Those who have had the luck to play with an iPhone 4 before it’s official June 24th launch have all confirmed that the new handset’s quadruple-density Pixel Display is just as gorgeous as Apple is boasting.
But over at Daring Fireball, John Gruber points out another reason the iPhone 4’s display is so bright, crisp and lurid: a new production process that eliminates the space between the LCD and the touchscreen.
One depressing omission from yesterday’s keynote was the long-requested addition of direct printing support for iOS devices. Jobs himself has said it’s coming, but apparently not this year, leaving your only option for printing a document on your iPad as emailing it to a computer with access to your printer.
If you don’t mind upgrading your printer, though, HP’s coming to the rescue with a line of new printers that will allow you — more or less — to print directly from your iDevice. Their line of new printers will cost between $99 and $400, and they come with a unique perk: each printer has its own, unique email address.
With HP’s new printers, all you need to do is email a document to your printer from your iPhone or iPad and have it automatically printed out. You can even share that email address with friends and family members.
There’s no word on exact models yet, but HP promises the first of their email-capable printers will be out next month, with small business models hitting in September.
Until Apple gets around to offering printer capability directly from your iOS, this seems like the best solution around… as long as you’re already in the market for some new printing hardware.
A couple months ago, Apple stopped selling cases on their online store, which implied they were getting into cases themselves.
They call their new case a “bumper” and it comes in numerous colors, including white, pink, orange and other spectrums of colors. It looks like it wraps around the sides of the device without protecting the back, hence the automobile terminology: it’s all about protecting the iPhone at its most vulnerable spot.
Additionally, Apple has just announced an official iPhone dock, which will cost just $29 and support charging and syncing.
[images via GDGT]
We all knew the iPhone was bound to get a better camera this year — it’s long flagged behind competing smartphone’s offerings — and so it has: Jobs has just announced the details of the iPhone 4’s new camera: 5MP, capable of 720p video recording.
Great news here is that Apple’s sticking to a sane five megapixels. Instead, they are trying to improve low-light photography on smartphones, which is typically abysmal, by getting more light to the sensor through back-illumination and an LED flash.
Additionally, the iPhone is getting HD video recording, with the new camera capable of 720p footage at 30 frames per second. To harness that power, Apple is also building building video editing software into the iPhone 4… with iMovie for iPhone!
Confirming that Apple’s not just dabbling in the chip game, Steve Jobs has just confirmed that the iPhone 4 uses the Intrinsity-designed A4 CPU, just like in the iPad.
But that’s not where the hardware changes stop. Revealing the back of the device, Jobs shows that it is backed to the gills, and just like in the Gizmodo prototype, most of the iPhone 4’s internals are made up of battery.
The iPhone 4 will come with up to 32GB of storage, quadband HSDP / HSUPA with 7.2 MBps down and 5.8 Mbps up, dual mic noise suppression, 802.11n WiFi and GPS.
What kind of battery life are we talking? Seven hours on 3G, six on browsing through 3G, 10 on WiFi, 10 on Video, 40 on music and 300 hours standby.
The iPhone’s also about to get a lot more interactive with the addition of a three-axis gyroscope, which in combination with the accelerometer provides 6-axis motion sensing. Amazing! I can’t wait to see what app developers do with it.
At today’s WWDC, the next iPhone might not be the only things we see: Engadget has photos of what looks to be an entirely new input device: a Magic Trackpad.
The Magic Trackpad is essentially a giant, Bluetooth-connected multitouch trackpad for Macs, and will not only support all of the functionality of a MacBook Pro touchpad or Magic Mouse, but apparently handwriting recognition to boot. If that’s the case, I imagine it could function pretty handily in Photoshop as well.
I’ll grab this in a heart beat if the price is reasonable. For most of my desktop work on my iMac, I find the Magic Mouse wanting compared to my MacBook Pro’s excellent trackpad, and it’s atrocious for gaming. With the Magic Trackpad, I could finally have the big trackpad I’ve always wanted for my desktop, transforming it when needed into a mousepad and supplementing it with an excellent third-party gaming mouse.
