News - page 2085

Oh dear. RIM’s iPad competitor, the PlayBook, gets a solid panning from the New York Times’ David Pogue.

The main problem is the lack of apps. Not even native apps. It doesn’t even have built-in email! The hardware is pretty limited too — no 3G or GPS.

The PlayBook, then, is convenient, fast and coherently designed. But in its current half-baked form, it seems almost silly to try to assess it, let alone buy it.

Remember, the primary competition is an iPad — the same price, but much thinner, much bigger screen and a library of 300,000 apps. In that light, does it make sense to buy a fledgling tablet with no built-in e-mail or calendar, no cellular connection, no videochat, no Skype, no Notes app, no GPS app, no videochat, no Pandora radio and no Angry Birds?

On the bright side, it does have a couple of spectacular features: its secure, can be synced wirelessly, and can power an external screen independently (the iPad only does mirroring). RIM promises updates to the hardware and software throughout the year, but by then, Apple will be finishing the iPad 3. It looks like a bomb.

New York Times: A BlackBerry Tablet, but Where Are the Apps?

UPDATE: WSJ’s Walt Mossberg slams it too: “I recommend waiting on the PlayBook until more independently usable versions with the promised additions are available.”

If you haven’t downloaded free MPlayerX yet, do it now. The newish player (it;s been around for just over a year) is the perfect balance between simplicity and performance. It’s the player QuickTime should have been — it’s simple, it’s pretty and it plays absolutely anything you throw at it. It has features like multitouch control via a trackpad that allows you to not only jog control — in a way that makes QuickTime seem awkward and clumsy — but also control volume. Here’s a full list of features from the app’s Mac App Store page:

Researchers at Gartner did everything but point at Steve Jobs as the reason for a decline in demand for PCs. “With the launch of the iPad 2 in February, more consumers either switched to buying an alternative device, or simply held back from buying PCs,” one expert announced Wednesday afternoon.

Worldwide demand for PCs during the first quarter of 2011 fell 1.1 percent to 84.3 million units, figures Gartner said “indicate potential sluggishness, not just a normal seasonal slowdown.”

An Apple cloud service has been one of the main focal points for a lot of recent speculation, and a new job listing on the Apple website confirms that the company is currently putting together a crack team of people to build “the future of cloud services at Apple.”

The listing is for a “Cloud Systems Software Engineer” – a full-time role in a “small team” based at the company’s main Cupertino campus. In true Apple style the listing doesn’t reveal a lot of information about this cloud service, however, it does state that the team will be responsible for writing software “which forms the foundation” for some of Apple’s “most exciting new products and services.”

Apple’s only attempt at cloud services so far has been MobileMe, which has left a great deal to be desired for many of its users. Recent rumors claimed that a revamped MobileMe service would soon go live, featuring a digital storage function similar to iDisk which would enable users to store content that could be streamed to iOS devices.

Since Apple has only just started advertising for people to build their new team, it doesn’t look like the cloud service will be launching anytime in the immediate future. It is believed cloud services will be a big part of iOS 5, so the first we hear about it could be at WWDC in June.

Interestingly, since this job listing became famous, it seems to have been removed by Apple.

[via AppleInsider]

Steve Jobs isn’t exactly the kind of guy to let a grudge go. That’s why when Google released Android and it featured a “pinch to zoom” feature just like iOS, Jobs decided to make sure that Apple board member and Google CEO Eric Schmidt couldn’t steal any of Cupertino’s other bright ideas… like the original iPad.

The lightning-fast Thunderbolt standard might be confined to 2011 MacBook Pros for now without a lot of accessories to boast of, but just you wait: Intel has announced that they are releasing Thunderbolt development kits that will finally enable every Joe and Jane Manufacturer to make some devices that can capitalize upon the standard’s 10Gbps bi-directional data transfer capabilities.

So here’s the question. Obviously we can expect to see a host of new gadgets soon boasting a Thunderbolt port, including the usual gaggle of hard drives and Blu-Ray drives and printers. When they come, though, will any products eschew USB 3.0 for ThunderBolt entirely, though?

If so, or if not, who will win the upcoming battle between the USB 3.0 and ThunderBolt standards? Let’s just hope Thunderbolt’s not another Firewire.

Although Apple’s quarterly earnings report won’t be out until next week, two analysts already predict the tech giant will announce “conservative guidance.” The tech giant, which usually tries to game the process by announcing low guidance in order to beat the Street’s expectations, may truly be hurt by the repercussions following the Japanese earthquake.

Goldman lowered its revenue for the June quarter to $22.66bn, down from $22.67bn. Barclays told investors Wednesday it sees the timing of the iPhone 5, iPad 2 availability and the ipact of Japan as “key factors” in the upcoming second-quarter report.

