News - page 2259

Although it’s never going to replace the iPod in most people’s pockets, Microsoft’s done a lot to overcome the initial missteps with their Zune line of portable media players.

In fact, if not for the overwhelming advantages of the App Store, I’d recommend the Zune HD to people over the iPod Touch. It’s a fantastic media player with a beautiful high-definition screen and a great interface, and it’s available at a wonderfully down-to-earth price: the 32GB Zune HD only costs $199 compared to the 32GB iPod Touch’s price of $299.

Only the Zune platform’s woeful app marketplace makes it a sucker buy for those who want the most of their PMPs: if all you want to do is watch movies or listen to MP3s, the 32GB Zune HD is a great deal.

Now, Microsoft is teasing the imminent release of the 64GB Zune HD. There’s no price available yet, but my guess would be $299, which is $100 cheaper than the 64GB iPod Touch. Whether or not you think that’s a good deal depends a lot on how invested you are in the App Store, but if you’re looking for a great, next-gen PMP at an affordable price, this is one Microsoft product that even an Apple fan can feel pretty good about owning.

Although some questioned Apple’s decision to support HTML 5 over the dominant Flash technology used in so many online ads and graphics, it appears CEO Steve Jobs may have the last laugh. A video platform company Monday announced it will convert Flash videos to HTML 5 for such publishing heavyweights as the New York Times and Time magazine.

As a result, we may see the two when Apple unleashes the iPad on April 3.

Eager to plunge your Companion Cube through a gravity-defying dimensional riff in pursuit of the ephemeral promise of imaginary cake? Dying to invisibly sneak up on a sandwich-munching Heavy and slide a butterfly knife between his vertrebrae? Have a zombie-killing date scheduled with three buddies in New Orleans’ French district? Want to do all of it on your Mac?

Well, good news! Valve Software’s games delivery service, Steam, is now accepting Mac beta testers. It’s easy to sign up: all you need to do is go to the page and log in with your Steam user name and password. A quick poll and system check later, and you’ll be officially entered.

I’ve entered, and so should you: perhaps a Cult of Mac Left 4 Dead II multiplayer night is in our future later this month.

The iPad has a lot of untapped potential as an image editing tablet… but the only way to load your images on-the-go is to lug a laptop around with you or spring for the iPad Camera Connection Kit, which gives users a couple of options to load images on their iPad: either by connecting their digicam through USB or, if all else fails, slap in an SD card and read your snapshots off of physical media.

It’s not a bad solution, though we’d prefer a USB slot. The only problem is that up until now, the Camera Connection Kit has been MIA on the Apple Store. Well, no longer: you can now order the kit for $29.00, with a ship date of late April.

I’m actually less interested than the iPad Camera Connection Kit for loading images onto my iPad — I’ll always be able to slurp in photos through iTunes — but I can’t help but wonder if the Jailbreaking community’s going to figure out a way to allow SD cards plugged into the card reader to function as expandable storage on the iPad. That right there is going to give a lot of incentive to people to hack their devices.

The iPad may be selling like gangbusters, but an interesting survey done by NPD suggests that it’s still not the ideal device for a slim majority of computer users: amongst surveyed 18-34 year olds, 51% said they would rather have a more conventional portable like a laptop or netbook than an iPad. Even Apple owners aren’t totally convinced: 44% said they’d rather have a MacBook than an iPad.

According to NPD’s vice president of industry analysis, Stephen Baker: “The most interested potential iPad customers see it primarily as a music device, or for its internet access capabilities.”

If you”re curious about how you’ll browse the App Store on your iPad, look no further than this video.

It’s a familiar and intuitive experience. In short, it’s more like browsing the App Store through iTunes on your Mac than launching the App Store on your iPhone, with apps displayed in multiple columns and big, beautiful Coverflow.

The one big thing that stands out to me about the video is that much like the launch of the iPhone App Store, developers are still experimenting with how to price, name and list their apps.

Understandably, iPad apps cost more than their iPhone versions… but expect a lot of fluctuation here, as App Store developers try to figure out if the iPad App Store can escape the $0.99 curse of iPhone apps.

It’s also interesting the naming conventions developers are using to differentiate their iPad versions from the iPhone apps are all over the place. Fieldrunners for iPad is listed right below Flight Control HD, and XL is also a naming convention that is gaining traction. Presumably the different naming schemes will be consolidated at some point… my guess with a little bit of strong-arming on behalf of Apple.

