Disclaimer: Some of you may find this material offensive — you’ve been warned.
Jon Stewart gives us his take on last week’s most talked about tech news: Google’s glasses and Facebook’s purchase of Instagram for 1 billion dollars. It’s classic Daily News humor that includes ball-licking dogs, time-travelling cock-blockers and illicit drug innuendo. If that sounds like your kind of humor, head on past the break to watch the video. Cheers!
How awesome is Instagram for Android? Well, just take a look at the photo above. Instagram may not be stable, but at least you’ll have hipster filters to make every random crash, well… hip! This photo, taken by reader Alan Liddell, is aptly named “functionality,” and shows that not every app launch goes off without a hitch and perhaps Instagram should have spent a little extra time in the dark room filtering its code for Android.
When we first saw Nokia’s 808 PureView — a Symbian-powered phone that can putput SLR caliber photographs thanks to some sophisticated, satellite-grade oversampling technology and an absurd 41MP camera sensor — we were totally blown away by the quality of the images it took, but knew it would never come to the iPhone, because the frickin’ camera module took up half the back of the camera body.
But what if it did? What if Nokia’s PureView technology came to the iPhone. Well, you’d get something that looked like this monstrosity… except it would take way better pictures, because this iPhone only has a 1.2MP cam. What?
Ever wonder who exactly Samsung hired to test out the Galaxy Note before shipping it out to retailers across the globe? It was no easy task finding a quality assurance team that measured up to the pure magnitude of the Galaxy Note, but after interviewing nearly a dozen teams, Samsung went with lead QA Engineer Peter the elephant and his expert team of mixed mammals.
On “Them, Robot”, last Sunday’s episode of The Simpsons, Mr. Burns briefly pulled out his iPad and gave us all a quick glimpse of his homescreen. So what kind of apps does an old coot like Burns download? Medical apps like Am I Alive and Google Naps, home automation apps like Trap Door and games like Ukelele Hero and Captain Billy’s Whiz-Bang.
My favorite, though? Angry Burns. Fox should actually make that game happen.
[via Gizmodo]
Give most elderly people an iPad and even if they are not tech savvy, they suddenly just get it. Unfortunately, not so for this guy from a German comedy show, who puts his iPad’s Gorilla Glass coating and liquid damage indicators to the test by using his brand new tablet as a chopping board. His daughter’s expression at the end pretty much covers the same surge of horror I feel at the idea of using my new $829 iPad Wi-Fi + LTE for similar ends.
[via AllThingsD]
The iPad’s multitouch screen works with a fingenail… why not a hoof? Such went the thinking of Tim Cook in his first colossal misstep as Apple’s new CEO. Introducing the Horse iPad, which is optimized for the horny keratine covering of an ungulate’s foot, and feature’s Apple’s new revolutionary Horse Recognition System, as well as a bundled five horse e-books.
Very funny, very weird spoof created by The Dawson Brothers for BBC Three’s Feed My Funny.
[via ObamaPacman]
Does the idea of an Apple TV with Siri functionality make the insides of your toes tingle with excitement? We’re there with you, and we totally want to know what it would be like to have Siri in our living room whispering us sweet nothings. Apple didn’t announce a new iTV with Siri functionality yesterday, so we’ll have to wait a little while longer to see what the future holds, but to hold us over till that day comes, Tripp and Tyler made a new video to show us what a Siri TV would be like.
It is absolutely breathtaking.
Fans of Monty Python, gather your dead parrots and your stuffed John Cleese plushies: today is your day to celebrate the official launch of Monty Python: The Holy Book of Days for iPad, an app that gives faithful Python followers everything they could ever wish for on a plate, with strawberries on top. The rest of us might be left wondering what the fuss is about, though.
Here at Cult of Mac, we’re anxiously awaiting the unveiling of the iPad 3. In the mean time, we can only speculate. So here’s our analysis of the secret meanings behind Apple’s iPad 3 invitation. Modest expectations, wouldn’t you say?
