News - page 1844

Apple has always been considered the underdog of the PC industry, although Mac sales have been on an upwards trend for the last few years while the rest of the industry continues to take a nosedive. The iPad is cannibalizing PC sales, and PC manufacturers are starting to concentrate on the smartphone and tablet space. The “PC” sales numbers are still not quite matching up with reality: the iPad is a personal computer, and Apple is crushing the competition.

With that in mind, research firm Gartner has released its PC shipments report for the first quarter of 2012. According to the report, Apple sits as the third largest PC maker in the U.S.. And the iPad? Well, no one can touch the iPad.

It’s been some time since we’ve seen an update to the popular productivity app Springpad, and for good reason. After fishing through months of feedback from over 3 million users, it appears the Springpad team has been hard at work improving their “Smart Notebooks,” and readying the release of their new and improved Smartpad 3.0. Released today, Springpad for Android and iOS features a complete redesign, with a clean UI and a plethora of new functions.

Remember the Mac 128K prototype with the 5.25-inch ‘Twiggy’ drive? Our own Adam Rosen showed you the prototype in detail several months ago, and a model has now surfaced on eBay. The cost to own this piece of Apple history? $100,000. What’s even more interesting about this item is the seller. Looks like Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak might be cleaning out his closet.

Apple recently responded to the Flashback trojan that has reportedly infected at least 600,000 Macs. The Cupertino company said that it is working on an antivirus tool to detect and remove Flashback from infected computers. Another tool called FlashBackChecker can check to see if you’re infected right now.

Russian firm Kaspersky Lab has released a free Mac antivirus tool to not only discover, but also delete Flashback from your Mac.

When Apple first debuted the new 1080p Apple TV in March, they said they’d brought their set-top box up to spec with the rest of the industry by including what they called a “single-core variant” of the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S’s A5 processor.

But how is it an A5 processor if only has one core? The answer is that technically, the A5 inside the Apple TV is still a dual-core chip, but one of them’s a dud.

One of the big discussions emerging around BYOD programs and the expanding use of mobile technologies like the iPhone and iPad is whether it’s a better approach to manage the device itself or simply the business data that’s on it. There are benefits and drawbacks to each approach and they aren’t mutually exclusive – IT can manage and lock down a device as well as create a secure sandbox on it to hold corporate data.

The one thing that both approaches have in common, however, is that they require some form of on-device solution (an agent for device management or an app/suite for information management). Even when an iOS device is deployed without a management agent, configuration data or profiles are still loaded on the device itself.

Mobilisafe is a new mobile management company (their flagship product is still in beta) that is taking a novel approach and developing a mobile management solution that don’t load anything onto mobile devices themselves.

Apple’s App Store approval process is a mysterious thing. Sometimes the Cupertino overlords can be incredibly stringent about the guidelines an app has to adhere to in order to be approved for sale onthe App Store, and other times we’re all left scratching our heads wondering how on earth an app like this made it through.

Siri knockoffs are nothing new, of course. In fact, they’ve been a pretty common occurrence in the iOS App Store ever since Apple unveiled the digital assistant alongside the iPhone 4S last October. We’ve seen apps like Evi that piggyback off Siri’s success, but a relatively new app has seen incredible success by riding Siri’s coattails all the way to the top of the App Store charts.

The best part? Not only does it look heavily — ahem — inspired by Siri, even the developer doesn’t know how it got approved.

Like a lot of people, I greeted the news that Apple was on the verge of scheduling a press conference for the inevitable third-gen model by scouring the web to discover who would pay me the most for my gently used first-generation iPad.

After poking around a bit, I selected NextWorth, which had a good reputation on various sites (including ours) and was offering $170 for my WiFi 16GB iPad, a solid $30 higher than anyone else. I printed the prepaid UPS label and shipped it off, waiting for the deposit to my PayPal account on the other side.

So imagine my surprise when I received an e-mail two weeks later offering just $70 — effectively the value of the battery and internal electronics alone. Needless to say, I was pissed off. As it turns out, I had good reason to be. Quite ironically, I was getting shorted on my iPad because of a software glitch. As were many others like me.

Google’s beautiful magazine-esque news reader has received its first major update today. The update takes care of a slew of issues but most importantly, it takes care of the painfully slow syncing. Users will now have instant online sync as well as sync speeds 7x faster than the previous version. Other improvements to the app include:

There’s been a lot of news stories this year about iPhone and iPad use by U.S. federal agencies. Most of those stories have been reports of agencies ditching BlackBerries for iPhones and/or iPads.

This week’s news from the FAA is different in that the FAA already has iPads in the hands of employees and the agency is planning to expand their user dramatically – to the point where employees will be offered a choice between an iPad and a laptop as their mobile computing device.

