Earlier this year, Sanho — makers of the super useful Hypermac line of batteries — found themselves in a pot of hot water boiled by Apple’s legal team, who objected to Hypermac’s use of repurposed (and patented) MagSafe cable connectors to juice up hungry MacBooks.
You can’t keep a good product down, though. HyperMac has just relaunched the HyperMac line, this time working around their reliance upon old MagSafe cables so as not to draw Cupertino’s ire once more.
Remember that supposed iPad Mini flaunted by famous Taiwanese racecar driver Jimmy Lin earlier today? We thought he was holding a fake, but we may have been more right than we knew: according to reader Greg Mills, it’s a Photoshop fake.
Square Enix just released a iOS port of one classic JRPG from the SNES era, Secret of Mana, and now it appears that they’re teasing another: Joystiq just sussed out a cryptic new teaser site for what appears to be a smartphone compatible (and hopefully iOS specific) port of Chrono Trigger, their famous 16-bit time travel RPG first released way back in 1995.
Chrono Trigger is still one of my favorite games. The site says “Spring 2011.” Oh please, oh please, oh please.
Don’t feel like ordering direct from Apple? AT&T’s now ready to sell you an iPad 3G directly at the usual $629, $729 and $829 prices, with the same no contract deal as through Apple’s online store. But surely you want to give your money directly to Ma Bell out of sheer loyalty to the AT&T experience, right?
Considering the depths that Apple fans will plump into a new version of iOS even before it’s released — let alone a month later — we’re amazed to hear that developers are still stumbling upon new features of iOS 4.2… especially when those features are as buzzworthy as augmented reality. Yet that’s just what Occipital has discovered lurking in the firmware of Apple’s latest iteration of its popular mobile operating system.
Apple tried but failed to control the technology behind Microsoft’s incredible gesture-recognizing Kinect controller, but if you wonder what might have been if they succeeded, keep your eyes on this January’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. That’s where Ellipti Labs will demonstrate what gesture recognition could look like on the iPad.
When Steve Jobs himself was queried on the possibilities inherent in the seven inch tablet form factor, he replied that they were “dead on arrival” and declared them to be “tweeners: too big to compete with a smartphone and too small to compete with the iPad.”
Despite this, rumors have persisted that 2011 will see the introduction of a 7-inch iPad Mini… and now a famous Taiwanese celebrity and race car driver is claiming to own a prototype.
Amazon, long reticent about announcing sales figures of its Kindle e-reader, could sell more than 8 million of the devices this year, 60 percent higher than Wall Street analysts predicted, according to a news report. That would be a dramatic rise from the 2.4 million Kindles sold in 2009, unnamed sources within the online bookseller told a reporter.
The sales increase may stem from two trends: a growing demand for standalone e-readers even in the face of the multipurpose Apple iPad and Amazon’s decision to let its e-books be read on a wide variety of platforms, including the iPad, iPod touch, iPhone, RIM’s BlackBerry, Android-based phones and the latest addition: phones using Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 operating system. The multi-platforms are a sign Amazon does not plan to pin all of its e-reader and e-book sales on the Kindle, now offered in three versions, according to Piper Jaffray Analyst Gen Munster.
Hyundai has gone high-tech for their luxury Equus sedan, releasing the 2011 owner’s manual as a free interactive iPad app. Now you can view a multimedia reference guide, locate Hyundai dealers, schedule service appointments, read (and ignore) safety warnings, and – according to the App Store description – “experience Equus rear-passenger massage and relaxation therapy.”
Wow. That’s some owner’s manual.
Even better, an iPad comes with the car! Nice perk. Vehicle cost: $58,900. iPhone and iPod touch versions of the app are scheduled for release shortly.
Here’s our 2010 Year in Review of the best 10 hardware peripherals for your Mac that we’ve come across in the last twelve months.
If you missed any of these or didn’t get a chance to check them out for some reason or another, don’t fret — all of them are still available and worth a look.
10. Mac Edition eGo Desktop Hard Drive 2TB
Leander Kahney: Iomega’s new Mac Edition eGo Desktop Hard Drive packs a whopping 2-Terabytes in a compact, stylish package.
The Mac Edition eGo drive is a good-looking complement to Apple’s new glass-and-aluminum Macs. It’s styled to match Apple’s Mac Pro with a sleek, silver case and a grill front.
It’s available in 1TB and 2TB configurations ($159.99 and $249, respectively), and offers several connectivity options: there are two FireWire 800 ports and one USB 2.0 port. It ships with a FireWire 400-to-800 conversion cable, which makes it compatible with Macs without a FireWire 800 port.