Apple products scored highly in a computer magazine’s annual reliability survey, “smoking the competition” in all categories, including desktops, notebooks and smartphones. RIM was the cellar-dweller in the handset category, scoring “worse than average” on every ease of use question.
“Can Apple do no wrong?” asked PCWorld, on releasing the results of the Reliability and Service Survey. “Indeed, 2010 was a remarkable year for the world’s highest-valued tech company,” the magazine declared.
Is the iPhone becoming passe? That’s the belief of one analyst predicting Google’s Android will surpass both Apple’s handset and Nokia in 2011. “The iPhone was last year’s device and now people are looking for something different,” the IDC analyst told Bloomberg.
Android’s move shouldn’t come as a surprise; Apple’s handset had just a one percent lead (24 percent versus 23 percent) over the Android platform in the third quarter of 2010. The Samsung Galaxy S, with 14 percent of all Android-based shipments, is seen as delivering an iPhone-like experience with a lower price, according to the research firm’s Francisco Jeronimo.
Mark your calendars. Chair Entertainment and Epic Games’ much-anticipated Infinity Blade will be hitting the App Store on December 9th.
The game will cost $5.99 as a universal app playable on the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPod Touch (Third and Fourth Gens) and the iPad.
Imagine entering a large, circular war room in the deepest, most hidden bunker of Cupertino headquarters, modeled similarly to the one in Doctor StrangeloveAfter shaking hands with Peter Sellers doing his classic Steve Jobs impression, you’d cast your eyes up at the enormous map on the wall, and as you looked upon it, you’d see countries around the world suddenly light up.
Those lights, though, wouldn’t indicate nuclear explosions… they’d represent the megaton blasts of the iPad launching over the past two days in Taiwan, Denmark, Portugal, The Czech Republic, Sweden, Poland, Nortay, Hungary, Finland and South Korea. Later this week, Brazil is also slated to get the iPad.
Of course, you’d never get into such a room. As General Woz Turgidson would be sure to point out, it would be a serious breach of security. I mean, you’d see everything. You’d… you’d even see the Big Board.
Apple’s North Carolina data supercenter is soon to go live, but it will sadly have to do so without the man most largely responsible for its creation: Apple’s Global Data Center Director Oliver Sanche passed away of a heart attack on Thanksgiving Day.
Here’s a great way to fulfill your hunger for new and entertaining ringtones for your iPhone.
RingtoneFeeder is an inexpensive paid subscription service from which you will download short songs, sounds, and other unique audio files that you can use as ringtones. Subscribers will receive two new ringtones weekly on Tuesdays via iTunes on their computer.
This one’s got us raising an eyebrow: an app that figures out not only the distance to an object, but its speed — for a buck.
From the app’s press release:
Employing the device’s three-axis gyro and basic trigonometry establishes distance. Speed and laps are measured using the motion sensing of the video camera, timing the interval between the object entering and leaving the frame. The app is compatible with iPhone 3Gs, iPhone 4, and iPod touch 4.
We’re assuming that though SpeedClock is compatible with the 3Gs, it must deliver somewhat less-accurate results on it as there’s no gyro. We’re also assuming the app isn’t all that accurate for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the app requires the user to guesstimate the distance from the iPhone to the object. But who knows, maybe one day the tech’ll get there; somehow the idea of state troopers aiming iPhones instead of radar guns seems somewhat more cuddly.
Thanks to the inclusion of WebSocket support for the iPad’s Safari browser in iOS 4.2, the doorway for collaboration through the web between the iPad and assorted devices has been flung open.
One of the first apps to take advantage of the iPad’s new trick is $10 SyncPad, which presents users with a faux whiteboard to scrawl notes on, then lets other users of the app scribble on that same whiteboard over the Internet, with the results showing up in realtime (well, almost — the developer, Davide Di Cillo of development company 39 Inc., told us it updates a little slowly, but that the problem’s been fixed in the latest update, which is waiting for Apple’s approval).
There’s no limit to the amount of collaborators, although each has to have (of course) the app and an Internet connection; the iPad-less can view the whiteboard through a web browser for free, but have to make do without being able to add input for the time being — although Di Cillo says they’re working on a fee-based version that’ll allow collaboration via a browser as well. There’s also a view-only free version of the app for the iPad.
Hewn from the trunk of — well — some sort of tree, then sanded down and oiled and hand rubbed and buffed with the bottom of a virgin angel, BlackBox sells these lovely sheathes for MacBooks of all variety for $129 a pop… except, alas, the MacBook Air, which could do with the reinforcement.