The swarm of speculation, once surrounding when Apple would release a CDMA iPhone has a new target: HDTV. Wednesday, a Wall Street analyst provided a bit more fuel, telling investors he expects the Cupertino, Calif. tech giant to unveil a “Smart TV” by the end of 2011.

Brian White of Ticonderoga Securities writes a trip to a China tradeshow prompted his belief. White says the new device won’t be another revamp of Apple TV. The Smart TV would “provide a full-blown TV product for consumers,” according to the analyst. Understanding we’ve heard this all before, the analyst assures us Apple is moving “at a faster pace than the market expected.”

The new Italian i’mWatch describes itself as a “technological jewel” – it is currently the closest you’ll get to having an iPhone on your wrist, and it’s by far the coolest wristwatch I’ve ever seen. Featuring a high-resolution touchscreen, the i’mWatch lets you receive calls, text messages, notifications from Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, and so much more.

Browsing through the list of its plethora of features makes you wonder whether you would ever need to take your iPhone out of your pocket:

• Receive calls and see you caller’s name and number
• Make calls using the keypad or your iPhone’s address book
• Receive text messages and emails
• See the weather forecast for your city
• See your Facebook news feed
• Receive notifications from Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare
• Download music from the i’music store
• Listen to the radio
• Download apps from the i’m store
• View your iPhone’s photo collection, arranged by album
• View stock market data
• Receive notifications for Calendar appointments and reminders
  Continue reading

It’s always sexy time in Philadelphia, apparently.

Public health officials there are the latest in the U.S. to arm horny inhabitants with info on where to find condom dispensers via mobile phones in the hopes of helping bring down STD rates in young people.

iCondom Philly, offered free in iTunes, is launching as part of a health campaign that includes a sex ed site called Take Control Philly. The city is in the top 10 U.S. cities for sexually transmitted diseases with a disproportionate number of adolescents affected.

If you don’t live in Philadelphia, you may still be in luck. iCondom Philly piggybacks off an app called iCondom, which provides the same info for New York City and Washington D.C.

Gratis to download but ad supported, thanks to hordes of helpful randy regular joes (and josephines) who have added condom dispenser info,  it can also help you locate the goods in Brazil, Spain, Australia, Canada, UK, France, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden and Ireland.

“When we designed iCondom, we had in mind that the application could be easily developed to meet the needs of each city’s publicly-run condom programs that exist worldwide. Philadelphia immediately understood how useful the application could be in targeting youth 11 to 19 years old,” said Morgane Danielou, Founder of iCondom.

For those that find the iPad’s 9.7-inch display far too small, Lenovo is working on a 23-inch tablet designed for the home. William Cai, Lenovo’s senior specialist in marketing, said that he believes a tablet that can be moved from room to room, used on (big) tables, and be docked to provide an all-in-one, could be the solution to the “problem” of having multiple screens around the home.

We think that there is potential for a 23-inch tablet. We’d have to take care of battery life and we are working to get the weight down.

It’s obviously not for full mobility use, but it could be moved from room to room in the house and used with a full keyboard, or as a television. Or you could lay it on a table top and use it for family games.

We’re hoping that we can launch it later this year.

Hopefully Lenovo will change its mind before then. I’m not sure how big a battery would have to be to power a device of this size – maybe some kind of battery rucksack that the user wears to keep the thing juiced up for an hour or so is the answer?

While several competitors have tried to beat the iPad with smaller devices, or even slightly larger ones, Lenovo’s idea is certainly the most drastic attempt at producing a tablet unlike any other.

Maybe there is a place for a 23-inch tablet in the home; would you buy one? Could you see a use for a device like this, that provides any advantage over an iPad coupled with an iMac? Let us know in the comments.

[TechCrunch via Revert to Saved]

For years, the oscilloscope was my favorite gadget for being such a ubiquitous instrument in the basement laboratories of 50s B-Movie scientists. As a kid, I didn’t know what an oscilloscope did, but it was clearly important somehow in the business of creating atomic supermen, or taking over the world with giant octopodes, or operating a Billion Bubble Machine.

In all things, there must be an end to innocence, though, and eventually, I found out that an oscilloscope is just a pretty bog standard machine allowing you to measure oscillations in voltage or current, and has nothing to do with playing God or conquering this world of man. I abandoned it as a favorite gadget, and moved on to playing with my iPod.

The oscilloscope seems to have come looking for me. This is the Oscium iMSO-104 oscilloscope kit, a hardware kit that will turn your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad into a mixed signal oscilloscope just by attaching it via the dock connector. There’s even an array of multitouch gestures at your disposal to change analog input level, zoom in on axes, move input readouts and so on.

