News - page 2181

In case you doubted that smartphone choice is the party game for the aughts, another survey has outlined what makes iPhone owners different from Android and Blackberry users.

This one won’t tell you what kind of meat they prefer, or whether they get more girls, but Retrevo polled some 7,500 smartphone owners to uncover preferences in other kinds of consumption.

iPhone owners tend to buy more Mac products and households that run a Mac OS as their primary computer purchase three times as many iPhones and almost six times as many iPads as other households.

iPhone owners are more likely to be younger than other smartphone owners, make purchases with their phones and watch TV online.

Android owners are more likely than iPhone or Blackberry owners to ditch landlines — 31 percent compared to 23 percent for the other two. Some  45 percent are netbook owners, 31 percent use their phones for GPS navigation, some of them don’t read books (15 percent) and about 10 percent don’t recycle.

Researchers conclude with a sweeping, but powerful, statement: “Apple is not just a company but a way of life and a commitment to a line of electronics, Android owners with their choice of carriers could make them more confident cell phone users and BlackBerry owners might agree with the motto slow and steady wins the race. “

It is natural to be confused by the image above, but before I explain what exactly is going on here, I’d like to give you a moment to come up with your own possible narrative. It’s clear that the Japanese man on the right is doing something with the iPad on the left through the wires hooked up directly to his brain, but what, exactly?

I look forward to hearing your first thoughts in the comments, but my immediate guess was that the Japanese man was using his iPad as some sort of extreme constipation-relieving device, during the usage of which he spontaneously had a quadruple heart attack that simultaneously struck each and every chamber of his heart. What other explanation could explain that man’s facial contortions?

The true explanation is just about as weird, though. As you can see in the video below, this is an iPad game that was demonstrated at last week’s Tokyo Game Show.

Apple’s Find My iPad feature strikes again, this time a cross-country escapade with a happy ending.  It begins when Southwest traveler Curtis Cogdill left his iPad on the airplane when traveling from Sacramento, Calif., to Portland, Ore:

After some discussion as to whose fault it was, Cogdill used his iPod Touch and Apple’s Find My iPhone MobileMe app to locate the iPad. While the family was in Oregon, the iPad had taken a cross-country trip to Orlando, Fla.

“You could zoom all the way in,” Cogdill said. “You could tell it was sitting where an airplane would be sitting at the terminal.” [CNET]

But the story doesn’t end there.  The wayward iPad soon took another journey.  While tracking his iPad, Cogdill watched as his beloved iSlate left the airport and traveled to a nearby home.

Lost, then found, then stolen – what a day.

Fortunately the story has a happy ending.  A Southwest supervisor, along with the police, recovered the iPad soon after the rightful owner contacted the airline.  The family is happy with the outcome, and MobileMe likely has another lifetime subscriber.

[via CNET]

After scratching his head for awhile and wondering what to do with a Macintosh Classic II , Maker Matteo from Ithaca, New York repurposed his old faithful Mac into a shelf-top clock.

From appearances, it looks like the clock — which Matteo rather laughably calls “steampunk” in style — only came into being after its creator accidentally doused his Mac Classic in acid then shot with a bazooka, but the innards of the admittedly ugly timepiece work well enough: a 16MHz CPU, 4MB of RAM and a 20MB hard drive running MacOS 7 and a dozen different shareware and freeware clock programs, including one that counts down the seconds to Matteo’s death.

Yeah, it’s hideous, but we love it: this is just the kind of bizarro clock I can imagine discovering thirty years from now in the basement of an elderly and now quite eccentric Steve Wozniak. Great work, Matteo!

Earlier this month, a member of the Chronic Development Team announced that he had discovered an exploit that would allow any iOS device currently on the market to be jailbroken forever, no matter how Apple patched it through software. Christened “SHAtter,” the exploit is widely anticipated, not only because it will allow versions of iOS 4.0.2 and above to be jailbroken, but because the only way Apple can fix it is through hardware. Once SHAtter is released, all current iOS devices will essentially be jailbreakable forever.

Here’s a warning, though. The SHAtter jailbreak still isn’t out, which means that any website or program claiming to be capable of jailbreaking a device running iOS 4.0.2 or above is likely a scam unless it was released by the Dev Team themselves… and chances are, it’s something much worse.