Personally, I prefer HD, which not only plays up the iPad’s higher-resolution display but also keeps extraneous characters down to a bare minimum.

[via Mac Stories]

According to 9to5Mac, Apple has started sending out shipping notifications to the earliest iPad pre-order customers.

WiFi only, of course. Curiously, even though it’s only March 29th, those who chose expedited shipping are being told to expect delivery on April 3rd. Don’t expect yours early… but do expect a lot of incremental iPad status updates like this in your newsfeeds this week.

What about you guys? Have you gotten your shipping notifications yet? Excited? Let us know in the comments.

Apple could ship 8-10 million iPads in 2010, or 2.5 million tablet devices within the first three months of this year, one analyst told investors Monday. If correct, the amount would far exceed the prevailing Wall Street expectation for 5 million iPads for all of calendar year 2010.

Morgan Stanley analyst Kat Huberty said her optimism is fueled by “strong initial pre-orders.” Indeed, because each 1 million iPads shipped translates to $0.25 of earning per share, the Cupertino, Calif. company is on track for a “significant earnings upside.”

According to Steve Jobs (as relayed by MediaPost), a mere four days after putting the iPad in eager customers hands, Apple’s going to launch the “next big thing,” a new “revolutionary” service to take the tech world by storm. But it’s not going to be a gadget. It’s an advertising network.

Meet iAd, another tin-eared Apple brand name that may be creatively bereft, but certainly gets the point across: a mobile advertising network for iPhone OS devices.

Of course, this won’t take any one by surprise who has been following the recent mobile advertising tiffs between Apple and Google. In January, Apple bought mobile advertising company Quattro for $275 million… a few months after Google had snapped up AdMob.

Apple’s also been warning developers from creating apps that use location-based data to serve up ads from competing mobile ad networks. Guessing that Apple would roll their own mobile ad network soon wasn’t a matter of prophecy.

At first blush, it seems weird that Cupertino would roll-out another big product so close to the iPad launch, but there’s little to lose here. Apple’s going to want developers to start building iAd functionality into their apps. This isn’t a consumer product or service, after all… it’s a developer service that will be completely invisible to most users.

As long as this isn’t another Mobile Me fiasco, launching iAd sooner rather than later shouldn’t take any of the luster off of the iPad launch.

Steve Jobs once again made Barron’s annual list of the 30 most respected CEOs worldwide.

Jobs, however, stands out among the global tycoons — other repeat honorees include Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com and John Chambers of Cisco — being called “probably the world’s most valuable CEO.” His career is called “cinematic” and on the eve of the iPad roll-out, Barron’s says, “America could use 1,000 more like him.”

Praise aside, unlike many other rankings, this one isn’t a popularity contest but is based on stock performance.

Here’s why, for Barron’s, Jobs just may be the MVP of the business game:

“Probably the world’s most valuable CEO is Steve Jobs of Apple, as shown by stock dips on news of his medical problems. Apple recently hit a record, with a market value topping $200 billion, a reflection of the Street’s confidence that a healthy Jobs (at least from what we can tell) continues to keep Apple ahead of the game. Jobs likely accounts for $25 billion or more of Apple’s market value.”

This is the latest accolade for Jobs, who was also named most admired celebrity entrepreneur and CEO of the decade recently.

Via Apple Insider

Whether questions like “Will the iPad will live up to its hype?” or “Should I stay or should I go to the Apple store?” are what keep you on edge, now you can ask Steve Jobs.

Head over to Ask El Jobso, the oracle for Apple lovers.

The random response generator was devised by the team at The Apple Lounge after one of their bloggers got a one-word answer from Jobs, generating a ton of  news stories last week.

Kinda like the Magic 8 Ball for Apple addicts, some of the answers generated are from real email answers that the King of Cupertino has recently fired off to people.

Let us know if El Jobso solves your dilemmas big and small.

Although they are supposed to be mortal enemies, Steve Jobs was just spotted chatting amiably with Google’s Eric Schmidt at a coffeeshop in downtown Palo Alto, reports Gizmodo.

Overheard from the conversation were two lines by Jobs. Enthusiastically, “They’re going to see it all eventually so who cares how they get it.” Which seemed to be about web content, said the tipster. And, “Let’s go discuss this somewhere more private,” after they noticed the crowd gathering around… Schmidt was very quiet, listening, and Jobs was doing a lot of the talking.

And as Giz notes, what’s that black thing on the table? An iPad maybe?

Someone just forwarded me this hilarious story about a woman who was pinned to the floor by her Mac Pro.

