Cult of Mac

MEDL Technology’s The Panel is a monitor you can travel with: a slim, rechargeable 13-inch monitor that will work with just about any major device over USB… no VGA, MiniDisplay or HDMI port required.

Weighing just 2.2 pounds and lasting over five hours a recharge, the 1280 x 800 LED-backlit Panel will hook up with about any device that can interface over USB, including PCs, Macs, iPhones, Ipods, DVD players, digicams and video game consoles.

This actually looks pretty useful. Not only can you use it as an easily totable secondary monitor, but you could use the Panel to bring lots of not-so-portable machines on the road with you.

Unfortunately, we’re still waiting for a price and release date, which means we’ve probably got a few months to go yet before we use the Panel to bring our Mac Mini to the local Starbucks for its debutante appearance.

We start the week with a deal on Apple’s mac mini. This bargain covers the 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo model for $556. Next up is a refurbished Nikon D90 body. This digital SLR is rated at 12.3MP and is priced at $699. Finally, our top trio includes new App Store freebies, including 80s Galaxy, a classic retro game.

As always, details on these and many more bargains are available on CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

Is there a cause-and -effect when it comes to the growth of Apple retail outlets and increasing market for the Cupertino, Calif. company? While pointing to a direct link may be too strong, one analyst is suggestion a potential correlation between the two.

In a report released overnight to investors, Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty talks about the “Positive Correlation Between Apple Store Expansion and Mac Market Share.” Just two examples: Between Sept. 2003 and Sept. 2009, Apple opened 123 U.S. stores. During the same period, the Mac’s U.S. marketshare grew from 3 percent to 9 percent. In Western Europe, after Apple opened 33 stores, the company’s marketshare jumped from 1.5 percent to 5 percent.

Sprint unveiled this weekend a new ad using the iPhone to promote the wireless carrier’s 4G service while at the same time knocking competitor AT&T. The ad, entitled “Make Your Phone 4G,” was posted to YouTube. The spot promote’s Sprint’s Overdrive device, permitting any iPhone, or other Wi-Fi-enabled handset, to access the carrier’s 4G network.

In the ad, two men (one intriguingly named “Steve”) sit on a park bench and hold a conversation. Steve tells his friend Matt that his iPhone is “limited to AT&T’s 3G speeds.” A voice-over then claims Sprint’s Overdrive 4G hotspot will deliver data speeds “up to 10 times faster” than AT&T.

Apple has started promoting ten-pack, WiFi-only iPad bundles to educational institutions… but those looking for the usual generous Apple education discount will be disappointed here.

According to MacRumors.com, this is the breakdown of the 10-packs currently available:

BF822LL/A: iPad Wi-Fi (16GB) $4,790
BF825LL/A: iPad Wi-Fi (16GB) with AppleCare Protection Plan for iPad – Auto Enroll $5,580
BF823LL/A: iPad Wi-Fi (32GB) $5,790
BF826LL/A: iPad Wi-Fi (32GB) with AppleCare Protection Plan for iPad – Auto Enroll $6,580
BF824LL/A: iPad Wi-Fi (64GB) $6,790
BF827LL/A: iPad Wi-Fi (64GB) with AppleCare Protection Plan for iPad – Auto Enroll $7,580

In other words, at the end of the day, schools hoping to introduce their students to tablet computing and e-reading can only expect $20 knocked-off the price of each iPad, regardless of price.

Well… it’s something, I guess, although it looks like the real carrot here is the savings on AppleCare, since opting to buy a 10-pack with AppleCare knocks another 200 bucks off the price.

Either way, don’t think you can use this deal to get around Apple’s 2 iPads per customer rule: you’ll need an authorized education purchaser login to take advantage of the deal.

Developers will gather at eBay offices in San Jose for a weekend event aimed at creating applications for the iPad.

Organized BarCamp style, the first iPad DevCamps will be held from April 16-18. In addition to new apps, DevCampers  — experienced Cocoa Touch developers, web developers, UI designers and testers — will also squeeze their cerebellums on how to best migrate Mac OS X applications and test and optimize iPad applications. The weekend workshop costs $50, but the cost may be offset by sponsors.

It’s organized by Raven Zachary, who runs iPhone agency Small Society and fathered previous iPhone DevCamps.

