News - page 2077

Fring – the popular video chat and VoIP application for iPhone and iPod touch – has just been updated to introduce group video calling with up to three other people. It’s the first application in the App Store to offer this feature, and it’s completely free.

To use Fring for video calling, you will obviously need a compatible device, such as the iPhone 4, the iPad 2, and the latest iPod touch. Fring is also available on compatible Android devices and supports cross-platform communication, so you can call and video chat between iOS and Android. The application works over 3G, 4G and Wi-Fi.

Fring uses a feature called ‘Dynamic Video Quality’ (DVC) that automatically and continuously adjusts your video call quality to match your connectivity; which its developers say provides you with the best audio and video quality possible.

If you’ve tried the new group video calling feature, let us know what it’s like in the comments.

While the vast majority of us gave up hope on the white iPhone 4 and just bought the black one instead, one analyst believes that the white device’s “mystique and scarcity value” could generate 1-1.5 million sales per quarter for Apple. Brian White, an analyst at Ticonderoga, believes the delay in the white iPhone’s release could drive sales.

Speaking to The San Jose Mercury News, White said:

The purchase of consumer electronic devices is not always a completely rational decision, and people buy Apple products for many different reasons, including status, aesthetics, functionality, quality and the ‘cool factor.’

In our view, this delay has created a certain mystique and scarcity value around the white iPhone 4 that we believe could drive incremental iPhone 4 purchases in the range of 1 million to 1.5 million units per quarter until the iPhone 5 potentially comes to market in September.

The white iPhone 4 finally went on sale today – 10 months after it was announced. Various manufacturing difficulties were blamed for its delay, and at times many speculated the device would never make it to market. A Cult of Mac poll yesterday revealed that only 12.41% of readers will buy the white iPhone, while 40.98% said they were now waiting for the next generation of the device.

[via MacLife]

Bob Mansfield is Apple’s Senior Vice President of hardware engineering, who earlier this week sold 99% of his shares in the company for $13.7 million, according to an SEC filing. Mansfield frequently trades his Apple stock; selling shares while they’re at their peak, then buying more as they fall with a 15% employee discount. His latest sale is his largest so far.

On Monday, Mansfield reportedly sold 38,863 of his Apple shares – leaving him with just 501 – each worth $351.89. Over the last three years, Mansfield has sold almost $58.5 million worth of investments, taking home $37.9 million after taxes.

Apple has reportedly purchased the iCloud.com domain for the new cloud-based storage service it is currently working on, paying $4.5 million to the previous owners who have now rebranded their service. Visitors to iCloud.com are currently redirected to the new service – now called CloudMe – but it is believed Apple will take over the domain when it’s ready.

The report comes from GigaOm, who cites a source familiar with the company:

My source, who is familiar with the company, says that Xcerion has sold the domain to Apple for about $4.5 million. Xcerion hasn’t responded to my queries as yet. At the time of writing, the Whois database showed Xcerion as the owner of iCloud.

MacRumors also received some information on the iCloud rebranding last week, but were unable to obtain enough information at the time to link the change to an Apple takeover.

Apple’s upcoming cloud-based storage service – also dubbed a ‘music locker’ – will purportedly be a solution for storing music and other content online which can then be streamed to internet connected devices, such as the iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad.

The most recent speculation has suggested that Apple is currently in the process of signing deals with all of the major music labels and getting the service ready for launch. An announcement is expected at WWDC in June.

A crash report received by iOS developer FutureTap reveals that Apple is currently field testing the next major release of its iOS firmware using third-party applications from the App Store. In a message posted to Twitter, FutureTap discloses a crash log from a device running iOS 5.0:

Just received the first iOS 5.0 crash report. MKUserLocationBreadCrumb sounds interesting.

FutureTap followed up the message with a screenshot (above) of the crash log, highlighting the “MKUserLocationBreadCrumb” API. MKUserLocation is part of the iOS MapKit Framework, which is used to find your device’s current location; while the “BreadCrumb” element is said to indicate a new tracking feature.

It’s possible the new feature has something to do with the new mapping technology that Apple revealed it was working on in a press release yesterday, however, this isn’t expected to appear as a finished product for another couple of years.

While there’s nothing major here, this crash report reveals – unsurprisingly – that Apple is readying its iOS 5 firmware for its announcement at WWDC in June. We will probably see its release alongside the fifth-generation iPhone – expected this fall.

[via AppleInsider]

To create buzz at the Seattle premiere of Mike Daisey’s excellent “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” the host theater threw a lookalike contest.

