News - page 2233

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.”

[image via GDGT]

And it’s here! Steve Jobs has just announced the latest iPhone, the biggest jump in core technology yet since the original: the iPhone 4. It’s the Gizmodo one.

“Some of you have already seen this,” he quips.

iPhone 4 will include over a hundred new features. Jobs claims it is extremely thin at just 9.3mm thick, 24% thinner than the 3GS, making it the thinnest smartphone on the planet.

Jobs claims it’s the most precise and beautiful thing Apple’s ever made, more akin to a beautiful old camera (?) than a smartphone of today. It’s a gorgeous amalgam stainless steel for strength and glass for optical quality and scratch resistance

The iPhone 4 has a micro-SIM on the side, with a camera and LED flash on the back. On the bottom, it boasts a microphone, a 30 pin connector, and a speaker. On the top, a headset, a second microphone and a sleep/wake button.

The biggest detail? There’s a stainless steel band that runs around the edge of the phone, which is integrated with the band system to give superior reception for BlueTooth, WiFi, GPS, 3G and all the other radio stuff.

Next up, the next “big thing” about the iPhone 4.

[images vias Ars[

We start out the week with some freebies for the iPhone and the iPad. For handset owners, the App Store has several free items, including “Zombie Parade,” a tower defense game. For iPad owners, try your hand at “MakePanic,” described as a “panic-inducing game.” We round out our top deals with a new t-shirt. If your “I went drinking with Gray Powell and All I Got Was This Lousy iPhone Prototype” tee getting a little frayed? Take a look at the “Slide to Unlock” baby doll t-shirt for women.

Along the way, we’ll check out a solar charger for your iPhone, some deals on used Macs, plus plenty of software for your favorite device. As always, details on these and many other items are available at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

Back on stage after showing off three new iPhone apps, Steve Jobs gets into the meat of why we’re here — the iPhone — with a few statistics.

As of today, over five billion apps have been downloaded from the App Store, with over a billion dollars paid to developers to date.

It is one of the greatest things we get to do. And that’s what makes the App Store the most vibrant app community on the planet. 5 Billion downloads and a healthy ecosystem! We’re thrilled with it.”

Who can blame Apple? The App Store is revolutionary.

[image via GDGT]

Eliciting a resounding “What the f***!” from a member of the WWDC audience, Zynga just took the stage and announced that the irritating Facebook phenomenon Farmville played by 35 million users a day is now coming to the iPhone.

It makes sense, actually: recent updates to Facebooks’ privacy settings, making it harder for apps to spam you, has seen Farmville lose millions of users in a month. It also makes sense because We Rule already proved how strong the concept of a Farmville clone on the App Store could be, at least as far as making money off of micro-transactions to hurry things along are concerned.

Oh, and say goodbye to withering crops! Push notification is fully supported.

[image via GDGT]

Netflix is already available on the iPad, but as the recent revelation that the iPad executable was a universal binary implies, it’s coming to the iPhone too.

The iPhone version uses adaptive vidfeo playback, and allows for seamless switching between 3G and WiFi networks. It’s coming this summer, and it’ll be free.

I guess they got around the performance issues, at least on the next-gen iPhone.

[image via GDGT]

Apple wants people to know they’ve gotten a lot better about App Store approval, and Steve Jobs has just given some numbers to prove it.

About 15,000 apps are submitted every week in thirty different languages. Jobs claims that an astonishing 95% of these apps are now approved within seven days.

What about the apps that aren’t? Jobs doesn’t want us thinking censorship: rather, the more common reason is that it doesn’t function as advertised, with the second most common reason that it is pulling from private APIs.

The third most frequent reason? “They crash. If you were in our shoes, you’d be rejecting apps for the exact same reasons.”

The point of this section of the keynote is clearly to make sure people don’t think Apple’s censoring. “Sometimes when you read some of these articles, you may think other stuff is going on,” Steve notes. True enough!

I wonder how much of that 5% is made up of jiggling boob apps, though.