Want your iPhone to look like a dusty, flickering prop from Bride of the Atom? There’s an app for that, and it’s free. The kit itself, though, will cost you $300.

[via Gadget Lab]

With the February release of the Verizon iPhone and the Schiller-claimed shipment of the white iPhone 4 “real soon”, rumor consensus at this point has the iPhone 5 pegged for a September launch instead of a traditional summer unveiling.

Could it end up being even later than that, though? A new analyst report says that it might slip later, with iPhone 5 production only set to start in September.

Rovio Mobile, the creator of the hugely successful series of Angry Birds games, has revealed in a message posted on Twitter that it is working on a solution to bring game syncing across all devices. The feature would enable players to begin a game on their iPad at home, which they could then continue from where they left off on their iPhone on the train. When you unlock a new level on one device, you unlock the level on all devices.

Game syncing is a feature that many iOS games would benefit from. As more and more games and applications become universal and playable on both the iPhone and the iPad, one of the biggest frustrations is that you have to complete the same levels, missions, and objectives twice – once on each device. The same goes for high scores.

Rovio has also confirmed a forthcoming Easter update to Angry Birds Seasons – due sometime next week – which will deliver 15 brand new levels to enjoy while you devour your eggs. And if you didn’t have enough platforms the play Angry Birds on, the Facebook version of the game will also get three new levels so that it doesn’t feel too left out.

[via AppAdvice]

Update: Final Cut X will be $299 and will be available in the App Store in June. Still unknown are the future of Final Cut Studio (Including Soundtrack, Motion, Compressor, Color, DVD Studio) or Express.

Apple is, at the very moment I’m writing this, taking the cloak off of Final Cut X live and to much applause in front of the Final Cut Pro User Group Network in Las Vegas. For several weeks there have been rumors and murmurings that Apple would today unveil the next iteration of its venerable Final Cut video editing software, we’re learning now those rumors were true.

Final Cut users know that the last major update the software had was about 10 years ago. Though many users love the program, it was getting so long in the tooth it was starting to look like a vampire.

Details of the new Final Cut X are still coming in since the unveiling isn’t over yet, but one attendee at the event is posting updates via twitter (thanks @fcpsupermeet). Here are some notables from his twitter stream:

• Crowd is unruly!
• Final Cut X is a full rebuild from scratch
• 64 bit – Crowd: “finally!” “thank you!”
• Cocoa, Core Animation, Open CL, Grand Central Dispatch support
• The Focus was on image quality
• Fully color managed
• Resolution independent playback/timeline all the way up to 4K
• Features people detection, single or in groups
• Non-destructive auto color balance
• Automatic audio cleanup (option to auto noise reduce audio, more)
• Features “smart collections”: a lot like the smart folders found in OS X
• Editing can start immediately during importing of AVCHD and other media, switches silently to local media as it ingests
• Uses every available cpu cycle to keep things rendered. Also highly scalable. Will even work on a Macbook
• No interruption for rendering. No transcoding, EVERYTHING native. (incl DSLR footage–assume this means AVC)
• Presentation received a standing ovation!

Via macrumors.com.

SAN FRANCISCO — The survival of Apple beyond the 1980s comes down to a single piece of software, says Guy Kawasaki, bestselling author and Apple’s former chief evangelist. That single, miraculous piece of software — Aldus PageMaker — fueled a desktop publishing revolution, and saved Apple’s bacon in the process.

The comment came Tuesday during a highly entertaining keynote speech at the Ad:Tech conference here to promote Kawasaki’s new book, Enchantment. The book is a manual of persuasion in the mold of Dale Carnegie’s famous How to Win Friends & Influence People. (I’m reading it and will post a review soon.)

Gamers, quantify your frugality! It’s that time of year again: the Humble Indie Bundle has again launched, this time offering Mac gamers the choice of paying whatever they want for the Humble Frozenbyte Bundle, a four-pack of game from dev Frozenbyte that includes the gorgeous fantasy action game Trine, the two Shadowgrounds games, and a new platformer called Splot as a pre-order bonus.

As usual, you can pay what you want for the bundle, and the games will all not only work on the Mac, but also be cross-compatible with Linux and Windows. In addition, you can even divvy up your donation between developer Frozenbyte, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Child’s Play and the Humble guys themselves.

All told, the latest Humble Indie Bundle is $50 worth of gaming excellence for whatever you want to pay… which, for Mac users as of writing, is hovering on average at around $6.19. I expect you to do better.

What’s better than a free app? Yeah, two of them — so today’s Daily Freebie is actually a twofer. Both are from MacPhun, developer of the PhotoStudio app we reviewed yesterday.

