Jonathan Seff at Macworld has posted a detailed review of the new 13″ MacBook Pro, which has one interesting finding: the computer’s battery life doesn’t quite live up to Apple’s claims of 10 hours.
The team at Patently Apple mined a patent granted today to find what may be future gold: more evidence that the Cupertino company is toying with the idea of touchscreen iMacs and MacBooks.
After slogging through patent no. 20100100947, titled “Scheme for Authenticating without Password Exchange,” they discovered a flowchart illustrating a touchscreen that could be associated with both a Macbook and a small desktop.
In a patent that even these document hounds defined “obscure,” the flowchart they sniffed out points to a touchscreen component not restricted to the iPhone.
Those iPhone images Gizmodo released earlier this week are likely those of a near-final design, one report suggested Thursday. The proof is a barcode indicating the handset “lost” in a California bar was a late pre-production version of a next generation phone widely expected to be released in June or July.
The barcode attached to the prototype handset is “N90_DVT-GE4X_0493.” Daring Fireball blogger John Gruber tapped his Apple sources, who helped decrypt the code.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvplGbCBaLA
Virtuoso pianist Lang Lang gave concert goers something special by playing “The Flight of the Bumblebee” on an iPad.
This unprecedented encore happened — where else?– in San Francisco. Lang Lang played the song, part of it one-handed, thanks to Smule’s Magic Piano iPad app.
The $0.99 app, from the makers of Ocarina and I Am T-Pain, lets users easily play music by touching light beams that stream down from the top of the screen. Full disclosure: Smule sent Lang Lang an iPad pre-loaded with the app in the hopes he’d take it for a spin.
Wonder if Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who penned the interlude over 100 years ago, would forgive Lang Lang’s occasional flub as he struggles to get it right on the unfamiliar device.
Via WSJ Digits
The war of words between Apple and Adobe over the Cupertino, Calif.’s company decision to block Flash apps on the iPhone has reached a breaking-point. Adobe now says it will court other handset makers, including Apple-rival Google.
“We’ve done everything we can,” Adobe vice president David Wadhwani told the Wall Street Journal Wednesday. Wadhwani said its relationship with Google continues to strengthen as the San Jose, Calif. software maker courts Android-based smartphones following the public split-up with Apple.
$0.69 for an iPad stand? Bah, we say. Ian Collins shows us all how to make up to four free iPad stands out of its own packaging materials. Ghetto? Perhaps. We prefer to call it recycling.
[via Laughing Squid
This adorable little device looking something like the offspring of EVE and WALL-E is the Mint, a robot mop for your floors similar to the Roomba, but unlike the Roomba, the Mint complies with Jobs’ own requirements for absolute silence in his devices.
Since it lacks a vacuum or spinning brushes, the only noise you’ll hear as the Mint whisks across your floors is the a barely audible squeegeeing.
The tiny robot uses NorthStar Navigation to prevent it from mopping the same spot twice. It costs $250, which doesn’t necessarily beat the alternative — a Polish maid scrubbing your floors in a tank top — but is certainly cheaper in the grand scheme of things than the resulting temptation, and the lawsuits that might follow.
[via Gadget Lab]
Investors on both sides of the Atlantic are abuzz with a rumor Apple is considering acquiring UK chipmaker ARM for $8 billion. If true, such a deal could be a blow to a wide swath of competitors.
Although there has been no official comment on or off-the-record on a Wednesday report by the Evening Standard, the rumor pushed stock prices for the Cambridge, UK chipmaker up 8.1 percent. Along with powering a wide arrange of electronic devices ranging from Blackberries, Microsoft and Android cell phones, ARM chips are used in Apple’s iPod, iPhones and the iPad’s A4 processor.
“They [Apple] could stop ARM’s technology from ending up in everyone else’s computers and gadgets,” the Standard quoted one UK trader.
ARM was founded in 1990 as a joint venture among Apple, Acorn Computers and VSLI Technology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKPxl5qdYhU
Steam for Mac is finally available in private beta form, bringing the popular gaming delivery system to OS X for the first time.
It’s looking pretty good compared to the PC version, although that charcoal color scheme is as dreadful as ever, and like most of the initial forays into Mac software development made by PC guys, the UI’s not quite up to Snow Leopard snuff.