Maybe you had to be imbibing the complimentary Appletinis (har!) to appreciate it, but none of these guys, or the gal, who participated look much like Steve Jobs.

Note to self: a black turtleneck does not an icon make.

But you can still catch the play until May 22.

Via Geekwire

Car manufacturers are finally developing better ways to hook your iPhone into your car.

Check out this video demo showing how BMW is integrating the iPhone into car entertainment systems.

Patched in through BMW’s iDrive system, the iPhone can can be used to play music, web radio, or send updates and messages to Facebook and Twitter.

“This suite of technologies allows smartphone features — the things people really love on their smartphone — to be integrated in a safe, easy-to-use way in your BMW,” says BMW Technology Group senior engineer Rob Passaro in the video.

“The great thing about this is, as Apple updates new features on its iPod, we get it automatically. You don’t have to go to the dealership to get these functions in your car as soon as they are available.”

Check it out:

Steve Jobs and Larry Page have been invited to testify at the May 10 senate hearing on privacy and mobile telephones.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy extended the invitation, saying in a letter to the two that: “like many Americans, I read with deep concern recent press reports indicating that” the devices “collect, store and track user location data without the user’s consent.”

The white iPhone 4 is finally going to be released tomorrow after nearly a year of questions, speculation, and overall doubt. The real questions is, are you going to buy one? Please participate in the poll below. There are plenty of choices to choose from, so the results should be interesting!

[polldaddy poll=4980606]

Happy voting!

Those maverick statisticians over at Retrevo have put together one of their smartphone landscape studies, finding that most consumers feel that their smartphones are either obsolete or will soon be obsolete.

That’s sort of a no-duh claim at first, but when you actually look at the numbers, smartphone makers are actually making new and better smartphones faster than consumers can possibly buy them.

Look at that chart above: during the last year alone, Samsung released over 30 new smartphones, while HTC released over 20 new smartphones. If you purchased a Samsung or HTC phone even as recently as a few months ago, there’s a good chance it’s already behind the tech curve.

The notable exception here? Apple. Ignoring the slight hardware changes of the Verizon iPhone 4 and white iPhone 4, Apple’s only released two smartphones over the course of the last two years: the iPhone 3GS and the iPhone 4.

Better yet, Apple historically has only radically redesigned the iPhone every two years. That means if you buy an iPhone shortly after it comes out, you can be reasonably sure it won’t be totally obsolete before your contract is up. What are the argument for buying an Android smartphone again?

If you like to manage your photos on your iPad but prefer Lightroom’s rich feature set to iPhoto or Aperture, meet Photosmith, an app for the iPad that allows you to do all of your Lightroom organizing, rotating, sorting, metadata editing, labeling and keywording.

All you do is import your photos into Photosmith using your method of choice — Camera Connection Kit, EyeFi card, email, etc — then do all of the light editing and organizing on your iPad. When you get back to your main computer, a Photosmith plugin for Lightroom slurps the images into your library, ready for editing.

Don’t want to wait to get home to share? No problem. You can export your photos using Facebook, Flickr, Dropbox or e-mail.

This is a pretty cool program for the die-hard photographer working within Lightroom. On your next vacation, you can leave the laptop at home and just bring along your iPad for most of your on-the-go needs. $18. [via Gadget Lab]

The white iPhone 4 will be here shortly, and given Apple’s difficulty getting it to market, you could be forgiven for thinking that it is in some way unique compared to the regular iPhone 4 besides chromatically. But nope, it’s basically just an albino iPhone 4, albeit with a different proximity sensor design… and it’s just as prone (or not prone, depending on your personal feelings on the extent of the problem) to the fabled iPhone 4 “death grip” as its predecessor, as this video from Italian Apple blog iSpazio makes clear.

End result? White iPhone 4 drops a bar, but signal isn’t otherwise compromised. Someone alert Consumer Reports: they haven’t had a tizzy about the iPhone 4 lately.

Stuck on an ancient PPC Mac? That’s cool: they’re still great machines, and I have an old Powerbook I keep around as a guest laptop myself. The problem, unfortunately, is that while these machines are still quite excellent at lighter computing tasks, the thing they have primarily been good for — doing some light browsing and emailing — has become more and more difficult, thanks to the heady advances of HTML5 and CSS3, and the decision of browser makers to leave the PPC architecture behind.

Mozilla’s excellent Firefox browser decided with version 4 to drop support for the PPC architecture, but thankfully, there’s TenFourFox, which takes Firefox 4 and gets it up and running under OS X 10.4 and 10.5, with precisely tuned builds for each PPC processor.

