Apple’s next iPhone could be more powerful and arrive in limited numbers as soon as April, according to Tuesday reports. Although no name was leaked, the new handset would include a dual-core processor, an OLED display, improved graphics and a better camera.
Korean carrier KT will begin offering the fourth-generation iPhone in April to corporate customers as part of a “litmus test,” The Korean Times reports. The newspaper, quoting a “high-ranking KT executive”, said the handset would be distributed locally in June. Apple traditionally has unveiled new iPhones in late June or early July.
Has Apple become a vacuum for components, first cornering the market on flashmemory for its iPod and iPhone, and now emptying the shelves of OLED displays for its rumored tablet? That appears to be the implication from a report that the displays have nearly vanished. Apple “pre-ordered them all,” an anonymous designer recently complained.
OLED displays are popular with manufacturers because they eliminate the need for backlighting a display. They also consume less energy, which equals longer battery life and offer owners a better picture, a feature needed for video or reading. Although Google’s Nexus One and Microsoft’s Zune HD also use OLED displays, a report points the finger at Apple because the shortage is in 10.1-inch OLED displays. Apple’s tablet device reportedly uses a 10.1-inch display.
While smartphones have certainly upped their resolutions in recent months, Apple’s iPhone line doesn’t usually garner negative reviews based upon the quality of their display panels, at least as far as their accuracy is concerned. The guys at MOTO Labs have come up with an easily reproducible DIY test that anyone can do to see exactly how accurate their smartphone’s touchscreen is. No surprise here: the iPhone’s is best of class, when compared to the HTC Nexus One, the Motorola Droid and the HTC Droid Eris.
The test works like this: opening a drawing program on your smartphone and slowly draw a grid of intersecting diagonal lines across the touchscreen with your finger. If the lines are smooth, the engineers of the smartphone have managed to seamlessly integrate the hardware components and software of the touchscreen display; if they are jagged, something’s off.
According to MOTO Labs, you need to go slowly because “on inferior touchscreens, it’s basically impossible to draw straight lines. Instead, the lines look jagged or zig-zag, no matter how slowly you go, because the sensor size is too big, the touch-sampling rate is too low, and/or the algorithms that convert gestures into images are too non-linear to faithfully represent user inputs.”
This is, of course, hardly a scientific test, but it’s hard to look at the comparison images between, say, the iPhone and the Motorola Droid and not see a major discrepancy in terms of quality. Apple’s flawless implementation of reliable touchscreen displays in the iPhone line is certainly a feather in their cap compared to the competition, and a great example of just how hard Cupertino works to get the details just right.
Apple announced it will release its earnings for the fiscal first quarter of 2010 on Jan. 25, two days prior to when many expect the Cupertino, Calif. company could introduce a long-rumored tablet device. The earnings report could be $11.98 billion, nearly 18 percent above last year’s.
Apple had suggested revenue for the three-month period ended Dec. 27, 2009 could range between $11.3 billion and $11.6 billion. The company often announces a conservative guidance figure ahead of actual earnings.
Over the weekend, the New York Times claimed that word from several inside sources indicated that the new Apple Tablet would have a multi-touch interfaces that required a “somewhat complex new vocabulary of finger gestures…. making use of technology [Apple] acquired in the 2007 purchase of a company called FingerWorks.”
It appears that the New York Times might have managed to pinch zoom right over the truth of the technology behind Apple’s latest product: a couple days later, and Fingerworks.com has quietly been shuttered.
Stéphane Richard, the CEO Delegate of Orange.fr has seemingly confirmed the forthcoming announcement of the much anticipated Apple Tablet in response to questions posed to him by journalist Jean Pierre Elkabbach of Radio Europe 1… but the whole interview could just as easily be the mindless corporate boasting of a mouthpiece not really listening to the question.
This video is all over Twitter this morning, and you can see why.
Never mind a rotating Lego iPhone dock – here’s one with added steering wheel, so you can use it to play all your fave tilt-to-steer racing games.
Expect crappy plastic versions of this to appear pretty much everywhere in the coming months, all of them priced 20 bucks and none of them any good. If you really want one, build your own.
