News - page 2143

Amazon, long reticent about announcing sales figures of its Kindle e-reader, could sell more than 8 million of the devices this year, 60 percent higher than Wall Street analysts predicted, according to a news report. That would be a dramatic rise from the 2.4 million Kindles sold in 2009, unnamed sources within the online bookseller told a reporter.

The sales increase may stem from two trends: a growing demand for standalone e-readers even in the face of the multipurpose Apple iPad and Amazon’s decision to let its e-books be read on a wide variety of platforms, including the iPad, iPod touch, iPhone, RIM’s BlackBerry, Android-based phones and the latest addition: phones using Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 operating system. The multi-platforms are a sign Amazon does not plan to pin all of its e-reader and e-book sales on the Kindle, now offered in three versions, according to Piper Jaffray Analyst Gen Munster.

There’s a lot more happening in the Cupertino-centric world than the usual porn-unboxing videos and edible iPhones: here are the most bizarre moments involving Apple in 2010 — from severed appendages to exploded iDevices as art and spy evangelists.

Here’s our 2010 Year in Review of the best 10 hardware peripherals for your iPhone or iPad that we’ve come across in the last twelve months.

If you missed any of these or didn’t get a chance to check them out for some reason or another, don’t fret — all of them are still available and worth a look.

10. AR Drone Parrot

It’s going to be one lucky kid who gets this iDevice-controllable wonder

The AR Drone Parrot is a quadricopter that’s controlled by the iPhone, iPod touch or the iPad. It can be flown indoors or outside and features many sensors, including a front camera ,vertical camera and an ultrasound altimeter. High-tech sensors make it simple for kids to pilot. The AR Drone can also be used in video games, such as AR FlyingAce, a dogfight between two AR Drones.

The AR Drone Parrot is available from Amazon for $299.99

Hyundai has gone high-tech for their luxury Equus sedan, releasing the 2011 owner’s manual as a free interactive iPad app.  Now you can view a multimedia reference guide, locate Hyundai dealers, schedule service appointments, read (and ignore) safety warnings, and – according to the App Store description – “experience Equus rear-passenger massage and relaxation therapy.”

Wow. That’s some owner’s manual.

Even better, an iPad comes with the car! Nice perk. Vehicle cost: $58,900. iPhone and iPod touch versions of the app are scheduled for release shortly.

The Clamcase an iPad case that promised to turn your iPad into a laptop earlier this year is finally shipping. The company, Clamcase LLC, missed their Fall deadline for shipment by one day, but hey that isn’t a big deal. Right?

The keyboard portion of the case connects to the iPad via Bluetooth. It looks pretty awesome and I’ve asked the company to send me more information about it. It will be interesting to see if the product lives up to the hype you’ll see in the company’s product demonstration YouTube video.

The video presented a great proof-of-concept, but it left me wondering what reality will be like since the high-resolution press images weren’t available for download on the company’s press resources web page and most of the Clamcase images looked rendered versus photographed.

You can get the Clamcase, which retails for $149, for as low as $99 direct from the manufacturer for a limited time. If you order one of these let us know what you think about it after you receive it.

Check out the video after the read more link below.

Here’s our 2010 Year in Review of the best 10 hardware peripherals for your Mac that we’ve come across in the last twelve months.

If you missed any of these or didn’t get a chance to check them out for some reason or another, don’t fret — all of them are still available and worth a look.

10. Mac Edition eGo Desktop Hard Drive 2TB

Leander Kahney: Iomega’s new Mac Edition eGo Desktop Hard Drive packs a whopping 2-Terabytes in a compact, stylish package.

The Mac Edition eGo drive is a good-looking complement to Apple’s new glass-and-aluminum Macs. It’s styled to match Apple’s Mac Pro with a sleek, silver case and a grill front.

It’s available in 1TB and 2TB configurations ($159.99 and $249, respectively), and offers several connectivity options: there are two FireWire 800 ports and one USB 2.0 port. It ships with a FireWire 400-to-800 conversion cable, which makes it compatible with Macs without a FireWire 800 port.

Apple has joined the shameful list of companies that have denied support for WikiLeaks.

Apple confirmed that it removed a WikiLeaks App from the online App Store, as reported earlier, and did so because it “violated our developer guidelines.”

“Apps must comply with all local laws and may not put an individual or group in harm’s way,” Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller told the New York Times.

However, exactly how or why the app doesn’t comply with the law, or puts people in harm’s way, Muller didn’t explain. She also didn’t discuss the First Amendment or the freedom of the press.

The $1.99 WikiLeaks App let users view the WikiLeaks site and its Twitter account.

The app was taken down on Monday after being available for only three days. Apple joins Amazon, PayPal, Visa and MasterCard, Bank of America and others in denying services or support for the WikiLeaks organization.

