News - page 2076

More signs today that the pad may be overtaking paper as the preferred way readers get their literary fix. According to a survey by iSuppli, e-books will grow at an annual rate of more than 40 percent between 2010 and 2014. That’s a marked difference over printed books, which the survey predicts will fall five percent during the same timespan.

Traditional readers of print books may find the results “frightening,” says analyst Steve Mather. Total book revenue by U.S. publishers “will fall to $22.7 billion in 2014, down from $25 billion in 2010,” according to the survey.

Talk about unhealthy communication: a hospital uses GE call systems for patients, Philips Emergin as an electronic interface for notifications, Cisco wireless to connect communications devices within the hospital and Siemens for its main phone system.

Enter an iPhone pilot program for nurses, which helps them monitor patients and communicate with each other quickly across all of those platforms.

Lest it be construed that they were afraid to go head-to-head with Apple on domestic shores, Samsung has just filed suit against Cupetino in United States federal court, claiming that Apple is infringing upon ten of their patents concerning “fundamental innovations that increase mobile device reliability, efficiency and quality, and improve user interface in mobile handsets and other products.”

An aging line of smartphones coupled with shaken credibility led to Research in Motion shares falling 13 percent Friday morning. The slide was prompted by RIM Thursday cutting its shipment and sales forecast amid heated competition by Apple and Google’s Android.

“This further damages already low credibility, making them the ‘poster boy’ for a show-men story from here,” RBC Capital Markets’ analyst Mike Abramsky tells Bloomberg. RIM announced BlackBerry shipments would likely reach the low side of its previously-forecasted 13.5 million to 14.5 million units. Likewise, quarterly sales would be “slightly below” its earlier projection of $5.2 billion to $5.6 billion.

The iPad as well as older cousin the iPod Touch have been adopted in schools like they were the next no. 2 pencils.

We’ve been following the roll-out in schools as well as the on-going woes that parents are having with in-app purchases – so a story about schools waiting to see how the lawsuit brought against Apple caught our attention.

As we move into the touch computing era and our fingers again become the primary pointing device, it’s interesting to look back at the beginnings of earlier forms computer control. Dan Knight has posted a nice retrospective of the first few decades of mouse design over at Low End Mac:

The first computer mouse was carved from a block of wood and used two wheels to track its motion. The first commercial mouse was the Telefunken Rollkugel, an accessory for Telefunken’s computers that replaced the wheels in Engelbart’s design with a ball, making it essentially an inverted trackball.

Early mice started out with more buttons than later models – first three, then two, then whittled down to a single button with the Apple Lisa and Macintosh. It’s inverted cousin, the trackball, had a similarly downward growth trend over time:

…the first trackball used a 5″ Canadian five-pin bowling ball. The trackball first came to popularity with Missile Command, an Atari arcade game introduced in 1980 that used a 4″ ball.

For more see the full story at Low End Mac: Mouse Design 1963-1983

Woe be the PC maker. That seems to be the message coming from a number of analysts, slashing expectations in the face of growing tablet demand. The latest to adopt shrinking expectations is Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty. Huberty cut her PC growth estimates for 2011 to two percent, down from seven percent. Tablets will cut 29 percent of PC demand, she estimates.

Acer, maker of many low-cost netbook PCs, could be the hardest hit. According to IDC, the PC maker’s first quarter 2011 U.S. shipments fell 42 percent, compared to the same period in 2010. Dell, who Huberty says faces the “greatest risk” due to falling commercial demand and rising supply costs, saw first-quarter growth fall 11.8 percent.

There are plenty of accessories for the iPhone that can enhance our experience with the device, such as the huge variety of musical docking stations, fancy protective cases with built-in bluetooth keyboards, in-car chargers, stylus pens, the new Square credit card reader, and even guitar connection kits.

But what about the accessories that are yet to be invented? Here’s a list of 8 accessories that we wish were real, including an electric shaver attachment, a laser pointer and smudge-proof screen spray:

TV Tuner

There might be applications in the App Store that allow you to catch up with your favorite TV shows, such as Netflix and Hulu, but there aren’t many ways to watch live TV on our iPhones. The iPhone TV Tuner (pictured above) would allow us to do just that, with no data connection required.

Apple has surpassed Microsoft in quarterly profits for the first time ever, bagging $760 million dollars more during the first calendar quarter of 2011. Microsoft announced today that its net profit for the past quarter – the company’s third fiscal quarter – is $5.23 billion. Last week, Apple reported profits of $5.99 billion over the same period, which is its second fiscal quarter of 2011.

