There’s a couple of interesting new portable iPhone/iPod speakers on the market featuring built-in solar chargers.
Devotec Industries’ Solar Sound portable stereo claims to be the first solar-powered speaker also using Bluetooth for wireless music distribution — perfect for piping music from an iPhone during a picnic.
The $99.99 portable speaker includes a pair of 2W speakers using a 150mA solar panel to provide juice for the built-in 1500mAh Lithium-Ion battery. A solar charge provides eight hours of music at medium volume, or four hours if you crank the unit up to 11, according to maker Devotec Industries.
In an Apple-like design touch, a yellow logo lights up during charging. An AC-DC plug and charging cable are also provided.
Along with the portable speakers, the half-pound device includes touch-screen controls and a built-in microphone.
The next iPod Touch and iPod Nano are about to get cameras, according to intelligence coming from Chinese case makers.
What’s the worst kept secret in China?
The features and dimensions of Apple’s new iPod Touch and iPod Nano, which are hush-hush here in the U.S. ahead of their expected September unveiling, but are well-known in China.
According to more than a dozen pictures of new cases acquired by CoM, the new iPod Touch and iPod Nano will both get cameras.
The big surprise is that the iPod Touch’s camera is in the center of the device, not offset like the camera in the iPhone.
The Nano’s new camera is placed in the bottom left corner, which becomes top left when the iPod is held horizontally to take a picture, with fingers on each corner.
The outside dimensions remain largely the same as previous models, but the Nano gets a widescreen display, the better to take photos with the camera on the back.
But the dozen pictures of new cases below all but confirm the rumors. Chinese case manufacturers are so certain of the features and dimensions, they are already sending out samples of the cases. They wouldn’t do this unless they were pretty confident.
“My company had got full information and dimension,” wrote a Chinese distributor in an email to a U.S. reseller. “Enclosed some image and instruction for your reference. Most of the sample available now. If you need some sample check quality please freely let me know.”
Hit the jump for dozens of new cases exclusively unearthed by CoM.
As Apple ponders a makeover of some of its stores — the first international remodel is underway in Bluewater (UK) — it’s a good time to consider which of the over 250 retail outlets are worth making a pilgrimage to, or a slight detour if something goes awry while you’re on the road.
The top five must-see Apple stores, as per travel site Jaunted, are London, Tokyo, Sydney, New York — and Scottsdale.
Cultofmac.com may have been infected with the System Security 2009 Trojan. Luckily, it's Windows only. Screenshot from Malware Help. Org.
Just spent two days recovering from a hack attack at Cultofmac.com. The site was a seething cesspit of Viagra spam and — get this – Windows malware.
Looks like hackers compromised an FTP login to our host (a notorious weakspot), allowing the filthy scumbags to inject hidden spam into almost every post we’ve ever published (more than 3,500 articles).
The lowlifes also added a malware redirect to a couple of index.php files. The redirects were located inside hidden iframes, and took a bit of finding. Not sure how these manifested themselves, but they seem to have popped up in the site’s RSS feed. At least one reader seems to have been infected with the System Security 2009 Trojan and the Bloodhood PDF virus — both Windows malware. Sorry Chris!
Luckily, most of you guys are on the Mac, or I’d have a lot more apologising to do.
I’ve spent the last two days downloading the site database, doing a global search/replace to remove the spam and virus links, and the re-uploading the DB.
I changed all the logins/passwords to everything; killed a bunch of old and dodgy-looking accounts on the site and host; and locked down the site with WordPress plugins to prevent brute-force logins and the like.
Amazingly it all seems to have worked, because I’ve no idea what I’m doing.
There may be a few gremlins in the RSS feed. New feeds are working fine, but I’m unable to get my old feeds to update. If you’re having the same problem, just cross your fingers and we’ll all hope together that the problem magically fixes itself tomorrow, especially because I’ve got a major scoop.
Is your MP3 collection maxxing out your iPod, your CD library getting out of hand? If you have $1800 lying around, Olive’s Opus device provides up to 2-terabytes of storage. While not as portable Apple’s handheld devices, the Opus No. 4 stores up to 3,000 CDs in Free Lossless Audio Codec, reportedly providing quality superior to MP3.
The 13 pound unit does include a touch-screen interface and will wireless distribute music to up to 10 rooms via Olive’s MELODY Hi-Fi Multi-Room Player.
Steve Jobs has been awarded a patent for the iPhone's box.
When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone to a delighted Macworld audience in January 2007, he said Apple had protected its invention with more than 200 patents.
He didn’t mention that his company had also patented the box the iPhone comes in.
