If you use Posterous for posting stuff online, you might be interested in the new, free Posterous iOS app that’s popped up in the App Store today.
It’s got everything you’d expect to see in a mobile blogging tool. Namely: a big green POST button that’s everywhere in the app; no matter what else you’re looking at, you can always start a new post with one tap.
The Amazon iPhone app received an update Tuesday, allowing iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 users to scan barcodes anywhere and instantly compare prices on the scanned item at amazon.com.
Using the device’s camera, users of the free app can point at a barcode out in brick-and-mortar land and know within seconds whether Amazon has a better deal on offer.
As if its frenetically gleeful yellow and purple icon wasn’t enough enticement to download, yesterday saw Yahoo make its free Yahoo Messenger app even more appealing with some beefy upgrades: backgrounding, voice calling and the biggie, video calling.
We tested it briefly and found the video calling works pretty well over wifi, even with a 3GS — though, obviously, the person on the other end won’t see a face unless the 3GS is turned around — with decent transmission of both voice and picture. But the app suffers from a few issues, which fellow Cultist David Martin will reveal in a full review later this week.
While voice and video calls will only work between users of the app, Yahoo also yesterday added the Skype-like ability to make voice calls (including international calls) to landlines or mobiles at low fees via a Yahoo Voice Phone Out account.
Apple released a 3rd beta build for iOS 4.2 on Tuesday, along with a 2nd for iTunes 10.1. It looks as though new builds are coming at roughly two week intervals at this point.
If you fancy yourself as a bit of an iPad artist, you might like to grab yourself one or two of these Stylus Socks, now on sale for five dollars a pop on etsy.
Slip one of these socks over any pen or stylus-shaped object, and you’ll be able to use it to paint directly on your iDevice screen as if it were a paint brush.
They’re made of MedTex130, a “conductive knit fabric for use in e-textiles”. You can do all sorts of fun things with it.
Seller Ivo Beckers told me: “When the material arrived last week, I gave it to my daughter Esmée (10) who likes to sew clothes and bears with her aunt Esther. I gave them a Koh-i-noor pen holder as well for the fitting and they did a great job. It fits perfectly around the pen holder’s top and works amazingly smooth as a stylus for the iPad.”
With pudgy poodles and tubby tabbies becoming the norm in the US, an iPhone app promises to help keep pet calorie counts under control.
Called CUPetHealth, the $3.99 app was developed by a team of seven computer science students at Cornell as part of a class project and vetted by the university’s veterinary experts for accuracy.
The app is meant to take the guess work out of feeding for the household’s four-legged companions. After entering the daily diet and noting several lifestyle variables to determine the appropriate number of calories each day, the app responds with “overfeeding,” “underfeeding” or “appropriate.” The app also keeps track of medication and vaccine and flea control information.
Apple has been awarded a patent for filtering objectionable text messages, better known as sexting.
The new patent, “Text-based communication control for personal communication device,” was granted on Tuesday by the U.S. Patent Office.
It describes an intelligent control unit or app that filters text messages if they contain “objectionable” content.
Designed to give parents more control over their children’s’ text messages, the system can also be set up to check spelling, grammar and punctuation. If kids grades are dropping at school, parents can block messages unless they are grammatical and free of spelling errors. Likewise, the sytem can check for foreign language words, so if the child is suposed to learning Spanish, it will only send messages that contain a minimum number of Spanish words.
Who said Apple has authoritarian tendencies?
Via iSmashiPhone. Thanks Mike!
This new TV commercial for Microsoft’s new Windows Phone 7 inspired me to write a script for this weekend’s Saturday Night Live. No, really!
WEEKEND UPDATE SEGMENT
Seth Meyers, Amy Poehler
SETH
Microsoft this week unveiled its long awaited Windows Phone 7 to compete with the Apple iPhone and Google Android phones. The company also released a TV commercial depicting a world of people so engrossed in their cell phones that they fail in their jobs, neglect their kids and ignore the sexual advances of their spouses. To which people in the commercial respond: “Really!?!”
Which brings us to a segment we like to call, “REALLY!?! with Seth & Amy.”
<Applause>
UPDATED: Added a quote form Vince Tseng, SquareTrade’s VP of marketing.
Following up on our story about Glassgate last week, an iPhone insurance company says the iPhone 4 is significantly more prone to damage than the previous model. But it also found little evidence that Glassgate is a widespread problem.
We start off with three hardware deals. The first comes from the Apple Store, which is offering a number of MacBook Pros, starting at $1,019 for a 2.4GHz unibody model. We also take a look at a growing product segment – iPad cases. This time it is a crystal jelly skin with a dot-wave pattern – just $4. We wrap up our deal spotlight with more Mac minis from the Apple Store, including a 2GHz Core 2 Duo model for $499.
