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“Icons” Pop Art exhibition was opened on the day when most New Yorkers were preoccupied with St. Valentines’s Day bustle. The 15 000 square feet installation room houses the photos not only of Steve Jobs but other renowned persons as well. His photo is placed beside that of Jack Dorsey (Twitter founder), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook creator) and Bill Gates (Microsoft CEO). Although Jobs doesn’t seemed to be very enthusiastic of his second row placement.

Last year’s installation was called “The Holy Trinity” and immortalized such personalities as El Jobso hung between Linus Torvalds (Linux creator) and Bill Gates.

This exhibition features the four luminaries who resemble more the wanted posters rather than pop art celebrities.

It will run till late March.

Steve Jobs called Flash technology a ‘CPU hog ‘ and an “old technology” with numerous “security holes.” On the iPad demo with the Wall Street Journal that took place in New York Apple CEO attempted to persuade the WSJ honchos to bring the issue to the iPad.

The parties discussed one of the stumbling rocks- the inability of iPad to support Flash technology. The point is that the Journal invested a great deal of money in Flash enabling to deploy videos, slides and other interactive media.

Jobs in turn quoted a number of reasons to regard this technology retarded and “old”. He equaled Flash with some non-defunct technologies abandoned by Apple. Among these are floppy drives and the CD technology substituted by the iTunes and iPod. What is more, Flash is supposed to reduce the iPad’s battery life to 1.5 hours (from originally 10 hours). Job’s offer was the WSJ to abandon Flash in favor of the H.264 codec .

Opera had finally demonstrated new Opera Mini for the iPhone at the Mobile World Congress.

In comparison to the default iPhone browser it looks pretty quick – Opera Mini loads the New York Times like 5x faster than its rival. Its main disadvantage is that it lacks the all-important feature pinch-to-zoom, and the only alternative is a method of double-tapping the webpages. Generally, the iPhone owners will find that the usual silky smooth scrolling through favorite webpages and responsive interface are maintained at the very best.

Unlike other platforms, the iPhone variant actually remembers the website you happened to browse last – the feature that will obviously be favored by a legion of iPhone admirers.

Company says as soon as beta tag is removed the browser will be submitted for approval. And it is not obvious whether Apple approve it or not, because it maintains the option of rejecting any app that “duplicates functionality” of the apps Apple builds into the iPhone. Opera co-founder Jon von Tetzchner has his own point of view on this:

“Opera Mini is the world’s most popualr mobile browser and users on the iPhone deserve a choice.”

On Thursday’s night Charlie Rose show featured an interesting discussion with Michael Arrington, Walt Mossberg and David Carr about the upcoming Apple iPad.

Michael Arrington is known as the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch. Walt Mossberg writes 2 columns for the Wall Street Journal. David Carr works as a culture and media columnist for the New Your Times. The 25 minutes long coverage reveals some interesting opinions that are worth to hear:

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Silicon Alley Insider reported recently that Steve Jobs visited New York City to meet with executives at The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times for discussions about bringing their content to the iPad.

Apple CEO held a dinner meeting with 50 representatives of The New York Times, though the visit to The Wall Street Journal was more low-key and the audience was very limited.

On Friday morning Steve Jobs also visited Time & Life Building to demonstrate an iPad to Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore and roomful of magazine editors.

It is obvious, that the goal of Jobs’ NYC visit is a content partnership. Since the iPad presentation, Apple has been working hard to broaden its content deals by pursuing book publishers and bringing textbook publishers on board. Currently the company apparently starts to focus its efforts on the magazine and newspaper industries.

Here is our live blog from Apple’s event:

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Rumors of the Apple tablet reaching new highs. MacRumors has found evidence that Apple acquired the domain name iSlate.com presumably in preparation for the new device. Remember how Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, referenced an Apple slate two months ago?

MacRumors discovered that the domain was originally registered in October 2004 by Eurobox Ltd. In 2006 it changed hands to Data Docket, Inc. In 2007 it was transferred to registrar MarkMonitor.com, a site which handles registrations and trademark protections for Apple among other companies.