The iPhone’s box certainly is elegant. Pull off the top, and the iPhone is presented to its new owner sitting on a slab of glossy plastic, like an expensive watch. Hidden underneath are its accessories and instructions.
Jobs has always been fascinated by packaging, believing the unboxing routine to be a crucial part of the customer experience. All of Jobs’s products have been carefully packaged going back to the original Mac in 1984. Jobs believes unpacking a product is a great way to introduce unfamiliar technology to the consumer — they explore the components as they unbox them.
The new patent application contains little but pictures of the iPhone packaging. No less that 17 designers are named on the patent, including Apple’s design head designer Jonathan Ive.
Hit the jump for a cool exploded picture of the iPhone package.
A dormitory at Foxconn's factory city in Shenzhen.
A security official has been suspended by Hon Hai Group after the suicide of an employee who lost an iPhone prototype, Bloomberg reports.
Hon Hai Group, one of the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturers, suspended a security official and turned the case over to Chinese authorities, the company said in a statement, but didn’t provide further details.
The security official is identified only by the surname “Gu.”
Last week, Sun Tanyong, a 25-year-old employee at Hon Hai’s Foxconn International Holdings unit committed suicide after losing one of 16 iPhone prototypes he was charged with mailing to Apple in California.
Tanyong leapt to his death off a dormitory at Foxconn’s factory city in Shenzhen. He had reportedly been subject to an illegal search and rough treatment by Foxconn security.
Hon Hai says it is unaware of the reasons behind Sun’s suicide, according to the statement.It offered the company’s condolences to Tanyong’s family.
Apple says it is awaiting the outcome of an investigation.
“We are saddened by the tragic loss of this employee,” spokesman Steve Dowling told Bloomberg. “We require that our suppliers treat all workers with dignity and respect.”
Foxconn is one of the largest contract makers of mobile phones, and produces Apple’s iPhone and iPods at its walled factory city. Home to 270,000 workers, the walled city has its own fire station and hospital, stores, restaurants, and recreation facilities. The giant factory also produces cell phones for Nokia and Motorola, Sony Playtation and Nintendo Wii, as well as PCs for Hewlett Packard and Dell.
Despite worldwide economic recession, Apple enjoyed its best non-holiday quarter ever in its 2009 third quarter ended June 27, 2009, the company said on Tuesday.
Apple made a whopping $1.23 billion profit on revenues of $8.34 billion. The gobs of cash came from robust sales of 2.6 million Mac computers (up 4% from last year thanks to a MacBook refresh in the quarter), and blockbuster sales of the iPhone 3GS, which sold 5.2 million units, up an unbelievable 620% from a year ago.
This when other tech companies companies like Nokia are tanking.
“We’re making our most innovative products ever and our customers are responding,” said Steve Jobs in a statement.
Other highlights:
– the traditional iPod is on the way out. Apple sold 10.2 million iPods during the quarter, down 7% from a year-ago. The market is saturated and customers are buying iPhones instead.
– Gross margin was an amazing 36.3 percent, up from 34.8 percent in the year-ago quarter. (Dell makes about 5% margins on its products).
– The iPhone 3GS and $99 iPhone are a huge hit. Apple shifted 5.2 million iPhones during the quarter, up 626% from a year ago.
– Apple is a truly international. Overseas sales accounted for 44% of the quarter’s revenue. This will jump when the iPhone goes on sale in China later this year.
Apple’s full unaudited financial statement after the jump.
Image used with a CC-license. Thanks to basykes on Flickr.
A British thief was busted in Germany after posing as broke tourist selling his iPod and electronics gear to get home.
The sorta-samaritans walked away and realized instead of MP3 players and video gear they had bought a camcorder bag full of potatoes.
It’s one of the oldest tricks in the book — buy a cell phone in a parking lot, find out it’s got sand instead of hardware in it — but the thief pulled off the bait and switch at least 26 times.
His accomplice has not been caught yet — and police in Dusseldorf warn he may be armed.
Should someone approach you, remember only Zune owners would sell their devices to get home.
Klipsch's $100 in-ear headphones with Apple=friendly microphone and remote.
Are you looking for an alternative to Apple’s in-ear headphones? High-end audio gear maker Klipsch next month will begin selling a $100 headset, the Image S4i, complete with the same three-button microphone and remote as Cupertino’s $88 version.
Multiple reports Tuesday indicate a 25 year-old employee of Foxconn, one of Apple’s OEM suppliers in China, killed himself last week after losing a 4th generation iPhone which he had been instructed to ship to Apple headquarters in Cupertino, CA.
