Ultimate Ears, owned by Logitech, makes my favorite portable speaker ever: the UE Boom. The cylindrical powerhouse of a speaker is rugged, stylish, and easy to use.

Imagine my utter joy when I received Ultimate Ears’ latest entry into the portable speaker market, the UE MiniBoom, and found them to be even tinier and equally rugged and easy to use. Oh, and they sound fantastic, too.

When it comes down to who will control the future of the PC, Microsoft, Apple and now Google are battling it out for control of the incredibly important education market, and more specifically, schools.

Not only do school contracts provide each company with massive sales orders, but it allows iOS, Windows, or Chrome to take root in kids lives as they hopefully take their OS of choice with them into the workforce. While Microsoft has asserted its dominance in schools, Google’s VP of product management for Chromebooks, Caesar Sengupta, says 22% of the school districts in the U.S. are now using Google Chromebooks.

Samsung has reputation of making smartphones with screens bigger than the Hindenburg and the newly released Galaxy Note 3 is no different. With a 5.7-inch display the Note 3 is one of the most monstrous phablets ever built, which is cool if you’re using it as a tablet, but really sucks if you’re trying to hold it in one hand and make a phone call.

To make things easier on its single-handed users, Samsung has included a hilarious new tiny screen mode feature called “Use for all screens” that shrinks the UI of the smartphone phablet down to a window that’s small enough for you to use with one hand. To make things worse you’ll have to dive deep into the settings to toggle the tiny screen mode. The only other option was to shrink the size of the actual device, but rumor is Samsung decided that’d be too elegant.

Here’s a video by Android Central on how the setting works:

You know what people love? Cats. Just look at the Internet: It has cats everywhere.

You know what else people love? Breaking stuff. Just look at Angry Birds.

And a third thing people love? Taking two things and jamming them together. So now we have Cat on a Diet, a game about breaking stuff. Plus, it has a cat. And the cat is overweight. So that’s like a hat trick. Best game ever.

Well … it’s alright.

Cable industry veteran and former CableLabs executive Jean-François Mulé became an engineering director at Apple last month, and he’s hard at work on “something big.” His appointment comes just weeks before Apple is expected to unveil its latest Apple TV, and at a time when the Cupertino company has been working hard to improve the $99 set-top box.

But is Mulé part of something a little more exciting?

The big screen biopic Jobs opened this summer to mixed reviews, primarily over the film’s lack of accuracy in depicting events from Steve Jobs life and Apple’s history. It’s not the first movie out about Jobs and it definitely won’t be the last as filmmakers strive to tell a celluloid version of the life of the mercurial Apple co-founder.

A lot of Apple old-timers have commented on the accuracy of the movie, but it took a Mountain View, CA local-access TV show called John Wants Answers to get Steve Wozniak, Daniel Kottke and Andy Hertzfeld together to dish fact from fiction. Host John Vink has a long history with the Cupertino company; he was an engineer at Apple from 1996 to 2012 and currently heads Macintosh desktop engineering for Nest Labs.

The two-hour discussion went through the film scene by scene, peppered with entertaining banter and some surprising recollections from the panel. Dan Kottke, who also worked as a script consultant on the movie, noted that “in making that film, it was a huge choice of where to start it and where to end it…I thought the movie did a pretty good job of getting the emotional notes right.”

Read on to know more about why no one ever got fired over kerning, had to ask what a Macintosh was and why you should watch TV movie Pirates of Silicon Valley.

Fact Versus Fiction

The general consensus was that events, dates, facts and fiction were occasionally conflated to tell a better story. Many scenes were partially correct, but key details were altered. Some events portrayed were complete fiction, and the chronology wasn’t always right.

One example is the story of the Apple I and the Homebrew Computer Club. In Jobs the film, a young Steve Jobs stumbles across Wozniak’s new creation – a computer with a keyboard and screen – and becomes mesmerized staring into the TV monitor. He then sells the idea of a computing revolution to a reluctant Woz and convinces his shy companion to bring his system to the Homebrew Computer Club.

