News - page 2076

I live on this long, steep hill that some days just feels so infinite and Sisyphean that I fear I might be the character of some inexplicably forgotten short story by Jorge Luis Borges. On particularly hot summer days, I’ll sometimes muse to myself, halfway up this interminable hill, that walking really is for suckers, and I should just lop off these wimpy locomotive appendages and treat myself to some of those robo-legs I’ve had my eye on for so long.

Apple doesn’t make robot-legs, unfortunately. What they do make are MacBooks that come with SSD drives… and to me, investing in one was pretty much the direct equivalent of having my computer’s old weak, broken legs cut off and some rocket-powered karate kickers transplanted in their place. You simply will not believe how fast computing can be with an SSD, or how slow your current “fast” computing experience is without one.

Need more proof than my say so? MacWorld tested a few MacBook Pros — a couple with SSDs, a couple identically specced without — and found notable speed improvements.

Given its execrable reception and terrible performance, you’d expect an RIM BlackBerry Playbook — viscera spilled across a white room table — to contain nothing but 400 grams of dirty sand and several old marbles and rusty jacks.

But no! The boys over at iFixIt split the PlayBook open, and found a circuit board, a touch panel and some big batteries inside. Who’d a thunk?

I don’t know about you, but that’s pretty troubling. It was hard enough to accept the PlayBook’s woeful deficiencies (including features as simple as native email, contacts or calendar) under the assumption that it had no silicon at all inside, and was, in fact, some sort of glorified ant farm sold at a premium to unsuspecting suckers. That there’s actual hardware inside makes its deficiencies inexcusable, especially when that hardware is virtually identical to that of the iPad 2.

One thing I love about tablet breakdowns is the way they just casually reveal exactly which technology has become super-efficient, and which technology still has a long way to go. That tablets like the PlayBook and iPad 2 are essentially just huge batteries with a single tiny, index-card sized circuit board attach really show you how far CPUs have come in thirty years… and how much battery technology still has to go.

The App Store has spawned some pretty good looking applications for iOS devices; apps for iPhone and iPad are largely renowned for their simplicity and alluring design. With that said, you’d think iOS applications that have an Android sibling – from the same developer – would be just as pretty, right? Wrong.

Here’s a gallery of screenshots that compares iOS apps with their Android versions and highlights some of the differences:

Image editing application Acorn has been updated to version 3, and now comes with a boatload of new features for you to play with.

Plans to invest in a Sharp production facility have been reportedly dropped by Apple, with the company choosing instead to use Toshiba as the sole supplier of liquid crystal displays used in the iPhone.

A report in Japanese newspaper Nikkan Kogyu Shimbun claims that “Sharp was no longer a candidate for Apple’s investment,” and that the company wishes to avoid placing full dependancy on one country for the production of iPhone LCDs. It is believed the Tohoku area earthquake – which could have effected component production – may have persuaded Apple to think twice about its investment in two suppliers located in Japan.

Sharp has since issued a public statement denying the rumors, insisting that the report “contradicts the facts,” and requesting the paper retracts its report. If the rumors are true, however, it would be a substantial loss to Sharp.

Three people with knowledge of Apple’s supply chain have revealed that the iPhone 5 will feature a faster processor and will begin shipping in September, according to a new Reuters report. The device will look similar to the iPhone 4 and will go into production around July/August.

The rather short report doesn’t really give us any juicy details, and only ties in with previous rumors that have already suggested the next-generation iPhone will feature a faster processor, and will ship before the end of 2011.

Other reports have speculated the device will boast an 8-megapixel camera, increased storage options, a dual-mode wireless chip to support both CDMA and GSM carriers, and will be capable of shooting 1080p video. Some have also claimed the device will feature an aluminum rear casing, similar to that of the iPod touch.

The faster processor will inevitably be Apple’s new dual-core A5 chip which features in the iPad 2.

If you’re still taking time out of your day to call every Apple reseller in your area in the hope of finding that iPad 2 you’re after, the new FindOne app for iPhone could save you a lot of time and effort.

You select which model of the iPad 2 you want and FindOne checks the inventory of every Target and Walmart store in your vicinity to see if they have your chosen device in stock.

As a man who leaves as many discarded pens as his wake as a molting peacock after a spontaneous squid attack, one of my many problems with styluses for iOS devices is where to put them when you’re not using them. Unless I can physically attach the stylus to my iPhone or iPad itself, it’s gone.