None the less, Steam for Mac looks good enough and seems to work pretty well. I’m really excited about this: I really think a good delivery platform is exactly what is needed to galvanize more serious OS X game development.
[via 9to5Mac]
No matter where you fall on the 4G iPhone story, I think we’re all united in feeling bad for poor old Gray Powell, otherwise known as the most unlucky S.O.B. in the universe. Heartless automaton that I am, even I tear up a little bit when I think of what he must be going through right now. I think all of us — Powell most of all — need a dose of levity right about now.
Courtesy of McSweeney’s, then, comes this wonderful imaginary email from Gray to his colleagues at 1 Infinity Loop on the morning after he lost the iPhone.
If I could give back those last five beers, I would do it in a heartbeat. I don’t know why I let that girl look at it. That was a total disregard of our phones before hos mantra. Worst mistake of my life. I should have never taken the prototype out of its case, or taken the case from the protective cover, or taken the protective cover out of the lockbox. I should have never taken the lockbox out of the safe and I definitely should never have signed the contract that requires your right testicle if you lose the phone. It was a pretty painful morning, and I’m not referring to a hangover, though that didn’t help.
It’s worth a few chuckles, especially for this line “Mr. Jobs screamed at me so much that his turtleneck was totally drenched with sweat.” Somehow I doubt that’s very far from the truth.
It’s way buggy still, but hats off to jailbreak hacker David Wong who not only figured out how to get the iPhone to dual boot, but to actually run Google’s Android operating system.
Of course, the entire exercise is one of utter futility — why would you run Google’s inferior Android operating system when you can tool around in iPhone OS (my only tentative answer: maybe tethering?) — but even so: this takes some brain meats. Well done, sir.
Oooooh, take a look at this. Above you see a screenshot of MidiPad, a software controller for software sequencer Ableton that’s “coming soon” for iPad.
Macworld‘s founder David Bunnell’s first meeting with Steve Jobs is surprisingly genial. This time he gets to meet the REAL Steve Jobs. Plus he has one of the best ideas of his magazine career.
From the “oh that’s awesome” category — which quickly leads to the credit card coming out of the wallet — some of the most unique and whimsical iPhone stands I’ve seen from Forked Up Art.
Stands are $30 each, come in portrait and landscape orientations, and are made of genuine used cutlery. The best form of recycling I’ve seen recently. It’s earned a place in my kitchen!
Thanks to iPhone Savior for the tip.
As the focus of iPhonegate shifts to the legality of Gizmodo’s purchase (hint: it looks very dodgy), we have to ask: who would you rather be right now? The poor schlub who lost the iPhone in a bar? Or the guy who found it, made a half-hearted effort to return it, and sold it to a ferociously-competitive tech website, which may be on the wrong side of the law?
[polldaddy poll=3089952]
Twenty doctors are using iPads to keep track of patients in a trial program at a California hospital district.
At Kaweah Delta Health Care District in Visalia, doctors and staff already use smart phones, including the iPhone, to access the hospital’s network. Over the weekend, the small group of doctors in a trial run were given iPads to keep abreast of patients, whether they are off site or in another wing of the hospital.
Technology director Nick Volosin has already ordered another 100 iPads to equip hospital employees including home health and hospice care workers, nurses, dietitians and pharmacists.
Apple has filed a very interesting patent for a travel app called iTravel that books flights, hotels and car reservations. But the most interesting part is how it uses a radio chip to check you in at the airport, whisk you through security and allows you to wireless board your flight.
The iTravel app uses Near Field Communications, a short-range wireless technology that is starting to become widely used in cell phones for mobile ticketing, payment and electronic keys, especially in countries like Japan.
Apple is rumored to be adding NFC chipset to the next iPhone. If so, it could turn the iPhone into an electronic wallet, allowing you to for everything, from a cup of coffee to a subway ride. Your iPhone could unlock your car, pick up e-coupons at the local mall, and pay for all your supermarket groceries just by laying it on top of the checkout.
Scott Beale of Laughing Squid snapped this spiffy wooden stand cradling an iPad cash register at soon-to-be opened San Francisco coffee house Sightglass.