Samsung is getting into the tablet game with their own would-be iPad killer, but unlike many other Atom-based netbooks, Samsung has a secret weapon: an A4-like mobile CPU created by (now Apple owned) Intrinsity, the Hummingbird S5PC110.
In one of the more mysterious statements of the day, HP chief Mark Hurd claims that his company didn’t buy Palm and its webOS operating system to enter the smartphone business, but rather to drive “small form factor web-connected devices.” You know. Tablets and MIDs.
Hurd claimed that HP had no interest in spending “billions of dolllars” trying to get into the smartphone business. “That doesn’t in any way make any sense.”
Uh, really? As Apple has amply proven with the iPhone and iPad, the future of computing is mobile. Whoever controls most of the operating system space in the mobile arena is going to profit big time: this is exactly the reason why Google is licensing their Android operating system for free.
But in actuality, the reason mobile computing is the future isn’t because you can make telephone calls or text messages on mobile devices: that’s just the reason that gets them initially into people’s pockets. It’s mobile internet that’s the future, and someday, our smartphones are probably going to be just tiny, 3G-capable tablets with VoIP capabilities that we keep in our pockets.
While Apple and Google battle it out in the smartphone arena, perhaps HP is playing it smart after all, and trying to position itself to be ready to pounce in the post-smartphone future which iPhone and Android create.
Iomega has just released a new slate of eGo portable external hard drives, and at least a couple happily have support for Apple’s own Firewire standard.
The first Mac-friendly eGo is the 1TB eGo BlackBelt Mac Edition, which has both FireWire 400.800 and USB 2.0 connections, as well as Iomega Drop Guard protection and a Power Grip band around the casing which will protect your data against falls of up to seven feet. It’s a pricy drive, though, at $229.99.
Iomega’s second Mac-happy eGo is the Mac Edition eGo Desktop Hard drive, which comes in flavors between 1TB and 2TB, and again comes with FireWire 400/800 and USB 2.0 support. It costs between $149.99 and $229.99.
Additionally, all drives come with a complimentary 12 month subscription to Trend Micro Smart Surfing software for Mac, Iomega QuikProtect backup software, EMC Retrospect Express backup software and MozyHome Online Backup service. That’s a pretty impressive list of software extras.
You should be able to find both drives at Apple stores later this month.
Looking for a display just as big and gorgeous as the iMac’s 27-inch screen for your MacPro? HP has just announced a new 30-inch monitor that will finally give your beautiful machine the LCD it deserves.
The HP ZR30w boasts a resolution of 2560 x 1600 pixels in a 16:10 aspect ratio, and — according to HP — achieves more than 64 times the colors available on mainstream LCD, with 100 percent accuracy in sRGB colors and 99 percent accuracy in Adobe RGBs. The end result is red, blues and greens that are visibly more lurid.
The new display comes with DisplayPort and DVI-D inputs, as well as an integrated 4-port USB hub and a 6-way adjustable stand. It all comes in dark but decidedly un-Mac-like brushed aluminum.
It’s a gorgeous, albeit slightly beefy display, make no mistake. Unfortunately, the big issue here is the price: the HP ZR30w is a lot of monitor, and it costs a lot of money. $1,299, to be exact. Consider the price of the 27-inch iMac, which is only $400 more expensive: it really is like Cupertino just sold people a top of the line display and threw an amazing Mac in there as a heavily discounted bargain.
Patents are usually dry, dull affairs, but this latest Apple patent has an elegant beauty to it that is more than a little bit breathtaking.
Yes, it’s for a solar-powered iPhone, but Apple being Apple, they’ve got a better solution to solar-charging than just a bunch of ugly panels stuck to the back of the device: the energy collection cells are actually hidden underneath the display. The iPhone itself would look no different, but lay it out in the sun and it will juice itself up.
The Chinese are always quick-on-the-draw with their knockoffs, but this may be the first time we’ve seen a iPhone doppelganger before the handset its emulating is even officially announced.
It’s called the GPS iPhone, and it looks pretty convincing. You know, except for the telescoping television antenna. Somehow, I think Ive would choose to do that a little bit differently. You could gouge your eye out on that thing.
