated by tipping and turning the phone; and a virtual box of balls that roll and bounce as he rotates the phone. Again, see the impressive video:

Ellingsen has released the source code for the iPhone hack, and he’s asking for people to submit their ideas and vote on suggestions for what to do with it.

So far, he’s thinking about an iPod+Nike-like pedometer, a Labyrinth game, SmackBook navigation for Safari and a virtual pet that’s shakeable, among other ideas.

(Via Waxy)

Apple just sent out invites to a special media event at San Francisco’s Moscone West convention center on September 5 at 10AM — and music is clearly the theme.
There’s been lots of speculation that new iPods are on tap, including stubby, ugly iPod nanos and a touchscreen iPod Touch.

Photographer Frasier Spiers spotted this chappie with an Apple ‘do at the weekend grand opening of Glasgow’s new Apple store.

The rest of Fraser’s pictures in this Flickr set capture the character of Glaswegians better than any other the other pictures I’ve seen from the grand opening.

One of the things I thought strange about the other picture sets was the absence of drunks. If you’re out all night in Glasgow, you’re certain to encounter a few. Well, Fraser captured one. Fraser says this young man was extremely drunk, and boasted about his sexual prowess to the waiting line for hours.

I thought this guy was a drunken thug, but he’s nerd from GlasMUG cheering people on.

And here’s a kid who queued for hours in a Che Guevara shirt. Fraser writes: “The irony of wearing a Che Guevera (SIC) hoodie whilst queueing for hours to attend a retail store opening is beyond parody. “I wanted an iPod Shuffle for Christmas, but my mommy says that Apple exploits the workers! I got a packet of seeds and a sickle instead”¦.”

(Thanks Oleg for noting Fraser’s pictures in the comments).

The latest build of Leopard (build 9A527) has a default desktop that looks like some kind of Star Trek supernova in outer space, according to a leaked screenshot.

Here’s what it looks like in use. The outer space theme is used at least twice in Leopard: the Time Machine backup app also has a spacey UI.

As Phil Ryu notes, with the cosmic backdrop, Leopards’ interface looks like the control deck of a futuristic spaceship looking out into void.

Could Apple be trying to imply that Leopard is so advanced it’s positively science fiction?

After learning that the teen who first unlocked the iPhone got a Nissan 350Z for his efforts, Wired News editor Kevin Poulsen is willing to trade his classic Nissan 300-ZX for an unlocked iPhone.

Kevin’s car is similar to the car Woz drove (see below), but it needs a bit of TLC, so you might want to offer him an unlocked Razr instead. Or maybe just a regular razor. You know, for shaving. Bids in the comments please.

Via Fake Steve.

Two Apple geniuses from Apple’s new store in Glasgow, which celebrated its grand opening this weekend. Photo by Setteb.it.
Gary Allen of IFOAppleStore, who travelled to Scotland from Berkeley to attend the grand opening, noted that the doorway smelled of urine. Scots are notorious drunken urinators in shop doorways. Link.

Photo by Stillframe

Many wireless companies will unlock cell phones after the initial one- or two-year contract has been fulfilled. But AT&T says the iPhone is “different” and won’t be unlocked at the end of the contract:

AT&T will unlock phones for customers once they have fulfilled their contracts, which typically run one to two years. One big exception: Apple’s iPhone, distributed exclusively in the USA by AT&T. “That’s different,” says AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel.

USA Today.

The “leaked” pics of a new iMac making the rounds are clearly a Photoshop fake made from images of Apple’s Cinema Displays taken from Apple’s website. See below.
The color also screams fake.

A new iMac is rumored to be introduced by Steve Jobs at a special event at Apple HQ on Tuesday — and everyone is hoping for a redesign. But Apple’s consumer machines do not come with metallic finishes. That’s reserved for the “pro” level machines. If the iMac has a new case, it will be made of plastic and will come in black, white or maybe other fruity colors.

The Fake:

From Apple’s website:

.

Pic: Forbes.

Fake Steve has been outed by (of all publications) the New York Times, and turns out he’s Dan Lyons, a senior editor at Forbes. Here’s the story: A Mystery Solved: ‘Fake Steve’ Is an Editor

“Mr. Lyons said he invented the Fake Steve character last year, when a small group of chief executives turned bloggers attracted some media attention. He noticed that they rarely spoke candidly. “I thought, wouldn’t it be funny if a C.E.O. kept a blog that really told you what he thought? That was the gist of it.”

Ironically, Lyons was the author of a Forbes hit piece on blogs last year, called Attack of the Blogs. It begins: “Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective.”

Of course, libel, lies and invective is what makes Fake Steve fun, but a lot of it was aimed at his fellow journalists. It was pretty clear Fake Steve was a journalist or editor — given all the pops he made at fellow Silicon Valley scribblers. He called Gawker publisher Nick Denton a “macrocephalic sodomite” (Denton is gay and has a large head).

Now that he’s been outed, it’s going to be pretty uncomfortable for him running into his targets.

UPDATE: Fake Steve has just posted his won entry about the Times story. He’s glad he was busted by the Times and not Valleywag, which has been on the hunt for months. Fake Steve writes:

“One bright side is that at least I was busted by the Times and not Valleywag. I really, really enjoyed seeing those guys keep guessing wrong. For six months Dr. Evil and Mr. Bigglesworth put their big brains together and couldn’t come up with the answer. Guy from the Times did it in a week. So much for the trope about smarty-pants bloggers disrupting old media. Brilliant. My only regret is that we didn’t get a chance to see Bigglesworth take a few more swings and misses.”

