Cult of Mac

Apple’s long-awaited CDMA iPhone should pay off handsomely, to the tune of $9 billion in 2012, one analyst estimates. The Cupertino, Calif. tech giant should garner $6 billion in the U.S. and half that in markets such as China, India and Japan.

JP Morgan analyst Mark Moskowitz told investors Tuesday Apple has a “multi-billion dollar revenue opportunity” capable of keeping the company at above-market growth for up to the next two years. Moskowitz expects Verizon will sell 10 million CDMA iPhones next year, a near mirror of the carrier’s own projected 11 million units sold for 2011. The CDMA iPhone was Verizon’s best-selling handset in history.

A  Texas Sheriff credits a new crime tip app for making a major drug bust.

We wrote just last week about whether the Eye on Laredo app was more “neighborhood watch 2.0,” as local law enforcement was pitching it, or digital vigilante.

The app has apparently already hit paydirt. Someone using it reported “suspicious activity” in a Blue Jeep on Mines Road (which looks to be a fairly deserted area) and tipped off police.

Police noticed the same blue Jeep at a convenience store about 12 miles from the sighting. They also spotted some large bundles in the cab, which turned out to be nearly 400 pounds marijuana, valued at $200,000.

Via Pro 8 News

Jailbreaking your iPhone is easy enough to do as long as you don’t mind staying parked at an earlier firmware until the Dev Team gets a new hack out, but unlocking your iPhone to work with any carrier is a lot more complicated. What if you want to just unlock your iPhone once and be done with it forever? A new company called CutYourSim claims that they can just do that, offering permanent unlocking of any GSM iPhone for a one-time fee of $169.99.

How are they offering this service? As near as anyone can tell, it looks like CutYourSim has someone on the inside of AT&T who is unlocking iPhones for them on the sly.

Intel, watching the torch pass from laptops to tablets, is determined to make 2011 “about becoming relevant,” as its marketing manager told one reporter Monday. The chip maker is taking another whack at finding an answer to the iPad, launching the Oak Trail chip designed specifically for tablets.

Although Intel doesn’t plan to launch its new 45nm Atom chip until May, the company says 35 tablets are set to use the component. However, some question whether the Santa Clara, Calif.-based firm can make a dent in the existing tablet marketplace. While Intel CEO Paul Otellini told employees he is “very optimistic about our opportunities in tablets,” Gartner’s research head Michael Gartenberg warned tablet users “seem to be quite happy with the Arm architecture.”

Thanks largely in party to the debut of Epic Games’ cross-platform Unreal Engine on iOS through titles like Unreal Citadel and Infinity Blade, games on the iPhone and iPad have finally reached a level of graphical excellence indistinguishable to the untrained eye from many of the last’s year’s console games.

Dream:scape is a new iOS title currently pending approval with Apple that aims to add to that rich pedigree, not with another action game, but with what appears to be an adventure game. Not much is known about Dream:scape, short of the impressive trailer above, and this blurb of a description:

The player takes on the persona of a coma patient unlocking his past by exploring the dreamscape of his memories. As the player explores the huge open world, memories are unlocked. These are represented by cut-scenes, featuring audible dialog, and diary entries, which the player reads in-game via a 3-D representation of a leather-bound book. The player must determine which areas to explore so as to find and unlock the story.

It certainly looks gorgeous, and the plot seems suitably Silent Hill style for my liking, but I’m a bit worried about the voice acting, which seems just a spot too amateurish for a game that is largely supposed to be about exploring relationships and memories of loved ones in the past. Then again, the developer seems to be a small one, so I’m more than willing to give him a break.

Like many of JBL’s speaker docks, the On Air Speaker Dock looks less like a piece of stereo equipment than a Sharper Image Anti-Ionization Purifier repurposed by the BBC into the helmet for one of Doctor Who’s more disposable villains, but look beyond the strange styling and you’ll see JBL’s first AirPlay-capable dock.

Now shipping to BestBuys and Apple Stores around the country, JBL’s willingness to write a check for AirPlay’s licensing fees mean you should be able to stream your iTunes library directly to the dock no matter where you are. The unorthodox design is meant to fill the room with 360-degree sound; otherwise, you’ll find a color LCD, digital FM radio, inbuilt alarm clock and more.

$349.99, though. AirPlay or not, that’s way more than any Doctor Who helmet should ever cost.

There’s few things in life less annoying than having to charge your Apple Wireless Keyboard or Magic Trackbad once or twice a year. In fact, on the annoyance scale, it’s well below other marginal annoyances like having to sharpen your pencil when it gets dull, or floss out a popcorn kernel after a night at the movies.

