If you’d asked me a couple of months ago if we’d ever see the release of the white iPhone 4, I would have laughed: delaying the white model until just three months before the assumed release of the white iPhone 5 just seemed like an empty promise, and I expected another quiet announcement on Apple’s part once March arrived that the white iPhone 4 had been canceled once and for all.
Looks like I’m going to have to swallow my skepticism: white iPhone 4s are now popping up in AT&T’s system. It appears that the white iPhone is a very real product indeed.
Apple, after acknowledging its growing use by enterprises, reportedly has hired former National Security Agency analyst, U.S. Navy cryptographer, and author David Rice to direct the tech giant’s global security efforts. The move is seen as a response to security-conscious business customers expressing interest in the iPhone, iPad and other Apple products.
Rice, expected to start at Apple in March, graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1994 and received a master’s degree in information warfare from the Naval Postgraduate School. He was a Global Network Vulnerability analyst with the NSA and a Special Duty Cryptologic officer in the Navy.
After months of warrantless speculation that the iPad 2 would have a Retina Display, sanity seems to finally be sinking in, and even analysts are now beginning to temper their predictions by saying something closer to the truth: while Apple is interested in putting a Retina Display in the iPad, it won’t be coming until at least iPad 3.
According to IDC Analyst Tom Mainelli, Apple’s already working on an iPad with a 2048 x 1536 resolution Retina Display, but it’s not a next-gen device.
“Our sources say Apple has requested that manufacturers begin work on displays with that resolution for the iPad 3,” Maintelli told Digital Arts Online. “[But] “I don’t believe anybody is ready to produce that resolution in volumes at this point. And Apple is going to require huge volumes for the iPad 2.”
During a presentation to investors in New York on Thursday, T-Mobile CEO Philipp Humm put an explicit percentage on the so-called iPhone effect: how many T-Mobile subscribers leave every month for AT&T just because of Apple’s smartphone.
According to Humm, the churn rate — or number of contract customers lost per month — is sitting at 2 percent right now. Of that 2% leaving the network, a full ten percent are because customers want the iPhone.
To counter, Humm says that T-Mobile will launch a line of sub-$100 Android smartphones with subscription plans starting at just $10 a month. That doesn’t exactly sound like the plan of a company that thinks it’s going to get the iPhone any time soon, does it?
Worse, it reeks of desperation: you can’t retain customers you’re losing for lack of the best handset on Earth by offering them a cheap deal on some of the crummiest.
Here’s the moment when Apple sold its 10 billionth app over the weekend. The screenshot was captured by Fabio M Zambelli of the Italin tech blog, SetteB.IT.
Curiously, Zambelli took the screenshot at 10.30AM GMT. However, the winner of the sweepstakes says the winning app was downloaded at 9:30 GMT. “For 1 hour a lot of people wasted time,” said Zambelli in an email.
When you have to fork over a couple of hundred bills to get your Mac repaired, it can sometimes seem like Apple’s pretty desktops and laptops are too fragile for their own good, blowing apart in the path of a sneeze… but actually, Cupertino’s taken great pains to make them some of the toughest laptops around.
Case in point: during a recent wave of arson in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia, the business of one Mac owner was savagely burned down. All of the items inside were destroyed by the fire, save two: a pair of 20-inch 2007 aluminum iMacs.
Even more amazing? Not only did the iMacs survive the fire, they also continued to operate even after being repeatedly sprayed by the hoses of the local fire constabulary.
It occurs to me this story would be great evidence to pull out next time you’re denied warranty coverage for your Mac at the local Genius Bar. In my experience, Geniuses like to deny coverage for both smoking around your Apple products and getting them wet… both of which at least these two iMacs seemed to be immune to.
Now that Verizon finally has the iPhone, it makes sense that eventually Apple will try to consolidate both the Verizon and AT&T specific handsets into a single model. But how? One network is CDMA, the other is GSM. They aren’t compatible.
Long before the Verizon iPhone was confirmed, we’d been hearing whispers about a dual CDMA/GSM radio chip manufactured by Qualcomm that would allow future iPhones to connect to both Verizon and AT&T networks. It now looks extremely likely that Apple will be using this Qualcomm-sourced radio component for future iPhones and iPads, instead of the Infineon hardware currently being used.