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — Prowling the showfloor for scoops on the second day of Mobile World Congress, we happened to stop by the Windows Phone 7 booth, where we discovered that just hours before, an original first-generation iPhone beat a top-of-the-line Windows Phone in one of Microsoft’s very own challenges. Oh, delicious hubris!
Steve Jobs called then tweeners: too big to be a phone, too small to be a tablet. Others have coined a better portmanteau to describe them: “phablets.” It’s a wonderful word, isn’t it, somehow evoking both expectoration and flabbiness?
Anyway, we’re going to be seeing a lot of phablets next week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona (and make sure to stay tuned for our on-site reporting all next week), and my guess is that with most of them, the rationale that manufacturers have employed in making them will be eerily similar to the thought process described in the latest strip of Dilbert.
[Thanks, Mike!]
Which would win in a fight? OS X Mountain Lion or a real Mountain Lion? Over at DealMac, Jeff Somogyi put together this absolutely hysterical chart, delving into the question.
The cheeky result? If the criterion on which you are judging Mountain Lions includes messaging, productivity, note taking, notifications, sharing, gaming or Twitter support, OS X has the edge. If, however, you are judging mountain lions based upon their ability to leap 18 feet straight in the air, run at land speeds of up to 45 miles per hour and urinate upon things to mark their territory, the real-life Mountain Lion will eat your face off.
Go on over to DealMac to check out the full post, it’s priceless.
The guy in the picture above is named Bill Flora, and according to the caption accompanying his smiling face from this CNET article, Bill’s a key leader on the team that created the Metro interface that Microsoft will be using for all desktops, laptops and tablets running Windows 8.
Looks like a nice guy, right? Now take a look at Bill’s work desk, and notice that he is designing Windows 8 using exclusively Apple products, including an Apple Cinema Display, a MacBook Pro, an Apple Bluetooth Keyboard and what appears to be a Magic Mouse.
Good taste in hardware, Bill! Windows 8… good enough to be designed on a Mac. Hey, that should be Microsoft’s new tagline!
[Thanks for the tip, Paul!]
Update: Apparently Bill is no longer with Microsoft. Here’s hoping Apple snatched him up!
Over at my old haunt Boing Boing, my favorite Elfquest-obsessed Pittsburghian Brit Rob Beschizza grabbed a great slice of 70s prime time music and used it as the background track for an exciting YouTube video smashing together every Apple product ever in just 30 seconds of Flash.
My favorite part, though, is that Rob didn’t stop there: he then also did it for NeXT (using The Neverending Story theme as the soundtrack). A considerably slower paced video, to be sure. You can see it after the jump.
Who is this muttonchopped Steve Jobs and crime-fighting cyborg partner, The Amazing Mac Man? More importantly, where can I get one of those Apple-branded codpieces?!?
[via MIC Gadget]
Over at The Loop, Jim Dalrymple posted a picture of what Samsung’s new 5.3-inch smartphone, the Galaxy Note, looks like next to the iPhone 4S.
While we were over there, guffawing with the rest of you, we happened to note this comment from Joel Glovier, who claims:
Everybody knows this is trick photography, right? The hand on the right is a bit closer to the camera than the hand on the left, as evidenced by the larger shadow of the right hand, and it’s distance away from the hand.
We thought we could put this defense to rest, because at CES, we here at Cult of Mac did a side-by-side comparison shot of the Galaxy Note compared to the iPhone 4S, and — nope — this isn’t trick photography. It really is that big. In fact, we quipped it was an Apple Newton rip-off!
Or as Han Solo might say, “That’s no moon…” But it’s the size of one!
Ask a lot of people who don’t use iPhones like to dismiss Apple’s impact on the smartphone industry. Hey, we had PDA-like smartphones with touchscreens before the iPhone, so what’s the big deal?