Six months ago, Apple’s excellent performance in recent years was highlighted when the Cupertino company surpassed Microsoft in quarterly revenue for the first time in nearly 15 years. Despite this, Microsoft continued to hold Apple off when it came to profits, largely due to the high profit margins it achieves with its software business.

Apple’s latest accomplishment is now the third time the company has trumped Microsoft over the past year. In May of 2010, Apple first surpassed Microsoft in market capitalization, then went on to surpass Microsoft in quarterly revenue in October, and has now surpassed Microsoft in quarterly profits.

Apple’s market cap is now nearly $100 billion higher than Microsoft’s. It’s no wonder Apple has enough cash reserves to keep the company going until 2018, without selling another single product.

[via MacRumors]

A new patent discovered by Patently Apple reveals that Apple is working on its own fitness center application for the iPhone.

The patent titled “Systems and Methods for Accessing Personalized Fitness Services Using a Portable Electronic Device” was originally filed in October, 2009, and describes an app that can benefit its users by helping them with their diet; suggesting when they should go to the gym and what exercises they should do; and allowing them to compete with friends and be ranked on their performance.

Services are broken down into four categories: New Customers, Getting There, In the Gym, and Post Workout; which will help users find their nearest fitness center and motivate them to actively attend, encourage them to workout and suggest different exercises, and provide post-workout motivation and fitness tracking features.

As we are all well aware by now, yesterday saw the launch of the white iPhone 4 in 29 countries around the world. What you may not be aware of, however, is that the white iPhone is ever so slightly thicker than the black model, as discovered by some early adopters of the device.

A MacRumors reader was one of the first to discover the difference, and emailed the site to let them know:

Just picked up the white iPhone 4 and realized it doesn’t fit into my Incase slider case. It appears that Apple has increased the size of the plastic that borders the glass on both sides by about 1mm

Ryan Cash of Marketcircle also discovered the difference, but it didn’t take an ill-fitting case for him to realize: Cash claims to have noticed simply by picking the device up:

A colleague of mine just picked up a 16 GB iPhone 4 in white. I was a bit surprised when I picked it up off his desk (I had my black 32 GB in my other hand at the same time) – it immediately felt thicker. We placed them side-by-side on his desk, and sure enough, the white iPhone was a hair thicker.

It has been a long 10 months, but the long-awaited white-colored iPhone 4 is shipping and for sale today in the US and 28 other countries. Therefore, you would expect that people would be excited to get their hands on one of these babies, but that doesn’t seem to be the case for Apple Stores in the US.

The stores I checked in the Houston, Texas area didn’t have lines forming — like you would normally expect for a product launch. China on the other hand was a completely different story as long lines were reported there.

Seeing the latest installment of the Fast & Furious franchise, Fast Five, this weekend? You may want to check Fandango’s iPad app before you try to book your tickets.

A feature called “The Pulse” shows realtime ticket sales (more or less), indicating what movies are going to be hot over the weekend — and which screens will be empty.

Bad news for Fast Five fans: It looks like the movie, which opens on Friday, is going to be sold out. It’s already shaping up to be the biggest pre-sold movie of the year to date, says Fandango’s Harry Medved, who shows us how The Pulse works:

For more fun, see The Onion: Today Now! Interviews The 5-Year-Old Screenwriter Of “Fast Five”

Here’s a peek at Al Gore’s new book, “Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis,” which has been turned into a very cool interactive iPad app.

The former vice president’s book features text, images, interactive infographics, documentary video and audio commentary.

It looks like a great, immersive experience (and probably pretty scary, given the subject matter) — the climate change equivalent of the beautiful The Elements app.

Check it out:

The app ($4.99 on the App Store) was designed by Push Pop Press, a San Francisco startup by a pair of ex-Apple engineers, including Mike Matas, who helped design Delicious Monster. Push Pop Press is working on a Mac desktop application to create similar eBooks, which will be “very affordable” when it eventually ships. Reporter Brian Chen has more detail at Wired.com: Gore, Ex-Apple Engineers Team Up to Blow Up the Book

Here’s another video showing Gore’s app/book in more detail:

We start the day with two MacBooks and the latest iPod nano. First up is a 1.4GHz MacBook Air laptop with a 12-inch screen for $879. Next is an 8GB current-generation iPod nano for $109. Finally, ExperCom offers a 2.4GHz MacBook Pro with 13-inch screen for $1,049.

