Cult of Mac

The camera in the iPhone is pretty crummy, even when compared to the constabulary of terrible camera sensors installed in other smartphones. When the iPhone 3G came out with a 2-megapixel camera provided by Aptina, the competition was boasting 3.2MP, and when the iPhone 3Gs matched that ante thanks to a sensor from OmniVision, other phones raised the bet to 5.

So there’s reason to believe a report from Taiwan’s Digitimes that Apple’s forthcoming iPhone will again boost its megapixels to match the likes of the Motorola DROID, which has a 5MP sensor. According to their sources, OmniVision is set to supply a 5-megapixel camera for the next-generation iPhone, due to arrive in the second half of next year.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql0V4SNt-c4&feature=player_embedded

With yesterday’s release-then-nearly-instantaneous-pull of the Nescaline NES emulator, the message should be clear: jailbreaking is the only real option for iPhone emulation enthusiasts. Good news, then, for jailbreakers: ZodTTD has has released the Nintendo 64 emulator N64iPhone through Cydia just in time for Christmas, with one killer little feature… Wiimote support through Bluetooth pairing.

Emulation tends to be slow on less beefy hardware, and it doesn’t look as though N64iPhone manages to defy expectations in that regard: even when using the Wiimote, the emulator appears tricky to control, with notable slowdowns. Still, at least it’s working. Heck, at least it’s real, unlike the last N64 emulator we wrote about, which turned out to just be a clever video.

If you can deal with slowdowns and convoluted controls in your quest for mobile Metroid Prime, you can download N64iPhone through Cydia for just $2.50.

Apple’s iPhone 3G garnered 4 percent of U.S. cell phone subscribers in 2009, ranking No. 1 in single handset models, according to an Internet research firm. The iPhone beat the RIM BlackBerry and Motorola RAZR, which placed 2nd and 3rd.

Apple may be preparing to sell up to 45 million iPhones in 2010, according to suppliers. The orders for an upgraded iPhone camera would double those expected for 2009. The news appears to coincide with other reports that Apple may introduce a new iPhone in mid-2010.

“OmniVision Technologies is expected to see CMOS image sensor orders for Apple’s iPhone devices grow to 40-45 million units in 2010,” according to industry sources cited by DigiTimes. The orders for a 5-megapixel sensor may be a response to Verizon’s Droid and Google’s Nexus One handsets which both have more sensitive cameras than the iPhone 3GS’ 3.2 megapixel camera. OmniVision supplied the iPhone 3GS 3.2 megapixel image sensor.

At this point, it’s not really surprising that the iPhone 3Gs’ graphics are capable of pumping out the polygons needed to bring a sophisticated 3D engine to the handset, but it’s still wonderful to watch Epic Games’ Mark Rein play Unreal Tournament deathmatch on his third generation iPod Touch. You can see a video of it in action after the jump.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4IjeO7g6kA
If you’re not sold on the freshmen  augmented reality apps available for the iPhone, this one probably won’t change your mind.

With it, you launch a simulated iPhone on your iPhone screen. Then you can zoom your virtual iPhone or spin it around and run other apps on it. The virtual “apps” aren’t real applications but the effect is suitably trippy nonetheless.

Developed by Ogmento for Orange Telecom Israel to generate interest for the iPhone launch there, it’s not available to the general public.

Useless? Pretty much. But sort of an Escher for the digital age.

Via Mashable

An iPhone price war currently underway in France may be our first glimpse of what we can expect if, as rumored, AT&T’s exclusivity deal with Apple runs out next year, and the iPhone comes to other carriers.

Flickr user raneko (who is no stranger to regular Cult readers) has just uploaded a bunch of fantastic photos of Apple mice through the ages.

Tis the holiday season and we want to give your iPhone a present. Star Walk, my childhood dream of an iPhone app, has given us 5 codes to give away to Cult of Mac Twitter followers.

Send us a tweet on Twitter with your favorite night sky memory by December 23rd at 2 p.m. PST and we’ll pick a winner at random. You must include @cultofmac in your tweet to be counted in the contest.

Here’s an example: “I remember driving through West Texas at night and softly weeping at the vastness of space @cultofmac”

Get creative even though we’re selecting at random. You can pick up Star Walk, the iPhone astronomy app, from iTunes for $2.99.

With just days before Christmas, we highlight three Mac deals for the harried, last-minute holiday shopper. If you have an iPod on your list, but you don’t want to cross that mystical $100 barrier, Apple still has 8GB iPod nanos for just $99. Not often does shipping make it into the headlines, but as retailers pull out all the stops to attract online sales, Apple still has free next-day delivery. But hurry – 1pm EST Wednesday is the deadline. Last on our top trio seems perfect for all those iPhone owners out there: 80 percent off select cases for the Apple handset. (We also have a 50% off deal for iPod touch owners.)

Along the way, we have deals on a skin for the Nike+ iPod running sensor, the latest batch of App Store price drops and more software for your iPhone or iPod touch. For details on these and many more bargains, check out CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the break.

One of the features I loved from the first moment I saw it in Windows 7 was Snap, the one that lets you instantly resize any document window by dragging it to one side of your screen.

