China’s government has finally approved the sale of iPhones with Wi-Fi, removing one of the last barriers for Apple to fully introduce the handset to one of the world’s largest mobile populations. Until now, Apple’s exclusive carrier in the country, China Unicom, could only offer the iPhone 3GS with WAPI, a homegrown version of Wi-Fi approved by the government.
The official announcement comes after the CEO of one mobile carrier said in March the iPhone would gain Wi-Fi in the near future.
Reversing their long-embraced policy of buying other companies rarely, Apple’s been on a shopping spree the past six months with the acquisition of Quattro Wireless, Lala, Intrinsity and Siri. What’s behind it?
Bloomberg has an interesting overview of Apple’s evolving acquisition strategy. What it comes down to, at the end of the day? Staying ahead of Google in the mobile space.
According to analyst Brian Marshall, Apple “learned a good lesson with AdMob.” Apple let the acquisition process linger too long, allowing Google to outbid them. Instead, they had to settle for “second-fiddle Quattro.”
It’s not new that international data plans are pecuniary disembowleings, so it’s natural that AT&T’s official pricing for the iPad would be for the sadomasochistic only. Expect to spend as much as $200 a month for a slice of bandwidth exceeded by many App Store video games, or just a couple of downloaded iTunes albums.
According to the Wall Street Journal, industry insiders are predicting that Apple will cave on the terms of the iPhone 4.0 SDK rather than be dragged into an antitrust battle over them.
Happy Sex with Maryline, a sexuality coaching and education guide for adults from La Roche Communication hit the iTunes App Store Tuesday, intimating a new, more comfortable, perhaps an even more mature approach to Apple’s understanding of the relationship between the iPhone and Sex.
After nearly two years of sophomoric inconsistency regulating which kinds of sexually charged material could legally be powered by its iPhone OS, Apple seems prepared to grow beyond the “Whose Boobs” era into one in which iPhone users might legitimately ask, “is that a sex coach in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?”
At a posh dinner party, Steve Jobs eats a plate of raw vegetables with a blonde bombshell sitting on his knee. Instead of going to Macworld and plugging the Mac, he’s too busy partying with Tina the nymphette.
Part 13 of Macworld founder David Bunnell’s personal history of the first Mac: “My Close Encounters With Steve Jobs.”
This weekend market the White House Correspondents Association, an annual black tie dinner when a large number of political insiders gather to smile politely while a washed-up comic offers up lame impressions of Jimmy Carter. (With the lone exception being that time that Stephen Colbert shot everybody in the face)
During the dreaded run-up to Jay Leno’s observations about the foibles of modern life, CNN’s Ed Henry convinced First Lady Michelle Obama to send her first-ever Tweet from his iPhone. Except she couldn’t — because she had no idea how to type on it.
“How do you type on this?” she asked, before handing the phone back to Henry and dictating the highly inoffensive “from flotus: ‘here at dinner this is officially my first Tweet. i am looking forward to some good laughs from the potus and jay'”.
There you have it. No word on whether Steve Jobs is sending the White House the entire collection of “This is how you…” ads from when the iPhone was first introduced.
Yes, we have an official replacement for the MacQuarium as the best use for a 25-year-old Mac: Cut a slot into it so it can serve as the ultimate past-meets-future iPad stand. Great work from Flickr user Mapgoblin, though you might want to consider washing the front of your old Mac if you decide to emulate him.
(And yes, I know the photographer thought it was a Mac Plus — I’m pretty sure it’s actually a 512k Fat Mac)
An update to ABC’s iPad app that adds 3G video streaming has already been submitted to the App Store.
The popular app will likely win Apple’s approval and will shortly be available as a free download. Since its launch a month ago, ABC’s app has been one of the most popular on the iPad, all owing users to enjoy high-quality streams of ABC’s hit shows, like Lost.
However, as we noted last week, the app works over Wi-Fi only. It will not stream video over AT&T’s 3G cell network. This came as a shock and surprise to new iPad 3G owners, who were also beginning to discover that other video services, like Netflix and Youtube, severely downgrade video quality when streaming over the cell network.
Silicon Alley Insider: ABC iPad App Update With 3G Video Streaming Already On Its Way
One of the coolest roles of the 3G iPad has to be as that of navigator. No more squinting at the iPhone’s tiny screen while trying to navigate the spaghetti-bowl of the NYC-area highway system; no more ending up in the wrong Springfield because of accidentally tapping in the wrong place.