The first is a free version of PerfectPhoto, macPhun’s iPhone photo editor. It may lack the fancy filters of the paid version, but it comes with all the darkroom tools you’ll need to edit photos on the iPhone: adjust exposure, contrast, color temp, shadows, crop images and even a posterize and vintage effect. Frankly, you’re going to be using PhotoStudio for the effects anyway.

The second app, Cartoonatic, (that’s a screencap from its App Store page, above) is where the real fireworks are, though — it’ll let you transform a video clip with nine different, wild-looking effects, with live previews while recording, the ability to play around with the clip’s speed, add a soundtrack from your music library and all kinds of other neat stuff. That’s a lot of wow for free.

In November of last year, Brazilian billionaire Elke Batista declared that he wanted Apple to abandon Foxconn and China and come build iPads in Brazil.

Well, looks like he got half his wish: while Foxconn remains involved, future iPads may soon be built in Brazil thanks to a $12 billion investment by that company in the South American nation.

Apple’s resisted consumers’ calls to equip future iPhones and iPads with build in SD and microSD card slots thus far, making getting your photos to your iDevice a matter of either picking up a Camera Connection Kit (which only works on iPad) or accomplishing the same feat more indirectly through iTunes.

At CES, much beloved memory card makers Eye-Fi unveiled a cure all for these woes: a new feature coming soon to their line of WiFi-equipped SD cards called “Direct Mode” which allows the card to broadcast itself as its own WiFi network, made accessible to any iOS mobile device just by loading up an official app.

It’s taken a few months, but Direct Mode is now here. If the prospect of slurping your SLR’s photos or videos onto your iPhone or iPad wirelessly appeals, you’ve got two options. If you’ve got an existing Eye-Fi X2 card, you should be able to invoke the new mode just by installing a firmware update, due out next week along with the appropriate iOS app. Otherwise, the new Eye-Fi Mobile X2 card with 8GB of storage and Direct Mode bake in will go on sale on April 17th for the price of $79.99

At an event in London today, HTC unveiled a brand new addition to its ever growing smartphone lineup called the Sensation 4G. Boasting 4G data connectivity, a Super LCD screen, and a dual-core 1.2 GHz Snapdragon CPU, the Sensation is a worthy adversary for the iPhone 4. So how do the two compare?

We’ve created a great little comparison that compares all of the main specifications, helping you decide which device deserved your hard earned cash. Check it out after the break!

Best Buy hasn’t exactly been playing fair cricket when it comes to distributing iPad 2s to customers. First, Best Buy admitted they were holding back iPad 2s, supposedly for an “upcoming promotion” but rumored to actually be to manipulate their sales quota numbers. Strike one.

Now we’ve got strike two. A reader writing to Crunchgear says a Best Buy manager effectively blackmailed him into buying a $109 rip-off Best Buy protection plan before he would sell him an iPad 2.

Although Apple is yet to officially announce its sales for the fiscal second quarter, one analyst already has high expectations. The quick take-away: more record iPhone sales and overwhelming demand for the iPad 2 versus the original Apple tablet. In terms of sales numbers, expect 7 million for the iPad and 17 million for the iPhone.

RBC Capital Markets’ analyst Mike Abramsky told investors Tuesday he believes Apple will have sold 2 million to 3 million iPad 2 units, higher than the Wall Street consensus. In a survey RBC conducted in March, 28 percent of the people asked said they plan to buy an iPad 2 – 40 percent higher than an earlier survey gauging the consumer intentions toward the first-generation iPad.

According to several reports from various sources recently, it seems there could be a nasty ‘virus’ lurking in dodgy internet adverts that wipes your iOS device when you tap on them. Users searching for jailbreak and unlock methods on their devices are the ones currently at risk.

When performing a search for these hacks on an iOS device, false adverts are returned that claim to unlock your device for free. Tapping on them takes you to a webpage that shows an animation lasting 10 to 15 seconds, followed by a message that says: “DOWNLOAD UNLOCK 2 NOW FREE.” By this point the device is completely wiped of all your information.

Apple’s long-awaited CDMA iPhone should pay off handsomely, to the tune of $9 billion in 2012, one analyst estimates. The Cupertino, Calif. tech giant should garner $6 billion in the U.S. and half that in markets such as China, India and Japan.

JP Morgan analyst Mark Moskowitz told investors Tuesday Apple has a “multi-billion dollar revenue opportunity” capable of keeping the company at above-market growth for up to the next two years. Moskowitz expects Verizon will sell 10 million CDMA iPhones next year, a near mirror of the carrier’s own projected 11 million units sold for 2011. The CDMA iPhone was Verizon’s best-selling handset in history.