News - page 2234

If rumors of a Verizon iPhone in September (or a Sprint iPhone later this summer) are true, AT&T is going to have a hard-time keeping iPhone customers on their network after their exclusivity is up. One great way of keeping subscribers would, of course, be to offer better rates and improve their service… but since this is Ma Bell we’re talking about, they’ve just decided to try to almost double the price of Early Termination Fees from $175 to $325 to keep their existing customers locked-in.

To be fair, this is already the price of Verizon’s ETF… so AT&T is really just trying to make it equally difficult for subscribers to walk away from a contract as Verizon already is. Short term, however, it makes it a lot more expensive a proposition for customers to abandon ship for their competitors.

On their part, AT&T is saying the timing of the price increase isn’t related to Verizon getting the iPhone. Yeah, yeah. We’ll believe that only if a CDMA iPhone isn’t announced at WWDC.

With Apple’s factory leak in China seemingly spurting iPhones by the palletful into Vietnam and other south-east Asian countries, it’s looking less and less likely that, hardware-wise, Jobs will have anything to surprise us with when he officially unveils the fourth-generation iPhone in four weeks. We know what it looks like, we know its hardware, we know its operating system… heck, we even know what colors it comes in, black and white.

But just in case you weren’t quite convinced by the white faceplate that leaked last week comes these better shots of a fully assembled white iPhone. It could still be fake, of course, but it takes a special kind of incredulity to disbelieve that Apple, after all these leaks, just wouldn’t release the next iPhone in white, of all colors. Either way, guess we’ll know for sure at WWDC.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs will deliver the keynote address at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference June 7 in San Francisco. The announcement by the Cupertino, Calif. company unleashed further speculation Jobs will unveil a new version of Apple’s iPhone. At the 2009 WWDC, Apple introduced the iPhone 3GS.

The consumer electronics giant noted the 2010 WWDC sold out just eight days after tickets became available. The conference, running through June 11, will focus on Application Frameworks, Internet & Web, Graphics & Media, Developer Tools and Core OS. But many onlookers instead are looking to a potential dust-up between Jobs and his well-known ire for Google’s Android and Adobe Flash.

“Watch out Android, Apple CEO Steve Jobs is preparing Apple’s response, and we suspect things could get pretty personal,” predicted 9to5Mac.

Dismayed enough by AT&T’s woeful service that you’re considering hiring a shyster? The Worstphoneever website offers up a helpful class-action lawsuit generator against AT&T that uses your actual call drop data to tell just such a shyster just how bad (and actionable) your service actually is, and help him sue Ma Bell on everyone’s behalf.

The site works by searching for baseband crashes as recorded by your iPhone’s log files, automatically uploading them to the service, saves them to a database and tabulates them. Once Worstphonever has enough data, the site makers claim that they will file a class action lawsuit on behalf of their users, “running Apple and AT&T through the ringer” while giving users a “slice of the action.”

Not that we’d recommend this. There’s obvious privacy concerns associated with uploading your iPhone logs to a third-party, and while AT&T’s service can be atrocious, suing Apple over it just seems sleazy.

Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty Monday morning raised her target price on Apple to $310 a share, up from $275, and also increased her prediction for iPhone sales in 2011 to 61.5 million device, a 25 percent premium on Wall Street consensus.

Huberty told investors her more bullish predictions are based on the following insights: The iPhone continues to gain market share, while the Cupertino, Calif. company continues to experience greater-that-expected demand for its new iPad. Also contributing factors: there is still room to grow in China and the once reluctant corporate market is beginning to open up to the iPhone.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8OKFle2gGk&feature=player_embedded

Having long hated Apple’s Get a Mac campaign, I was surprised to find myself getting sentimental as I watched this three-minute tribute to the whole Mac vs. PC saga, as put together by OneMoreThing. Minimize Justin Long’s lugubrious smarm and what you’re left with is the core strength of the campaign anyway: John Hodgman’s consistently winsome and hysterical performance as the PC. That core strength, though, always seemed directly opposed to the message: PCs suck. It’s just so hard to hate PCs when their avatar is this awesome. Either way, it’s nice to see Hodgman get one last hurrah: this is a man who earned his paycheck for the last five years. Hurrah!

Raise your hand if, like me, you think iPad apps like Netflix are far too blithe about letting users indulge their every movie-viewing whim, allowing access to videos whenever they damn-well please.