The relatively inexpensive ($30) CoPilot GPS iPhone app now has an iPad version, CoPilot Live HD North America — currently the only iPad GPS app out there. The good news is that unlike most apps, the HD iPad version is the same price as the iPhone version. The bad news is that so far it’s only available for North America.
Now if only someone would make a car mount requiring less commitment than this one.
I’ve been infatuated with Iron Man ever since I was wee — so give me any reason to mention the red and gold-clad champion and I’m as giddy as a mad scientist in a repulsor-equipped, titanium-alloy exoskeleton.
Iron Man Central, a collection of all-things Iron Man, has just come to the iPhone. There’s a lot of content for fans to play around within the free app: videos, background information on the character, real-world news about Iron Man titles and events, wallpapers, social media interaction — and of course, the obligatory pimp for the new movie.
Yes, the app’s release coincides with that of the new Iron Man flick, but Zumobi, the app’s developer (and creator of a number of media-related apps like NBC’s Meet The Press and FHM magazine apps) says the updates won’t fade when Iron Man 2 finally does from theaters. iPad version’s coming soon.
[via Mashable]
Web surfing on the iPad 3G using its cell connection is really pretty good, especially if you get away from congested urban areas.
Using the iPad over the weekend, I’ve been pretty impressed by the speed of the iPad 3G for routine Web surfing. Video, however, is another matter — it’s a disappointment.
What you see here isn’t World of Warcraft running natively on the iPad, but rather WoW streamed through the Gaikai online gaming service, which allows you to play games within your browser using HTML5 and their server streaming technology. In other words, it’s a thin client.
I imagine this is pretty maddening to play — WoW depends on a mouse and keyboard — but if thin clients get big enough, developers will start programming for iPad-based input, even for non-native games. As a reformed WoW addict, I hope to god that doesn’t happen: I don’t need another reason to start back up.
If you’re interested in the possibilities here, you can sign up for Gaikai’s private beta here.
[via MacStories]
Apple sold 300,000 iPad 3G devices during the first weekend the device was available, one analyst estimates. Nearly all stores surveyed – 49 out of 50 – had run out of stock, according to Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster.
Munster’s comments about lack of availability of the 3G models coincides with Monday remarks by Apple CEO Steve Jobs that the Cupertino, Calif. company was trying to keep up with demand. More than 1 million iPads were sold in the first 27 days, the company announced.
If you are looking for a way to check your hair surreptitiously at the upcoming WWDC, behold the “MocBook” pocket mirror and card holder.
It comes from Japan, where locals love mignon tech, and is available in versions that mimic the MacBook, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air.
Steve Jobs is very serious about HTML5 being the future of the web, and in Jobs’ view, H. 264 is an integral part of that formula. Google and Microsoft agree: they’ve committed to MPEG LA’s video codec as the new standard for online video. That puts the three biggest players all in the same corner when it comes to H. 264.
But Opera and Firefox aren’t fans of the standard. Instead, they back a codec called Ogg Theora, which is royalty free and open source, while H. 264 is closed source and only royalty free until 2015. Their fear is that mass adoption of H. 264 will cause MPEG LA to “flip the switch” on royalties five years down the line, leaving companies no choice but to pay exorbitant licensing fees.
So why isn’t Apple on board with Ogg Theora? Apple fan Hugo Roy wrote Steve Jobs over the weekend, asking him about Apple’s backing of the H. 264 standard. Jobs informative and surprisingly length reply follows:
Cult of Mac reader Ian Chan was inspired by our recent story of a football player getting grounded after listening to his iPod during landing to pen the above comic on airplane safety.
Chan — along with everyone else who has forgotten to turn off a device on board — says:
“I might be overreacting, but perhaps you (the FAA) should worry more about your pilots making $17,000 a year and being on food stamps [warning, link to Michael Moore] than me listening to Miley Cyrus on my flight home.”
Word.
Via Ian Chan
It’s just a matter of course for any new Apple product to be vivisected down to its very bolts and each part catalogued by the Internet’s gadget coroners, but no one does a better job at it than the boys over at iFixIt, who have already torn down the iPad 3G.
Take out the trusty old ex-acto knife and whittle down your T-Mobile SIM cart just right and you can cram it right into your iPad 3G’s medulla oblongata. Jailbreak with Spirit and you can then use your iPad to send SMSes, provided you’ve got some command line skill. Who said there was no reason to jailbreak your iPad?
