Sprint and HTC have leaped ahead in the race for 4G, with today’s unveiling of HTC’s new, Sprint-powered EVO 4G smartphone, likely to be the first smartphone in the U.S. able to run on a 4G network when it hits stores this summer.
Not content with their DIY touchscreen analysis experiment back in January, the team at Moto Labs have gone one better, and repeated the test with more handheld devices and a fairer test environment.
We’ve reached mid-week with a number of Mac-related deals. First up is about nine iMacs from the Apple Store, including a $849 model with 20-inch screen and a 2.66GHz processor. Next we have a new batch of App Store freebies, including “Squism,” a puzzle game. We round out our top trio of deals with a bargain on Apple’s MagSafe power adapters for MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops. The 60-watt power adapters are priced at $35.95.
Along the way, we also take a look at MacUpdate’s Spring Bundle of Mac applications for $49.99.
As always, details on these and many other items are available at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.
Less than a week after a report leaked that Google is deeply involved in creating a TV service, a prominent Apple analyst now says Apple could revamp the HDTV market in the next two to four years.
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster told investors Tuesday Apple is “uniquely positioned” to enter the HDTV market with what he calls a “premium all-in-one” alternative to the high-definition sector. Munster believes Apple could sell a product for $1,999 that would replace the HDTV, the Blu-ray player, your digital video recorder, cable box and game console.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mP-0Y8bLzc
Ported and expanded from the popular Amiga shareware game Deluxe Galaga by the original author, Edgar Vigdal, the 2D space SHMUP Warblade features well over 100 levels, multiple power-ups and dozens of enemies. Without a doubt, its one of the best Galaga-inspired arcade shooters on OS X… and now it’s heading to the App Store.
Most SHMUPs require extremely precise controls, but Warblade is no danmaku, and the game’s level design is forgiving enough that it looks like the iPhone’s touchscreen will work out pretty well. Vigdal claims that the port is 80% done, so we should see it on the App Store soon.
I’m pretty excited: the App Store seems woefully short on good SHMUPS. Until someone gets around to porting Cho Ren Sha 68K to the iPhone, Warblades looks like it’ll be the best SHMUP gaming on the Apple handheld is going to get.
Novatel have just announced some fantastic new functionality for their wonderful MiFi series of mobile WiFi hotspots: live iPhone and iPod Touch media streaming.
Using any application that supports UPnP/DLNA media steaming for the iPod Touch (e.g. PlugPlayer), the latest update will allow you to stream music and movies to your Apple handset from the MiFi’s microSD card slot.
With microSD cards now coming in capacities up to 32GB, what this means is that you can now pretty easily double the capacity of your media library if you’re willing to pick up a MiFi… and while the MiFi might be a redundant addition to your gadget bag if you’ve got an iPhone 3G, it would be an excellent way to keep your iPod Touch mobile and media rich without signing a two-year contract.
[via Gadget Lab]
In an endless sea of interchangeable memory cards, Eye-Fi has managed to stand out from the crowd by infusing their line of postage stamp sized SD cards with WiFi capabilities… and looking hip while doing so.
Their latest card, the Eye-Fi Pro X2, is a lightning-fast, Class 6 SD card that will wirelessly sync you photos or videos to iPhoto without ever once having to pull out your digicam’s mini-USB cable. The Pro X2 can also automatically upload to MobileMe, Flickr, Evernote, Picasa, Facebook and YouTube through the card’s 802.11n WiFi chip, and it’ll even send notifications automatically by email, Facebook, Twitter or SMS when you’ve uploaded something new. It all happens invisibly as soon as your Eye-Fi card is within range of a hotspot it can connect to.
Eye-Fis are fantastic cards, but they don’t come cheap: the Pro X2 costs $150 for an 8GB card.
The phone has not been completely eclipsed by Apple’s iPad when it comes to reading your daily newspaper or magazine. Tuesday, publishing giant Hearst Corp. inked a deal with Samsung, naming the cell phone maker its “preferred e-reading service partner.”
Samsung’s smart phones, such as its newly introduced Galaxy S, will include software from Skiff allowing owners to read newspapers or magazines on a phone’s 4-inch screen. Along with creating gadgets such as the 11.5-inch e-Reader device introduce during CES in January, Skiff makes e-reader software for computers, tablets and phones.
