News - page 2225

As a former Londoner myself, I can give you clear advice from the outset: don’t take your car into London. It’s slow, expensive, and bound to end up a frustrating experience.

Y’know those popular kids in high school? The ones who get along with everyone, are easy on the eyes, fun to hang out with, good at everything without being exceptional in any one area, and don’t ever seem to run out of energy?

That’s Casio’s EX-H10. Aside from one ridiculously high-performing attribute, the EX-H10 isn’t really exceptional in any one arena; rather, this point-n-shoot is a collection of quality and smart features brought together in a relatively high-value, good looking — if stoutish — container.

Panasonic just announced the addition of a new wide-angle, 5x zoom camera to their line, the slim Lumix FX75.

Somewhat notable here is the ultra-wide 24mm lens equivalent on this camera, but we like the wide-open f2.2 aperture even more — definitely on the fast side of the spectrum for a PnS, and pretty nifty for creating shots with a shallow depth-of-field. A souped-up Venus Engine HD II image processor should help keep things snappy, and the camera also shoots HD video video in AVCHD Lite at 720p and 30 fps. And of course, like the other models toward the high-end of Panasonic’s range, the FX75 is equipped with a Leica lens.

Panasonic also festively included a “Happy Mode” in the FX75, a setting that adjusts the brightness, saturation and color to ramp up an image’s cheeriness (presumably for tourists visiting London). No word yet on ship date or pricing.

On the increasingly small off chance your computer doesn’t have it’s own webcam (or you’ve blowtorched it because those aliens from Tau Ceti II were spying on you), German developer Drahtwerk has a clever solution: an app that lets you turn your iPhone into a wifi-tethered webcam.

iWebcamera ($5) includes a pause-mode, two quality options and a “send drivers by e-mail feature,” which is apparently some BS that Windows users need to deal with.

The bad news is that iWebcamera is only for Windows boxes; the good news is it’ll work with any iPhone, even the Original.

It appears many analysts couldn’t get the word out fast enough after Apple announced over the Memorial Day holiday how well the iPad is selling. Analysts increased predictions on how many tablets Apple would sell and how high the Cupertino, Calif. company’s stock would rise.

Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster told investors Monday he expects Apple will sell 6.2 million iPads during calendar 2010, up from the 4.3 million he had previously projected. Despite warning investors to “keep iPad expectations in check” due to international and domestic iPad supply problems, Munster also boosted to $330 his target for Apple shares, up from $323.

Well, Apple has shuttered LaLa, its streaming music service. The sign appeared early Tuesday morning, but while the closure comes as no surprise, what is unsettling is the dead air that replaces the web-based music application. What’s more, don’t bet the farm LaLa will be reborn as some streaming version of iTunes.

“I have a hunch we’re not going to see one soon,” opines Peter Kafka at the Wall Street Journal‘s All Things Digital. Although it could be just a teaser for Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ appearance tonight at the All Things Digital conference, Kafka notes web-based music services are on life support and the music industry’s legal eagles control the oxygen supply.

CNN paid a visit to Foxconn, the Chinese factory complex where 10 workers jumped to their deaths this year.

What did they find? A super-concentrated complex in Shenzen where sleeping quarters, restaurants, hospitals, supermarkets and swimming pools are packed into 2.3 square kilometers (about 0.9 square  miles).

It’s a factory town, they report, that feels more like a “heavily secure” university campus.

Apple has sold more than two million of its iPads in under 60 days, a sign demand for the tablet device is not slowing. The Cupertino, Calif. company also acknowledged it was having difficulty keeping up with the fast-moving sales amid reports of short supplies.

“Customers around the world are experiencing the magic of iPad, and seem to be loving it as much as we do,” CEO Steve Jobs announced Monday. “We appreciate their patience, and are working hard to build enough iPads for everyone.”

At this week’s Computex expo in Taipei, Hitachi-LG unveiled their new HyDrive: an amalgamation of a Blu-Ray DVD drive and solid state drive that could afford us a look at the direction future MacBook hardware will take to slim down chassis design.

The HyDrive is interesting: the current models offers 64GB of NAND flash memory with a read/write speed of 175MB/60MB per second, although capacities should increase. The SSD and Blu-Ray drive are then connected through SATA II. The end result is two drives — one optical, one solid state — that take up half the room as their separate counterparts in a laptop.

We all know how much Cupertino likes efficiency. If Apple chose to use a combined solution like this in their next MacBooks, they’d significantly cut down on the size of their internal components, leading to slimmer, lighter notebooks that have Blu-Ray functionality to boot.

The HyDrive will launch in August 2010, and while there’s no official price yet, they’re still definitely priced for luxury laptops: it’s been hinted that a HyDrive could add $200 to the price of a standard notebook.