Sun Danyong was a recent engineering graduate who worked in product communications for electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn in Shenzhen, a city in the booming industrial corridor between Guangzhou and Hong Kong.
On Thursday, July 9th, according to the first English-language report on the incident at Venture Beat, Sun got 16 prototype phones from the assembly line at a local Foxconn factory. At some point in the next few days, he discovered one of the phones was missing.
On Monday, July 13, he reported the missing phone to his boss. Then, that Wednesday, three Foxconn employees illegally searched his apartment. Accusations have reportedly been flying about the Chinese language Twittersphere that Sun was detained and physically abused during the investigation, although this has not been substantiated.
Shortly after 3am on Thursday July 16th, security cameras at Sun’s apartment building show him leaping to his death from a window in his apartment.
No Dock or Menu Bar was available on early versions of Mac OS for spacecraft
All this Moon landing nostalgia is wonderful and I’m enjoying every minute of it, especially We Choose The Moon and the CAPCOM and EAGLE Twitter accounts — anyway.
If you’ve ever wondered whether you could make it as an astronaut, here’s the ultimate test: Virtual AGC for Mac.
Apple is due to announce Wednesday its earnings for the quarter that ended June 27, and you know what that means: wild speculation by analysts followed by pouting and a drooping stock price when Apple out-performs expectations.
But lately, it’s gotten still more insane: now, these same analysts are trying to infer some read of the overall economic condition based on Apple’s earnings. Which, to me, is a comically fruitless exercise, because Apple operates in a different universe from most companies. It has radically differentiated offerings in all of its businesses, and its focus on innovation is such that it always comes out with a new market-defining product that the rest of the industry can’t match. Apple’s an especially bad indicator of the rest of the consumer tech sector during this recession. Apple doing well doesn’t mean that Dell’s in good shape, or vice versa.
BusinessWeek’s Arik Hesseldahl, a long-time Apple-watcher, has a very sober account of this lunacy, which suffers from the problems associated with a lot of traditional business reporting — in pursuit of balance, he can’t actually address the questionable premise that Apple, a company that was out-performing the market before it collapsed, might signify the end of the recession by continuing to out-perform the market.
I can say this much: Apple will have great earnings on Wednesday. And that means that it remains good to be an Apple stockholder, even as the rest of the world is in chaos. It doesn’t mean we’re getting back to normal anywhere else.
If your memory is a little hazy on where to find a medicinal pot supplier, there are a couple of apps for that.
The Cannabis app, available on iTunes for $2.99, helps users locate the nearest medical marijuana collectives, co-ops, doctors, clinics, attorneys, organizations and other patient services in the thirteen states where pot is legal for medicinal purposes.
Cannabis is the work of a Devin Calloway — web engineer and medical cannabis patient and self-described “digital activist” — and software engineer Julian Cain. The pair will donate $0.50 of every app sold to found a cannabis non-profit reform fund.
Cannabis isn’t the only app on iTunes for pot-seeking people. The other cannabis finder is called California Herbal Caregivers and, for $0.99, offers a list of the state’s 700 dispensaries on-the-go.
Despite Apple’s ongoing policing for “inappropriate” apps, both pot apps are rated 12+, or suitable for anyone over the age of 12, for “infrequent/mild alcohol, tobacco or drug use references.”
Complaining he hasn’t received Visual Voicemail on his iPhone for weeks, Siegler joins a growing chorus of pundits dissatisfied with AT&T, including Gizmodo, Wired and GigaOm.
But as some Techcrunch commenters point out, Visual Voicemail is bolloxed by a popular tethering hack, which allows the iPhone to share its internet connection with a tethered computer.
“I enabled the tethering hack weeks ago when it came out,” says one commenter. “It broke visual voicemail, so I reverted it. One heck of a coincidence if everyone’s voicemail spontaneously broke the same week that a tethering hack came out that breaks visual voicemail.”
Siegler didn’t respond to a query asking if he had tried the tethering hack, and he makes no mention of it in the comments to his post, where he engages in some back and forth with TC readers.
Either way, here’s a very simple fix to get Visual Voicemail back, while still enabling the tethering hack.
The days when you plugged your tiny thumb drive into your Mac may be over; memory maker Kingston Monday unveiled the 256GB DataTraveler 300 — more hard drive space than many desktop or laptop computers.
This thumb drive isn’t meant to transfer a few MP3s or an occasional Word or Excel file. No, the European branch of Kingston reports the DataTraveler has bigger tasks in mind, like 51,000 images or 365 CDs.