Not in Silicon Valley? Satellite dev camps are in the works around the US (Colorado, Portland, New York, Boston) and the globe (Brazil, Switzerland, Munich) check the list for complete locations.

Not that there was any doubt which app marketplace had the most apps out there, but sometimes, seeing it all laid out there as empiric data points on a chart can really put things in fresh perspective.

Take this chart just posted by Silicon Valley Insider, which ranks all four major smartphone providers according to how many apps they have available on their marketplaces.

Of course, we knew Apple was destroying pretty much everyone out there in volume of apps available. Of the competition, Android’s doing best: they’ve multiplied their app catalog sixfold in the last nine months (to Apple’s own 3.5x) but unless they keep that up for the next 18 months, they’re not likely to catch up… especially with the iPad imminent.

As for RIM and Palm? The fresh perspective here isn’t that Apple’s beating the competition… it’s that they’ve managed ripped the heads off of both RIM and Palm’s steaming App Marketplace trunks.

Don’t have the scratch to pick yourself up an iPad when it is released next week? Well, as long as you’ve got six hundred CDs lying around, we’ve got good news for you: thanks to a little company called iPodMeister, you can trade in your old, unwanted CDs and DVDs for pristine Apple swag.

It’s not a scam. iPodMeister was founded by a group of musicians and students who realized that they could make a lot more selling used CDs abroad than locally. They have pretty strict rules about what CDs or DVDs are eligible, but if it’s in its original casing with the original inset and as long as it isn’t a bootleg, they’ll probably accept your disc.

So how many CDs or DVDs will an iPad cost you? A 16GB iPad WiFi will cost you 600 CDs or DVDs, with the 32GB costing 700 and the 64GB costing 800GB. On the other hand, if you want an iPad 3G, you’ll need to drop 950 CDs or DVDs for the 16GB, with the 32GB costing 1050 and the 64GB costing 1150.

It’s not exactly a great trade if you’d be willing to try to sell your CDs or DVDs yourself, but if you’ve already digitized the vast majority of your music collection, this is a pretty good deal. And heck, if you haven’t digitized your old CDs, but still want in, iPodMeister will even rip them for you for the cost of another 100 to 250 trade-in CDs.

[via New York Times]

You don’t have to be computer savvy to understand the vision of Steve Jobs.

Architect Peter Bohlin who designed Apple’s epic glass cube for the Fifth Avenue store in New York is “a total computer illiterate” his partner Bernard Cywinski told the Philadelphia Inquirer. He still sketches on paper rather than by computer and prefers talking in person to text messages.

Yet Bohlin interpreted Jobs’ wish to create a kind of “clubhouse” for Apple fans so well that the Cube has become one of New York’s most-photographed landmarks.

Even though he’d never designed a retail space, Jobs chose Bohlin to design this Manhattan magnet for Apple lovers based on his work for the new Pixar headquarters and studios in Emeryville, California.

Jobs “didn’t care” about that handicap, said Karl Backus, the principal in BCJ’s San Francisco office who manages the firm’s Apple projects. That’s because Jobs thought of the stores not as retail spaces but as social spaces.

Amazon’s Kindle used to be the best e-reader out there, but now that the iPad’s been announced, the e-reader’s slowly-updating, monochrome display looks like something the ghost of Johannes Gutenberg is ectoplasmically sliming digital type upon from beyond the grave.

No surprise, then, that they’ve already announced the Kindle for iPad app… or, officially, Kindle Apps for Tablet Computers (Including the iPad).

Make no mistake: this is basically a Kindle-compatible version of iBooks, right down to a re-skinned library screen. The New York Times describes it in action:

The Kindle app for the iPad, which Amazon demonstrated to a reporter last week, allows readers to slowly turn pages with their fingers. It also presents two new ways for people to view their entire e-book collection, including one view where large images of book covers are set against a backdrop of a silhouetted figure reading under a tree. The sun’s position in that image varies with the time of day.

The big question is whether or not Apple is even going to let apps like the Barnes & Noble reader or Amazon’s Kindle for iPad on the App Store. Both would compete with iBooks as an e-reading app, and Apple has a history of turning down apps because they duplicate existing functionality.

