Pete Mortensen - page 18

Apple’s entry into the mobile phone market has been a pretty spectacular success in its first six months on the market, according to research house Canalys. As Roughly Drafted notes, in North America, the iPhone is the No. 2 smartphone platform, not just model. It trails only the full BlackBerry market at this point, but is ahead of all combined Windows Mobile devices. This confirms an earlier NPD report that Apple was commanding about 27 percent of the smartphone market. In honor of this moment, let’s look back at some memorable quotes of the last year:

“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”
— Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO

“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”
— Ed Colligan, Palm CEO

“They would have been stepping in between us and our customers to the point where we would have almost had to take a back seat “¦ on hardware and service support.”
— Jim Gerace, Verizon Wireless VP

“What Apple risks here is its reputation as a hot company that can do no wrong. If it’s smart it will call the iPhone a ‘reference design’ and pass it to some suckers to build with someone else’s marketing budget. Then it can wash its hands of any marketplace failures.”
— John Dvorak, International Tool
Ah, memories.

Via Daring Fireball

I don’t think I’ll ever get sick of stupid crap vaguely inspired by the iPod. The best of these in recent memory is the iPond, an Australian product that crams a really tiny fish tank — and a Siamese fighting fish — into a weird package that looks sort of like an iPod (and more like a 1G Zune). Oh, and it plays music through a really crummy speaker.

The best part of all of this? The iPond is virtually guaranteed to kill any fish unfortunate enough to get put into the iPond. Fighting fish need 10 liters to live, and the iPond is .65 liters. Oops. The Sydney Morning Herald has the story:

Studies proved fish had memories well beyond a few seconds and were social creatures that experienced pain and boredom, he said.

“The fish in this thing does not look like it has very long to live and it can barely move,” he said.

“Even if it does live it’s not [a] life worth living … it’s really just a torture box.”

Even better? The sound from the speaker leaks inside the tank. So it’s a really loud torture box. I know it’s a little late, but how do I get this on my wishlist?

Via Gizmodo.

Once Apple began to work with Intel, it got a lot easier to begin predicting the future development of Mac hardware. When IBM and Motorola provided the horsepower (or lack thereof, as the case may be) for the Mac platform, it was anybody’s guess when Apple might ship new machines — or what would cause the shipping delay this time. Intel, however, is an open book. They show off their processor roadmap up to a year in advance.

RIght now, everyone is waiting for Apple to unveil new portable Macs using the Penryn chip, the world’s first consumer 45nm CPU. They should drop at MacWorld. But Intel’s way out in front. According to BusinessWeek’s Reena Jana, the future will be ultra-efficient chips powering greener laptops with longer battery life. She writes about her exclusive preview on the Next blog.

Yet Intel seems to really be walking the walk on these two matters. Chip-wise, the company will be rolling out a platform code-named “Menlow,” in Q2 or Q3 of 2008. It’s the first-generation of low-power platforms, which promises to run on 10 times less CPU power and is 5 times smaller than previous chips.

Sounds like the ideal way to make a tiny MacBook with extremely efficient battery life that won’t burn your knees. I’m just waiting for the first Mac portable that can operate for 9 hours without a charge.

Image: Linksys

Remember a year ago, when the iPhone was announced? No, not Apple’s iPhone, the VoIP product line from Cisco’s Linksys product line! Though Cisco enjoyed a lot of press after Steve Jobs gave Apple’s revolutionary multi-touch wonderphone the same name, but then the other iPhone sort of vanished. What’s happened since?

Not much, actually. As our colleague Rob Beschizza reports for Wired News, the Linksys iPhone is selling OK, and the company plans to roll out new models under the name. But the name iPhone is Apple’s. No one, not even the most contrarian anti-Apple antagonists, thinks of seamless VoIP calls when they hear the name.

But a year on, Apple has its iPhone and Cisco has its iPhone, and no one confuses one with the other. And everybody’s happy with that, as Cisco spokesperson Karen Sohl says:

Relations with Apple, Sohl said, are good. “There’s no bad blood,” she said. “We enjoy working with Apple.”