“This demonstrates how far flash technology has developed,” Antoine Harb, business development manager for Kingston Technology in the Middle East is quoted. Could this signal Apple a flash memory iMac or MacBook is possible?
Future perfect? Dave Lawrence's mock-up of Apple's homepage circa 1983
Dave Lawrence over at Newton Poetry had some fun with Photoshop making this retro-future homepage for Apple products. He picked a critical year in Apple history, 1983, when the company faced competition from IBM and the flop of the $10,000 Lisa.
Inspired by “how Apple’s web site has changed over the years,” Dave “thought it’d be cool to use it as a time-traveling template to take a peek into the past… It’s not accurate, of course, because I took some embellishments on the iPhone prototype and the fact that some sort of World Wide Web existed during the Reagan administration.”
Still, it’s an interesting take on web design—as well as what’s gone right and wrong with Apple products over the years.
Dave also mentions he’d like to see what would happen “if someone took a snapshot of Apple.com as it would appear throughout the years before its actual launch in 1996. For instance, I’d love to see what the homepage would’ve looked like on the Newton’s launch day, or the first PowerBook, or System 7.”
Anyone game? Send us your what-may-have been mock-ups.
If you’re looking for sturdy earphones with good sound isolation, the Shure SE110 may be a good swap for your Apple earbuds — if you don’t mind the bulky, three-foot cord.
First the good:
The Shure SE110 headphones come with a two-year warranty for materials and workmanship, the first thing you’ll notice after unboxing is that are built to withstand a lot of wear.
The cord and jack are thicker and more solid than regular Apple earbuds and, even after a short trial, I’d be willing to wager they last the warranty. If they do, at $79 per pair, the price is decent for the overall quality.
I like to think I’m a lover not a fighter, but the beating my iPod earbuds take indicates otherwise: a pair lasts about six-to-nine months, if that, in the cycle of gym bag to computer bag to handbag. (My old Apple pair in the pics below have been glued back together, note the sad fray around the buds).
So sturdy is a big selling point for me. Over the years, I’ve waffled between getting Apple replacements or versions that cost about half of the $30 Apple price, since they seem to last about as long anyway.
Some perverted unfiltered online content. No wait, it's the Apple website! And in an app that enables access to unfiltered content, but doesn't have to worry about review copies and 17+ ratings: Safari. Because Apple's hypocritical like that.
Apple recently announced that 1.5 billion apps have been downloaded from the App Store. With the dodgy approvals process alienating developers, you’d sometimes think Apple reckons it got where it did alone, without the people actually making the apps. Now, the company’s gone one step further, cleverly shooting itself in the foot (and developers in the face), thereby trying everything it can think of to screw up its lead and give the competition a sporting chance.
After all, surely Apple wouldn’t be quite so stupid as to ban all promo codes for 17+ rated apps? But that’s the story on TUAW, punching in the gut an already broken system (given that Apple has yet to provide non-US App Store account holders with an official means of redeeming promo codes). (See also: Q & A: How Sex Game Apps Get Approved By Apple)
You might think “so what?”, since, clearly, the only things rated 17+ would be dodgy ‘porn’ apps, right? Well, no. As we reported, Eucalyptus—an eReader for Project Gutenberg content—was saddled with a 17+ rating recently, due to it supposedly allowing ‘unfiltered internet content’. (In practise, Apple was seemingly miffed at the app enabling access to the text from Kamasutra, despite, say, Safari enabling access to hard-core pornography websites.) This means the 17+ rating is likely to affect some or all updates for all web-oriented software—Twitter clients, web browsers, IM clients, Flickr clients, eBook readers, RSS readers and so on.
Promo codes don’t generally affect the public. Although they’re sometimes given away by developers, they’re usually used by writers and journalists as review copies. Without promo codes, 17+ apps run the risk of not getting mainstream coverage, meaning they’re far less likely to ‘break through’ and become a sales success. (Contrary to what you might think, most publications don’t in fact have a ‘budget’ for writers to buy software, and many outlets enforce a policy of strictly not paying for review copies. When you’re reviewing hundreds of apps, those dollarpoundeuros stack up pretty fast.)
Here’s hoping Apple has a change of heart, because the App Store already has enough problems, without Apple making things worse, not only for developers and reviewers, but for users (who won’t find out about great new 17+ apps) and themselves (since sales will be lower).
UPDATE 2: Edge Lite’s now also gone. Some stores report Edge still available, but it’s certainly not on the US or UK stores. I guess Killer Edge Racing had better watch out, given that Langdell’s website has a Flash movie for the game Racers (which we suspect will never see the light of day).