According to security researcher Costin Raiu at the Kapersey Labs, there is a new exploit in the wild that is being circulated as greenpois0n, a purported iOS 4.0.2 or above jailbreaking tool. Instead of actually jailbreaking iOS devices, though, it instead steals your passwords.

It’s easy to forget after the remarkable ease of August’s JailbreakMe exploit that jailbreaking your iOS device is actually a complicated process and not one that should be conducted by amateurs. As always, remember that the only real source to trust when it comes to jailbreaking your iPhone is the iPhone Dev Team… and unless they have released a tool directly to jailbreak your device, you should stay far, far away.

Adobe has announced the release of new video and photo editing packages.

Photoshop Elements is upgraded to version 9, and its video editing cousin Premiere Elements 9 is released as an OS X application for the first time.

Separately, they will cost you $99 each, or you can buy them both together for $149.

What do you get for your money? Well in Photoshop Elements, Adobe promises some off-shoots of the Content Aware Fill feature found in Photoshop, making it easy to edit and repair photos and have the gaps filled in realistically and automatically. The Organizer feature and Auto-Analyzer are designed to make managing large image collections easy, and there’s new face recognition technology.

Elements users might like to check out the official Facebook pages where Adobe is posting lots of tips and how-tos.

In Premiere Elements, you’ll find the same Organizer alongside tools for image stabilization and color correction.

Both applications offer access to Adobe Plus, an online backup and storage service that gives you 20GB of space for $50/year.

3D is all the rage this year — seems like every electronics outfit in existence had a new 3D TV on display at this year’s CES — and now practically anyone can shoot their own 3D photos (to display on the aforementioned 3D TVs).

The $250 stereo-imaging H-FT012 lens is part of Panasonic’s micro four-thirds lineup, and is meant for bodies like Panasonic’s $900 (for the body only) LUMIX DMC-GH2, a touch-screen hybrid (still + video) camera that shoots full HD at 60 fps, also released today. Note to James Cameron wannabes, though: The H-FT012 doesn’t do video.

Focal length is fixed at a narrowish-but-useable 65mm, and at F12, the lens is daylight-use only; still, this is probably the most practical 3D-image kit currently out on the market.

If you live in the US and own an Apple computer, you’re one of the happiest computer owners in the nation.

Apple, Inc. ranks first in customer satisfaction among its PC industry peers, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index’s (ASCI) survey.

In general, US consumers are happier than they’ve ever been with their computers. The ASCI score for personal computers totaled 78 out of 100 for the last year — higher than it has ever been since the 1994 baseline score.

Apple owners, however, are especially satisfied.  The Cupertino company scored highest for the seventh year in a row, earning 86 out of a total 100 points. That score is two points over last year’s survey and Apple’s highest score to date.

“The company now has a 9-point lead over its nearest competitor. No other company in the ACSI has as formidable a lead within its own industry,” comments Professor Claes Fornell, a professor at the university and head of the ACSI. “Innovation and product diversification, along with strong customer service, have long been at the center of Apple’s success.”

Apple wasn’t always leading the pack: scores from the early 2000s show Apple lagging behind Acer and Dell. In 2004, the year the iMac G5 launched, saw an uptick in consumer ratings.

Despite a few snafus — real or imagined — with the launch of the iPhone 4 and the arrival of the iPad, Fornell doesn’t predict that either will have any impact on Apple’s bottom line.

“At the same time, sales of Mac computers set an all-time quarterly high, which suggests that the popularity of the iPad has not impacted Apple’s desktop computer business. The company’s net income rose 78% in the second quarter and stock price, despite recent volatility, was up about 50% compared with one year ago.”

Via redorbit

Massively multiplayer online games, or MMOs, pander to the obsessive. There’s always another dungeon to explore, another raid to launch, another auction to cash out. Unfortunately, it’s that very addictive quality of MMOs doesn’t mesh well with a mobile, connected lifestyle… given that so much of an MMO’s gameplay is unsuitable for mobile devices, how do you let obsessive players feel connected with their in-game avatars from their iPhone or iPad?