The iPad will ring up those double-ristretti with Square, an app with a peripheral credit card swiper (see the built-in one on the bottom of this wooden stand) that turns the iPhone and iPad into cash registers, accepting cash or credit card payments. Square can calculate sales tax, accept touchscreen finger signatures and then generate email or SMS receipts.
No word on who crafted the fab stand, yet, though.
Via Laughing Squid
What’s up with Google now? That’s the question being asked about the Internet giant’s acquisition of a mysterious startup run by former Apple employees. The San Jose, Calif. company Agnilux includes Dan Dobberpuhl, the former founder and CEO of P.A. Semi, purchased by Apple for $278 million two years ago.
First reported by Thomson Reuters’ PEHub, the deal with Google is raising eyebrows about the lengths being taken to keep the company below public radar.
If Apple needed another reason to consider adding more U.S. carriers offering the iPhone, its current exclusive domestic carrier, AT&T, provided more ammunition Wednesday morning. The carrier announced it activated 2.7 million iPhones in the last quarter, a 13 percent drop from 3.1 million U.S. activations during the December quarter.
Additionally, AT&T reported U.S. iPhone activations hit 2.7 million during the first quarter of this year, a 69 percent year-over-year jump from 1.6 million activations in the first quarter of 2009. However, the 69 percent increase in U.S. iPhone activations was outpaced by Apple’s reported 131 percent increase in global iPhone sales.
While much of the talk about the iPhone’s success had centered on the U.S. and Europe, it appears Apple’s entry into China has been a little-discussed but important reason why the Cupertino, Calif. company Tuesday blew the doors off analyst expectations.
Analysts were off by up to 30 percent, expecting Apple to announce almost 2 million fewer iPhone sales than the 8.7 million the consumer electronics leader actually reported. The reason for that gap could be China.
Even HP’s aware that they’ve got a tough fight on their hands convincing consumers that they want to give them their $500 bucks for an HP Slate tablet as opposed to the iPad… but the PC manufacturer may still be be too optimistic.
If an early review of the device is anything to go by, it’s not going to be a fight… it’s going to be a slaughter.
Landing Pad is a lovely piece of work; a blog that celebrates the beauty of the best-looking iPad apps around, in all their full screen glory.
No scrappy little thumbnails here; at Landing Pad, each app is shown full-size, as Steve Jobs intended it to be seen.
In all seriousness, for those of us outside the US who still haven’t even seen an iPad yet, this is the next best way of getting a good idea of what it looks like after watching Apple’s official (and somewhat too clean) videos.
Landing Pad is the work of the tech consultants at Thoughtbot. Writing on their blog, Chad Mazzola provides some background:
“The iPad and iPhone provide a platform that makes excellent design the standard, not the exception. The elegance and power of multi-touch technology and the iPhone OS, matched to restraints on factors such as screen size and browser, have allowed the creation of applications that fit perfectly in the environment they inhabit. More and more, websites and applications built specifically for iPhone OS are overtaking their desktop companions in ease of use and sheer beauty.”
Or, to put it another way, (i)apps are a threat to websites as we know them. Maybe.
With the fourth-generation iPhone making the display even bigger and more pixel dense, it looks increasingly unlikely that Apple has any plans for the much rumored iPhone Nano… but that’s not stopping just the scuttlebutt of a potential Apple product from inspiring competing phone manufacturers to release their own iPhone Nano clones.
The HTC HD Mini is just such a clone. It takes the 4.3 inch touchscreen on HTC’s HD 2 handset and squishes it down to a compact 3.2 inches, while also packing a 600MHz processor. It’s being touted as a budget version of the HD 2, and it could find its way to AT&T or even sold unlocked.
I definitely see the market for a tinier touchscreen phone, and the HD Mini is a cute little smartphone, but here’s where the bile rises: the Mini’s running the crapusculent Windows Mobile 6.5.1 operating system. Not even Android! I think I’d rather hold on to the fever dream of an iPhone Nano someday creeping out of Apple’s labs than ever sully my finger swiping it across a Windows Mobile homescreen again.
In Part 2 of My Close Encounters with Steve Jobs, Macworld-founder David Bunnell tells of seeing the Mac for the first time, and why Steve Jobs parks in handicapped spaces.