Y’know those popular kids in high school? The ones who get along with everyone, are easy on the eyes, fun to hang out with, good at everything without being exceptional in any one area, and don’t ever seem to run out of energy?
That’s Casio’s EX-H10. Aside from one ridiculously high-performing attribute, the EX-H10 isn’t really exceptional in any one arena; rather, this point-n-shoot is a collection of quality and smart features brought together in a relatively high-value, good looking — if stoutish — container.
At this week’s Computex expo in Taipei, Hitachi-LG unveiled their new HyDrive: an amalgamation of a Blu-Ray DVD drive and solid state drive that could afford us a look at the direction future MacBook hardware will take to slim down chassis design.
The HyDrive is interesting: the current models offers 64GB of NAND flash memory with a read/write speed of 175MB/60MB per second, although capacities should increase. The SSD and Blu-Ray drive are then connected through SATA II. The end result is two drives — one optical, one solid state — that take up half the room as their separate counterparts in a laptop.
We all know how much Cupertino likes efficiency. If Apple chose to use a combined solution like this in their next MacBooks, they’d significantly cut down on the size of their internal components, leading to slimmer, lighter notebooks that have Blu-Ray functionality to boot.
The HyDrive will launch in August 2010, and while there’s no official price yet, they’re still definitely priced for luxury laptops: it’s been hinted that a HyDrive could add $200 to the price of a standard notebook.
For scuba-diving iMovie users looking to edit together some gorgeously lurid undersea footage, Sanyo’s gorgeous new Xacti DMX-CA100 promises to be the world’s first completely waterproof camcorder capable of shooting 1080p video at up to 60 frames per second nat up to 10 subaqueous feet. Even better: the resulting footage is captured in iPhone-friendly H.264 format, although a word of caution: your iPad isn’t nearly this submersible.
Additionally, the Xacti DMX-CA100 can capture still shots at up to 14 megapixels, and supports 6X optical zoom and high-speed sequential zooming that allows you to capture up to 22 photos per second at a 2MP resolution.
Sanyo’s latest Xacti will be released this June in colors of black, yellow or pink for a still unrevealed price.
The t’Light sounds more like a rejected noun from the Middle Earth dictionary than a product you’d actually buy, but it’s a fantastic idea: an attractive, minimalist 3 watt LED desk lamp containing a USB port, an iPhone dock and a jack which emits enough power to juice your laptop… although there’s regrettably no adapter available for a MacBook, since Apple frowns on anyone else making them. That’s hardly the t’Light’s fault, though, and the price isn’t wholly unreasonable: it costs only $90.
Here’s a device filling a mystery niche if I’ve ever seen one: the iP49 is a bulky, fold down clamshell travel alarm clock which includes a dock for an iPhone or iPod… itself a travel alarm clock. Double indemnity of redundancy. ho!
Personally, I’m not sure I get it, but in case you do, the iP49 features separate weekday/weekend alarms, customizable snooze times, gradual wake and sleep volume controls so you don’t start off the morning swallowing your tongue.
It also boasts “Bongiovi Acoustics’ patyented Digital Power station technology and four neodymium compression drivers,” which sounds impressive and promises to provide “studio quality” sound wherever you are. It also boasts both an AC adapter and a built-in, rechargeable lithium-ion battery.
The iP49 is available from iHome now for $159.99.
Logic3’s latest accessory, the LCD ProDock, is a compact dock for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPod Classic that isn’t particularly remarkable in any way, except for one: it comes with a neat, Nano-like LCD remote that allows you to browse your docked iDevice’s media content through an iPod-style interface.
Otherwise, it’s a pretty standard cheapie dock, featuring component and composite video outputs for hooking up to a television or stereo, but we do like that remote. We’d like it even better if it had a clickwheel instead of buttons.
You can pick the LCD ProDock up now for just £79.99
Speaking Tuesday at Amazon’s annual shareholder meeting, CEO Jeff Bezos said that a color version of the Kindle e-reader is “still a long way out.”
According to Bezos, adding color to the Kindle’s e-ink display, while possible in the lab, is simply “not ready for prime-time production.”
