Cult of Mac

If Apple dropped the costly iPhone data plan, the move could earn Cupertino $7 billion and create a bridge between the iPod and iPhone market, an analyst suggested Wednesday.

“Apple’s more than 100 million iPod users give the company a huge opportunity to capture significant market share in the mobile device market,” Sanford Berstein’s Toni Sacconaghi told clients.

By dropping the required $70 per month data plan, Apple would break out of the limited smartphone segment and open the doors to an iPod touch userbase worth $7 billion in income and $4 billion in profit each year.

The state of Maryland has proposed a ban on writing, sending or reading text messages while driving.

One lawmaker, however, is concerned if the bill becomes a law it will mean he can’t make any more calls using his iPhone touchscreen during commutes.

Saqib Ali, a delegate for Montgomery County, told a panel of colleagues yesterday that he uses his iPhone all the time.

He’s worried that tapping the touch screen to make calls would violate the ban proposed by delegate Frank Turner on writing, sending or reading a text message while operating a motor vehicle.

Turner’s bill doesn’t target talking on the phone. Just thumb jockeying instead of keeping your hands on ten and two.

Ali wonders how a police officer would know he was dialing his phone and not texting while driving.

Hmmm. Is this splitting hairs or should drivers be forced to keep their hands on the wheel and off their phones, period?

Image used with Creative Commons license, thanks to Mike Kline on flickr.

Via AP

Photographer Kelsey Blessman named this shot “iGod,” it’s part of an ongoing series on technology.

Portraits include one called iFashion where young woman wears iPod headphones as a necklace and others that feature diskettes, cassette tapes and film.

Image copyright Kelsey Blessman.

Via Etsy

Sprint reportedly will launch the Palm Pre in May, timing that could steal the thunder of an expected new version of Apple’s iPhone.

According to the Boy Genius Report Web site, Sprint documents suggest Palm could begin shipping its touch-screen phone in May, a month before many believe Cupertino will introduce its next-generation iPhone.

The Pre, a touch-screen smartphone widely viewed as a rival to Apple’s popular handset, essentially replaces the Treo 755p.

A Paris court has rejected an exclusive iPhone distribution agreement between France Telecom and Apple, reports said Wednesday.

Orange is the wireless subsidiary of France Telecom.

The court said the pact constituted a “restraint on freedom.” France Telecom told reporters it was “shocked” and planned to appeal the ruling.

The court’s action follows a December temporary ruling by a regulatory board opening the way for rival Bouygues and others to sell the iPhone to French customers.

Woohoo! A bumper issue of WTF iPhone Apps this week, thanks to the ever-increasing avalanche of bobbins and foonity spewing forth from the App Store.

Let’s not dally! Onwards! With the craziness!

First up this week is Angry Scot: “Learn the Scottish way to say No! This application will help you summon your inner Scotsman to give you the courage (and words) to solve your problems in these trying times. Each response is carefully crafted and then spoken by an authentic Scots person in his native tongue.”

Daft, but we can live with it. Can things get worse? You bet they can. We’ve not even started yet.

This free iPhone, iPod app from 1-800-flowers.com could come in handy, the idea of using a meeting deadzone to order a forgotten birthday gift (sorry mom!) appeals to me immensely.

You can order stuff from the site, namely  flowers, plants, balloons, plus cookies, cakes and wine and cheese, some for same-day delivery.

Caveat: the first few user reviews are on the low side, with one person having to go through customer support to access an existing account, so you might want to make sure you’ve taken it for a spin before Valentine’s Day next week.

Available on iTunes.

You may know there are now 2,345 fart-oriented applications on the iTunes AppStore, but were you aware of the growing number of ways the iPhone and iPod Touch can help you keep track of your own or (more likely) your mate’s menstrual cycle?

Yes, Apple’s amazing mobile device can help you keep your relationship together, plan a family, or just avoid unnecessarily broken household objects.

Choices include:

* the free uPMS, an app directly aimed at guys “suffering the monthly Pychotic Mood Shifts from their better halves;”

*PMS Tracker, which, for a buck lets a user quickly track the approximate time each woman in his/her life will have PMS, using a green, orange, red coding system to indicate the likelihood of turbulence on any given day;

* iPeriod is an app aimed at busy women who need a little assist with “doctors appointments, event planning, and knowing when to leave the house prepared,” which could be a handy little $4 tool. It even predicts a user’s next 12 periods, fertile days and ovulation windows;

* another $4 app, MyMate seeks to help the sensitive man “organize information [he] frequently needs but can never remember.” It calculates period and ovulation days for up to six months and also provides means for tracking favorite color, song, perfume, “Don’t Likes,” gift ideas and sizes (with convenient European conversions);

*the high-end Woman Calendar is a $10 tool for family planning that logs biological data including cycle days, basal body temperature, ovulation dates, weight, and other customized personal records. It’s got a module for journaling and allows a user to export data from a date range to a CSV file for backup and use with other desktop applications. Comes with password protection or data security;

* last, but not least is IAmAMan, the $2 “private life planner” that lets a user stay abreast of the cycle probabilities for several women. The record and existence of each person tracked is password protectable, so no one need find out who or how many people a user is tracking, and it has a handy click-to-call feature that dials a woman up just by tapping her name.