Put your hands down. You’re not like me at all. But I know there are movie purists out there for whom cinema is an experience, rather than just two hours spent killing time while waiting for a significant other’s root canal to finish.

For the purists, then: Cinema for iPad, a $3 app that screens movies on its own schedule, with a virtual “theatre lobby” that lets users discuss the movie they’ve just experienced. Once the app is purchased, the movies are free, but we’ve no clue what the developer‘s tastes are like, or how frequently the movies are rotated.

We’ve raved about Hippo Remote Pro so enthusiastically, one would think it were made of gold-pressed latinum; that’s because it’s probably one of the (if not the) best soft-remote app currently available for the iPhone.

And now it’s better: Its developers have added a heavily customizable gamepad function — cool for watching the life being sucked from that annoying Blood Elf rogue on a 52-inch HDTV while laying about on the couch with a mojito (or a rootbeer float, if you’re so inclined/underaged). Of course, that’s in additon to the trackpad function and oodles of application-specific profiles for Hulu, Plex, Chrome, and the rest it already comes with.

Hippo Remote Pro is $5; there’re also Basic ($2) and free versions, but neither of those include the gamepad.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNnX6XRQBec

It looks like the final curtain has closed on Apple’s award-winning “Get a Mac” campaign launched in 2006.

Apple has pulled the ads from the company site, the page now redirects visitors to “Why You’ll Love a Mac.” (Nostalgics can still find them on YouTube, though.)

The last ones, released in October 2009, were surprisingly clever but Mac man Justin Long speculated in an interview last month that the ads had run their course:

What’s the status on those Apple commercials?

JL: You know, I think they might be done. In fact, I heard from John, I think they’re going to move on. I can’t say definitively, which is sad, because not only am I going to miss doing them, but also working with John. I’ve become very close with him, and he’s one of my dearest, greatest friends. It was so much fun to go do that job, because there’s not a lot to it for me. A lot of it is just keeping myself entertained between takes, and there’s no one I’d rather do it with than John.

Are you sad or glad to see them go? Which one was your favorite?

Via Mac Rumors

Is Apple the IBM of 1984? That seems to be the implication Google wants mobile consumers to draw through a new ad and comments made at the Internet giant’s I/O conference. In a slap at Apple and the iPhone, a Google executive said his company saved consumers from a ‘Draconian future.’

“If Google did not act, we faced a Draconian future where one man, one company, one device, one carrier would be our only choice,” Google vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra told the crowd. The words were eerily like another anti-Apple message made last week by Adobe’s founders.

The drumbeat continues as Google takes on Apple in yet another realm Cupertino once thought secure. The Internet giant plans to take on iTunes, adding music downloads to its Android Marketplace.

At first, owners of Android devices will need to visit Google’s Web shop to purchase and download tunes to their cell phones (and later tablets, potentially). Unclear is when the music download service will become directly available through Android-based handsets, according to TechCrunch.

Two new surveys released bear good news for both Apple and the beleaguered publishing industry: More than 90 percent of consumers love their iPad. The surveys by ChangeWave found demand for the tablet device is increasing after the product’s introduction and that iPad owners are three-times as likely to read newspapers and magazines compared to owners of other e-readers.

In a survey conducted this month, 7 percent of people said they would “very likely” purchase an iPad with 13 percent saying they were “somewhat likely.” What’s intriguing is that a similar survey, conducted in February prior to the iPad’s release, found 4 percent “very likely” would buy the Apple device and another 9 percent saying they were “somewhat likely” to purchase the highly-hyped gadget. The numbers indicate a positive word-of-mouth for the iPad, even after the device moved from rumor to reality.

Got an iPhone 3G and looking for a project to occupy yourself this weekend? The binaries of hacker David Wang’s Android port for the iPhone 3G has now been released.

Android on the iPhone is still more of a “because you can” proposition than recommended for day-to-day use, but follow Wang’s somewhat complicated guide and you’ll soon have an iPhone that dual-boots into Android.

There’s some drawbacks, of course: Wang has yet to implement any sort of power management into Android for iPhone, so your fully-charged handset will only last about an hour before it shuts off. Also, if you want to switch back to the iPhone OS, you need to do a reboot.

Still, if you’re interested in what the mobile space looks like from the other side, Android for iPhone looks like a worthwhile little hack.

