News - page 2128

Despite Steve Jobs’ promise that it would get better, AirPrint is currently only “all that and a bag of chips” for people who happen to be lucky enough to own a few specialized printers.

Google’s not waiting for Apple to get AirPrint together, though. They’ve just announced Google Cloud Print, a new service that allows you to register your network-connected printers with Google’s cloud services and connect them to your Gmail account. Once you’ve done so, you can print email and any attachment that Gmail can read (including HTML, DOC, PDF and more) directly from the Mobile Safari Gmail interface.

The ability to wirelessly print from Gmail using an iOS device is a pretty swank offering, but unfortunately, it’s not really Mac friendly right now. Enabling the feature allows of downloading the latest Chrome beta from the Cloud Print Website on the computer connected to the printer you want to use… but it’s Windows only, and because Chrome for Mac betas tend to lag behind the Windows beats in features, OS X users will have to wait for Google Cloud Print support to come to the platform… a timescale the search giant itself will only commit to as “coming soon.”

Research in Motion’s PlayBook Tablet could sell 4 million units in 2011, and 6 million devices in the first 12 months following its release, expected sometime this quarter. That’s the word from RBC Capital analyst Mike Abramsky, who Tuesday morning told investors of results from survey taken after the recent CES.

Although the survey figure is substantially above previous estimates of 1 million PlayBooks sold this year, 6 percent of the 1,100 people polled said they “likely” will buy the RIM tablet. The percentage is half that of a similar survey conducted in February 2010 just after Apple unveiled the iPad, Abramsky notes.

The Eastman Kodak Company has all but lost their patent infringement case against Apple over the image preview used in iOS today after an ITC judge dismissed Kodak’s claims.

An elderly Israeli woman returning from London was caught last Thursday trying to bring 44 iPhones into Jerusalem through Ben-Gurion International Airport by strapping them to her body.

Procrastinators and cheapskates rejoice. Today is your lucky day!

The popular coupon site Johnny Funcheap is offering Expo tickets for just $10. That’s a $15 savings (normally $25).

Just enter the priority code FunCheap.

Macworld 2011 starts on Thursday, January 27 and runs until Saturday, January 29. The show floor is open from 10am – 6:00pm all three days.

The evidence continues to mount that the iPhone 5 will contain a Near-Field Communication chip, with Bloomberg now agreeing that the next iPhone will be NFC capable.

If you’re looking for something to do in San Francisco during Macworld, eleven of the city’s strip clubs are offering half off admission with your Macworld badge.

When I first spotted this two-page centerfold ad in SF Weekly I wondered: do they think Macs are more randy or just more lonely than other tech people?

There are tech conferences every day of the week in San Francisco – this is the first time I’ve seen a big ad for a group of strip clubs promoting discounts for tech-conference goers.

Also: don’t they know a lot of the attendees are women? You can see from our last year’s “Faces of Macworld” gallery by Traci Dauphin that Macworld isn’t necessarily a man’s world. Dunno. Maybe I should gather a fistful of dollar bills and some geek girls for an expedition.

It was a half-empty or half-full quarterly revenue report for Verizon Tuesday. Just weeks from the Feb. 10 sale of Apple’s iPhone, Verizon fourth quarter profits fell $2.6 percent to $26.4 billion, a hair’s-breath from analyst expectations of $26.48 billion. However, the carrier also reported earlier today adding 872,000 postpaid customers, far exceeding Wall Street expectations of 646,000.

Although consumers could have put off a decision to join Verizon Wireless until the carrier begins selling the iPhone, subscriber growth was described as “spectacular” by one analyst. “The expectation of [Verizon] getting an iPhone appears not to have had an impact,” Stifel Nicolaus’ Christopher King told Reuters.

Verizon Wireless is still in the countdown stage of offering the iPhone 4G Feb. 10 and the carrier already is adjusting prices. The first big change is the discontinuation of a $15 per month for 150MB data plan. Instead, the carrier will push all smartphone owners (yes, you with the iPhone) into a $30 per month unlimited alternative.