At CES, Toffee cofounder Natasha Sullivan (left) and Tegan Ledford show off one of the company's popular leather briefcases. The lightweight briefcase has a pair of retractable handles and elastic straps inside to hold the MacBook in place.
LAS VEGAS — I’ve never paid much attention to laptop sleeves, but as they get fancier and fancier, they are becoming perhaps the most popular MacBook accessory out there.
At least, that’s according to one high-end sleeve and case maker from Australia.
LAS VEGAS – Pineapple Electronics’ Rumble KW Headphones have an unusual design, which makes them 100 percent waterproof. Unlike most other earbuds, the Rumble KW Headphones are good for swimming laps, snorkeling, or just taking a shower.
The in-ear style buds create sound not through sound waves, like traditional headphones and earbuds, but through bone conduction. The Rumble KWs vibrate bones in the listener’s skull, creating sound in the inner-ear.
“See, it has no holes whatsoever,” said Pineapple’s Philip Kye, as the Rumble Headphones played in a glass of water.
On the show floor of CES, the KW’s sibling headphones — Pineapple’s Rumble K Headphones, which aren’t waterproof — sounded pretty good, if a little muddy. The bass is outstanding, and they create a freaky buzzing and thumping in your ear.”The technology is tuned for lower frequencies, more bass,” Kye said.
The KWs are limited to 100 decibels, so can’t damage the listener’s hearing. They seemed well-suited for gaming — or listening to music while cleaning the hull of a boat.
LAS VEGAS — Out of the seven (!!) new Cyber-shot models on display at the sprawling Sony “booth,” the two at the very top end grabbed my attention and shook it vigorously. The 14mp, $400 DSC-TX7 and the 10mp, $350 DSC-HX5 are quite different from each other, but share four really cool features.
Speakerball, anyone? The G-Note 14's wireless speakers.
LAS VEGAS — I’d never heard of Florida-based Augen before running into the tiny, gadget-strewn booth at this year’s CES.
That’s because, says VP of Product Dev Daniel Gofman, they’ve been working to produce tech for other companies the last few years; 2010’s CES marks the first year they’re striking out on their own into the already over-saturated iPod/iPhone dock market. But Augen has a trick or three up their sleeves worth looking at.
LAS VEGAS — The iTamtam is perhaps the strangest iPod dock yet conceived — but also the most practical. It’s a sturdy iPod speaker that doubles as a stool. It is based on a famous stool from the sixties that’s now featured in the Museum of Modern Art.
“It’s a speaker you can sit on,” said Patrick Parma, a spokesman for Branex Design, the Parisian firm that holds the rights for the Tam Tam stool.
The seat was updated as a speaker for its 40th anniversary. Called the iTamtam, the speaker/stool has an iPod/iPhone dock on top and a pair of 25-watt speakers built under the seat.
Model Nicola Gigante shows off one of Deos's Swarovski Crystal-covered earbud covers.
Apple’s iPod earbuds are the next earring, says Deos, a New York jewelery company which makes crystal covers for the ubiquitous white earbuds.
“Coming from the fashion business, we asked ourselves: ‘What is the next earring?” said Deos partner Charles Siebenberg.
“This is the next earring,” he said, holding up a pair of white earbuds.
Encrusted in Swarovski Crystals, the $98 earbud covers snap right on the earbud speaker housing. Each pair has more than 200 Swarovski Elements and is available in solid colors, floating colors (gradient mixed) and patterns.
As well as Swarovski crystals, the company also sells covers with Swarovski Crystal cuffs, and covers made from diamond and titanium, aluminum, and sports silicone.
Ivyskin's Federa Hedayatnia with the SmartCase. The iPhone case has a removable backplate that can be swapped for a rechargeable battery or a card carrier.
Of all the cases at CES, Ivyskin’s SmartCase looked to be one of the best. Made from tough polycarbonate in a range of colors, the SmartCase is a nice-looking iPhone/iPod case with a removable back plate that can be swapped out for an interchangeable battery pack (hit the jump for more photos of Ivskin’s Federa Hedayatnia showing how it works).