There’s plenty of tower defense games available for the iPhone, pitting players against wave after wave of enemies as varied as robots, zombies and monsters, but Fluffylogic’s foray into the genre is sure to pique the interests of any geek who has ever watched The Empire Strikes Back.

Star Wars: The Battle For Hoth puts iPhone gamers in charge of repelling the Imperial advance with heavy weapon soldier, 1.4 FD P-Tower Laser Cannons and X-Wing Control Towers, while the Empire is provisioned with Viper Probe Droids, Snowtroopers, 74-Z Speeder Bikes, AT-ST Walkers, TIE Fighters, and hulking At-AT Walkers.

Brilliant. The Battle for Hoth is the scenario the tower defense genre was practically invented to simulate. There’s no explicit word on release date or price right now, but Fluffylogic says Star Wars: Battle for Hoth’s release is “imminent,” so keep refreshing the App Store.

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At yesterday’s I/O event, Google officially unveiled their long rumored GoogleTV platform, a software platform that will be baked into new televisions and set-top boxes that merges cable and online video in a single service.

Essentially, Google TV takes advantage of Google’s search business by making it easier for you to find the television you want to watch, whether its pumped out by your cable provider or available on the Internet. Once you find the show you want to watch, you can choose what to do with it, whether that’s watch it, schedule an alarm or record it to your DVR.

Google TV also incorporates a Boxee like home screen, with some special functionality: integration with Android Apps. The service can even augment the television you’re watching: one particularly neat function demonstrated was the ability to automatically translate a television show’s closed caption subtitles into another language in real time.

It looks fantastic… and also makes Apple’s own “hobby” of a television platform look more anemic than ever. If Google can’t prod Apple into taking the home theater market seriously, we might as well just give up on AppleTV for good.

Even the iPhone isn’t powerful enough yet to run Blizzard’s fanatically popular World of Warcraft MMORPG, but thanks to the World of Warcraft Armory App has long given the mobile night elf or orc alike the ability to access their characters’ stats, check the leaderboards, browse items or calculate their talents.

A forthcoming update to the Armory App finally adds in a long-requested killer feature: the ability to use the auction house out of game. The feature is called Remote Auction House, and it allows you to browse the auction house for free out of game, or to pay an extra subscription price of $3 per month to buy, create or re-list items without ever logging into your Mac.

The subscription fee is a bold move, but Blizzard has proved time and time again that the die-hards raiders will keep ponying up. I’ve known more than a few gamers in my time who spend hours a day in the Auction House: a few bucks a month to allow them to do their auction grinding on the subway or at the park would, to them, be a small price to pay for a little more sunshine in their lives.

The updated app is now out, but the Remote Auction House functionality hasn’t yet been pushed live. Expect it soon.

User ratings on iTunes alone can be misleading when you’re trying to decide which movie to buy or rent. A perfectly execrable movie might have a four or five star rating thanks to the efforts of a small pool of fans to bump its rating up.

The latest addition to iTunes seems particularly useful, then, in avoiding buying or renting a dud film: as of now, the iTunes movie store features the reviews of Top Critics and the Tomatometer rating score from the Rotten Tomatoes movie review aggregation site to let you see, at a glance, what critics thought of the movie you’re about to buy.

I hope this is just the first step towards Apple bringing more outside review data into iTunes as a whole. Being able to see at a glance if a movie is worth my time is great, but it would be fantastic to see the same sort of aggregation happen when I want to buy a new album, or even an App Store game.

[via TUAW]

Are you ready to get vooked? You know you want to. And a little company called Vook, with offices in Alameda and New York, is more than happy to show you how.

Vook began with a mission to unite the disparate worlds of books and videos into one complete, blended story. With an innovative platform where all forms of media come together to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts, vooks weave together content from talented writers with professionally shot and edited video to give readers/viewers/users a whole new way of experiencing creative output.

And what better vehicle to deliver the experience of this new medium than Apple’s iPad?

I don’t often play around with advertising, but Olympus’ virtual ad for it’s new PEN E-PL1 camera is pretty fun.

Go to www.getolympus.com/PEN3d and download a paper cutout of the camera (you can get it here). Install a plugin, and when you hold the paper camera up to your iSight webcam it turns into a 3D model of the camera.