Still, if you’re willing to spend $60 on a gadget just to avoid life’s smallest and most inconsequential inconveniences, there’s the Mobee Magic Bar… an aluminum sleeve that plugs into your local USB slot and which will charge your Magic Trackpad or Wireless Keyboard’s battery through induction.

A pretty slick solution to a pretty mundane problem, no? Sadly, these won’t start shipping until the end of June, so you’ll have to wait… but then again, the chances of your keyboard batteries running down before then are pretty small anyway.

[via HardMac and Gizmodo]

Amazon’s goal is to have a Kindle in every pair of hands in America. That’s Apple’s goal with the iPad too, but the difference is, Apple wants to do it while remaining profitable on the hardware. Amazon’s willing to give that up if it means they can make boatloads of cash on the ebooks.

That’s why Amazon releases free Kindle software for every platform capable of running text on a screen, and that’s why — if you plot the Kindle’s price decline over the past couple of years — you can see that it is on track to eventually be free in November of this year, at least to Amazon Prime customers.

For the rest of the consumers out there, though? Amazon’s now working on a new plan: ad-supported Kindles. And while users don’t get much of a discount off of the regular Kindle now (just $25 off the $139 entry-level Kindle price to have your e-reader “sponsored” with advertisements on the homescreen and in the screensavers), I expect that the savings will drop to free soon enough.

Amazon’s plan has never really been to build the best e-reader, although the Kindle’s an excellent device. Their plan has been to make a good enough e-reader cheaply enough that they can just give one away to anyone who wants one.

Steve Jobs is keen to bring wireless syncing to iPods this year, and carbon fiber may be the key.

Following the news that Apple has just hired a leading carbon fiber expert, we can reveal that the company has been testing Wi-Fi syncing in iPods for the past two years.

Getting large libraries of music and movies to synchronize wirelessly over WiFi hasn’t been easy, according to a source close to the company who asked to remain anonymous. But Steve Jobs himself sees it as key to updating the aging devices, which are becoming increasingly obsolete in the iPhone/iPad era.

“Jobs is pushing hard to get WiFi syncing into the next-generation of iPods,” says our source.

Visitors to The Establishment Hotel in Sydney, Australia, can now enjoy access to an iPad 2 during their stay after the hotel recently deployed one of the devices to each and every one of its 31 rooms. The iPads are free to use and include a selection of movies and music including the hotel’s welcome video. There’s also a collection of apps that provide access to international news in addition to travel and restaurant guides.

Justin Hemmes, Merivale’s CEO, said the company is looking at ways in which it can further integrate technology into its hotels:

Now that we have the hardware, we are only limited by our own imagination. Well, maybe also by the software developers’ abilities but seriously, we will be looking at ways in which we can integrate this technology further into the whole guest experience

As well as the iPad, guests also get an AppleTV and surround sound system in their room which enables them to enjoy the iPad’s content on the big screen over AirPlay. If I wasn’t in Sydney, I wouldn’t want to leave the room!

[via MacStories]

Despite recent speculation that a third generation iPad will launch later this year, component makers in China have ruled out the possibility of two iPads in twelve months, and claimed that although Apple has released its plans for a higher resolution tablet, the device is still in the “initial planning stage.”

Sources said they do not see the iPad 2 as a transitional product, and pointed out that the launch of an iPad 3 so soon after the release of the second generation device would simply cut off interest in the iPad 2. Component makers confirmed that they are yet to receive any notice for next generation iPad components, and with such a strong demand for the iPad 2, an update won’t appear anytime soon.

Touch panel makers also revealed that Apple may be considering an AMOLED panel for the iPad 3, which would be a “great risk” for the Cupertino company since AMOLED technologies are currently largely controlled by Samsung. It may mean Apple could no longer have priority over the key technologies used in its devices, and meeting demand for the device could prove even more difficult.

[via DigiTimes]

A new service from Piecable, called Piecable Viewer, allows you to run iOS applications in your web browser. They’re not just watered down demos either; they’re complete applications – just like you’d get from the App Store – that run on Flash with just one additional line of code.

The service provides developers with a great way of giving people access to their applications for testing, without having to worry about iTunes redemption codes or the UDID limit Apple places on developer accounts. All they have to do is sign up to the Piecable service and choose one of its tiered pricing plans, add an extra line of code to their application, and upload it to the service. They receive a link to the app on the web which can be sent out to agencies, clients, organizations, and the press, enabling the recipient to play around with the application in their web browser.