We start the week with deals for taking images and then storing your important data. When digital cameras appeared, we thought it could sound the death knell for single-lens reflex units that were a step up from single point-and-shoot devices. However, we now see a resurgence in SLRs, reborn for the digital age. One example is Nikon. We take a look at the Nikon D3000 which couples the ease of digital with the flexibility of the company’s famous Nikkor lenses. As digital content grows, we find even 200GB hard drives bursting at the seams. An increasingly common solution is external hard drives. Whether you just want to store your family pics or archive an avalanche of important financial documents, we check out two drives from both ends of that spectrum: the ‘disaster-proof’ 2TB ioSafe Solo and the convenient home Western Digital My Book.
For details on these and many more items, check out CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.
Computing legend and former Apple Fellow Alan Kay has kindly written a detailed note explaining a comment he made at CES, facetiously reported here. Looking for a newsy nugget from Kay’s complex talk, I was trying to make a joke about something profound being revealed at the CES gadget orgy. (“We all thought it was pretty funny too,” said Kay in a separate email).
Kay’s note explains a comment he made about the logical expression NOT BOTH underlying all human thinking.
“What I said was that all human symbol/logical REPRESENTATION systems and all computers past present and future can be made from NOT BOTH,” Kay says.
The iTunes App Store approval process is infamous for its impenetrability, its arbitrariness and its Leviathan-like slowness to move. Yet Apple’s been remarkably good about improving the App Store approval process in recent months: sure, apps are rejected as arbitrarily as ever, but recent changes to iTunes Connect have made figuring out just how far through the process an app is to approval or rejection far more transparent. But if recent dev reports are anything to go by, Apple might have also managed to improve approval times as well.
According to some of the developers quoted by TUAW, Apple has significantly improved the turnaround time of app approval. In fact, some of the new turnaround times border on the preternatural. Consider Atomic Cactus’ anecdote:
I’m a developer behind Atomic Cactus, we have 3 games currently in the app store, and they all took approximately 2-3 weeks to get approved. Today at 4:00 am I submitted for approval our latest app, which isn’t exactly a “fart app” (it’s a pretty polished puzzle game with OpenFeint). As of 1:30 pm today, the app is in the app store.
In other words, Atomic Cactus submitted an app and had it approved in a little under ten hours. Amazing, and heartening to hear if true! Any app developers out there able to confirm or deny an improvement in App Store turnaround time? Let us know in the comments.
In a profile piece on the sudden surge of “slate-like” tablet computers that took CES by storm (which, with few exceptions, already managed to seem like also-rans compared to Apple’s still unannounced and unreleased tablet), the New York Times claims that Apple has been working on a multi-touch capable version of the iWork suite for the last few years.
That’s interesting, no doubt, but the New York Times goes on. According to the newspaper, “conversations with several former Apple engineers” who claim to have had a role in the creation of the device, the Apple Tablet’s multi-touch interface requires a “somewhat complex new vocabulary of finger gestures to control it, making use of technology it acquired in the 2007
purchase of a company called FingerWorks.” Sound familar?
Google’s Nexus One, the Internet giant’s first entry into the self-branded cell phone arena, costs $174.15 to build, making it just slightly more expensive that its rival from Apple, the iPhone, according to a Monday report. The figure from iSuppli also indicates the build price of the Google handset is just $5 under the subsidized $179 customers pay for the device when agreeing to a two-year T-Mobile contract.
The Nexus One retails for $529 if purchased unlocked and without a carrier’s contract.
41,090 finger strokes later, Croop hangs iPhone painting "My Living Room" at the Dairy Center gallery. @Deb Sanders
Back in 2008, after looking at photographer Russ Croop’s paintings ably done using the NetSketch and Brushes apps on his iPhone, we wondered how long it would take before this form of fancy finger work hung in art galleries. (An exhibit of fellow fingerpainter Matthew Watkins took place at an Italian Apple reseller in September).
Fast forward 13 months: Croop has a one-man show of 15 works called “Painting Through a Keyhole: the iPhone as Canvas” at the The Dairy Center for the Arts in Boulder, Colorado until February, 12, 2010 and participated in the international offerings at “iPhone Therefore I Am” at the Chicago Art Department that also launched Jan. 8.
iPhone art appreciation at the Boulder gallery. @Deb Sanders.
