Will the iPad do something iTunes and the App Store so far haven’t: become significant money-makers for Apple? Nearly a third of the iPad’s revenue will come from content sales, one analyst said Tuesday.
When the iPhone was first released in China last year in partnership with China Unicom, it confusingly shipped with 3G but without WiFi.
The reason for the omission, of course, had to do with government censorship: the Chinese government’s Golden Shield Project requires wireless Internet devices to use China’s own WAPI standard, and up until recently, you had to choose between WAPI and WiFi.
That strange and arbitrary rule was actually changed before the Chinese iPhone was released, but by that point, Apple had already redesigned their handset to conform to the previous GSP regulation.
Luckily, it looks like Chinese iPhone owners will be getting WiFi soon. According to Silicon Alley Insider, Unicom Chief Executive Chang Xiaobing is saying that WiFi-enabled iPhones will be coming to his telecom’s customers soon. Existing customers will be compensated for their WiFi-less troubles… a compensation which will probably involve expanded use of Unicom’s 3G network.
It’s excellent news for legit Chinese customers… but with the Hong Kong iPhone black market still thriving, it’s unlikely to make the iPhone the success in China that it is in the rest of the world.
The lawsuit Apple filed against HTC last week was just a public ‘warning shot’ across the bow of handset makers in an effort begun early last year to thwart the rise of potential iPhone killers, an analyst told investors Tuesday. Apple’s intimidation seems to be working. Rivals are returning to the drawing board to find work-arounds and a better response to the Apple smartphone.
“Lawyers are redoubling efforts to gauge potential defensive and offensive responses,” said Oppenheimer analyst Yair Reiner. Apple’s warnings “are meaningfully disrupting the development roadmaps for would-be iPhone killers,” he adds.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLZRNVzKGAQ
This iPhone 3Gs video camera stabilizer is probably too extreme a DIY project for anyone to actually carry out, but if you choose to brave Google Translate’s gobbledygooked English translation ofthese Japanese instructions, you should be able to get the jist and make your very own iPhone steadicam… just the thing to make your own backyard Evil Dead remake.
Yesterday, Valve yawned open its PR orifice and finally confirmed the huge Mac gaming development that everyone already knew was coming: they’re bringing the Steam digital delivery service to OS X. Today, from that same orifice, we have more details, including the games we can expect to see released next month.
“Steam and Valve’s library of games including Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series will be available in April,” the company has confirmed.
Even better? As hinted, you’ll be able to use the same product key to download and play both PC and Mac versions of the same title.
“Steamworks for the Mac supports all of the Steamworks APIs, and we have added a new feature, called Steam Play, which allows customers who purchase the product for the Mac or Windows to play on the other platform free of charge,” says the company.
A small bit, this, but almost totally unprecedented in Mac gaming, where ports of PC titles inevitably require a separate purchase. Also nearly unprecedented: Mac and Windows players will both be part of the same multiplayer universe, which means they’ll be able to play on the same servers.
Even better news? Valve has said that they’re treating the Mac as a “Tier 1” platform, which means that, from now on, the company will release its own games at the same time as on the PC and Xbox 360. Portal 2 will be the first game to be released simultaneously on the Mac, PC and 360.
Of course, there’s a lot up in the air here… Steam’s not just about Valve games, and if other companies don’t start releasing native ports for OS X (as opposed to the cheap and sluggish practice of dropping them in DirectX wrappers and slapping a $50 price tag on the resulting .DMG), Steam for Mac will never get more traction. Let’s hope Valve’s investment into OS X finally convinces game developers to embrace the fastest growing home computing market out there.
Here’s Homer Simpson’s iPhone. Pretty dull, actually. Only one page of apps, and most of them look like the defaults. No iFart? No iBeer? No iDoh?
Wait – what’s that app there? Third row down, third from left?
Ah! Couch Gag! Yeah, one of my favorite apps.
Funny, it never does that when I use it.
After Street Fighter, Tekken’s one of the biggest fighting game franchises around. It’s no surprise, then, that the iconic Namco brawler would be quick to follow Capcom’s Street Fighter IV as an iPhone-specific port.
There’s nothing official yet, but according to Pocket Gamer, an anonymous source has told them that iPhone and iPod Touch owners can expect the Iron Fist Tournament to come to their handhelds soon.
Of course, when “soon” is is still very much up in the air, although it is apparently in the final phases of development. Hopefully, Namco will figure out a less obtrusive control scheme for Tekken than the Street Fighter IV‘s fighter-obscuring overlays.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is today’s Best Thing Ever.
Panic are the people who make fabulous Mac software like FTP client Transmit and web dev box-of-tricks Coda.
Now they’ve made their own status board – it’s a monitor hung on the wall, displaying an internal web page that aggregates stuff from different sources and displays it beautifully.
