News - page 2125

Google’s upstart Android operating system has toppled Symbian, as the most-used smartphone operating system. Symbian, created by cell phone giant Nokia, held the position for a decade. Nearly 33 million Android-powered smartphones sold during the previous quarter – seven times that of a year ago. Meanwhile, Symbian sales totaled 31 million during the last three-month financial period of 2010.

Apple placed third in the smartphone rankings, selling 16.2 million iPhones during the same period, compared to 8.7 million the previous year, according to research firm Canalys. The growth was overshadowed by Android’s gargantuan 615.1 percent increase over 2009.

Skype for Mac version 5 was released last week, and while it added group video chat to the popular VoIP applications, it also takes a way a pretty big system feature: the ability for Flash-based app to access the web cam when Skype is running.

Reports of the problem have been flooding into Skype’s developer database since early November, when Skype for Mac 5 was still in beta.

Nonetheless, the problem not only persists in the final version, but according to Skype, the app’s insistence on hogging the camera even when it isn’t being used is by design.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2011 — They call themselves the “Kickstarter Kids.”

They’re the group of entrepreneurs backed by Kickstarter, the group funding website — and there were a bunch of them at Macworld.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2011 — Here’s a surprising statistic from Macworld 2011: about 40% of show goers don’t have a smartphone.

That was the number given to me at a meetup on the show’s last night. It was from someone who ran a competition all week in one of the booths. To win a prize, entrants had to download an app to their smartphone — and about 40% didn’t have a device that could download apps.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2011 — Down on the show floor, I ran into podcaster Tim Chaten, who was using an iPod touch to record video.

Chaten had his iPod touch mounted in a home-made camera rig, complete with an external microphone.

It looks like a pretty good setup for shooting quick and easy videos.

Here’s how he put it together:

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2011 — Even without Apple, Macworld 2011 was packed and there was a great vibe. Check out some of the most interesting products on the show floor.

Above: These wholesome twins at the ShedWorx booth were so nice. ShedWorx develops VoltaicHD video conversion software for the Mac.

I’ve been keeping my eye out for a basic, inexpensive iPhone stand for a while now. I use my iPhone as an alarm clock at night and I’ve needed something to keep it propped up. Well I’m happy to report I’ve found my solution, it’s called the Glif.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2011 — Here at Macworld, people are raving about the iStreamer, a small metal box that turns your iPhone or iPad into a high-fidelity audio source by connecting it to your home stereo.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2011 — Macworld 2011 is in full swing. Even without Apple, the show is packed and there’s a great vibe. The best thing is the people. Check out some of the many friendly faces and interesting products on the show floor.

Above: Three-year-old Hope Malabed takes a break with an iPad. There’s lots of kids with iDevices at Macworld.

I realize a lot of people don’t care about how nasty their iPhone or iPad screens get—but I do—and I know I’m not alone.

Well those of us who like to keep a clean screen have a nifty new tool at our disposal: it’s called the Sidekick, and from what I saw, it works great. Peep the video to see how it works.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2011 — Given the explosion of visual art inspired by mobile devices running Mac iOS and apps developed to help artists create work on them, it came as a bit of a surprise to see the way Macworld organizers chose to display digital art at the 2011 Conference and Expo.

The Expo’s art was placed in “digital art galleries” displayed on 27″ Samsung wide-screen TVs housed in unobtrusive kiosks, dispersed in the cavernous hallways of the 2nd and 3rd floors, where only a portion of the conference’s attendees — media personnel and those who purchased something other than Expo Only tickets — was likely to see it.

This is curious in the light of recent attention given to the digital creations of artists producing work on the Mac platform, which in years past could be seen framed, on brightly-lit wall space, in the middle of well-trafficked concourses.

Click on images in the gallery above to see artist and title information, as well as the curious distortion effects rendered in iPhone photographs of art (made, in many cases, ON iPhones) displayed in a digital TV slideshow.

Got a new MacBook Air and looking for an accessible docking solution for when you want to work on a larger monitor at your desk?

The BookArc is an attractive docking solution for the Air made from heavy gauge steel with a built-in wire management system that neatly integrates the cables that need to plug into both sides of the Air.

You’ll need to supply your own display, mouse and keyboard, but once that’s done, turning your Air into a desktop is as easy as positioning your closed Air in the BookArc cradle and plugging it in… and because your Air docks in a closed position, it should run even faster than if you just plugged your display normally, because the Air’s GeForce 320M only needs to drive a single display.

The BookArc is only $39.99, but it won’t ship until February. If you want to keep appraised of when it becomes available, you can sign up for notifications over at the official website.