Apple last week was reticent to go beyond a “very strategic” component to describe how it plans to use a $3.9 billion payment to suppliers. However, now comes word the tech giant is giving suppliers marching orders to build high-resolution displays (2,048×1,536) for a future iPad.
“Apple has requested that manufacturers begin work on displays with that resolution for the iPad 3,” according to sources who spoke with an IDC analyst. The enhanced display will not be ready for the iPad 2, matching earlier reports about the updated tablet expected early this year.
I recently came across a humorous post on Facebook that made me laugh out loud so I thought I should share it. It read:
I named my iPhone Titanic, why you ask? So that every-time I plug my phone into the computer it says ” Titanic is now syncing”– haha
While the gallows tone of this tidbit of humor might offend some people it definitely makes most of them laugh at the creativity and obvious play on words.
So now the question is did you give your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad a unique name? If you did share it with everyone by leaving a comment.
The iPad isn’t just creating revenue for Apple and iOS developers, in many retail establishments it’s now tracking revenue as well. Everyone’s favorite iDevice has been increasingly seen helping out at the checkout counter and point-of-sale operations in restaurants and coffee shops worldwide.
Several vendors are now offering iPad software and integrated terminal hardware supporting order management, payment processing, reporting and remote management capability. What an ideal Geek Trend: iPads, Coffee, Cupcakes and Commerce!
Nike released another major update to their Nike+ GPS iPhone app last week. The app uses technology from MotionX, rather than the shoe sensor that Nike jointly developed with Apple. At CES, Nike launched the Nike+ SportWatch GPS in partnership with TomTom. Apple is notably absent from these recent announcements, and it seems the elegant simplicity of Nike+ is suffering as a result.
Gail Davis of Orpington Kent hung up the phone when Apple called to say she'd won a $10,000 iTunes gift card. She thought it was a prank call.
The winner of the Apple’s 10 billionth App download sweepstakes nearly made a horrible mistake: she hung up the phone when Apple called to say she’d won.
“I thought it was a prank call,” says Gail Davis of Orpington, Kent, UK. “I said, ‘Thank you very much, I’m not interested’ and I hung up.”
Apple’s countdown to the App Store’s 10 billionth download is now over, and the lucky downloader of that 10 billionth app will soon be receiving a $10,000 iTunes gift card.
It’s taken just over two and a half years for the App Store to reach this landmark since its launch in 2008, which is quite remarkable considering it took almost seven years for the iTunes Store to reach the same milestone for music downloads. App downloads have been growing exponentially in the last year. In just January 2010, Apple had sold 3 billion apps. There are more than 300,000 apps available in the App Store; and Apple has sold 160 million iOS devices.
Apple has promised that the lucky winner of that whopping iTunes gift card will soon be announced, and if you think it could be you, keep your eye on the promotional page of Apple’s website.
This is pretty mystifying. 9to5Mac has done some more digging around in the latest iOS 4.3 SDK and found some references to the type of camera sensor the iPad 2 will have. Surprisingly, though, it’s not the 5MP sensor found in the iPhone 4, but instead a much lower resolution camera, most similar to the one in the iPod Touch.
Found in the AVCaptureSession.plist file within the K94 directory is mention of a “Back Facing 1MP Photo” string. K94 is rumored to be the iPad 2’s internal codename.
It’s curious that Apple would chose to go with so few megapixels for the iPad 2. In the latest iPod Touch’s case, the decision to go with a smaller megapixel camera had everything to do with the thinness of the device: the iPod Touch is simply two svelte to fit the iPhone 4’s camera modules into, but with a 0.7MP camera module, they just fit. The iPad 2 is a far thicker device than the iPod Touch, though.
Is Apple just trying to save some money here? Do they not think people will use the iPad 2’s rear camera very much because of the unwieldiness of the tablet form factor? Or, like the iPod Touch, is this an issue of physical footprint?
Images of cheap Chinese iPhone knock-offs leaking out of Asia are one of the most fun things to write about as an Apple blogger. Who is actually stupid enough to buy an iPhome 5G from Orange when what they really want is an iPhone from Apple? Who are these laughably crappy clones aimed at?
