Nicole Martinelli - page 33

So the iPad is a runaway hit and there’s no stopping the iPhone: the Telegraph still finds reason to harrumph at Apple with a “Bottom Ten” of what they consider the Cupertino company’s worst products.

The surprise: iTunes tops the list as Apple’s worst product to date.

If these schadenfreude rankings are evergreens for news outlets, they are usually topped by obvious turkeys like the Lisa and Apple III. Both of these commercial flops are still “less bad” than iTunes, however, ranking six and eight respectively.

Popstress Rihanna poses for the Italian edition of Vanity Fair wearing just a raincoat and an overdose of bling.

Her trusty iPhone is to help avoid pesky wardrobe malfunctions. There must be an app for that.

Via iPhone Savior

A couple of Reuters reporters scoured electronics shops in Shanghai for an iPad clone until someone led them to a dark backroom on a fifth floor of one of the city’s many clone marts.

You can’t see a whole lot from the blurry pic, but they report that the counterfeit iPad sports three USB ports in what looks like a heavy-set, pumped-up iPhone. This isn’t the first iPad copycat to come out of the area, but this one looks more like the Apple device.

The price for the faux iPad is just slightly lower than the real deal 2,800 yuan ($410), compared to the iPad’s $499-$699 price. It runs a Windows OS.

Denver police arrested a 20-year-old man in connection with an iPad theft that also cost the victim part of his pinky.

20-year-old Brandon Darnell Smith was arrested early Saturday at a traffic stop.

“It’s bittersweet,” the victim, 59-year-old Bill Jordan, told local ABC affiliate 7NEWS. “The bitter part of it is there is nothing anybody can do to replace this. It is what it is.”

Designer Mark Pernice took that love we all have of late-night grimaces immortalized with the Mac’s built in Photo Booth program to another level: he made a mask out of it.

Pernice took one of those gazing-up-the-nostrils, Mr. Bean-on-acid shots of himself, then got master special effects wizard Christian Hanson to whip up a mask from it.

The iPad may be too popular for its own good:  Apple seems to be imposing limits on how many you can buy.

When a hospital district wanted to buy 100 of them to equip medical staff, they ran into trouble:

Apple’s ordering system automatically canceled Volosin’s purchase, informing him that he could not order more than three.
“They were limiting people form ordering too many, which I thought was interesting,” he says. “They’re used to dealing with consumers and not bulk orders.”

Now, a medical student who endeavored to buy a bunch of iPads for his pals at the NeoGAF gaming forum, ran straight into “lifetime limit.”

How’s this for customer service? Steve Jobs personally intervened to get a dodgy iMac replaced. Author Michael J. Weber bought a new iMac, but his Apple machine was a lemon. Perhaps emboldened by Steve Jobs’ recent email responses to customer emails, Weber didn’t waste any time going straight to the top to complain about it:

Steve,
Received a 27″ i7 iMac today that would only boot in verbose mode. Whatever happened to “It Just Works”? This was a top of the line unit built to order in Elk Grove, CA — not China. And it booted like a Gateway 2000!

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Does the iPhone make the man?

If you think your gear speaks volumes about you, a survey of 1,500 women says you’re kinda right.

A little over half the women surveyed by mobile phone purveyor Phones4U, 54 per cent, said they’d be more likely to give their digits and date an iPhone owner than a non-iPhone owner. (Though it appears the 46% of females unswayed by Apple devices may be more street smart, see below).

iPhone owners were also deemed better groomed, more likely to have a good sense of humor and have the gift of gab than other mobile phone owners.

The team at Patently Apple mined a patent granted today to find what may be future gold: more evidence that the Cupertino company is toying with the idea of touchscreen iMacs and MacBooks.

After slogging through patent no. 20100100947, titled “Scheme for Authenticating without Password Exchange,” they discovered a flowchart illustrating a touchscreen that could be associated with both a Macbook and a small desktop.

In a patent that even these document hounds defined “obscure,” the flowchart they sniffed out points to a touchscreen component not restricted to the iPhone.