Along the way, we also check out a quad-core i7-based MacBook Pro bundled with AppleCare, plus screen protectors for your iPhone 4 or iPad, as well as iLife software for your Mac. As usual, details on these and many other items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

This slinky little number is the Sinjimorou Sync Stand, a low-cost stand for iDevices of various shapes and sizes.

While Google’s Android Marketplace in the past often elicited giggles and guffaws when compared to Apple’s App Store, the Android app alternative needs to be taken more seriously. The Android Marketplace will catch up with Apple’s 350,000 iOS applications in July.

“Approximately five months from now Google’s Android Market will be the largest store in terms of number of applications followed by the Apple App Store for iPhone and iPad,” market research firm Distimo announced Thursday. The researchers based their assumption on the past three months of app store activity and warned volume “could easily accelerate or slow down.”

In our last post announcing the availability of the white iPhone 4 on Apple’s web site, we asked who would buy a new iPhone on a two year contract ten months into the lifecycle of the current model.

Hey, why not ask the people in this huge line for the iPhone 4 outside of the Beijing Apple Store?

“New things are always fashionable.” said 19-year old high school student Chen Zhi. “I think girls always like products that are white in color.”

Berry Li, a 22-year old of indeterminate profession, agrees: ““White is brighter. The color makes you feel young.”

In other words: to pick up girls and to fight off the hideous ravages of time. Why will you be buying a white iPhone 4? Give us your examples of magical thinking in the comments!

What a difference a letter makes: change “smuggle” to “snuggle” and the game about taking clandestine immigrants across the border becomes…a game about cuddly creatures escaping the wilderness for the comfort of a zoo, where they are provided plenty of food, shelter and “state of the art healthcare.”

The developers of  Smuggle Truck changed the name and graphics to Snuggle Truck to gain Apple approval for sale in iTunes.

Remember all the excitement leading up to Apple introducing the iPhone 4 for CDMA networks, such as Verizon? Well, just as Christmas Eve tension leads to Boxing Day blahs, so goes demand for the CDMA iPhone. A new report suggests the Cupertino, Calif. company has cut in half its orders for the CDMA iPhone 4 this year.

Pegatron, which was expected to ship 10 million CDMA iPhone 4s in 2011, now may only make half that number. “Volume is estimated to drop to only five million units,” a Taiwan-based industry publication wrote Thursday, citing “upstream component makers.”

After a ten month delay officially blamed on needing to put “more UV protection” into the mix (and unofficially blamed on light leaking onto the camera sensor), the mythical white iPhone 4 is here.

It’s available now on Apple’s official site in both AT&T and Verizon flavors, but be warned: there’s a 3-5 business day ship time, and that number’s probably only going to go up. If you want one today, go to a store.

The best comment on the white iPhone 4 I’ve seen today comes courtesy of Twitter’s AmyJane, who writes: “Got white iPhone email from Apple. Thought, “What kind of ass buys a new iPhone now?” Exactly 10s later I dropped and shattered my iPhone.”

AT&T’s issued its second warning to jailbreak tetherers: either sign up for their official Personal Hotspot tethering plan, which costs $45 for 4GB, or AT&T will upgrade your mobile data plan for you.

Between last year’s arterial spray of unreleased Apple products leaking in Vietnam and the surplus of presciently iPad 2 cases popping up in Asia months before Apple unveiled the second-gen tablet, it’s been pretty clear for awhile that Foxconn needed to get its house in order. They had some pretty bad leaks, and given Apple’s notorious secrecy concerning future products, heads were bound to roll.

Now they have. Digitimes is reporting that three Foxconn employees have been arrested for leaking the iPad 2 design weeks (editor’s not: weeks? Try months) before apple’s official announcement.

In a recent study by National Geographic co-sponsored by Nintendo Power magazine, it was found that the only people on Earth who have never heard of that strange, mushroom-gobbling, Koopa-smashing plumber, Mario, are the natives of certain Papua New Guinea aboriginal tribes. So I guess we know where Apple is outsourcing the App Store review process: a shameless rip-off of Super Mario Bros, using Nintendo’s trademarked assets, has hit the hit the iOS App Store.

If the PC industry was waiting for a reason to embrace the tablet, they need only talk to the folks at Canalys. The research firm – the first to view tablets as PCs – said Thursday PC sales experienced 187.9 percent year-over-year growth when the iPad was lumped in with sales.

Apple was displaced by Dell from the No. 3 spot it held during the last quarter of 2010 by just a measly 1.5 million units. However, the Cupertino, Calif.-based tech giant shipped 74 percent of the 6.4 million tablets sold during the first quarter, the research firm announced.