It is Cyber Monday, the online version of retailers’ Black Friday. To mark the event, Apple and others are marking down their products. First up is the mothership, which announced 30 percent off on select items purchased at the Apple Store. Next is ZAGG, which began a 50 percent off sale sitewide. Finally, the iPhone App Store has marked-down several applications for the iPhone and the iPod touch, including “Perfect Photo,” photo-editing software.
Along the way, we’ll also look at some hardware bargains ($885 for a MacBook Air, $200 for an iBook G4, $199 for a 32GB iPhone 4), as well as deals for your iPad and Mac. As usual, details on these and many other items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.
The Dev Team has just announced that they have been successful in attaining carrier unlock for the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS, which is now available through Cydia.
Same old, same old, I know. But what’s more interesting is how the Dev Team managed to unlock these old devices: by patching in a vulnerable baseband from the first iPad firmware!
While you were either sleeping off the turkey or watching a game, some industrious Apple analysts were busy surveying the Black Friday landscape. The results: iPad sales were hotter than grandma’s pumpkin pie. After Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster and his team watched Apple retailers for seven hours he came away with this conclusion: the iPad is “the Mac of the masses.”
Strictly in terms of sales, 8.8 iPads were selling each hour, compared to 8.2 Macs, according to Munster. Despite comments like “the 11-inch MacBook Air has been flying off the shelves” from retailers, Mac sales were down compared to 2009, when Apple retailers sold 8.3 computers per hour for the day after Thanksgiving.
Whenever it arrives, it looks like Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily won’t be the only iPad-only magazine around: British billionaire and part Virgin Airways owner Richard Branson is also planning on launching a new iPad publication called Project, and it’s likely to be revealed as early as tomorrow.
Did you miss out on that incredible $399 iPad deall TJ Maxx was using to lure customers into their stores this past Black Friday? You might be in luck: a new deals site has just gone online, and their goal is to deliver 32GB WiFi iPads to their customers for a hundred bucks off the standard price.
The past week’s rumor cycle has consistently pegged early December as the date when Apple would simultaneously introduce iOS 4.3, iTunes in-app subscription support and News Corp’s new iPad-only magazine, The Daily… but according to sources, that date is very likely aggressive, and the actual rollout has been delayed until early 2011.
Apple’s iPhone is more than just sizzle, according to a German survey measuring smartphone loyalty released Monday. Although 75 percent of smartphone owners surveyed said they may switch to another handset when they buy their next phone, 59 percent of iPhone owners said they are sticking with the Apple handset. The figure tops the BlackBerry and Android-based alternatives, leaving Nokia and Microsoft in the dust.
“If a phone doesn’t do what it says it will do or what the owner hopes it will do, the maker will lose loyalty,” GfK analyst Ryan Garner told Reuters. Garner explained that people tend to “buy into experiences at the high-end level.”
A few months ago, it seemed like I switched OS X Twitter clients every other day. A long time Tweetie user, the lack of updates eventually made me ready to switch, but after plowing through client after client in rapid succession — Twitterrific, TweetDeck, twhirl, YoruFukurou — only to keep turning back to Tweetie for the admittedly nebulous reason that none of the competition felt “right” to me.
That all changed when I discovered Kiwi, my new go-to Twitter client. Despite the fact that a change to Twitter’s API meant that Kiwi often alerted me for @replies that hadn’t actually shot down the pipeline, I finally deleted Tweetie from my machine and became a Kiwi user full time.
I’m delighted to see, then, that Kiwi has been updated to its second major release, Kiwi 2. It fixes the aforementioned @reply bug, but also adds a host of new features like account grouping, inline images, gesture support for multitouch trackpads and the extension of its already-excellent themeable interface.
If you’ve been looking to trade in Tweetie for a client with more advanced features while retaining Tweetie’s simplicity and streamlined presentation, I’d recommend Kiwi 2 heartily. The ad supported version will cost you nothing, and removing the ads is a one-time fee of $9.95. Worth twice that, if you ask me.
Although they were once Thor-like with the Mjolnir of the ban hammer, Apple has become much more sparing and reluctant to ban apps outright from the App Store in recent months… a sea change that can probably be leveled more at Cupertino’s belated but common sense clarification of the App Store approval guidelines.
Bans still happen, though: an emulator here, a program tapping private APIs there, but these days, Apple’s bans are a lot less sensational than they once were. That’s what makes Apple’s latest ban so puzzling: they decided to ban a small Danish magazine app about Google’s Android OS from the App Store.
Why? According to the CEO of publisher Mediaprovider, his conversation with Apple about the app went something like this:
“So what’s the problem?” Dixon asked, knowing full well what the problem was.