Don’t think for a second, though, that Amazon intends to let the iPad run away with the e-book market without a fight.
Bezos appears to have been very specifically saying that a color e-ink Kindle wouldn’t be out soon, but his wording leaves the possibility of an iPad-like Amazon tablet wide open. Trying to beat Apple at the tablet hardware game is probably folly, but there’s got to be a lot of temptation in the Amazon offices to give it a try.
There’s a growing number of analysts and pundits who believe that netbooks will increasingly become irrelevant to most customers as tablets This latest Retrevo poll seems to support that opinion.
The Retrevo poll’s sample size was over 1,000 individuals of different genders, ages, incomes and location who considered buying a netbook last year. The question asked was: “Did you hold off on buyinga netbook after the iPad was announced in January?”
The results are quite good for iPad. 40% waited to buy a netbook until after Apple announced the iPad, while 30% didn’t wait at all. The remaining 30%? They all abandoned their netbook plans and went with iPad instead.
For years, I’ve been resiting the urge to upgrade my deck and instead pumping my iPod or iPhone audios to my antediluvian car stereo with a cheap $2 cassette deck adapter. For guys like me, then — individuals who own cars worth less than their phones, and are proud of the fact — the iDeck iPod Car Cassette Adapter seems ideal: it turns your existing cassette deck into a permanent in-auto iPod dock.
I’d be typing “SOLD” here except for that last remaining sticking point, the price: the iDeck costs $39.99 through Amazon. Heck, for that price, a cheapskate like me might as well buy a new car. One with floorboards!
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It’s hard to describe Onkyo’s latest PC as anything besides a little bit daft. The E713 is an all-in-one Windows 7 PC (with all the hideous matte gray plastics aesthetics of such) which prominently boasts a slide-out, built-in iPod dock that has been sillily mis-designed so it’s mouth just isn’t quite wide enough to slide an iPhone in. What?
Otherwise, it’s not a bad looking machine, featuring a Core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM, a digital TV tuner, Blu-Ray drive, 1TB hard drive and a 23-inch 1920 x 1080 LCD for just $1100… but the obvious bone-headedness of designing a computer with a built-in iPod dock that can’t dock with Apple’s most popular product is just the sort of casual ineptitude that keeps us all on Macs to begin with.
The Elgato EyeTV HD DVR is easy to recommend to Apple fans who are serious about video: it’s whole raison d’etre is to make it as easy as possible to transcode your high-defenition television content to watch on your MacBook, iPhone or iPad.
As a DVR, the EyeTV allows you to plug it into your satellite or cable box and record shows in high-definition H.264 video, which can easily be converted to iPad or iPhone optimized files when you plug it into your Mac’s USB port. If that’s too much work for you and you expect to watch a show on your iPad over your HDTV, you can opt to record in iPad or iPhone mode.
Even better? If you don’t want to physically sync your EyeTV media to your iPhone or iPad, you can just stream it over 3G or WiFi with the EyeTV app.
The Elgato EyeTV HD is available now at your local Apple Store for just $199.
WiFi operates in unregulated portions of the radio spectrum. These frequencies are shared with things like microwave ovens, cordless phones, garage door openers and an increasing plethora of other WiFi devices. What many WiFi networks face these days is like trying to tune in to a weak radio station in a busy city market.
This week a few tips and suggestions to try when things aren’t working.
Borrowing their aesthetic from the super-dimensional beings who crafted 2001’s monolith, LaCie’s new line of NAS drives, the Network Space MAX, are easily configured to automatically mirror your disks so that all your data is backed up twice, courtesy of the RAID 1 Department of Redundancy Department.
This featureless slab of black plastic contains two hard drives amount to either 2TB or 4TB of data, although effective capacity is half of that, since the MAX drives automatically back your data up twice to make sure you’ve always got a secure backup on hand, no matter what calamity strikes.
Other features include built-in server and torrent downloading functions, which are pretty handy, and a USB 2.0 interface to access the MAX directly from your Mac. If you want to be surer than your Time Capsule that your Mac’s data is absolutely safe, the MAX series looks like a safe buy at prices starting at $279.99.
