Apple has just lost one of its magic patent bullets thanks to a non-final Office action by the USPTO. Patent No, 7,469,381 (used against Samsung in California) has been declared invalid after evidence supporting prior art (as well as being obvious) was brought about during a reexamination request.
This news is not only great for Samsung, but many other manufacturers who are currently caught up in Apple’s legal charades.
Apple is expected to unveil a new, smaller iPad today, October 23rd, 2012, at 10AM ET/1PM PST, with a launch of the device expected for sale on November 2. Invites to the event were sent out last week.
This is the most anticipated iPad release yet, bringing the apples-and-oranges competition between Amazon’s Kindle Fire and the newly-releaced Google Nexus 7 to a boil just in time for the holiday gift-giving season of 2012. We’re all extremely excited to see what this heavily rumored new form factor will bring to the table, and how Apple will position the device in its already spectacularly successful line of iOS devices.
The iPad 2 was announced in March of 2011, with the new iPad (not the iPad 3, as we all assumed) was revealed in March of 2012. The iPad 2 broke the thinness barrier of the iPad one, and brought faster CPU and graphics enhancements, while the iPad 3 upped the ante to Retina-quality resolution and a faster, warmer CPU.
What will the iPad mini do to convince us all we need yet one more of Cupertino’s magical devices in our households? In this Cult of Mac rumor roundup, we’ll examine everything we think we know about the iPad Mini.
Sharp has been hard at work on a new display technology known as IGZO which looks set to be a perfect solution for mobile devices. Not only does it offer higher touch sensitivity, but it’s so energy efficient it can triple the battery life of devices. We’ve been expecting Apple to use IGZO displays for some time, but reports have suggested that Sharp simply cannot make them quick enough to meet the demand of Apple’s consumers. However, it seems that’s all changed.
Just hours ahead of Apple’s iPad mini event in San Jose, Sharp has announced that it soon expects sales of its IGZO displays to surge.
Apple will hold a media event at 10AM PT/1PM ET today, October 23rd at the California Theatre in San Jose. Select members of the press will gather to see the “little more” Apple has up its sleeve for the holiday season. The rumored iPad mini is expected to be announced as well as new Mac hardware and iTunes 11.
Wondering what all Apple will announce this time around? Here’s what you can expect to see at tomorrow’s event:
The Apple Store is down. As usual, Apple’s replaced it with a blank page and a little sticky note that say’s “We’ll be back.” But if Apple ever decided to be a bit more honest, the sticky note would look a lot more like the one in the picture above.
Source: Reddit
CineXPlayer, the best (and most awkwardly-capitalized) movie-playing app for the iPad, now plays MKV files, streams movies direct from network-attached storage (NAS) drives and makes your lovely HD movie files all crispy and nasty-looking with the optional SuperSharp feature.
Apple’s search engine leaked the iPhone 5 hours before the actual keynote announcement last month. This time Apple search engine hasn’t spoiled any of the announcement, but the world’s most popular search engine has one of the main products of today’s announcement.
This morning Google search was pulling results from Apple.com that revealed Apple will release a 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display today. Google’s web crawlers even picked up that the pricing on the new units too.
Hate, nay loathe the horizontal? Does laying down leave you feeling unseemly? Does landscape orientation drive you crazy? Would you rather live in a tiny apartment at the top of a skyscraper than in a luxurious two-story country home? Then NewerTech’s new NuStand Alloy stands are for you.
While most of Apple’s stock iOS apps are pretty handy, there are a few that the large majority of us probably never open. I’m talking about apps like Stocks, Voice Memos, and Weather (which always seems to be inaccurate in the U.K.). Unfortunately, the Cupertino company doesn’t allow us to remove these, so the only way to do it was to jailbreak. Until now.
Thanks to a nifty new web app, you can temporarily remove stock iOS icons from your device without jailbreaking. Here’s how.
Stainless Games brought the 1997 classic that is Carmageddon to the App Store last week, but its launch was marred by a nasty save game bug that was capable of wiping all the progress you had made in the game.
Thankfully, the company has now issued an update that fixes the problem.
When Apple holds a press event to announce its latest gadget, the vast majority of us are frantically refreshing our favorite websites in an effort to keep up with the news as it’s breaking. It’s not often we get to watch the event live.
But sometimes, Apple treats us to a live video feed. And it’s doing that today for the much-anticipated iPad mini event.
Preview is a catch-all file viewer, handling a variety of image formats as well as the ubiquitous portable document format, otherwise known as the PDF, which was introduced by Adobe in 1993, and was released as an open standard in 2008. One thing Preview has had trouble with, until now, has been adding extra pages to a PDF document.
Not anymore, as the Mountain Lion version of Preview will let you add pages to PDF documents on the fly. Here’s how.
Pictures of a new and improved front-facing camera have emerged, but whether it’s for the iPad 3 or a future model is unclear.