The Mac Pro is a big, heavy machine and can weigh upwards of 40 lbs. The story circulated on an Apple consultant mailing list recently. Here it is, typos and all:

This is by far one of the funniest tech calls that I have ever recieved. One of my clients called this morning to say she is trapped under her MacPro tower and she needed me to come asap to help her out. I asked “where are you?” and she said “at home not at the studio”. She screamed “just get here!”. So I rushed over there, punched in the key code to get through the gate and entered her house calling out her name. I found her laying flat on her back on the staircase with the MacPro crushing her chest. I ran up there to pull the tower off her and I couldn’t help but to laugh. You see she is this small 4 foot 6 inches middle aged tiny lady. She just didn’t have the strenght to push the tower off. She had this idea to move the tower upstairs but because the tower was so heavy for her, she thought she could pull the tower while laying flat on her back over her body. Crawling the machine slowly up the stairs. It didn’t work. Helped her move the tower upstairs but the tower ended back down stairs anyway. It was just too funny.

So there you have it. Pro tip: Don’t move heavy machines around by putting them on your body and crawling across the floor.

With the update of many of Apple’s pro apps including Final Cut, and Aperture, the hardware they’re designed to run on is starting to feel a little stale.  Certainly the top of the line Mac Pros, still dominate Geekbench scores for the first thousand pages or so,  but for the first time in the Intel era, the MacBook Pro is no longer the dominant laptop.  So too, is the fate of the entry model Mac Pro, which is finding itself out-classes by average gaming rigs on the PC side.

These updates are Waaaaay past due, I know I’ve got both a Mac Pro and  a 17” Macbook Pro in need of an update, but for those of you not staying up every Monday night in the hopes of a Christmas-like Tuesday morning, here’s the skinny:

• Mac Pro: last updated 03 March 2009, 388 days ago. Average release cycle: 236 days.
• Macbook Pro: last updated 08 June 2009, 291 days ago. Average release cycle: 200 days.

Certainly Apple dominates profitability in the computer market, but they do that by staying far, far ahead of the curve in technology, innovation and design.   But that competitive advantage is only sustainable as long as you drive as hard as Apple has historically to stay out front. That’s not happening here with this generation of machines.  This has been the longest wait for Pro Laptops in the Intel era, and so far the second longest wait for a pro tower.

Of course, Steve has words of comfort for the faithful, “Not to Worry” he wrote in response to a like-minded cultist’s query last week.

I’m not worried, Steve. I’d like to say I’m running out of patience, but what choice do I have, really?

…and so the wait continues, see ya on Tuesday…

This week hasn’t heralded any major App Store gaming releases, so this weekend, in the wake of the inamorata’s shamelessly bragged-about decimation of my all-time high score, I’ll be revisiting an old iPhone favorite: GeoSpark ($1.99) by Critical Thought Games.

As we reported earlier this week, gaming appears to be an early market for the iPad. Now comes word of some of the games that could be ready to download from the the iTunes App Store when the tablet device begins shipping April 3. Before Apple closed the leaky search engine, a blogger Thursday captured a partial list of game titles update for the iPad.

According to the PadGadget site, the following “HD” versions of iPhone entertainment titles were found. “HD” (along with “XL”) is often used by developers to denote games tailored to the iPad’s environment. Here is the list:

Earlier this week, as if in response to the iPhone’s incredible gains on the handheld gaming market, Nintendo announced the successor to their popular DS console, the 3DS. The main difference over their earlier, dual screen device? 3D without glasses.

The problem with this approach is that the Nintendo DS’ screens are too small for true, pop-out-of-the-display 3D to really work… and it also raises some big questions about touchscreen gaming.

Over at Kotaku, Deputy Editor Steven Totilo has an interesting theory on how Nintendo is going to do 3D gaming without 3D displays: they’ll borrow a trick from the book of App Store developers like Ngmoco and fake the 3D by using the accelerometer.

If you don’t purchase an iPad online or in-person at an Apple Store, you may be able to walk into some Best Buy stores come April 3, reports suggest Friday. About half of the electronics giant’s retail location could have Apple’s tablet device available next week.

The retailer’s “Store-within-a-Store” locations, which comprise about half of Best Buy’s 1,000 stores, will become the first to offer the iPad outside purchases through Apple, according to MacRumors. Apple CEO Steve Jobs has indicated as much in emails reported earlier this week. As to where iPads will be sold, Jobs reportedly responded: “Initially at Apple Retail and online stores and Best Buy.”