Apple has just announced the initial figures of iBooks at this year’s WWDC, and in addition, they’ve got some great new iBooks features in the pipe.

In the first 65 days, users have also downloaded over 5 million books, or about two and a half per iPad… and five out of six big publishers in the United States claim that the share of eBooks going through the iBookstore is about 22 percent.

Next, some enhancements to iBooks. They’ve just added the ability to take notes to iBooks, as well as the ability to view and read PDFs. For PDFs, you get a whole new bookshelf.

That’s some good additional functionality that should make iBooks more interesting to people who live and breathe PDFs.

Image via GDGT

The iPad has been a huge success for Apple, and it was the first thing Jobs wanted an iPad-obsessed audience to know at this year’s WWDC.

To date, Apple confirms they’ve sold over 2 million iPads, which is one every three seconds. It is now shipping in over ten countries, and Apple wants to prove that they’ve got a revolution on their hands by showing the WWDC audience a video reel of the great coverage the iPad has gotten worldwide.

Additionally, there are now over 8,500 native iPad apps in the App Store. Apps account for 35 million downloads in two months, or about 17 apps per iPad sold. The guys behind Wolfram Associates’ Elements says he made more on the app in the first day of the iPad launch than five years of Google Ads.

Image via Ars

Taking the stage at this year’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, Steve Jobs has just taken the stage, and with an “It’s great to be here,” we’re off to a running start with some WWDC specs.

This year, the WWDC sold out in 8 daysm with over 5,200 attendees from 57 countries. There will be over 120 hands on labs with over 1,000 Apple engineers.

It’s going to be a big one. What will the next two hours reveal?

Image via Ars Technica

In response to the slate of employee suicides which has rocked Foxconn over the last six months, it is now being reported that the electronics manufacturing giant is now offering a 66% performance-based pay rise to their workers… built on top of the previous thirty percent pay increase.

Of course, being a performance-based pay raise, that gives Foxconn license to skimp. To be eligible, workers must pass a three month performance review. That gives Foxconn the ability to arbitrarily hold it back from the majority of workers.

Still, if Foxconn does go through with the move, and awards the pay raise fairly, it’ll be a huge improvement that will see the salary of the average Foxconn employee jump from $132 to $292 a month.

AT&T is reportedly easing upgrade restrictions on when customers can upgrade their handset, a move reportedly in anticipation of Apple announcing a new version of its iPhone. The changes allow iPhone customers — who may not have been eligible — to upgrade without paying early termination fees.

Customers of the carrier can go to the AT&T website and click on “Check Upgrade Options.”

According to French blog Mac Generation, we can all expect Safari 5 to be unveiled at WWDC in just a handful of hours.

Rumor? Sure. But they’ve got a convincing looking changelog, boasting a 25% improvement in JavaScript performance, a new Safari RSS Reader which will probably be too simplistic for serious feed junkies, more than twelve new HTML5 features, hardware acceleration in Windows and the option to add Bing as your default Search engine. It also looks like Apple is changing Safari’s address field to function more like Firefox’s Awesome Bar.

At today’s WWDC, the next iPhone might not be the only things we see: Engadget has photos of what looks to be an entirely new input device: a Magic Trackpad.

The Magic Trackpad is essentially a giant, Bluetooth-connected multitouch trackpad for Macs, and will not only support all of the functionality of a MacBook Pro touchpad or Magic Mouse, but apparently handwriting recognition to boot. If that’s the case, I imagine it could function pretty handily in Photoshop as well.

I’ll grab this in a heart beat if the price is reasonable. For most of my desktop work on my iMac, I find the Magic Mouse wanting compared to my MacBook Pro’s excellent trackpad, and it’s atrocious for gaming. With the Magic Trackpad, I could finally have the big trackpad I’ve always wanted for my desktop, transforming it when needed into a mousepad and supplementing it with an excellent third-party gaming mouse.

Apple retail sales in the UK jumped 31 percent to around $894 million through September 24, reports said Monday. The increase came from MacBook, iPhone add-ons and the iPod touch.

