LAS VEGAS — Orbitsound claims its T12 Soundbar sounds so good, they refused to demo it on the show floor.
“It just won’t do it justice,” said Ted Fletcher, founder of Orbitsound, which is based in London.
“It’ll revolutionize the way you listen to music,” he added.
LAS VEGAS — Dexim, a young Chinese company that is starting to win design awards, is at CES showing off an iPod/iPhone docking station.
The MHub Docking Station isn’t the most exciting product here, but looks well-made and well-designed, and promises to reduce a considerable amount of desktop clutter. It includes a iPhone/iPod dock, SD card reader and a three USB connections.
“It really reduces your desktop spaghetti,” said Patrick Tarpey, a spokesman for Dexim.
Priced at $80, the MHub won an International CES Innovations 2010 Design and Engineering Award, and competes with Griffin’s iSimplifi.
LAS VEGAS — Lasers make a big difference for pico projectors, says Microvision, which, coincidentally, is showing off the first laser pico projector made for iPod at CES.
Although pico projectrors are a crowded field, Microvision’s SHOWWX Laser Pico Projector is the first powered by laser, which gives it better color and infinite focus, the company says. Most other pico projectors are powered by LED.
LAS VEGAS — Powermat is a wireless charging pad for powering up gadgets without plugging them into their chargers. I’ve been testing a competing product from Pure Energy Solutions for several months, and found that wireless chargers really change your charging habits. My wife and kids, for example, who never charge their cell phones/iPods, have no trouble dropping their gadgets on the Pure Energy’s WildCharger charging pad. For once, there’s not a bunch of lifeless gadgets lying around.
Powermat has noticed similar trends among its buyers, and at CES is showing off several new, inexpensive charging pads priced to encourage users to have several pads around the house.
We’ve reached mid-week and the annual gadget nirvana, CES, is set to open in Las Vegas. While you won’t see Google’s “Superphone” or Apple’s much-discussed tablet among today’s list of deals, there are many other chances for striking gold – or platinum, or just a really cool-looking case for your iPhone. We start the day off with a deal on a Curtis iMod iPod player with a 7-inch screen for just $40. Next up: an 80 percent discount on iPod touch cases. We round out the top trio of products with a new batch of freebies from Apple’s App Store, including the NYT crosswords.
For details on these and many other bargains, check out CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.
Can Microsoft’s combative CEO needle his nemesis once more by stealing Apple’s thunder during the CES? That’s the question many are asking following reports Steve Ballmer will introduce a tablet during a keynote speech for the gadget get-together in Las Vegas.
The HP-made device “will be touted as a multimedia whiz with e-reader and multi-touch functions,” the New York Times reported late Tuesday. For months, rumor has swirled around Apple prepping a tablet to possibly launch later this month and begin sales in March. The chatter has reached such a crescendo that a fellow NYT columnist called the rumored product from Cupertino, the “Jesus tablet.”
Verizon Wireless, which has belittled the iPhone in ads for the carrier’s Droid smartphone, will be one of multiple carriers for Apple’s long-awaited tablet device, an analyst announced. “Verizon and others,” said Broadpoint AmTech’s Brian Marshall.
“Definitely Verizon. I’ve been told that’s a certainty,” he added, referring to unnamed sources.
While most eyes are on CES and attention focused toward Apple’s expected tablet, analysts predict 2010 will also be a gangbuster year for the iPhone. Apple should sell 36 million iPhones, a 40 percent increase over 2009. In what was described as a conservative projection, Piper Jaffray announced 15.8 million iPhones will be sold this year – by AT&T, alone.
Apple sold 11.3 million iPhones during calendar year 2009, according to the financial analysis firm.
PocketHeat is an app that has recently been pushed to the iTunes App Store designed to keep your hands warm in the winter. For $0.99, the app will push your iPhone or iPod Touch to its maximum CPU capacity.
It’s rather mystifying that this app got through the App Store approval process, since pushing your iPhone or iPod Touch CPU to the point of meltdown seems risky, to say the least.
Still, it has given me my own killer idea: an exfoliating iPhone app that works by making a user’s handset physically explode. Any developers out there want to help me make it happen?
Intel’s decision to marry their new mobile Core i5 and i7 CPUs with integrated graphics has reportedly not gone over well with Apple, who are rumored to be demanding custom-designed chips from Intel for an update to their MacBook and MacBook Pro line of notebooks.