One of the things on there is tweets sent @panic – so while you’re watching them and saying how amazing their status board is, they’re watching you right back.
Thank you, Panic, for brightening up the internet this morning.
(Via Gruber and Hacker News.)
It’s Hanukkah come early! Well, not really, but Canon’s fresh new instant rebate sale may have you itching to light up that menorah!
Most likely a response to Nikon’s recently announced instant rebate sale, Canon’s sale is actually pretty impressive. They’ve definitely got Nikon beat in the sheer variety of lenses that qualify for the instant rebate, and they are even including two flashes in the lineup.
So if you’ve been itching for some new Canon gear, now has just become an excellent time to start scratching. You have until April 3rd to cash in on any of the rebate options below.
We start the week with a deal on the iPod touch, starting at $139 for an 8GB first-generation MP3 player.Also on tap today is a new batch of App Store freebies, including “Big Brain on Fire,” which is described as a rhythm-based puzzle. Last on your top trio is Text Soap 6, a Mac application that transforms your text.
As always, details on these and other bargains are available on CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.
Apple has begun cracking down on App Store developers hawking ‘cook-cutter’ applications with little or no advantage over similar Web-based apps, according to a Monday report. The tighter requirements are likely designed to ensure App Store offerings are unique to competitors.
“Last month or so [Apple] has started cracking down on basic applications that are little more than RSS feeds or glorified business cards,” TechCrunch writes.
Along with a glimpse of Apple CEO Steve Jobs attending Sunday’s Oscars, viewers may also have seen the first public shots fired in the ebook pricing wars between the Cupertino, Calif. company and online retail goliath Amazon. The 30-second commercial included several best-sellers appearing on the iPad’s iBookstore and at prices spanning $7.99 to $14.99.
Sen. Edward Kennedy’s “True Compass: A Memoir” had a $14.99 iBookstore price, lower than the $19.25 Amazon charges Kindle e-book readers. However, both the $12.99 price for the iBookstore version of James Patterson’s “I, Alex Cross” and $7.99 iBookstore version of “Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Journey to Change the World…One Child at a Time” by Greg Mortensen and David Oliver Relin were higher than Amazon: $9.99 and $7.19, respectively.
Well, it looks like it’s official: after accidentally leaking the existence of a Mac client in their latest beta, and teasing the same in a series of hysterical promotional images, Valve has announced that the Steam games delivery service will indeed be coming to OS X… along with the sequel to their nabacularly terrific teleportation puzzler, Portal.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGEcYtVBxGc&feature=player_embedded
On Friday, we mused about what would happen if Old Spice’s “I’m On A Horse” campaign was applied to Apple’s products… which seemed ridiculous enough a suggestion at the time, but if the recent Oscar Night iPad spot is anything to go by, maybe Apple decided to go just that route.
After all, slowed down by 15% and annotated by Neil Curtis, the iPad spot is just as surreal as the Old Spice ad. In fact, it is rife with goofs, most notably multitouch interactions that have little to no bearing to what the model is doing on screen. As for that iPad model, s/he is practically the Orlando of Apple spots, transmutating from female to male to female again over the course of the ad… all the while magically warping in and out of different pairs of pants.
It’s a bit strange to see a company as detail-obsessed as Apple make so many careless little mistakes… but you’d be hard pressed to catch any of these gaffes at regular speed. It just goes to show that as nitpicky as Jobs can be, the collected Internet will always one-up him.
[via Crunchgear]
If you are diminutive in stature, the best way to boost your ego is to stand next to an even shorter person. In the world of finance, you compare a not-so bad quarter against a real stinker. Such sleight-of-hand translates into exceeding Wall Street comparisons. That is what’s happening with Mac sales for February 2010 compared to February 2009, when sales dropped 16 percent.
“We expect the strong (year-over-year) growth in NPD data that we saw (in January) to continue in the month of (February),” analyst Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray said Monday.
You’re probably already familiar with Vers’ signature line of wooden cases for the iPhone and iPod Touch. No surprise in the wake of the iPad’s announcement, then, that they have just announced a new wooden iPad Case, which (for $80) will ensconce your tablet in dead cedar flesh.
It looks pretty good, and I like the built-in kickstand, but personally, I’ve never quite understood the appeal of wooden casesl, but that might have more to do with my hysterical phobia of slicing a splinter through the fleshy web between my thumb and forefinger than any real failure of the concept.
A few short months ago, the Kindle seemed completely unassailable. While Amazon’s e-reader was hardly a tech revelation, before the iPad, it didn’t need to be: Amazon’s gigantic e-book store engorged with millions of $9.99 titles and free online connectivity through Whispernet was a huge wager that other companies struggled to meet.
