News - page 2150

Steve Jobs has made no bones about being skeptical in regards to multitouch displays on desktop and notebook Macs, observing that multitouch works best when a display is horizontal: anything else just leads to gorilla arm.

Right now, that means that Macs’ multitouch options are limited to accessories like the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad, but given the iPad’s success, it’s natural Apple is trying to find a more directly interactive approach to horizontal multitouch, in which the display can convert flush with a lap or a desk when it’s in touch mode.

Now a bevy of new patents have been awarded to Apple, most interestingly in a convertible MacBook-to-iPad-like device, spotted by Patently Apple.

Has your iPhone’s battery been lasting longer through the day since you updated to iOS 4.2.1? There may be a reason for that: Apple’s using network-controlled fast dormancy in iOS 4.2 to better optimize the way in which the iPhone connects to the cell network, which results in a noticeable bump in battery life.

Sometimes a story seems too good to be true.  Last month we reported about a charming Geek Wedding Proposal Video, presumably made by Frank when proposed to his girlfriend Kasey on a bridge in Central Park.  A band played her favorite song, Frank appeared in a rowboat under the bridge, and a perfectly executed ring-toss was made to his fiancé-to-be – all captured by four synchronized iPhones and a MacBook Pro.

It appears The Cult and the video’s viewers were the victims of a hoax. According to Mashable, it was made to promote a new business venture that specializes on mining the marketing potential of viral videos.

Google’s much-delayed entry into the e-book market, Google Editions, is set to launch by the end of 2010, according to today’s Wall Street Journal. If Editions does appear, the e-bookstore could rival those now offered by Apple and Amazon.

The competing e-bookstore will arrive in the U.S. by the “end of the month and internationally in the first quarter of next year,” the report quotes Google product management director Scott Dougall. Google Editions would differ from both Apple and Amazon by allowing access to e-books through almost any Web browser, rather than connected to specific devices, such as the iPad, iPhone or Kindle.

Wall Street investment banking icon JPMorgan Chase & Co. is giving iPads to every associate in its global investment banking division, according to a company e-mail obtained by Bloomberg News. Employees receiving the devices will get to keep them free of charge as long as they remain at the unit until the pilot program ends on May 1, 2011, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.

Industry analysts viewed the move as a significant victory for Apple in its quest to wrest control of the Enterprise communications submarket away from Research in Motion, Ltd., whose Blackberry handheld devices have been a ubiquitous companion of “serious businesspeople” for more than a decade.

The flocks of kids I always see clustered around iPads whenever I walk into an Apple Store suggest that kid + iPad = best new toy ever. Only problem is,  really young kid + iPad also = anxious parent.

Griffin thinks it has a case + app combo to fix that. LightBoard is a shatter-resistant polycarbonate case that fully encloses the iPad (Including the screen, but with cutouts for the speaker and headphone jack) and doubles as a table. Then the free LightBoard Trace app superimposes traceable drawings through a piece of paper laid over the screen and held in place by a clip on the case.

LightBoard is available through Griffin’s website for $40.

For Mac users awash in social networking (and that’s like saying “for NASCAR drivers with the ability to make left turns”), today’s release of Flock‘s completely revamped browser — which, like its predecessor, is heavily integrated with social networking sites — should be exciting news.

It’s been a long wait for Mac users, as the browser completed its transformation from a Mozilla to a Chromium 7 skeleton. The new Flock arrived on Windows last summer, and Flock’s blog claimed an October release for the Mac version, with no word since then. But it’s here, it easily integrates major social networks right out of the box (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and even LinkedIn) — and it’s fast.

We’ll take a closer look at Flock in our upcoming browser comparo. Stay tuned.

Will the iPad kill — or save — the newspaper? Countless observers have argued both cases. I come to bury these notions, not to praise them.

The newspaper industry is suffering through a painful transition, characterized by layoffs, closures, mergers and the abandonment of mission and even dignity in the quest to maintain relevance to advertisers.

The “iPad-will-destroy-newspapers” crowd assumes that paper is the problem. Paper is expensive, slow and bad for the environment. Because the iPad delivers news cheap, fast and without the conversion of trees into trash, the public will choose iPad-based news, which will kill off newspapers.

The “iPad-will-save-newspapers” people, on the other hand, see the wide range of news-reading apps as the newspaper’s salvation. There’s some logic to this, given that the iPad is a theoretically superior advertising platform. But that’s not going to happen.