Whatever Happened to the Other iPhone? [Wired News]

Leander’s got the full story over at the Mothership. Anyone else have some gorgeous laser-etched Apple stuff they’d like to share?

Image via Flickr

At this point, it’s pretty clear that everyone loves the iPhone. Celebrities, executives, Time Magazine, even my Uncle Jim. It’s Apple’s biggest sensation since the original launch of the iPod, and a break-out success all around.

Unfortunately, the June arrival of the iPhone came at a cost. Apple had to delay the launch of its Leopard operating system by months in order to pull software developers off the Leopard team and onto the iPhone team. At the time, I didn’t think much of it. If anything, I presumed only good could come of mingling iPhone DNA with Leopard DNA.

But it’s mainly been frustrating. The delays were bad enough, but it really does appear that the switch-up had an impact on the overall quality of the shipping version of Leopard. I can’t think of an operating system from Apple since OS X 10.0 so filled with bugs and questionable design decisions. There are whole communities devoted solely to the documentation of Leopard bugs.

Worse, some of the intentional choices with Leopard aren’t up to Apple’s standards.There are many wonderful features like QuickLook and Time Machine, but a lot of the new interface elements are just flashy for the sake of flashiness. CoverFlow is goofy for browsing through anything other than photos in the Finder, and I will never understand the logic of a translucent menu bar as long as I live.

I’m never going to join the throng calling Leopard the new Vista, but I do have to wonder: How much did the stress put on the Leopard team to finish the iPhone disrupt the shipping version of the OS? This is a team that definitely put in 80, 90 hour weeks if not longer to finish the iPhone and then had to go straight back onto Leopard to meet an ambitious ship date. Whose quality wouldn’t take a hit under such circumstances?

What do you think? This is the first time in memory when I can recall a core Mac product being impeded or hampered by a more pressing new market product for Apple. What does that mean for the six-color bleeding Mac faithful? Are you bugged, or just delighted you got your iPhone on time?

Well, it’s command-line for now, but the iPod touch has been hacked to enable VoIP calling by a modder going by Eok.
The hack uses the utility SvSIP, which was originally created to enable the same capability on the Nintendo DS. It’s pretty far from usable by mere mortals for the time being — typing can be enough of a pain on the virtual keyboard, let alone doing any mucking around in a shell script — but this is fun. The touch is an iPhone in all but communication connectivity only anyway, why not make it a true little brother to the iPhone?

Also, can I get a German layout for my iPhone? I love the look of “QWERTZUIOP”.

Via iPodNN

I just stumbled across Mister BG’s all-too-real parody of Apple’s Product Lifecycle. This is my favorite paragraph:

The haters offer their assessment. The forums are ablaze with vitriolic rage. Haters pan the device for being less powerful than a Cray X1 while zealots counter that it is both smaller and lighter than a Buick Regal. The virtual slap-fight goes on and on, until obscure technical nuances like, “Will it play multiplexed Ogg Vorbis streams?” become matters of life and death.

It’s funny because it’s true. Well done, sir.

Via Digg.

One good opening deserves another, so Apple is just about ready to match its new San Francisco store in the Marina with a new shop in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village big props to Apple’s creatives for a logo that’s so darn Big Apple. Beautiful work, guys.

David Sebastian Buus took the photo while on a bike ride.

doctormac: New Apple Store in NYC / Dec. 7.

Via Digg.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: apple, retail, nyc, greenwich

Love Time Machine? According to Peter Weisz, you can soon reach new levels of productivity with it by applying its time-travelling powers to your stock options. Inspired satire. Definitely click through.

The entire world went crazy in the last 24 hours, as investors and rumor-mongers alike realized that maybe, just maybe, Apple might possibly sort of, update the iPhone with new features at some point in the future. All of the hullabaloo was set off when AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, repeatedly pressed for information about higher-speed iPhones, said “You’ll have it next year!”