On Friday, we started something new here at Cult of Mac: we asked you what iPhone games you were playing that we might recommend for our weekend gaming feature.
On our part, we recommended Space Miner: Space Ore Bust, a humorous, lite RPG spin on Asteroids.
Here’s some of the games you recommended that tickled our fancy.
Forget all the talk about e-books, gaming and other applications on the forthcoming iPad. It’s only natural that the most ubiquitous media on the planet — advertising — is making plans how to best use the tablet’s 9.7-inch screen. Major publishers, automakers and retailers are preparing ad campaigns specifically tailored to the iPad’s unique characteristics.
PointRoll, an analytics firm, and AdMarvel, which delivers ads, reportedly will team up to develop interactive ads for the iPad, according to the marketing news site Clickz. Although the two ad players hesitate to name names of companies seeking to get their brand before iPad owners, they did provide a glimpse into what sorts of ads we might expect.
Despite what Apple and even my fellow Cultists of Mac tell me, for me, the iPad isn’t a compelling gaming or productivity platform (at least primarily) and it’s not a viable laptop or even netbook replacement. For me, the iPad is a thing, attractive lozenge of aluminum and glass that will usually sit on my living room table on top of the pile of magazines and newspapers that are usually placed there. Despite Steve Jobs’ assertion that people don’t read anymore, the iPad is an e-reader, first and foremost…. and it’s going to be the best e-reader ever released.
It does not appear that I’m alone in this opinion. comScore recently polled 2,176 iPad customers and discovered that over one-third of them said that they mainly thought they’d use the device as an e-reader.
Dip a human being in glue, roll him up in crushed glass and steal $2,250 from his wallet and it’s called torture, but when CrystalRoc does the same thing except for calling the crushed glass “Swarovski crystals,” not only does no one call the cops, but George Michael excitedly calls up his personal shopper for one.
It’s all just semantics though. It’s still torture.
There are a few apps I find absolutely indispensable, and Instapaper Pro is at the top of the heap. When I find an interesting long article during the day (for example, this wonderful New York Times piece on the evolution of the science museum from wunderkammer to proslytizer) I just click Instapaper’s “Read Later” bookmark and give it the attention it deserves later, in a stripped down, paginated, ultra-readable iPhone-friendly format.
I’ve been eagerly anticipating what Instapaper developer Marco Arment had up his sleeve for the iPad version, and now he’s given users a sneak peek on the official blog. There’s no huge surprises here, which even Arment admits: “No multi-column reading, no fake book-page animations, and no giant newspaper graphics,” he says. Never the less, it looks perfect, right down to the dual-pane navigation view. Even better: Arment says that existing Instapaper Pro customers will get the iPad version for free.
Once Apple.de gets around to allowing me to buy an iPad, I think this is the app I’m most looking forward to giving a try. I intend on buying the stock 16GB iPad WiFi, and Instapaper is that rare app that actually gets better and more indispensable when you don’t have a mobile broadband connection. This is a must have program for everyone who loves reading, and reading’s going to be the thing the iPad excels at most.
According to research by Deutsche Bank that assembled the revenue and operating profits of the top ten PC makers in the world, Apple is destroying the competition when it comes to being profitable.
In fact, an astonishing 35% of the profit to be made in the computer sector is deposited directly into Apple’s piggy banks. This is despite the fact that Apple only accounts for 7% of global computing manufacturer’s revenue.
In fact, only Dell and HP come close at tickling the underbelly of Apple’s precipitous pile of lucre…. but with revenue share numbers vastly more proportional to their profit shares.
As you can see, Cupertino’s head-rippening of the competition continues.
This is YoruFukurou, a Twitter client from Japan, built by @seabream and @aki_null.
It’s a native app for 10.5.8 or 10.6, and packs a lot of features into a nicely self-contained and fairly minimal little package.
One of those features is tabs: you can add Twitter-wide searches or personal filters to the line of filters that appears just below the text entry box.