Star Wars titles on the iPhone tend to be bog-standard, lightsaber-swishing affairs, but THQ Wireless looks like they finally might have a Star Wars game in development that’s worth picking up: Star Wars Cantina.

As the title perhaps implies, this is a light-hearted simulation of running a cantina at the famous Mos Eisley Spaceport.

According to the official blurb, “Your task is to see that the right beverage finds its way to the right customer. And don’t keep them waiting, some of the customers are real troublemakers! Working towards your daily quota, accuracy and speed are essential. As a reward for a job well done, outfit your cantina with decorations and attractions to appeal to even the most difficult customers.”

Star Wars Cantina should be coming to the App Store soon. It looks great. Now what about the HD version?

Pioneer have just unveiled two new high-powered 7.1 SurroundSound AV receivers… both of which come with a homegrown remote app, making them perfect additions to your home theater set-up if you like to do all of your media control through your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Both the VSX-1020-K and VSX-1120-K feature Bluetooth audio streaming, HDMI 1.4 connections for 3D home theater systems, Internet radio support and Dolby ProLogic IIz decoding in the 5.1 channel receivers. For $200 more, the VSX-1120-K includes the Marvell Qdeo video processor, which provides excellent clarity and superb accuracy for the highest quality video switching.

As for the app, iControlAV is Pioneer’s first foray into app development, and predictably allows its flagship AV Receivers to be fully controlled over WiFi.

Unfortunately, there’s no release date available for either model, but the VSX-1020-K starts at $549, and the VSX-1120-K will cost $749.

One day after Apple stock granted to four top company executives vested, the 1.1 million shares were sold during a day of record-high trading in the Cupertino, Calif. firm.

After Jerome York’s recent death, the Wall Street Journal has an interesting overview of the history and composition of Apple’s Board.

Apple’s current board is only made up of six individuals, making it one of the smallest boards of the Fortune 500.

One of the reasons Apple’s board is so small is that one of the stipulations of Steve Jobs’ return to Apple was that all of the members who “let things go to hell” were fired, and the remaining board members were hand-picked for their personal loyalty to Jobs, which was tested by Jobs recent illness.

Despite this, the recently deceased York himself was disgusted with the way Steve Jobs handled his illness, saying that Jobs should have publicly disclosed his health problem three weeks earlier in the same news release that announced he was pulling out of the Macworld trade conference. He claimed the concealment “disgusted” him: “Frankly, I wish I had resigned then,” York said last year.

It remains unclear when or even if Apple will choose to replace York, but if so, it’ll be another cherry-picked Jobs candidate.

It’s worth noting that while the remaining members are extremely loyal to Jobs, York’s passing actually removes one of the most vocal and outspoken independents on Apple’s board, which could increase shareholder unrest.

A fascinating read. Check out the whole thing.

There’s a new king in town.

According to mobile advertising company AdMob, Apple’s iPhone OS now accounts for fifty percent of worldwide smartphone traffic on its networks, increasing its share from 33 percent just a year ago.

The iPod Touch is also a huge winner: although it’s not a smartphone, the iPod Touch lead AdMob’s Mobile Internet Device (MID) traffic, their biggest source of network growth over the last year.

The venerable but aging Symbian OS was the main loser in Apple’s market gains: the smartphone OS plummeted from 43% in February 2009 to a mere 18% in 2010.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__TR86PLiHw

You may want to put your Mac on mute — audiophonic doofus explosion incoming — but what you’re looking at here is the first working, untethered jailbreak of the iPhone 3Gs and iPod Touch G3… and if its developer is to be trusted, it should work on the iPad when it comes out next Friday too.

According to jailbreaking wunderkind George Hotz (aka geohot), the jailbreak should be out soon, although asking for a release date “won’t make it happen any sooner.”

If geohot’s right about the iPad jailbreaking technique being similar to the iPhone 3Gs and iPod Touch G3, we could be looking at a zero day iPad jailbreak. Oh, good. I don’t think I could do without 5 Icon Dock HD.

Almost a week before Apple is expected to begin selling the iPad, an analyst has increased this year’s sales estimate for the tablet device by 30 percent. Apple may also release a new iPhone in June, along with seeing a 17 percent jump in Mac sales, the analyst adds.

BMO Capital analyst Keith Bachman told investors Thursday his initial estimate of 2.5 million iPads sold this year “may be conservative.” In addition, Bachman raised his estimate for 2011 iPad sales to 7.2 million, up 30 percent from his earlier prediction of 5 million.