According to The Register, a Microsoft employee who made this hilarious Zune parody ad (featuring his boss, Monkey Boy Steve Ballmer) was fired for his trouble.

Via Fake Steve

Columnist John Dvorak at an Apple Store. Pic by Steve Rhodes.

Columnist John Dvorak, who is perhaps the most hated pundit by Mac users because of his constant (and quote deliberate) Mac bashing, is now a Mac user himself — and he likes it.

In his latest PC Magazine Column, Dvorak confesses that he has been using an iMac at work for a couple of months, and it’s “not half bad.” After heaping on more weak praise, he says he has no plans to buy a Mac for personal use at home, but he increasingly finds himslef recommending the Mac to friends and neighbors who ask him what to buy! He writes:

“I can see why the Mac is gaining market share, because the rationale for using one is simple. Do you want to deal with the agony of antivirus, firewall, antispyware, and other touchy software subsystems, many of which do not work well? Or do you want to boot Microsoft Word and write a document and be done with it?

As someone who does recommend gear to people, I have to think to myself, “Should I recommend something that will come back to haunt me, or recommend a Mac with its higher price but lower hassle factor?” The answer is simple. I hate the idea of having to do customer service for people who cannot keep their systems clean, and that’s most people.”

Chart: MarketWatch.

Apple’s Q3 was the company’s best ever. It raked in $5.41 billion in sales, posting a $818 million in profit. Gross margins — the amount of revenue that is profit — is up to a whopping 36 percent. This surely is the highest in the industry. By contrast, Dell reported Q2 2007 margins of just 4.3 percent, earning $605 million profit on revenues of $14.1 billion.
Apple also reported 10 million iPods sold — up 21 percent on the year before; and 1.76 million Macs, up 33 percent year-on-year.

Apple’s stock is rebounding on the news: it’s up 6 percent after taking a hammering yesterday on AT&T’s iPhone numbers.

Picture by Ed Dame.

Apple sold 270,000 iPhones on the opening weekend, according to Apple’s Q3 results.

See the data PDF here.

AT&T’s quarterly results said only 146,000 were activated in the first two days — so it looks like 124,000 people either waited a few days to activate their phones, or had trouble activating them, as was widely reported.

Photo by Seth Dillingham

The Sitening blog claims to have unearthed the identity of Fake Steve Jobs — it’s veteran Mac columnist Andy Ihnatko — but the evidence is flimsy at best.

The “proof” is that FSJ’s computer has an IP address in Boston — and Ihnatko lives in Beantown. Ergo sum.

The Sitening blog obtained FSJ’s IP address by sending him a special URL in email. When FSJ visited the special URL, it revealed his IP address: 68.160.21.224, which comes from the Boston area.

But I’m skeptical. Andy’s a humorous writer, but the styles are different. And FSJ is obviously a reporter or editor with a Silicon Valley business publication — Forbes or Fortune, or such like — not a specialist Mac writer. The subject matter on FSJ’s blog ranges too far from Apple — he’s obsessed with Sun and Google as he is with Steve Jobs.

When Wired News first contacted FSJ earlier this year to set up a sponsorship deal, my colleague Kevin Poulsen, the ace hacker, used the headers of FSJ’s emails to track him to a hotel in New York, then a public park or cafe in New York (he was probably using free WiFi), and finally suburban Boston.

We assumed Fake Steve was traveling that day. Maybe he took a business trip to New York to his home in Boston. But who knows? Maybe he works in Boston, or that’s where his girlfriend lives?

The only one who knows FSJ’s identity for sure is my boss, Wired News EIC Evan Hansen, who’s keeping mum.

This is great news. I couldn’t be more delighted that BBC journalist Alan Johnston’s kidnapping didn’t end tragically. He’d been detained for 16 weeks and his release was negotiated by Hamas, now in control of Gaza.

He told the BBC: “It is the most fantastic thing to be free.”

More details at NYT.

Picture: CommonGate

The paparazzi caught Ms. Lohan leaving Planet Blue at the Country Mart in Malibu on Saturday clutching an iPhone in her hand, according to crazyGossip. More crazy Lohan shopping pics at the site.

I bet the iPhone’s glass top is great for chopping and snorting.

According to Erica Sadun at TUAW, the iPhone can be used with an old SIM card. She activated her phone, then popped out the SIM card and put in an old one. The iPhone continued to function as an iPod, plus web and email via Wi-Fi.

However, I’m pretty sure this won’t work with an unactivated iPhone — and in the comments someone noted that it’ll likely get disabled when iTunes checks for a software update.

Todd Ficharker, who describes himself as the “clumsiest person in the world” smashed the screen of his iPhone less than 24 hours after he bought it. He explains:

“I tried answering a call while it was plugged in and the short cord pulled it out of my hand and hit the corner of a table on the way down. 100% my fault.”

But there’s a silver lining! Unbelievably, Apple replaced it for free.

“They gave me a brand new phone for free. Talk about fantastic customer care. I am in love 4-eva with Apple.”

Via MacFeber

Pic by Leander Kahney: Apple’s San Francisco store on iPhone opening night.

Goldman Sachs analyst David Bailey thinks Apple sold 700,000 iPhones on its opening weekend, more than half again than the 500,000 estimated by his esteemed colleague Gene Munster.

Bloomberg reports that Bailey initially pegged 350,000 iPhone sales, and Munster estimated 200,000.

Said Munster: “In 2009, we estimate a third of Apple’s sales will be from iPhone. This is a huge product.”

Dinner Conversation: June 28th, 2007
Click on the pic to read the captions.