YoruFukurou (it means “Night Owl”) supports link shortening, TwitPic pictures, current iTunes song, and loads more. It counts your tweet’s characters, it has a variety of appearance modes and adjustable colors, and a decent set of keyboard shortcuts. In short: it’s neat. It really does cater to pretty much all your Twittering needs – well, certainly all of mine, but then I’m not a terribly demanding Twitter user. (Sorry, can’t bring myself to say “Tweeter”. Euw.)
Best of all, it’s free. Go get it.
We start the day with a mix of Mac deals, including a loaded 27-inch iMac with Intel’s i7 processor cranking out 2.8GHz. ExperCom has added 8GB of RAM and three years of AppleCare – all for $2,379. Also on tap is a 32GB iPhone 3GS from AT&T. (If you’re interested, you might want to snap this bargain up soon, since they seem to be going quickly.) Finally, we wrap up out top trio with Medical freebies from the App Store, including a medical encyclopedia.
Along the way, we check out other gadgets and software, including a new round of price drops from the App Store on applications for the iPhone or iPod touch.
As always, details on these items and many more are available from CoM’s “Daily Deals” page which starts right after the following jump.
At yesterday’s 2010 CTIA Wireless Show in Las Vegas, BlueAnt unveiled their latest iPhone-pairable Bluetooth headset, the T1.
The BlueAnt T1 is aimed less at your average desk jockey than, perhaps, the amorphously-envisaged NASA engineer testing shuttle engines in wind tunnels all day long. BlueAnt’s patented “Wind Armour Technology” promises to provide clear audio even in winds up to 22mph.
Otherwise, the T1’s sealed design promises to keep out dust and moisture, while removable silicon cases protect the headset from drops. Other features include automated caller announce, voice-controlled answering capabilties and A2DP support which will allow you to hear commands from your iPhone’s GPS software, if you’ve got it.
The BlueAnt T1 should be available in May for about $80.
In the wee hours of the morning, Nintendo very quietly announced the successor to its wildly successful line of Nintendo DS gaming handhelds: the Nintendo 3DS.
Following Nintendo’s recent trend of embracing bold and unconventional gaming hardware (e.g. the Nintendo Wii’s motion-sensing controls, or the original Nintendo DS’s dual screen / touchscreen approach) the 3DS, as its name implies, promises to bring full 3D without glasses to handheld gaming.
What’s of interest to the announcement for Apple fans, though, is the timing. Like many tech companies, Nintendo tends to announce its biggest products at industry events. The Nintendo DS is such a wild success for the company, they’d be sure to announce their follow-up handheld at a major expo, such as May’s E3 Expo.
Instead, though, Nintendo chose to announce the 3DS with a terse press release and a promise to give more details in May…. following right on the heels of a report that shows that the iPhone and iPod Touch have claimed 19% of the handheld gaming market from Nintendo, thanks to the App Store, in only 21 months.
This announcement has all the hallmarks of a hastily made pacifying gesture to Nintendo investors alarmed by Apple’s unexpected success in the handheld gaming market: “Don’t worry, we’re not resting on our laurels, we’ve got something new up our sleeves.”
I’m eagerly anticipating E3’s 3DS announcements. My guess is that the App Store has changed the mobile gaming development scene forever, and an integral part to Nintendo’s own strategy will be to extend their WiiWare downloadable games service to the 3DS while opening it up to public submissions.
It’s all fun and games until someone pokes their eye out with a pencil – or Apple focuses on the portable gaming market. That could be Sony and Nintendo’s thinking amid news that the iPhone and the iPod touch now have 19 percent of the market. Even worse for the gaming veterans: Apple saw 500 percent growth in gaming software revenue during an otherwise down market.
Apple had five percent of the revenue from U.S. video game software sales in 2009. While 5 percent doesn’t sound like much, its a 500 percent jump when compared to the one percent the Cupertino, Calif. company held in 2008.
No one here’s going to argue that the App Store can’t be arbitrary and borderline tyrannical… but you know, sometimes developers get what’s coming to them: Zits & Giggles, a high-brow dermatological simulator, has been pulled from the App Store after its creator, Tommy Refenes, told an audience at San Francisco’s Game Developer Conference that he “absolutely f***ing hate(s) the iPhone App Store.” And that f-bomb ain’t “fudge.”