Along the way, we’ll also check out more cases, software and other items for your iPhone, iPad, iPod and Mac. As always, details on these and many other items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.
A Japanese game developer must read our coverage of the meteoric growth of App usage. The developer, DeNA paid up to $400 million for San Francisco-based Ngmoco, creator of well-known iPhone apps such as the Rolando series and Eliminate. “We’re building the largest mobile social gaming platform in the world,” declares DeNA founder and CEO Tomoko Namba.
As part of the deal, the two-year-old Ngmoco could receive an additional $100 million if the game developer meets unspecified goals by the end of 2011. The iPhone developer was founded by Electronics Arts exec Neil Young, plus Bob Stevenson, Alan Yu and Joe Keene.
Add India to the list of countries Apple possibly is targeting with a much-discussed, often-predicted, but as-yet under-wraps CDMA iPhone. Two Indian mobile carriers reportedly are in talks with the Cupertino, Calif. company to bring the popular handset to the fastest-growing wireless market.
The two carriers – Reliance Communications Ltd. and Tata Teleservices Ltd. – would join the two mobile providers currently selling the iPhone in India: Bharti AirTel Ltd. and Vodafone Essar Ltd. The Wall Street Journal mentioned no timetable for Apple introducing a CDMA iPhone into the market.
It was a month ago to the day that I ditched physical books, comics, and magazines for my iPad. A round-the-world trip for work precipitated the change. For 29 days, I would be outside the U.S., with stops in Australia, Singapore, India, and the UK. Not to mention that the India stop included three cities and four additional flights. It was not the time for a big stack of physical media, nor for a full laptop. It was time to travel light and to travel digital.
In the process, I’ve learned a lot. Some of it more boring, self-discovery kind of stuff, which I’ll save for my personal blog, if at all, but a lot of it about tablets, computers, and where entertainment itself might go.
1. The current iPad is good enough for most uses.
In spite of my promise to wait for the iPad 2, the thought of a total of 65 hours on planes quickly converted me to the quite-capable version 1.0. I really put it through its paces: web-browsing, Twitter, RSS reader, Facebook, blogging, video, gaming, and book-reading. Despite its early generation, it’s wholly adequate for most of these tasks. It is weakest, as many people have noted, for typing. If you can get it perfectly flat, as on a tray table in an airplane, it’s possible to hit a near touch-typing speed, but any other grip means going slow and making mistakes. Though some have complained about its anemic 256 MB of RAM, I found it plenty speedy for every task I threw at it. The absence of video cameras for video chat was a minor nuisance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXkoIBDXwd8
Taking their iPhone Where No iDevice Has Gone Before, a father and son in Newburgh, NY recently took a weekend science project to new heights. Luke and Max Geissbuhler attached an HD Video Camera, iPhone and some styrofoam packing to a weather balloon, then launched their homemade satellite on a journey that lasted 72 minutes and climbed over 100,000 feet into the atmosphere!
Who knows what Hyundai intends on using this desk for, but I have to admit, I can imagine worse desks than a 70-inch, 1080p iPhone. It was on display at the Kintex show in Korea this week, for some reason.
[via Gizmodo]
If you need convincing about the power of HTML5, look no further than Biolab Disaster, a fantastically retro, shoot-em-up platformer with some fantastic gameplay. Here, go play it for a bit now, I’ll wait for you.
Fun, right? Want to play it on your iPhone now? Well, the game’s developer has it up and running on the iPhone 3GS at sixty frames per second, and it looks awesome.
The only problem? The developer seems a little unsure about whether or not Apple will let Biolab Disaster onto the App Store because it uses the JavaScriptCore Framework, which is a private API on iOS. He’s hopeful he can get around that problem by bundling his own copy of the JavaScriptCore Framework with his app, which is perfectly legal to do since it’s part of WebKit, but there’s always the chance Biolab Disaster for iPhone will be shot down.
Let’s keep our fingers crossed: Biolab Disaster on the iPhone would be the perfect pick-up-and-play platformer SHMUP.
One thing that you tend to notice when you watch as much television as I do is that almost ever character on TV uses a Mac … usually with a big sticker conspicuously placed over the glowing emblem on the lid, because while writers and set designers want to show that their characters are cool enough to use a Mac or an iPhone, Apple doesn’t go in for product placement on shows it doesn’t like.
When they do sponsor, it always smacks of love: Consider critic’s darling 30 Rock and their proudly prominent “Sponsored by Apple” product placement … all despite the fact that the shows ratings have been in the toilet for seasons now. Steve Jobs grooves on some Liz Lemon.