I for one am pissed. I support WikiLeaks and believe strongly that it is conducting the most important journalism of the last several years, and in a stunning, ballsy fashion. I’d love to see Steve Jobs, who has nurtured an image of a revolutionary, speak up in support. Little chance of that though.

This morning the Federal Communications Commission is voting on the charged issue of net neutrality.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak wrote a passionate, funny nearly 1,800-word letter to the FCC about the importance of keeping the internet free.

Perhaps the strongest part of the letter is where he muses about how charging per bits would’ve kept the tinkering he and Steve Jobs did strictly in the garage:

“Imagine that when we started Apple we set things up so that we could charge purchasers of our computers by the number of bits they use.

The personal computer revolution would have been delayed a decade or more. If I had to pay for each bit I used on my 6502 microprocessor, I would not have been able to build my own computers anyway…”

Via The Atlantic

A new update for Tweetie-esque GMail client Sparrow has just hit the Internet in time for the Holiday, adding some important new refinements including the addition of:

• Progress Bar
• Gmail shortcuts
• Quick labeling
• Quick Labeling and Archiving
• Smart recipient auto-complete
• ‘Download message on demand’ option
• Auto-restart on Menu Bar/Dock settings
• Quicklook in the compose window
• Horizontal scrollbar
• Plain text option

Sparrow’s developers also intend to bring the app to the Mac App Store, and so they’re now forking Sparrow into two different apps: one that is free and ad-supported, the other a paid version without ads.

I’m downloading it to give it a try — I’ve loved the idea about Sparrow, but the first betas were just too buggy and feature-poor to deal with. I can’t wait to see if my niggling issues have been fixed.

Smurfs’ Village, the iPhone/iPad game a lot of parents point the finger at for accidental in-app purchases, has now added a few warnings.

The first sentence of the game description now reads:

“Smurf Village is free to play, but charges real money for additional in-app content. You may lock out the ability to purchase in-app content by adjusting your device’s settings.”

Yesterday, I packed up almost all of my earthly possessions and allowed a surly, sausage-lipped German and a pleasant Scottish lad to take them all away, to cram them in a shipping container and sail off across the sea.

In that shipment was my 27-inch iMac, my main work machine, and so for the next few months I will be using my 11.6-inch iMac for all of my work and productivity needs. It’s a fine machine for that, but I’m already twitching over the USB port situations… the MacBook Air simply is not a good hub to try to sync three device simultaneously.

I love the look, then, of the Green Wall Charger from VogDuo, a pocketable four-way USB charger that has one awesome perk that competing devices don’t: a timer that ticks down in two hour increments. Once it reaches zero, it cuts the circuit and no further juice is drawn… a cute trick that isn’t just fantastic for maximizing your iPhone’s battery life, but also to maintain a clean eco conscious.

The Green Wall Charger only pumps out five watts per USB port, so a single port isn’t enough to charge an iPad, but VogDuo thought ahead: a Y-connector is provided in the package so you can hook your iPad up to two sockets simultaneously.

Pretty rad. I’d buy this today, if not for the fact it’s not available yet: it won’t make an official debut until CES next month.

If you’re as addicted to Chair and Epic’s Infinity Blade, as I am, today’s a banner day: an update to the elegiac swordfight action game has just dropped, and it adds a slew of new content.

Although Adobe itself is hardly on the ropes, having just scored their first billion dollar year in revenue, Apple continues to pummel Flash into the ground, like a berserker rabbit punching the occipital lobe of a downed enemy.

The latest blow? Apple has just launched iAd Producer, a new tool for online advertisers that allows them to create interactive iAd content in an easy, streamlined manner that would have previously required Adobe’s Flash developer tools.

A couple weeks ago, one of my friends brought me a new MacBook Air from the States, and as he delivered it to me, he — a die-hard Windows user — eloquently endorsed Apple’s sexy new, razor thin ultraportable by noting that as far as was concerned, “using this laptop is what living in the future feels like” and that “I’ll definitely buy one, because this computer will get you laid.”

He’s not an exception: I’ve turned more Windows-loving heads with the new MacBook Air than any other laptop I’ve ever owned. It looks like makers of Windows PCs have noticed the same thing, because Acer, Asus and Lenovo are all set to ape the MacBook Air’s incredible design.

There’s already a few hacks out there to allow you to extend the admittedly rather limited AirPlay functionality of iOS 4.2 to run on non-iOS devices: last week, for example, TUAW’s Erica Sadun released AirPlayer, an app that tricks AirPlayer into think your Mac’s an AppleTV.

Now, though, plucky and ingenious hackers are figuring out how to do the same thing on non-Apple hardware, and the first fruit of those labors has now been released for Linux.

An Apple press release has observers scratching their head. The usually tight-lipped Cupertino, Calif. company projected it will sell more than 1 million Apple TV units by the end of the week. Normally, the company run by Steve Jobs only speaks about milestones it has already passed. However, the announcement could be more a way to stick a finger in Google’s eye than pre-tooting any corporate horns.