And just like that, the stock jumped up. It’s so funny. I’m going to go further, and announce that at some point in the future, Apple will release an iPhone with more storage, GPS, better typing, more applications, games and faster WiFi. Some of those features will be delivered in 2008. Does the stock go up now?

Image via Flickr

Make it so!

QPox via Digg

One of the enduring complaints about the first-generation iPhone (other than the price, slow EDGE data, AT&T exclusivity, limited storage, battery life, no third-party apps, no landscape keyboard outside of Safari…) is the lack of GPS support in its version of Google Maps. While several high-end smart phones now double as navigation tools, the iPhone requires you to enter your starting location for driving directions.

But that fault might soon disappear. Yesterday, Google rolled out Mobile Google Maps 2.0, which features My Location, a service that uses the positions of nearby cell phone towers to guess where you’re located. It’s not available for iPhone yet, just BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and S60 Nokias (if Apple allowed third-party apps, you’d already have it…), but it seems like an iPhone GMaps update is inevitable. I tried to make it work on my circa-2004 BlackBerry, and it doesn’t work. I now have a phone-crashing application, and that’s it.

Anyone have it working? How accurate is it in your neighborhood?

Via GigaOM 

A video from 1996 at Newton just resurfaced after years of obscurity. Basically, the erstwhile Apple division had 4,000 spare modems for the PDA that they just had to get rid of. Soon, a spectacular display was planned. Over at MacLife, Maurice Sharp, a former Newton Engineer, explained what happened…

I remember making this video… the simple beginning of an email letting people know there were some modems if you wanted one, the discovery that a few was 4,000 or so, then the start. Luckily I lived very close by so I rushed home to get my video camera.

During this time, the Newton group was still in it’s heyday. We were pushing the envelope. We had fun disagreements on what the optimal design was for our customers. There should still be a Newton prototype around somewhere that was built into an empty Palm Pilot shell (now that would have been interesting, though the cost of the Newton would have been much higher.) And the return of Jobs and demise of Newton was not even a bad dream.

I really admire the faith of the Newton true believers. Right up there with the Amiga faith.

Via MacLife

Licensing songs for commercials is a major stream of revenue for musicians these days. Moby likely wouldn’t be a household name if it weren’t for his gleeful whoring of his 1999 album Play. Inevitably, however, rampant licensing can get a little out of hand. For example, right now, The Shins are basically endorsing both the iPhone and Zune. The band’s song “Sleeping Lesson” accompanies the above the Zune ad (message: using Zune is exactly like doing acid!), while the cover of the album it comes from, Chutes Too Narrow, appears in an iPhone commercial.

Of course, this isn’t the first time a rock band has two-timed the iPhone. John Mayer, who played at MacWorld during the lunch of the device went on to endorse the BlackBerry Curve in advance. I guess a paycheck is just a paycheck, some times.

Via GigaOM

Celebrating the growing Hackintosh community, the small but prominent group of closeted Mac-lovers finding ways to put unauthorized installs of OS X onto garden-variety PCs, Willowhaven, a user at Insanely Mac, has created a set of logos to print out and slap on the side of your beige box to show your true heart.

They all look pretty good, except for that horrifying Apple + Dell logo. Some things simply can’t get redeemed.

Via Begley

A Guy Named Joe wants to kill us all. Slideshow after the jump.

Via Digg.

Mark Richardson of Ragus Media has created the cheery, oddly sentient iMac choir commercial concept that Apple hasn’t bothered to. It’s fun, but man, do I ever hate the music. Think Apple will buy it and put it in production like the CSS ad?

Via Gizmodo

Though I still don’t have an iPhone (waiting on 3G), I’m drooling for one even more after seeing a demo of wPhone, a fantastic WordPress plug-in that allows really intuitive, full-featured blogging on the iPhone (and even some crappier ones, like my old school Blackberry). Essentially, instead of trying to render the full-bandwidth version of WP, this server-side plug-in changes the interface to optimize for iPhone or other mobile, and then uses GZip compression to enable speedy connections over EDGE and GPRS.