What does this mean? Firefox 4’s advanced Javascript engine, WebM video support, HTML5 and CSS3 on your old Mac. That old Mac just might have some Facebooking in it left yet.

[via TUAW]

Gameloft is famous for using hugely popular games as the inspiration for some of its iOS releases. For example, Modern Combat 2 is not too dissimilar to Modern Warfare 2; N.O.V.A. bears some resemblance to Halo, and Starfront’s similarities to Starcraft are uncanny. As a keen iOS gamer, I like this. Though some game developers are beginning to offer iOS versions of their most popular releases, some still aren’t, and I admire how Gameloft offers a substitute to some of my favorite console and PC games.

Gameloft’s latest release is called Order & Chaos Online – and is their iOS answer to World of Warcraft (WoW). It just hit the App Store and comes with a $6.99 (universal) price tag. That’s not too bad for an iOS game, but you’ll also need to pay a subscription fee. You get three months free when you first login, and to continue playing after that you’ll have to pay $0.99 per month, $1.99 for three months, or $2.99 for six months.

Order & Chaos Online is a true real-time, full 3D massively multiplayer online role playing game, or ‘MMORPG’. It features a vast fantasy world for your to explore with thousands of other players from around the world. When you begin the game, you use the character creation system to cuztomize your hero.

Trying to answer the perilous question why they were storing cell phone tower data to begin with in their response to the iPhone tracking furor earlier today, Apple has disclosed a future product: a crowd-sourced database, using iPhone users as a way to determine arterial congestion… of the traffic variety, not circulatory.

Tina Fey must have thought she was just going to Google to promote her biography “Bossypants,” but she was in for some evangelism from Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt and a little hostility from the crowd.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8Mkufm3ncc&feature=player_embedded#at=78

The “fireside chat” first turns to gadgets about 25 minutes into the conversation. When asked about her five-year-old daughter, Fey says she uses her phone with “4,000 pictures on it” makes the unmistakeable iPhone scrolling motion with her finger and says “the phone is a good way to see what you’re actually doing in your life.”

Apple Wednesday said it will release a free update to its iOS software which the Cupertino, Calif. company claims will secure location data stored on the iPhone and iPad. The update will “reduce the size of the database file, encrypt the file, and ensure it is deleted if users disable location services on their iPhone or 3G-connected iPad,” Apple announced in a press release.

Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported the tracking feature continues even when users disable location services. The growing concerns, which now goes by “Locationgate,” has prompted class-action lawsuits and government investigations.

Apple is certainly rather talkative today; as well as confirming the release of the white iPhone 4 tomorrow, it has also issued a press release announcing that the iPad 2 will launch in another 12 countries this week.

Tomorrow, April 28th, the second-generation tablet will hit Japan; while Hong Kong, India, Israel, Korea, Macau, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, Turkey and UAE will get the device on Friday, April 28th. China will also get the device on May 6th.

Customers can purchase the device at Apple retails stores from 9 a.m. local time, select Apple authorized resellers, and from Apple’s online store beginning at 1 a.m.

Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for the iPad 2 I ordered in the U.K. on April 1st. What gives?

Embattled cell phone giant Nokia Wednesday announced it will cut 7,000 jobs as a result of its Microsoft Windows Phone agreement and outsourcing its Symbian handset software. The cuts represent 12 percent of the company’s handset employees and could save Nokia $1.46 billion.

“The competitive environment has changed rapidly,” explained Nokia CEO Stephen Elop. The cuts including 4,000 layoffs and 3,000 jobs shifted to Accenture are just the latest move by Nokia. It recently inked a deal supporting Microsoft’s Windows Phone software instead of Symbian. Additionally, Apple recently was pegged as the largest mobile phone company, in terms of revenue, causing Nokia to be the largest handset maker in only volume. The former Microsoft executive Elop was hired about a year ago in a bid to make the Finnish company more competitive with Apple’s iPhone.

Apple has today issued a press release and finally confirmed the launch date of the white iPhone 4. It will be available beginning tomorrow, April 28th, from Apple’s online store, its retail stores, AT&T and Verizon stores, and select Apple authorized resellers.

It was also be available from various carriers in Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Macau, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, and the U.K.

Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president – who confirmed in a tweet that the device would launch this spring – said in the press release:

The white iPhone 4 has finally arrived and it’s beautiful. We appreciate everyone who has waited patiently while we’ve worked to get every detail right.

The device launches 10 months after it was first announced, with various manufacturing issues rumored to be the cause of the delay. Apple’s official statement will finally spell the end of white iPhone 4 rumors. Oh, Lord, what a wonderful day.

