Cupertino’s got a lot of flack for their prudish stance on adult-oriented applications on the App Store, with Steve Jobs himself famously saying that if revolutions are about freedom, than the iPad is revolutionary because of its freedom from porn.
Regardless about how you may feel about Apple censoring the content an adult can consume on a device that he owns, though, at least Apple’s not going to be alone in ridding their app marketplace of all adult content: Microsoft plans to do the same thing with their Windows Phone 7 Marketplace when it launches later in the year.
Steve Jobs himself described AT&T’s early update pricing for the iPhone 4 as “generous,” and generous it is — suspiciously so. How generous?
Well, if you qualify for an upgrade before December 31st, the 16GB iPhone 4 will cost you just $199 while the 32GB model will cost you $299. Things get a lot steeper if your upgrade is after the start of 2011, though, with prices jumping to $399 and $499, respectively. Don’t want to sign a new contract, but still want an iPhone 4? Prepare to pay $599 to $699.
If Safari 5’s new Reader feature sounds familiar, that’s because it’s not a new idea.
The Readability bookmarklet has been doing a very similar thing for a year or so now, and of course works in many different browsers, not just Safari. Incidentally, Readability’s developers are delighted about Reader.
Those who have had the luck to play with an iPhone 4 before it’s official June 24th launch have all confirmed that the new handset’s quadruple-density Pixel Display is just as gorgeous as Apple is boasting.
But over at Daring Fireball, John Gruber points out another reason the iPhone 4’s display is so bright, crisp and lurid: a new production process that eliminates the space between the LCD and the touchscreen.
It’s not the streaming iTunes we were all hoping for — that announcement makes more sense to come at Apple’s iPod-centric September event than WWDC anyway — but iTunes 9.2 is on its way, and while you won’t see anything revolutionary in this iterative point update, there is a bunch of cool new functionality allowing iPhone owners to more easily cope with the new features in iOS 4.
When Steve Jobs announced yesterday that they were finally taking the “phone” out of the iPhone OS and rebranding it “iOS,” I breathed a sigh of relief: even before the iPad, branding an operating system that runs on non-phone hardware like the iPod Touch always seemed confusing, and if rumors of a new Apple TV are correct, Apple’s plans for iOS are far bigger than the smartphone arena.
But I also met the announcement with a bit of a “Whuh?” Cisco has owned the trademark for iOS for almost two decades: it’s what their routers run on. Then again, Cisco also owned the iPhone trademark, and Apple came to a deal with them on that one back in 2007: they must have worked out a deal.
They did. According to a Cisco blog post, “Cisco has agreed to license the iOS trademark to Apple for use as the name of Apple’s operating system for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. The license is for use of the trademark only and not for any technology.”
As of this moment, there’s no news if Apple reached a similar licensing agreement with the Greek government, who certainly could use the money right about now.
One depressing omission from yesterday’s keynote was the long-requested addition of direct printing support for iOS devices. Jobs himself has said it’s coming, but apparently not this year, leaving your only option for printing a document on your iPad as emailing it to a computer with access to your printer.
If you don’t mind upgrading your printer, though, HP’s coming to the rescue with a line of new printers that will allow you — more or less — to print directly from your iDevice. Their line of new printers will cost between $99 and $400, and they come with a unique perk: each printer has its own, unique email address.
With HP’s new printers, all you need to do is email a document to your printer from your iPhone or iPad and have it automatically printed out. You can even share that email address with friends and family members.
There’s no word on exact models yet, but HP promises the first of their email-capable printers will be out next month, with small business models hitting in September.
Until Apple gets around to offering printer capability directly from your iOS, this seems like the best solution around… as long as you’re already in the market for some new printing hardware.
Although Steve Jobs didn’t highlight the update on stage at yesterday’s WWDC, Apple has more or less quietly updated Safari to version 5, confirming the details of yesterday’s leak.
There’s a lot of new functionality in the change log, but the most evident new functionality is Safari Reader. Yesterday, I speculated this would be a remedial newsreader, but it’s actually not that at all: instead, it’s basically a built-in version of Arc90’s Readability bookmarklet that strips a web page down to just newspaper-style text on a blank white page, retaining only simple text formatting and in-line images.
What’s particularly awesome about Reader is that on multi-page articles, it’ll automatically appends pages together so you can read the whole article in one sitting, no navigational clicks required. Just click the “Reader” button at the left of the address field to go into Reader mode (it only works on articles of a certain length).
It’s hard to remember when one of Steve Jobs keynote speeches WWDC had a glitch, but the Demo Gods weren’t smiling on Jobs today. Thanks to network problems, Jobs had to ditch on a demo because of Wi-Fi trouble. But maybe it’s not some luckless Apple engineer’s fault: The same thing happened to Google during its developers conference last month at the same venue.