UPDATE: At the time of writing, Edge Lite remains on the App Store, carrying an irony stick. So either someone missed the lite version or it really is all about the money. Which would be a huge shock, obviously.
We yesterday reported on the feud between Mobigame, makers of excellent iPhone game Edge, and EDGE Games, a company owned by Tim Langdell, who seemingly claims ownership over the word ‘edge’ in relation to any kind of gaming.
Edge by Mobigame - now no longer available from your local App Store
As stated yesterday, this ongoing battle has raged since April, and although compromises have apparently been suggested by both sides (indeed, Mobigames offered to rename their game Edgy, but Langdell then almost immediately registered that trademark himself), no agreement has been reached. More absurdly, Langdell contests that Edge wilfully ripped off ancient EDGE 8-bit videogame Bobby Bearing (and named it Edge to suggest the name of Langdell’s ‘famous’ trademark!), despite that game being a clone of Marble Madness and Edge playing almost nothing like Bobby Bearing.
Sadly, Edge is now again gone from the App Store, seemingly removed without warning (unlike the first time round, when Mobigame temporarily pulled the game voluntarily, in the hope of coming to a satisfactory agreement with Langdell).
Mobigame’s David Papazian told Cult of Mac: “We did not pull it. We don’t know exactly why it has been pulled [and] we don’t know if the game will come back. Maybe it will in some territories, but it does not depend on us. We are as surprised as many people, I think.”
“Making Edge took nearly two years of our lives, We hope the happy few who played it had a great time. We don’t know what to do now, and we cannot believe this is really happening. But we will probably have to fight since we strongly believe the law is on our side.”
Pre users will have to stay with version 8.2 to sync with iTunes
UPDATE: the original headline and a reference to “wireless” syncing in this article have been changed to correct a misunderstanding on the author’s part.
Apple has confirmed that Palm Pre will no longer be able to sync with iTunes versions beginning with the latest update, killing a sales feature that Palm had long relied upon in billing its phone as a major competitor to the iPhone.
“iTunes 8.2.1 is a free software update that provides a number of important bug fixes,” said Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris, in a BusinessWeek report Wednesday. “It also disables devices falsely pretending to be iPods, including the Palm Pre,” she continued, adding, “As we’ve said before, newer versions of Apple’s iTunes software may no longer provide syncing functionality with unsupported digital media players.”
For a device roundly touted as iPhone’s most worthy competition in the smartphone market, Palm’s Pre has not made many waves since being released on June 6 by Sprint, and remains hampered by an online app store with very little product.
There is some disagreement among analysts about how well the Pre has been received so far by the market, with some crowing that expectations have been more than met, while others say not so fast.
While the news of iTunes’ Pre lockout is no surprise, and Palm could still easily craft workaround allowing Pre users to sync with newer versions of iTunes, including using third party solutions to do the job, the lockout news is further evidence that Apple is not about to let up the pressure on a company now run by some of its former employees.
As flash memory and solid state drives steadily become the storage media of choice for portable electronic devices, Apple’s iPod Classic – the device widely credited with kickstarting the company’s rise from the ashes of the John Scully era – may not survive to celebrate its 10th birthday in 2011.
1.8 inch hard disk drives manufactured by Samsung and Toshiba, the last two manufacturers standing in a once-robust market for small, high-capacity spinning disk drives, sit languishing in the supply channel, according to a report at Ars Technica, and industry trends do not bode well for the future of Apple’s signature gadget.
When Apple launched the first iPod in 2001, the hard disk was the only vehicle capable of storing large amounts of data flexibly at reasonable cost. Since then, however, advances in Flash memory and SSD technology have made those two storage options the industry standard for everything from netbooks to iPhones and the entire line of Apple’s portable music players, with only the Classic continuing to rely on the 1.8″ HDD.
The trend toward Flash memory and SSD technology has been building for at least the last couple of years, with Apple having been ahead of the curve when the company introduced its Flash memory-based iPod nano in 2005.
SSDs typically offer higher performance–often much higher performance–than hard-disk drives and are more durable since they have no moving parts. While the larger question of where the technology is headed remains somewhat in debate, in large part over concerns about data’s long-term reliability in SSD storage media and Flash memory’s eventual degradation related to writing, erasing and re-writing its memory blocks, the fate of the 1.8 inch HDD seems dire.
The industry’s current disdain for small-form HDD products, and Apple’s apparent design trajectory for its mobile PMPs and handset devices, suggest the time has come to prepare farewells for the iPod Classic.
