We start off the day with yet more deals on MacBook Pros. This one comes from Expercom: a 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook with 13.3-inch screen for $1,098. Next, we have some free iPad applications, including “Bumper Boats HD Premium,” a puzzle game. Another crop of iPhone app price-cuts have arrived, including TomTom USA.
Along the way, we also check out new iPhone cases, speakers and Mac software. As always, details on these and many other items are available at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.
A faux marble stand in hardwood from Old Time Computers.
The iPad has already gone beyond kid-appeaser — a recent study reported that the most downloaded apps are for adults using the device at work.
So if you want to give the iPad a permanent place in your office, you might want something to prop it up with that doesn’t involve pencils and rubber bands.
Here are our top five picks for iPad stands that deserve a place next to that sleek perpetual calendar and won’t look like some random piece of junk when your iPad is elsewhere.
1. Old Time Computers Marble finish stand. For that banker desk look, try this handcrafted stand in hardwood with a marble finish. It comes with a USB cable and audio jack, available for $59.00 on Etsy. The same artisan has some terrific wooden stands in the same vein — including a combo iPad/iPhone dock charger — as well as antique-looking external keyboards with a steampunk aesthetic.
What’s better than a snarling dirtbike, burnin’ rings of fire and a sarcastic stuntman in an Evel Knievel jumpsuit? Exactly — nothing. Add hot 3D graphics, cool audio and some smart, funny writing, and you’ve got an iPhone full of contusion-forming, bone-shattering fun. At least, for a half-hour anyway.
Apps that use GPS to peg a user’s location on a map are nothing new — but an app that works with the user’s own maps — of say a college campus, airport terminals or the sprawling San Diego Zoo — now that’s a prettyneat trick.
Snap + Map by FogTechnologies is a $2 app that lets you does exactly that, by superimposing your GPS location onto a user-defined map — either downloaded in the form of a pdf or from a picture taken with the iPhone’s camera. The app calibrates the iPhone’s GPS receiver with the map by asking you to enter your current location, then move a short distance and enter it again. Of course, much of this app’s usefulness depends on the iPhone’s somewhat spotty GPS capabilities.
Brilliant idea though — especially for ephemeral locations like Burning Man, where I can totally envision this app saving my life during my next visit; possibly quite literally.
Take Smule’s Glee or I Am T-Pain popstar-forging apps, strip away the Auto-Tune (and some of the polish), stir in a little Simon Cowell and bam — you’ve got Music Idol, a dollar-app that creates a virtual American Idol community on the iPhone, complete with the ability to rate other would-be star’s performances.
The app — which has also been formatted for the iPad — gives users the ability to upload 20-second performance, then show off their talents through the app’s searchable database or post clips to the user’s Facebook page. The developer claims a 2000-member user-base (culled partly from an earlier version of the app called Riff Raters).
While the Smule apps are collaborative in nature, this one seems like more of a way to introduce the world to your unique talents — or perhaps invite a hailstorm of abuse. Either way. to prod talent in the app’s direction, the developer is giving away $10 iTunes gift cards every week.
You can now search for iPhone apps when using Google’s mobile search page. The feature, announced earlier this week, displays matches at the top of search results on the Google site.
Selecting an app takes users to Apple’s App Store, permitting users to view that application’s listing, along with the name of the app’s creator and user reviews. The searches can be conducted either from an iPhone or Android handset.
The feature, which the Mountain View, Calif. company plans to roll out for other phones and more countries, is currently available only in the U.S. for the iPhone and Android-based phones.
Although my affinity for Apple’s iDevices has long made switching an impossibility, I’ve long loved DVD Jon’s DoubleTwist application, a wonderful and streamlined iTunes-replacing program that allows you to sync your music or video library to pretty much any device under the sun.
Today, DoubleTwist got even better. Although the program has long synced to Android phones, the DoubleTwist Player, which finally gives Android what its been sorely lacking: a killer media player app. Even better, it offers some degree of interoperability with iTunes, and allow you to import your iTunes playlist, ratings and playcounts.
It’s free for a limited time, and finally brings an Apple-like media experience to Android phones. The only limitation is the lack of a widget allowing you to control your media playback from the homescreen, although it’s promised soon.
Maker of diabolically intricate pixel-art extrordinaire, the phenomenal eBoy has just released his first iPhone App. Called FixPix, it’s a simple, slightly nauseating but completely addictive puzzle game: you use your iPhone’s accelerometer to tilt cut-out portions of an image back and forth until they perfectly line up, bringing you to the next stage. You can grab it now for only $2.