CBS’ hit sitcom How I Met Your Mother is one of those shows in which every character has a MacBook Pro with a sticker over the Apple logo, despite the fact it’s pretty much the biggest sitcom out there. Apple clearly thinks the show’s a bit artless … which is funny, because that’s the only way to describe the product placement bukkake party for Microsoft products that was last night’s episode.
As usual when Apple releases a new device, Colorware is now letting bloggers know that those who aren’t happy with their new fourth-generation iPod Touch’s stock look can now come over to their website, pick your colors and let them hussy it up for you.
Like all of Colorware’s services, getting your iPod Touch slathered in hues will prove expensive: it will cost you $150 if you provide your own iPod Touch, or $380 for the 8GB model if you decide to buy directly from them.
Paying that much to get your iPod Touch painted seems a little bit nutty to us. There’s no doubt that Colorware’s a quality service… it’s just that a skin or color case offers almost as much customization, is infinitely cheaper and doesn’t need to be submerged in turpentine to remove.
This isn’t a 3GS tarted up by Colorware, it’s the “iPhonc,” a little no-name Chinese cell phone looking to capitalize upon a bit of brand confusion with a stolen Apple logo (albeit, one with a reversed stem) and the elimination of a single stroke from the product name’s typeface.
I would be curious one day to pick the brain of one of these iPhone knock-off designers. They really are ingenious. If only they used that same ingenuity to design capable smartphones instead of dancing around trademark infringement.
[via 9to5Mac]
It’s been a long time since Wal-Mart first tipped that they’d be selling iPads in their brick and mortars starting later this year, but with the holiday shopping season coming up in the rear view mirror and Target now selling iPads themselves, Wal-Mart couldn’t very well hold back any longer… so starting this week, you should be able to ask any Wal-Mart greeter to direct you to the iPads and have them not look at you like you’ve got two heads.
“There’s an app for that” is the “Where’s the beef?” or “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing” of our generation: an advertising slogan so ubiquitous and memorable that it is referenced constantly in popular culture. Lazy joke writers love it, while Don Draper himself would admire it’s almost crystalline beauty.
Well, mentally affix a ™ symbol to the end of that phrase everytime you hear it, because Apple has just won their trademark on “There’s an app for that.”
Two and a half weeks ago, as New Zealand rolled back their clocks for Daylight Savings Time, Kiwis started noting an odd iOS bug: any recurring alarms they had set on their iPhones were going off an hour early. Curious, but then it gets curiouser: last week, when Australian had to adjust for Daylight Savings Time, it happened again.
We love the story: its like a mini-Y2K for iOS 4.1, hitting iPhone users around the world as their country enters Daylight Savings Time… and with Europe set to enter DST on October 30th, and America on November 6th, the bug is about to hit a lot more people.
So what does Apple intend to do about this? Apple Australia says they’re on it and have developed a fix that will be included as part of an upcoming software update. Since iOS 4.2 has a late November ship date, that means we’re likely to get an iterative iOS 4.1.1 update sometime before the 30th, when all of Europe starts hurling their iPhones dramatically against the wall when their alarms rob them of an hour of sleep.
The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal both agree that a CDMA iPhone is coming to Verizon in January, and their agreement on the matter has one of Apple’s strategic leaks written all over it. But when the iPhone comes to Verizon, will it be boasting 4G mobile internet speeds?
Don’t count on it, says Steve Cheney of Techcrunch, who reports that the Verizon iPhone to debut in January will be unable to access Verizon’s LTE network.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHlN21ebeak
This is the first TV advert from Microsoft for its new Windows Phone 7 — and it’s actually pretty good.
Well, it’s not embarrassingly strange and meaningless like Microsoft’s recent advertising.
Even if the ad has little to do with Windows Phone 7 per se, and more about mobile culture in general, it’s still eye-catching and engaging, which is more than can be said for the Vista ads.
What’s going on? The phones look pretty good and the advertising does too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3pHac6Otqk
Here are a selection of videos from Microsoft introducing the Windows 7 phone software and some of the different handsets. Above: New Windows Phone 7 devices available from Dell, HTC, LG and Samsung.
It’s worth watching a couple of these videos to get an idea of how the competition for mobile is heating up. If the videos present a true picture of the Windows Phone 7 experience, it looks like a credible competitor to the iPhone.
The easy customization of the Windows Phone 7 home screen — “pinning,” in Microsoft’s parlance — looks like a compelling feature. Home screen customization isn’t something you about from iPhone users — but it is a feature you hear Android users talk about a lot.