However Apple’s name was temporarily exposed as the actual owner of “iSlate.com” for several weeks in late 2007. It was quickly back, but MacRumors has found the historic record proving Apple ownership of the iSlate.com domain:

What do think? Is iSlate the name of Apple’s Tablet? Is it a good one?

iTablet rumors continue today, with the New York Times blogging that, according to an some Apple employee:

“I can’t really say anything, but, let’s just say Steve [Jobs] is extremely happy with the new tablet.”

Apple has had a tablet in the labs for years, but Steve Jobs and others didn’t see a mainstream market for the device or were not “extremely happy”. It looks like now the situation is different.

Moreover, the NYT post adds that former Apple employee has told them:

“You will be very surprised how you interact with the new tablet.”

Anyway we have to wait for another month. Remember? Rumors say iTablet will be announced on January 26th.

Here is a video preview of the new Apple Store opened in New York:

Bell Keller, Executive Editor of the NY Times, let slip on the still unconfirmed Apple tablet in a speech last week.

The New York Times speech comes from an internal “all hands” meeting at TheTimesCenter, which was intended to be off the record. However, the video was also provided to the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. Skip to about 8:20, and you’ll hear:

We need to figure out the right journalistic product to deliver to mobile platforms and devices. I’m hoping we can get the newsroom more actively involved in the challenge of delivering our best journalism in the form of Times Reader, iPhone apps, WAP, or the impending Apple slate, or whatever comes after that.

Given the matter-of-fact way Keller refers to the slate, it sounds like a done deal versus a hypothetical.

via gizmodo, niemanlab

Here are new iPhone ads: ‘Dine’, ‘ Nature’, and ‘Pass’. Each one feature six applications per ad. All three commercials also mention that there are now 75,000 applications available in the App Store.

The first one is named “Dine”. Here is the list of apps used in the video and the video itself:
- TripCase [App Store, Free]
- New York Subway 09 [App Store, $4.99]
- Epicurious Recipes & Shopping List [App Store, Free]
- Zagat To Go ‘09 [App Store, $9.99]
- Quickoffice Mobile Office Suite [App Store, $9.99]
- Gap StyleMixer [App Store, Free]

The second is “Nature”:

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NYC UpNext 3D is a new application available in AppStore. It offers a 3D map of New York. There is a support for GPS, users can see their position and all the surrounding streets. The application also includes Manhattan. Every single building is shown with the correct proportions of height, width and thickness. UpNext 3D NYC integrates many points of interest and users reviews. The app is very well made. There is even a subway map.

App costs $2.99 (AppStore link). Here’s a video demonstration:

G-Map is announced recently. Hopefully it will show up in AppStore soon. Among the features are:

• Stand-alone electronic map that needs no internet connection
• Large-capacity map data enables easy search of desired location and route
• Real 3D View of intricate major intersections and highway junctions
• Smart location search powered by a search engine
• POI
• Detailed information on restaurants, hotels, and leisure destinations provided with Premium POI
• Search by phone number and latitude/longitude

For now developers say that the covered area is: Buffalo, NY/ Cincinnati, OH/ Cleveland, OH/ Columbus, OH/ Nashville, TN/ Pittsburgh, PA/ Rochester, NY/ Boston, MA/ Hartford, CT/ Middlesex, NJ/ Nassau-Suffolk, NY/ New York, NY/ Providence, RI/ Wilmington, DE.

NEW YORK (AP) — Best Buy Co. will start selling the iPhone on Sept. 7, becoming first U.S. chain to do so outside of Apple Inc.’s and AT&T Inc.’s own stores.

The announcement by Best Buy expands the availability of Apple’s vaunted phone to 970 full-size stores and 16 smaller Best Buy Mobile stores. It’s also a coup for the Minneapolis-based chain, which has been upgrading its cell-phone departments.

Last week, Best Buy announced it had completed a two-year conversion of its stores to include upgraded cell-phone departments under the Best Buy Mobile brand. It has upgraded its computer systems to handle cell-phone activation and spent 250,000 hours training its employees.

via cnn

We all saw iPhone 3G “twice as fast” adv video. The funny thing is that in real world everything is much slower than in advertising.

However new iphone 3G is really faster than the old one: EDGE vs 3G.