BGR has posted photos purporting to be a new display assembly for the iPad. It features a bigger opening for the front-facing camera, suggesting a HD camera is coming.
Fieldrunners 2 is one of my favorite iOS games, hands down. Developer Subatomic Studios has taken the tower defense genere to a new level with this sequel to their popular and multi-platform game, Fieldrunners. This second game was released in July of this year, almost 4 years after the first iteration came out on iOS, then Mac.
Today, the studio announced that they’ve added in-app purchasing to the game, something many games come with from the start. Those games, however, typically come at no up-front cost. Fieldrunners 2 was released as a premium, paid game, at $2.99 for the iPhone and $7.99 for the iPad version. Why did they add this freemium-style in-app purchasing system to a game that’s already doing well as a paid app?
The fans of the game wanted it.
Apple released iOS 6 to the masses on September 19th, and it was reported that 15% of all iOS devices had been updated to the new operating system within the first 24 hours of availability. Chitika Insights has been tracking iOS web traffic since the release of iOS 6 last month, and new numbers today confirm a particularly aggressive adoption rate.
It seems like every time Apple has an event we all go through the same routine and emotions. You load your browser with the all the regular sites. You tweet the same witty lines. You feel disappointment in the newest product. Then the reality distortion field kicks in and you start hungering for it all the sudden.
Joy of Tech created an excellent Apple Event Checklist that knows exactly what you’re going to go through tomorrow. It’s going to be great. It’s going to be horrible. Here’s the full list:
Find My Friends is an interesting app, allowing family and friends to keep track of each other in real time. When you use your iTunes account with the Find My Friends app, you can let those important to you know where you are using the location services on your iOS device, like your iPhone.
But what if you have friends or family that don’t have iCloud, or even iOS (perish the thought!)? It turns out that the latest Find My Friends app that comes with iOS 6 allows for email notifications, so you can have your iPhone send out an automated, location-based email whenever you arrive or leave a specific location. Here’s how.
The short form: If you have $60 to spend on a pair of iPhone-ready headphones, buy the RHA SA950is. They are hands-down the best $60 I have ever heard, and better than a lot of cans at several times the price. Move over Porta Pros — there’s a new boss in town.
The picture above is purported to show third party non-approved authentication chips for Apple’s new Lightning USB cables. They’re pretty much a huge deal for anyone who plans to make iPhone 5 accessories or cables, because now that the Lightning authentication chip has been cracked, manufacturers can create cheaper accessories because they won’t have to pay Apple a fee to use the official Lightning chip.
Here’s an incredibly neat little hack for making your iPhone’s flash suck less, and it’s marred only by the photo used to illustrate it, which features some kind of Android “phone.”
If you ever wondered how you might use colored gels on your iPhone’s flash, read on. Or just look at the picture — it’s pretty self explanatory (once you get over the inexplicable purchase of an Android handset anyway).
Earlier this year, Apple CEO Tim Cook famously said that Cupertino was going to “double down on secrecy” this year. It hasn’t worked. Apple — once a company known for the surprise “one more thing” — had every single detail of the iPhone 5 leaked to the public before the actual event. Can Apple ever get its secrecy back?
Probably not. A new report talking to a number of Apple employees under the condition of anonymity suggests that while Apple HQ is as secretive of new products as ever, Cupertino can do nothing about leaks that come out of the Asian supply chain.
Quick, answer this one: what’s the quickest, easiest, no-sign-ups required way to get a bunch of photos from your iPhone to the internet, right now?
Instagram? Nope. You’re kind of right, but Instagram has its limitations. And you need to sign up to use it. Apple’s Photo Stream? Closer, but you still need to be using iCloud.
The quickest, easiest and no-sign-uppiest service I’ve yet seen has to be Photoset, a new thing from the people who make Tumblr.
After Steve Jobs was kicked out of Apple, he went on to create NeXT, which focused on creating technology to aid the education industry. The video above shows Steve talking about the challenges that NeXT faced as he was building it, as well as footage inside NeXT and its employees.
Source: YouTube
Via: The Loop
Actions turns your iPad into a remote control for your Mac. No, it’s not a VNC app which lets you project your desktop onto your tablet’s screen. Nor is it a media remote (although it can be). Instead, Actions lets you assign, uh, actions to easy-to-tap tiles on the iPad’s screen, and these actions are then performed on the Mac (or PC).
The short version: Actions lets you trigger Mac keyboard shortcuts from your iPad.
When two of the biggest companies in tech are hardcore frememies, it’s nearly impossible to find the middle ground to reconcile. Samsung and Apple are trying to break things off entirely, even though they need each other.
In the latest news on their breakup, Samsung has said that they will end their LCD panel supply relationship with Apple as of next year. The stated reason behind Samsung breaking ties with Apple is that Apple’s supply pricing strategy provides Samsung with insufficient margins.