Cult of Mac talked to Croop about how he got from iPhone touchscreen to art gallery, the mistakes he made — that every iPhone artist should avoid — and the misunderstandings most gallery goers have when they see his work.
CoM: How did the show come about?
Russ Croop:
The Dairy Center for the Arts has three galleries and hosts different art shows almost every month…It’s supposed to be a pretty exacting juried selection process with several judges from different disciplines. They use a high-tech projector system that times each image so every picture gets equal billing. I submited my iPhone paintings last April 2009 and didn’t find out that I was selected until October 2009.
CoM: How did you decide on the title and theme?
RC: I often compare creating art on the iPhone to painting through a keyhole because when you zoom in to add detail, you can only see a small portion of the “canvas.” This is especially true when using NetSketch.
For Apple fans abroad, the price discrepancy between between the cost of an Apple computer locally and what it would cost in the States is often enough to justify a flight to the States. In first class. On a chartered Gulfstream jet. Loaded as cargo in the belly of an Anatov An-225.
Fine. I’ll cop to the slightest of exaggerations. But as an American living abroad, paid in dollars but doing business in Euros, the 40% premium on the cost of a new MacBook Pro or iMac is enough, sometimes, to make me want to weep. Apple’s not alone in this: across the board, gadget makers releasing their products in the EU set a MSRP assuming a dollar-to-euro exchange rate of 1 to 1…. even when, in reality, the actual exchange rate is 1 to 1.45. There’s optimistic ways to look at it, of course — commit to buying that new MacBook Pro I have my heart set on for its euro price but in the States, and I get a trip home “for free.” But this is meager comfort: in reality, it often feels like the low prices of gadgets in America and Japan are subsidized by the exorbitant markups people pay for their technology in the rest of the world.
Don’t believe me? Check out this helpful infographic over at CMYPlay, which colorfully and informatively breaks down the price discrepancies between the same model of MacBook Pro over a handful of countries. At the end of the day, the average Brazilian spends enough in local currency for one MacBook Pro that he could pick up two of the same model if he bought it in the States. It’s almost enough to make a native Brazilian woe the day he was born in that bright, sunny paradise of plump, bethonged bikini bottoms.
As equally tenuous a confirmation of last week’s Wall Street Journal report that the Apple Tablet’s enclosure would be made of a very Mac-conventional material indeed, this Reuters report, which says that the Apple Tablet will be a brushed aluminum unibody affair, and ship in Q2 of 2010.
Apple owns a not-unsubstantial chunk of graphics chip manufacturer Imagination Technologies, which makes their newly announced mobile GPU, the PowerVR SGX545, of interest to me and you, my fellow iPhone droogies. After all, this could be the graphics chip that will pump out the polygons come June’s iPhone 4G.
And what a nice chip it is. The HD-capable PowerVR SGX545 adds full support for OpenGL 3.2 and OpenCL 1.0, and is specced to deliver real-world performance of 40 million polygons per second at 200MHz.
The iPhone is currently at a disadvantage to handsets like the Motorola Droid or the HTC Nexus One, at least as far as screen resolution is concerned. It stands to reason that Apple will attempt to improve the iPhone’s current maximum resolution of 320×480 by incorporating a HD-capable GPU. In fact, given Apple’s tendency to distinguish each new iPhone model with a short acronym, it wouldn’t be surprising if the next iPhone was christened the iPhone HD. A chip as the PowerVR SGX545 would be a perfect fit for such a phone.
In fact, outside of the obvious Apple ownership connection, there’s plenty of reason to believe that upcoming iPhone and iPod Touch hardware refreshes will contain the PowerVR SGX545, given the PowerVR SGX536 chip firing all synapses inside the black plastic brainpan of the iPhone 3Gs.
Then again, Imagination Technologies is doing a lot of boasting about the SGX545’s DirectX 10.1 support, so perhaps, horror of horrors, what we’re really looking at here is a Windows Mobile GPU.