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvplGbCBaLA

Virtuoso pianist Lang Lang gave concert goers something special by playing “The Flight of the Bumblebee” on an iPad.

This unprecedented encore happened — where else?– in San Francisco. Lang Lang played the song, part of it one-handed, thanks to Smule’s Magic Piano iPad app.

The $0.99 app, from the makers of Ocarina and I Am T-Pain,  lets users easily play music by touching light beams that stream down from the top of the screen. Full disclosure: Smule sent Lang Lang an iPad pre-loaded with the app in the hopes he’d take it for a spin.

Wonder if Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who penned the interlude over 100 years ago, would forgive Lang Lang’s occasional flub as he struggles to get it right on the unfamiliar device.

Via WSJ Digits

Twenty doctors are using iPads to keep track of patients in a trial program at a California hospital district.

At Kaweah Delta Health Care District in Visalia, doctors and staff already use smart phones, including the iPhone, to access the hospital’s network.  Over the weekend, the small group of doctors in a trial run were given iPads to keep abreast of patients, whether they are off site or in another wing of the hospital.

Technology director Nick Volosin has already ordered another 100 iPads to equip hospital employees including home health and hospice care workers, nurses, dietitians and pharmacists.

Scott Beale of Laughing Squid snapped this spiffy wooden stand cradling an iPad cash register at soon-to-be opened San Francisco coffee house Sightglass.

The iPad will ring up those double-ristretti with Square, an app with a peripheral credit card swiper (see the built-in one on the bottom of this wooden stand) that turns the iPhone and iPad into cash registers, accepting cash or credit card payments. Square can calculate sales tax, accept touchscreen finger signatures and then generate email or SMS receipts.

No word on who crafted the fab stand, yet, though.

Via Laughing Squid

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FW-lrMXLBE

This fierce edit of Steve Jobs’ April keynote by Neil Curtis — father of the 180-sec keynote is, like, um great. (Curtis reminds us that, uh, it’s all in good fun).

Very reassuring for anyone who has, like, uh, spoken in public, or, you know, heh, been interviewed for radio, or, um, so, done a podcast, and um been horrified at all the excess, uh, verbiage? and weird intonations? and half sentences (“We nailed?”) that, so, now, inevitably, you know, clutter up the way you, uh, talk.

Channeling the fashion vibe of Flava Flav,  a music producer in Atlanta sports an iPad on a chain that’s, well, off the chain.

According to Paul who snapped the pic, it was playing a music video at the time.

At 1.5 pounds, the iPad necklace is a definitely heavy look.

Bill Jordan went to Denver’s Cherry Creek Apple store to buy an iPad for a co-worker as a perk for getting a promotion.

In what may be the most violent iPad theft to date, police say surveillance video shows the 59-year-old Jordan shadowed by two young men who assaulted him before he reached the parking garage.

The Uffizi Gallery in Florence is one of the largest treasure troves of Renaissance art in the world, but getting around the meandering rooms searching for sparse or missing signage can be a challenge.

Getting good information about the paintings usually means bringing a guide book and often overlooking anything but the A-list paintings.

Enter the official Uffizi iPhone app, which will get you from Giotto to Botticelli and back again in Italian and English.  The best part:  you can download it for free for the first two weeks, until April 26.

This isn’t the first time the gallery has tried to get more hands on with visitors: they also recently launched a touch screen system to give more info about the paintings.

Via the Uffizi web site

Police busted a middle school boy for renting out his iPod Touch packed with sexy photos and videos of underage girls.

The iPod Touch’s large storage capacity and big screen were put to use for an increasingly common kind of extracurricular activity. The boy’s business was halted when a renter of the illicit images was caught last week at Pyle Middle School in Bethesda, Maryland.

Students id’d the girls in photos as fellow students — sixth to eighth graders — as well as some from a nearby high school. In a letter to parents, school officials said that their investigation revealed the girls posed willingly and that the photo and video sessions took place outside school grounds.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYVIHf9KBSE

This mini Apple store is the latest awesome creation from Gary Katz, who has been turning shoe boxes into iPhone theaters.