Every few months, Mac security firm Intego pops up, waves their arms hysterically around and screams that the OS X sky is falling, having identified new malware in the wild. Rinse, repeat.
Their latest report is no different: Intego has identified 30 screensavers developed by a company called 7art and one app called Mishinc FLV to MP3 that are infected with a spyware program called OSX/OpinionSpy.
Was AT&T’s recent decision to drop its unlimited data plan for iPhone customers a signal the carrier prefers RIM’s BlackBerry over Apple’s handset? The move could turn the tide against the iPhone and in favor of BlackBerry customers comfortable with operating using fewer network resources, one analyst said Wednesday.
“In Canada and Europe, price-sensitive smartphone customers already do more on BlackBerry under data caps,” RBC Capital Markets’ Mike Abramsky told investors. At just 50MB per month, BlackBerry users require one-tenth of the resources of iPhone owners, who can consume between 250-500 MB per month, Abramsky said.
According to Apple Insider, Apple has started to cull programs on the App Store that offer Dashboard-like widgets to the user.
The most tangible evidence of the purge comes from Developer Russell Ivanovic, whose MyFrame app was removed by Apple for including widget support.
Going straight to Steve Jobs, Ivanovic received this reply: “”We are not allowing apps that create their own desktops. Sorry.”
Apple Insider speculates that this might be preparation work for Apple to introduce their own widgets in iPhone OS 4.0, although surely we’d have seen some evidence of that in beta form by now.
An equally valid reason Apple may be shutting dashboard apps down is because of their strict ban against interpretive code, which is essentially what a widget is.
When you write an email to Steve Jobs, he’ll sometimes write you back a letter with the answers to your questions. “>Write a letter to AT&T CEO Randall L. Stephenson, though, and what do you get? A threat of a cease-and-desist, as Girogio Galante found out.
The exchange was prompted by a slightly miffed but non-threatening email to Stephenson in regards to AT&T’s new data rates, in which Galante threatened to leave AT&T for Sprint. His email closed with the line: “Please don’t have one of your $12/hour “Executive Relations” college students call me – I’ve found them to be generally poorly informed… and they have little authority to do anything sensible.”
Yet it was one of those very same “$12/Hour ‘Executive Relations’ college students” who called Giorgio. His name was Brent, and after calling Giorgio to “thank him” for the feedback, but while this “college student” may not have been authorized to do anything “sensible,” he was apparently authorized to threaten Galante with legal action if he ever dared to email AT&T’s CEO again.
Could anything better exemplify AT&T’s total contempt for their customers? If you write Steve Jobs, you might have a heated exchange with him, but at least he’s listening. Just attempting to communicate with AT&T, though, is enough to get you potentially sued. What dicks.
In one of the more mysterious statements of the day, HP chief Mark Hurd claims that his company didn’t buy Palm and its webOS operating system to enter the smartphone business, but rather to drive “small form factor web-connected devices.” You know. Tablets and MIDs.
Hurd claimed that HP had no interest in spending “billions of dolllars” trying to get into the smartphone business. “That doesn’t in any way make any sense.”
Uh, really? As Apple has amply proven with the iPhone and iPad, the future of computing is mobile. Whoever controls most of the operating system space in the mobile arena is going to profit big time: this is exactly the reason why Google is licensing their Android operating system for free.
But in actuality, the reason mobile computing is the future isn’t because you can make telephone calls or text messages on mobile devices: that’s just the reason that gets them initially into people’s pockets. It’s mobile internet that’s the future, and someday, our smartphones are probably going to be just tiny, 3G-capable tablets with VoIP capabilities that we keep in our pockets.
While Apple and Google battle it out in the smartphone arena, perhaps HP is playing it smart after all, and trying to position itself to be ready to pounce in the post-smartphone future which iPhone and Android create.
Artist johannes-p-osterhoff pwned the squeaky clean iPad advert in a Berlin subway station by putting porn in right before the device launched in Germany.
The attention gained from his protest over the “porn-free device” crashed his server, so osterhoff (who prefers to go all lowercase) got back to us just now on how he did it, sending Cult of Mac exclusive photos of his guerilla art operation at the Rosenthaler Platz stop in Berlin’s subway.
A few of our especially astute readers thought the osterhoff’s Photoshop skills could use work, but as you can see in the above pic, his protest over the allegedly porn-free iPad was an old school cut-and-paste operation.
Less than a week after its long overdue update allowing VoIP calls over the iPhone’s 3G connection, nearly five million people have already downloaded the latest update to the popular Skype App from iTunes.