If all of that is gibberish, it basically means that blogging from your phone has rarely been so easy. It looks NICE.

Intomobile via Digg and PMPToday

Video and lyrics by Anthony Sigalos. I have to say, voice synthesis program Alex doesn’t really deliver much emotion, does he?

Via Fake Steve

Not content to chronicle the fake life of Fake Steve Jobs, author Daniel Lyons has expanded his scope a bit this week by introducing guest blogger Fake Bono of U2, who showed up to present the totally non-existent White Beatles and Product (RED) U2 iPhones. The Beatles model comes with the complete Beatles catalog, plus the band’s solo work, and the U2 model comes with all of Rock and Roll. Read for yourself:

Edge and I hate to be left behind, so we’ve come up with an even bigger idea we’re going to pitch right here where Steve has to read it. Why just buy the Beatles? What you really want is to buy rock and roll. All of it. Presenting the U2 Rock and Roll iPhone. 64 gigabytes of Product (RED) iPhone packed with all of rock and roll. Beatles, Stones, Zeppelin, Sabbath, U2 of course, plus Nirvana and Pearl Jam all the way up to the complete Arcade Fire and Mike Doughty. If it rocks, it’s in here.

Yeah. Seven posts in all, and now Fake Steve has posted an elaborate tale of account hackery to explain how Bono seized control in the first place. All in good fun. Nice Thanksgiving prank.

Via iPhone Savior 

Being in an extended turkey coma this morning, I didn’t quite get out of bed early enough to hit the brand-new Apple Store in San Francisco’s Marina, but fortunately the amazing SFist (t-shirt picture) and IFO Apple Store (all else) were all over the opening. Based on the reportage, it sounds pretty stunning. And hey, 1000 free t-shirts!

Gary Allen of IFO Apple Store had a lot of nice things to say:

The store is definitely unique, combining individual features from various stores–or no stores at all. The facade lacks the usual stainless steel and uses white masonry like the Lincoln Road store. The ceiling is about 15 feet tall, unlike any other store. There are no window displays, which would obscure the view of the store interior. And the suspended Apple logo duplicates the Fifth Avenue store. It definitely establishes a presence for Apple in another neighborhood of San Francisco.

Nice. You have to love Apple’s commitment to not stand still with their Apple Store recipe. Each store has its own unique qualities. Fabulous.

Is there anything more re-assuring in life than knowing that Fake Steve keeps being funny even after the disclosure of his true identity? He’s now featuring simply hysterical Zune 2 parodies with custom backs poking fun at Microsoft and a certain dancing CEO…

Well, Apple legal has cleared another hurdle for the stock option back-dating scandal that rocked the computer industry last year. A judge in San Jose dismissed a major lawsuit against the company because the suit was not brought within a three-year window of the incidents. Of course, since the back-dating was only disclosed last year but stopped in 2002, it would have been pretty hard to do that in the first place. Actually, it’s absurd that our laws are written in such a way that they need to be prosecuted very quickly after commission. I understand the purpose of a statute of limitations, but why wouldn’t it be within three years of discovery? Only seems fair.

Picture via Fake Steve

I was talking with a friend awhile ago about the current state of hardware piracy in China. Basically, if it’s available in the US, there’s a nearly identical knock-off on the streets of Beijing and, by correlation, in the back alleys of San Francisco and New York. I found an absurdly faithful iPod shuffle copy a few months ago, and now “ECNokia” (very original name) is offering an iPod nano fatty rip that they’re advertising as identical in industrial design, but throwing in a bigger screen, a digital camera, SD cards, video recording and an FM tuner.

Granted, we don’t know that this picture is in any way accurate, but the interesting thing is that it could be. After all, Chinese companies do all of the manufacturing for iPods at this point. If you were Foxconn or whomever, it would be pretty darn easy to just leave the molds for your Apple project on the line as you make a few knock-offs. This is the bizarre situation of our present era of outsourcing: Companies can copy a market-leading project without reverse-engineering it, because many of the copiers are the actual engineers.

Via Gizmodo