We start the last week of April with three new deals. First up is an 8GB version of Apple’s current iPod nano for just $130. Next is the i.Sound Twin Charging dock for the iPod and iPhone. We wrap-up today’s spotlight with an anti-glare screen protector for your iPad 2.
Along the way, we also check out a discount on select iPad cases, as well as software for your Mac. As usual, details on these and many more items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.
Boom. According to MIC Gadget, who aren’t about to start cutting off pinky fingers to testify the image’s veracity, the front panel on the right is for the next iPhone, featuring most notably a significantly (but not miraculously) thinner bezel.
It certainly looks legit enough. Rumors have had it that the next iPhone will largely be identical in hardware to the iPhone 4, but boast the new A5 chip, a larger screen real estate in the same form factor accomplished by narrowing the bezel, a modified antenna design and possibly a capacitive home button.
What do you think? Real or fake? Let us know in the comments.
When the new MacBook Airs shipped with Snow Leopard on USB disk drives, many of us hoped that the days of DVD-based operating system installs were behind us. Optical media is pretty much dead, after all, largely thanks to Apple’s successful push into digital delivery with their iTunes service. Sure, you need to ship operating systems physically somehow… but as more and more of us jettison our DVD drives, USB is just a heck of a lot more ubiquitous.
It doesn’t look like OS X 10.7 Lion will be the first Apple operating system to ship exclusively on USB drive, though. A listing for Lion has just popped up on German’s Amazon website, and it’s for a DVD, not a thumb drive. My guess is that users will have a choice at retail — how else to satisfy the need to upgrade of MacBook Air users like me? — but still, it’s a tad disappointing. Maybe Apple’s waiting to go all-in on flash media OS installs until it can be done through Thunderbolt?
[via AppleBitch]
If you’re on iOS 4.3.2 and fancy taking a joyride on another company’s network besides the one you are indentured to, good news: the iPhone Dev Team has released Ultrasnow 1.2.2, which will allow you to unlock iOS 4.3.2 on both the iPhone 4 and on the iPhone 3GS.
If you’re on the 3GS, you’ll need to be both jailbroken and on the 06.15.00 baseband, which is easy enough to do… *cough*.
Once accomplished and rocking either an iPhone 4 or an iPhone 3GS with baseband 06.15.00 restored, you’ll need to preserve the old baseband and grab Ultrasnow through Cydia. The process is a bit complicated, and sometimes results in test participant implosion, so follow this tutorial for a walkthrough on getting through the carrier unlock process safely.
In a typically terse email to a concerned iPhone customer, Apple CEO Steve Jobs thundered down some authoritative wisdom about the so-called iPhone LocationGate scandal: Apple isn’t tracking anyone, and if you think that Android isn’t tracking you, think again.
Apple has increased its supply commitments by more than a third to $11 billion – a record – during the March quarter, according to an SEC filing. The jump from $7.9 billion usually spent in that three-month period indicates the Cupertino, Calif. company is pulling out all stops to ensure it meets demand for the iPad 2 and expected iPhone 5.
“We believe the increase is attributable to procurement ahead of a tight supply environment and expected shipment increases in June (iPad) and September (iPad + iPhone),” Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty told investors.
Last month, President Obama almost smacked some goofus upside the head for insinuating he couldn’t get an iPad. “I’m the President of the United States. You think I’ve got a – you think I’ve got to go borrow somebody’s computer?” he said.
It was a perfect little moment of presidential sass, and the only way it could have been more perfect is if Obama had called his interlocutor a jive turkey before actually smashing him over the head with his iPad. However, questions abounded, including what flavor of iPad Obama favored: a first-gen model or the iPad 2?
Well, here’s your answer, courtesy of the White House’s Flickr account. The president owns an iPad 2 and what appears to be an unassuming gray polyurethane smart cover… a wise choice on the President’s part, given how prone to picking up Marmite and beer stains the leather covers are.
But one great, eternal question remains: does the president use the iPad 2 WiFi-only model, or the iPad 2 3G? Update: As a reader points out, it’s an iPad 2 3G!
[via TUAW]
We’ve been following the roll-out of iPads in schools, now principals are getting them too.
Much like city councilors, the administrators are using tax dollars for iPads to reduce paper and, to some extent, paperwork.
Case in point: in Salisbury, North Carolina, all seven principals in the district are using them to perform teacher evaluations, classroom walkthroughs and assessments, calendars . The highly totable tablet allows them to patrol the halls and take notes, potentially making them more present and active in school affairs.
The rationale seems sound, until you read this:
“I walked through rooms showing my iPad off to students, taking pictures and having conversations with kids about how technology makes learning more fun,” Nancy Barkemeyer principal of West Rowan Middle school said. “Having a new ‘toy’ helped me make connections with some kids.”
Still, aside from trying to impress the cool kids (do we ever stop trying?), it might be good that school principals get up to speed, tech-wise.
What do you think about spending tax dollars for administrator iPads?
Via Salisbury Post
Tablets are set to create 17 percent of all wireless data demand by 2020. Already, the media-saavy tablet category creates five times as much data traffic as the average smartphone. The tablet’s demand on the network is growing at 30 percent per year, according to Goldman Sachs.