If you want something more capable than an AppleTV to hook up to your television (most notably the ability to play local content), the Mac mini has the perfect form factor for a working HTPC… and now Mac accessory maker OWC is ready to supercharge it for you for that express purpose.

Called the Media Center Solution, the service works by just shipping any new Mac mini to OWC, who then go about upgrading the RAM to 4GB, installing a bundle of open source media center software like (Plex, Handbreak, MakeMKV) and then linking the Mac mini with either a 4, 8 or 12TB RAID, which will allow you to store up to 6,000 hours of DVD-quality video.

That’s not all. Not only will OWC send it to you back with an optional external Blu-Ray drive, you can also pick between two Elgato HDTV interfaces allowing you to use your Mac Mini as a DVR. They’ll even throw in a $15 iTunes gift card and an Apple Remote.

Monster Cable’s a pretty loathsome company, suing pretty much everyone who dares put the word “monster” in their names while selling absurdly overpriced copper under advertising claims that border on the pseudo-science employed by snake oil salesmen. I hate these guys… which is part of the reason why I’m so shocked by how neat I think their latest product is.

Ludicrously called the Monster iMotion CarPlay 3000, the cable is a car charger for your iPhone or iPod with one neat little extra: it allows you to control your music without ever touching your device just by making gestures in mid-air as you drive.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2011 — Macworld 2011 is in full swing. Even without Apple, the show is packed and there’s a great vibe. The best thing is the people. Check out some of the many friendly faces and interesting products on the show floor.

Above: Cute girls in short tube dresses. Good thing are weather here is unseasonably warm! They are promoting MacKeeper and boy did they get a lot of attention!

In a unique alliance, Samsung (maker of the iPad rival Android-powered Galaxy phone and tablet) will sell half of its mobile processor chip output to Apple (maker of the iPhone and iPad), according to a Friday report. Samsung makes the low-power but brawny A4 chip which Apple designed and uses in its iPhone, iPad, iPod touch and Apple TV.

“Samsung has agreed with Apple to quadruple monthly shipments of its mobile AP chips to 20,000 sheets throughout this year from 5,000 last year,” reports the Korea Times, citing an industry source.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2011 — Dolly Drive, a new cloud-based storage solution specially tailored to Mac specifications, launched Thursday from the Indie Spotlight at Macworld in San Francisco and looks to be one of the smartest plays — and best values — to come out of this year’s show.

Remote storage accessible from anywhere, any time, Dolly Drive is designed to work exclusively and specifically with Apple’s Time Machine, giving Mac users an inexpensive, seamless method for creating secure, redundant (in some cases, perhaps, primary) backups that can be accessed to restore digital files from any location with an Internet connection.

With tri-level security including authentication encryption, data transmission over secure tunnel and multi-leveled, complex authentication protocols for third-party access to data at Dolly data centers, a Mac user can feel confident in the security of data stored for as little as $10 per month for 250GB. Other pricing plans prove Dolly Drive is serious about delivering value for a service that should be attractive to computer users of any sophistication level.

No other remote storage solution we’re aware of is engineered to work directly through Time Machine, nor is any so dedicated to serving Mac users.

This is definitely one of the nicest finds we’ve seen at Macworld 2011 and well worth further exploration.

In just a couple of days, Apple will be putting the venerable Xserve line of rack server Macs out to pasture in favor of the Mac mini. So if you need any, get hopping… just don’t expect Apple to do the same in shipping them out. In fact, the Apple Store is now listing both the Quad-Core and 8-Core Xserves as not shipping for another three months.

As experts attempted to gauge the potential impact of AT&T losing its exclusive iPhone arrangement to Verizon, the opinions ranged from a severe body blow to downright demolishing. However, just weeks from the Feb. 10 (Feb. 3 for pre-orders) date for Verizon sales to begin, one expert claims 90 percent of AT&T iPhone owners are locked-in to contracts with costly early-termination fees.

Indeed, Susquehanna analyst Jeffrey Fidacaro believes AT&T will lose 2 million subscribers – “at most” to rival Verizon. What’s holding them there? Apparently, there are several hundred reasons. The No. 2 carrier will charge a $325 early-termination fee. The 90 percent expected to remain with AT&T is even higher than the figure CEO Ralph de la Vega gave reporters last year. The carrier executive said in May that he wasn’t too worried about the (then potential) Verizon deal, given that 70 percent of iPhone owners used family plans with onerous restrictions and the 40 percent of iPhone users attached to corporate discount plans.