For scuba-diving iMovie users looking to edit together some gorgeously lurid undersea footage, Sanyo’s gorgeous new Xacti DMX-CA100 promises to be the world’s first completely waterproof camcorder capable of shooting 1080p video at up to 60 frames per second nat up to 10 subaqueous feet. Even better: the resulting footage is captured in iPhone-friendly H.264 format, although a word of caution: your iPad isn’t nearly this submersible.

Additionally, the Xacti DMX-CA100 can capture still shots at up to 14 megapixels, and supports 6X optical zoom and high-speed sequential zooming that allows you to capture up to 22 photos per second at a 2MP resolution.

Sanyo’s latest Xacti will be released this June in colors of black, yellow or pink for a still unrevealed price.

Even if the iPad did have weight sensors, this would still be a self-evidently bad app idea…. and grow exponentially worse in direct correlation to user weight density.

[via Slashgear]

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATpSPNIuj3M&feature=player_embedded#!

Steve Jobs himself said the iPad is “magical” but this may be the first we’ve seen it used as a prop in a magic trick, thanks to Japanese YouTube illusionist “Salary Magician.”

His tricks are all standard sleight-of-hand affairs that take advantage of the iPad as a prop behind which birds, books and envelopes can be hidden “in plain sight” but the real beauty of this act is the way Salary Magician has conjured himself up a home-made app to give his tricks that extra bit of shazam.

End note: is “Salary Magician” the best name for a Japanese magician ever, or what?

[via Gizmodo]

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qw5jH8GN12U&feature=player_embedded#!

Created by Stanford alums Ashkay Kothari and Ankit Gupta as part of the Launch Pad class at the Stanford Institute of Design, Pulse is an absolutely gorgeous iPad newsreader that makes RSS and Atom feeds as easy as Google search, and even more gorgeous than Google Reader Play.

Whether in line with the national average or not, the recent slate of suicides at Foxconn has been a public relations nightmare not just for the Chinese electronics manufacturer, but for their partners as well.

Now, a report from Chinese site Zol.com.cn suggests that Cupertino might be taking the well-being of their subcontracted workers into their own hands: they claim that Apple will subsidize the wages of Foxconn employees working on their products with a profit-sharing scheme.

According to the article, Apple believes the main reason for the suicide jumps is low wages, and so they are prepared to offer roughly 1 to 2% of the profits of Foxconn-produced Apple products to the employees who have worked on them.

According to a report in the Financial Times, Google is so fed up with Windows 7’s woeful security issues that they are now taking Redmond’s operating system by the pants seat and unceremoniously hurtling it from the building.

What machines are employees getting instead? Linux rigs… and Macs.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJeGt5fe7e8&feature=player_embedded

It was a rude dose of unexpected knowledge in the intricacies of USB when starry-eyed iPad owners first came home with their new devices, plugged it into their computer’s port and instead of juicing saw… nothing.

The culprit, they soon found out, was the iPad’s USB requirements: it simply hates the low-powered USB ports so ubiquitous in most PCs, and will accept nothing less than a full 10 watts of energy output if you want it to charge. This forced some users to divorce syncing from charging, plugging their iPads into their computers only when they wanted to slurp up some content from iTunes, and charging it via the wall plug.

Not exactly ideal. Luckily, in the months since the iPad’s debut, some of the biggest names in motherboards (namely Gigabyte, MSI and Asus) have all come out with software that juices up their motherboards to be able to power the iPad.

Better yet, Asus’ software seems to work on pretty much any computer, as illustrated by the above YouTube video. If you’re still grinding your teeth about USB charging issues with your iPad, you might give it a shot.

[via Engadget]

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbHF63b7g50&feature=player_embedded

Although the joke in this Star Wars iPad Briefing video —in which footage from A New Hope is overlaid with Steve Jobs’ iPad presentation — is fairly straightforward, it’s really the skeptical coughs and embarrassed shuffling of the Rebel Pilots that really makes it work…. not to mention Han Solo’s exasperated eye-roll.

If you’re dreaming of Netflix for your iPhone, good news: you’re just a jailbreak away. Hacker Knisitruck says that the existing Netflix iPad app is secretly a universal binary and can be easily ported to the iPhone with a few simple steps.

Steve Jobs’ “hobby” device might not be a hobby for long: Engadget reports that sources close to Apple claim that the Apple TV is currently getting a massive overhaul as an iPhone OS, streaming video device.

The old Apple TV was like a big iPod that connected to your set, so it’s not really a surprise that Apple’s re-imagining of Apple TV is essentially as a big iPhone connected to an HDTV. According to Engadget, the new Apple TV will have an A4 CPU, run iPhone OS and only ship with 16GB of flash storage.

Why so little room? Because Apple’s trying to do away with local storage in favor of their cloud iTunes service. The new Apple TV will be capable of streaming your media at 1080p through a web connection (or a Time Capsule, if you still want to store your media locally, but it’s all still streaming).