“You know… your magazine,” replied the Apple rep, who identified himself only as Richard. “It’s just about Android…. we can’t have that in our App Store.”
Although this wouldn’t be a surprising ban a year ago, these days, it seems more like Richard was being a little overzealous than official Apple policy against informational Android apps to us: after all, the App Store has several apps dedicated to competing products, such as Windows 7. Granted, the war between iOS and Android these days is a lot more heated than the one between Windows and OS X — largely because Apple recognizes that mobile is the future of computing, and desktop OSes are the past — but Apple already knows that Android will eventually dominate iOS when it comes to total marketshare. Why ban an app about Android, then? Apple’s not concerned with total domination of the market… just the domination of the slice of the market that matters most.
Microsoft’s attempts out replicate Apple’s successes in the retail space have always seemed… well… rather bereft of imagination and mindlessly emulative. Microsoft Stores almost always are opened in the same malls as Apple Stores, sometimes directly across the way. Instead of a Genius Bar, there’s a Guru Bar. And so on.
Microsoft’s “Me Too”ism in the retail has simply been painful to watch… so painful that it prompted us to write a post entitled “Why Microsoft’s Mall of America Store Will Fail” just last month.
Looks like we were right. According to the LA Times, Microsoft’s retail stores are a complete bust, despite having been designed by George Blankenship, who helped build Apple’s own retail stores.
What will the CPU of your next MacBook look like? Well, it’ll almost definitely be one of Intel’s Sandy Bridge microprocessors, and if you want to see the future, you should peer into the entrails of the latest Windows notebooks.
Apple’s iPad is the first generation of what I hope will be a long line of magical tablets. Unfortunately, it has one minor problem that will be more evident now that iOS 4.2.1 has been released.
That problem will be the made evident by the over zealous use of multitasking on a device that only has 256MB of memory in which to run applications. The iPhone 4 twice that or 512MB. Users won’t be able to help themselves because multitasking is just to valuable to ignore or give up.
So the problem of having less memory to run apps will be frequent warnings that “your device is running low on memory. ” I’ve seen it happen to others and the image above is my own personal encounter with the problem. Apple had given the iPhone 4 pretty liberal amounts of application RAM, so I was a bit taken aback that the iPad didn’t have at least 512MB to 1GB of RAM when it was released.
Fortunately, the work around is easy.
Leaping right out of the “What the heck?!?!” category comes Welcome to the CrApple Store a blog for disgruntled Apple Store employees. A couple of readers pointed it out to me today
The complaints touted on the blog range from the size of repair parts packaging to things like brain-washing and drinking the Apple Kool-Aid. It just goes to show you that you cannot make everyone happy.
Steve Wozniak, Apple’s co-founder, apparently reads the Cult. After we published the recent piece on the Cupertinto, Calif. company buying HP’s old campus in the city, Wozniak offered more historical details on Apple’s connection with the acquisition of the 98-acre parcel. “Apple really is returning home,” Woz said in a comment.
“Actually, almost all of the Apple ][ development occurred in the HP calculator division (APD) which was located in the section acquired earlier. When this HP division moved to Corvallis, Oregon, my wife did not want to move so I transferred to HP’s Data Systems Division (HP-3000) across Pruneridge and I worked there for about one month, at first choosing not to start Apple due to my love for HP,” he said, shedding light on Apple’s early connection with the HP site.
The HP location, for which Apple reportedly paid $300 million, also had a connection to Apple’s earliest computer – the Apple I.
“This is also the division of HP that had the PROM burners I used to burn the 256-byte “monitor” program of the Apple I (took 2 PROM chips – not much memory in those days). I had previously learned how to burn these PROMs to display 4-letter words when you missed the ball on a Pong game I’d built for myself,” Wozniak wrote.
Only 11 more days til Christmas! Yikes. If you are still at a loss as to what to get your loved ones, look no further, CultofMac is here to save the Holidays! Keep in mind that most of the cheap or free shipping ends this week.
We get in the Black Friday mood with a number of price cuts and freebies for the iPhone and iPad. First up is the Apple Store’s Black Friday event, with offers such as a 16GB Wi-Fi iPad for $458 – $41 off the usual price. We also have the Sketchbook Pro app for the iPad for just $0.99 – a $7 drop from Thursday. Finally is a new batch of iPhone app price cuts, including “Iron Man 2” for just $0.99 – a $4 reduction.
Along the way, we have price cuts on MacBook Airs and iMacs, as well as iPhone 4s. Plus there are cases, snap-on batteries and much more. As usual, details can be found on CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.