The backstory: Monday, Roku said it will sell its millionth TV set-top box in the next two weeks. Also, the curious announcement likely has a tie-in with Google’s TV.

Google TV reportedly is having trouble, warning partners of a possible delay in supplying the software for televisions. In its announcement, Apple pointedly noted it is selling 400,000 television episodes and 150,000 movies every day.

[Silicon Alley Insider, Barron’s]

Behold! An iPhone fit for a Brobdingnagian! This is the world’s biggest iPhone, located in the heart of London’s famous St. Pancras International Train Station. But while it is impressively enormous, a Bunyan-sized handset for the on-the-go colossus, it’s something of a cheat: it’s made up of 56 interconnected iPads.

Ever since the Wikileaks dumped hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables up on their site for everyone to see, traditional companies have been trying to disassociate themselves from the whistle-blowing wiki. In rapid order, Wikileaks lost the support of its host, Amazon, their DNS provider, PayPal, and MasterCard.

Now Apple’s App Store Review Team has . But is it censorship?

Although the second generation AppleTV is certainly sexy, it’s not quite as “magical” a device as we’ve come to expect from the wizards at Cupertino. Not only are the media offerings a bit limited compared to the competition, but the new AppleTV is prone to some technical problems… most notably reports of bog slow downloads.

It looks like a potential cause for those tortoising downloads on the Apple TV has been identified, though, and it’s not Apple’s fault: it’s Google’s.

An increasing number of families love their iPad so much, they buy a second Apple tablet, rather than share. That’s the conclusion of a survey finding 17 percent of iPad owners have more than one of the popular Apple tablets in their home.

“The main reason for owning more than one tablet in the household is due to other family members using the tablet,” according to YouGov. While more than a third (37 percent) of tablet owners responding to the survey say their partner uses an iPad, 14 percent say they purchased another iPad because their kids are using one.

Trying to thumb type a search query into your iPhone on the run sucks, and it’s sow to boot. Google knows it, which is why they have the Google Search app, allowing you to just dictate your search query when typing is otherwise inconvenient.

But it looks like Apple might have noticed it too. New job postings indicate Apple is looking to improve the native voice recognition capabilities of iOS.

One of the reasons why modern Mac laptops are able to attain such great graphics performance while maintaining excellent battery life is because Apple switched over to NVIDIA chipsets that marry their own superior mobile GPUs with Intel’s Core 2 Duo processors.

Unfortunately, Apple’s reliance on NVIDIA chipsets is also the reason why Mac laptops didn’t jump to the new Core i series of Intel CPUs last year, as Intel has been fighting it out with NVIDIA in court, trying to push the graphics maker out of the Intel-compatible chipset business.

Looks like they were successful. NVIDIA’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang says that his company will be permanently exiting the chipset business to focus on SoCs (or systems on a chip).

Proving that home electronics are driving that gift-laden 2010 sleigh, the iPad is credited with a sales spike this holiday season.

Comscore reports that computer hardware is the top growing category for the 2010 holiday season to date with a 25-percent increase over last year. Shoppers snapping up handheld devices (such as Apple iPads and e-readers) and laptop computers account for much of the growth.

The one-size-fits-all ease of electronic gifts were also behind the record numbers for e-spending: $27.46 billion was spent online, a 12-percent increase over the same days last year. Free Shipping Day also proved appealing, merchants throwing that in increased sales by 61-percent over the same day last year.

The other day, as I was stuffing my new 11.6-inch MacBook Air in my tote, I once again felt that bubble of warm gratitude that after twenty odd years of waiting, someone had finally come along and given me the perfect writer’s laptop that I’ve always wanted: the perfect amalgam of extreme portability married to great battery life and a sturdy, pleasant-to-use keyboard.

I’d had such pleasant reveries before, but this time, it was punctuated with a bit of sadness, as I remembered the many journals I’d carried around over the years — a rather absurd addiction of mine, given that I rarely wrote anything of worth in them — and realized that the new MacBook Air was effectively more convenient to carry around than even the composition notebooks I used to lug with me when I wanted to travel light but still be able to do some quick writing if the inspiration struck.

It’s weird that I’m sad that the MacBook Air obviated a kind of notebook that I never really used anyway, but I liked having all sorts of notebooks around, and now there’s no point in buying any new ones. I guess I’ll have to content myself in the future with the likes of this composition notebook skin for MacBook Air, which takes its attention to detail right down to the simulation of the note page’s fuzzy, blue lined rule.

The old saying about a rising tide lifts all boats seems pertinent even to smartphones. A dramatic rise in demand for smartphones has allowed Android to enter the market yet hasn’t caused Apple to cut its price for the iPhone, writes one analyst Monday.

With demand for smartphones growing at 90 percent per year, the question isn’t how Android will hurt Apple. “The more smartphones you build, the more price you can charge. This is regardless of platform,” according to Asymco’s Horace Dediu.