By many people’s estimations, the iPad is missing anywhere from between one and two cameras, and Apple’s curious choice to eschew adding at least one web cam to their tablet when they already had their video-conferencing standard FaceTime in the wings is often cynically described as a move to encourage customers to quickly upgrade to the second-gen unit once it pops out of Cupertino’s manufacturing shops.
Why wait until then, though? This iPad Cam-Case design by Chet Rosales adds a swiveling camera to the enclosure. Of course, without proper support from Apple (and a port of FaceTime to iPad), a case like this would be pretty useless… but we’re hopeful, if not optimistic, that Apple might choose to sell something like this themselves when the camera-equipped, second-gen iPad comes out sometime in the next year. Let’s not leave the early adopters behind.
This gorgeous pinhole camera on Etsy isn’t just elegantly simple in its design, but its made out of an old iPhone box. Load a standard 35mm film reel into its spool and you’ll be able to take simple pinhole snaps with the best of shoebox toting grade schoolers. It even has a built-in advance and rewind reel, enabling you to “shoot a picture, advance to the next frame, use the entire roll of film, rewind it back into the canister and take it to the drug store for processing!” Who needs iPhoto?
When some intrepid young capitalist coats a new gadget in superglue and then rolls it in Swarovski-brand crushed glass then reprices it for a few thousand dollars more , we usually decry the resulting product as a tacky, shameless money grab aimed at Cristal-swilling rappers, bling-encrusted divas, porn star kingpins and the like.
This $299 iPhone 4 case, on the other hand? What can we say? Has Steve ever looked so bedazzlingly fabulous?
Earlier today, Apple made a new job posting on their official site, calling for an iTunes Fraud Prevention Specialist to work in Austin “canceling fraudulent orders” and “researching and resolving fraud escalations from various sources.”
It was a well-timed posting. A couple of days earlier, developer Thuat Nguyen and his dev company “mycompany” was caught hacking into the accounts of 400 iTunes users and funneling money from their accounts into a number of cheesy, crappy, Dragonball-themed e-book apps… a transparent money-funneling move that got Nguyen banned from the Apple dev program.
Since the job posting appeared, though, it seems that Apple has rethought lending any publicity to the fact that they think, internally, they need to do more about iTunes fraud: the job posting has since been pulled. No need to be cagy about this, Apple: credit card fraud happens, it’s not really your fault, and it’s good that you’re hiring more guys to protect us. Don’t worry about it!
After the fashion of their many other great infographics, GigaOm has continued their series of informative high-res JPEGs with iPhone: The Art of the Launch, which puts into perspective just how huge the iPhone has become… and some of the problems that have faced previous launches.
The most interesting part of the infographic to me? The citation of Gizmodo’s Brian Lam back in 2006, ahead of the iPhone launch: “The iPhone Will Be Announced On Monday. I Guarantee it. It isn’t what I expected at all. And I’ve already said too much.” Considering that four years later, the same site would strip a stolen and still unannounced iPhone 4 down to its bolts for its readership, that seems like an awfully coy admission of insider knowledge for Gizmodo to make, in retrospect.
The guys over at repair shop TechRestore have put together this goofily sinuous and retro-styled stop-motion video of an iPhone 4, doing a strip tease down to its very frame. Consider this the technological equivalent of a burlesque dancer slowly undressing herself down to her skeleton in a dust-free clean room. Or don’t, because that’s just plain creepy.
Elusive as some albino cryptozoological flora, the white iPhone 4 has been snapped in all its glory by Japanese blog Impress Watch. It looks exactly how you’d expect it to look, but since this is the iPhone 4 many of us wanted to be holding in our hands a couple of weeks ago, Impress Watch’s catalog of unboxing shots can be classified as a bit of late night gadget pornography starring that elfin, ivory love who somehow got away.
YouTube’s mobile website has just gotten a lot more iPhone-friendly, thanks to some hefty HTML5 optimization.
A new spartan, icon-driven dashboard now greets the YouTube visitor coming in through Mobile Safari, offering quick and easy access to subscriptions, playlists, favorites, your videos, search and settings. It’s all a lot more finger friendly.
When it comes to video viewing, you also now have a lot more options, including the ability to play a video in a higher-quality format, vote it up or down, write comments or view related videos.
The biggest change, though, is speed: videos load much quicker than the native YouTube player, as well as gaining higher-definition options for watching on the likes of the iPhone 4’s Retina Display.
If you want to check it out, just point Mobile Safari to youtube.com and check it out.
With the release of iOS 4, Apple has erased many of the advantages competing platforms — most notably Android — had previously enjoyed. But while much noise has been made about the iPhone’s new multitasking trick, news that the iPhone can now use image recognition to create a more accurate augmented-reality experience has been far less trumpeted.
Maybe that’s because it’s not really an ability of the iPhone itself, but rather an API that Apple has made available to app developers with the release of iOS 4.
It works like this: The app uses a particular API to capture live video from the iPhone’s camera, then shunts the feed back to servers that use image-recognition software to figure out what the iPhone is looking at; the server then sends a graphic (or graphics) back to the iPhone that’s overlayed onto what the user is looking at (we’ve got instructions on how to easily demo the new tech later on in this post).
Police searched an iPod as evidence in a rape case after his accuser recounted that her attacker had recorded the incident.
According to court documents, Kerry LePage of Raleigh, North Carolina was arrested in May for second-degree rape. The woman pressing charges said she remembered that LePage had an iPod in his hand during the attack. The iPod was later found between the mattress and box springs and is being held by police.
This isn’t the first time the iPod’s video recording has landed it in police custody: an iPod Touch’s large storage capacity and big screen were at the center of a middle-school sexting scandal and some teens were recently apprehended after filming a theft with an iPod.
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?
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.
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.
CC-licensed photo by David Reber's Hammer Photography - http://flic.kr/p/849Yoi
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.
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.”
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.