The upcoming MMO Guild Wars 2 by ArenaNet has an answer for that… and it’s an app. Their application will let players stay connected to in-game chat even when on the road, while also allowing them to help out their fellow Guild Wars 2 buddies by guiding them towards quest destinations, cities and towns.

It seems like a great step to connecting MMOs to devices that aren’t quite powerful enough to run them… yet. Of course, an approach like this is probably going to be irrelevant in a few years, when someone finally makes a mobile MMO that challenges World of Warcraft’s numbers. Until then, ArenaNet’s approach to bringing the iPhone into the MMO experience is refreshingly useful.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pCRh7gcAOs

iOS 4’s introduction of app folders is a welcome addition to the operating system in that it’s a fantastic tool to use to wrangle a large app library, but it only takes a few minutes of playing around with the functionality to discover its sad limitations… which in my case rests mostly with the folder systems’ inability to support multiple pages in folders, or folders nested matrioshka-like inside one another.

That’s why I’m so excited about FolderEnhancer, a Cydia tweak for jailbroken iOS 4.1 devices that adds a host of new tweaks to the default foldering system, including sub-folder hierarchies, pages and moving multiple icons at a time.

Sure, this isn’t for everyone, but I’m envisioning a happy future in which my multiple overflowing games folders are united and subdivided into meticulously delineated genres. I’m just keeping my fingers crossed for free: all of the best Cydia tweaks lately have had price tags attached.

Is your MacBook’s 250GB hard drive just not cutting it? SeaGate has just unveiled their newly updated FreeAgent GoFlex external hard drive, boasting two huge features that make it easy to recommend to on-the-go Mac owners with large media libraries, or those looking for a beefy and portable Time Machine repository.

First of all, there’s the size: the new FreeAgent GoFlex is the world first 1.5TB portable drive. Better, it’s entirely bus-powered, which means no power cable or dual-USB cable.

Even better, though, is that Seagate’s new drive comes standard with the company’s USB 3.0 adapter… a standard which no Macs support now, but definitely will sooner rather than later. In the meantime, the GoFlex is backwards compatible with both USB 2.0 and — if you snap on an adapter — even FireWire.

The SeaGate FreeAgent GoFlex comes formatted for Windows’ NTFS file system by default, but you can either reformat it with Disk Utility or avail yourself of the included NTFS driver for Mac. The price is quite reasonable too: it’s available now for just $229.99, which is $20 less than the MSRP.

Starting in November when iOS 4.2 drops, we’ll finally be able to print directly from the iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad through AirPrint. At the beginning, AirPrint will mostly only work with printers shared on your network, but eventually, AirPrint-certified printers will appear that can sense nearby iOS devices out-of-the-book.

In the meantime, though, we’re going to have to settle for some printers kludging iOS printing… namely by assigning each printer an e-mail address to which documents can be sent for printing through your iPhone or iPad’s built-in Mail.app.

HP’s just announced three such printers: the HP Envy e-All-In-One, which will cost $249 and do the whole smorgasbord of home printing duties including printing, copying and scanning; the HP OfficeJet Pro 8500A Plus, an all-in-one office inkjet with wireless connectivity; and the HP PhotoSmart eStation, which costs $499 and is capable of printing photos of up to 9600×2400 dpi, and comes with an optional (blargh) Android tablet.

They’re all attractive printers, and they are all technically “AirPrint-compatible” in that when AirPrint rolls down the software update pipeline, they’ll at least be shareable from your Mac. If you want a truly AirPrint compatible printer, though, best wait for a spell longer.

The Apple iPad appears to be spearheading an expected 296 percent jump in flash memory for 2011. Once known for producing iPods and iPhones with insatiable appetites for memory, the iPad (along with its rivals) tablet device means 1.7 billion Gigabytes of flash memory will ship next year – up from 428GB used this year, according to iSuppli.

The hardware analysts expect 8.8 billion GB of flash memory will ship by 2014. “Tablets have stolen some cache from netbooks,” declares senior memory and storage analyst Michael Yang. Part of the reason for the iPad’s popularity is its use of NAND flash storage, rather than traditional hard disk drives.

The role of iPods and earbuds as inner-cochleal deafening devices has been debated for years, with recent studies suggesting very strongly that hearing loss in children and teenagers is much higher than it should be thanks to the likes of Apple’s portable media player.