[via 9to5Mac]
Federal regulators apparently have taken note of the ongoing spat between Apple and Adobe, and the iPhone maker’s decision to prohibit developers from submitting apps originally created for Flash. The U.S. Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission are “days away” from deciding which agency will launch an antitrust probe into Apple’s developer agreement banning Flash from apps, according to the New York Post.
The probe “will focus on whether the policy, which took effect last month, kill competition by forcing programmers to choose between developing apps that can only run on Apple gizmos or come up with apps that are platform neutral, and can be on a variety of operating systems, such as those from rivals Google, Mikcrosoft and Research in Motion,” the report said, citing persons in the know.
One million iPads have sold in under 30 days, Apple announced Monday. It took twice as long for the iPhone to reach the same figure.
“One million iPads in 28 days — that’s less than half of the 74 days it took to achieve this milestone with the iPhone,” CEO Steve Jobs said in a statement. Demand for the tablet device continues to outstrip supply, but the Cupertino, Calif. company is “working hard to get this magical product into the hands of even more customers,” Jobs added.
In part 12 of Macworld founder David Bunnell’s story of the early Mac, Bill Gates is the only developer to actually deliver on his promises of software for the Mac. Microsoft’s Excel literally saves the Mac just when sales drop to nil, but at the same time Gates’ engineers are reverse engineering the GUI for the first version of Windows.
The “Spirit” iPad/iPhone jailbreak is available for download from the Dev Team. You can download Spirit here.
The free, untethered jailbreak is available for Mac and Windows, and works with any iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch on firmware 3.1.2, 3.1.3, or 3.2. It’s a quick, easy, one-click process, according to QuickPwn, although the Cydia app is buggy. Just download the jailbreak software, plug in your device, and your iPad or iPhone is instantly recognized. Hit the “Jailbreak” button and you’re done.
Note: Before performing a jailbreaking make absolutely sure you’ve got a backup of your SHSH blobs so that if anything goes wrong you can restore to 3.1.2. You can find a step-by-step guide from Redmond Pie here.
Spirit is not a carrier unlock (which allows you to use unauthorized wireless carriers like T-Mobile).
The Dev Team highly recommend syncing with iTunes before trying this jailbreak. If anything goes wrong, you will have to restore the device. It’s especially iffy on the iPad.
Note: On iPad, all this is still sort of beta. Some packages in Cydia, not designed for iPad, might screw up your system and require you to restore. Be careful. (And no, Cydia’s appearance is not final.)
Dev Team: Spirit Freed.
I just noticed something about surfing the web on an iPad. Here’s a hint: look at the red circle in the New York Times screenshot above.
It was hard to spot because it’s actually noticing something that’s not there: the blue Legos where the Flash plugin should be.
In January, when Steve Jobs introduced the iPad, he wasn’t able to load the NYT‘s front-page videos (remember the Lego bricks visible during his debut event?) The absence of Flash seemed like a major problem. Video, games, rich-media — none of these would work, pundits said, and the iPad would be a crippled device.
But that hasn’t proven to be the case. Not at all. During the past month I’ve been using the iPad, I’ve rarely encountered problems with the lack of Flash. All the sites I visit regularly – the BBC, NYT and Wall Street Journal — all of them have quickly made video and rich-media available in iPad-friendly formats.
YouTube is especially iPad-friendly. I’ve yet to encounter a YouTube video the iPad wouldn’t play. And because so many sites use YouTube to embed video, it seems like a lot of the web is iPad-friendly.
The only problems is streaming music from MixRiot (which I use a lot but isn’t exactly mainstream) and playing Farmville and thousands of other Flash games. But given how much time I waste fertilizing my kids’ crops and sending them gifts, that’s actually a blessing.
And it’s only going to get worse for Flash. Look at the chart below from Encoding.com, which does a lot of video encoding for sites like MTV and MySpace. In the last four quarters, Flash video (represented by FLV and Flash VP6) dropped from 69 percent to only 26 percent of all videos. Meanwhile, the H.264 format went from 31 percent to 66 percent, and is now the most popular format by a long shot.
In Part 11 of Macworld founder David Bunnell’s memoirs, Steve Jobs triumphantly introduces the Mac to the world. “It sang to us. It performed mathematical calculations with the blinding speed of a Cray mainframe. It drew beautiful pictures. It communicated with other computers. It bounced rays off satellites and sent a subversive message to the Soviet Union.”