Of course, there’s more to this than that. Refenes seems to have had an axe to grind with Apple, having raised Zits & Giggles price from $0.99 to $15.99 to $299.99 to $399.99 over a period of about six months. Shockingly, the app still managed to sell fourteen copies at the price of $299.99.
What was the point of all of this? To prove how crummy the App Store is because it’s not aimed at “real gamers,” apparently.
“My conclusion to all of this is that the people you’re selling games to on the App store, they’re not necessarily gamers. There are some games that sell very well on the App store, but for the most part, when you have stuff like Street Fighter and Assassin’s Creed, the are a way to sell a brand, just like the Tiger handhelds were,” said Refenes.
Something tells me that Apple couldn;t really care less about some punk kid mouthing off, and this is really about selling a zit-bursting simulator for more than the cost of a real-life visit to a dermatologist.
Whatever, though: I think this is one zit on Apple’s backside we’re all perfectly happy to see excised.
It’s not easy being Steve Jobs: one minute, you’re the guy behind the world’s most admired company, the next you’re about to become a pin cushion turning a profit for a journalist as a sitcom.
Still, no matter what you think of Jobs, it’s cool that every now and then he takes a few seconds to answer email from everyday users.
He seems to have been busy with a lot of his famous, less-than-a sentence replies lately, but his answer to an Italian blogger at The Apple Lounge may be the first one he’s sent using an iPad. (Up until March 20, he was still using 3.1.2 iPhone OS.)
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3wvMKKjxmA
Revolutionary Concepts (who also did the excellent port of the early 80s’ laser disc game Cobra Commandhave just released a trailer for their forthcoming iPhone game, Frogman.
Basically, take the gameplay of Konami’s classic coin-op arcade game Frogger, plop it in a bright, cartoony 3D world and turn the eponymous amphibian into a superhero whose origins owe as much to Seth Brundle as they do to Ben Edlund.
It looks fantastic: as the developers state, “[It’s] Frogger’s 3rd Cousin Twice Removed – on Steroids!” There’s even an iPad version coming. For guys like me, who always loved Frogger, but wanted more levels, this looks like just the ticket. Here’s hoping it hits the App Store soon.
Apple’s U.S. retail stores will again sell iPhones for full, unsubsidized pricing without requiring proof you’ve also bought a two-year AT&T contract. The full-priced iPhones will still remain locked to AT&T, Apple’s exclusive U.S. wireless carrier.
First announced internally on Monday, the Apple memo obtained by Gizmodo states “customers purchasing iPhone as device only at full price are no longer required to have an AT&T account or provide a form of ID.”
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpTCS3g-cBY
According to a long and enthusiastic press release (doubtlessly designed to bring as much attention to the approval process as possible), Opera has announced that they have submitted their Opera Mini browser to the App Store.
Although Apple often takes an unfavorable view upon applications which duplicate functionality of built-in iPhone apps, Opera thinks their Mini browser gets around the issue by refusing to execute code natively on the handset. Instead, it asks Opera’s servers to translate, optimize and render the data into a format that only the Opera Mini browser can understand.
The result? A browser that is supposedly up to five times faster than Mobile Safari, especially on EDGE.
Don’t fret, my little poppies. I know you want a new MacBook Pro, with one of Intel’s sexy new Core iX mobile processors fused to its circuit board cerebellum. Uncle Steve says not to worry. Literally. But reading between (or below, or above) Steve Jobs’ sole line of text commenting on the matter, it’s easy to guess that a hardware fresh of the MacBook line is coming soon.
According to MacRumors, MacBook Pro shipments have “abruptly” become constrained, which generally points to an imminent refresh.
Even better, one of their readers wrote to Mr. Jobs directly, expressing concerns about Apple’s recent focus on the iPad and the lack of news about MacBook Pro refreshes.
I recognise the need for secrecy etc but I am really losing heart in the lack of vision for the MBP and Mac Pros. Not expecting a response but as someone who has personally switched dozens of people onto the mac way this is a sad email for me to compose.
To this maudlin complaint, Jobs played the world’s smallest violin on one hand while typing this reply into his iPhone with the other.
Not to worry.
If you’re in the market for a new laptop, you might want to start saving up your lunch money.