Only Apple knows what new hardware features the iPad 2 will boast when it comes out in April 2011, but one thing everyone can agree on is that it will have FaceTime support by way of at least one camera module.

Now Digitimes is claiming that they know who is going to provide the lens modules for the iPad 2, and no shocks here: they say it’s Largan Precision, who also apparently supply the 5-megapixel lens module in the iPhone 4.

This fleshes out an earlier report that Omnivision would be providing the actual camera sensors, as well as another Digitimes report on the iPad 2 from last week, which rather improbably claimed the iPad 2 would have a USB port and a Retina Display… neither of which are likely.

Although it pays off in compactness, the MacBook Air’s locked down, proprietary construction makes it one of the least self-serviceable or upgradeable computers out there. Heck, you can’t even upgrade the RAM: it’s soldered onto the motherboard.

If you’re brave enough to crack open your Air, about the only thing that will actually prove replaceable to most mortals will be the Toshiba SSD drives, which is what prompted Taiwanese company Photofast to start selling 256GB SSD modules that offered a 30% boost to your Air’s read and write speeds.

Unfortunately, it looks like Photofast’s MacBook Air SSD business has been shut down by Apple, who apparently threatened the company’s >a jref=”https://www.9to5mac.com/38937/apple-makes-photofast-stop-sales-of-speedy-256-gb-macbook-air-ssds?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+9To5Mac-MacAllDay+(9+to+5+Mac+-+Apple+Intelligence)”>standing as a member of Apple’s own MFi program, which allows them to make officially licensed Apple accessories.

It’s sucky, especially if you wanted to double your 11-inch Air’s for cheap (as I did), but in all honesty, my butter fingers are probably better off not cracking open my Air’s guts. Apple’s probably done me a favor here.

To help spread the word about God, a Christian group is now appealing to Steve Jobs.

Apple pulled an app called the Manhattan Declaration from the iTunes store last week after outcry and over  7,000 signatures on an online poll that the content was an anti-gay and hate-mongering.

The Manhattan Declaration is an over 4,000-word statement of beliefs signed by over 400,000 people described as “a call to Christian conscience” crafted in 2009. The app version, which includes a four-question poll on same sex marriage and abortion, launched in mid-October.

Apple products scored highly in a computer magazine’s annual reliability survey, “smoking the competition” in all categories, including desktops, notebooks and smartphones. RIM was the cellar-dweller in the handset category, scoring “worse than average” on every ease of use question.

“Can Apple do no wrong?” asked PCWorld, on releasing the results of the Reliability and Service Survey. “Indeed, 2010 was a remarkable year for the world’s highest-valued tech company,” the magazine declared.

Is the iPhone becoming passe? That’s the belief of one analyst predicting Google’s Android will surpass both Apple’s handset and Nokia in 2011. “The iPhone was last year’s device and now people are looking for something different,” the IDC analyst told Bloomberg.

Android’s move shouldn’t come as a surprise; Apple’s handset had just a one percent lead (24 percent versus 23 percent) over the Android platform in the third quarter of 2010. The Samsung Galaxy S, with 14 percent of all Android-based shipments, is seen as delivering an iPhone-like experience with a lower price, according to the research firm’s Francisco Jeronimo.

Mark your calendars. Chair Entertainment and Epic Games’ much-anticipated Infinity Blade will be hitting the App Store on December 9th.

The game will cost $5.99 as a universal app playable on the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPod Touch (Third and Fourth Gens) and the iPad.

Imagine entering a large, circular war room in the deepest, most hidden bunker of Cupertino headquarters, modeled similarly to the one in Doctor StrangeloveAfter shaking hands with Peter Sellers doing his classic Steve Jobs impression, you’d cast your eyes up at the enormous map on the wall, and as you looked upon it, you’d see countries around the world suddenly light up.

Those lights, though, wouldn’t indicate nuclear explosions… they’d represent the megaton blasts of the iPad launching over the past two days in Taiwan, Denmark, Portugal, The Czech Republic, Sweden, Poland, Nortay, Hungary, Finland and South Korea. Later this week, Brazil is also slated to get the iPad.

Of course, you’d never get into such a room. As General Woz Turgidson would be sure to point out, it would be a serious breach of security. I mean, you’d see everything. You’d… you’d even see the Big Board.