Still rocking an iPod Classic? I know I am: although I love my iPod Touch, a part of me just can’t let go of the notion that the true magic of the digital music experience is the ability to carry around, on one pocketable device, more music than you could conceivably listen to in a decade. Picking and choosing which songs and albums to load? What is this, the stone age?

That’s why I still rock my 160GB iPod Classic, which is actually just a few gigs a way from being filled up entirely. Now Toshiba is doing the rounds with a new 1.8-inch drive that is just as thin as the current Classic drives — just 5mm — but goes all the way up to 220GB, while boasting better battery life and a bigger buffer for less skipping.

So: 220GB iPod Classics, coming soon? I don’t really know. I’d say that the Classic line is on its way out: Apple’s committing to flash memory and multitouch these days. But is there a possibility that Apple will continue to crank out the Classic to appeal not to everyday users but to niche listeners like me who want to hold their entire iTunes libraries in the palm of their hands? I doubt it — extreme niche really isn’t Apple’s thing — but maybe.

[via Hard Mac, 9to5Mac]

AT&T is expecting a “rocky, volatile and hard to predict” 2011 after losing iPhone exclusivity, said CEO Randall Stephenson speaking with analysts on Thursday.

However, the erstwhile sole American provider of Apple’s nifty prestige handset claims to be “fairly confident” that they will still manage to grow through the disruption.

Last quarter, AT&T gained enough subscribers to pass Verizon as the biggest domestic wireless carrier, now boasting 95.5 million wireless customers compared to Verizon’s 94.1 million.

The only problem is now Verizon’s got the iPhone, and analysts are going absolutely bonkers predicting how many people will flee AT&T, and how many CDMA iPhones Verizon will sell. Some analysts say that up to 10% of AT&T’s existing subscribers could jump ship in the coming year, while others suggest that Verizon could sell twenty five million CDMA iPhones.

Meanwhile, Verizon’s further sweetening the pot by offering unlimited data and mobile hotspot features for up to five connect devices, neither of which AT&T has officially countered yet.

“Rocky?” Seems like a bit of an understatement, don’t you think? 2011 is going to be a knuckle-whitener for AT&T.

I’d be hard pressed to identify a gadget more likely to be repeatedly dropped as much as a cell phone. The constant, frenzied fumbling into a pocket for a ringing call pretty much guarantees that your phone will go flying out of your hands on at least one occasion. So when Apple unveiled the iPhone 4 with a design that was glass both front and back, I arched my eyebrow. I suspected daftness.

As it turns out, though, the iPhone 4’s Gorilla Glass backing is pretty tough. It’s not tougher than the iPhone 3GS’s plastic, though. There was also Glassgate, where various third-party slider cases would cause particulate matter to become trapped between the rear back of the iPhone 4 and case, scratching the Gorilla Glass and even growing into larger fractures over time.

No surprise, then, to hear that the first class action lawsuit over Apple’s decision to use Gorilla Glass in the casing of the iPhone 4 has just been filed in Los Angeles. The lawsuit, filed by Donald LeBuhn, claims that the iPhone 4 is not as durable as Apple claims and that Apple continues to sell the product without warning customers of its defective glass housing.

After months of rumor, speculation and delay, Rupert Murdoch’s iPad-only newspaper, The Daily, is finally ready to say “how do you do,” judging by these very stodgy and dusty invites News Corp. just sent out.

The Daily will be officially unveiled on Wednesday, February 2nd at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City at 11am EST, headed by Rupert Murdoch and Apple VP of Internet Services Eddie Cue.

Yesterday afternoon, Apple released version 10.1.2 off iTunes through Software Update, a seemingly mysterious update to Apple’s catch-all media library / shopping / syncing / social networking software gryphon.

As is usually typical, Cupertino was terse about what was in iTunes 10.1.2, only noting that it “provides a number of important stability and performance improvements.” No new features were mentioned.

Don’t shrug off iTunes 10.1.2 though, especially if you plan on buying a Verizon iPhone in the coming weeks. In the update’s Read Before You Install iTunes document loaded in the .dmg file, it is explicitly noted that the 10.1.2 update adds support for syncing with the CDMA iPhone 4.

Best grab the 10.1.2 update now if you plan on jumping ship to Verizon. You might easily forget, then spend hours bashing your head against the wall in activation before a Genius finally explains the problem to you with such smug bemusement that you almost squinch his turtleneck shut with your hands then and there.

If you bought your copy of excellent FTP client Transmit directly from its makers at Panic Inc, then stand up and shout “YAY”, because you can go grab yourself an updated version today.

But if you bought your copy via the magical Mac App Store, turn towards Cupertino and shout “BOO”, because the exact same update was submitted to their approval system three weeks ago, and still hasn’t been approved.