Although we’ve heard talk of Apple’s plans to open 25 stores in China over the next two years, here’s proof: workers taking the wraps off a store built in Shaghai.
In April, Apple told investment analysts the company was ‘well pleased’ by its initial steps into the China market. Chief financial officer Tim Cook said iPhone sales were up 200 percent during the first half of 2009. Apple added 800 more distribution points and saw iPhone sales increased 9-fold to 2.1 million units.
This is the iPad version of the quickie, DIY iPhone stand made from office supplies. This one isn’t made from the usual yellow No. 2 pencils but a handful of Faber-Castells — the fittingly cultish 2001 Grip model with a triangle shape.
The makers over at Geeky Gadgets suggest using pencils with erasers to avoid scratching but note that you should extend the two pencils until there is plenty of wood to rest your device on or wrap a little tape around the metal on each to protect the edge of your iPad.
Would you use one of these to prop up your iPad in a pinch?
Via Geeky Gadgets
As with anything involving art, opinions may vary on who makes the best cover for your Apple mobile device. I’ve always been partial to the output from GelaSkins, myself. To begin with, the selection is vast, with an art style that speaks to just about any kind of taste from the utilitarian to the bizarre and their DIY option has always seemed the perfect way to truly personalize your device.
GelaSkins have now announced a new line of covers specifically for the iPhone 4 that may solve the much-talked-about antenna reception issue and definitely offers a layer of coolness utilizing the custom home screen supported in iOS4.
Preset designs from all of GelaSkins’ online catalogs are now available for the iPhone 4, along with customizable skins through the Do-It-Yourself service.
The new line of GelaSkins for the iPhone 4 cover the front and back of the device, giving it both style and scratch protection. Optional skins also cover the sides of the iPhone 4 with the desired design, with users being able to opt out of the side coverage if they want to showcase the phone’s metal frame.
The DIY GelaSkins design service offers users the option to turn their own artwork into custom covers (not only for iPhone 4 but for any device GelaSkins can be made to cover). And iPhone iOS4 users can now download free, matching wallpapers that continue the image through the iPhone 4’s screen, offering a continuous design as shown in the images included here.
All GelaSkins vinyl protective covers are removable using patented 3M adhesive, which prevents air bubbles from forming and allows for easy application.
Are Wall Street analysts being too aggressive expecting Apple to report 8.5 million iPhones sold during the fiscal third quarter? One believes so, suggesting to investors they wait until the fourth quarter for real gangbuster sales figures. Indeed, Kaufman Brothers’ Shaw Wu cut his third quarter iPhone sales projection by 1.5 million units.
“We are shifting our iPhone assumptions to latter quaters due to the high likelihood that an inventory drawdown and screen supply constraints could impact near-term shipments over the next two quarters,” he wrote in a Tuesday note. We believes “most Street estimates have not factored this in and thus we believe consensus at 8.5 million iPhones for the June quarter may likely prove too aggressive.”
iShred LIVE, a free application from Frontier Design Group, and GuitarConnect, from the venerable peripherals company Griffin Technology look to raise the bar for making Apple’s flagship portable devices essential pieces of gear for musicians of any skill level.
The $30 GuitarConnect cable features a 1/4″ spur that connects easily into guitars, basses, or any instrument with a 1/4″ input, and a stereo 1/8″ mini-plug that connects directly to iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad for use with audio applications such as iShred LIVE. The 6 foot cable provides an additional stereo 1/8″ mini-jack to connect headphones or audio cable for connection to a home stereo, amp, mixer, or other audio source.
iShred LIVE (iTunes Link) is a mobile app with amp modeling and stomp box effects for guitar, bass, and other instruments, letting users play real instruments through their device.
Remember all the talk a few months ago whether the iPad would hurt sales of the iPod touch? That fear was overblown, according to one prominent analyst who Tuesday described the impact as ‘minimal.’
Additionally, despite early talk the iPad was selling better than Macs, Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster expects the Cupertino, Calif. firm will sell more computers than Wall Street predicts. Indeed, Mac sales were up 37 percent for the first two months of Apple’s third-quarter, the period when iPads first went on sale.
We have laptops and desktops but what do we call the iPad, which is neither? It’s been suggested we call it a “kneetop” because it rests on our knees. But what about thightop, tummytop, or crotchtop? Vote below, or leave new suggestions in the comments.
