When Steve Jobs said that the iPad was ushering in the “post-PC’ era, he was right. Gartner has released its PC shipment results for the third quarter of 2012, and things aren’t looking good for traditional computer makers like HP and Acer. The rise of smartphones and tablets has caused PC shipments to decline drastically in the last year, and it doesn’t look like the downwards spiral will be ending anytime soon.
Does the packaging design for the EarPods headphones look familiar? It should.
There’s no denying that Apple’s success with iOS has influenced every aspect of their business, but it goes even further than you might think: Apple’s now even modeling its packaging after iOS app icons!
Which app has you stymied? You know the app that no matter how hard you try you just can’t “get”. For me it’s Illustrator. Not that I a) have it or b) have needed to use it very often, but when I’m faced with a vector graphics app, I’m just stuck.
You see more and more of them every day: iPads, doubling as cash registers in businesses small and large, thanks to forward-thinking mobile payment companies like Square. Now Groupon, the deals-and-couponing social network, is getting in on the game with Breadcrumb, an incredible point-of-sale system which makes integrating an iPad into your business as simple as if Apple made the product themselves.
The Speck PixelSkin HD is a thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) case that’s designed to give you “slim and smooth” protection for your iPhone 5, while offering “grippyness [sic] with high-contrast matte pixels.”
Its raised bezel aims to keep your iPhone’s display free from scuffs and scratches should you drop it on its face, while the rubberized covers for the volume keys and sleep/wake button prevent fluff and grime from gathering within nooks and crannies.
The PixelSkin HD comes in a variety of colors — including red, purple, blue, black, and grey, and it’s priced at just under $30. The PixelSkin HD was one of my favorite “simple” cases for iPhone 4S, so will it retain that status for the iPhone 5?
EA announced back in June that Need For Speed Most Wanted would be coming to Android and iOS by the end of October. Well, that day is slowly approaching, and EA is reminding us by flaunting more in-game footage of this action-packed open world racer.
At first glance, it looks as if someone’s raided a high street Apple Store, stolen all the iPhones and iPads and MacBooks Air, and dumped a load of retro computers in their place.
Look closer, and you’ll begin to understand what a remarkable achievement this place is.
Welcome to the Moscow Apple Museum, owned and operated by 46-year-old computer engineer Andrey Antonov. If ever you felt the need to explain to your kids how Apple got where it is today, this is the place to take them.
IPEVO’s USB document cameras are a weird kind of hybrid product. Or anti-hybrid, maybe? To scan documents and digitize them, you’d usually use either a sheet-feed scanner, or the camera in your iPhone/iPad.
The Point 2 View and Ziggi cameras sit on your desk — like dedicated scanners — but snap the documents using cameras, like your iPhone.
Multi-touch? Pah, that’s so last year. Gestures are where it’s at. Only yesterday, we reported on a prototype wrist-mounted motion detector; today, we’re trying out Flutter, a free OS X app that we first mentioned back in March when it was still a demo.
Now it’s available in the Mac App Store. It claims to put gesture controls at your, um, fingertips, using your Mac’s built-in webcam.
How cool does this laser-engraved iPhone 5 look? Image via Gizmodo.
One of the things I miss most about the design of the iPhone 4S is the ability to easily change the back of my iPhone to something different, like a non-standard color, or even teak.
You simply can’t do that with the iPhone 5, but Gizmodo just pointed out an even better idea: you can laser engrave the back of your iPhone 5 with your own custom design.
This is awesome, and there’s a laser engraving place right around the corner. I might just have to give it a try. The only questions are, which design should I get, and is this going to void my AppleCare+? After all, technically, it’s just a bunch of scratches.
There’s more laser-engraved iPhones at the link below, so check them out.
The Washington Post’s WP Politics app for the iPad is an excellent resource for anyone interested in United States politics. I spent a few days with this free app and found it to be an excellent tool for tracking and understanding the 2012 election season. While not without its flaws, this app does two critical things exceedingly well. First, it aggregates media and information from a broad range of sources into one tool. Whether you’re looking for the latest news about a particular candidate or economic data from years ago, it’s all here. Second, it organizes and contextualizes the information in a way that helps the casual user to understand it. It classifies news articles by genre, organizes Twitter feeds by source, and breaks candidates down by their stances on the issues. If you’re looking for an app to help you follow the upcoming election, or politics in general, look no further.
iOS 6 Maps. An unmitigated disaster, right? That’s what I’d say as I struggle to get Maps to even give me correct directions from work to my house, but apparently, I’m in the minority: a recent poll suggests that most people don’t think Maps has degraded at all in iOS 6.
According to the sensor-studying pixel peepers at DxOMark, cellphone cameras have already surpassed the compact cameras of five years ago in terms of image quality. Amazing.