But perhaps there’s another solution. Gizmodo noticed that NVIDIA, maker of the MacBook line’s ubiquitous GeForce 9400M GPU, is now teasing a new notebook technology called Optimus that is supposedly capable of achieving the performance of discrete graphics in a notebook while still delivering great battery life.
It’s probably just scalable performance, but if the Optimus tech is as good as NVIDIA is bragging, it would allow Apple to ditch the substandard switchable GPU configuration of current unibody MacBook Pros, which requires a reboot, to a discrete-only solution, like the earliest MacBook Pros and PowerBooks.
While it probably won’t encompass a 3D interface, there’s been enough background murmurings about the method users will employ to interact with Apple’s forthcoming tablet to expect something new. What that “new” is? Only Apple knows… but if our tipster is right, whatever the Tablet’s UI is, it’s going to be different enough from OS X or the iPhone OS to require a significant learning curve.
According to reader Tom: “I just heard [to] be ready for a steep learning curve regarding the “new” Apple product about to be released [and its] interface. This person is an employee of Apple and had just had a meeting regarding some of the new things coming. He/She would not go into details, but did say that he/she hoped we liked learning.”
Its publication conveniently timed to coincide with insistent talk about the forthcoming Apple Tablet’s unexpected new interface, Gus Santementes of the Baltimore Sun has spotted a new Apple interface patent that describes a touch-screen device with a graphical user interface for “manipulating three-dimensional virtual objects.”
In essence, the patent — filed by three Apple software engineers — describe a way for users to manipulate 3D virtual objects like an icon, a shape or a character. The patent states that “there is a need for electronic devices with touch screen displays [to] provide more transparent and intuitive user interfaces for navigating in three dimensional virtual spaces and manipulating three dimensional objects in these virtual spaces.”
It’s possible this is the patent office skeleton of the new Tablet UI we’ve been hearing about, but I doubt it. This doesn’t describe much more than a method of interacting with 3D objects on a touchscreen, which isn’t particularly revolutionary.
My guess is that if the new Tablet UI has the dye of the weird to it, it’s going to be a lot less pedestrian than a 3D shell plopped atop the iPhone OS. More interesting is the patent’s description of an internal camera that can be shifted by the user to either back or front mounted positions: that’s something I could easily see coming to the Tablet and future iPhones, if it works up to Apple’s standards.
[via Patently Apple]
If you read this site every day, it’s hard to imagine that you could have suffered the sort of massive cranial trauma that would prompt you — swollen tongued, googly eyed and phonemically fixated on an open-ended “Duhhhh…” — to waltz into a Best Buy and buy your next Mac. The online Apple store is only a click away, with free shipping even!
But yeah, yeah. I know. Snap decisions and all. Just promise me one thing: if you do, for some reason, make the decision to pick up your next Mac from your local Best Buy, don’t let their Geek Squad sell you a $40 optimization. According to Slate.com’s The Big Money, that optimization is just as much a waste of money as you’d expect.
LAS VEGAS — The first piece of hardware to take advantage of the iPhone 3.0 OS’s much-heralded hardware interface has finally surfaced at CES. And of all things, it’s a speaker clock from Sharper Image.
LAS VEGAS — Ed Curran is a reporter for WBBM-TV in Chicago, and he’s shooting CES using an iPhone.
LAS VEGAS — The biggest electronics show in America — the Consumer Electronics Show (or CES for short) — opens later this week in Las Vegas, but several companies paid big bucks to preview their new wares to the hundreds of journalists at a special preview event on Tuesday evening.
And there, in the middle of the room, was this bright-red Apple TV. Yeah, a high-def, flat-panel TV shaped like an Apple. The question is, what idiot would buy a TV shaped like an Apple?
“It’s unique, it’s fun, it’s apples,” said the flak unhelpfully.
Made by an unknown-to-me Chinese company, Hannspree, perhaps someone thought it might be mistaken for a real Apple TV, made by, you know, Apple? It has a remarkably Apple-like logo on the front (see the pic after the jump). And it does remind you of the old toilet-seat iBooks of old; the transluscent plastic ones with the carrying handle.
But the company was also displaying TVs covered in fur that looked like Polar and Panda bears, so who knows?