Despite operating at a net loss, Apple’s UK arm opened three retail locations during the timespan with plans to create two more, according to papers filed with the UK’s Companies House, a government registry of businesses operating in Britain. The Cupertino, Calif. firm has 27 stores operating in the UK.

Confused by which combination of keypresses triggers your favorite shortcut? What about trying to remember which arcane spell of glyphs describes that shortcut in Mac terminology?

There’s a site for that… or, at least, there will be, when its owner gets finished with it. Keyonary is an online directory of keyboard shortcuts . Using the search bar, you simply type in the shortcut you’d like to find and Keyonary will return it to you.

To be honest, the site’s pretty rough right now, and while the presentation is slick, the owner’s entering all these shortcuts in by hand… which means that while Photoshop and OS X are fairly well covered by Keyonary, there’s a lot of shortcuts for other popular Mac apps still to be filled.

Still, we wanted to point Keyonary out… not because of what it is now, but what we hope a little encouragement will allow it to become: an I Use This for user-submitted shortcuts to all your favorite Mac applications.

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The classic German board game Carcassone has finally come to the iPhone with an official port including original artwork, eight different AI players, a cool looking solitaire mode and Internet multiplayer with push notifications.

From the App Store description: “Build a medieval landscape, tile by tile, claim landmarks with your followers and score points. As a winner of the prestigious “Spiel des Jahres” award in 2001, the game allows for a plethora of play styles and strategies.”

The game’s iPhone-only for now, but a universal iPad version is imminent.

I’ve never played Carcassone but it is a game much beloved by my board-gaming friends. I’ve been eager to get my teeth into this one.

Carcassone can be purchased on the App Store now for just $4.99

Samsung is getting into the tablet game with their own would-be iPad killer, but unlike many other Atom-based netbooks, Samsung has a secret weapon: an A4-like mobile CPU created by (now Apple owned) Intrinsity, the Hummingbird S5PC110.

A new report by the Hong Kong based advocacy group SACOM (Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior) says that an eleventh employee has died at Foxconn.

Unlike the last ten deaths, though, the latest reported death wasn’t a suicide. Instead, 27 year old Foxconn employee Yan Li died on May 27th after a continuous 34 hour working shift. Allegedly, Yan —who worked night shifts at Foxconn from 200 — literally worked himself to death.

Yesteday, an AT&T spokesperson put the kibosh on any possibility of using the iPhone’s new tethering abilities to drive your iPad.

“It won’t be possible to tether the iPhone to the iPad to share Internet access,” an AT&T spokesperson bluntly said.

The usual hue and cry against AT&T resulted, but now, AT&T is clarifying matters, saying they don’t have any problem with iPads and iPhones tethered together in conjoined bliss. Rather, they blame Apple.

“You’ll need to speak with Apple. There is no AT&T policy around tethering and the iPad,” a spokesperson told Gizmodo.

Well, that’s certainly good news if true. I can’t think of any reason Apple wouldn’t allow this if their network partners are onboard. Hopefully, then, iPad-to-iPhone tethering is something we’ll see in iPhone OS 4.0.

Our favorite iPhone newsreader app, the wonderfully minimal and elegant Reeder, is finally getting a long overdue iPad version.

In fact, it’s undergoing the App Store approval process as we speak… and as a first look of what to expect, Techcrunch posted some gorgeous shots of what the iPad Reeder app will look like, which merges Reeders existing muted and clean aesthetic (Instapaper for feeds is a good comparison) with functionality like pinching to quick-look at a stack of feeds:

As an indirect response to Adobe’s own We campaign, Apple has unveiled a wonderful new sandbox playground advocating HTML5, which allows users to play around and do a number of things in their browsers that they might not even know HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript can do.

It’s a lot of fun as a playground, and certainly shows what HTML5 can do. The only problem? It’s only viewable on Safari: try to run it on any other HTML5-capable browser and you get a message prompting you to download Apple’s own browser.