[polldaddy poll=3437482]
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6ygPYHA4hs&feature
As far as compulsive time wasters on the App Store are concerned, Doodle God is a new favorite.
The game is a silly puzzler, in which various elements are combined to create new elements. Some of the puzzle logic is hysterically (and frustratingly) wonky: the combination of “Life” and “Rock” results in “Egg,” for example. Successfully bond two elements together and you’re given a new building block to play with, as well as a pithy, oft-times humorous philosophical quote.
I’ve really been enjoying the game, inscrutable though it sometimes may be. If you’re interested in trying it before you buy, there’s a great Flash version, or you can pick it up on the App Store for just $0.99.
This is a guest commentary by Chicago music producer and author Chris Gray.
The inclusion of a physical caps lock key on modern computing devices has annoyed me to no end… because it allows for easy etiquette abuse by a great number of users.
I recently wrote Apple CEO Steve Jobs asking him to lead the way in putting this annoyance to bed. Remove the caps lock key. Replace it with another enter key or something else. It’s only use is FOR SHOUTING IN EMAIL AND BLOG COMMENTS.
If you’re looking for an unconventional portable hard drive with the aesthetic of a West Coast Chopper, Iomega’s new Skin drives might fit your requirements: each 500GB drive comes with a unique design that, according to the Press Release, screams “Who says portable storage has to be boring?”
Or, depending on your tastes, even palatable. Looking beyond the skins, though, you can expect fast 2.5″ drives and Iomega’s Mac-friendly Protection Suite, including a 12 month subscription to Trend Micro Smart Surfing for the Mac, Iomega QuikProtext and Retrospect Express backup software, and MozyHome cloud storage.
You can buy a cheap dashboard mount for your iPhone for as little as $10 bucks, but if you take your phone seriously as a replacement for your GPS unit, you might want to consider Magellan’s new iPhone car kit.
Compatible with all iPhone and iPod Touch models, the Magellan Premium Car Kit features an adjustable dash mount, a built-in speaker and noise-canceling microphone and even a GPS receiver to boost your iPhone’s signal. It’s compatible with all iOS GPS navigation applications, and it’ll even accommodate most cases without fretting.
It costs $130, which is certainly pricier than most, but then again, most dash mounts don’t have this volume of functionality. If you’re serious about GPS, the Magellan Premium Car Kit looks like money well spent.
[via Crunchgear]
The iPhone 4 already takes some of the best smartphone snapshots around, but it’s no match for a DSLR. No worry, though: the guys over at Hypebeast just paired the iPhone 4 with a DSLR lens through a Manfrotto pocket tripod mount.
The end result? Probably worse photos than the iPhone 4 took before. But until smartphones get DSLR-style CMOSes (improbable until someone figures out how to shrink a CMOS without making the pixels less sensitive to light) and lenses (pfft), this kind of Frankenstein rig is probably the most that serious iPhone 4 shutterbugs can hope for.
Want to know what it’s like to work at Apple? A post over at Quora has some illuminating answers, but according to ex-employee Chad Little, it all boils down to “a divided mix of typical corporate red tape and politics… mixed with a start-up level [of] urgency when the direction comes from Steve.”
“If you have a project that Steve is not involved in, it will take months of meetings to move things forward,” says Little. “If Steve wants it done, it’s done faster than anyone thinks is humanly possible.
Verizon understandably relishes the opportunity to kick AT&T and the iPhone whenever they possibly can, so it’s no surprise that their latest full-page ad in The New York Times this week for their upcoming flagship Android device, the Droid X, openly mocks the iPhone 4’s death grip issue with one choice line: “And most importantly, [The Droid X] comes with a double antenna design. The kind that allows you to hold the phone any way you like and use it just about anywhere to make calls.”
Ouch.
[via MacWorld]
One of the more frustrating aspects of Apple’s official response to the iPhone 4 reception issue is that the solution they are adopting isn’t just a non-fix, but it’s transparently just an optical illusion.
The iPhone 4 death grip is very real, but it only exhibits itself in middling reception areas. Why? Because Apple symbolizes 40% of the signal in the fifth bar of reception. If you have five bars of reception, you won’t notice a Death Grip drop, but if you have four bars or less, you’ll see numerous bars instantly drop off your iPhone if you touch it wrong.