The new iPhone won’t be in people’s hands until June 24th, but existing iDevice owners who are looking forward to the incredible features of iOS 4 won’t have long to wait: it’ll be available for download to owners of the iPhone 3GS, 3G and iPod Touch on June 21st, just two weeks away.
The best part? It’ll be free to everyone. No longer will iPod Touch owners have to pay for an OS update. “We’ve finally found a way to get these upgrades for free to our iPod touch customers, and we couldn’t be happier.”
I’m sure iPod Touch owners, long screwed by update fees, agree. I know I do.
A couple months ago, Apple stopped selling cases on their online store, which implied they were getting into cases themselves.
They call their new case a “bumper” and it comes in numerous colors, including white, pink, orange and other spectrums of colors. It looks like it wraps around the sides of the device without protecting the back, hence the automobile terminology: it’s all about protecting the iPhone at its most vulnerable spot.
Additionally, Apple has just announced an official iPhone dock, which will cost just $29 and support charging and syncing.
Jobs has just completed outlining all of the iPhone 4’s revolutionary new features. Now to reveal what it’ll cost your wallet.
Coming in black and white, the iPhone 4 will cost $199 for the 16GB models, the same price as the 3GS. $299 gets you the 32GB iPhone 4.
Already in a contract? AT&T is allowing anyone with a contract expiring this year to be immediately eligible for a new iPhone at the same $199 – $299 price, as long as they top up their contract for two years.
Predictably, the 3Gs is becoming the new sub-$100 model, and will cost $99.
The iPhone 4 will be available on June 24th, with pre-orders starting on June 15th. It will immediately ship in five countries: the US, France, Germany, the UK and Japan, with 24 more countries following in August, and 40 more countries following in September.
It’s almost over, but like usual, there just “one more thing” and while we all knew it was coming, it’s the first time it’s been directly confirmed: a front-mounted camera on iPhone 4 that allows for user-to-user video chat.
Calling Jonathan Ive on his iPhone 4 to demo the new iPhone’s video chat capability (after first having issues with a connection and yelling at the audience to turn off their WiFi), Jobs reminisced about growing up with the Jetsons and Star Trek, “dreaming about communicators and video calling. Now it’s real!”
Apple’s calling their user-to-user video calling solution FaceTime.
In addition to utilizing the front-mounted cam, FaceTime allows you to switch to the rear camera so the other person can see what you’re seeing. You can use FaceTime in either portrait or lansdcape.
FaceTime is iPhone 4 to iPhone 4 only (no other iDevice has a front-mounted video camera yet), and it works anywhere with WiFi. What a shock: AT&T’s 3G network just can’t handle it. Apple claims they’ll work with their carrier partners to get it ready later in the year, but look at AT&T’s abysmal record implementing tethering, and my guess we’ve got a long wait ahead of us.
Apple’s getting into the advertising game with their iAds network, and Jobs says the goal is Emotion + Interactivity. The idea is to make it painless for developers to put ads in their apps: just tell Apple where you want them and they’ll inject it themselves. Likewise, it should be painless for viewers to see them: tap them and it’ll expand. You’ll never be hijacked into the browser.
They’ve only been selling iAds for eight weeks, and already attracted a huge number of advertisers, including Nissan, Citi, Unilever, AT&T, Chanel, GE, Liberty Mutual, State Farm, Geico, Sears, JCPenny, Target, Best Buy, DirecTV, TBS network, and Disney.” Overall, iAds has brought in $60M in advertising, and makes up 48% of US Mobile Display Advertising Spending in the second half of 2010.
The demonstrated advertisements look pretty good, admittedly. Certainly more like interactive applications than musty old banner ads. They’re almost like mini-apps that dynamically download when needed into an existing program. The new interactive Nissan Leaf iAd is particularly impressive, which allows you to interactively compare a $1 of gas when driving the fully electric Leaf compared to other hybrids.
iAds probably isn’t going to be very good for consumers — I despair that there will be literally no reason for a developer not to put ads even in paid apps anymore, and that too much of the iPhone’s screen real estate will be taken up with advertisements — but it should be a windfall for both Apple and the developers taking part in the iAds ecosystem.
It’s made a huge splash on the iPad, so naturally, iBooks is coming to the iPhone and iPod Touch, with the same controls, same note taking features, same highlights, same PDF reading and same bookmarks.
Like the iPad version, you can purchase and download a book to all your devices for no charge, and automatically sync your place, bookmarks and notes.
Not so surprisingly, on the iPhone 4 retina display, iBooks looks gorgeous. And to think: this coming from the man who said that people didn’t read anymore.