That’s just a quick round up of a few apps I found after reading about PMS Buddy a web app that’s reasonably popular on Facebook and reportedly headed to the AppStore.

As these things go, there are likely more coming down the pike.

Via Cnet

Not long ago, I reviewed Altec Lansing’s expressionist CLASSIC PC speakers and found them great value for the money. After listening to them for a while beyond the publication of that review, I still loved the sound quality from those $80 speakers but found myself wishing for a little more oomph on the bottom end.

Well, I should have known Altec had already thought of that. Ingeniously engineered into the small-footprint housing of their Expressionist BASS computer speakers, powerful 4″ (100mm) long-throw subwoofers deliver all the lows that are typically missing from the little speakers you find sitting on desks all over the world.

Of course, you could spend lots of money on high-fidelity audio components for a computer set-up, which in many cases would include a separate subwoofer that sits at your feet or hides somewhere nearby, effectively dispersing the low frequency signals you need to get a truly rich audio experience on the computer. Altec Lansing has managed to put that all together for you in a pair of attractive desktop cones that are super easy to hook up and sound great without breaking the bank.

Twin 1 ½” drivers deliver mid and high frequencies so vocals and details come through with the clarity you expect from the company’s long history as a quality speaker manufacturer, and the sub-drivers in each speaker really do provide that punch-in-the-head color you want from your online gameplay, movie watching and YouTube browsing. They also have an auxiliary input for conveniently connecting portable CD, DVD, and MP3 players.

To get the most out of these speakers I had to play around with the EQ in my iTunes app to correct for their increased bass response, but once I got everything balanced the way I wanted it, I found I could actually listen to all sounds from my computer at a lower overall volume than previously and now, two weeks into using them, I find I actually mute the computer volume quite a bit less than I used to, and I work with music on in the background more as well.

For $130, Altec Lansing Expressionist Bass computer speakers could help you come to love computer audio.

Image copyright Spacesick.

THE HORROR, etc.

Hat tip: Gruber.

Iotum is taking its innovative Calliflower conference calling application mobile with a free application for iPhone and iPod Touch on Apple’s iTunes AppStore, the company announced Tuesday.

Calliflower makes organizing and participating in multi-party calls simple and engaging by allowing participants to see the status of other callers, and features interactive chat, intuitive conference controls, recordings, call archives, invitations and reminders, integration with calendars, and more.

“We’re liberating Calliflower conference calling from the desktop and extending all of its features to the world’s most powerful mobile device,” says Iotum CEO Alec Saunders. “We had to reread some of the iPhone’s UI requirements in order to get Apple to approve the app, but we feel it faithfully recreates on the mobile platform what over 200,000 users have come to appreciate about the web-based app.”

One useful feature of the web app that won’t be found (yet) on the iPhone is Calliflower’s document-sharing functionality. “It’s Flash-based,” Saunders told us, “so we’ll have to wait for Flash on the iPhone before we get document sharing.”

Users can create a new Calliflower account directly from the free app on the iPhone, or existing Calliflower users can simply log in using their current Calliflower account.

iPhone 3G owners in Florida and New Jersey become the latest to sue Apple over what they charge are “false and misleading advertising” about the handset’s speed.

The latest court challenges were described as “more cookie-cutter lawsuits” against iPhone advertising. The Cupertino, Calif.-based company has been sued four times in two weeks over nearly identical claims, according to Apple Insider.

In Florida, residents Onel Gonzalez and Ron J. Brayteson are asking a district court to stop Apple’s advertising and require the company pay damages.

Texas native Jesse Jane is on hand for the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas, where she talked tech with the Canadian Broadcast Company.

For the last six years, she’s been making movies for Digital Playground, one of the bigger U.S. adult entertainment companies, which prides itself on being one of the first of the early technology adopters.

Jane gave a heads-up on where the porn industry is going with tech, with a nod to the iPhone, Twitter and iChat:

Q. Besides high-definition, what other technologies are you seeing that are notable or interesting?

A. There’s always new stuff going on. Just in toys, they’re always coming up with these inventions like Sybians and crazy machines to have sex with or get tied up with.

Now we’re shooting on the Red [digital HD] cameras I think Digital Playground is the only one and we have all the Blu-ray coming out. I’m learning with my little camera and my website, where I’m able to upload daily diary videos, which is fun. Technology is getting a lot easier to make things more personal with your fans. They like the daily clips.