Apple chose to capture 40% of the iPhone’s signal in the fifth bar to give the superficial appearance of excellent reception even when the cellular signal was as low as 60%. Their fix to the iPhone 4 death grip, then, is to more accurately correspond the actual cellular signal to signal bars, so the reception drop doesn’t appear to be so profound. This will make the “Death Grip” drop in reception look less serious, but on the other hand, it’ll make iPhone reception look worse across all devices. If you were used to getting a stead five bars of reception on your iPhones in the past, the update might drop it down to four or even three bars.
To pre-emptively counter complaints of signal degradation from customers, Apple’s slyly decided to make the first three bars of signal look bigger. That’s the optical illusion: they are hoping that by making the first three signal bars look larger and more tangible will stop people from complaining (or, worse, filing class-action lawsuits) about the just-as-imaginary reception degradation.
The bottom line: the forthcoming software update for the iPhone 4’s Antenna Problems will not fix anything, it’ll just make it less superficially noticeable. And now, even Apple is admitting it, specifically telling customers that the software update won’t fix the “Death Grip,” and the only solution is to either hold the phone differently or buy a case.
Come on, Apple. This is nuts. If you’re going to rely on a software update stage trick to fool customers into thinking everything’s okay, you can’t also cop to it all being an illusion through your official Customer Support organ. It’s time to just start bundling bumpers with the iPhone 4 and be done with it.
Although the iPhone 4’s reception issues get all the press attention, the iPhone 4 has another pressing issue: the tendency of the proximity sensor to misread how close your face is to the handset, which can in turn cause the touchscreen to turn on when it’s close to your face, allowing your chin or cheek the unfortunate liberty of blindly dialing or even hanging up during a call.
The proximity sensor issues are commonly theorized to be a software issue, but according to an Apple Store Genius spoken to by TUAW’s Aron Trimble, we may be looking at another design flaw.
Why? According to the Genius, Apple had to move the proximity sensor location in the iPhone 4 so that it actually points into the ear canal during a call. That means that if you have particularly glistening ear canals, light bouncing around the ear canal can mistakenly tell the proximity sensor that you’re no longer on a call.
The Genius’ recommendation on how to fix the issue? He said that you should make your calls from somewhere darker.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0V2rhMnncZQ
During the WWDC keynote, Steve Jobs’ efforts to show off the improved speed of Mobile Safari on the iPhone 4 were thwarted by a catastrophic WiFi meltdown, but a month later, our good buddy Obama Pac-Man is here to prove what Steve could not: Mobile Safari on the iPhone 4 is wicked fast.
In a showdown against the iPhone 3GS on 3G with WiFi turned off, Mobile Safari rendered all the tested sites significantly faster on the iPhone 4. It’s all a matter of a few milliseconds here, a half a second or so there, but that time adds up in an app as integral to the iOS experience as Mobile Safari.
Extra points go to Obama Pac-Man for his stylistic choice of silence for the video: anyone else would have supplemented it with a loud soundtrack of moist mouth-breathing or, failing that, phlegmatic nu-metal. Bravo.
TUAW published a report today that included new video evidence supporting the belief that the iPhone 4 death grip is very real. I know you are probably rolling your eyes about this, since there have been many other videos covering this topic, but this time things are different. This video includes the demonstration of the iPhone 4 along with a customized field services app that clearly shows the iPhone 4 antenna problem isn’t the result of some software glitch as Apple claims.
Apple has issued an update to its MobileMe iDisk application today and version 1.2 brings some welcome improvements. As well as support for multitasking and fast app switching, iDisk is now a universal application and works natively on the iPad.
What’s more, iPad users can now export documents from iDisk in to iBooks or office applications like Apple’s own Pages, Numbers & Keynote offerings.
Another big improvement is the ability to listen to music from within the iDisk application – this means you can save space on your device by uploading your tracks to an iDisk folder and then listening to them from there. Obviously this will require a data connection to your iDisk, however.
The full list of improvements is as follows:
iDisk is the last of Apple’s MobileMe apps to be updated for multitasking and iOS 4. All we’re waiting on now is the MobileMe Gallery app improvements and iPad support!
Download MobileMe iDisk for your device from the App Store here.
The much anticipated Archetype first-person shooter has hit the US App Store today and claims to deliver a “high quality console-style FPS experience on iPhone or iPod Touch.”
First launched in the Czech Republican App Store, Archetype, for just $2.99, offers 3 game modes; Training, Challenge and 5-on-5 Team Deathmatch over Wi-Fi, 3G and even EDGE. With 5 maps to choose from a variety of weapons, Archetype seems a must for any online FPS fan.