Woz spoke at length about what really happened:

“Steve and I both had gone over to a friend’s house, Captain Crunch, John Draper of the old blue box phone phreaking fame,” recalled Wozniak. “He sat down at a terminal, a teletype, and he started typing. Then he began playing chess with a computer in Boston.” Woz and Jobs were dumbfounded.

“Whoa!” said Woz. I thought: “this is just like Pong. I have to have this ability.”

Woz got some chips, an expensive keyboard ($60 – uppercase only) and wired the thing into his TV set. “This was not a computer, this was a terminal,” said Woz, “But it was a very short step before that terminal just got a little addition that made it a computer.”

Soon Woz made those additions and while Jobs was off at college, he started going to the HomeBrew computer club. Every two weeks, Wozniak hauled his TV set in the car, set up everything on a table in the lobby and started programming in earnest. Soon crowds began gathering and he started showing off his creation.

The buzz was growing, so Woz recalled that during one time Jobs was back home, “I pulled him to the club and showed him all the people around me. And he got the idea that we could sell them. I would have given them away for free.” The HomeBrew computer club already was full of people who wanted to change the world and Woz wanted to help.

“This is the complete opposite of the movie,” interjected show host John Vink. “In the movie we had Steve Jobs trying to convince you [Woz] to come to HomeBrew and you said ‘Nah, I don’t wanna go.'”

“Oh no,” replied Wozniak, “I’d been there since day one.”

What’s a Macintosh?

The development of Lisa and Macintosh were seminal events for the future of Apple. The group concurred that the scene where the Lisa team was chewed out for not having multiple fonts in the word processor was complete fiction. Nobody was fired for a lack of typefaces or kerning, but they did note that a different engineer at Apple was fired around that same time for not wanting to undertake the effort to build a mouse for the system.

Many of the celluloid scenes did portray parts of events accurately, with dramatic effect added for flair. One clip included in the trailer portrays Jobs drafting a young Andy Hertzfeld for the Macintosh team. When Hertzfeld asks for more time to continue working on his Apple II project, Jobs yanks the computer off his desk and says “you’re working on the Macintosh team now.” Then a quick cut to Apple employee Bill Fernandez, who asks “What’s a Macintosh?”

Via email I asked the panel if that was how things really happened, or just good theater?

All three agreed that the Mac project was not a secret around Apple engineers and management at that time.

Nobody would ever have asked “What’s a Macintosh?” That line was just tossed in for dramatic effect, and Fernandez was actually working in Japan at that time. But Hertzfeld did confirm that he lost his computer in the transition.

“[Jobs] came by my desk and said “you’re working on the Mac now’,” said Hertzfeld. “I had just started this new OS for the Apple II, DOS 4.0… and I wanted to get it in good enough shape that someone else could take it over. Steve said ‘Are you kidding? The Apple II’s obsolete, the Apple II’s gonna be dead, you gotta work on the Mac!”

Hertzfeld pleaded for more time, but ultimately to no avail. “Then he unplugged my computer and carried it away. So I had no choice but to go after him!”

The Mac Failed Terribly

Some of the most animated discussion centered around Jobs departure from Apple in 1985 and the initial failure of the Macintosh project. They felt the movie didn’t accurately portray why Jobs was removed from the Mac team.

Woz: “The real situation was that the Mac failed terribly. Totally. We built a factory to build 50,000 of them and we were selling 500 a month. Steve had cancelled projects because they could only sell 2,000 a month.”

“I think he was taking it real hard that he’d failed for a third computer he’d tried to create and his vision really didn’t understand you have to build a market, it takes time, you aren’t going to sell 50,000 on day one. And meanwhile, we had to save the company.”

Jobs wanted to cancel or hamstring the Apple II in favor of the Macintosh, but it was important to continue selling and marketing the older system for a few more years. It generated most of the revenue. That was the primary business decision.