Such logic is patently absurd, but as it often does, a picture says a thousand words about how a thousand shitty devices did things before the iPhone came around, and how the makers of these crappy phones do things now that the iPhone is the gold standard of smartphone design.
Think that’s pathetic? Check out how tablets changed after the iPad too. Unreal!
[image by Josh Heifferich, via AppAdvice]
Siri’s notorious inability to understand a thick Scottish brogue is pretty notorious at this point, but perhaps no video makes the point more humorlessly than this mock advertisement for Siri from Apple Scotland. It’s more than a little foul-mouthed, so if you’re at work, put some headphones on.
Meet the HP Envy 15, a laptop that Engadget says “unapologetically copies the MacBook Pro” but “stumbles in several critical areas” including being heavier than the MacBook Pro and having a worse display, touchpad (pictured), keyboard and battery life.
Completely shameless, no? It’s the tech equivalent of The Third Man’s Harry Lime selling counterfeit penicillin on the post-war Viennese black market. Accept no substitutions.
[via Reddit]
I’m not a huge fan of The Big Bang Theory, but this clip from the latest episode is too good not to post.
What if Siri wasn’t just Wolfram Alpha stapled onto a smart text-to-speech program, but instead an actual woman, working a call center, and just as slinky and sexually promiscuous as any bro showing off in front of his drunken friends by asking for a blow job could ever hope?
That’s probably not many people’s fantasies, but it is the hilarious chimera of Big Bang’s Raj, who is as cripplingly shy as he is addicted to his new iPhone 4S.
You know that moment when your iPhone slips out of your hands and begins its slow tumble to the ground? Time slows down, as it does in the milliseconds before any horrific accident, and you absolutely freeze with a sort of full-body shudder of anticipation at the shattered glass screen you just know will be the end result of its 32 feet per second per second fall towards the concrete.
In a recent episode of Fred Armise and Carrie Brownstein’s Portlandia, they did a skit that documents the internal monologue of such a reverie. The end’s a bit surreal (and a little weak), but as an iPhone owner myself, I can relate. Looks like it’s time for Brownstein to buy a bumper.
As part of its annual promotion to get more Americans to cram nacho cheese-flavored asbestos triangles down their gob during halftime, Doritos throws a Crash The Super Bowl contest where they invite fans to make their own commercials. Win the contest and your winning ad gets aired during the Super Bowl.
I don’t usually pay attention to stuff like this, but this entry for the contest is just wonderful. It portrays Siri (or a Siri-like) as a magical genie in a smartphone capable of automatically beaming bags full of Doritos, a festive sombrero or even three hot, bikini-clad girls into a bro’s apartment at just a long press of the home button, no questions asked.
The only problem? In Dorito’s land, Siri’s speech-to-text transcription abilities have a couple of small auditory processing kinks to work out. The result? A guy’s request for hot wild girls leads to him being torn apart by… well, you’ve got to see it for yourself. Brilliant.
[via iDownload Blog]
As a person who frequently hangs his iPad 2 by the Smart Cover from the fridge while I’m cooking, my vote was going to be “genius” until I thought of exactly how quickly it would take a subway thief to just snag the iPad 2 off the bar on their way out the door. What do you think?
[via MIC Gadget]
There are few things on Earth as annoying or punchable as a little brother. Sure, deep down in the recesses of his subconscious, your younger brother is just trying to impress you with his antics. From that perspective, his insistence on constantly nudging you while you’re trying to beat your Angry Birds high score on your iPad is in, reality, an act of love and admiration.
Likewise, it must be remembered that an older brother’s responsibility from time immemorial is to firmly take his younger siblings in hand and instruct them upon the ways of the world: the rules, the social decorums, the hidden pitfalls, the unspoken expectations. From that perspective, then, isn’t knocking your younger brother unconscious by hitting him in the face with your iPad also a supreme act of love?
Probably not. But like giving your younger brother an Indian burn, purple nurple or atomic noogie, it is pretty funny.
[via Macgasm]