Of course, that’s five million people who are going to go absolutely bonkers when Skype starts inexplicably charging for 3G calls at the beginning of next year.
According to Skype, they are charging to make sure they can maintain quality on Skype-to-Skype calls, but I can’t help but wonder if the long delay in bringing 3G calls to Skype was a roadblock placed by AT&T, who — rightly — see a 3G capable Skype as a threat ti their minutes business… especially once iPhone OS 4.0 comes around and enables VoIP multi-trasking.
One runs the biggest tech company in the world, the other is a global leader in fighting poverty.
This is a guest commentary by Shawn Ahmed, a anti-poverty campaigner. It was originally published here.
Last week, Apple surpassed Microsoft to become the world’s biggest tech company. As someone who used to spell Microsoft with a dollar sign, I can’t believe what I’m about to say: this is a bad thing for the world.
Verizon spokesman John Johnson says the company will not have the iPhone any time soon.
“No plans to carry the iPhone in the immediate future,” he told Beet.TV. Instead, Johnson makes a plug for “incredible Android devices.”
The news has got to come as a disappointment to Verizon customers hoping to get their hands on Apple’s gear, as well as AT&T customers hoping to switch to what’s considered the best network in the U.S.
Verizon has been long rumored to get the iPhone, but those rumors now look like wishful thinking. Unless, of course, Verizon has taken to Apple’s tactic of denying interest in a product right up until they launch it.
Information management application Yojimbo was updated today, and version 2.2 adds an interesting new feature called “Sidekick”.
Sidekick creates a kind of “Yojimbo-to-go” export of all your notes (or a subset of them if you prefer). This is done by turning the notes into a self-contained mini website that you can put anywhere on your Mac or your network.
The iPhonePortugal website has posted two videos taking a closer look at the chassis of the new 4G iPhone. There are no surprises, but it is interesting to see how closely the industrial design of the iPhone 4G matches the iPad and new MacBook Pros.
These parts were purchased in China by one of our readers (weren’t stolen or found) then delivered to us. We will not reveal the price.
Are those parts genuine? We can not know but we can tell for sure those parts are perfect, have no defects, not faulty at all, there is not even one single difference between the 2 copies we have.
These are pictures of what appear to be spare parts –PowerbookMedic is a repair shop — but don’t appear to be the final versions. The text on the back is placeholder text. As well as the back case, PowerbookMedic also has images of a white front panel and some chassis parts.
The 4G iPhone is likely to be introduced at next week’s WWDC.
Today is a MacBook and MacBook Pro bonanza. Our top three picks include new MacBook Pros, starting at $1,099, along with a $759 2.26GHz MacBook and a 2.88GHz MacBook Pro for $1,899.
We’ll also check out a $929 unibody MacBook Pro, the latest crop of App Store freebies (including the multiplayer action game “Finger vs. Finger”) and deals on iPod shuffles and others.
As always, details on these and many other items are at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page, which starts right after the jump.
If you believe iPads are not just for keeping the offspring entertained during car trips, there are numbers to back that up.
Half of the top ten paid iPad apps are “productivity tools,” in other words, apps that grown-ups use for work.
According to Distimo, a start-up that analyzes app stats, the top two paid iPad apps in April are word processor Pages and Goodreader, a large-file PDF enabler.
Pinball HD is the only game in the top five paid apps at spot no. 3, followed by note taker app Penultimate and presentation app Keynote. (You can download the full report here.)
iMaria is a virtual girlfriend app billed as your very own English play pal. But the developers struggled with the “hot Brit chick,” concept seeing as the virtual girl is in fact embodied by Playboy model Maria Eriksson, who is Croatian. (More at her NSFW site.)
So, well, at least she’s great to look at, right? Sure, but a come-hither look and perma-tousled hair is about as far as you’ll get with iTunes enforced no-porn rules.
She’s been iDubbed to have a “cute English accent,” and your interaction with her hinges around some pretty banal activities: should she cook for you? Or should you take her out? You can then choose what you eat, too. She does look pretty suggestive peeling those potatoes for your English stay-at-home meals but is that’s about it.
Jobs doesn't see Apple TV becoming another iPhone.
Apple TV remains just a hobby, the Cupertino, Calif. company’s chief executive said in a Tuesday interview. The problem: the cable industry.
Cable operators “give everybody a set-top box for free, or for $10 per month,” Steve Jobs told an audience at the All Things Digital conference. “That pretty much squashes any opportunity for innovation, because nobody’s willing to buy a set-top box,” he said.