Now we can watch porn with our iPhones, and in the next month or two, with Digital Playground we’re going to be able to stream, Twitter and live iChat on our website from our iPhones.”

Jane also hearted her iPhone, which she calls a lifesaver during downtime.

“I love my iPhone because I can sit there and check my e-mail and update my website from my phone while I’m sitting there waiting at the airport.”

Via CBC

This could get ugly. Seems there’s a bit of a competition going on out there over how many apps one can get running simultaneously, as reported by Gizmodo.

Last spring, some guy reported running 150 on a 2.2ghz MacBook Pro,, which was quickly challenged by some clown running 108 on Vista (huh?).

Now, we get the new champ, whose mark has been set on a 20-inch 2007 iMac, with a 2.4ghz Core 2 Duo and 4 Gigabytes of RAM. Makes for a kind of interesting showcase for Exposé, I guess.

How about you? How many apps do you run simulataneously on your Mac?

Via Gizmodo

Last week I posted some half-baked rants about iPhoto 09, and as usual the comments briefly buzzed with some agreement and disagreement.

But there was also this comment, from reader KaL MichaeL (reproduced sans editing):

“I love your blog except when you say anything negative about an apple product. I feel that if you are promoting the Mac Cult then you are a apple Fan end to end.”

And that… that struck me as a little weird.

No personal criticism intended, KaL MichaeL, but words cannot express how much I disagree with you on this.

The Cult of Mac celebrates all that’s good and great about Apple and its products, but that doesn’t make us blind to its failures and errors. A blog that simply promoted Apple and Apple fandom from “end to end”, as you put it, would be beyond dull. In fact, it would probably be a little bit like Hotnews: nothing more than PR puffery.

And that’s not what we’re all about. We don’t want to do that. We want to celebrate what Apple does (in our opinion) right, and moan in a grumpy manner about what it does (in our opinion) wrong. What else, after all, is the blogosphere for?

Cult readers, now’s your chance to cut me down and demand more slavish devotion to the Church of Mac. Or not.

Confirmation came Tuesday from Fortune on just how popular games are to iPhone users. Games comprise about 21 percent of the almost 19,000 applications from Apple’s App Store.

“Six out of the top 10 paid apps on Apple’s App Store are currently games or entertainment programs,” Fortune’s Philip Elmer-Dewitt wrote.
The nugget of information comes from 148Apps, a site that tracks applications offered to iPhone and touch owners.

The report echos ComScore, which recently announced iPhone users outpace every other segment for game downloads: 32.4 percent versus 3.8 percent for most cell phone owners.

A hint about when Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple may unveil a new generation of iPhones came Monday from a far-away source: the sands of the United Arab Emirates. In an off-handed remark, a carrier said new iPhones could be released in June.

A new Apple handset “is due out in June,” Mark Davis, Program Director for UAE carrier Etisalat, told a local business newspaper.

The comment followed news Etisalat would offer the iPhone 3G February 15th in the UAE and later in Saudi Arabia.

Troubled cell phone maker Motorola Tuesday announced its shipments were cut in half during the fall, its marketshare falling to 6.5 percent.

The Schaumburg, Ill.-based company said it shipped 19.2 million phones during the December quarter, a 47 percent decline from nearly 41 million handsets sold during the same period in 2007.

As a result, the company posted a $3.6 billion quarterly loss highlighted by continued bleeding by its Mobile Devices group. Motorola said the group ended the December quarter down $595 million. The handset area lost $388 million during the same period a year ago.

Accomplishing what Apple has so far failed to do, Google has now created a todo list that syncs perfectly between your desktop, the web, and your iPhone.

Michael Bolin, one of the engineers who works on the Tasks function in Gmail, announced a new iPhone-optimized Tasks site that you can visit at gmail.com/tasks.

I’ve been playing with it this morning and so far, it looks and works great in Mobile Safari. And hey, get this: I can add a todo to the list while I’m out and about, and it *magically* appears in Gmail when I return to my computer! How about that?

It’s worth pausing for a moment here, and reminding ourselves that Apple STILL has not supplied iPhone users with todos or text notes that sync with their Macs. I’ve come to the conclusion that Steve Jobs, Tim Cook and the rest of them simply don’t have anything to do, and therefore don’t understand why anyone else should need a sync-able todo app.

Therefore, I propose that henceforth this should be known as Give Apple Management Things To Do Day, or GAMTTD. If Tim Cook’s any good with a hand drill at the top of a ladder, my gutters could do with replacing. Any time this week would be good, Tim.

These iPod Nanos bedecked with crystals look a little like the flashy glasses Elton John used to wear. (No, the look is not understated).

John, 61, put his signature on 1,000 of these limited-edition iPods for a cause. A percentage of the proceeds (12.5%) go to his AIDS foundation.