As an illustration, the Cisco Global Mobile Date Forecast says the average data traffic in 2010 per tablet was around 405MB each month. By comparison, a smartphone generates 79MB of data traffic each month.
Here’s the official caption:
Filmmaker Spike Lee uses his iPad to photograph President Barack Obama as he greets guests at the National Action Network’s Keepers of the Dream awards gala in New York, N.Y., April 6, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza).
But I know you guys can do better than that.
Keep it clean, play nice and make our drizzly San Francisco Monday.
Photo Via White House Flickr stream
A new jailbreak tweak that’s just hit Cydia enhances your Tweetbot experience by introducing a ‘now playing’ feature – enabling you to tweet the music you’re currently listening to at the tap of a button.
The simple hack adds a new button to the window in which you compose your tweets – and one tap will insert the artist and the name of the song you’re listening to, in addition to the ‘#nowplaying’ hash tag.
While there are other third-party Twitter clients that support this feature straight from the App Store, there aren’t many to choose from. And if you’ve already fallen in love with Tweetbot, this tweak is a great add-on. It’s free to download – all you have to do is search for ‘Now Playing for Tweetbot‘ within Cydia.
We loved the Tweetbot app from Tapbots in our review, and this extra little bit of functionality makes it even greater for music lovers. It’s also another great example of the way in which applications can be improved with minor jailbreak tweaks.
[via iPhone Download Blog]
This week’s roundup of must-have iOS games includes the second episode in a series of five Back to the Future games from Telltale – with a brand new story for Marty and Doc.
We’ve also got Real Racing 2 HD – which has just been updated to feature dual-screen gaming, allowing you to connect your iPad to your HDTV and enjoy the ultimate racing game at 1080p.
Final Fantasy III also makes our list of favorites. This 90s classic has been around on the iPhone for a few weeks, but it now features new and improved 3D visuals and story sequences exclusive to the iPad.
Find out more about the games above and check out the rest of this week’s must-have’s – including Bunny the Zombie Slayer and NBA Jam – after the break!
High resolution artwork discovered in the latest build of Mac OS X Lion has generated rumors that Apple could be planning to bring a Retina display to the Mac. Preview 2 of Lion, which was released in late March, features icons in sizes up to 1024×1024, and a desktop background at a resolution of 3200×3200.
The new Lion wallpaper was discovered at the beginning of April by OSXDaily, and was noted for its ultra-high resolution which no Apple display has ever supported. The new icons – which are double the size of the current 512×512 Mac OS X icons – were discovered over the weekend by MacMagazine.com.br.
Considering there is currently no need for icons or wallpapers of this size, these discoveries would suggest Apple is working on bringing a better display to the Mac. MacRumors notes that Apple has built-in Support for HiDPI display modes in Lion:
Taking cues from iOS, Apple has reportedly built in support for what it calls “HiDPI display modes”. These HiDPI modes allow developers to supply 2x-enlarged images to support double-high resolution displays. Like the iPhone 4’s Retina Display, this means that user interface elements will remain the same size, but everything will be twice the resolution and therefore twice as detailed.
While a Retina display Mac would be pretty neat, I would much prefer one in my iPad first.
After 86 hours of downtime, the man behind Cydia has confirmed that the app is finally back online following an issue with Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing service. In a message posted to Twitter on Sunday night, Jay Freeman – better known as Saurik – wrote:
After 86 hours offline, Cydia is finally back! I’m eating some celebratory cake, and am looking forward to a night with >1.5 hours of sleep!
The downtime limited Cydia’s functionality for all users, and meant purchasing packages, using the Theme Centre, and managing Cydia accounts was near impossible.
Though some users may have had some success with accessing these services more recently, there were still intermittent periods of downtime as Amazon’s EC2 service slowly came back online.
All issues seem to have been completely ironed out now and Cydia is fully functioning for all. Hooray!
[via iPhone Download Blog]
Pictures taken by a source at Best Buy reveal that the retailer’s inventory database is currently listing an April 27th launch date for the elusive white iPhone 4. The device featured in the pictures is the GSM model – which supports the AT&T network – though it is expected that the CDMA model designed for Verizon will launch on the same day.
One report over the weekend claims that 16GB and 32GB models of the white iPhone 4 have already been shipped to Best Buy stores located throughout the U.S. – with around 10 16GB models on order for each store. Inventory numbers for the 32GB are currently unconfirmed.
The entire Internet is aflame, at least by. The standards of your average Saturday night, on word that Boy Genius Report has gotten ahold of a strange pre-production white iPhone 4 loaded up with admin and field-testing apps and running quite nicely on T-Mobile 3G. That’s quite newsworthy, as no shipping iPhone supports the obscure 1700 MHz AWS band that T-Mo rolls in the U.S.
There are many number of ways of faking this — I still find it hard to believe that you wouldn’t take some serious pictures of the hardware in search of differences from the existing iPhone 4 if you actually had it in your hands — but the various software screens are fairly convincing, including a number of apps I’ve heard are used in testing, but that mere mortals like us never see.