Like the iPhone 5, most of today’s competitive smartphones sport a camera with a sensor of at least 8megapixels. This is a far cry from one of the world’s first mass-produced camera cellphones, the Sharp-made J-SH04, which had a sensor resolution of 110,000 pixels, or just 0.1-Mpix.
Go a GoPro HD Hero2? And an iPhone, iPad or (ahem) Android device? Then head over to the App Store right now, because — with a new free app — you can use one to control the other.
Cook is doing a tremendous job as CEO, so was Jobs really irreplaceable?
When Steve Jobs passed away a little over year ago, he left Apple — the company he started in his parents’ garage back in 1976 — in the hands of Tim Cook, its former Chief Operating Officer.
The question on everyone’s lips at the time was how well Apple would fare without its co-founder at the helm. Jobs was unique. He was an innovator and a visionary, and he had this incredible ability to see into the future.
Jobs knew what we wanted — and what we didn’t — long before we did. He devised exciting new products that have changed our lives and sold in their millions, and he left rival companies playing catch-up. He revolutionized not just one, but a number of different industries.
He really did make a dent in the universe.
So naturally, when Jobs passed away, it was hard to imagine Apple without him. He had spent time away from Apple in the mid-eighties when John Sculley was CEO, and when he returned in 1996, his company was on the brink of bankruptcy.
Some feared that the same thing would happen again — that Apple would lose its way and struggle to maintain its edge without Jobs steering the ship in the right direction. But 12 months on, the company’s in a better position now than it’s ever been in.
There can’t be much I hate more than a bad ringtone. I have one (because my phone is a Samsung and all of its tones are awful); my neighbor has one, which he takes forever to answer when his family call from overseas at like two in the morning every day; idiots on the bus and metro have them (usually some tinny-sounding “music” snippet of a record I never want to hear in full); and even my parents have them — not that anyone ever calls their cellphones, thank god.
In fact, there are only two things in the world of ringtones that make me optimistic. The first is that — with the slow death of Nokia — the horrible default Gran Vals tone (and its cheesily remixed derivatives) is also dying.
The second is Cleartones Organic, a set of 50 ringtones and 50 notifications which will calm you like a cool forest breeze.
It’s been nearly three years since Rovio’s first Angry Birds game made its debut on iOS devices, and you might have thought that interest in the series may have died down a little in that time. But you’d be very wrong indeed. According to the Finnish firm, Angry Birds games still see more than 200 million active users every single month.
Lacie’s new Thunderbolt Little Big Disk claims to be the fastest portable Thunderbolt drive around, running at up to 635MB/s – “a 33 percent increase from the previous model.”
There’s been plenty of debate over whether or not Microsoft will ever bring its Office productivity suite to Android and iOS devices. Many reports have claimed it will, while Microsoft itself has denied the rumors. But now product manager Petr Bobek has confirmed that it will happen next year.
The Nomad Brush Flex is the latest in Nomad’s line of capacitive touchscreen brushes. That’s right — brushes. When you’re painting into an app like Brushes or Procreate on the iPad, then you really do want to use a stylus os some kind. And if you’re going to go to the trouble of using a stylus, why not make it a brush?
Noticed a shortage in Mac App Store updates lately?
OS X developers are reportedly becoming frustrated with the lengthy delay they must endure to have their applications approved for the Mac App Store. Average wait times have increased to 27 days over the past month, whereas approval for the iOS App Store takes just 7 days on average. Some are blaming the influx of iOS updates for the iPhone 5 and iOS 6, but claim that Apple should be over the worst of it by now.
The SlingPlayer app for both Android and iOS has been discounted to $14.99 (50% off) after receiving a long-overdue update. SlingPlayer is one of the more expensive apps so grabbing it while it’s half-off is a must for anyone considering the purchase of a Slingbox. The SlingPlayer works in conjunction with a compatible Slingbox and smartphone or tablet, allowing users to watch live or recorded TV while on-the-go.
Lytro’s Light Field cameras — the ones which let you refocus an image after you have taken it, are now on general sale. BEtter yet, they come in a range of Nano-tastic colors, and get a whole lot of new controls.
Journalists and PR folk, or hacks and flacks, are supposed to fight like cats and, uh, laser pointers shone onto walls. But like Jedis and ninjas, there are good ones and bad ones. And today, I got the best product tagline from one of the good ones, regarding the ECOXBT Bluetooth speaker:
Think Jambox…if Jambox wasn’t scared of the water and a wimp.
You know, with the complete flood of email we all get each and every day, it’s hard to sort through and find the email from just the important folks in our lives. You can star emails, flag them, send them to special folders via arcane filtering rule sets, but it’s never been just dead simple to keep track of the folks that you really want to hear from, and weed those away from the rest of the onslaught of emails we all face daily.
Apple’s new OS X Mountain Lion has added a super easy way to do just that, however, and it matches its iOS counterpart fairly well. It’s called VIP, and boy is it simple to implement.