In addition to 250 Swarovski crystals, the iPods also come pre-installed with “Rocket Man: The Definitive Hits.”

Prices range from about US$565 (£400) for the 8GB model, the 16GB model runs $636 (£450).
Available online from February 9.

The iPhone, the iPod and Apple all made the top ten of a list of 100 brands commanding attention and participation from social communities online.

The iPhone reigns as the number one most social brand of 2008, outscoring parent company Apple, which ranks number three in the list complied by social media marketing company Vitrue. Overall, Apple dominates by also securing iPod at number seven and the Mac legacy brand at number 16.

That gives Apple or Apple products three spots in the top ten and four in the top 20.

The top 20 is ruled by media and entertainment brands including CNN, Disney, Xbox, MTV, Sony, Nintendo, PlayStation, Turner and Fox News.  Full line-up here.

The list was compiled by analyzing online conversations on a variety of social networking, blogging, micro-blogging, photo and video sharing sites. Vitrue then gave them a composite score and ranked brands by it.

Interestingly, the rankings don’t take into consideration social networking bastions like LinkedIn, Myspace and Facebook. The reason? “The Vitrue 100 is measuring companies that are using social technology, not those who are the technology.”

Hmmm. This is the second year Vitrue has done the study, I suspect the line between using technology and being technology will blur. Wonder if the rankings would be super different if they were included…

Photo used under Creative Commons license, thanks to jm3 on Flickr.

Via Macnn

Does one cheer Alesis for coming up with the TapeLink USB or ask, “what took you so long?”

The TapeLink USB is a dual-well cassette deck designed to digitally archive audio. The device allows users to transfer cassette recordings onto a hard disk, flash memory, CD or iPod. Connection to a computer is provided via USB, with support for 16-bit, 44.1 kHz CD-quality recordings. Two different dubbing modes support either normal or high-speed dubbing. The deck also features full auto-stop capability to keep irreplacable old tapes from breaking. It works with metal or CrO2 tapes and features on-board LEDs for visual reference to sound levels.

The device comes bundled with three different apps to assist in archiving: SoundSoap Standalone Edition (SE) for reduction of background noises such as room noise and electrical hum; Audacity, a lean, clean, excellent piece of audio-editing software; and EZ Tape Converter to assist with transfers.

TapeLink USB is compatible with Mac OS X and carries an estimated street price of $200.

Really, what did take so long?

Via electronista

In a world wth iPod docking stations on offer from what seems like thousands of different companies, the stylish XIS100 iPod Docking Station from Xantech is the first such product designed for the high-resolution television revolution.

It features a unique component video output capability that will let owners of the new 480P video output iPods see their video in full native resolution on a plasma, LCD or other compatible TV screen with component video output. It also features the full iPod menu on its screen and offers full on-board browsing.

The XIS100 is compatible with all current iPods and comes with a 15 button remote with chrome finish. The dock station with touch panel also features an On-TV menu display for music and video navigation.

Support for English, Japanese, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, German and Russian; no info yet on exact availability date or price.

Via Slippery Brick

Image © Chris Chan

Apple Retail Stores’ same-store revenues – a key retail metric comparing sales of stores open for at least a year – fell 17.4% in the December quarter from a year earlier, according to a report at Barrons. That should come as no huge surprise, given the economic contagion sweeping the globe.

What’s interesting about the report, originally issued by Needham hardware analyst Charlie Wolf, is that Apple also turned in an extremely impressive sales-per-square-foot performance of $4700 for the year, highest among electronic retailers by far. Foot traffic at Apple’s brick and mortar emporiums was only down 1.8%. , indicating the computer giant’s products retain a certain cache for beleaguered consumers, who remain interested to touch and play with the bright and shiny things in Apple Stores, even if they can’t afford to buy them at previous rates.

This is why we use Macs. Well, it’s one reason, anyway.

There’s always a lot of talk in the blogosphere how one day Macs will no longer be impervious to computer viruses and malware, but every time there’s a real-world example of a computer network going down due to some kind of security issue or DOS attack, it seems PCs are the machines that get hit and Macs are the machines that keep going and going.

A computer virus hit the Vancouver school district on January 7, forcing 10,000 PCs off-line so district IT staff could wipe them clean, an arduous undertaking that, three weeks later, remains unfinished.

An online student forum by Point Grey secondary students identified the virus as Win32.Krap.b trojan, a bug that affects mostly Windows operating systems, shutting down computers as soon as users try to start them. Vancouver School Board spokesman David Weir said each of the district’s Windows machines were shut down, taken off the network and are being individually scanned and repaired as necessary. The project has caused major disruption throughout the school system, and frustration among teachers and students alike.

The report in the Vancouver Sun describing the situation noted that a Macintosh computer lab funded by the Parents Advisory Group at one school in the district was unaffected by the problem. Smart parents of the kids at that school.

Via Edible Apple