Hertzfeld chimed in: “I tell that story a little bit differently. The Mac did sell a lot of units initially, because of its novelty, because of its positive qualities. In June of 1984 it sold over 60,000 units. So they upped the forecast because Christmas was the big time and they thought they’d sell 80,000 units.”

But sales fell off steeply after the back-to-school rush in early fall, and by the end of the year sales were down to about 1,000 a month.

“When the Macs weren’t selling, a major mistake they made was trying to focus it on the office market,” recalled Hertzfeld. This was the time of the Lemmings commercial, a disastrous followup to the wildly successful 1984 spot. “The whole Macintosh Office thing never really got developed. The Mac needed a hard disk, that was really the biggest single design mistake that we made.”

Kottke: “And meanwhile Lisa had a hard drive.”

Woz: “Patience, patience, patience. Don’t put out a machine when it’s not a good enough machine for the price you’re selling this year. Work on it, work on it, work on it, and put it out when it is a good enough machine to sell at the price you’re offering.”

Steve Jobs and Apple clearly learned that lesson in the post-NeXT period.

Woz: “The Lisa was the right machine, with the right amount of RAM, but it was the wrong year for pricing. We finally got the Lisa back when we got OS X, actually, that’s what I like to say.”

Summing Things Up

The panel generally thought the that TV movie Pirates of Silicon Valley was a better portrayal of events of this period. Regarding Jobs, “there was no sense of suspense about this movie” said Wozniak. It didn’t show Steve’s thought process, how he reasoned and argued with people.

Hertzfeld noted that both movies had good acting, but Pirates had the better script. He felt that Jobs often felt like a laundry list of incidents instead of something which would show a deeper meaning.

Kottke said the producers of the film faced many decisions about what to put in and what to leave out, such as details about Pixar and NeXT. He said the filmmakers had tried very hard to get things right.

But one of Kottke’s most surprising memories might have been a quick quip to Woz: “Did you not love the Apple III? Because we all thought it was great!”

For more fascinating details, you can watch the entire two hour episode of John Wants Answers on YouTube. Source: John Wants Answers

Image: Photos: Jeff Lee

AT&T has announced that it has extended its LTE coverage across the United States yet again, with 13 markets receiving new or improved LTE this time around. Eleven of them are getting LTE coverage for the first time, while the other two are promised faster and more reliable LTE speeds.

So, it happened that a friend of mine turned off Bluetooth on her Mac mini, and then turned it off for the evening. When she got up the next morning, her Bluetooth keyboard was on, as per usual, but she couldn’t log in on start up, as her Mac did not see her keyboard.

She was worried that she’d have to go borrow or buy a wired keyboard, plug it in, and enter her password, then turn Bluetooth on again to make her wireless keyboard work again.

Luckily, that’s not what had to happen. Here’s how we solved it.

Pincase is yet another great Pinboard client for iOS. It’s $2, it’s universal, and it is ready for iOS 7. Oh, and it looks lovely too. What more could you need for managing and reading your bookmarks. What? You want more? Okay…

Apple has today restored push email services on iOS devices in Germany almost two years after it had to be shut down following a legal battle with Motorola. The Cupertino company announced the change in a new support document, which explains how users can restore push services on their iOS devices.

I’d noticed that calendar events created from the iOS 7 Mail app now contain a clickable URL that links back to the original e-mail message, but what I didn’t know is just how rad this is. Federico “another espresso please” Viticci over at Mac Stories knows exactly how rad it is, though, because he dug in and found out that it’s not only system-wide for iOS 7, but hooks into something similar that the Mac has done for years.

Want to check out the new M7 MoCoPro in your iPhone 5, but don’t have an app to do it? Then check out David Smith’s Pedometer++, a free app which grabs data from the low-power motion-tracking chip and shows it to you.

Belkin’s new Express Dock for iPad lets you dial in the perfect fit for any Lightning iPad, whatever case it’s in. Literally: there’s actually a dial on the back to adjust the dock’s size.

The Hulu Plus apps for Android and iOS have today been updated with support for Google Chromecast. You’ll find a new ‘Cast’ button within the app that will stream your favorite shows to your television with the help of the $35 dongle.