Features include a precise dual joystick-style control system, the ability to rank up by earning experience points, an offline tutorial mode and the opportunity to add friends and challenge them in team deathmatch.
Developers, Villain, have also optimized Archetype for the iPhone 4’s retina display by offering high-resolution graphics that provide fantastic looking weapons and textures, and, they claim, “headshots never looked so good!”
Get your hands on Archetype in the App Store here and let us know what you think!
A Chinese gadget site has reviewed the best iPhone 4 knockoff on the market, and while it looks good ands costs only $100, it’s really a piece of junk.
Says M.I.C Gadget:
“It’s the new king in the knockoff market, built to look like a real iPhone 4 while doing its best — with features like a front-facing camera with flash, removable battery, and that outrageous imitation of the industrial design, no one would say that this knockoff is not cool.”
But under the hood, the hardware and software are rubbish. The touchscreen barely works; the back is made of plastic, not glass; it says 64GB but it’s only 64MB; video is so crappy it is unwatchable; the Mail app is MMS, not email; the “five megapixel” camera is only 0.3 megapixels, and so on.
M.I.C Gadget: iPhone 4 Knockoff Review.
PS: M.I.C Gadget also has reviews of a knockoff MacBook Air and a phony iPad.
If you want to give your MacBook more of the oomph of a desktop, the DeskBook Pro dock from Zemno would be a neat little solution… except for its mind-boggling expensiveness.
Like most laptop docking stations, the DeskBook primarily functions as a port multiplier: slot your MacBook in and you’ll expand your available USB 2 ports to six, as well as two FireWire 800 and one FireWire 400 ports.
The DeskBook Pro also operates as an external hard drive, with two bays that can accept either a 500GB hard drive or a battery. Don’t expect the battery to juice your MacBook, though: it’ll only power the DeskBook away from a power outlet.
Additionally, the DeskBook packs a DVI-out port for the connection of a third monitor to your MacBook. The important thing to note here, though, is this monitor will be driven by USB, so you’ll want to go light on it: it won’t hold up to more performance-intensive tasks.
Not a bad array of functionality, all told, but the price is enough to prevent this from being dropped in many shopping carts: $600 without the $180 hard drive or $150 battery pack. If you want a desktop that bad, at that price, you might as well just buy an iMac.
Prince is one of the most played musicians in my library,but I can’t buy any of his newer albums on iTunes: he won’t license his music to Apple. Why? According to a new interview, it’s because the “Internet is over” and iPod and iPhones fill our heads with malevolent “numbers.”
“The internet’s completely over. I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won’t pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can’t get it,” Prince said in an interview with the Daily Mirror.
“The internet’s like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you.”
This, of course, is typical nuttiness from The Formerly Known Formerly Known Artist: Prince, who is also a big believer in chemtrails and, as described by Kevin Smith, has some very curious opinions about the appropriation of both camels and women for a God-loving Christian’s personal use.
But all can be forgiven for “Sign ‘O’ The Times.” I think I’ll go listen to it on my evil, number-spurting iPod now.
Two of the most popular sporting games for iPad have gone on sale today for a limited time only courtesy of Gameloft, who have slashed the prices of Real Soccer HD (previously $6.99) and NFL 2010 HD (previously $4.99) to just $0.99.
I’ve found both games to be a great buy, in fact, Real Soccer is one of my favorite soccer games for the iPad, so if you’ve been considering either of them, now is a great time to snap them up!
Gameloft also has a sale currently running on two of their other games including Hero of Sparta HD and Brain Challenge HD, both of which have also been reduced to $0.99.
The savings don’t stop there, though – as well as their sales, Gameloft have permanently cut the prices of both Modern Combat: Sandstorm HD and Gangsta: West Coast Hustle HD from $6.99 to $4.99.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gEAeE9kd2E
It was only a matter of time before some plucky app developer divorced the iPhone 4’s flash functionality from the Camera.app proper to create a bitchin’ Strobe app… but huskily-voiced 15 year old John H. Meyer is the first dev out of the gate with Strobe Pro, an app sure to please photographers and ravers alike.
Strobe Pro probably won’t be particularly useful when used with the iPhone 4’s built-in camera, but paired with a DSLR as a strobing flash could result in some startlingly effective shots. As for the app itself, I’m particularly impressed by Strobe Pro’s wicked slick transparent view mode.
Strobe Pro isn’t available on the App Store yet, but it should be out as soon as it gets through App Store approval.