News - page 1351

Wood. It’s just better.

This portable bluetooth speaker uses sustainable bamboo to wrap a pretty great little speaker up in the warm resonance of wood. Kickstarted and made by the folks at Otis & Eleanor, the Bongo portable bluetooth is capable and beautiful at the same time.

There are Bongo designs for everyone, some with dark brown stain, some with black, and some with no stain at all. The speaker grilles come in a variety of ’60s and ’70s-inspired fabric with colors straight out of your mom’s old living room. The unit we got to spend time with comes with brown, copper, gold and red tweed covered speakers and fits in just about any decor we can throw at it around the house. It also looks stunning in a hotel room, what with its classic retro look.

Remember the Slate Mobile AirDesk, which I described as resembling a “neatly-drilled chopping board”? Did you look at it and think “I like that. I could see myself using one of those, if only it was a little smaller, so I could carry it in my bag.”

If the answer to either of these is yes (or to the second question, mostly), then you will be ecstatic at the news of the SlateGo, a slightly smaller version of the laptop lap-desk.

You know the old saying: “Give a man a router, and he’ll turn a piece of wood into a perfectly-designed desk for the iPad-toting Mac user”?

Or was it “Give a man a router and he’ll set up a wireless network in your home office”?

No, wait, it was “Offer a man a router, and he’ll be forced to infer from context which device you mean to give him.”

Anyway, it’s a good saying, and it might apply to Artifox’s Desk 01, a desk which is equal parts beautiful and functional.

The Mobile Home is a one-thing-well kind of product. It connects to your iPhone via Bluetooth and lets you trigger Siri remotely. Which brings me to that excellent name – this is literally a mobile home button.

The portable battery from Halo is perfect for those times when I want to go stealth, keeping my iPhone 5 as free of those bulky, heavy battery cases as possible.

Between running levels of Hodappy Bird and checking Twitter for any vanity retweets, slapping photos of my meals up on Instagram and surreptitiously reading Facebook posts from ex-girlfriends, I am a battery killer.

With the Halo charger available, I found myself grabbing it and a lightning cable on my way out the door all the time, whether heading to the coffee shop or just for a quick bike ride along the Coastal Trail in Anchorage. It’s a perfect way to ensure I have the power I need on demand without strapping my iPhone into some fat case like the Mophie.

This is Leica’s new T, a camera with just a few buttons, and which is milled from a solid block of aluminum. Sound familiar? Hell, it even comes with a Smart Cover.

Specs-wise, this thing looks great, with Wi-Fi and a very clever way to add GPS. But I do worry about that lack of buttons.

Yesterday, often reputable Japanese Apple rumor site Macotakara reported that like Marilyn Monroe, the iPhone 6 could be curvy.

Specifically, they said that the iPhone 6 would have curved edges, compared to the iPhone 4 and iPhone 5’s squared edges, as well as a curved display. The result would be a device that felt almost organic in the hand: an important consideration, given that, at 4.7-inches, the iPhone 6 will be more difficult for people to hold.

Today, famed Apple concept artist Martin Hajek has updated his iPhone 6 render based upon the ‘curvy’ rumor, and my god, does it look gorgeous. Check out more images after the jump.

In the past, we’ve seen at least one madman use his iPad as a cutting board. While the guy was clearly senile, it does raise an interesting point: the design of many Apple products, from the iPad to the Mac, look like they might have been inspired by cutting boards in Jony Ive’s kitchen.

If you’d like to show solidarity with the Cult of Mac in your kitchen, consider this: a cutting board made of Apple wood that is identical in shape and design with the unibody MacBook Pro. For a cutting board, it’s not cheap at $110, but on the positive side, that’s at least a grand cheaper than you’d buy a working aluminum MacBook Pro for.

More pics after the jump.

Remember the olden days when you had to phone up and order a pizza — or worse still, trudge down the road to go and pick one up in person?

Thankfully that dystopian past will be well and truly over come Monday, when Domino’s Pizza launches its new iPad app — which lets you build your own custom pizzas, and then order them for take-out and delivery from the comfort of your own couch.

Making this app particularly nifty is that the 3-D pizza builder uses rendering application OpenGL to give you a realistic photo-effect image of what your final pizza will (or should) look like upon delivery.

If you’re a Pinterest user, you may be interested in a new mobile app feature being rolled out by the photo-sharing site.

Called ‘Guided Search,’ the tool makes it easier to explore Pinterest when you’re not exactly sure what it is that you want to find.

Forget about a close run race — the iPad is absolutely obliterating Android tablets when it comes to web traffic stats.

The data, which comes from Chitika Insights, looks at the distribution of Web usage across leading tablet devices for early April 2014.

Based on a sampling of tens of millions of U.S. and Canadian tablet-based online ad impressions, it leaves no question who’s ruling the tablet roost.

Frogmind’s excellent Badland has just been updated — adding ten new levels to what was already a fantastic game.

For those who haven’t played it before, Badland is well worth downloading. It’s a flapping game, but one that will cleanse your palate of the sour (if slightly addictive) taste of Flappy Bird, thanks to its gorgeous graphics and well-designed level layouts.