The new GoPro Hero3+ makes jumping out of an airplane in a squirrel suit just a little bit more tempting. The new camera is smaller, faster and apparently much better.

Apple will be “unable” to launch a new iPad mini with Retina display this month due to supply constraints, according to sources in its supply chain, who have been speaking to Reuters. It’s thought the new device will only be available in “limited quantities” this year — if at all — and there’s a possibility it won’t be ready in time for the lucrative holiday shopping season.

Even if you love screen protectors, you probably hate applying them. Even the best bubble-proof tempered-glass covers have to be lined up before pressing them into place, and those wasted seconds are seconds that allow dust to creep twixt screen and cover, to be petrified in place forever like a dinosaur-DNA-carrying fly in amber.

What you need is the Alin, a screen protector with a big plastic guide to line things up for you.

As you may have heard, a lot of users have complained of motion sickness while using their iPhones after upgrading to iOS 7. The new zooming and parallax effects that were added make a lot of people nauseous, but Jimmy Kimmel and his team of researchers have found an amazing new cure for those suffering from iPhone-induced motion sicknesses, it’s called “stop looking at your f**king phone every 5 seconds”

Check out the full video below:

What do you get when you combine everyone’s favorite drawing app for the iPad with everyone’s favorite paper journal? You get an awesome partnership with Paper by FiftyThree and Moleskine.

FiftyThree and Moleskine have created an easy way to take a digital creation and make it a frozen moment in time. The Paper app can now send drawings to Moleskine and have them beautifully printed and shipped in a custom book.

Have you had issues sending or receiving iMessages since you updated to iOS 7? Although Apple claims problems only exist for “a fraction of a percent” of its users, a large number of iMessagers have been complaining about failed messages since iOS 7 was released.

Today Apple acknowledged that iMessage has been having problems, and a fix is coming in a future iOS 7 update.

Finding a gold iPhone 5s at your local Apple Store is no easy task even though it’s been on shelves more than a week now. Rather than calling every single Apple Store, Best Buy, Walmart, and carrier store in your area, our friend Mordy created the awesome iPhone Check web app that tells you if local stores have any gold units in stock.

The simple web app scrapes data from store.apple.com for the most up-to-date info on local pick-up options. Use the drop downs to select the color and carrier you want, press submit and viola! A chart of green and red squares indicate whether a store has stock of 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB units in the color of your choice.

Source: iPhoneCheck

We’ve been seeing leaked parts for the next-gen iPad and iPad mini for awhile now, so you should already have a good idea of what the devices will be like. Expect a thinner and lighter fifth-gen iPad with faster specs, and the second-gen iPad mini will most likely have a Retina display. Apple’s media event for the tablets is expected to take place sometime this month.

Since the release of the iPhone 5s, leaks suggest that Apple will bring the iPhone’s updated color options to its iPads as well. A new round of hands-on videos take a look at the iPad in Space Gray.

Cult of Mac Deals has done it again. You loved the last two “name your own price” bundles, so they’ve brought it back! This time, they’ve put together their best bundle yet!

Once again they’ve delivered 10 top Mac apps for a price that only you can name with The Name Your Own Price Mac Bundle 3.0! Headlining this bundle is Camtasia 2, an incredible screencasting app for Mac. Normally $99 by itself, you can get it along with CrossOver and 8 other apps for a fraction of the price! All you have to do is beat the average price of the bundle. Note: This deal ends at midnight tonight!

Apple just released two firmware updates to address some rare battery issues with the Macbook Pro and Macbook Air lines Tuesday. The firmware can be downloaded directly from Apple’s support website.

The firmware for both models fixes some rare issues with the battery, one of which will shut your Macbook Air down after 1000 charges.

With iOS 7, Apple added official support for third-party game controllers. The new framework is part of the company’s MFi program, and we’ve already seen some Made-For-iPhone controllers in the wild. Logitech teased its own iPhone gamepad just last month along with ClamCase, and now Logitech’s upcoming controller has been leaked.