When the iPad 2 came along with its Smart Cover in tow, I thought I had the answer. The Pogo Stylus has a clip to attach to shirt pockets and the like, and I thought it could fairly easily slip on the Smart Cover itself. In fact, this does work, but it pushes the Smart Cover away from the iPad 2 display just enough for the detritus at the bottom of my bag — a fragrant snuff made up of tobacco detritus, cookie crumbs and Cheetos dust — to siphon its way through the gap and onto the screen. Blech.

Here’s a smart alternative, though. Applydea (short for Apply the Idea, and not pronounced “Apple Idea” or “App Lydia”) designed a very clever aluminum stylus called the Maglus, which comes replete with magnets that allow you to stick the stylus directly to the Smart Cover or iPad 2 spine.

Earlier today, we linked former Engadget editor Nilay Patel’s incredible breakdown of the Apple vs. Samsung lawsuit, largely to discuss Apple’s sales numbers for iPod Touches and iPads and the like.

We thought, though, that Patel’s most compelling argument that Apple was in the right was worth its own post: check out the “borrowing” Samsung did from iOS for their TouchWiz homescreen icons.

We’d realized, of course, that Samsung’s icons had been “inspired” by Apple, but putting them side-by-side really just makes the theft look totally shameless. How does a company like Samsung think it’s cool to openly rip-off one of its biggest customers like that? I’m shocked it took Apple this long to sue.

Steve Jobs isn’t the kind of guy who likes it when smartass no-goodniks pretend to be him. Take it from me, a man who once spent the better part of six months in traction after donning a turtleneck and trying to bluster my way past security at Apple’s Corporate HQ by loudly squealing “My name is Steve Jobs!” in my best Truman Capote voice.

There’s at least one man out there, though, who has pretended to be Steve Jobs and not found his teeth grinning out of the opposite orifice. That man is Noah Wyle, aka that dreamy Dr. Carter from E.R., who played Steve Jobs in the famous 1999 biopic Pirates of SIlicon Valley.

So says Paul Allen, at least. He’s the co-founder of Microsoft, a notorious patent troll and the author of the new biography Idea Man. He says that Noah Wyle portrayed Jobs as a “mean-spirited jerk.” Far from being offended, Jobs seemingly approved, saying that Wyle did “a fantastic job.” Or should we say… fantastic Jobs. Groan, cymbal crash, sound of rotten tomatoes pummeling human flesh.

Apple critics are accusing the company of ripping off Samsung, not the other way around. They say the Samsung F700, first shown at Cebit in 2006 and released in February 2007, is the inspiration for the iPhone, first shown at Macworld 2007 and released in June that year. LOL @ Apple: Suing someone you stole the design from to begin with.

UPDATE: It looks like the F700 was actually first announced in February 2007 — a month after Steve Jobs debuted the iPhone — and was released in December 2007, months after the iPhone’s debut. Worse, it was greeted with accusations of being a complete iPhone ripoff!

What do you think? Did Apple copy the iPhone from Samsung?

[polldaddy poll=4942753]

If possession of any one app could ever be considered an instant ticket to membership in the Cult of Mac, this is it. Mactracker has been around since early 2001, and we’ve talked about it before on our site (Giles Turnbull thought it was so fantastic he included it in his list of 50 Mac Essnetials); but last week a newly-updated version hit the Mac App Store — which is enough to earn it a spot as today’s Daily Freebie.

The app lists painstakingly complete data on every Mac product ever made in an elegant, searchable, easy-to-use interface. The new update even brings with it the ability to track your Macs’ serial numbers, service work performed, etc.

The app is free, but we think a little donation at the app’s website (which is where those who’re allergic to the App Store can also download the app directly) is money well spent.

Are you a student teetering on the brink of an abyss of poverty some might describe as utterly Dostoevskyan? Barely enough coins in your pockets to buy tonight’s dinner — a single can of brine-soaked beans — and a sufficient volume of cheap lard trimming candles to light your midnight studies and pre-dawn app programming exercises, let alone the $1599 to attend this year’s WWDC? No need to hit your land lady with an axe handle for her hidden gold cache. Apple’s willing to give you a scholarship to attend WWDC in June at San Francisco.

According to Apple, to apply, you must be “at least 18 years of age, currently enrolled part-time or full-time at a college or university, and either an iOS Developer University Program member, Mac Developer Program member, or ADC Student member as of August 1, 2010 or later, and have identified yourself as a “Student” in your developer profile.”

About the only provision Apple’s making besides the academic ones is that applicants be talented, as they “will be judged on technical ability, creativity of ideas expressed in products or projects, prior WWDC attendance, technical and work experience.” No morons, in other wosrds.

