Apple’s most direct competitor in the future won’t be Microsoft or Google, but Amazon.com.
With the release of the Amazon Kindle Fire, Amazon.com declared war directly on Apple’s core business model, which is to sell integrated solutions for the consumption and creation of digital content.
Starting Thursday, Apple strikes back.
Laaaaaaaaaaadies and Gentlemen, welcome to Friday Night Fights, a new series of weekly deathmatches between two no-mercy brawlers who will fight to the death — or at least agree to disagree — about which is better: Apple or Google, iOS or Android?
After this week’s topic, someone’s going to be spitting teeth. Our question: What’s Better? The iPhone’s 3.5-Inch Display, or Android’s 4+ Inch Superphones?
In one corner, we have the 900 pound gorilla, Cult of Mac; in the opposite corner, wearing the green trunks, we have the plucky upstart, Cult of Android!
Place your bets, gentlemen! This is going be a bloody one.
Bloomberg is reporting that Apple’s next-generation iPad will feature a quad-core processor and LTE/4G data speed capability. The tablet has reportedly entered production and is slated for a March launch.
According to the report, the iPad 3 will feature a hi-res display, faster processor, and compatibility with LTE. Full production is expected to begin in February for an official launch the following month.
Oliver Bussmann, CIO of SAP, makes an unlikely cheerleader for Apple’s iPad — but one who is bound to get noticed. (If you’re now picturing him in a varsity sweater shaking pom-poms, sorry).
But Bussmann is unabashedly enthusiastic about Apple’s magical tablet computer.
SAP deployed some 14,000 iPads to employees last year, making the stodgy German business management software colossal the second largest corporate iPad user worldwide. (Korea Telecom handed over 30,000 to its workers).
“It’s an exciting time. The line between consumer and corporate is fading and we’ve been aggressive in regards to the iPad,” he said. “There’s a huge opportunity to be in driver’s seat.”
LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 — How did professional auto-modder Mark Abate build this custom iPad-integrated Bat-trike? He started with a stock 2010 Can-Am Spyder trike, then worked a whole lot of Gotham-inspired magic on it, that’s how. Full gallery ahead!
LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 – As a kid who grew up in the ’80s, I feel robbed by the tech industry. Robbed, spit upon, and laughed at by a bunch of bald guys in suits who have deprived the ghost of my youth by failing to give me the technology they flaunted when I was a kid. I was promised holograms, damn it, so where the hell are they? Compared to holograms, touchscreens just seem like caveman technology.
Wading through the heaping mess of CES rubbish, I got lost in a time vortex. When I popped out the other side, I stumbled upon this little beauty. Behold! The holographic iPad!
Apple’s carrier partners in Singapore are removing the front- and rear-facing cameras from the Cupertino company’s latest iPhone 4S before selling it, according to a new report. The doctored devices are aimed at members of the military who are prohibited from taking cameras into their bases.
LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 – If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Apple must be feeling very flattered. Also ripped off.
Many of the new Ultrabooks here on display at the Consumer Electronics Show are so similar to the MacBook Air, they can only be described as knockoffs.
Not only do the they rip off the basic design premise — lightweight, portable laptops with long battery life — they copy the same wedge aluminum casing, wedge shape, chiclet keyboard, large, button-less trackpad, and the selection and placement of ports.
See for yourself. Here are just a few of the MacBook Air knockoffs on display at Intel’s massive booth.
If you’re frustrated that your app was rejected from the App Store, you are in good company.
Scott Virkler, senior vice president of eProducts at global science and medical publishing behemoth Elsevier, had a few choice words about Apple’s approval process – and getting rejected by it.
Virkler, speaking in San Francisco at Appnation Enterprise, said his company had three apps rejected by Apple just last week, “because they don’t get our business.”
John Sculley, a former Apple CEO who was at the helm of the Cupertino company between 1983 and 1993, has no doubts that it can revolutionize the television set. If anyone’s going to change the experience and the “first principles” of TV, Sculley told the BBC in a recent interview, it’s going to be Apple.
OnLive made headlines earlier this week when the company announced a new iPad app at CES which brings Windows 7 to the iPad, allowing you to run Microsoft Office applications like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
Those of you who are interested in the app and you live in the U.S., you can grab it now, for free, from the App Store.
LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 – The forthcoming iPad 3 will be thinner than the iPad 2, Cult of Mac has exclusively learned at the Consumer Electronics Show from a well-placed source.
LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 — Our very British Editor Leander and I were invited to sit in with Leo Laporte, Sarah Lane, and Alex Lindsay for Tuesday’s live episode of Macbreak Weekly. We had a hoot ‘n hollerin’ good time playing with new gadgets from the show floor, talking about this year’s trends in tech, and pondering how Microsoft just might be becoming the next Apple.
The full video is almost 80 minutes long, so feel free to skip around to all the good parts where it’s just me talking.
LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 – When Steve Jobs unveiled the sixth generation iPod nano in September of 2010, he coyly said, “You can even wear it as a watch!” Overnight, the “iWatch” was coined and a whole new industry was born, as accessory makers flocked to deliver iPod nano watchbands.
Over the last year, Apple’s added a variety of new graphical watchfaces to the iPod nano, further emphasizing the nano’s suitability as a watch replacement. But that’s not nearly enough. The iPod nano’s inherent iWatchiness is a quality that Apple is still seriously under-exploiting.
Want to know how good a real iWatch could be? Look no further than Sony’s SmartWatch, on display this week at CES.
Tim Cook is one of the world’s top CEOs, but you wouldn’t know that by where he lays his head at night. The recently appointed head of Apple Inc. lives in a 2,400-square-foot, relatively modest home in Palo Alto, California.
The four-bedroom condo boasts a tiny yard and small adjunct section of real estate in the back. Not much for a man who was recently awarded a $378 million stock incentive.
You think your users are hard to please? Try cops, says Travis Taniguchi.
He’s a police criminologist for the Redlands Police Department in California, and one of the driving forces behind an iPhone and iPad app-friendly police department. Cops are not only skeptical, but armed.
“You want to talk hostile customers or end users? You don’t get more hostile than a cop,” Taniguchi joked.”They do that lean back thing, then they put a hand on their gun. It’s not easy.”
As the only “suit” on an Appnation Enterprise Summit panel about upstarts – he was gently ribbed by other panelists about not following the casual jeans-and-blazer mandate – he gave some interesting insights about how police departments can implement mobile apps.
LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 — Four times bigger than last year, and now filling about half the massive north hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center, the iLounge is home to an enormous plethora of iDevice accessories. I weaved and wandered through lanes of the iLounge pondering the products I was seeing, and out of all of what I found filling the massive space, these were the trends that stood out.
LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 – Or maybe it’s that they’re pretending even less. The amount of bling at the Monster “booth” — it was actually more of a compound, complete with a super-secret inner sanctum — would make Snooki (who was at the show) blush. Their three newly released headphones seemed far more focused on fashion than sound; even Monster founder Nole Lee’s Segway (was it a Segway?) rolled around on gold-rimmed wheels. Then there were the booth fashion shows…
Foxconn workers at an Xbox plant in China threatened a mass suicide earlier this month after the manufacturer reportedly refused to pay compensation it had promised earlier. Today, Microsoft and Foxconn have announced that the dispute has now been resolved.
Chinese sources revealed earlier this week that Apple’s third-generation iPad is now in production and scheduled for a launch in early March. It was reported that the device would sport a long-awaited Retina display supplied by Sharp.
However, that may not be the case. According to a new report from Korea’s Electronic Times, Apple turned down Sharp’s displays after they failed to pass the company’s approval process, and decided to use panels from Samsung and LG Display instead.
Pod2g and his “Dream Team” of fellow iOS hackers seem to be making some pretty decent progress on their much-anticipated A5 jailbreak, promising in their latest blog post that the exploit’s public release is now just “a matter of days” away.
The Pentax WG-1 GPS ($350) is a waterproof, shockproof location-aware camera.
If you’ve never tried a waterproof camera before, it can be quite a jarring experience. Every fibre of your soul tells you that you shouldn’t put electronic gadgets in water, so immersing this beast feels decidedly like the wrong thing to do.
As soon as you’ve done it, though, there’s a rush of delight as you press the on button and the screen lights up, and everything just works as if it were out on dry land.
LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 – Amazing to think Sony has never offered an armature-driven earphone before; now that they are, they’re diving in huge time with eleven models. Aussie new kid on the block Audiofly just have one in their new lineup, but it’s a doozy, and it sounded absolutely stunning; we fully expect these to be a huge hit.
LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 — Sennheiser is attacking the audio market with two exciting new headphones: the high-end HD 700s, and the mid-tier anodized-aluminum-crafted Amperior. Both have taken me to my happy place.
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LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 — The last Altec Lansing dock we reviewed, the Bluetooth-equipped InMotion Air, left us with a weird taste — it was just too funky. AL’s new LIVE 5000 more than makes up for this: It looks *really* stunning up close — and sounds fantastic to boot.