The folks at ioSafe could adopt another oft-quoted tagline when talking about their new Solo SSD external hard drive: ‘When your data absolutely, positively has to still be there.’ The new storage device is said to withstand forces likely better than many humans could.
If the original Solo’s ability to endure a half hour of 1,550-degree fire and a month in 30-feet of fresh or salt water wasn’t enough, the Auburn, Calif. company has upped their game, introducing crush-proof (2.5 tons), fall-proof (20 feet onto a pile of rubble) and shock-proof (1000g) protection for your important data.
We offer some Mac deals for your listening enjoyment, including Logitech’s AudioStation iPod Speaker System for $68. The unit with iPod dock, wireless remote and AM/FM clock radio pumps out 80 watts of your favorite tunes. If you’ve already tired of the new cases from over Christmas, slip on this Pro Flexi graphic skin case (20 styles) for your iPhone 3G or iPhone 3GS. Finally, maybe you’re stuck in a snow drift and nowhere to go? Try the all-in-one FM transmitter for iPhones and iPods from HHI.
As always, all the details on these and many more bargains can be found on CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.
A potential deal to bring the iPhone to Verizon’s CDMA network later this year may have hit a snag over pricing, one analyst said Tuesday. An iPhone that works on CDMA networks could appear by the middle of 2010, according to UBS.
“We believe a CDMA iPhone is also in the works,” analyst Maynard J. Um told investors. However, “Verizon Wireless and Apple may currently be apart on pricing,” he wrote. Apple receives an average of $700 per iPhone from AT&T, while Verizon pays $450 for the Droid, made by Motorola, estimates say.
This bang-whiz creation is the brainchild of Justin Adler plus the handiwork of artist/costume maker/prop designer extraordinaire Ted Southern.
It’s the innards of two Apple G4s, plus a graphic card, turned into a the kind of table that will make any night feel like was-there-something-in-my drink? night, if the promo video is anything to go by.
Sure, it doesn’t have the cool linearity of the iPod table, but it’s better than the scrap heap.
Apple announced Tuesday its App Store reached the 3 billion download mark, or one billion downloads since September. The Cupertino, Calif. company passed 2 billion downloads for the iPhone and iPod touch just three months ago.
The new figure means 10.1 million apps per day were downloaded over the last 99 days, reports said. That improves on 6.9 million downloads per day set between April and July, 2009.
“Three billion applications downloaded in less than 18 months — this is like nothing we’ve seen before,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said. Jobs called the App Store “unlike anything else available on other mobile devices” with “no signs of the competition catching up soon.”
In July, on the App Store’s one-year anniversary, Apple announced more than 1.5 billion downloads. In late 2009, the service had more than 100,000 apps available for iPhone and iPod touch users.
The App Store’s success caught many insiders off-guard, including early investors. Apple would have been happy for only a fraction of the 2 billion downloads reported in October.
The App Store could host 300,000 applications in 2010, tripling the current number, analyst predict.
[Via Barrons and AppleInsider]
You’ve probably noticed that I tend to get a little overexcited about iPhone photography apps. I got so excited about the Lego Photo app that Pete mentioned the other day, I went and made a Flickr group for it. But this post is about another little gem I’ve found, under the name Hipstamatic.
As Google prepares to introduce its Nexus One smartphone, user interest in Android-based phones approaches that of Apple’s iPhone, a new consumer survey finds. However, unlike Apple’s monolithic brand identity with the iPhone, Android seems hobbled by its own success.
Although 28 percent of people who plan to buy a smartphone in the next 90 days want an Apple iPhone, 21 percent “prefer to have the Android OS on their new phone,” said the ChangeWave survey conducted in December. In September, Android was picked by just 6 percent of those surveyed.
The giant Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas later this week will be all about tablets, eBook readers and 3D TVs. But of primary interest to Apple followers will be the big gathering of iPhone App developers.
More than 100 iPhone developers and accessory makers will exhibit at the iLounge Developer’s Pavilion, up 150% from numbers announced in July.
Just before Christmas, we asked you: What were your favorite desktop apps of 2009?
Based on the responses we got, two apps got fractionally more mentions than most: Google Chrome, and OmmWriter. Neither of which were apps I expected to see topping many end-of-year lists.