The biggest reveal? The price. Engadget says the new Apple TV will costs only $99. Wow.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yO2KQHkt4A&feature=player_embedded

If you’re looking for a little project to pursue this Memorial Day, word comes down the pipeline that installing Android on your iPhone 2G or 3G is now easier than ever, thanks to the automated iPhodroid application.

Earlier methods of installing Android on the iPhone were rather complicated, but this new method only requires a jailbroken iPhone running firmware 3.1.2 (in other words, jailbroken using PwnageTool, RedSn0W or Blackra1n and not Spirit), OpenSSH installed with the “alpine” password, MacFuse and the iPhodroid software. Connect your iPhone, run iPhodroid and five minutes later, you’ll have a dual-boot iPhone running the two best mobile operating systems on the market. Shiny.\

[via 9to5Mac]

When Gizmodo got their hands on the first leaked fourth-generation iPhone prototype, they weren’t able to give a resolution for the display. It was a frustrating omission which caused many of us to wish they’d taken a microscope to the display and confirmed resolution through the tedious process of pixel counting.

Someone else has now done just that and seems to have confirmed what we all suspected: the next-gen iPhone display is a 960×640 IPS, quadruple the resolution of the current iPhone.

That’s really impressive: imagine how fantastic games are going to look on the iPhone, or video for that matter… the new iPhone is going to be just shy of native 720p HD. This is turning out to be an iPhone well worth having waited for. WWDC just can’t come soon enough.

Uh oh. The Department of Justice just keeps on moving their anti-trust magnifying glass farther and farther away from Apple’s competition with Amazon, blowing up the pores on the whole iTunes apple skin. The DoJ is now reaching out to Hollywood as they investigate their anti-trust case against Cupertino.

According to the New York Post:

“The [Justice Dept.] is doing outreach,” said one Hollywood industry source. “You can’t dictate terms to the industry. The Adobe thing is just inviting the wrath of everybody.”

Added a senior source at a media company: “If Apple thinks it’s going to increase its monopoly with the iPad, it should look at the history of other walled gardens.”

While the DoJ is just “investigating” right now, an anti-trust case — scurrilous or not — is pretty much inevitable at this point: Apple is now the biggest tech company in the world, and since so many big, powerful companies are now smaller than them, they’re going to lobby to knock Apple down a few notches in whatever way they can.

Skype’s been teasing us with the promise of this for a while now, and we postulated they’d add the feature after Apple revealed iPhone OS 4 would include background VoIP — and yesterday it finally arrived: Skype’s iPhone app now works over a 3G network.

The rash of suicides at Foxconn are not due to harsh working conditions but the plight of China’s migrant workforce, says an open letter signed by a dozen Chinese sociologists.

The letter blames the string of Foxconn suicides on the social problems faced by China’s vast class of migrant workers.

Originating from poor rural areas, Chinese migrant workers are often rootless and isolated, cut off from friends and family. Instead of finding good jobs in urban factories, they are often too poorly paid to settle in their new cities, and have limited access to education and healthcare. With no prospects at home, they are stuck. The sociologists call it the “path of no return.”

We have made them live a migrancy life that is rootless and helpless, where families are separated, parents have no one to support them, and children are not taken care of. In short, this is a life without dignity.

The sociologists note that at the end of 2008, the population of Shenzhen exceeded 12 million, but only 2.28 million were registered as permanent residents. The giant Foxconn plant, which employs upwards of 600,000 workers, is located in Shenzhen.

The sociologists call on Foxconn and the Chinese central government to boost wages, and improve access to housing, eduction and healthcare. They also say demand workers be given a “voice,” which presumably means unions.

We call on every enterprise, to make a conscientious effort to increase migrant workers‘ pay and rights, and allow migrant workers to become true “citizens of the enterprise”.

Here’s the full text of the open letter:

Fake Steve tears down bullshit claims that the Foxconn suicides are below China’s national average (see Fast Company, ZDNet, Daring Fireball, Wall Street Journal, Alley Insider and others).

Working together with our colleagues in the PRC’s propaganda ministry we have developed a great new counter-narrative that we’ve been pushing pretty hard in background conversations with friendly hacks. Basically it’s the notion that Foxconn’s suicide rate is actually below the national average of China, meaning that if you’re working at Foxconn you’re actually less likely to commit suicide. That’s right. The truth is, we are actually saving lives in China.

Fake Steve continues:

But, see, arguments about national averages are a smokescreen. Sure, people kill themselves all the time. But the Foxconn people all work for the same company, in the same place, and they’re all doing it in the same way, and that way happens to be a gruesome, public way that makes a spectacle of their death. They’re not pill-takers or wrist-slitters or hangers. They’re not Sylvia Plath wannabes, sealing off the kitchen and quietly sticking their head in the oven. They’re jumpers. And jumpers, my friends, are a different breed. Ask any cop or shrink who deals with this stuff. Jumpers want to make a statement. Jumpers are trying to tell you something.

Fake Steve: Our new spin on the Foxconn suicide epidemic

Via Owen Thomas.