Thanks to its front-facing camera, the iPad 2 is capable of producing a glasses-free 3D effect using head-tracking technology. Jeremie Francone and Laurence Nigay from the Laboratory of Informatics of Grenoble at the EHCI Research Group have used this technology, along with some really basic applications, to show off what the iPad 2 is capable of when it comes to 3D.

We track the head of the user with the front facing camera in order to create a glasses-free monocular display. Such spatially-aware mobile display enables to improve the possibilities of interaction. It do not use the accelerometers and relies only on the front camera.

The video below demonstrates how the concept works, and I think it’s really impressive. I can’t wait to see how developers might use head tracking to create a 3D gaming experience.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBQQEcfkHoE

It looks like a stack of iPhone 4s, but this is a coffee table — the iTable.

It’s also a speaker dock with a motorized speaker bar that rises like a stage organ when your hand is swiped across the  touch-sensitive controls (see the video below).

Designed a built by Kyle Buckner, who is best known for custom car interiors, the iTable is the first in a line of Apple-themed furniture.

“I am creating a line with this category,” said Buckner by IM.

Lots more pictures and a video after the jump:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Sj2Q0rGUmo

Here is British comic Eddie Izzard on OS X’s Software Update. It’s pretty funny and spot on.

The clip is taken from his Izzard’s live show at the Madison Square Garden, which is just out on DVD.

It has got to be the first standup skit ever about OS X’s Software Update. In fact, it’s the first skit I’ve seen from a popular comic about Macs in general, except Sinbad of course. A sign of Apple’s ever-expanding popularity?

Via Gizmodo.

These may not be the worst of times, but they’re not the best either. So the folks who make Geotrio Tours, an iPhone app that allows users to become virtual tour guides, think that awesomeness should be rewarded — they built a feature in their virtual tour app that allows people who go on the user-made tours to tip their guides, all from within the app.

The tours use the iPhone’s GPS to guide tourists along a set route, with photos and audio automatically popping up at predetermined points along the route. If they enjoyed the tour (and if they’re not cheap sods), at the end of the tour, tourists can leave tips for the guide. Virtual guides can make tours of anything they want, for free, at Geotrio’s website, or via their free TourRecorder app. There’s also a paid, pro version for the likes of big institutions.

No one’s going to make a million bucks off the app (if your tour is that good, send me a link), but it might net you some money for time invested in a fun little project.

Author Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography of Steve Jobs is likely to be a doozy, if this fascinating profile of Bill Gates in Time is anything to go by.

I just spent the last hour or so reading the 1996 profile, which Isaacson published when Gates was at the height of his power. Isaacson managed to get full access by persuading Gates it was a shot at winning Time’s Person of the Year. Gates didn’t win, but the profile is a great piece of work. It’s full of personal anecdotes and is psychologically penetrating. Isaacson talked to Gates’ friends, family and colleagues, and paints a rich, detailed portrait. It’s highly readable but also critical of Gates. We can only hope Isaacson does the same thing for Jobs, who has famously resisted biographers so far. As previously reported, Jobs has granted Isaacson full access for iSteve: The Book of Jobs, which is to be published early next year. (I don’t think it’s fair, but columnist Michael Wolff says Isaacson is a social-climbing sycophant).

Here’s a taste of the Gates piece:

When Gates decided to propose to Melinda in 1993, he secretly diverted the chartered plane they were taking home from Palm Springs one Sunday night to land in Omaha. There Buffett met them, arranged to open a jewelry store that he owned and helped them pick a ring. That year Gates made a movie for Buffett’s birthday. It featured Gates pretending to wander the country in search of tales about Buffett and calling Melinda with them from pay phones. After each call, Gates is shown checking the coin slot for loose change. When she mentions that Buffett is only the country’s second richest man, he informs her that on the new Forbes list Buffett had (at least that one year) regained the top spot. The phone suddenly goes dead. “Melinda, Melinda,” Gates sputters, “you still there? Hello?”

Time: IN SEARCH OF THE REAL BILL GATES

Via Apple 2.0: The man who won Steve Jobs’ trust

Okay, this is sorta creepy — and if you aren’t aware of this little fact by now, you should be: Unless you’ve adjusted the settings to turn this feature off, every time you snap a photo with your iPhone it embeds data with your exact location in the image file. This data, called a geotag, can be easily read using easily available software by anyone who has access to your images online (btw, contrary to what the folks at NBC say, it’s not new technology; the ability to geotag photos has been around since at least the first iPhone to include GPS, the 3G).