In the wake of the iPad, though, the Kindle’s prospects look bleak. Before they’ve even released it, the iPad has managed to slaughter the Kindle in the eyes of the gadget-buying product. Case in point: ChangeWave Research has surveyed 3,171 consumers about their e-readers, and 27% say they’d rather have picked up an iPad… if it had been available at the time they picked up their original e-reader.
It’s a hypothetical exercise, of course: — despite the headlines on some blogs, those surveyed aren’t saying they would have waited for the iPad — but it’s still impressive that Apple has managed to impress so many existing Kindle owners with a device that costs more in both initial expenditure and e-reading upkeep in every way. But it’s also unsurprising: just like the iPod made all other MP3 players on the market look like antediluvian crapgets, the iPad’s done the same to e-readers.
In his emails to Apple customers who take the time to write him and ask him questions, Steve Jobs usually comes across as a really busy guy who, despite his workload, is really trying his best to maintain a human, one-on-one connection to his customers.
On some other occasions, though, Jobs will occasionally comes across as a devastating master of pith, capable of infusing a few matter-of-fact words with a palpably scornful undercurrent, as if — if he wasn’t just so darn busy all the time — he might instead muse for a few hundred words on just what it must be like to be as stupid as the quivering, moronic biomass to which he must deign to pander… and of which his correspondent is just one molecularly small part.
Whether the specific email from Jobs that is the subject of this post comes across as the former type of Jobsian communiqué or the latter is up to you. Either way, it contains at least one new bit of information about the iPad: you won’t be able to tether it to your iPhone.
Apple just premiered the very first iPad commercial during the first ad break of tonight’s Academy Awards. It was very good, just a rock song and demoing every imaginable feature while continually rotating from portrait to landscape. We’ll post as soon as Apple or Youtube does. Embed from Engadget now in post. Real Apple version here.
Thanks for the finds, Mitchell and Paolo!
Edit: And CNET caught Steve Jobs on the red carpet.
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 Angry Birds, Bloom, FallDown!, Icy Escort, RandomPlay, Sir Revs-a-Lot, SteamPunk Hockey, Vector Runner
Design collective Quirky just launched this earbud detangler that looks like a pocket protector for the aughts.
Cute, colorful and just $5, Wrapster is made out of bendable rubber. It keeps your wires uncrossed when you’re wearing an iPod and stores them when you’re not.
Perhaps if nerds start wearing what look like 4-inch safety scissors in their front pockets, those annoying co-workers who waste their time with questions like “How do I clear cookies from Firefox?” will start running for cover.
The Italian priest who launched prayer app iBreviary has now slashed the price from $0.99 to gratis.
Given the popularity of the app, Don Paolo Padrini decided to give the current version away for free. (Profits from the app previously went to refurbishing a parish shelter.)
Available in English, French, Spanish, Italian, Latin and an Ambrosian Rite version (for mobile Milanese), this virtual breviary, or book of hours, gives the morning prayer, evening prayer and night prayer or complines for the day. It is the first app of its kind to obtain approval from the Vatican.
As a paid app, it was in the top 100 of its category (reference) beating out similar mobile prayer helpers like iPieta and iMissal.
What’s next? Don Padrini tells us his developers are hard at work on an iPad version they hope will be ready to launch when the new device hits stores in March.
Have you ever been in this predicament: you’re on the road with your laptop and you want to listen to some tunes, but don’t want to haul out the external speakers that will give justice to your music? Or, maybe you are traveling and all you have is the laptop’s built-in speakers? Why compromise between between good sound and convenience? Logitech has introduced the perfect middle-ground: laptop speakers that easily attach to the screen of your laptop or netbook.
The Laptop Speaker z205 (pictured) is just 1.35 inches thick and 2.5 inches tall. But good things come in small packages. The $39.99 unit includes two high-performance drivers, built-in amp and an acoustically-tuned enclosure for “superior audio quality,” Logitech claims.
We close out another week with a trio of hardware deals. In the spotlight is a deal on 3.06GHz 22-inch iMacs from ExperCom. The desktop computers are outfitted with 8GB of RAM and AppleCare for $1,399. (There are other iMacs available in today’s deals.) Also on tap: MacBook Pro laptops, starting at $849. We round out our top trio with deals on Mac Pro Xeon workstations starting at $2,149 for a 2.66GHz model.
Along the way, we check out a new crop of App Store freebies, including the game “Scoops – Ice Cream Fun for Everyone.” In addition, we take a look at some storage options and new bargains on Mac software.
As always, details on these and many other items, are available on CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.
Speculation over whether or not Verizon will get a contract to sell the iPhone is pointless. But no matter the outcome, Apple is on track to sell at least 35 million of the iconic handsets in 2011, an analyst told investors Friday.
Merrill Lynch analyst Scott Craig said selling 33 million iPhones this year is “basically achievable” this year, no matter if Verizon becomes the second handset carrier this year or AT&T remains Apple’s exclusive carrier throughout the remainder of 2010.
