At an event in London today, HTC unveiled a brand new addition to its ever growing smartphone lineup called the Sensation 4G. Boasting 4G data connectivity, a Super LCD screen, and a dual-core 1.2 GHz Snapdragon CPU, the Sensation is a worthy adversary for the iPhone 4. So how do the two compare?
We’ve created a great little comparison that compares all of the main specifications, helping you decide which device deserved your hard earned cash. Check it out after the break!
Best Buy hasn’t exactly been playing fair cricket when it comes to distributing iPad 2s to customers. First, Best Buy admitted they were holding back iPad 2s, supposedly for an “upcoming promotion” but rumored to actually be to manipulate their sales quota numbers. Strike one.
Now we’ve got strike two. A reader writing to Crunchgear says a Best Buy manager effectively blackmailed him into buying a $109 rip-off Best Buy protection plan before he would sell him an iPad 2.
You can just imagine the teens huddled in this iDevice-compatible park shelter listening to music. The shelter has imbedded wireless speakers that work with the iPod, iPhone and iPad. The solar-powered gathering place does not work at night, officials say.
It’s part of a park renovation project in Carterton, Oxfordshire. The £200,000 project (about US$326,000), in part funded by city coffers and in part by grants, will renew the Alvescot Road Recreation Ground.
Aside from offering a spot to sit around and scowl protected from the drizzle, there is also a play area with jungle gyms, swings and a zip-wire.
We weren’t able to find out other details about the shelter, but will update when we do.
We start off with three hardware deals, one for the desktop, one for the laptop and one for the on-the-go. First up is a Core i3 iMac running at 3.06GHz with a 22-inch screen. Next is a 1.4GHz MacBook Air, along with several other Airs from the Apple Store. We wrap the spotlight up with a deal on a 32GB iPod touch with FaceTime for $232.
Along the way, we also check out other hardware and add-ons, ranging from the Xserve to a 27-inch Cinema Display. As usual, details on these and many other items can be found at the CoM “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.
Although Apple is yet to officially announce its sales for the fiscal second quarter, one analyst already has high expectations. The quick take-away: more record iPhone sales and overwhelming demand for the iPad 2 versus the original Apple tablet. In terms of sales numbers, expect 7 million for the iPad and 17 million for the iPhone.
RBC Capital Markets’ analyst Mike Abramsky told investors Tuesday he believes Apple will have sold 2 million to 3 million iPad 2 units, higher than the Wall Street consensus. In a survey RBC conducted in March, 28 percent of the people asked said they plan to buy an iPad 2 – 40 percent higher than an earlier survey gauging the consumer intentions toward the first-generation iPad.
According to several reports from various sources recently, it seems there could be a nasty ‘virus’ lurking in dodgy internet adverts that wipes your iOS device when you tap on them. Users searching for jailbreak and unlock methods on their devices are the ones currently at risk.
When performing a search for these hacks on an iOS device, false adverts are returned that claim to unlock your device for free. Tapping on them takes you to a webpage that shows an animation lasting 10 to 15 seconds, followed by a message that says: “DOWNLOAD UNLOCK 2 NOW FREE.” By this point the device is completely wiped of all your information.
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.
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?
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.