Among modern addictions, the one to iOS photo apps appears to be gaining purchase in the global culture. Facebook, Flickr and all manner of photo sharing services across the Internet are rife with the evidence, as is the success of web-based standalone services such as Instagram and Hipstamatic.

So, if you’re inclined to think of your iPhone or iPad as a palette for creativity, consider FX Photo Studio for the full-on rush its beautifully executed UI and finely detailed features bring to your artistic toolbox.

This 99¢ app ($2.99 for the iPad version) from the developers at MacPhun packs nearly 200 different effects and filters into a robust processing engine that will amaze you with its ability to enhance your photographs in ways limited only by your own imagination.

We start another week of deals with a number of Mac Pro Xeon workstations. The units from the Apple Store start at $2,039 for a Quad Core Xeon 2.66GHz. Next is a leather flip stand for the iPad. (We also include several other iPad cases.) Finally, there is a deal on Apple’s Final Cut Studio 3, which bundles Final Cut Pro 7, Motion 4, Soundtrack Pro 3, Compressor 3.5, DVD Studio 4, and Color 1.5 — all for $709.

Along the way, we all take a peek at several software titles, ranging from Adobe Photoshop Elements 9 to the backup and synchronization tool Sync Pro 6.

As always, details on these and many other items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

Forget those china plates, iPad and iPhone apps are the new must-haves for people who want to follow the fairy tale wedding of Kate Middleton and Prince William.

To makes sure there is as much interest as possible on April 29, broadcasters and publishers are crowding the iTunes store with dozens of apps, many of them free, aimed at filling the teacups of royal watchers the world over to brimming.

Among them are the Royal Wedding Insider from BBC America (with an unfortunate ad for The Tudors miniseries in it), The Royal Wedding from Hello! Magazine as well as offerings from NBC , one from People that allows you to print your own commemorative stamp and a virtual tea towel app.

Though they’ll probably never surpass the interest in the Kate Middleton doll with its big head or the fun factor in commemorative condoms, unlike ceramics (which more or less live forever) you can dump these apps guilt-free as your interest wanes post-nuptials.

Let’s face facts: worrying about someone dropping a twelve pound bowling ball on your new iPad 2 is probably as paranoid as, say, worrying about it being trampled by an elephant driven insane by the winter’s musth.

Still, if you must worry about such things, or other high impact calamities that could happen to your iPad — like a 747 smashing into it as it plummets out of the sky, or a narcoleptic parachuter face planting upon your tablet after sleeping through his ripcord count — it looks like you might want the G-Form Extreme Sleeve.

Made of something called “PORON® XRD™,” the G-Form works by turning rigid upon impact, protecting the iPad from being smashed into smithereens. As you can see, it works quite well, and it’s not even that expensive at $59.95.

The new Fusion case for the iPhone 4 from Nelson Technologies is the thinnest, lightest, and the longest running rechargeable battery case currently on the market, promising up to an extra 42 hours of audio, 11 extra hours of video, and 2 extra days of runtime.

Despite its low profile design – which adds less than an inch in total width or depth and weighs less that 2.4 ounces – the Fusion also claims to be robust and protects your device from ordinary wear and tear.

The case features a 1,500 mAh lithium polymer SaFPWR smart battery that’s rechargeable for over 500 cycles and increases iPhone runtime by more than 200%. Intelligent built-in technology ensures your iPhone never short-circuits, overcharges, or over-discharges.

Blowing into them isn’t going to do a lick of good, but if you’re a fan of retro gaming, these gorgeous iPhone 4 cases have been designed to look exactly like the backsides of retro Famicom and NES cartridges, replete with emphatic warnings about taking your copy of Zelda into the bathtub with you, or trying to clean the contacts by licking them out. These beauties aren’t cheap, though: each one will cost you nearly $57.

Apple’s AirPlay system is an exclusive club. If you want to be part of it, you pay Apple a licensing fee to get “Made for AirPlay” certification, at which point Apple sends you a private key that allows your hardware to broadcast itself as ready for streaming. Technically, there’s no whiz-bang hardware at play here: just a private key that Apple keeps close.

Developer James Laird just ripped that key from Apple’s clutch. Frustrated by the lack of open-source Airport Express and/or AirPlay emulators out there, Laird has just released his own home-baked emulator, called SharePort.

SharePort allows you to stream music from iTunes to third-party software or AirPlay certified hardware. Previously, you could stream iTunes to an Airport Express, or use third party software to stream to an Airport Express, but now you can use iTunes to stream directly to 3rd party software or hardware.