On the one hand, it makes sense for Apple to expand it’s reach to as many standards as possible now, especially since AT&T will likely own T-Mobile unless anti-trust regulators hold up the acquisition. On the other hand, the intent of that deal is to convert all of T-Mo’s towers to LTE fairly rapidly. It’s interesting.
Have a look through the gallery and let us know what you think — I’m actually most skeptical of Apple Connect. Would Apple really copy pattern unlock from Android?
Have you ever needed to insert a special character while typing a document in Mac OS X, but didn’t know how? Apple doesn’t provide an easily accessible way to view which keys generate which characters. Buried in System Preferences though, is a keyboard viewer which will let you figure out which keys give which symbols. This video will show you how to enable this function and use it to discover helpful key combinations.
Mowing the lawn is the outdoor equivalent to vacuuming your carpet: it has to be done regularly, and most people put it off. But now you don’t need a riding mower with dual-cupholders to impress the neighbors while being slovenly. Husqvarna has just introduced an iPhone app for remote deployment of their Automower robotic lawnmowers with GPS Communication Units.
The Automower works by following a thin wire laid on or under the grass. Using SMS Text Messaging, you can display the location of your mower on Google Maps, tell your machine when to start and stop, return for a charge, or check current operating status. There’s also a GPS Theft Tracking feature in case your mower ventures too far away under somebody else’s control. Would that be called Find My Lawnmower?
Doing yardwork from the couch gets my vote! Or it would, if I had a lawn…
[via TG Daily]
This is how much it costs in electricity to run my 13″ MacBook Pro per year, if it were continually left on: $11.20. My 32-inch flat screen TV? That’s a whopping $100/year, if left on; but when it’s off, it’ll only drain to the tune of about 75 cents per year (similarly, my MBP only drains about $2/year in sleep mode).
How do I know this? I’ve been (lame-pun alert) charging around, giddily testing everything in the house with Belkin’s Conserve Insight, a brilliant, $30 tool that measures the energy use of any gadget or appliance that plugs into a wall outlet — and the results have been (oh, and again) electrifying enough for me to really change my habits.
I’m a reluctant iPad parent who gave my toddler my gadget to play with once. Ever since that one experience, it has become impossible to use it when she’s around without her wanting to monopolize it.
She’s a true addict. She even looks at me weirdly if I put it down somewhere within her vicinity without handing it over to her.
Everybody freaked out this week about the discovery that iPhones store location history in an unencrypted file. Congressional grandstanders Al Franken and Ed Markey demanded that Steve Jobs explain himself. Matt Drudge used his Caps Lock key to write a screaming headline about it. Gimme a break.
The whole “LocationGate” scandal is a non-issue, as far as I’m concerned. It’s just a lot of noise about a potential privacy breach that buries the real privacy violations happening every day.
This week’s selection of must-have iOS apps features a brand new social news experience called News.me. Created by Bit.ly, with backing from The New York Times, this app shows you not just what your friends are sharing, but also what they’re reading.
Sony’s new Crackle application offers a library of over 100 great movies and TV shows, such as The Da Vinci Code, Ghostbusters, Seinfield and Spider-Man – all of which are completely free to watch.
RockMelt also makes this week’s must-haves – a web browser that seamlessly integrates social networking and syncs with RockMelt on your computer.
Find out more about the applications above, and check out the rest of week’s must-haves – including Seamless, Photosynth and FindOne – after the break!
Apple may be prototyping an iPhone 5 with a tapered design, a larger 3.7-inch screen and a gesture-sensitive Home Button.
This is according to the ex-Engadget crew at the new “This my Next” website, who whipped up the mockup above to illustrate the various rumors they’re hearing.
Joshua Topolsky warns, however, that none of this is set in stone: “Keep in mind that this info isn’t fact — we’re getting lots of threads from lots of places and trying to make sense of the noise. The versions of devices our sources are seeing could be design prototypes and not production-ready phones. Still, there are strong indications that Apple will surprise a public that’s expecting a bump more along the lines of the 3G to 3GS — and this is some insight into where those designs might be headed.”
Looks like the white iPhone 4 is just about to be released.
One customer in the UK was able to buy a 16GB white iPhone 4 from Vodaphone, and an internal memo from BelCompany in the Netherlands says the near-mythical handset is being released next week — Wednesday, April 27th.
In addition, retailers in Europe are getting supplies of the iPhone with “do not open until April 27” stickers, says 9to5Mac.
It is not clear, however, if that is the worldwide launch for the white iPhone 4. But it certainly looks like it.
We close out another week with hardware. First up are several iMacs from the Apple Store, starting at $1,019 for a 3.06GHz Intel Core i3 machine with 22-inch display. Next is a stand from Sharper Image for your iPod or iPhone. The stand includes a 1600mAh battery and is compatible with all iPhones and iPod touch models up to the 2nd generation. Finally, another group of discounted iPads, including a 16GB 3G model for just $329.
Along the way, we also check out several cases for your iPad, as well as a dock for your iPod or iPhone. As always, details on these and many other items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.