Even if Apple does let them in, though, Apple may not allow users to buy Kindle or Barnes & Noble e-books as in-app purchases, effectively hobbling them. In fact, I’m guessing that’s exactly what’s going to happen: Apple may be willing to let existing Kindle owners migrate over to the iPad, but there’s no way Apple’s going to allow Amazon to get a foothold as an e-book seller on their own platform.

While much of the discussion about books available on Apple’s soon-to-be released iPad revolves around the price publishers will get from Cupertino versus Amazon, there is another wrinkle to the story: 30,000 classics are already available for the tablet device – and they are all free. Along with iBooks sold by Apple, the iPad will also display the many out-of-copyright classics available without charge from Project Gutenberg.

In a world of DRM, where Apple’s FairPlay DRM will restrict distribution of newer books, the iPad also supports the ePub standard.This little known ability could help Apple realize its plans of getting educators onboard the iPad.

Our Monday giveaways for this week are shaping up to be a great one! This week we’re giving away 8 apps aimed at making you more productive and getting the most out of your iPhone experience.

Make sure you follow @cultofmac on Twitter and re-tweet your favorite article of the past week, and make sure you include the hash tag: #cultofmac <— very important, because that’s how we filter out the tweets that are entering the giveaway. We’ll pick five random winners on Tuesday and DM you on Twitter, plus we’ll @reply you, just in case you don’t monitor your DM’s very often.

Now, here are the apps we’re giving away this week:

Smooth Movie: Do your iPhone movies have “the shakes”? Smooth Movie is a video processing utility app that smooths out shaky videos taken on your iPhone 3GS.

QR + Emoji: QR+Emoji is an unique and elegant 2D Barcode Generator, which provides a quick and easy way to create 2D Barcode (QR Code) with Emoji icon hints. You can send hidden messages to your lover with a kiss, exchange phone numbers at the bar with a smiley, or post locations to friends with memorizable icons.

Smart Groups: A pretty good organized address book is possible. Introducing Smart Groups, a powerful app enabling support for “smart” groups and effortless organization of your contacts. Just the perfect companion for the bundled Address Book application.

Battery Go!: a utility which helps you determine the amount of talk, internet, video, and music time you have remaining on your current battery charge. They also show your current charge percent and let you play around with the number using a slider to see what your hypothetical battery life would be if you were to keep using your phone for a while.

CNotes: short for Contact Notes, is the ultimate extension to the built in Contacts and Notes applications on the iPhone. With CNotes, you can write notes and associate them with the contacts in your iPhone (or iPod touch) address book.

Currencies: Convert more than 130 currencies on your iPhone and iPod touch. Sleek design, easy to use. Who ever said a currency converter had to be boring and ugly?

TouchPad: Tired of having a keyboard and mouse laying around in your living room? Get rid of that lousy setup with TouchPad! Use your iPhone or your iPod touch to remotely control your computer through WiFi (wireless network). With TouchPad’s intuitive use, you’ll feel right at home if you have already used a track pad on a MacBook. It’s almost like having a micro laptop in your hands!

Feathers: Decorate your tweets with Feathers!

Apple is now accepting iPad apps for a “grand opening” of the iPad App Store, according to an email just sent to registered developers.

“iPad will begin shipping soon and your opportunity to be part of the grand opening of the iPad App Store starts today,” the email says.

There’s no details about when the store’s grand opening will be. Apps have to be submitted by March 27 to be part of the grand opening. The iPad is due to hit stores on April 3.

See the screenshot for more details.

Thanks Thomas.

It’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.

This time, we review 4×4 Jam, A Doodle Fly, Business Card Reader, Gorillacam, Magnetic Joe, Magnetic Joe 2, Neocell Fighters Evolution, Noise.io LE, Rasta Monkey, Samurai: Way of the Warrior, and Ultimate Video Poker.

It’s Friday, and we’re all a little tired, so welcome to a new weekly whatever here on Cult of Mac, where we’ll spend Friday afternoon feverishly anticipating the forthcoming weekend to be spent gaming on our iPhones with a beer balanced on our bellies. Let us know what you’re playing on your iPhone in the comments and we’ll showcase some of the more interesting recommendations next week.