Apple’s North Carolina data supercenter is soon to go live, but it will sadly have to do so without the man most largely responsible for its creation: Apple’s Global Data Center Director Oliver Sanche passed away of a heart attack on Thanksgiving Day.

This one’s got us raising an eyebrow: an app that figures out not only the distance to an object, but its speed — for a buck.

From the app’s press release:

Employing the device’s three-axis gyro and basic trigonometry establishes distance. Speed and laps are measured using the motion sensing of the video camera, timing the interval between the object entering and leaving the frame. The app is compatible with iPhone 3Gs, iPhone 4, and iPod touch 4.

We’re assuming that though SpeedClock is compatible with the 3Gs, it must deliver somewhat less-accurate results on it as there’s no gyro. We’re also assuming the app isn’t all that accurate for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the app requires the user to guesstimate the distance from the iPhone to the object. But who knows, maybe one day the tech’ll get there; somehow the idea of state troopers aiming iPhones instead of radar guns seems somewhat more cuddly.

Thanks to the inclusion of WebSocket support for the iPad’s Safari browser in iOS 4.2, the doorway for collaboration through the web between the iPad and assorted devices has been flung open.

One of the first apps to take advantage of the iPad’s new trick is $10 SyncPad, which presents users with a faux whiteboard to scrawl notes on, then lets other users of the app scribble on that same whiteboard over the Internet, with the results showing up in realtime (well, almost — the developer, Davide Di Cillo of development company 39 Inc., told us it updates a little slowly, but that the problem’s been fixed in the latest update, which is waiting for Apple’s approval).

There’s no limit to the amount of collaborators, although each has to have (of course) the app and an Internet connection; the iPad-less can view the whiteboard through a web browser for free, but have to make do without being able to add input for the time being — although Di Cillo says they’re working on a fee-based version that’ll allow collaboration via a browser as well. There’s also a view-only free version of the app for the iPad.

Hewn from the trunk of — well — some sort of tree, then sanded down and oiled and hand rubbed and buffed with the bottom of a virgin angel, BlackBox sells these lovely sheathes for MacBooks of all variety for $129 a pop… except, alas, the MacBook Air, which could do with the reinforcement.

The Dev Team has just announced that they have been successful in attaining carrier unlock for the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS, which is now available through Cydia.

Same old, same old, I know. But what’s more interesting is how the Dev Team managed to unlock these old devices: by patching in a vulnerable baseband from the first iPad firmware!

While you were either sleeping off the turkey or watching a game, some industrious Apple analysts were busy surveying the Black Friday landscape. The results: iPad sales were hotter than grandma’s pumpkin pie. After Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster and his team watched Apple retailers for seven hours he came away with this conclusion: the iPad is “the Mac of the masses.”

Strictly in terms of sales, 8.8 iPads were selling each hour, compared to 8.2 Macs, according to Munster. Despite comments like “the 11-inch MacBook Air has been flying off the shelves” from retailers, Mac sales were down compared to 2009, when Apple retailers sold 8.3 computers per hour for the day after Thanksgiving.

Whenever it arrives, it looks like Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily won’t be the only iPad-only magazine around: British billionaire and part Virgin Airways owner Richard Branson is also planning on launching a new iPad publication called Project, and it’s likely to be revealed as early as tomorrow.

Did you miss out on that incredible $399 iPad deall TJ Maxx was using to lure customers into their stores this past Black Friday? You might be in luck: a new deals site has just gone online, and their goal is to deliver 32GB WiFi iPads to their customers for a hundred bucks off the standard price.

The past week’s rumor cycle has consistently pegged early December as the date when Apple would simultaneously introduce iOS 4.3, iTunes in-app subscription support and News Corp’s new iPad-only magazine, The Daily… but according to sources, that date is very likely aggressive, and the actual rollout has been delayed until early 2011.

Apple’s iPhone is more than just sizzle, according to a German survey measuring smartphone loyalty released Monday. Although 75 percent of smartphone owners surveyed said they may switch to another handset when they buy their next phone, 59 percent of iPhone owners said they are sticking with the Apple handset. The figure tops the BlackBerry and Android-based alternatives, leaving Nokia and Microsoft in the dust.

“If a phone doesn’t do what it says it will do or what the owner hopes it will do, the maker will lose loyalty,” GfK analyst Ryan Garner told Reuters. Garner explained that people tend to “buy into experiences at the high-end level.”