It might not be quite time to strike a new iPod off of your child’s Christmas list, though: a new study suggests that the prevalence of young people suffering from hearing loss thanks to loud music may be much lower than it has seemed.

According to a report done by the University of Minnesota’s Department of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences, the conventional hearing tests are producing false positives for hearing loss at a rate of about ten percent.

That’s not enough, obviously, to throw caution to the wind. Cramming ear buds down your aural holes, putting on some Iron Maiden and then wildly spinning your iPod’s volume wheel until brains start dripping from your tear ducts is still going to have some consequences.

That said, it seems that the threat iPods pose to the hearing of our nation’s youth is about the same as it ever was: as long as you listen to your iPod at a lower, more responsible volume, you’re fine

If you’ve ever wondered what killed off AT&T’s unlimited bandwidth plans, look no further than the App Store.

The study was performed by Finnish analytics company Zokem, which analyzed the mobile web usage of over 10,000 smartphone users across 6.5 million sessions in sixteen countries over the past year.

What Zokem found was that while a smartphone’s mobile browser — Safari, in the case of the iPhone — is still the biggest bandwidth hog on most smartphones, apps are now taking up 50% of mobile data volume. Predictably, the most popular apps across all smartphones are Facebook and Twitter.

Keep in mind that this study was not aimed at any particular platform, so iPhone users were lumped in with Android, Palm and Windows Mobile customers as well. Given how well-developed the iPhone’s App Store is compared to its competitors equivalent marketplaces, though, I wouldn’t be surprised if iOS device users use up an even larger percentage of mobile data through apps. At the end of the day, though, the disparity between app and browser usage is only going to get more profound as more media — and perhaps iTunes itself — enters the cloud.

More than 60 percent of current iPhone owners will remain with AT&T even when Verizon begins selling the Apple smartphone, according to a new survey. The findings contradict early fears about how the exclusive iPhone carrier could be hurt if Apple expands participating U.S. partners.

The survey by Credit Suisse found 63 percent of iPhone owners would remain with AT&T and just 23 percent (or 1.4 million) of 18 million iPhone users would jump to Verizon. Previous reports suggested AT&T could lose up to 40 percent of iPhone owners should Verizon get the nod. Verizon could begin selling a CDMA iPhone as early as January, 2011, some analysts believe. (Credit Suisse is betting on February 15,2011 for Apple to announce a Verizon iPhone. The analysis firm previously said there was a 75 percent chance AT&T would remain the exclusive iPhone provider through 2010.)

iPhontography is a revolutionary new art form of images inspired by, shot with, and edited on the iPhone. A series of exhibits, the result of a presentation made in August at the Artistic Photographers of America meeting in San Francisco, will bring together artists and their work at some of Apple’s larger retail stores around the country and the world starting later this month.

The work is curated from art submitted to Pixels at an Exhibition, a website created to showcase images submitted by iPhone users from across the globe. Show curator Knox Bronson and other iPhone artists will attend each exhibit and present information about the Pixels project and talk about techniques and apps used to create the images on display.

The exhibits begin September 27 at the flagship Apple retail store in downtown San Francisco at One Stockton Street, with a reception from 6:00 – 8:00pm.

Additional exhibits are thus far scheduled for Chicago on October 21, and at the New York City Soho Apple store on October 29 – in conjunction with the PhotoPlus International Photography Expo and Conference. Plans for shows in Los Angeles and London are also said to be in the works.

The blog AutoSpies.com captured pictures at the Paris Motor Show of BMW’s new replacement for the old-and-busted rear-seat DVD screens: Apple iPad cradles that rotate, and support both portrait and landscape orientations. No, this isn’t just some concept. It’s the new hotness.

The cradle debuted on the new BMW X3, but will be available for all other model series starting in the Spring.

Popular open-source media player VLC is now available for iPad, thanks to developer Applidium.

Offered gratis, VLC faces some competition from other universal media-playing apps already available for the iPad including paid apps  OPlayer ($2.99) and CineXPlayer ($3.99).

VLC has long been my go-to app for video viewing (can’t remember the last time I even bothered to update Quicktime), nice to know it’s available now for the iPad, too.