This time, it took him a weekend to make a store mock-up, and this one requires two iPhones for the full effect. One iPhone slots into the back wall, playing a loop of the iPad intro and Apple ads and another iPhone provides the Apple logo to light the store sign.  The minuscule iPads, iPhone and iMacs are the fruit of long hours with an Exacto knife.

Katz put tiny versions of his own business cards in here, too, in case computer engineer Barbie has some tech dilemmas.

This is a one-of-a kind labor of love to avoid tussles over trademarks, but his other clever iPhone theater kits can either be bought or downloaded, including this drive-in version.

Although a few small, private colleges have rushed to adopt the iPad — pledging them to incoming students before they were even in stores — several big universities have delayed adopting them for at least a few semesters.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Princeton, Cornell and George Washington universities have deferred admission of the iPad for students.

Princeton and George Washington decided to wait over security issues; Cornell is concerned over connectivity and bandwidth.

First came iPhone apps for iMussolini then Che Guevara, now there’s an app for Spanish dictator Francisco Franco.

Just like the other ones, iFranco is a compendium of speeches, messages, videos and audio El Caudillo made during his 36-year reign.

It also appears that, like the others, the $0.99 app was approved from a non-US iTunes store but is available in the US.

A lot of bytes and ink have been spent on whether the iPad is good for anything but games or gently ushering your computer-phobic granny into the digital age.

Proof the device is good enough for real business, Norway’s prime minister Jens Stoltenberg reportedly ran his country from an iPad while stuck at the airport in New York yesterday.

While Stoltenberg was grounded due to volcanic eruptions in Iceland, his staff thought it best to let citizens know he was still busy with state affairs, sans tie and what looks to be a fairly regular airport lounge, by updating the state Flickr account with a photo titled “The Prime Minister is Working At the Airport.”

Even though everyday Norwegians won’t be able to buy an iPad in stores for at least another month, it’s nice to see the PM is an early adopter.

Via Flickr

Israel has banned all iPad imports — yes, that means even bringing one on business or vacation — over concerns that higher-powered wireless receivers and transmitters in the device may disrupt national networks.

The iPad will be device non grata in Israel until authorities certify that the computers comply with local standards. About 10 unlucky iPad owners have had the devices confiscated so far. Visitors see their devices held in custody — racking up fines — until they depart the country.

“If you operate equipment in a frequency band which is different from the others that operate on that frequency band, then there will be interference,” Nati Schubert, a senior deputy director for the Communications Ministry told AP. “We don’t care where people buy their equipment … but without regulation, you would have chaos.”

The MacBook Air may be light but its reputation has been weighed down by overheating problems that Apple attempted to patch up with a fix in 2008.

This scorching photo comes from Sarah, who says her 1-year-old machine branded her:

I got this burn an hour into working Monday morning, after picking up my machine from the desk to walk it to a different room. I picked it up with my right hand, set it on my left hand and in the crook of my arm as I grabbed the cord, and almost immediately dropped it because it was so hot. So probably a few seconds of contact led to a burn mark that’s still there 3 days later.

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Just a day after Apple approved it,  the Opera Mini Web Browser app is topping free downloads on iTunes stores around the world. At this writing, it is number one of the top ten free iTunes downloads in all 22 iTunes stores — from Japan to Sweden,  Australia to Austria.

In the 20 days it took to get a thumbs up from Apple, expectations were high, and as our reviewer Giles Turnbull discovered, mostly met: it’s a fast workhorse that plows through downloads even with spotty connections. On the downside, Giles found the zoom controls a little stiff and the overview display somewhat basic.

So, users of the Opera mini-browser: does it warrant the first-place spot or are the massive downloads just a fad?

Customs officers in San Francisco confiscated a shipment of 2,000 iPhoneys they estimate to be worth $1.2 million.

The faux iPhones flew in via Taiwan before being ferreted out by customs agents on March 9.

They must have been pretty good fakes it took about a month to verify that they were, in fact, fraudulent.

A video from local ABC station show some pretty heavy-handed knock-offs sans Apple logo on the back.

One of the tip-offs: the almost-iPhones had a sliding back cover to remove the battery while on the real deal, the battery compartment is sealed.