According to Nokia, the answer to that question is twenty percent of the global phone buying population.
Referred to as KIRFs, these fake phones are a huge problem for traditional handset makers. In fact, at least one out of every five cellphones sold around the world — primarily in Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe — is an illegal or unlicensed clone of a more popular prestige phone… and the actual number may be quite a bit higher.
So next time you see a funny post about the latest iFauxn to come out of Shenzhen, remember: that ridiculous little knock-off and its ilk is probably in just as many pockets around the world as the real iPhone itself.
As it turns out, turning your iPhone 4 transparent is as easy as grabbing yourself a pentalobe Torx screwdriver, opening up your iPhone 4’s chassis and applying paint thinner to the inside of the Gorilla Glass to strip off the black undercoat.
What a great looking mod! Too bad it’s going to wreak havok with your iPhone’s photographs. As you might remember, the white iPhone 4 was delayed because the white inner coating underneath the Gorilla Glass caused light to leak onto the camera sensor, washing out your snapshots… and that all happened with a layer of paint. Imagine how unusable your iPhone 4’s camera will be if the case is totally transparent.
Instagram has become an iPhone photography phenomenon (although not everyone likes it), but like any online community with that many participants, it can be hard to find the really good stuff.
So English developer Elliott Kember has put together Instagre.at, a site that slurps up popular photos from Instagram HQ and spits them out in a very desktop browser friendly way that lets you navigate with your arrow keys.
You can flit left and right through the popular images, but try hitting the down arrow too: it lets you drill into further lists of images using a particular Instagram filter, or by a particular user. Use the up arrow, or the Escape key, to go back to the popular list. Neat stuff.
1. He appears to be single, a “lifelong bachelor.”
2. It’s the subject of gossip inside Apple.
2. Two “well-placed sources” say so.
If Cook steps into the CEO role, Apple’s other executives will encourage him to come out, Valleywag says. This would be a good thing for Silicon Valley and for gay rights.
Being gay is certainly no problem here in the San Francisco Bay Area. No one bats an eyelid. But Apple’s other execs are concerned about public perception, Valleywag says. Could it spell trouble for the Apple brand?
Apple’s longtime partner in China may get an iPad 3G, according to a Friday report. Apple in late December 2010 received government certification for a device identified only as “model A1337.” Although the parties refused to comment on the report, the news may point to the iPad.
“Specifications are consistent with the tablet device and because all existing commercial versions of the iPhone — Apple’s only other device that uses cellular networks — are already being sold in China,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
US Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot through the head twelve days ago during a Tucson, Arizona rampage that left six dead and thirteen wounded, is now able to stand with assistance… and is using an iPad.
A hacked together media center originally meant to run on the first Microsoft Xbox, XBMC runs pretty much on every platform under the sun these days, including the original Mac OS X-based, Intel x86 AppleTV… so it was probably only a matter of time that it was ported to the second-gen, A4 based model. That time is now!
Steve Jobs has very clearly spelled out his feelings about multitouch on a desktop or laptop environment. Multitouch, in Apple’s view, is meant to be horizontal, not vertical, which is why you will never see a touchscreen iMac or MacBook. The Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad are Apple’s answer to the problem posed by desktop multitouch.
Makes sense to me. That said, the problem with even the Magic Trackpad is that it’s not real multitouch, in the sense that you are not directly interacting with a display with your fingers. Instead, you’re phoning what your fingers are doing to a connected display, the same as any mouse.
That’s clearly not as elegant a solution as Apple would like, so it’s no surprise to me that a new patent application spells out the possibility of a Magic Mouse with either an “OLED or specialized display surface made of collimated optical glass that contains a unique magnifying capability.”
Some insight is emerging as to what Apple product (hardware, software, or media) is earning the most bucks. Turns out, at the core of success for the Cupertino, Calif. company might be software. Earlier this week, Apple announced its iOS-powered triumvirate — iPhone, iPad and iPod touch — comprised 65 percent of the $17.3 billion in the last-quarter revenue.
Additionally, sale of Mac OSX products accounted for 20 percent of all sales. Combine those two with sales of the Mac OSX software and the various App Store products and 90 percent of Apple revenue is coming from software, according to analyst Horace Dediu of Asymco.