AT&T customers living in St. Louis have just had their LTE jetpacks filled and should be able to start flying through downloads and web pages — not to mention battery life. Along with St. Louis, Staten Island, NY was added to the AT&T LTE club with 4G LTE being expanded to the 5 boroughs. AT&T is certainly playing LTE catch up and while the rollout may seem like it’s running at a turtle’s pace, AT&T has already pushed out LTE to five of the twelve promised markets. Those remaining include:

Apple’s iPhone and iPad docks suck. They look great, but they also grab onto your phone and won’t let go, they don’t fit if you use a case and they don’t do anything but charge the phone (yes, you can plug it into a stereo, but who does that?) The LIL KIKR, on the other hand, looks awesome, sounds awesome, and is made from tough, long-lasting aluminum.

Looks like Big Red is out for blood after tremendous consumer backlash put the kibosh on their plans to charge customers a $2 “convenience fee” to pay their bill. We would have been better off surrendering our $2 because now Verizon is pulling the ol’ “upgrade fee out of a hat” trick. That’s right, starting April 22, Verizon customers can expect to pay $30 for the privilege of purchasing a new device while signing over their souls for the next two years.

Quickoffice Pro HD is one of the App Store’s best third-party office suites, and until Microsoft Office hits the iPad, it’s the best way to view and edit Word and Excel documents on the go. Its latest update adds Powerpoint editing to that, in addition to native email support, an enhanced visual interface, and more.

Last week I took a brief look at how managing a handful of Macs differs from managing dozens or hundreds or even thousands of Macs. Some readers asked how big companies like Apple, Google, Viacom, or IBM actually go about managing large numbers of Macs – both in terms of the tools they use and in terms of how their IT processes differ from supporting Macs in small businesses.

I can’t speak for how Apple manages the Macs of its thousands of employees, but I have worked with several large companies as a Mac IT professional – along with a number of schools and colleges, government agencies, and small businesses. Here’s a look at the tools and processes that they use to configure, deploy, and manage Macs on a grand scale.

Brazil’s Jundiai city council has paid tribute to Apple’s late co-founder and former CEO by naming one of its streets Steve Jobs Avenue. The council actually announced that it would commemorate Steve with a street a day after his passing last year, but city officials only confirmed the name this week.

Unreal. This phony iPhone 4S found in Turkey looks and feels exactly like the real thing up until you turn it on… and even then, if you weren’t already familiar with what an iPhone’s low battery warning looks like, you might mistake it for the real thing. This is why you should either buy your gadgets from an Apple Store, or test them extensively before buying.

It’s long been rumored that the Department of Justice would file an antitrust suit against Apple for e-book price fixing, but now it’s happening, as the United States DoJ just filed such a suit against Apple, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Penguin.

At issue here is Apple’s attempt to overthrow Amazon’s hegemony on e-book selling by collaborating with publishers ahead of the iBookstore launch to standardize how much is charged for e-books, not just through Apple, but through Amazon as well.

Apple’s new iPad is still selling like hot cakes, and new customers continue to face a 1-2-week shipping delay when purchasing through the Apple online store. But the company is reportedly struggling to meet demand with production constrained by Retina display supply and the recent cuts to factory worker overtime at Foxconn.

Renowned developer Steven Troughton-Smith has released the iPad version of his popular Speed iPhone app. Thanks to the iPad’s larger 9.7-inch display and Retina resolution, Speed for iPad is the perfect GPS for your automobile. Not only does Speed track your location on a map, but the app tells you how fast you’re going and the distance you’ve traveled.

Apple retail stores in London have begun stocking international parts ahead of this summer’s Olympic Games as the company prepares for an “onslaught” of international journalists seeking repairs. Many of the journalists covering the event, which kicks off on July 27, are expected to be carrying Apple notebooks, so international keyboards are expected to be high in demand.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pA810ce4eLM

After teasing the game way back in October, Criterion will finally release Burnout Crash! for iOS tomorrow, April 12. The top-down racer will be Criterion’s first mobile game, and it’s already shaping up to be a huge hit. Even David Hasselhoff loves it, as you can see from the clip above.

Apple’s online store just went down, and it looks like the Cupertino company has switched out the yellow sticky note of old for a cleaner, fresher look. It’s very simplistic and contains plenty of linen, like the rest of Apple’s recent UI designs.

We’re fans of the new “We’ll be back” design. What do you think?

(The store is probably just down for maintenance, but we’ll let you know if anything interesting pops up.)

Looks like Instagram’s billion dollar deal with the devil didn’t land it in hot enough water after all. Following widespread concerns regarding Instagram’s future from what was apparently a vocal minority, the popular photography app has soared to the top of the App Store.

For the first time in the app’s 16 months on the App Store, Instagram reigns as the most popular free app for the iPhone. Take that, haters.

Ah, the wondrous findings of random polls. This one appears to favor my personal favorite company and therefore I won’t argue against it. The rest of you are free to sound off in the comments after reading the favorable findings of this ABC News/Washington Post poll. A random national sample of 1,007 adults were asked whether or not they had a favorable or unfavorable impression of the following four tech companies: Google, Apple, Facebook, and Twitter.