Women’s activewear retailer Lole launched a new store design concept with 15 iPads they hope will connect customers and make the store more sticky.

The new concept store called Atelier Lole opened doors recently in one of Montreal’s main shopping drags, St. Denis Street. One of the main portions of the store is set aside for community, with tree stump stools and iPads on a low workbench opposite a wall featuring customer’s travelogue pics.

Described as kind of a “living Facebook,” through an app developed especially for the stores users can also “flip” through photos directly on the iPads located along the Atelier’s social wall.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHOZZJ_2Wjg&feature=player_embedded

Samsung’s just pushed live their latest advertisement for the first of the prestige-band iPad competitors, the Samsung Galaxy Tab… and while you certainly shouldn’t expect device agnosticism from someone who has “Cult of Mac” written on his paychecks, I’ve got to say, I think they did a pretty good job enumerating the Tab’s relative advantages over the iPad.

In about two minutes, the commercial quickly and compelling puts ticks next to the boxes of all the iPad’s more niggling omissions — web cam and expandable storage being the most obvious — and even a few that no one really cared about, like the fact that you can’t also use the iPad as a big stupid looking phone, which you can with the Galaxy Tab.

Apple has reportedly acquired all shares of the Swedish face-recognition firm Polar Rose. The company develops three software applications able to recognize faces in images.

The Cupertino, Calif. based company appears to be interested in two Polar Rose applications, Face Cloud and FaceLib, according to a Norwegian Mac site Mac 1. Speculation is that the software could be rolled into web apps, such as MobileMe. Apple already offers face recogntion in iPhoto.

Like all iPods before it, the new sixth-generation iPod nano comes with a handy diagnostic mode to allow Apple’s constabulary of technicians to dig into the underlying wetware of the device before the flouncy frills of the operating system have been slathered on top.

Unlike past iPods nanos, though, the new nano doesn’t have a clickwheel, which makes accessing its hidden iTerm Diagnostic Mode slightly different than before.

If you want to access the nano 6G’s diagnostic mode, here’s how you do it:

1. Reset your nano by holding down the sleep and volume down buttons until the Apple logo appears.

2. When you see the Apple logo, hold down all three buttons until “iTerm: iPod Display Console” flashes on screen.

3. (Other) You can reset your nano into Disk Mode by simply holding down the volume buttons when you see the Apple logo.

My favorite takeaway from the new nano’s diagnostic mode? The fact that the sixth-generation iPod nano is apparently codenamed “Snowfox” internally. That’s just adorable.

At this year’s Photokina expo in Cologne, Germany, Casio has unveiled their latest point-and-shoot, the EXILIM EX-H20G, a sexy and slender little camera that manages to differentiate itself with an interesting Hybrid GPS system which can figure out your position by using your last known coordinates, even if you’re indoors.

Here’s how it works: the EXILIM EX-H20G is chassis-stuffed with acceleromaters and motion sensors, all of which work to estimate your current position the second you walk through the front door. Walk back outside again and the EXILIM tries to get a new fix and updates any photos that have been made in the interim with revised coordinates.

Outside of that nifty little software trick, the EX-H20G has a 14.1-megapixel sensor (which is surely too much for a sensor this small) that is also capable of recording 720p HD video at up to ten degrees of optical magnification. It will be released in November and play nice with your Mac for the price of just $349.99.

Over the years, Napster has pupated from an illegal peer-to-peer music sharing network to a streaming audio subscription service, and today marks another surprising evolution in a brand that has, over the past decade, meant all things to all men: it’s now an iPhone app.

10-4, you heard that correctly: Apple has finally approved Napster on iTunes as a free application. Weighing in at just 1.8MB, Napster will stream over 10 million songs to you on your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, provided you’re willing to give a Hamilton a month to Napster LLC (which the App Store listing proudly reminds us is “a Best Buy company”) for their Napster plus Mobile Access subscription.

Okay, it’s not the long delayed U.S. launch of our favorite streaming music service, Spotify. None the less, it’s great to see so many options for streaming your music start hitting the App Store, and I think it heralds great things for Apple’s own entry into the Cloud: clearly, whatever Apple’s got planned, they don’t think existing services like Napster or Spotify are a threat. iTunes Live, when it comes, is going to do things we didn’t even know we wanted.