Apple may be warring with Google in the smartphone arena, but they’re not going to take it out on their customers: Jobs has just confirmed rumors that Apple was getting into bed with Microsoft and adding Bing as a search option to iOS.
Google’s still the default, but now you have another choice, and Bing’s doing some really snazzy things with the HTML5 presentation of results. If you like your search results to be pretty, it looks like Google’s going to have some catching up to do with Bing.
Oh, and the three of you who still default to Yahoo… you can still search with them too. Go nuts!
It has made less and less sense by the day that the iPhone OS would continue to be called that as non-iPhone devices begin to run it. Jobs has just confirmed the earlier rumor of an iPhone OS rebrand: starting with iPhone OS 4.0, it’ll just be called iOS4.
From a humble blogger’s heart directly to Cupertino: thank you, my benefactors. You don’t know how confusing it was to talk about iPhone OS for the iPad on a daily basis. Having “Phone” plugged into the name of an increasingly non-Phone operating system was just ridiculous.
Anyone else wonder if this is the first blush of a reveal of a new iOS-capable Apple TV?
Randy Ubillos, Apple Chief Architect of Video Apps, has just taken the stage to show off iMovie for iPhone, claiming it’s one of the most exciting things he’s ever worked on.
What’s iMovie for iPhone about? “Record HD video and edit with beautiful transitions and titles, all on the device you carry with you every day,” says Ubillos.
Once you bring up the app, you quickly get a list of all the project you have, and can just tap on a project to get into the editing environment. Clips are viewed along the bottom of the display: rotate the phone to landscape and you can record directly into the timeline, or choose from existing clips, which are dragged in. Pinch to change the scale of the timeline.
Photos can also be added, as well as transitions (entered with a scroll box) and even titles. The new camera records geolocation information and gets picked up automatically by iMovie and put into the screen as an option.
You can also add music tracks to your video from your iTunes library.
Wow. This is incredible. There’s just nothing like this out there right now. It’ll be available on the App Store for just $4.99.
We all knew the iPhone was bound to get a better camera this year — it’s long flagged behind competing smartphone’s offerings — and so it has: Jobs has just announced the details of the iPhone 4’s new camera: 5MP, capable of 720p video recording.
Great news here is that Apple’s sticking to a sane five megapixels. Instead, they are trying to improve low-light photography on smartphones, which is typically abysmal, by getting more light to the sensor through back-illumination and an LED flash.
Additionally, the iPhone is getting HD video recording, with the new camera capable of 720p footage at 30 frames per second. To harness that power, Apple is also building building video editing software into the iPhone 4… with iMovie for iPhone!
Confirming that Apple’s not just dabbling in the chip game, Steve Jobs has just confirmed that the iPhone 4 uses the Intrinsity-designed A4 CPU, just like in the iPad.
But that’s not where the hardware changes stop. Revealing the back of the device, Jobs shows that it is backed to the gills, and just like in the Gizmodo prototype, most of the iPhone 4’s internals are made up of battery.
The iPhone 4 will come with up to 32GB of storage, quadband HSDP / HSUPA with 7.2 MBps down and 5.8 Mbps up, dual mic noise suppression, 802.11n WiFi and GPS.
What kind of battery life are we talking? Seven hours on 3G, six on browsing through 3G, 10 on WiFi, 10 on Video, 40 on music and 300 hours standby.
The iPhone’s also about to get a lot more interactive with the addition of a three-axis gyroscope, which in combination with the accelerometer provides 6-axis motion sensing. Amazing! I can’t wait to see what app developers do with it.
While trying to show off the iPhone 4’s new retina display by comparing web pages, Steve Jobs encountered an unfortunate problem with the Moscone center’s WiFi.
Making a hat tip to Google’s problems at their IOKeynote, Jobs joked: “You could help me out by getting off of WiFi.” Unfortunately, his problems didn’t end there, as when he switched to a backup iPhone 4, he got the dreaded “Could not activate cellular network.”
Giving up on web pages, Jobs apologized: “I’m sorry guys, I just don’t know what’s going on. Scott, you got any suggestions?”
A perfect audience response: someone shouted out “Verizon!”
The second big thing about the iPhone 4, according to Jobs, is the revolutionary new display.
They’re calling it the retina display, and it quadruples, as reported, the pixel density of the last iPhone. You now get an industry leading 326 pixels per inch in the iPhone 4. It’s a marked improvement on the display in the 3GS in both brightness and clarity.
“There has never been a display like this on a phone,” says Jobs. “People haven’t even dreamt of a display like this. It turns out there’s a limit around 300px per inch that the human eye can’t differentiate between the pixels — text looks like you’ve seen it in a fine printed book, unlike you’ve ever seen on an electronic display before.”
“Once you use a Retina Display,” Jobs confidently brags,”you just can’t go back.”