Having turned over a new leaf when it comes sustainability, Apple is rightly proud.

So proud, in fact, that it made the surprisingly un-Apple move of opening the doors of its North Carolina data center to NBC’s show, to shine a focus on the building’s pioneering use of renewable energy.

Facebook has been on quite the buying spree lately. After snatching up Oculus VR, the social network is now acquiring a popular fitness tracking app for the iPhone. ProtoGeo Oy, the Finnish app maker behind Moves, announced today that it is joining Facebook.

The third episode in acclaimed adventure game The Wolf Among Us has just dropped on Steam, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and iOS, and –if the trailer below is any indication — it’s a doozy. Titled ‘A Crooked Mile,’ the new episode looks to raise the stakes for its main character, the detective in a city full of ex-patriate fairy tale characters.

It looks like Bigby Wolf is really working on the “bad” part of his better known moniker (The Big Bad Wolf) in this video game series based on the Eisner Award-winning Fables graphic novels by Bill Willingham and published by Vertigo Comics.

The trailer (below) is short on details but long on accolades as it shows Bigby tearing through the magical side of New York, dropping the F-bomb and getting very, very angry. Those red eyes aren’t a good sign for anyone.

Apple hasn’t shied from going toe-to-toe in a heavy legal battle for months or years if need be, but rather than seeing its latest class action lawsuit go to trial, Apple has relented to settle instead.

Four major tech companies including Apple and Google reached a settlement this morning with the 64,000 tech workers who filed a class action lawsuit on the grounds that the Silicon Valley firms had conspired to keep wages artificially low through no-hire agreements.

If you’ve ever wished you could grab lunch with Apple’s Tim Cook, now is your chance. Cook is auctioning off a lunch date at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California. All proceeds from the action will go to the RFK Center for Justice & Human Rights.

And yes, you might be experiencing deja-vu. Cook did a similar auction last year, and the top bidder paid $610,000 to have coffee with the CEO.

PaperSync is a more appealing version of the Mod Notebooks service. Like Mod, PaperSync scans your paper pages and turns them into digital files. Unlike Mod, PaperSync uses plain old PDFs, and works with any notebook you like, not just the special Mod notebook.

Prong’s PWR promises to provide your phone with power, preventing all problems. It’s a slim-ish case with a built-in battery along with a pair of flip-out power prongs that can be thrust directly into a wall outlet.

Remember when the coolest brag for a gadget was that it was “credit card size”? Those times are back. The Revi Charger is a credit card-size iPhone charger with a built-in backup battery, and could really be just the thing in an emergency.

Over the years, cherubic Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has demonstrated a love of all things two-wheeled, four-wheeled and winged.

After spotting his latest hot wheels — a super-spiffy Tesla X — we were inspired to take inventory of what he’s been docking in his garage (that other one) all these years. He’s something of a speed demon, really. Though you’ll be the judge whether he or Jony Ive has the winning wheels. 

Compared to the likes of the Roku, which boasts a 1,000+ channel library, the Apple TV doesn’t exactly have a lot of different media channels. The Apple TV boasts only has around 33 third-party channels. Much of the reason the channel selection is so limited is because, unlike Roku, the Apple TV is a closed ecosystem: only Apple can release a new channel for its streaming set-top box.

Things, however, are getting rapidly better, as the above chart shows.

If you’ve ever wanted to slash and hack your way around a party full of your friends, now may be the time. Bonsai Slice is a new free-to-play multi-player iPad-only party game that has you using your iPad as a sword, slicing and dicing your way through a bunch of wacky objects. You’ll collect new swords, chase high scores and crazy combos, and compete with your friends in real time and online.

You can even play in single-player mode, but where’s the fun in that?

Check out the video below for a taste of the sword-swinging action.

Sell the house. Sell the car. Sell the kids. Take every penny you own and invest it in Apple stock, because the company is about to go gangbusters.

The big news from yesterday’s earth-shattering earnings call is that this is a company that is extremely confident about its financial future.

Apple has come under fire recently for not innovating. You’ve heard the whining: Apple’s lost its mojo. There have been some nice updates to existing products, but Apple’s done nothing lately to realign the universe. It’s been four long years since it’s last biggie — the original iPad. Where’s the latest product that reshapes the modern world?

To many observers, it looks like the company has been treading water in the two-and-a-half years since Steve Jobs’ death. Android is seating Apple’s lunch, and Apple’s got nowhere to go but down. Apple’s over.

But that narrative is nonsense. Wednesday’s earnings call — and the gobsmacking 7-to-1 stock split — clearly telegraphs that Apple’s executives have something huge up their sleeves. Maybe a couple of things. Maybe a lot of things.

If you’ve been paying close attention to the news and rumors, 2014 looks like it’s shaping up to be Apple’s biggest year in decades.

A new video uses an case out of China to show how a “speculative” iPhone 6 with a 4.7-inch display would measure up against the iPhone 5s, Nexus 5, and Galaxy Note 3. But how reliable is a leaked case, anyway?