It’s quite magical and I laughed with delight when the virtual camera appeared on screen. You can remove the lens, check out different shooting modes and play with the flash. Turn the camera around and you can take pictures or shoot video of yourself, which you can share on Facebook.

The virtual camera works well on a MacBook and iMac. Even though you have to install a plugin, I think it’s worth it. This is digital marketing done well.

The PEN E-PL1 is one of a new generation of new Micro Four Thirds (M4/3) cameras that promise DSLR quality with point-and-shoot ease. It has an interchangeable lens, built-in image stabilization and can record HD video.

(The June print issues of Wired and Popular Photography contain pre-cut cameras. There’s also a competition to win the camera and some cash: Shoot a video explaining what you’d do with the PEN camera and $5,000. Details at www.youtube.com/getolympus).

Act quickly, and you can get Gameloft’s Rogue Planet for iPhone/iPt for free.

Today only until 5 pm ET, the strategy game is free as part of the company’s 10th Anniversary Happy Hour. That’s a $5 drop and the best price we’ve seen for this game.

Grab it quick; time’s nearly up.

Future iPhones may be able to flash ads for theater discounts or suggest a burrito special in the neighborhood as you head out of the office at lunch time.

Geo-tagged ads and coupons would zap themselves to iPhone users a number of ways, including RFID, Apple Insider writes.

The Cupertino company applied for a patent this week titled “System and method for providing contextual advertisements according to a dynamic pricing scheme.”

If the price (or timing) is right, users could make buys at kiosks or use coupons or discounts from their smartphones.

Here’s how they described it in the application:

“If the submitted advertisement… provides a coupon for food at a restaurant, the submitting advertiser… may include an indication that the advertisement… is directed to food sales, times of day when meals are popularly served, a GPS location of the restaurant, keywords that may relate to the restaurant in an Internet search, how weather may affect the use or non-use of the coupon in the advertisement…, etc.”

Via Apple Insider

There have been hints of heavy iPad demand, ranging from out-of-stock reports and Apple’s own admission of trouble keeping up, but now comes some hard numbers: the iPad is outselling the Mac by nearly two-to-one. The Cupertino, Calif. company is selling more than 200,000 iPads per week in the U.S. while selling about 110,000 Macs per week nationally, an analyst said Thursday. The iPad is selling almost as fast as the iPhone 3GS during its first three months.

“Checks indicate that U.S. iPad sales remain strong post-launch, driven by rising consumer visibility to iPad’s user experience, sustained PR/word-of-mouth marketing, 3G iPad launch, and broadening iPad apps/content,” RBC Capital Markets analyst Mike Abramsky told clients this morning.

Despite Apple’s public pronouncements of success in China, a survey finds 90 percent of consumers don’t use – and don’t like China Unicom, the No. 2 carrier the Cupertino, Calif. company picked to exclusively sell the iPhone.

Fewer than 10 percent of China residents between the age of 22 and 32 use China Unicom, and of that group, most said they disliked the service, according to China Market Research Group, which asked 2,000 mobile phone owners. More than 9 out of 10 people questioned pointed to rival China Mobile as having better coverage and service.

Apple’s iTunes has widened its lead over traditional music sellers, capturing 26.6 percent of digital music sales in 2009, up from 21.4 percent in 2008 – the year Apple became the No. 1 destination for music sales.

Walmart, which had held the title of top digital music store, fell further behind iTunes with 12.5 percent of the 2009 market, down from 14.9 percent in 2008, according to a May 22 Billboard survey. Other bricks-and-mortar music vendors, such as Best Buy and Target, also lost ground.

Borrowing their aesthetic from the super-dimensional beings who crafted 2001’s monolith, LaCie’s new line of NAS drives, the Network Space MAX, are easily configured to automatically mirror your disks so that all your data is backed up twice, courtesy of the RAID 1 Department of Redundancy Department.

This featureless slab of black plastic contains two hard drives amount to either 2TB or 4TB of data, although effective capacity is half of that, since the MAX drives automatically back your data up twice to make sure you’ve always got a secure backup on hand, no matter what calamity strikes.

Other features include built-in server and torrent downloading functions, which are pretty handy, and a USB 2.0 interface to access the MAX directly from your Mac. If you want to be surer than your Time Capsule that your Mac’s data is absolutely safe, the MAX series looks like a safe buy at prices starting at $279.99.