Scholarship tickets will be passed out by May 3rd, with application due by April 26th. There will be 150 scholarship winners in all. Get on it there, Raskalnikov.

This is pretty neat. Deskscribble for the Mac is a new app that allows you to use your mouse, trackpad or Wacom tablet to deface, tag, scribble upon or vandalize anything you see on your Mac’s screen.

For example, if you were reading this post with Deskscribble open, you could easily vandalize my author bio photo… say, by blackening out one of my teeth, or drawing visible oscillations meant to denote pungent stench waves that are emanating from my body, or even just by drawing a cigarette poking out of the beak of the little budgerigar sitting on my shoulder.

Defacing the bio photos of Cult of Mac authors you find obnoxious is just the tip of the iceberg of Deskscribble’s functionality, though. You can also use it to highlight sentences in web pages you want to remember for later, circle interesting Craigslist ads, make notes to yourself atop of open windows, etc.

Pretty neat, although best with a tablet. If you’re interested in Deskscribble, it can be purchased for just $9.99 in the Mac App Store.

[via MacStories]

Apple’s usually pretty good about crowing about the number of devices it’s managed to sell to consumers… at least when they’re selling well. Yet Cupertino has kept iPod Touch numbers surprisingly close to its breast since the plucky touch PMP debuted in 2007.

Not that Apple hasn’t released numbers at all, just that they generally dump all iPod numbers into one catch-all “iPod” category. No one’s ever really believed this was because the Touch was a shameful dud — clearly it’s a hot seller — but if you ever wanted to know exactly how many iPod Touches were floating out there in the wild, just waiting to beam out their secret personality suppression fields once Steve Jobs finally gets around to thumbing that “Global Domination” button in his office… well, you had to guesstimate.

No longer. One interesting little perk of Apple’s lawsuit against Samsung is that we finally know how many iPod Touches have been sold: 60 million since it launched in September 2007.

As one of the many smelly long-hairs who once set his American eyes upon the distant, wild lands of Europe and decided to explore it equipped with nothing but a festering ruck sack, a worn down copy of Don McLean’s American Pie (10 minute version) and a slim black journal filled with blank verse that would have made even late-career Jack Kerouac barf, I know the crawl opening every virgin Moleskine notebook by heart.

“The Moleskine notebook is the heir and successor to the legendary notebook used by artists and thinkers over the past two centuries: among them Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and Bruce Chatwin,” it reads.

Note that Moleskine does not claim to be the same company behind those notebooks. It isn’t, and in fact, the story of how Italian notebook makers Modo & Modo took one of their regular, unassuming notebooks and turned it into a multimillion dollar busines and the hipster’s preferred analogue writing companion is pretty fascinating.

In truth, there’s not really such a thing as a Moleskine notebook. Picasso and Chatwin certainly didn’t use one. A Moleskine notebook is essentially just a notebook with an impeccably composed page of marketing copy inserted before the first leaf.

So here’s the question: if Moleskine is just some copy rattling on about Hemingway and van Gogh attached to something that can take notes, is a note-taking iPad app which opens up for the first time to display that same copy just as much of a Moleskine notebook as the one you might carry around in your back pocket?

Moleskine seems ready to find out with their new iOS app. The bad news? It’s just awful. The good news? It’s free, unlike a “real” Moleskine, whatever that is.

The blogosphere is seething today with theories about why Apple is suing Samsung, one of its key suppliers and partners.

It’s been suggested that Apple has little interest and chance of winning a “look and feel” lawsuit, otherwise known as “trade dress.” It’s a tactical move, a way to win concessions from either Samsung or Google. Silicon Alley Insider, for example, says it’s to force Google to charge hardware makers for Android, which is currently free.

But the real reason is this: Apple is pissed off with getting ripped off. And it has a good chance of winning, because it has won several trade dress lawsuits before.

Here’s a quick video of Project magazine’s panoramic cover for its latest issue.

The iPad-only magazine uses the iPad 2′s gyroscope to create a cover that moves through 360-degrees as you sweep the iPad around the room. It is available now from the App Store for $2.99.

More about the magazine here.

M.I.C. Gadget is no stranger to having their collective skulls smashed together by Cupertino’s lawyers with a Three Stooges-style acoustic cacophony of coconuts colliding, and I’m sure that’s what is going to happen here with the iHub: a third-party hub that not only looks like a little Apple TV sticking out of your USB port, but actually featuring the official Apple logo.