As for me, I’m playing Space Miner: Space Ore Bust: an Asteroids clone fused with an addictive RPG upgrade mechanic and a quirky sense of humor that good-naturedly vivisects the usual sci-fi plot tropes. In fact, while the graphics and gameplay are great, it’s really the humor that sets the game apart: Space Miner’s the rarity of a genuinely funny game, with the character design and quirkily ironic banter of a Tim Schaffer game.

For that matter, Space Miner’s a rarity for me in that it’s a campaign-based iPhone game I’ve beaten, then immediately picked up again for a second playthrough. My only complaint of the $2.99 title is that I wish the core campaign was longer: while Space Miner took me a meaty six hours to beat the first time around, and while the game encourages multiple playthroughs, giving up my end game nuclear war cruiser for the early game’s wimpily pew-pewing jalopy was a hard thing indeed.

What about you? What will you be playing this weekend?

We close out the week (and winter in the U.S.) with a trio of MacBook deals. First up is a MacBook Pro with a 2.46GHz Core 2 Duo processor, along witha 15-inch screen for $999. Next is a 1.8GHz MacBook Air with 64GB of SSD memory for $1,199. Finally, is a fully tricked-out 17-inch MacBook Pro laptop running at 2.66GHz with three years of AppleCare for $2,090.

Along the way, we also have more deals on MacBook Pros, some musical hardware for your iPod or iPhone, plus a great laptop buddy. As always, details on these and many other bargains are available on CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

For some time, Apple has viewed its Apple TV product as a ‘hobby.’ While the device has been updated occasionally, the streaming video gadget has not been seen as a weapon in Cupertino’s battle with Google for media supremacy. However, that may change as word leaks that Google, Intel and Sony have teamed-up for GoogleTV.

A GoogleTV prototype already exists, according to the New York Times. The device employs Google’s Android operating system, Google’s Chrome Web browser and Intel’s Atom processor. The project has been underway for several months and plans to get a toolkit to developer over the next two months, with products introduced possibly this summer. Google has begun limiting testing of its set-top box with Dish Network, according to the NYT.

Back when everyone thought Apple’s tablet was going to be called the iSlate, HP stole the rumored name for their own iPad-esque wedge of aluminum and metal, the HP Slate, but the specs remained a mystery. Now Spanish gadget blog Clipset has the details on HP’s forthcoming tablet, confirming pretty much what we knew all along: it’s basically a netbook with the keyboard broken off.

According to Clipset, the HP Slate is driven by Intel’s Atom processor, and contains built-in USB ports, a memory card reader for expandable storage, and the poorly thought-out placement of a backwards-facing webcam.

That Intel Atom processor would be just fine if the HP Slate was being driven by a custom touchscreen OS like the iPhone OS, but instead it runs Windows 7, which runs chunkily at best on netbook processors and has a long way to go as a multitouch-driven OS.

The cost? €400, or almost $550, although my guess is that in the US, HP won’t dare go higher than the entry-level iPad’s $499 price.

It’s a nice try, but one that falls short. They might confuse some people: in chassis design, the HP Slate looks so much like the iPad that it resembles a Chinese knock-off more than a competing product. Caveat emptor. But there’s just no way anyone is going to mistake Windows 7 for iPhone OS.

[via Gadget Lab]

Tech site H-Online has an interesting story today, quoting security expert Charlie Miller about his forthcoming talk at the CanSecWest conference next week.

He says OS X is full of security holes. There are lots more than in Windows, he claims.

And yet: OS X is a safer system to use. Why? Because, in the words of The Inquirer, its users are “so far from the action.”

H-Online quotes Miller saying:

“Mac OS X is like living in a farmhouse in the country with no locks, and Windows is living in a house with bars on the windows in the bad part of town.”

At the conference next week, Miller will reveal how he found the holes – but won’t tell anyone exactly what they are.

Hmm. So this place we’re in right now: this is just a rural idyll? Is Miller right with his summary of the state of OS X security, or is he trying to drum up a little additional buzz about his security consulting business?

It was inevitable that Apple’s 27-inch iMac would eventually be stripped off the computer guts that drove it and pared down into Apple’s long-anticipated update to their original LED-backlit Cinema Display… and now that the 27-inch iMac’s perpetual quality assurance problems seem to have been ironed out, it looks like that’s just what we’re going to see.

According to Apple Insider, sources have told them that the 27-inch display has been floating around Apple’s labs for sometime, referenced by the codename “K59.”