Irradiated Software makes a Mac utility that does a similar job. It’s called Sizeup, and I find it pretty useful. But it’s keyboard-controlled, not mouse-controlled, and you have to remember some new shortcuts to get the most from it. How about a mouse-controlled alternative?

Enter Cinch, a new app from the Sizeup developers.

A word to drivers down under: make sure your license and registration are up to date.

Police in Tasmania are using iPhones to snap plates, relay the pics to a database of unregistered vehicles and unlicensed and disqualified drivers via an app developed for the department.

In just 10 days of operation,  the app has outed 167 unregistered vehicles and caught 107 disqualified or unregistered drivers, the Mercury reports. Formerly, officers had to radio in the information and wait for a co-worker to check.

Within the first 10 minutes of trying it out, police pulled up alongside a car at a traffic light ran the app and found the car was unregistered. They pulled over the car, found the driver was also without a license and drugs in the car, too.

The app, designed by the Tasmania police department, is also used by motorcycle cops.

Via Mac Daily News

A federal judge Tuesday dismissed a liability lawsuit against Apple, just hours after the Cupertino, Calif. company released a firmware update claiming to cure complaints about the iMacs screen. The lawsuit, which potentially could have become a class action, claimed Apple knowingly sold the allegedly defective computers.

While the lawsuit was dismissed as being too broad, Judge Jeremy Fogel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled the claim could be resubmitted to add more detail, thus reducing the suit’s scope, reports said. Apple “internally recognizes and concedes” the defect without alerting consumers, the lawsuit alleged.

Belkin’s latest dongle — the tiny little Bluetooth Music Receiver — is a cute little gadget: it streams music from your iPhone or iPod Touch to any stereo thanks to the magic of A2DP.

It’s simplicity itself. All you do is plug the glowing, cycloptic dongle into your stereo, either through the 3.5mm headphone jack or using your stereo’s RCA cables. Once that’s done, you pair it with your iPhone, iPod Touch, or other A2DP-compatible PMP, and you’re good to stream music to your stereo from up to 33 feet away whenever you want. It’ll even remember six different devices.

For $50, it’s not a bad buy, although I can’t imagine I’ll take the plunge: 33 feet isn’t very far, and I figure Apple has got to get around to letting me stream my iPhone’s music to my Airport Express network through WiFi one of these days.

“Methinks AT&T doth protest too much,” might have been Hamlet’s response to the carrier again denying it will institute data tiers for iPhone users. Attempting to avoid a storm of protests over earlier comments, AT&T Mobility President Ralph de la Vega now tells BusinessWeek: “I guess I should have been more clear.”

The comment was the second in one week by de la Vega concerning a Dec. 9 AP report quoting the AT&T exec mentioning incentives for iPhone owners to “reduce or modify their usage.” AT&T has said iPhone owners use 40 percent of the carrier’s network capacity despite their being just three percent of smartphone users.

The iPod is always a tricky thing to manipulate in this chapping, frostbiting weather. In the December wind, the hand freezes quickly in a contorted, blue-skinned claw around the iPod Classic; fingers pressed against the iPhone’s frigid touchscreen tend to break off like icicles at the tips.

For iPod manipulation in these hypothermic months, then, a solution, courtesy of alpine gear makers, The North Face. They’ve just introduced two new jackets — the Hustle Audio Jacket for guys, the Femphonic Audio Jacket for women — which builds an iPod remote right into the sleeves. You can change tracks, play, pause and wiggle the volume around without once exposing your fingers to the ice-fanged bite of the season.

North Face jackets tend to be expensive, so you can expect to pay $350 for both the Hustle and Femphonic audio jackets, but while that’s a couple hundred dollars more than what you can theoretically buy an off-brand winter coat for, it’s only a $50 premium over North Face’s usual coat prices.

Canadian researchers have developed an add-on that makes iPods easy to use for people with disabilities.

Called the CanPlay podWiz, it lets users control off-the-shelf Apple iPod Nanos by using knuckles, jaw muscles and voice prompts. It’s a black box with a microcomputer that acts as a switcher for external commands that are delivered through a range of means and can be wheelchair mounted. (Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be any pics available).

It’s the brainchild of CanAssist,  a research lab at the University of Victoria, which has also developed a host of cool ideas from the Polecam Power Chair and to a launcher that wheelchair users can throw balls to their dogs with.

125 CanPlay podWizzes will be given to young Canadians this Christmas, but director Neil Livingston says he’s in touch with Apple to make the product commercially available through its distribution network. No word on how much it might cost.

Via Globe and Mail

CBS and Disney – two television networks with strong ties to Apple – are considering a plan by the Cupertino, Calif. company to revamp how Americans receive TV programming, according to one report. Apple would like to expand its iTunes service to offer consumers major television content via the Internet.

The proposal would “offer access to some TV shows from a selection of major U.S. television networks for a monthly fee,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

Emulators themselves are on fairly well-established legal ground, but the ROM files required to play all of your favorite classic video games are far sketchier. Technically, if you rip a copy of a game yourself as a backup, you’re in the clear… but since few have the technical acumen or equipment to do so, they usually resort to downloading the ROMs from warez sites.