Trust be told, I actually kind of wish Apple made a USB hub like this. The little Apple logo lights up when the hub is plugged in, and the square Apple TV shape means that you never have to worry about your USB ports rubbing their male connectors shamefully together. Even the box is cute: it looks just like the iPod Nano box! Maybe Apple will make something like this for Thunderbolt.

$10 will get you one, if Apple doesn’t sue MIC Gadget into a juicy paste before you click the order button. [via Gadget Lab]

Since February, consumers who have wanted to buy an iPhone 4 have had a bit more choice when it comes to carriers than they once did, but even so, there’s still a healthy demand for the ability to unlock an iPhone to wirelessly handshake with any compatible carrier. International travelers, for example, might prefer to be able to easily slap a cheap foreign SIM card into their iPhones when traveling abroad as opposed to paying exorbitant roaming rates, while regular consumers who have run out their contract might like to be able to take their iPhones to another network.

Unfortunately, right now, the only way to accomplish this is either to convince AT&T to unlock your iPhone (good luck with that) or to unlock your device through a jailbreak. Apple could be preparing to make switching your iPhone from one carrier to another easier though, as a recent patent awarded to them details a method in which Apple could wirelessly and remotely reprogram iPhones to work on different carriers.

Not that I think we’ll see that system ever come into play, but wouldn’t that be nice: some mechanism to invoke the ability to actually use the phone you paid for on whatever network you want? Perchance to dream.

One of the reasons Apple’s competitors have had such a hard time manufacturing their own sub-$500 tablet is because Apple’s got a lock on most of the world’s available touch panel supply. Things aren’t going to get any easier for them: Apple has just added Chimei Innolux as a third supplier of touch panels for the iPad 2.

From a consumer perspective, hopefully this means more iPad 2s, which still remain constrained. How constrained? A month after launch and people are still camping overnight to get one. Like they were Phantom Menace tickets or something!

Everyone backup your iTunes library then light their iMac on fire and dramatically hurl it out of your window while blaring “God Save The Queen” from your iPad, because new iMacs are on their way!

Well, or so the theory goes. 9to5Mac reports that iMac supplies are becoming constrained. Since Apple’s Tim Cook is basically some sort of Cylon when it comes to having exactly enough stock on-hand to match demand, that’s as much an unmistakeable sign that new hardware is coming as the heavens rending in twain to make way for a seraphim riding a flaming rhinoceros would be for the Apocalypse, or at the very least, the day the PlayBook outsells the iPad.

What’s in store for the new iMacs? Apple’s new 10Gbps bi-directional I/O port, ThunderBolt, is a lock, and I expect we’ll see some blazing new Sandy Bridge chips as well.Either way, the last iMac refresh took place in July, so we’re about due.

The iOS App Store might be a walled garden, but that’s not to say that developers and publishers don’t have the elbow room to engage in some of the principals of capitalism, like cross-promotions. Just don’t be surprised if one day, Apple routs you out.

The latest example of Apple clamping down on developers for engaging in practices that they don’t quite think is critic is the crackdown on pay-to-install apps, which now appears to be in effect, with publisher TapJoy claiming that Apple is actively banning such apps from the App Store.

Back in March, a U.S. Magistrate ordered Steve Jobs to undergo limited questioning in relation to an antitrust lawsuit pressed against Apple by RealNetworks, who were shut out of iTunes when they figured out a way to wrap songs purchased via their Harmony software in a simulacrum of FairPlay DRM convincing enough to be played on 2004’s iPods.

Apparently, that limited questioning happened a few days ago between RealNetworks’ lawyer and the Apple CEO, who is currently on medical sick leave. Personally, I imagine that it consisted mostly of monosyllabic grunts intermixed with a series of contemptuous stares withering plucked from the physiogonomic vocabulary of some dandy Star Prince crash-landed upon Planet Feculon and forced to cavort with its natives. Either way, the transcript will doubtless be juicy.

We may never get to read it though. Apple has just asked a federal judge to dismiss the lawsuit. Just when it was getting good!

Wanna scare a PC maker? Pull out a tablet. It’s become common knowledge that the iPad and other tablet devices are going to eat the PC’s breakfast, but now a lengthy Wall Street report calls tablets “one of the most disruptive forces” for PCs this year. How disruptive? Try 21 million lost notebook sales – just this year.

But what about all of these Android-based tablets appearing? Surely Apple’s iPad can’t dominate for long, right? Apple likely will own 64 percent of the tablet market this year and 74 percent if the Android alternatives disappoint. “We believe the downside scenario for Android shipments is more likely at this point,” Goldman Sachs tells investors Tuesday.