The only thing stopping Apple from releasing K59? The cost of the 2560 x 1440 display panels. The 27-inch iMac is already an absurd deal, the equivalent of getting a top-of-the-line cinema display and getting a computer built-in for free. If the K59 can be delivered for a significantly lower price point, some of us might be looking at 54-inch desktops in our immediate futures.

The National Trust is one of the UK’s national treasures – a charity that looks after all manner of old and ancient pieces of British heritage.

That means owning and maintaining miles of coastline, acres of woodlands, heaths, mountains and gardens, and quite a few stately homes.

The Trust is much loved, but it has something of a stuffy reputation. The stately homes are usually preserved as they would have been in times past – which means you’re allowed to walk through and take pictures, but not touch.

Not anymore. A new policy of opening up means the Trust is allowing people to touch historic objects for the first time.

It’s also a good time to launch a National Trust iPhone app. The free app includes locations, maps, opening times and visitor information for all National Trust properties in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

I particularly like the “Near to me” feature. Obvious to include, of course, but might come in really useful next time I’m exploring an unfamiliar part of the country with the family in tow.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuiXjmhZ4-8&feature=player_embedded

While not a Final Fantasy game per se, Square-Enix’s latest game Chaos Rings (to be released sometime soonish for the iPhone and iPod Touch) has all the hallmarks of their most famous series of JRPGs.

A white-haired protagonist wielding a sword bigger than the length of his body? Check. NPCs androgynously envisioned by character designer Testuya Nomura? Yup. Being slurped into random battles every three steps? Uh huh. And I’m guessing we can expect a ten minute cutscene or two as well.

No word yet on when this is dropping on the App Store, but the Japanese trailer above says “soon” and the trailer itself looks remarkably polished. I imagine we’ll see it within a month or two.

Although you can’t read a Mac publication or talk about Apple without stumbling over lengthy coverage of the iPad, for developers wanting a sneak peak before April 3, the story is much different. Much. In a 10-page document, Apple binds developers to the strictest rules of secrecy outside the CIA.

In a requirement harkening back to World War II, Apple insists developers quarantine the iPad in a room with blacked-out windows, presumably to prevent the tablet device being ogled by telephoto lenses, according to BusinessWeek. If that’s not enough, the iPad “must remain tethered to a fixed object,” according to the report which cites four people familiar with the secrecy rules. Finally, because Apple is a trusting lot, developers seeking to use a pre-release iPad must send Cupertino photographic proof that all steps have been met.

A terse entry from the sometimes reliable Digitimes might spell bad news for MacBook owners waiting for an imminent hardware refresh: Intel is having a hard time meeting demand for their latest Core i3, i5 and i7 processors, the most likely CPU candidates for the next iteration of Cupertino’s laptop line.

It all comes down to Acer. Apparently, the Windows laptop maker was so optimistic about consumer demand for Intel’s latest processors that they made an abnormally large order, slurping up practically every batch spit out of the assembly line. This has caused Intel to prioritize delivery of the remaining chips to major clients.

The question is: is Apple still considered a major client for Intel? Intel and Apple simply aren’t as close as they were two years ago, mostly due to Apple’s GPU partnership with NVIDIA: now, with Apple getting into chip development of its own, Intel may well see the writing on the wall… Apple’s an up-and-coming competitor.

Thanks to some great hardware design and some daringly surreptitious pricing agreements between Apple and the biggest publishers out there, Amazon’s Kindle e-reader has been feeling the pinch from the still unreleased iPad for the last few months, and it’s only going to get worse from here.

Still, the Kindle has at least one advantage the iPad doesn’t (yet): cross-platform libraries. Until (or even if) Amazon can put together a next-gen Kindle device that out-iPads the iPad, it behooves them to get their Kindle e-reading application on as many devices as possible as a stop-gap measure.

No surprise, then, that after a delay of several months, Amazon has finally brought the Kindle application to OS X. Unfortunately, it has all of the hallmarks of a panicked beta release (which is probably what it is) including some very sloppy and un-Mac-like interface design, the bizarre omission of a search function and some very swampy text rendering.

In other words, download at the peril of your sense of clean OS X aestheticism and functional application design. Unless you don’t plan on picking up an iPad, or have a large existing library of Kindle e-books, there’s little reason to give this a go.