Although iPhone smartphone customers will see a rate hike, owners of “feature phones” will actually benefit, according to a tech blog that Tuesday published a price list from an anonymous source. Non-smartphones will pay $9.99 per month for a 75MB data plan, up from $9.99 for 25MB.

Mike Daisey isn’t afraid to rant. The mercurial storyteller first made a name for himself on stage by decrying the state of American theater. Tech is a natural target for him – he’s survived a stint at Amazon.com and takes apart computers to relax – so he really makes his point forcefully with a two-hour monologue called “The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” onstage now through Feb. 27 at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. (See our review of the show here.)

During our 40-minute conversation, I get the uncomfortable feeling he’s ranting directly at me. In fact, the show takes tech journalists to task for being subservient to the industry as well as missing the whole story of where all the shiny gadgets we report about so breathlessly come from. Ahem.

Cult of Mac talked to Daisey about why both Apple fans and PC people will enjoy his show, as well as his own gadget gear and why donning Steve Jobs’ signature black turtleneck on stage would’ve been “fucking stupid.”

Boom boom, pow — the Black Eyed Peas, already one of the most cutting-edge bands to rock an iPod, may just have made music videos so two-thousand-and-late. That’s because they released an app today that includes a stunning, immersive 360-degree, augmented-reality enabled music video that sticks you in the middle of the action with the ability to pan around and become part of the action. And guess what — it’s only available on the iPhone, with no plans announced yet to make it available for any other platform.

It’s only been active for a matter of hours as far as I can tell, but already at the time of writing, the official App Store Twitter account has over 36,000 followers and I expect it will soon attract many more.

This appears to be an account for the old skool iOS App Store. No doubt the newer Mac App Store will get an account of its own in due course.

Satarii is a small San Francisco startup trying to get a super cool iPhone video accessory off the ground.

The Satarii Star is a tracking device that follows your every move while shooting video. Just set the iPhone in the cradle and put the tracking device in your pocket. When you move, the tracking cradle swivels around to keep you in the frame. It’s a super clever idea and looks to work pretty well. See the video below (the fun starts a few seconds in).

More evidence to suggest Apple’s elusive white iPhone 4 is coming this spring has appeared in the U.K. today, as operators Three and Orange are now listing the white device on their websites. Although both websites are showing the device as “unavailable” or “out of stock,” the fact that they’ve been added to the inventory reinforces hopes that the device is on its way.

This discovery follows news earlier today that AT&T is also listing the white iPhone 4 in its ‘Online Account Management System’, suggesting once again that the device will be available soon. AT&T also give no indication to the device’s availability, however, many are expecting a late February or early March release.

Apple has been promising the white iPhone since its launch 7 months ago, but following several delays and countless rumors regarding manufacturing issues and imperfections, the device is still yet to be made available.

If the white iPhone 4 does show its face late next month, what does this say about the iPhone 5 expected to be announced this June? Although there is still demand for the iPhone 4, it seems strange to me that Apple would still go ahead and release the white device just several months before announcing the next-generation iPhone.

Who wants complete ringtone freedom? Sure, you do. So Johnny Ixe of XVision (yeah, we’re wondering about the name too), the developer behind DataMan, has a new app called GeoRing that’ll play tracks from a user-created playlist whenever the phone rings — no extra ringtone-making fiddling or syncing or and just like DataMan, GeoRing can record where each call was answered (along with when and the call’s duration, of course).

There’s an included custom silent ringtone (so the iPhone’s actual ringtone doesn’t play over the music) and the ability to set where on the track playback starts. Pretty cool; we’d like to see the ability to assign songs to contacts though. GeoRing is a buck, and only works with iPhones 3Gs and 4.

Master storyteller Mike Daisey’s one-man-show “The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” is a theater piece that every Apple fan should see.

It’s a laugh-out-loud monologue about the world of Apple, but it delivers an important message: The products we love are made under inhumane conditions.

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.

[via TUAW]

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.