That’s primarily the reason why Apple has traditionally kept its App Store so closed off to emulators. So expect Nescaline, an NES emulator for the iPhone and iPod Touch, to be pulled as soon as Apple gets wind of it.

On sale for $6.99, Nescaline has a full feature list, including multitouch, light gun and save state support. It ships with five homebrew NES games, which is certainly legal. Unfortunately, its cardinal sin — at least in the eyes of Apple — is allowing users to input a URL where they can download additional ROMs. That means it’s as easy to put a warezed copy of Castlevania III on your iPhone as it is to cut-and-paste a Google search.

Expect Nescaline to be pulled quick, and if it comes back to the App Store at all, for the download feature to be neutered. Unfortunately, for right now, if you want to play emulators on your iPhone, legally owned games or not, jailbreaking is still your best bet.

Update: That didn’t take long. It’s been removed from the App Store.

Apple’s 27 inch iMac is the sexiest machines in Apple’s already sexed-out line of computers, but it’s been worth waiting to buy one: the first batch had numerous problems, including cracked screens, flickering displays and a yellow, nicotine-like graphical patina.

Rumor had it that Apple was scrambling to replace faulty ATI Radeon HD 4670 and 4850 GPUs on their iMacs, which strongly implied the problem was hardware, not software. Nevertheless, Software Update has just pumped out a Graphics Firmware Update for the 27-inch iMac that “address[es] issues that may cause image corruption or display flickering.”

Jury’s still out on whether or not this solves the widescale problems people are having with their iMacs. Any cultists out there with a 27-incher who can tell us how their baby is handling its new medicine?

If you’re looking for that last minute gift, an Apple Store is a fine destination. But if, like my hirsute Uncle Bob, your wrapping skills max out at wadding a clump of disintegrating newspaper around your gift and entombing it in an impenetrable, inch-thick layer of duct tape upon which you’ve written your season’s greeting in bold, permanent marker, the Apple Store might also have you covered: select Apple Stores are now offering free wrapping.

The way Apple is handling wrapping is smart. Instead of buying your iPod or MacBook Pro and then thrusting it at some beleaguered wrapper temp, already light-headed from papercut induced blood loss, Apple has set up an express line which sells exclusively pre-wrapped gifts.

Good news for last-minute shoppers via Dealnews: The Apple Store offers free shipping via next-day delivery with no minimum purchase required. That’s Apple’s best shipping discount this year. Sales tax is added where applicable. Customized items and gift cards are excluded. Orders of in-stock, non-custom configuration items placed by 1 pm ET on December 23 will arrive in time for Christmas.

With the official start of winter, we look at the few remaining days until Christmas. We start the week with three hardware deals, including a free one-day shipping offer that could rival the Macs being sold. First up is a 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook for $870 from PC Connection. Next, are two more deals from the Apple Store, each offering free next-day delivery. If you still want a Mac under the tree, but have been waiting for lower prices, this may be your day. Apple has a number of Macs, starting with Core 2 Duo iMacs for $849. There are also offers on MacBooks, MacBook Airs, Mac Pro desktops and Mac Pro Xeon servers. An 8GB iPod nano for $99 from the Apple Store rounds out our top trio of deals.

As always, for details on these deals and more more, check out the CoM “Daily Deals” page after the jump.

If you know your way around Macs,  can untangle the gnarliest iPod problems and love sales, Apple wants you for its retail stores.

To handle the general surge in customers — Apple’s 5th Avenue store is outperforming Tiffany’s, to name just one — the stores are adding a new role called “Expert.”

Previously these were internal promotions, so it sounds like you’d have to be a cut above the average “Genius”  with an interest in sales and management.

Apple’s ideal Expert from the job description:

•    (Seeks) A career in sales where you can share your passion for Apple in a fast-paced and dynamic team environment.
•    You love working with people — it energizes you.
•    You embrace Apple’s standards of customer service and live them every day.
•    You like being the first person on the block to touch new technology. And you like to share that knowledge.
•    You love learning. And you’ll learn from people every day.

If you think you can cut it, it looks like every Apple retail store is on the lookout for in-house Experts to don the new sky-blue T-shirt.

Via Ifoapplestore

So what if Time magazine passed him over for person of the year:  Steve Jobs beat out a couple thousand CEOs around the globe to be named the best-performing CEO by Harvard Business Review.

Researchers looked at what execs brought to the table and to shareholders from 1,999 publicly-held companies worldwide during the entire time of their tenure.

Though they admit “it may come as no shock that Steve Jobs of Apple tops the list,”  it does seem a little surprising that Bill Gates is absent. No shocker: Gates is out of the running because the research only considered execs who took the helm from 1997 on.

Even without Microsoft, tech execs took the lion’s share of the top 10, including Yun Jong-Yong at Samsung Electronics (ranked 2), John T. Chambers, Cisco Systems (ranked 4), Jeff Bezos from Amazon (7),  Margaret C. Whitman eBay (8) and Eric E. Schmidt Google (9).

So what put Jobs ahead of the pack?