Crucial has just launched its new M4 lineup of 2.5-inch solid-state drives, which are the successors to the RealSSD C300 range, and boast faster read and write speeds. The M4 uses 25nm technology NAND flash created by its parent company Micron, and is available in 64GB, 128GB, 256GB and 512GB models.

Crucial claim the new M4 SSDs reach read speeds of up to 415MBps – a 17% increase over its predecessor – while write speeds are up 20% with speeds of up to 260MBps.

As with all SSDs, however, this technology doesn’t come cheap. The 64GB M4 will cost you $130, which rises to $250 for the 128GB, $500 for the 256GB and $1000 for the 512GB. All can be purchased directly from Crucial and include a three-year warranty.

While the M4s are pretty pricey, solid-state drives are a great way of improving the speed of your Mac. Traditional hard drives are famous for being the bottleneck in modern-day Macs, and since the release of the incredibly nippy second-generation MacBook Air, many users have realized the difference an SSD can make and have adopted the new technology. Recent tests have proven that MacBook Pros equipped with SSD drives are significantly faster than those with traditional HDDs.

[via Macworld]

Apple pushed out the 9.1.2 update to iPhoto ’11 yesterday, introducing some new card themes and improving the application’s stability with several bug fixes.

Improvements to the application include fixes for the zoom slider in magnify view, an issue which prevented the toolbar from auto-hiding in full screen view, and minor issues with formatting with book, card and calendar themes.

The full release notes for the 9.1.2 release are as follows:

This update adds new card themes to iPhoto ’11. It also improves overall stability and addresses a number of other minor issues, including the following:

• Addresses an issue that prevented the Zoom slider from being accessible in Magnify (1-Up) view
• Fixes an issue where Toolbars were not auto-hiding in Full Screen view
• Search field now correctly performs an “includes” search when searching by text string
• Fixes minor formatting issues with book, card and calendar themes
• Message Size of emails now correctly updates when changes are made using the Photo Size menu
• Addresses an issue that prevented some iPhoto 5 libraries from upgrading correctly
• Multiple book pages can now be drag-selected when in All Pages view
• Design tools in print project panels are now accessible via separate Layout and Options buttons
• Photo backgrounds applied to a book are now preserved when book type is changed
• Tab key can now be used to navigate through all text fields in a book project

The update is recommended for all users of iPhoto ’11.

iPhoto ’11 users can get the update via Software Update, Apple’s website, or through the Mac App Store.

A new report from Nikkei Shimbun – the Japanese newspaper behind the iPhone 6 LCD rumors – claims the iPad 2 will finally launch in Japan on Thursday, April 28th. The second-generation tablet was delayed for over a month due to the earthquake and tsunami that recently devastated vast parts of the country.

Apple announced that it would be delaying the launch of the iPad 2 in Japan in the middle of March – stating its teams were focusing on recovering from the recent disaster – and the company is yet to release an update on the delay.

The iPad 2 was scheduled to launch in Japan on March 25th – the same day it hit 25 other countries, including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Mexico, Norway and the U.K.

If Nikkei’s claims are accurate, the iPad 2 will launch in Japan just a day after the white iPhone 4 is released worldwide; a busy week for Apple, it seems.

[via MacRumors]

ipswDownloader is a great new tool that makes the process of finding and downloading iOS firmware releases incredibly simple. Developed by Vitaly Parovishnik, and available for both Mac and Windows, the app supports every iOS device there is – including AppleTV – and features iOS firmware from version 1.0.1.

What’s great about ipswDownloader is that once you’ve selected your device and the firmware version you want to download, it provides additional details on the release that jailbreakers in particular will find incredibly valuable; such as the baseband version, whether the firmware can be jailbroken and unlocked, and the size of the download.

ipswDownloader is completely free to download and use. The full list of supported devices can be found after the break.

Remember that really cool transparent rear panel for the iPhone 4 we posted about a while ago? It was allegedly achievable by removing your device’s rear panel and eliminating its black paint with some paint thinner – allowing you to look in on the iPhone’s internal beauty. Now you can have your own transparent iPhone without ruining your device’s housing with paint thinner.

iFixit have just released their new transparent iPhone 4 rear panel for just $29.95. The panel includes the flash diffuser and camera lens, so you require nothing more to acheive this ultra cool mod.

Installing the panel is easy: you simply remove the two screws at the base of your device and the rear panel slides off. Recent iPhone 4s will require a pentalobe screwdriver, whereas earlier models will require a Phillips #00 screwdriver.

The panel is currently only compatible with GSM models of the iPhone – apparently Apple has modified the rear panel layout for the CDMA iPhone, so Verizon customers are out of luck.